Agricultural involution. The process of ecological change in Indonesia

Description

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. I: STARTING POINTS, THEORETICAL AND FACTUAL 1. THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH IN ANTHROPOLOGY The Limitations of Traditional Approaches 1 Cultural Ecology 6 2. TWO TYPES OF ECOSYSTEM 12 Inner vs. Outer Indonesia 12 Swidden 15 Sawah 28 II: THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF THE PATTERN 3. THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 38 4. THE COLONIAL PERIOD: FOUNDATIONS 47 The Company 47 The Culture System 52 5. THE COLONIAL PERIOD: FLORESCENCE 83 The Corporate Plantation System 83 The Development of Outer Indonesia 103 III: THE OUTCOME 6. COMPARISONS AND PROSPECTS 124 The Present Situation 124 Java and Japan 130 The Outline of the Future 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY 157 INDEX 173