Page 32 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Kata Pengantar

(Hart, Turton and White eds 1989) which is reproduced as the
final chapter of this volume.
Thus, in the literature on impacts of intensification in
Java’s rice producing villages we can find a whole spectrum of

theoretical perspectives, from neo-classical at one end of the
continuum to neo-marxist political economy at the other, with
the neo-populist ideas of the early SAE publications some-
where in the middle, and all of them relying to a large extent
on the SAE village data. In this way the SAE sample villages
have provided the ammunition for both the critics and the
apologists of Indonesia’s green revolution. 17

E. The SAE, Gunawan Wiradi and Land Reform

Towards the end of the 1970s it became possible, after
some years of enforced silence, to raise issues of land reform
in Indonesia. The period 1978-1982 saw a revival of public
interest in agrarian reform (as seen in the statements of public
officials, in academic writing and in the press media) which
later lost its initial momentum, followed by another period of
quiet, roughly until the early or mid-1990s. The SAE, before
its dissolution as an independent research organization in
1982, was able to make a significant contribution to the begin-
ning of the new agrarian reform discourse, and as we may ex-
pect Gunawan Wiradi was a prime mover in these activities.

17 It is interesting to compare this with the role of Russian zemstvo
statistics which provided the main empirical ammunition for both
Lenin’s work on the class differentiation of the Russian peas-
antry, and Chayanov’s neo-populist counter-theory of peasant
economy. But that would be another story.

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