“Agricultural involution” and its critics: Twenty years after

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Clifford Geertz’ Agricultural Involution: the Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963), a work whose basic arguments had already circulated in mimeograph seven years earlier (Geertz 1956a). Initial reactions in the West, from a variety of disciplines, were almost unanimous in praise (Sharma 1964; Wertheim 1964; Heeren 1965; Jaspan 1965; Benda 1966; Johns 1966; Yengoyan 1966; Conklin 1968), although reviews by Indonesian scholars, mostly appearing after the book’s translation to Indonesian (Geertz 1976) were more muted (Koentjaraningrat 1975: 202ff; Sajogyo 1976; Mubyarto 1978). “Involution” has by now become “a standard concept of textbook social science” (Evers 1980: 2) and has been used in a wide variety of rural and urban contexts in other countries to denote a particular variety of non-evolutionary, non-revolutionary change. Together with the linked concept of “shared poverty” it has become part of the everyday discourse of Indonesian policymakers and the educated middle class (including the majority who have not read Geertz’ work), and there is no doubt that it has had a profound influence on all subsequent social-science research, both historical and contemporary, on agrarian change in Indonesia and particularly Java. Nearly all published work since that time has either made use of the concepts of “involution” and “shared poverty” or cast its findings explicitly in contrast to them. As one recent author has noted, “reference to Agricultural Involution can hardly be avoided whether or not one agrees with Geertz’ approach” and the concern with Geertzian models has become almost “obsessive” (Gerdin 1982: 56).