At its simplest, the charge of arrogance can result from any denial of the common decencies of social intercourse that one villager expects of another. A villager who refuses or fails to return a greeting on the village path is open to the charge. Anyone who fails to invite certain of his neighbors to a feast runs a [Page 196] similar risk. Even someone who keeps to himself and avoids the lively banter that is the small change of village reciprocity may be accused. And, of course, anyone who, by the way he or she dresses, speaks, or walks, betrays an attempt at superiority will be singled out for being sombong.19 Young men who stay in the village studying, usually in vain, for years to pass the High School Certificate Exam and find a government job, and who refuse to work in the fields, are often considered sombong. In all of these instances, what is involved is not the failure of villagers to recognize the existing differences in income, property, education, religious knowledge, or skills that are part and parcel of village life. Rather, it is a question of requiring that villagers act in a way that recognizes a common local citizenship and mutuality or, in other words, the conceptual equality of other villagers.20
Wealthy villagers are especially liable to the charge of being sombong for two reasons. First, it is they who are most likely to place themselves above others and who have the means of doing so with comparative impunity. Second, since they are more able to help their fellow villagers, their obligations of citizenship, as it were, are conceived to be that much greater. On the analogy that Sedaka is “one family”-an analogy frequently made by villagers in the context of pointing out the shortcomings of some-a wealthy man who turns a blind eye to the needs of his kin and neighbors is thereby placing himself above others and is seen as sombong. As Mokhzani points out in his study of rural credit, the well-off who refuse loans to their neighbors in an emergency will be called sombong.21 The terms stingy and arrogant thus form a natural pair when applied to the rich. When Mat “halus” talks about how the attitude of the well-off has changed in the last decade, he says, “They’re stingier, they’re more arrogant” as if it amounted, in his mind, to the same thing. Mat Isa, referring to outside landowners in the same context, comments, “The rich are arrogant, as before; [Page 197] they don’t take the poor into account,” as if their callousness was merely an expression of their conceit.
The view that the rich who turn a blind eye to their obligations are arrogant is naturally advanced most insistently by the local poor, for whom character assault is one of the few remaining social weapons. The view is hardly confined to them, however, and it is common to hear well-to-do villagers criticize in precisely the same terms large, outside landowners who resume cultivation or who lease huge plots to commercial tenants. But we miss, much of the social import behind the charge of sombong by seeing it merely as an effort to call the rich to order by appealing to shared values. To avoid the accusation, a wealthy villager must not only attend to the most pressing needs of his kin and neighbors, but he must do so in a spirit of tolong, that is, in a manner that does not shame or humiliate the recipient. The benefactor must act in a fashion that preserves at least the form, if not the substance, of mutuality. To do otherwise will not exempt even the charitable rich from the accusation of being arrogant. What is demanded, ironically, is patronage that is not patronizing. Here it is as if the poor of the village want to have their cake and eat it too. They attempt, symbolically, not only to enjoin charity and assistance but simultaneously to negate the “social premium” the rich might expect to extract as compensation for their generosity.22 They attempt, in other words, to protect their vital material interests while at the same time minimizing the public social stigma that systematic relations of one-sided charity usually bring in their wake.
The charge of arrogance is, however, a double-edged sword. If modest peasants in Sedaka make use of it to influence the rich, the rich for their part also make use of it, more successfully, to control socially the behavior of the poor. In the talk of wealthy farmers, arrogance is often imputed to the more aggressive, less deferential poor who violate their view of what constitutes seemly behavior. The accusation covers especially those villagers who demand help (tolong) or charity as a matter of right and who thus fail to evince the appropriate gratitude to their benefactors, whether by deference, small services, loyalty, or social support. It also covers wage laborers, men or women, who insist on settling the wage rate before they come to work. From the farmer’s point of view, these matters should be left to his discretion and so should the timing of the payment for harvest work after he has sold his paddy. Laborers who violate these expectations (often because of bitter past experience) are seen as “uppity” (sombong). The poor who refuse work or, worse, accept and fail to appear, fall in the same category. Thus Lebai Hussein privately castigates a number of poor villagers who shun work but still expect zakat from farmers. He claims they are difficult (payah), uncooperative (rukun tidak mau bikin), and proud (sombong). Haji Kadir criticizes [Page 198] Mat Nasir, a landless laborer, in much the same terms for only wanting work at high wages when it suits him. “He’s difficult, stingy, and proud; we [villagers] shouldn’t be so calculating,” he concludes.
It is a fairly simple matter to construct, from these accusations and others we have heard, something of a portrait of “the good poor” according to wealthy villagers. In fact, Shahnon provides a sketch of this “ideal type” in the course of praising a man who comes seasonally from his mother’s village to work for him. This man, a distant relative, always comes when Shahnon needs him to thresh; he works carefully to thresh each sheaf thoroughly; he returns every day until the harvest is completed, he never asks what the wage is and when it will be paid but leaves that up to Shahnon; and he never asks for a zakat bonus, leaving that, as well, to Shahnon’s discretion. For workers from Sedaka itself, the criteria are similar but more extensive. A good worker should not only take any work at any wage when an employer asks, but, unlike many of the poor, he should not be given to slandering the rich behind their backs. He should be deferential, that is, not sombong or payah.
That this composite sketch of “the good poor” is an “ideal type” of which any actual poor person is a pale reflection becomes evident if one classifies the village poor by their reputation among the well-to-do. The category of “good poor” is, then, nearly empty! Abdul Rahim, Hamzah, Mansur, and Pak Yah have the best reputations for being willing workers who defer to their employers; but even here, opinion is divided. A good many more poor villagers have an unambiguous reputation for being proud and choosy, including Mat Nasir, Dullah, Taib, Mat “halus,” Rokiah, Rosni, Omar, Sukur, and, of course, Razak. As one might expect, the most deferential poor are not so highly thought of by their poor neighbors as by the rich. I have heard other wage laborers in the village disparage particularly Abdul Rahim and Mansur as “yes men” or slaves (tukang suruh, hamba) who simply do the bidding of their employers.
Here again, in the petty realm of pride and arrogance, we encounter a small ideological struggle over the social control of poor village workers. The traits of deference and loyal service that are necessary to qualify as one of the “good poor” in the eyes of the well-to-do are traits that are seen as demeaning by other wage workers. Inasmuch as the poor have few jobs or charity to offer one another, the struggle is an unequal one in which public behavior, at least, conforms largely with the expectations of the well-to-do.
BENDING THE FACTS: STRATIFICATION AND INCOME
The normative context is just that: a context and not a straightjacket. It provides the setting for conflict between winners and losers in Sedaka. The parties to this conflict are all bricoleurs with a given set of tools or a set of variations on themes that are, for the time being, largely given. Those themes include the normative expectations that those who are comparatively well-off should be generous to [Page 199] their less-well-off neighbors and kin, that such generosity should take nondemeaning (tolong) forms, and that neither rich nor poor should conduct themselves in an arrogant or shamefu
l manner. Just who is well-off, just how generous they should be, just what forms their generosity should take, just which forms of help are compatible with dignity, and just what behavior is arrogant and shameful are questions that form the substance of the drama.
Within these broad confines, both rich and poor have developed working strategies designed to make the normative principles serve their interests as much as possible.23 The rich, whose interests are most directly threatened by these values, attempt to bend them so as to minimize their obligations and to place themselves in the most favorable light. Of course, at some level, they are increasingly able simply to impose themselves-to use machines, to forego taking on tenants and laborers, to trim back their ceremonial and charitable burdens. They are, however, concerned with justifying their behavior, not only to others but to themselves, for they too work within the same moral confines. For the village poor, somewhat less bending and squeezing of existing understandings is necessary, if only because these understandings already work, symbolically at least, to their advantage. They seek, more straightforwardly, to maximize the obligations due them under the existing rules.
The more or less constant ideological struggle that ensues is fought out, always inconclusively, on several terrains. One such terrain, the central one in some respects, is the terrain of stratification and income. Unless it is first known who is rich and who is poor and just how rich and poor they are, it is impossible to evaluate their conduct. Thus the first issue, the first terrain of conflict, is precisely over the facts that, once established, form the framework in which social expectations are played out.
The resounding and insistent battle cry of Sedaka’s wealthy families across this terrain is, “We are not rich.” It is repeated and repeated in a bewildering, but consistent variety of forms-forms that go well beyond mere modesty. For example, the rich are never caught referring to themselves, individually or collectively, by the term “rich” (kaya). In fact, they only rarely use even the term senang, or “comfortable,” which is most often applied to the modestly well-off in the village. To take what they say about their economic status purely at face value would lead to the conclusion that they were barely making ends meet. [Page 200] Thus, they typically describe themselves as having enough to eat (boleh makan) or just enough to eat (boleh makan sahaja). Cik Yah, a divorced woman fairly well-off considering her small household, describes herself as “just hanging on” (tahan duduk). Lebai Pendek, head of the second wealthiest family in the village, who farms 13 relong and owns a tractor, allows that he has just “a little paddy land” (bendang sedikit sahaja). If he is a large farmer, a man emphasizes how much of his land is rented in rather than owned. If he owns a sizable plot, he emphasizes how poor the land is and how many children he has.24
Wealthy villagers, in other respects as well, took great pains to emphasize that they were fundamentally no better off than the generality of their neighbors. Thus they lost no opportunity to point out that they, like everyone else, were farmers and that they, like everyone else, planted rice. This was, to be sure, largely true providing one was willing to equate the planting of 20 relong with the planting of half a relong and to ignore quite a few villagers with no land at all to plant. Here they took full advantage of the slender facts that still provide for the conceptual equality of all villagers so as to avoid standing out as privileged.
The local terms of stratification are not, however, symmetrical. While the rich portray themselves as barely managing, the poor describe them as “rich” (kaya) almost without exception. They take care never to do so within earshot, but only privately or in the company of other villagers of modest circumstances. The public stage is once again controlled by wealthy villagers but, offstage, the poor lose no time in calling a spade a spade. A few, like Bakar “halus,” speak of the wealthy collectively as the “group”-or class-of “haves” (golongan berada). [Page 201] That the poor should call wealthy villagers “rich” is not merely a consequence of their standard of comparison, although the wealthiest in Sedaka are, as the poor see them, quite rich indeed. The poor, as we shall see, have a vested class interest in emphasizing, and exaggerating, the income and property of their wealthy neighbors.
If the rich consistently understate and downplay their economic comfort, the poor in Sedaka follow a parallel strategy of emphasizing their own poverty. They insist, “We are extremely poor.” Thus they describe themselves to others, and especially to the rich, as “hardup” (susah) or “extremely hardup” (sangat susah). Instead of using the standard Malay word for “poor” (miskin), they avoid this Arab loanword, with its demeaning connotations of begging, and use susah. As part of a contrasting pair with senang, susah focuses on the quality of life-on how difficult it is to make ends meet-rather than on a fixed economic status. They avail themselves of every opportunity to reiterate that they have little or no land to farm, that they cannot find enough work, that they have to buy some of the rice which they eat, that the prospect of renting in more land at a rent that would leave them some profit has all but disappeared.
Well-to-do villagers emphatically reject this self-description of the poor as fraudulent. Haji Salim provides, in this context, what might be termed the gospel according to the rich:
Before we had hard-up people-really hard-up people. So much so that they couldn’t eat. Before 10 percent had to buy rice, but now no one has to buy rice. Before, the hard up were many and the comfortable, few. Now we still have some hard up, but they are not so many and not so hard up. When we want to call them [for work] we can’t find enough. They have enough (cukup banyak) and with the new comforts (kesenangan), even if they don’t work, they can get enough to eat and wear. [That’s whyl they are less diligent (rajin) about working.
The link here between an alleged labor shortage and the prosperity that must account for it is particularly important, for it is Haji Salim who is bitterly criticized by the poor for having gotten permission to bus in Thai laborers last season to transplant his rice. In one form or another, however, his views are echoed by nearly all the comfortable farmers of Sedaka. They seize on the fact that a few small tenants now hire combine-harvesters as evidence of both their prosperity and their laziness. Daud, the son of headman Haji Jaafar, thus notes that Rosni and Taib hired the machine once and calls them lazy, because “It’s proper (sepatutnya) that those who farm only 2 or 3 relong should do their own work.” “If they really needed money, they’d do the work themselves.” Whenever a poor man is seen eating in a coffee shop, whenever poor men or women are seen in new clothes or shoes, whenever they buy anything but the cheapest fish, whenever they go off by bus to visit relatives, it is taken as further evidence that those who claim to be poor are dissimulating.
[Page 202]
The constant debate about the facts of economic stratification was apparent to me from the outset of the research. In the first few months in Sedaka, I made a point of visiting each family to establish the basic “facts” of household farming and income. Given the pattern of local sociability, most of these conversations were joined by curious neighbors who happened to be around at the time. An interesting pattern emerged. If I asked, say, a poor man how much cash he and his wife had earned in planting, reaping, threshing, and other work, he would do some mental arithmetic and arrive at a set of figures, usually with his wife’s help.25 But the figure was often contested by one or more bystanders. If the man said,, for example, that he had earned M$150 threshing, someone else might say, “No, it was a bit more; you must have threshed five days for so-and-so and another week for your uncle and Haji so-and-so in Sungai Bujur.” “You must have earned at least M$200 threshing last season.” Some time elapsed before I realized that it was invariably a relatively wealthy villager who disputed the poor man’s estimate and that he invariably claimed the man had earned more.26 A similar quarrel often swirled around how much zakat peribadi a poor man had received from wealthier households, with the well-to-do invariably asserting that the poor man had gotten one or two more
sacks, or naleh, of paddy than he had claimed. Such disputes were rarely acrimonious and they were always inconclusive, with each party defending a different figure.
A mirror-image of this pattern, with one significant difference, developed when I spoke with well-off men about their income, yields, and rents. They too would arrive at a figure. In this case, however, the figure was never openly contested, as it was in the case of the poor. Instead, in the next few days, the matter might come up in a conversation with another small group, or I might be approached privately by someone who had been there. If the large farmer had [Page 203] claimed, say, a yield of thirteen gunny sacks per relong from 8 relong, they might disagree and put the yield at fifteen gunny sacks per relong and perhaps even point out that the man had an additional relong or two in another village, which he had failed to mention. The men offering the revised figures, I soon realized, were invariably from the poorer stratum of Sedaka, and they invariably offered figures that further elevated the income and wealth reported by betteroff villagers. When it came to the zakat peribadi which the large farmer said he had given to laborers, the poor-often the laborer in question-would invariably insist that the zakat gifts were below what had been claimed.27
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 32