Page 294 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Landownership Tenancy, and ...

The second layers were those who were nominated as can-
didates for the first status mentioned above. Generally they had
their own compound and garden. The next stratum were land-
less laborers who live in their own houses built on someone else’s

compound; and the lowest stratum consisted of absolute land-
less laborers who have nothing to offer but their labor. In bet-
ween these categories were various statutes of a transitional or
mixed character, and all put together constituted a complex pat-
tern of land tenure relations with many local variations.
The purpose of mentioning social stratification described
briefly above is simply to give an overview which may be help-
ful in understanding the importance of land ownership in ru-
ral areas. In this paper, however, owing to the lack of such
qualitative data it is impossible to examine whether or not
such a “social portrait” still persists. More attention is there-
fore paid to the possible links between land ownership and
economic status as will be discussed below.
Before we discuss in detail, it is necessary to look at the
overall pattern of relationship between sawah owned and eco-
nomic status, as presented in Table 6.6. It clearly appears that
the data from this table support our belief that land ownership
is closely related to economic status. When we look at the cor-

relation coefficients for each indicator, the data for all house-
holds indicate a positive and significant correlation, although
the coefficients are not high (see last column). By village, how-
ever, the results vary. In the lowland villages (except for Vil-
lage I), dry land variation is less important than in the upland
villages, especially in terms of pekarangan (house gardens)
which is much less significant. In most upland villages on the

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