Rahul Goswami :
If you have a nodding acquaintance with conventional Marxist approaches to understand matters that concern land, peasants and what peasants and land in combination mean, then this is usually coded as ‘the agrarian question’. Its classic formulation was magisterially articulated by Karl Kautsky in Die Agrarfrage (which, in German, means the agrarian question), and first let loose on the dreary world in 1899.
Any serious phrasing of an answer to this question needs to embrace both the economic and political dimensions, to be concerned with the introduction of capitalist relations into peasant agriculture, the consequential transformation of agricultural production as well as the role of the transformed agricultural sector in industrial development. These processes of agrarian transition – so the theoretical model advises us – lead to the ‘de-peasantisation’ and transformation of the social classes.
Softened by theory in a thousand dense pages, you may well ask: Yes but who is the peasant in Southeast Asia when all we see are metropolises determined to be modern, workforces intent upon info-tech as their industrial medium, consumers certain that they are (or will soon become) pampered royalty, and hordes of politicians who are brokers of ill-formed dreams?
Be assured that there are peasants to be found in Myanmar and in Thailand, in Malaysia and in Cambodia, in Vietnam and in Indonesia, even in Japan and certainly in the Philippines. They glare with distaste at the chauvinistic attitudes that run not only along urban-rural lines but also alongside ethnic demarcations, and then phlegmatically return to their fields and rivers, there to debate the course of the universe and the tactics of resistance.
For resistance is in no short supply in Southeast Asia. It is there and palpable in the practices of the Dayak in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, as a reaction to the displacement of their traditional types of agriculture by oil palm plantations. During the Suharto regime, it is reckoned, Javanese people were influential in the bureaucracy and security forces, but since decentralisation more local Malays have moved into these positions. How far this is true is difficult enough to judge in Jakarta, let alone outside the bewildering archipelago.
The local social milieu of West Kalimantan has experienced turbulence since government programmes started relocating transmigrants (that is when ‘transmigrasi’ became a word in Bahasa and then a whole concept) to the area as a way to move landless people out of the country’s densely populated regions. This has led to various conflicts with the indigenous Dayaks, especially over access to and control of land resources. Unsurprisingly, palm oil plantation managers have generally displayed an arrogance in their dealings with local labourers and villagers, whose behaviour the former regard (typically) as grounded in backward and irrational attitudes.
In the case of upland communities on Palawan Island, the Philippines, a comparable demographic shift occurred with the arrival of lowland migrant settlers. As a consequence, indigenous people entered into competition over land and forest resources with these new arrivals. This took place in the context of community-based conservation measures in national parks that ‘granted’ indigenous peoples the responsibility to access, use and manage resources for poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation (two typically loaded concepts that command good exchange value in international development studies).
The thinking about protected areas (like parks) based this practice on outdated stereotypes of ‘ethnic traditions’ and ‘sustainability’, and on a narrow understanding of indigenous upland livelihoods as subsistence-based. In contrast, lowland migrants were classified as ‘modern’ and ‘productive’, thus receiving state support and public lands for commercial agriculture while indigenous populations were allocated miserly support intended to revitalise subsistence practices. Undoubtedly, such an approach displays an ignorance of the richly diverse livelihoods of the hill communities and can also reinforce poverty.
Kautsky may have found himself puzzled by the shape-shifting mosaic of change in today’s Southeast Asia, but only momentarily. Far-reaching changes in the rural societies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have created new contexts of ‘the countryside’ and ‘the peasantry’ and these influence the issues at the core of resistance and peasant politics. These people, who grow food from fields that have been tended for generations, who care for rivers and lakes, who protect a bio-diversity the local names of which are legion, are not consumers. They are peasants and they fly with pride their own rough and remarkable flags of culture.
(Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with the Unesco)
