Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns

Based on extensive, hands-on field trips to both Bali (1957-58) and Java (1952-54), anthropologist Clifford Geertz evaluates Indonesia's prospects for economic development and growth in the postwar period from 1945 to 1963. His model of economic expansion interprets characteristic shifts in institutional, cultural, religious, and social values as the prerequisite signposts of a "pre-take off" society in transition from a traditional agricultural equilibrium to the emerging dynamic of a non-familial, commercial/industrial production system. He looks for and documents these fundamental patterns of change in social stratification, world view, education, degree of family cohesion, and in the nature of work itself (rising status of technical vs. aesthetic skills) in the representative bellwether towns of Tabanan in southwestern Bali and Modjokuto in eastern central Java.Geertz zeroes in on these two analogous social units within the larger Indonesian polity to test his theories of the processes of modernization, individuation, and urbanization. He pulls back the kelly green palm fronds of idyllic Bali to compare changes in political, social, and economic organization in Tabanan (former seat of a Balinese royal court, traditional center of art and politics, and now administrative capitol of a fertile, populous, rice-growing region) with parallel developments in its Javanese counterpart. By choosing Tabanan as a laboratory for measuring periods of seismic structural change, Geertz opens up a fascinating archival window into Balinese society at a particular historical juncture. Scholarly but still accessible to the average intelligent reader, Peddlers and Princes increases our understanding of the complicated cultural, economic, and caste systems which color the classic Balinese village. Geertz shines when he explores the five "seka" (core social affinities) which form the critical underpinnings of Balinese life: temple, residential, agricultural/irrigation, kinship, and voluntary associations. Cooperation, community, and collective effort are still the strong central backbone of Balinese peasant society: he leaves these traditional organizational forms to either adapt to-or resiliently resist-the diametrically opposing pull of the twenty-first century. This books serves as a permanent time portal into Tabanan in the year 1957: it is a golden opportunity to carefully observe and appreciate an intimate, unwittingly preserved slice of the Balinese past.