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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
It is now more than 25 years ago that the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his well-known book Agricultural Involution. The processes of ecological change in Indonesia. In this excellently written essay, Geertz to argue that involution rather than evolution had occurred in Java during the past century and a half. This process was said to be responsible for the stagnating development, the depression, on the Javanese countryside which was so easily discernable when Geertz was conducting his field research in East-Central Java during the 1950s within the framework of the so-called Mojokuto project, in which Mojokuto was the equivalent of the American Middletown. In brief, the involution thesis boils down to the theory that as a result of Dutch colonial intervention at the start of the nineteenth centuryJavanese rural society developed a very high degree of social homogeneity, while balancing on the edge of the minimum of subsistence or below it. This society was characterized by the absence of sharp class-differences or a clear social stratification, the presence of ‘shared poverty’ and the necessity, as the island became more and more densely populated, to cut the (rice) cake in smaller and smaller parts.
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