Page 21 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

It was at this time that Gunawan Wiradi joined the SAE
after some years in intellectual ‘exile’, and immediately became
involved in the SAE’s field research and publications. He joined
the SAE exactly at the moment when the SAE researchers first

began to attempt more systematic research, through the
village re-studies, on the implications of the green revolution
and the Bimas programme for income distribution and the
role of institutional changes.
From the early 1970s onwards reports had begun to
emerge of changing harvesting practices in the main rice pro-
ducing areas of Java. Among these were the shift from open-
entry to closed systems of labour recruitment, through vari-
ous means of restricting the numbers of harvesters allowed to
enter the field and earn a harvest wage; the rise and spread of
tebasan (the sale of the standing crop before the harvest,
allowing the buyer to bring his/her own harvesters), and vari-
ous other forms of exclusionary labour arrangements such as
kedokan or ceblokan in which the worker, to get access to a
harvest wage, must perform one or more of the pre-harvest
tasks (such as transplanting or weeding) without pay; and shifts
in the technology of harvesting—from the ani-ani to the arit
(sickle)—and from storage in bundles (untilan) of stalk padi to

immediate threshing in the field or at the owner’s house. These
changes were also considered responsible for shifts on the gen-
der division of labour, with men being increasingly seen in
harvest work which had previously been reserved for women. 11

11 Various studies on these changes from the 1970s and early 1980s
are summarised in White 2000, pp. 87-96.

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