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Carl Somers's avatar

Tomas - Boy do I have the book for you. It turns out that none other than Clifford Geertz wrote a whole book (one of his most influential in fact) on exactly this subject. Like, literally exactly this subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution

Basically you are on the right track that it has to do with the social demography of rice production in that specific environment. You can go grow rice in a labor extensive (slash and burn) or labor intensive way (paddy based). Java and Bali are the most populated regions of Indonesia and they both are organized around sawah, or paddy based production. It turns out that rice responds to manual labor better than any other cereal crop. In other words, rice yields go up with the intensity of labor inputs, not literally infinitely but it can seem that way (think about people standing in a paddy transferring individual shoots of rice into the ground at very careful intervals and then tending that tiny paddy obsessively over months). Over time, as the farms get subdivided down through family succession the pressure on individual units of land to produce enough rice to sustain a nuclear family goes up. The response is to have more kids so that you can pour more labor into the paddy so that you can squeeze more rice out of it. More kids means more subdivision through succession, and so on and so on over many many generations.

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Mahardhika's avatar

As an Indonesian that live in Java Island. I approve this article.👍

Adding to that, Javanese people have a very polite character (not in japanese polite sense). Helping each other even stranger. If you go to java and ran out of money. You still going to survive because their hospitality.

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