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 dem…
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.
I literally spent 1 week researching this independently, with basically no source summarizing everything, patching together everything myself—including reading obscure maps of soil quality—only to find this packaged in a 60yo book...
Thank you for the reco!
From what I can read in the Wikipedia article and the ChatGPT summary, the rice-feeds-ppl-feed-rice is indeed a big piece. I didn't know about the role of Dutch pressure, but that makes sense. But the summaries don't shed any light on the fertility of the different lands. For example, the slash-and-burn was more common in Sumatra, but AFAIK rice paddies were simply not viable there because of the soil, so this piece was not as much cultural, but geological.
Anyway, fascinating. Thanks for sharing! ChatGPT and I are having a debate about it right now :)
It's been 20 years since I read the book but yes he does go into the colonial antecedents. I can't remember how that played into it. I also can't remember off-hand why Bali/Java went sawah while the other islands remained under swidden systems, whether it had something to do with the geological substrate or was somehow sociologically driven. I suspect the latter. One thing you have to remember re: fertility is that a big proportion of the labor inputs into the paddy under involution are precisely aimed at maintaining and feeding the productivity of the soil. This is done first through the engineering and maintenance of the paddy itself but then through careful collection and application of human and animal fertilizer (and unfortunately eventually synthetic fertilizers as well) and through the cultivation of symbiotic pisciculture in the paddy. The fish fertilize the paddy, eat pests (like mosquito larvae, for a start), and provide a supplementary source of protein for the family. The other thing to note of course is that not all these people are obviously able to stay on the land. They are constantly being spun off into nearby urban areas as surplus labor but the farms are still there with this built in logic to produce ever more people, or at least they are still there until they get eaten up by expanding urban settlement. Once it has built up that population density has an immense gravity to it. Even if the farms were totally dispensed with that huge urbanized population becomes a self-perpetuating mass that takes several generations to shrink, let alone dissipate. It's not surprising that many generations of policy efforts to induce resettlement to less settled (e.g. economically stagnant) islands have been unsuccessful. It's too hard, expensive, scary, etc. to move and what are the opportunities being offered, really? A contrast case can be found within China. I haven't done this at all and don't know anything certain about it but I'm sure that if you look into Southern Yunnan (i.e. the location of all the mind boggling pictures you've ever seen of endless minutely terraced rice paddies in China) you will find that a very similar process of agricultural involution was at play there for many generations, probably centuries. But it may be that Southern Yunnan does not still hold a disproportionately large-in-Chinese-terms population because China is such a huge ecosystem and the growth of China's coastal industrial zones has been so hot the last 30 years that yes, that rural surplus was drained away into other opportunity zones. Indonesia is no China, and what it does have in terms of an industrialized economy is concentrated in the same areas that produced the population surplus in the first place. Cheers - CS
Well, all that careful tending of rice paddies is done all over southern China, from Sichuan/Szechuan with its massive population in a basin to the 2 Hu’s (Hunan and Hubei) which produce 50% of China’s rice to the economically vibrant and historically rich Yangtze River delta (where Shanghai is). They just don’t need to terrace up mountains as they have more flat land.
Reading through your comment, I can't help but reflect on the fact that the Netherlands, which colonized Java, is itself also known for quite intense agriculture and heavily engineering their environment in pursuit of their goals. So it makes you wonder if there is some causal link going in one direction or the other...maybe the Dutch already had the mindset of maximizing yields from a small area of land and then brought that approach to Java? Or going the other way, maybe this approach occured in Java and then it was brought back to the Netherlands by returning colonial officers or Javanese immigrants? Either way, it seems unlikely to me that this same model would have been followed if Java had been colonized by a less densly populated country e.g. Russia.
The volcanoes are the source of the rice. They make the land boggy as they extrude clay after baking it and reducing it to ash.
With the clay, the nutrient rich ash, full of iron, subsidises fishing as well as population grown, everything a simple family unit needs can be carved or woven locally if they have a source of nutrition. And can stop us English stealing it all.
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.
Unbelievable.
I literally spent 1 week researching this independently, with basically no source summarizing everything, patching together everything myself—including reading obscure maps of soil quality—only to find this packaged in a 60yo book...
Thank you for the reco!
From what I can read in the Wikipedia article and the ChatGPT summary, the rice-feeds-ppl-feed-rice is indeed a big piece. I didn't know about the role of Dutch pressure, but that makes sense. But the summaries don't shed any light on the fertility of the different lands. For example, the slash-and-burn was more common in Sumatra, but AFAIK rice paddies were simply not viable there because of the soil, so this piece was not as much cultural, but geological.
Anyway, fascinating. Thanks for sharing! ChatGPT and I are having a debate about it right now :)
It's been 20 years since I read the book but yes he does go into the colonial antecedents. I can't remember how that played into it. I also can't remember off-hand why Bali/Java went sawah while the other islands remained under swidden systems, whether it had something to do with the geological substrate or was somehow sociologically driven. I suspect the latter. One thing you have to remember re: fertility is that a big proportion of the labor inputs into the paddy under involution are precisely aimed at maintaining and feeding the productivity of the soil. This is done first through the engineering and maintenance of the paddy itself but then through careful collection and application of human and animal fertilizer (and unfortunately eventually synthetic fertilizers as well) and through the cultivation of symbiotic pisciculture in the paddy. The fish fertilize the paddy, eat pests (like mosquito larvae, for a start), and provide a supplementary source of protein for the family. The other thing to note of course is that not all these people are obviously able to stay on the land. They are constantly being spun off into nearby urban areas as surplus labor but the farms are still there with this built in logic to produce ever more people, or at least they are still there until they get eaten up by expanding urban settlement. Once it has built up that population density has an immense gravity to it. Even if the farms were totally dispensed with that huge urbanized population becomes a self-perpetuating mass that takes several generations to shrink, let alone dissipate. It's not surprising that many generations of policy efforts to induce resettlement to less settled (e.g. economically stagnant) islands have been unsuccessful. It's too hard, expensive, scary, etc. to move and what are the opportunities being offered, really? A contrast case can be found within China. I haven't done this at all and don't know anything certain about it but I'm sure that if you look into Southern Yunnan (i.e. the location of all the mind boggling pictures you've ever seen of endless minutely terraced rice paddies in China) you will find that a very similar process of agricultural involution was at play there for many generations, probably centuries. But it may be that Southern Yunnan does not still hold a disproportionately large-in-Chinese-terms population because China is such a huge ecosystem and the growth of China's coastal industrial zones has been so hot the last 30 years that yes, that rural surplus was drained away into other opportunity zones. Indonesia is no China, and what it does have in terms of an industrialized economy is concentrated in the same areas that produced the population surplus in the first place. Cheers - CS
Well, all that careful tending of rice paddies is done all over southern China, from Sichuan/Szechuan with its massive population in a basin to the 2 Hu’s (Hunan and Hubei) which produce 50% of China’s rice to the economically vibrant and historically rich Yangtze River delta (where Shanghai is). They just don’t need to terrace up mountains as they have more flat land.
Reading through your comment, I can't help but reflect on the fact that the Netherlands, which colonized Java, is itself also known for quite intense agriculture and heavily engineering their environment in pursuit of their goals. So it makes you wonder if there is some causal link going in one direction or the other...maybe the Dutch already had the mindset of maximizing yields from a small area of land and then brought that approach to Java? Or going the other way, maybe this approach occured in Java and then it was brought back to the Netherlands by returning colonial officers or Javanese immigrants? Either way, it seems unlikely to me that this same model would have been followed if Java had been colonized by a less densly populated country e.g. Russia.
It is very possible.
A deep dive into the Netherlands is in my books. So I might look into it!
The volcanoes are the source of the rice. They make the land boggy as they extrude clay after baking it and reducing it to ash.
With the clay, the nutrient rich ash, full of iron, subsidises fishing as well as population grown, everything a simple family unit needs can be carved or woven locally if they have a source of nutrition. And can stop us English stealing it all.