Page 2 - Melacak Sejarah Pemikiran Agraria Indonesia Sumbangan Pemikiran Mazhab Bogor

Ahmad Nashih Luthfi’s Melacak Sejarah Pemikiran Agraria is an
important and useful work. Based on a wide-ranging study of se-
condary sources, and also on interviews with senior agrarian
scholars, the book makes two important contributions to Indone-
sian agrarian studies.

The first part of the book traces the various traditions of agrarian
research from the colonial period to the present, in the context of
shifting agrarian policies. In these chapters the author has sum-
marized many important but little-known studies from Indo-
nesia’s late-colonial and early independence period (1920s –
1970s).
The second part of the book explores the intellectual biographies
of Professor Sajogyo and Dr. Gunawan Wiradi, as two exem-
plary leading figures in the emergence of the ‘Bogor School’ of
critical agrarian studies. These two scholars, and others of the
‘Bogor School’, have consistently opposed the longstanding elitist
tradition in agrarian research and policy, insisting on the need for
attention to the structural problems which maintain and
reinforce rural poverty, and arguing for agrarian reforms to cor-
rect the unequal agrarian structures left behind by colonialism
and further distorted by developments in the neoliberal era.

In this way the author has made a truly original contribution to
our understanding of Indonesian agrarian studies. This book will
be essential background reading for young scholars, practitioners
and activists interested in problems of agrarian transition and
rural poverty in Indonesia.

Ben White, Professor of Rural Sociology, International Institute of
Social Studies (ISS), The Hague.