Page 26 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Kata Pengantar

explicit attention on issues of resource access, labour and em-
ployment and income distribution, and the ‘rural institutions’
linked to these processes, in both the farm and non-farm sec-
tors and in both lowland and upland villages. Due mainly to

donor interest the SDP’s first and main efforts were concen-
trated on a single river basin in West Java, with later expan-
sion on a smaller scale to East Java and South Sulawesi.
The SDP project got off to a rather slow start, since it had
been decided to begin with a massive survey of all 795 villages
in the Cimanuk River Basin, with 1045 questions. The resulting
data were difficult to handle with the still primitive computer
facilities available at the time, and one of the few studies to
make good use of them was Gunawan Wiradi’s M.Soc.Sc. thesis
at University Sains Malaysia (Wiradi 1978). In this thesis
Wiradi takes a balanced, historical perspective on labour
arrangements, which helped to put the rise and decline of
tebasan, kedokan, ijon, maro/mertelu, gadai and similar prac-
tices in perspective, in the context of the 1970s in which
“everything was happening at once”, as he puts it, in the rural
areas of Java.
Besides this study, the SDP only began to produce interes-
ting work after the team had selected a small number of sample

villages and initiated seasonal or annual surveys on the old
IPS model, but with broader scope (with more focus on insti-
tutions, land tenure, nonfarm sector, etc. and increasingly
combining quantitative and qualitative work). The re-studies
of SDP sample villages in 1983, and of some IPS villages in
1981 have provided two sets of multi-village re-studies, which
have become an important data-base for the next phase of

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