29. Clive Bell, Peter Hazell, and Roger Slade, The Evaluation of Projects in Regional Perspective: A Case Study of the Muda Irrigation Project (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming), chap. 2, p. 40. Labor input for land preparation alone fell by one-half between 1970 and 1973.
30. Today water buffalo have become almost more of a financial liability than a capital asset. Their number has fallen from forty-two to twenty-two over the past dozen years, reflecting not only their declining value but also the increased difficulty of feeding and breeding them. The costs for ploughing and harrowing that once circulated largely within the village sphere are now paid to the well-to-do, outside owners of this new factor of production. In the mukim of Sungai Daun, embracing Sedaka and many other villages, the number of water buffalo has fallen from 1,670 head in 1970 to 1,014 head in 1977, or nearly 40 percent. The current owners still use them for harrowing their own land and occasionally that of others, as well as for pulling seedlings or harvested paddy through flooded fields on a sled (andur). The labor time required to keep a water buffalo has also risen appreciably. Before doublecropping, the buffalo could be released to graze on the stubble and along the bunds and canals. Now, with two seasons, either fodder must be cut and brought to them or they must be carefully tethered lest they damage someone’s crop. At least one animal in the past seven years was slashed and left to die by an (unknown) villager who presumably found it marauding in his field. Breeding is also more difficult now that open grazing is restricted.
31. The costs of cutting and threshing a relong of paddy had more than doubled from roughly M$28 in 1971 to M$60 in 1976. By contrast, the consumer price index had risen by only 44 percent. See S. Jegatheesan, “Progress and Problems of Rice Mechanization in Peninsular Malaysia,” Working Paper No. 17 (Persidangan Padi Kebangsaan Malaysia [Malaysian National Conference on Paddyl, Kuala Lumpur, February 26-28, 1980), 11.
32. Jagatheesan, (“Progress and Problems,” 2), reports that for Muda as a whole, in 1975, farms below 2 relong in size relied on hired labor for only 39 percent of the total labor required for cultivation, while for farms above 15 relong hired labor formed nearly 90 percent of total labor required.
33. For example, a farmer might say that he earned anywhere from M$200 to M$250 threshing rice in 1977 and this season (1979) earned only M$100. His answer is really an order of magnitude and may reflect the earnings he typically expected before 1978. Despite the rough quality of these estimates, they are likely to be fairly accurate, given the striking ability of peasants to recall prices and wages over long periods of time.
34. Here he is being somewhat sarcastic at my expense, as I had just finished helping to crush unripe padi with a large pestle (antan) to make a preharvest delicacy (emping), widely eaten in the village, and it was well-known how copiously I sweated when working. His words were: Kalau mesin tak musuk, saya pun kerja, berpeloh macham Jim. There is also in his remark an indication of the humiliation of idleness that we shall encounter later among other harvest laborers who have been displaced by the machine.
35. Normally, transplanting is exclusively women’s work. But, as elsewhere, the gender-based division of work tends to break down for the very poorest families, with men transplanting and/or cutting paddy and women on occasion even threshing. In the past, poor migrant couples from Kelantan would routinely cut and thresh paddy without regard to any sexual division of labor.
36. La ni, alur sahaja bagi kat orang susah.
37. The imputed rate of pay for such work is quite high. Four mornings of gleaning will yield, on average, one gunny sack of paddy, which, valued at M$35, represents nearly M$9 per morning, or three times the then current standard rate of pay for a morning’s labor.
38. He calls such deposits tahi mesin, or “machine droppings.”
39. Haji Kadir, for example, planted 3 relong in this way during the main season in 1978–79. He thereby saved M$7 a relong over the prevailing gang-labor rate. There appear to be three reasons why the kupang system is less typically used for transplanting than for reaping. First, quality control is far more important in planting. Second, since planting is still done largely by hand and the labor surplus is not so marked at this period, the farmer is less often in a position to dictate terms. The exceptions are farmers who plant much earlier or later than the rest and thus have abundant supplies of labor from which to select. Finally, and perhaps most decisive, the effective wage rate (return per hour) for transplanting is already lower than for reaping, and a shift to the kupang system would yield little or no savings. Transplanting now includes the pulling and bundling of seedlings as well and costs roughly M$35 per relong. Moving to the kupang system would still entail piece-rates for pulling and bundling (at 6 cents a bundle, with roughly 240 bundles per relong, or $14.40), and morning wages for ten women (at M$3 a head, or M$30), for a total of M$44.40. Only when family labor can be deployed to pull and bundle seedlings, as in Haji Kadir’s case, would the kupang system appear to be advantageous.
40. This is especially the case when the crop must be gathered at the peak harvesting season. A few farmers who broadcast quite early and whose crop is ready before others may take advantage of harvesting before the peak labor season and employ otherwise idle women on the kupang system, thereby paying less for reaping than the contract system would have cost them. Normally, farmers avoid planting too early (or too late) as the earliest (or latest) ripening fields fall prey to pests such as rats and birds. In addition, early harvesters, unless their land lies along a road, cannot hire combine-harvesters, since the machines cannot enter the field without destroying the unripe crops of one or more surrounding cultivators.
41. Broadcasting has its drawbacks as well, and these together with its possible benefits are the subject of wide debate within the village. Debate centers on the yields that broadcasters may expect. Some say that broadcast yields are as high or higher than for transplanting, while others claim yields are lower. I have observed yields as low as six and eight gunny sacks per relong and as high as eighteen and twenty. One should remember, of course, that the savings in production costs that broadcasting makes possible mean that yields only slightly below those of transplanted fields will entail no net loss to the farmer. What is certain, however, is that the crop from dry-sown paddy is far more variable than for transplanted rice and thus involves greater risk. A few poor farmers have tried dry sowing, lost much of their crop, and are wary of attempting it again. Quite apart from the advantages and disadvantages of broadcasting, the option is not open to all villagers. Dry sowing requires fairly flat field conditions and good water control. Unless the farmer’s land has direct access to an adjacent canal, it requires permission from and coordination with the farmers through whose fields the water must pass during the irrigated season. This permission may not be forthcoming. These technical and social structures place some limits on the possible growth of broadcasting.
42. The technique was not new; it was known to all but used only rarely before. The fact that the irrigated season of 1978 had been cancelled due to drought, that the next main season—owing to the dryness of the soil—was late and threatened to lap over into the subsequent irrigated season, and that combine-harvesting was now available undoubtedly encouraged the experiment.
43. In the main season of 1979–80, for example, eight of seventeen broadcasters were among Sedaka’s wealthiest twenty-five families (per capita income), while only three were from among the poorest twenty-five.
44. There are other reasons for broadcasting as well. Nor, a well-to-do villager, farms six widely scattered plots; to establish six separate nurseries or transport mature seedlings from a single large nursery to. the separate plots would have been timeconsuming and/or expensive. Thus he had decided to broadcast much of his land. One or two others who have high land that must normally be planted later than the rest and is therefore subject to deprivations from rats find that broadcasting allows them to get the crop in earlier, keeping them in phase with surrounding f
ields.
45. Thus the Operation Manual for the MUDA II Project has a section entitled “Extension and Agricultural Support Services,” which in part reads as follows: “He [that is, the specialist on rice agronomy] is responsible for the continuous improvement of all aspects in agricultural management practices, including better land preparation, better planting techniques, such as the possibility of direct seeding.” Despite these straws in the wind, MADA had not, as of 1983, in fact adopted an “official” position on broadcast sowing.
46. I have neglected, in this account, another form of “mechanization” that is not related to combine-harvesting but that has reduced the incomes of poor households substantially. This is the general use of motorcycles to replace bicycles in the hauling of paddy in gunny sacks from the bund or granary to the main road, where it is picked up by trucks, or directly to the mill. This work, called tarik by villagers, was previously done by bicycles that both rich and poor generally possessed. Now the work, which often meant as much as M$ 100 or M$200 a season for poor families, is performed almost exclusively by motorcycles. The distribution of motorcycles, however, is very highly skewed. More than three-quarters of the twenty-eight motorcycles in Sedaka (1979) are owned by the wealthiest half of village households, and only one family among the poorest twenty-five households has one. Thus the proceeds from such lucrative labor, while remaining within the village, are now virtually the exclusive preserve of relatively well-off families.
47. Settlers must, in theory, be younger than forty-five years old, although in practice it is possible to bribe to have an identity card (Kad pengenalan) altered to show a later birth date.
48. The only possible exception was after a major drought and crop failure in 1954 in Kedah, when many able-bodied villagers left to find work on rubber estates and in the cities.
49. Tinggal orang tak larat sabaja.
50. Since 1979 fertilizer has been supplied through MADA to all farmers, whether members or not, thereby further reducing the potential benefits of membership.
51. The two exceptions are Mat Buyong, an opposition PAS member who once paid dues to UMNO to hedge his bets and who has in any case not paid back his initial loan from MADA, and Kamil, who is a genuine fence-sitter considering moving to the UMNO camp.
52. Two of these anomalies are also easily explained. One, Tok Mah, is a widow who would not join what is nearly exclusively a men’s organization and another, Ghazali, although a discreet UMNO member, is also the son-in-law of the wealthiest PAS landowner in the village and wishes to avoid a too open identification with the local UMNO elite.
53. Four of these seven families are, in effect, one extended family: Haji Kadir, his father, his sister and her husband, and his daughter and her husband.
54. One of these exceptions is Mat Buyong, whose special situation is described in n. 51 above, while the other, Lebai Hussein, is the brother-in-law of the village headman, Haji Jaffar, while his son is treasurer of the local UMNO branch. Both are very close (ranks 34 and 35 respectively) to the middle of the village income distribution.
55. The free fertilizer given to all farmers beginning with the main season of 1979–80 eliminated this advantage as well as making loan repayments to MADA less attractive.
56. Oleh Kerana politik campur kalau ambil tindakan, makamah nak tekan… dan parti politik mau suara rakyat. For parallels from Africa, see Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), chap. 7.
57. Not incidentally, it would also almost certainly further erode the membership base of the Farmers’ Association, thereby weakening its already hollow claim to speak for all farmers in the Muda region.
58. Eight UMNO members among the poorest twenty villagers were hired an average of two times, while the twelve PAS members among the poorest twenty villagers were hired an average of 0.9 times.
59. See table 4.10.
60. The local Malay term for this is also pagar, or “fence.”
61. These ten are Wahid (#2), Mansur (#9), Mat Sarif (#12), Samad (#17), Tok Zainah (#21), Ariffin (#27), Harun Din (#31), Lebai Hussein (#35), Ali Abdul Rahman (#36), and Tok Omar (#37). Two of the remaining six—Razak (#1) and Bakri bin Haji Wahab (#7)—have recently switched from PAS to UMNO and make no bones about their desire to be considered for benefits such as school loans, short-term public works employment, etc.
62. The pun here is more effective in Malay by the use of the word kami, rather than kita, for “we/us/our.” Kami is used when the person(s) spoken to are explicitly excluded from the group referred to as “us.”
63. Indicative of this was the widespread local disillusionment with PAS when, for a time, it joined the ruling coalition. There were few actual defections from the party, but members commented bitterly, “Datuk Asri (leader of PAS) makan gagi kerajaan” (Datuk Asri is taking [literally, “eating”] a government salary).”
64. Clive S. Kessler, Islam and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838–1969 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).
65. Many of the conclusions Kessler reached in his study of Kelantan are applicable in Kedah as well. As he notes (ibid., 125), many of the leaders of PAS are drawn from the ranks of religious teachers, prayer leaders, and traditional headmen, many of whom feel threatened by the civil servants and licensed businessmen who appear to have taken over. There is, then, something of a displaced elite aspect to the PAS leadership. It is also the case, as Kessler asserts, that PAS represents a “revival and coalescence of the radical and Islamic variants of Malay nationalism (p. 126).”
66. The average is particularly inflated, because the son of Haji Salim, a very wealthy entrepreneur owning 45 relong and living, technically, just outside the village, is a member of the JKK.
67. The current chairman of UMNO, Shamsul, is an employee of the government rice mill; the treasurer, Taha bin Lebai Hussein, works part-time for the District Office; Abu Hassan, an Executive Committee member, is a lorry driver for the Farmers’ Association. Yunus bin Haji Salim holds a government license to operate a market stall. Five others, including the deputy chairman, have sizable loans from the Farmers’ Association.
68. Sedaka is, perhaps, rather special in this respect. A study of large landowners in the Muda area has shown that they are more or less evenly distributed among the two major Malay parties, UMNO and PAS. See the fine study by Mansor Haji Othman, “Hak Millik Tanah Padi dan Politik di Kedah” (Master’s thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1978), chaps. 1–3.
5 • History according to Winners and Losers
[Page 138]
There is no quailing-even that forced on the helpless and injured-which does not have an ugly obverse: the withheld sting was gathering venom.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
CLASS-IFYING
For some very limited purposes, the laborious account of tenure, income, mechanization, and political power contained in the preceding chapter might suffice. It has at least the advantage of indicating how the “big battalions” of contemporary agrarian change—commercialization, capital, and irrigation—have reordered the relations of production in a very small place. To stop there, however, would merely add another small brick to an edifice that is the by now familiar and somewhat demoralizing story of the local effects of the green revolution.
As a social history—as human history—that account is inadequate. It is to real social history as the description of the technical features of an assembly line and a table of organization would be to a social history of the work force. To put this another way, the previous chapter did no more than sketch the determinate conditions with which the peasantry of Sedaka has had to come to grips.
If it is true that events are not self-explanatory, that they do not speak for themselves, it is also, alas, true that human subjects do not entirely speak for themselves. If they did, it would suffice merely to turn on the tape recorder and offer a complete transcript to the reader. This social-scientist-as-recorder technique has been tried with illu
minating results, most notably by what might be called the “Oscar Lewis school of anthropology.” Even Oscar Lewis, however, has found it necessary to arrange and edit the transcript and to add a preface or postscript. The necessity arises, I believe, for at least three reasons. First, the human subjects themselves often speak with a kind of linguistic shorthand—with similes and metaphors that they have no need to clarify to their neighbors but that would, without explanation, mystify an outsider. Thus, the fact that someone in Sedaka said of another villager that “he behaves like Razak” or that an American said of someone that he “struck out” when looking for a job, remain opaque until we know something about Razak and about baseball, respectively. Second, there are larger orders of meaning and coherence that human subjects “know” but have no need to verbalize in the taken-for-granted world of daily discourse. The standards for decorum at a funeral, the expectations about what gifts are appropriate for certain occasions might fall into this category. Such standards are, as it were, embedded in the pattern of activity and are only, if [Page 139] ever, specified when their performance becomes a bone of contention, that is, when they can no longer be taken for granted. Finally, the observer may find certain themes or values that appear to unify what might otherwise appear to be separate realms of practice, belief, or discourse. Ideals of “manhood” in some Mediterranean societies are a possible case in point.1 Here, the observer is creating a synthesis or interpretation that is perhaps consistent with the record but is unlikely ever to be consciously thought or spoken by those who have created that record. Such interpretations are, as Geertz notes, “our own constructions of other people’s [the human subjects in question] construction of what they and their compatriots are up to.”2
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 22