Power, labor, and livelihood : processes of change in rural Java /

Consideration of the nature and causes of contemporary agrarian change in Java has produced a lively literature of analysis and opinion, most of it responding in some way to the views expressed by Clifford Geertz in Agricultural Involution (1963). Hart (economics, Boston University) has entered a solid contribution. She characterizes the four main approaches to the problem that have emerged from the general debate and provides a brief but informative discussion of each. She has followed a research strategy familiar to anthropologists; it caused her to concentrate her study for months at a time on a single village in the coastal region of north central Java. This detailed work, however, is placed in a framework of analysis that connects the village to higher, more general levels of relationship, up to and including the state, particularly as that has been influenced by Suharto's New Order. The book should be of interest to general readers and university students, especially in economics, anthropology, and Indonesian research.-R.F. Maher, Western Michigan University