Agricultural Involution

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Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
AgriculturalInvolution.jpg
Cover page of 1st edition published in 1963
AuthorClifford Geertz
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Published1963
PublisherUniversity of California Press
ISBN 978-0-520-00459-7

Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. Its principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms—"involution". The term, also known as Neijuan, has drawn significant attention in China since its introduction in China's social sciences research, making it one of the most popular buzzwords in China. [1] [2]

Contents

Content

Written for a particular US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernisation theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, [3] Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia. The two dominant forms of agriculture are swidden and sawah. Swidden is also known as slash and burn and sawah involves irrigated rice paddies. The geographical location of these different types is important. Sawah is the dominant form in both Java and Bali where nearly three-quarters of Indonesia's population live, and swidden more common in the less central regions. [4]

Having looked at the agricultural system, the book turns to an examination of the system's historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution". This is his description of the process in Java where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change. What this amounted to was increasing the labour intensity in the paddies, increasing output per area but not per head. [4] In his book, Geertz credits the term to Alexander Goldenweiser:

I borrowed the concept of involution from the American anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser. He had used it to describe cultural forms - Gothic architecture, Maori carvings - that, having reached a definitive form, continued to develop by becoming internally more complicated. Here, I attempted to explain how such increasing internal complexity had taken place in the sedentary wet rice agriculture as opposed to the dry rice shifting cultivation regimes in the rest of Indonesia. [5] [6]

Critics

This was politically the most controversial text of Geertz as the Modjokuto Project (1953-1959) was a CIA-funded program for CENIS at MIT. [7] [8] However, in an interview with David Price he asserted that he was not involved with the political side of the project. [7] Late in his career, Geertz reflected that the book had become an "orphan," widely read and criticized without reference to his larger body of work. [9]

The term involution was introduced to social sciences research about China in the 1985 book The peasant economy and social change in North China by Philip C. C. Huang at UCLA, in which he uses it to explain why family farming, rather than industrial agriculture, dominates the agriculture in North China. The term is again used in Prasenjit Duara's 1988 book Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942, where Duara describes an involution of the state in the forms of its rural government. Since then, the term involution has drawn great attention in China. [2] [10] [11]

Since then, the term has been gradually extended to be used to describe a variety of aspects of the highly competitive Chinese society. In 2020, it has become one of the most popular buzzwords on Weibo, where it is used to describe the feeling of exhaustion in an overly competitive society. [12] [13]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shifting cultivation</span> Method of agriculture

Shifting cultivation is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned while post-disturbance fallow vegetation is allowed to freely grow while the cultivator moves on to another plot. The period of cultivation is usually terminated when the soil shows signs of exhaustion or, more commonly, when the field is overrun by weeds. The period of time during which the field is cultivated is usually shorter than the period over which the land is allowed to regenerate by lying fallow.

Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford Geertz</span> American anthropologist (1926–2006)

Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Work-to-rule is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract or job, and strictly follow time-consuming rules normally not enforced. This may cause a slowdown or decrease in productivity if the employer does not hire enough employees or pay the appropriate salary and consequently does not have the requirements needed to run normally. It is a form of protest against low pay and poor working conditions, and is considered less disruptive than a strike; obeying the rules is not susceptible to disciplinary action or loss of pay. It can also highlight rules that are technically in place but impractical and thus hamper the organization, if they were to be followed as written.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kasepuhan Banten Kidul</span>

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Involution may refer to:

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<i>Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali</i>

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It is perhaps most clear in what was, after all, the master image of political life: kingship. The whole of the negara - court life, the traditions that organized it, the extractions that supported it, the privileges that accompanied it - was essentially directed toward defining what power was; and what power was what kings were. Particular kings came and went, 'poor passing facts' anonymized in titles, immobilized in ritual, and annihilated in bonfires. But what they represented, the model-and-copy conception of order, remained unaltered, at least over the period we know much about. The driving aim of higher politics was to construct a state by constructing a king. The more consummate the king, the more exemplary the centre. The more exemplary the centre, the more actual the realm.

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Neijuan is an English loanword of the Chinese word for involution. Neijuan is made of two characters which mean "inside" and "rolling". Neijuan has disseminated to nearly all walks of life in mainland China in the recent few years, due to the uneven distribution of social, economic, and educational resources and ongoing economic malaise, especially in terms of higher education bodies and labour markets. Neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing.

References

Notes
  1. "China's "Involuted" Generation". The New Yorker. 2021-05-14. Retrieved 2022-05-14.
  2. 1 2 刘世定; 邱泽奇 (2004). ""内卷化"概念辨析". 社会学研究 (5). Archived from the original on 2019-05-04. Retrieved 2019-05-12.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. Reyna, Steve (1998). "Right and Might: Of Approximate Truths and Moral Judgments". Identities. 43 (3–4): 431–465. doi:10.1080/1070289X.1998.9962597.
  4. 1 2 McCullough, Colin (2019-03-29). "Review of "agricultural involution: the processes of ecological change in Indonesia" by Clifford Geertz". International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology. 3 (1): 5. doi: 10.1186/s41257-019-0021-y . ISSN   2366-1003. S2CID   92991498.
  5. Clifford Geertz. Change without progress in a wet rice culture: A citation classic commentary on Agricultural Involution, in Current Contents/Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, Philadelphia, Pa., Institute for Scientific Information, vol. 22 no. 12, 1991, p. 8. Archived
  6. White, Benjamin (1983). ""Agricultural involution" and its critics: Twenty years after". Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. 15 (2): 18–31. doi:10.1080/14672715.1983.10404871. ISSN   0007-4810.
  7. 1 2 Price, David H. (2003). "Subtle Means and Enticing Carrots". Critique of Anthropology. 23 (4): 373–401. doi:10.1177/0308275X03234002. S2CID   143560088.
  8. Thomas Gibson. Review of Life Among the Anthros and Other Essays by Clifford Geertz, Fred Inglis, The Journal of Asian Studies, August 2011, Vol. 70, No. 3, pp. 787-789
  9. Geertz, Clifford (1991). "Change without Progress in a Wet Rice Culture" (PDF). Current Contents. 12: 8.
  10. 黄宗智 (1985-03-01). The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China. Stanford University Press. ISBN   9780804712200.
  11. 黄宗智 (1992). 中国农村的过密化与现代化. 上海社会科学院出版社. ISBN   9787805157740.
  12. Liu, Yi-Ling (2021-05-14). "China's "Involuted" Generation". The New Yorker . Retrieved 2022-03-28.
  13. Wang, Qianni; Ge, Shifan (2020-11-04). "How One Obscure Word Captures Urban China's Unhappiness". Sixth Tone. Retrieved 2022-03-28.
  14. Smail, John R. W. (1965) Review of Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. By Clifford Geertz. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963. , Journal of Southeast Asian History (1965), 6: 158-161