Description

Since the 1980s, rural Java, Indonesia has been the site of striking socio-economic improvement. In a matter of years, forlorn and poverty clad villages became brightly lit spaces, with many amenities. This improved living standard has been accompanied, however, by an overreaching, if not squanderous, life style. A large portion of the farmers’ hard earned wealth is spent on cigarettes, electronic appliances, motorcycles, house renovations, mobile phones and communal projects such as oversized mosque.

How can we properly understand this phenomenon without falling into either the colonial myth of the profligate native, or the contemporary attitude of treating anthropological subjects as victims of forces beyond their control—be it colonial policies, exploitation by the Northern rich countries, friction between local and global political-economic power, or the political-economic regimes’ will to improve?

The talk will address this problem based on historical-ethnographic data from an upland Java farming community, and highlight the dialectics between the force of accumulation and force of distribution within the community, and what Edward Said termed the critical relationality between the farmers and the bigger world.

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Dr Pujo Semedi is a professor at the Dept. of Anthropology, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia where he teaches Indonesian Rural Economies and Ethnographic Research Method. In the last fifteen years Dr Semedi has conducted historical-ethnographic research on Java’s fishing, farming and plantation communities to see how differential access to crucial resources leads to variations in socio-cultural configurations. He is a contributor to the Netherlands’ Institute of Anthropology and Linguistic (KITLV)’s project “In Search of Middle Indonesia”, a research collaborator in the Universite de Montreal based ChATSEA (Challenge of Agrarian Transformation in Southeast Asia) program, and a co-researcher with Professor Tania Li on the project “Producing Wealth and Poverty in Indonesia’s New Rural Economies”. He is currently visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology and David Chu Distinguished Speaker at the University of Toronto.