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Indonesia After the Demise of Involution

The debate over Indonesia’s ’agrarian question’, at least among Western scholars in the last few years, has taken the form of a proliferation of writings critical of the views articulated by Clifford Geertz in his influential book Agricultural Involution. Beginning some ten years ago, writings critical of the involution thesis began to appear, and their volume has assumed the proportions of a flood. Refutations of Geertz’s analysis have become so numerous, and an alternative model of Indonesian agrarian transformation presented with such confidence, that a reader of this literature might feel justified in assuming that not only has Geertz’s analysis been totally invalidated but that we can now fully understand the major tendencies for change in Indonesian agrarian structure in terms of classical models of the social differentiation of the peasantry and the consequent development of capitalist forms of agricultural production from within the peasant economy. The time would appear to be ripe for a debate which is no longer centered around Geertz’s contribution a contribution based on a brilliant insight, but one which must now be recognised as having been essentially misguided. It is, of course, awkward that Geertz himself remains unpersuaded by the arguments of his critics (Geertz, 1984b), whom he argues, have largely missed the point of the original book. But, it is assumed, this should not dissuade us from moving the debate onto another level altogether. While in sympathy with the aims of a number of Geertz’s critics, I want to argue in this paper that Geertz is correct at least when he maintains that: