These transformations of the material base and their economic and social consequences for class relations have worked themselves out within the context of a given, normative environment. Two general facts about this normative environment are worth noting. First, it is not some Parsonian value consensus in which actors conform to a normative order that is somehow outside and above themselves but rather a normative environment of conflict and divergent interpretations. Well before double-cropping, for example, large farmers regarded zakat peribadi given to harvest workers as a favor or gift, while the workers themselves came to regard it as a payment to which they were entitled as a matter of right. Second, this normative environment was itself, in part, a product of the material conditions of production prior to double-cropping and mechanization. We are not therefore dealing with purely mental constructs outside day-to-day practical activity but rather with values that were firmly anchored in a host of commonplace material practices.1 The main point for my purposes is that the peasants of Sedaka do not simply react to objective conditions per se but rather to the interpretation they place on those conditions as mediated by values embedded in concrete practices.
In this connection, it is important to sketch briefly both the material practices associated with rice production and the normative understandings of them that [Page 306] prevailed before double-cropping. As for the practices themselves, one can satisfactorily account for them almost entirely in terms of the concrete material interests of the actors involved. These material interests were, in turn, largely an artifact of the striking inequity in the distribution of the means of production (rice land) prior to double-cropping. For substantial farmers, the key production problem was the timely and reliable mobilization of a labor force for the major operations of transplanting, reaping, and threshing. The constraints of a rainfed production schedule produce striking peaks of labor demand which, even with migrant workers, required readily available local help in the inevitable rush to get the paddy planted and harvested. Thus it made eminent good sense for large farmers to develop a loyal work force by means of material and symbolic acts of social consideration and friendship. In the first few years of double-cropping, when migrant workers were no longer easily available but combines had not yet appeared, this strategy became even more imperative. The same process was apparent in the relations between landlords and their tenants. When it was easy to rent in land, the landlord had a vested interest in making occasional concessions in order to retain a good cultivator. To these more strictly economic motives must be joined the incentives for village elites, especially since independence, to build loyal political followings as a precondition of their preferential access to the benefits available from local state and party institutions.
For those who needed land and work—or both—a similar, but even more compelling calculus prevailed. For them, living from hand to mouth, often having to leave after the harvest to find work elsewhere, the prospect of a steady tenancy or reliable field work each season was important. The contingent but inevitable crises of crop failure, a death or illness in the family, or a sudden ritual expense meant that the possibility of loans, charity, or emergency assistance was not just a convenience but a virtual necessity for the household.2 If they accommodated themselves publicly to these social relations of production while continually striving to redefine them to their advantage, their behavior made good sense as well.
But it is not sufficient merely to understand the obviously self-interested basis of these social relations of production. What is critical for my purpose—that is, the analysis of ideological conflict—is to grasp the nature of the normative filter through which these self-interested actions must pass and how and why they are socially transformed by this passage. Why, in other words, is economic power “euphemized” in this fashion and what are the consequences of its eu [Page 307] phemization?3 From one perspective what the wealthy did was to transmute a portion of their disproportionate economic means into forms of status, prestige, and social control by means of acts they passed off as voluntary acts of generosity or charity. This social control was, of course, again convertible into labor services-and hence again into material wealth. Are we, as Bourdieu asks in a similar context, to see in this simply a clever sleight-of-hand, “a disguised form of purchase of labor power or a covert exaction of corvees?” He answers:
By all means, as long as the analysis holds together what holds together in practice, the double reality of intrinsically equivocal, ambiguous conduct… the complete reality of this appropriation of services lies in the fact that it can only take place in the disguise of the thiwizi [a ritual of disinterested gift giving], the voluntary assistance which is also a corvee and is thus a voluntary corvee and forced assistance.4
The euphemization of economic power is necessary both where direct physical coercion is not possible and where the pure indirect domination of the capitalist market is not yet sufficient to ensure appropriation by itself.5 In such settings, appropriation must take place through a socially recognized form of domination. Such domination is not simply imposed by force but must assume a form that gains social compliance. If it is to work at all, it requires that the weaker party—if only publicly—acquiesce in the euphemism.
Three consequences of this euphemization of economic control are central to [Page 308] my analysis. The first is simply that, if it is achieved at all, it is not achieved without costs. The cultivation of people, no less than the cultivation of paddy land, demands time, effort, and resources. The large farmer who wanted to ensure his labor supply and his political following had to handcraft his social authority link by link by means of strategic gifts, charity, loans, sociability, feasts, and other concrete and symbolic services.6
A second, and closely related, consequence is that the euphemization of economic domination could be achieved only by virtue of a degree of socialization of the profits of cultivation. I use the word socialization cautiously, as there has of course never been any socialization of the ownership of the means of production. Instead what occurred was a modest and strategic socialization of a portion of the crop itself and the proceeds from it, which took the form of gifts in emergencies, zakat after the harvest, feasts, liberality, and so forth. This limited socialization of wealth—carried on, to be sure, between private individuals—was the only way in which wealth could be successfully converted into social credit and labor services. Here we have something of a rural analogue of what Marx called the contradiction between private appropriation and socialized production, except that in this case it is a contradiction between private appropriation and the social use of property. When we look closely at the charges the poor make against the rich, they are almost without exception arguments for the social use of property. Thus, the charges about the decline of feast giving, the disappearance of post-harvest zakat, the refusal of alms (sedekah), and hence the more global charge of stinginess and tightfistedness are directly related to the social use of property. Even the major issues of production relations—combine-harvester use, the resort to leasehold tenancy (pajak), accelerated rent collection, and the abuses of the Village Improvement Scheme—can be viewed as appeals to past practices, both customary and specifically Islamic, in which the property and influence of the rich were condoned only if they also served to provide land, work, and income to the rest of the community. This is perhaps also why the ideological struggle is largely confined to the Malay community, the only unit within which the social use of property was actively sanctioned. Such claims are now tenaciously defended precisely because they are grounded in both the symbolic and material practices of a shared, if contested, tradition.
A third aspect of the euphemization of property relations is that it is always the focus of symbolic manipulation, struggle, and conflict. We must not view these patterns as merely a ploy, a mystification, as dust thrown in the eyes of subordinate classes. While the symbolic conduct of the rich is certainly self [Page 309] interested, the very definition of what constitutes s
elf-interest is the outcome of a class struggle. Thus, we fail to apprehend the full significance of the occasional gift or zakat not only when we see it as the elites intend it to be seen-as disinterested liberality-but also when we treat it simply as a cynical disguise for appropriation. A more complete view requires us to grasp the double symbolic manipulation of the euphemization itself. As E. P. Thompson has observed in a related context:
Even “liberality” and “charity” may be seen as calculated acts of class appeasement in times of dearth and calculated extortions (under threat of riot) by the crowd: what is (from above) an “act of giving” is (from below) an “act of getting.”7
For a moment, let us try to ground this insight in a particular example from Sedaka with which we are familiar: the relationship between Hamzah and his frequent employer, Haji Kadir. Hamzah knows that Haji Kadir is in a position to provide him with, say, work or a loan against future wages. He also knows that Haji Kadir and others like him have typically described such actions in terms of help (tolong) or assistance (bantuan). Hamzah then uses this knowledge to pursue his concrete ends; he approaches Haji Kadir, using all the appropriate linguistic forms of deference and politeness, and requests his “help” and “assistance.”8 In other words, he appeals to the self-interested description that Haji Kadir would give to his own acts to place them in the most advantageous light. We know enough about Hamzah to gather that this is more or less what actually goes through his mind. If he wins he achieves his desired objective (work or a loan) and in the process he contributes willy-nilly to the public legitimacy of the principles to which he strategically appealed. Just who is manipulating whom in this petty enterprise is no simple matter to decide. It is best seen, perhaps, as a reciprocal manipulation of the symbols of euphemization.
I shall return to this issue later, but at this stage it is sufficient to note that the key symbols animating class relations in Sedaka-generosity, stinginess, arrogance, humility, help, assistance, wealth and poverty-do not constitute a set of given rules or principles that actors simply follow. They are instead the normative raw material that is created, maintained, changed, and above all manipulated by daily human activity. The argument I am making here about the norms surrounding the relations between rich and poor is very much like [Page 310] the distinction Bourdieu makes between “kinship systems” seen as “a closed, coherent set of purely logical relationships” that are obeyed and “kinship” as a practical activity of real social actors:
In short, the logical relations of kinship to which the structuralist tradition ascribes a more or less complete autonomy with respect to economic determinants, and correlatively a near-perfect internal coherence, exist in practice only through and for the official and unofficial uses made of them by agents whose attachment to keeping them in working order and to making them work intensively-hence, through constant use, ever more easily-rises with the degree to which they actually or potentially fulfill functions indispensable to them or, to put it less ambiguously, the extent to which they do or can satisfy vital material and symbolic interests.9
As with kinship then, the objective of a social analysis of the ideology of class relations is not somehow to tease out a consensus of agreed-upon rules but rather to understand how divergent constructions of those rules and their application are related to class interests. Thus, it is hardly surprising to find that the poor in Sedaka work incessantly at maintaining, strengthening, and sanctioning a particular view of who is rich, who is poor, and how they should behave toward one another. Their view of what counts as decent conduct, their gossip, their account of the “facts,” their use of nicknames, their view of what Islam requires, their strikes and boycotts, their selective appeals to customary practices are all bent toward a normative outlook that serves their material and symbolic interests. Since, as it happens, the transformation of production relations has worked largely to their disadvantage, they find themselves defending a large array of earlier practices.
The well-to-do villagers, for their part, also make use of the plasticity in any normative discourse to present themselves, their claims, and their interests in the best possible light. Their problem, as we have seen, however, is slightly different. They are unable simply to renounce the older practices and the normative assumptions lying behind them, but they are also unwilling to forgo the profit that respecting them would require. Thus they are largely driven to a construction of the “facts” that allows them to claim that the older practices are inapplicable. They assert, as we have seen, that the differences in income are negligible, that everyone here cultivates paddy on roughly the same footing, and that the conduct of those who are manifestly poor morally disqualifies them from any sympathetic consideration.
Two aspects of the ideological position of the rich deserve particular note. First, although it is rarely challenged in public, we know from unguarded derisive commentary by the poor that they hardly find it convincing-let alone hegemonic. Second, and equally important, the fact that the wealthy never [Page 311] explicitly deny the principle that the rich should be considerate of the needs of the poor-disputing rather the facts and their applicability to a particular casemeans ironically that they themselves inadvertently “contribute to the-entirely official-survival of the rule.”10
From a larger perspective, the ideological difficulties of the wealthy farmers in Sedaka stem from the fact that their economic behavior is increasingly based on the logic of the new market opportunities, while their social authority has been based on traditional forms of domination. They face, therefore, the classic ideological contradiction of the transition to more capitalist forms of production.11 To the degree that the new production relations have prevailed, there is a corresponding decline in the social use of property and hence in the social authority of the propertied class.
The net result of the process has been that the large farmers and landlords affiliated with the ruling UMNO party have been losing their social grip on the poor. In the past, UMNO’s political control of the countryside was predicated squarely on the social control that wealthier families could exercise over smallholders by virtue of relations of economic dependence, particularly tenancy and employment. It was enough for UMNO to attach to itself a large share of the wealthier villagers; their economic dependents were brought along as a matter of course. As the “organic” dependence of production relations has come unraveled, as profit has been steadily detached from social control over poorer villagers, these economic networks of local authority have become far more tenuous. They have not disappeared altogether but have become less numerous and less reliable. Those economic relations of dependence that remain, moreover, are now often organized more strictly by impersonal market forces-for example, kupang labor, leasehold tenancy, full and inflexible economic rents-so as to yield far less in terms of systematic social subordination.
It is worth recalling in this context that the inequitable distribution of paddy land in the Muda region has never in itself been legitimate. Most of the sizable landholdings in the area were, after all, acquired by jual-janji and other sharp dealings that took advantage of the periodic destitution of smallholders. As the stories about Haji Broom amply illustrate, the extent to which the privileged [Page 312] position of rich landowners ever carried social authority (as opposed to control) with it was based only on the extent to which their property served the practical needs of poor villagers for tenancies, work, and assistance.12 The connection I am emphasizing between social control and the social use of property is perhaps best captured in the example of self-styled charity-zakat peribadi, fitrah gifts, occasional loans, and alms. Such acts serve both to symbolize and to reaffirm the existing social hierarchy. Because they are so eminently divisible and discretionary, they are also used to single out the “deserving” poor for preferential treatment and thereby reinforce-at least publicly-their compliance with the norms of subordination.13 Once the strategic rationale behind such charity loses its economic and political force, a major element o
f social control is also lost. Thus many villagers have effectively been “turned loose” to fend for themselves, and it is this that wealthy farmers are at pains to justify. The results of this “freedom” are as economically painful for the poor as they are financially rewarding for the rich. But they also undermine the basis of social domination by the propertied class.
This is not to imply that the large farmers of the village have lost their control of local affairs, let alone that they face an insurgent peasantry. What has occurred, however, is that the basis of their domination has been transformed. Their control, which was once embedded in the primary dependencies of production relations, is now based far more on law, property, coercion, market forces, and political patronage. They have themselves become much more dependent upon the state for their credit and inputs, for their supply of patronage resources, and for the ultimate force that guarantees their continued control over scarce land and capital. The rewarding ties that now inextricably bind much of this class to the state mean, of course, that its members have become increasingly vulnerable to any events (for example, a prolonged recession or a major political change) that might jeopardize their access and influence. It is ironic but entirely logical that this class has been so securely wedded to the state at precisely the [Page 313] moment when its own autonomous control over subordinate classes is fast eroding. Lacking the economic control that grew from the earlier relations of production, lacking even an ideological position that is convincingly embedded in actual practices, this elite will now sink or swim depending on the resources for patronage, profit, and control the state can put at its disposal.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 50