Page 29 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

reports as evidence.
Five years later, both the ‘Collier et al.’ and the ‘Hayami et
al.’ approaches were criticized by Gillian Hart. Her main con-
tribution was to underline the need to view the dynamics of

agrarian relations in their broader social, and particularly their
socio-political context, by introducing the dimension of power
(as in the title of her book Power, Labour and Livelihood,
1986a). Neither the neo-populist explanations of Collier et al.,
nor the neoclassical arguments of Hayami et al., she argues,
can explain the timing and rapidity of the changes in Java
beginning in the late 1960s. Hart argued that kedokan/
ceblokan and other forms of interlocking agrarian transac-
tions should be seen primarily as a means of social control,
involving principles of selectivity and exclusion to elicit labour
compliance and create and reinforce relations of dominance
and dependency, as well as providing a cheap and effective
means of managing the labour process. Citing the evidence of
Gerwani’s earlier campaign against ceblokan, and the efforts
of local officials in Krawang to ban the practice as a security
threat, Hart argued that,

“the transformation of agrarian labour arrangements is a con-
sequence not just of changing technology, labour availability
and commercialization, but also of changing political condi-
tions and the tensions and contradictions which the institu-
tional arrangements themselves generate” (Hart 1986b: 197).
Hart also introduced a novel argument about “state pa-
tronage” in which the Indonesian New Order state was seen as
providing both subsidized inputs (through Bimas/Inmas) and
rural political stability (through repression of democratic

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