Agricultural Involution : The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia

Interdisciplinary research is always a gamble. All too often it results in a series of discrete articles or monographs with no very clear connecting theme. When the interdisciplinary research is applied to a political or geographic area such as Indonesia, the danger is that the spatial limits will be the only common feature of the products of the different disciplines. Accordingly, when the contributions from various disciplines to the study of a particular area produce genuine synthesis, the result is of unusual interest. Such a synthesis seems to have emerged from the work done on Indonesia under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms'involution'.Written for a US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernization theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia and its two dominant forms of agriculture, swidden and sawah. In addition to researching its agricultural systems, the book turns to an examination of their historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of'agricultural involution'in Java, where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater soc