Author | Clifford Geertz |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Published | 1963 |
Publisher | University 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]
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]
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]
The Four Modernizations were goals formally announced by China's first Premier Zhou Enlai to strengthen the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, science, and technology in China. The Four Modernizations were adopted as a means of rejuvenating China's economy in 1977, following the death of Mao Zedong, and later were among the defining features of Deng Xiaoping's tenure as the paramount leader of China. At the beginning of "Reform and Opening-up", Deng further proposed the idea of "xiaokang" or "Moderately prosperous society" in 1979.
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.
Huang is a Chinese surname. While Huáng is the pinyin romanization of the word, it may also be romanized as Hwang, Wong, Waan, Wan, Waon, Hwong, Vong, Hung, Hong, Bong, Eng, Ng, Uy, Wee, Oi, Oei, Oey, Ooi, Ong, or Ung due to pronunciations of the word in different dialects and languages. It is the 96th name on the Hundred Family Surnames poem.
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.
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.
Yuanyang County is located in Honghe Prefecture in southeastern Yunnan province, China, along the Red River. It is well known for its spectacular rice-paddy terracing. In 2013, part of the county formed the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site, the 45th World Heritage Site in China.
Priyayi was the Dutch-era class of the nobles of the robe, as opposed to royal nobility or ningrat (Javanese), in Java, Indonesia. Priyayi is a Javanese word originally denoting the descendants of the adipati or governors, the first of whom were appointed in the 17th century by the Sultan Agung of Mataram to administer the principalities he had conquered. Initially court officials in pre-colonial kingdoms, the priyayi moved into the colonial civil service and then on to administrators of the modern Indonesian Republic.
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.
Alexander Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser was a Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist.
Involution may refer to:
The environment of Indonesia consists of 17,508 islands scattered over both sides of the equator. Indonesia's size, tropical climate, and archipelagic geography, support the world's second highest level of biodiversity after Brazil.
Roy Frank Ellen, FBA FRAI is a British professor of anthropology and human ecology, with a particular interest in ethnobiology and the cultural transmission of ethnobiological knowledge.
Spheres of exchange is a heuristic tool for analyzing trading restrictions within societies that are communally governed and where resources are communally available. Goods and services of specific types are relegated to distinct value categories, and moral sanctions are invoked to prevent exchange between spheres. It is a classic topic in economic anthropology.
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali is a 1980 book written by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz argues that the pre-colonial Balinese state was not a "hydraulic bureaucracy" nor an oriental despotism, but rather, an organized spectacle. The noble rulers of the island were less interested in administering the lives of the Balinese than in dramatizing their rank and enhance political superiority through large public rituals and ceremonies. These cultural processes did not support the state, he argues, but were the state.
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.
In Buddhist studies, particularly East Asian Buddhist studies, post-canonical Buddhist texts, Buddhist apocrypha or Spurious Sutras and Sastras designate texts that are not accepted as canonical by some historical Buddhist schools or communities who referred to a canon. The term is principally applied to texts that purport to represent Buddhist teaching translated from Indian texts, but were written in East Asia.
The means by which agriculture expanded into the Philippines is argued by many different anthropologists and an exact date of its origin is unknown. However, there are proxy indicators and other pieces of evidence that allow anthropologists to get an idea of when different crops reached the Philippines and how they may have gotten there. Rice is an important agricultural crop today in the Philippines and many countries throughout the world import rice and other products from the Philippines.
The Bimanese or Mbojo are an ethnic group of Indonesia that inhabits the eastern part of Sumbawa Island in West Nusa Tenggara province. With a population of around half a million people, they are the second largest ethnic group in West Nusa Tenggara.
Hildred Storey Geertz was an American anthropologist who studied Balinese and Javanese kinship practices and Balinese art in Indonesia.
Wen Tiejun is a Chinese agricultural economist who is a professor at the Renmin University of China.
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.
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