The Agroecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia

Bibliographic Data

ID5814518
AuthorsM R Dove (0009-0006-9013-1777, corresponding author)
Year1985
Volume39
Pages1-1
Publication date1985-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIndonesia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0019-7289 • E-ISSN: 2164-8654
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3350984
OpenAlexW3124148949
LanguageEN
Citations received62
References cited6

Indonesia is a country known both for the magnitude of efforts directed towards the development of its agriculture, and for the apparently problematic results of many of these efforts. Some of the problems reflect the real difficulties of successfully articulating land, people, and work in a developing country; but others, as I will argue in this article, result from discontinuities between the empirical agricultural reality that must be addressed in development and the perceptions of those officials and planners who direct it. The basic discontinuity involves the contrast between the agricultural ecologies of inner and outer Indonesia, and the evaluation of this contrast by the preeminent culture of inner Indonesia, the Javanese. This is a contrast between irrigated rice cultivation in Java (and also Bali and Lombok), and the swidden cultivation of dry rice in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and the lesser Sunda islands. 1 Contemporary Javanese (speaking here of those in decision-making positions) uniformly speak of the former agricultural system as more productive, more rational, and in general better for the nation and national development than the latter. The swidden-based system of agriculture is regarded not merely as less good than the system of irrigated rice cultivation, but explicitly as something bad--irrational, destructive, and uncontrollable. It is the thesis of this article that this comparative evaluation of wet-rice and dry-rice agriculture is fundamentally distorted, and that the reasons for this are not pedagogical, but rather economic and political. My thesis is that the Javanese idealization of intensive rice cultivation and deprecation of extensive rice cultivation is based on a cultural myth, one important consequence of which is to rationalize and sustain the political and economic preeminence of their culture and government

Agroecology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Asian Studies and History

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