Category: Indonesia

2008 Floods in Central Jakarta (from Triastuti et al, Indonesia Climate Change Sectoral Roadmap, 2009)

Climate change will have dramatic consequences for Indonesia, including increase frequency of both floods and droughts; changes in the seasons; and of course, higher temperatures. Among the most vulnerable will be farmers, smallholders, fishermen, and those who depend directly on the production of food from the land. A sensible national policy for climate change should focus on helping such communities adapt to these challenges. But this impulse is directly in contradiction with the most important lessons that we hope to have learned about the problems of state intervention in the livelihoods of traditional agrarian communities.

As it turns out, Indonesia’s colonial period taught us a lot about these lessons. I am thinking here specifically of the tragic consequences of the cultuurstelsel, or Cultivation System, that the Dutch implemented in the early 19th century. The Dutch had an idea–which despite what many critics will tell you, was not entirely evil as a concept, even though it was completely odious as a policy–that Javanese should devote more attention to producing crops for export. As a concept, I emphasize, this is not unreasonable. But as implemented, it was a disaster. Yes, there was rampant corruption and conditions verged on slavery for hundreds of thousands of people (which prompted Eduard Douwes Dekker to write Max Havelaar). But I want to emphasize something else: rice, the mainstay of the subsistence economy, was neglected. Even worse, Javanese were “encouraged” to switch from hardy, traditional rice varieties to new varieties that could be double- or triple-cropped.

The problem was that these new rice grains were not quite as hardy. During good years, rice was abundant. But during years that were too dry or too wet, rice crops failed or rotted, and hundreds of thousands starved to death (something that is truly shocking in Java, one of the most fertile places in the world). The cultuurstelsel system therefore generated huge profits for the Dutch, but at the same time, took relatively stable subsistence agriculture and turned it into volatile plantation-style agriculture.

It’s important not to romanticize the subsistence model. But I want to focus here on the relative stability of food supplies under subsistence agriculture, and to contrast that to the volatility of food supplies under the cultuurstelsel. One of the great insights from Southeast Asian studies–something that has made careers from Furnivall to Scott–is that subsistence farmers are not irrational. Instead, their folkways are finely tuned to respond to their natural environment. Hardy rice is preferred because it is hardy, and even though it doesn’t produce as much rice as other varieties, because when the crops fail, people die.

The policy conclusion drawn from this, not so much by the Dutch but certainly by generations of anthropologists, ecologists, and others, is that we should understand the relationship between peasants and the land. Peasants actually know how to keep themselves alive, far more than even many well-meaning agronomists do (see Green Revolution, criticisms of). Agricultural policy should be careful not to disturb traditional lifeways for the purpose of helping farmers to engage “properly” with the modern global economy. It’s hard to argue with this as a general point, although one can quibble with lots of the details in specific cases. But the concluding message is this: if the problem is the Dutch, then solution is to get rid of the Dutch. No cultuurstelsel, no mass starvation.

When we look at climate change in vulnerable countries like Indonesia, most people who care about farmers and the communities that depend on them are well aware that adaptation will require assistance. This, though, requires really significant amounts of technical knowledge and extension service that can only be provided by crop and soil ecologists, agronomists, and other professionals. It means strangers driving around in Toyotas, peddling science to skeptical peasants. It means policies that favor things that are unfamiliar to peasants–dynamic seasonal modeling to figure out optimum planting times that differ from traditional lunar calendars, new types of crop rotation that differ from traditional methods, the list goes on.

Two features of this will make many in peasant studies uncomfortable. First, these professionals, and the policies that they implement, will come from the state. There’s no two ways about it. Second, the state’s policies will be disruptive to traditional folkways. For example, local understandings of rain and wind patterns that are intimately tied to folk religions will have to be adjusted. These will generate social dislocation, and resistance.

But climate change is not like the Dutch. You can’t remove climate change the same way that you could, in principle, remove the cultuurstelsel. Yes, peasants have embedded within their traditional social structures a wide array of mechanisms for dealing with the variability of local climates…but only on what amounts to a decade-long timeframe. The types of variability in rainfall, seasons, winds, etc. that will accompany climate change are going to place peasant communities outside of the scope of variation to which local communities are accommodated. One hopes that there is a way for these communities to adapt, but I would not bet on indigenous knowledge alone to do this.

Here’s a question: what is the metric of success for a comparativist working in a U.S. university?

I’ve thought about this a lot during this trip, which exposes me to a completely different community of colleagues than the one that I engage with normally. That community is made up of other comparative/IR scholars at (primarily) American universities. It’s an imagined community–I know only a fraction of these people personally–but it exists nonetheless. Roughly speaking, among this community success is defined as publications in good journals and university presses, lots of citations by others writing in those journals and presses, training grad students who can land academic jobs, things like that. Prestige is earned among this community by lots of publications and lots of successful students.

But here, in Indonesia, I engage with a remarkably different set of people. Almost none of them are faculty. Instead, they work for think tanks, NGOs, the Indonesian government, foreign donors, or international financial institutions. Very few of them care about whether I can land an article in World Politics. Almost no one cares about “the literature” and whether or not I’m “contributing” to it. Instead, these people are deeply motivated by practical concerns: policy and policymaking, contemporary social problems, and everyday politics. Success for these people means one of two things. It might mean saying something really profound about contemporary Indonesia. Alternatively, it might mean actually making a difference in the daily lives of regular people. There is little chance that something profound about Indonesia will show up in the AJPS (although I’m trying). Prestige, instead, comes from making a difference, however small, in Indonesians’ lives.

There’s nothing special to Indonesia about this second way of thinking about success. I would imagine that nearly every comparativist finds himself going to the countries that s/he studies and encountering a different audience for the work that s/he does, one less concerned with the currency of academic publications and more concerned with real politics. (People who only do cross-national regressions or historical archival work are exempted from worrying about what it means to be successful.)

Robert Cribb–whose wife is also a flutist!–has written about “circles of esteem” among various types of communities of Indonesianists. I think that the analogy travels to different types of work on Indonesian politics, one of which favors academic conceptions of success and awards prestige based on research output, and the other which has a practical conception of success and awards prestige accordingly. The U.S. tenure and promotion system is heavily biased towards the former. On the hierarchy of prestige, academic publications outrank public service. A book >>>>> helping to craft a policy that saves the lives of 100,000 people, the latter being rather difficult to summarize on an academic CV. One awesome backhanded complement that political scientists like to throw around is that someone is “like a public intellectual,” which means that his or her research is, at best, shallow. I have to say that the first conception of success does make sense to me–without weighing in on whether or not I’ve been successful so far, or will be in the future, I greatly enjoy writing articles that I try to get published in good journals, and I like talking about this with other people who are trying to do the same thing.

That said, I don’t know if there’s anything that I enjoy more than what I did yesterday: attend a discussion of religion and cosmopolitanism in contemporary Indonesia at a new NGO, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies-Indonesia. I presented some of my research on this topic, and then we just chatted for a couple hours (the audience included both a representative of the International Republican Institute and a jilbab-wearing Pilates instructor). I wouldn’t want to say that I said something really profound or made a difference to anyone in that room, but I do want to suggest that putting together that sort of public conversation on a topic that’s important to the real lives of lots of real people is not less important than getting an R+R from a good journal. And when I look at the meaningful work being done by some friends and acquaintances who work for the World Bank or for Bank Indonesia or for AusAID or whatever, I’m just in awe. (I’m especially in awe when they also manage to write that work up and get it published in the best journals…that’s just not fair.)

Every time I come to Southeast Asia, and spend my time engaging with this other set of friends and colleagues, it reminds me that the hierarchy of prestige in the American research university is by no means the only metric for considering yourself successful.