CLASS-IFYING

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 139

ever, specified when their perfOrmance becomes a bone of contention, that is, when they can no longer be taken for granted. Finally, the observer may find certain themes or values that appear to unify what might otherwise appear to be separate realms of practice, belief, or discourse. Ideals of "manhood" in some Mediterranean societies are a possible case in point. 1 Here, the observer is creating a synthesis or interpretation that is perhaps consistent with the record but is unlikely ever to be consciously thought or spoken by those who have created that record. Such interpretations are, as Geertz notes, "our own constructions of other people's [the human subjects in question} construction of what they and their compatriots are up to. "2

The problem necessarily arises of how to evaluate these constructions; on what basis is one construction to be preferred over another? The conceptual ground is treacherous here and proof, in the strict sense of natural sciences, is unavailable. Nevertheless, some standards of evidence and inference are possible. Such constructions should be economical and, at the very least, consistent with the practices and beliefs they purport to illuminate. To the degree that they also make sense of what would otherwise be unrelated or anomalous data from the record of human action, they are to be preferred over competing constructions. One final standard by which interpretations might be judged is the object of considerable dispute; it is that our interpretation or characterization should, in principle, be fOund plausible by those whose actions are being interpreted. The problem here, of course, is not only that all human actors have interests that lead them to conceal or misrepresent their intentions, but that this standard must also contend both with Freudian doctrine that judges many motivations to be inaccessible to the actor and with the notion of"false-consciousness." Thus, while it may be unrealistic to insist that human actors confirm our construction of their actions, we can insist that our interpretations take account of the full range of self-descriptions they do offer.

The last ten years have been momentous for the villagers of Sedaka and for their compatriots on the Muda Plain. One would be hard-pressed to find another decade in which their material life and production relations changed so dramatically or in which older patterns of social and economic life came unstuck so radically. 3 These are the gross facts all villagers have had to grapple with, to

1. A healthy skepticism is surely called fur when such claims are made. This is particularly the case when supposedly unifying themes are detached from their historical roots and appear to hover over a culture like some Hegelian spirit. This brand of "idealism" makes human actors into mere vectors or pawns of ideas that are, after all, human creations. Only when such ideas are linked firmly to the historical conditions that have favored their appearance and influence and that could, if altered, spell their weakening or disappearance do they merit being taken seriously at all.

2. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," chap. 1 in The Interpretation o/ Culture (New York: Basic, 1973), 9.

3. The decade from 1940 to 1950, which includes the Japanese interregnum, is a plausible rival fur this honor.

140 • HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS

understand, and to interpret. It should not surprise us that their constructions of what has happened, its meaning, who is to blame, and what it all portends should vary greatly. There are significant variations by individual, by age, by status, and, not least, by property relations-that is to say, by class. Whose ox is being gored makes a striking difference. One cannot expect a landless laborer to look on combine-harvesters with quite the same equanimity or satisfaction as does the large-scale farmer. And yet their divergent experiences and interests fOrm part of the same community of discourse. Their disparate and often contradictory understandings of events are intended to speak to, to appeal to, one another and are fashioned from the same cultural materials available to all.

What fOllows here and in the next chapter is thus an attempt to describe and analyze the beginnings of this new experience of class in Sedaka.

If, in the last chapter, I surveyed the impact of the green revolution with the eyes of an economic or social historian, in this chapter I propose to survey the same events through the partisan eyes of two sets of villagers-winners and losers. Depending on whom one talks to, there are at least two green revolutions at work here. BefOre plunging in however, it should be perfectly obvious that class is hardly the only social experience available to villagers. Factions, neighborhoods, and kinship ties, to mention only a .few, create their own fracture lines, which do not often coincide neatly with class. Villagers are also united fur some purposes with their local antagonists as members of the same ethnic group, the same religion, the same village, the same sector of the economy (paddy). Depending on the issue and context, these other experienced selves may be decisive. What is undeniable, though, is that property relations have become far more salient since double-cropping. But property relations are, as always, rather tangled and do not serve to divide the village neatly in two or three parts like some sharp sociological scalpel. Each aspect of the changes since 1972 defines a somewhat different collection of winners and losers; small landowners who would like to expand their farms by renting, fur example, may share a distaste fur leasehold tenancy with the poor while not sharing their aversion to the use of combine-harvesters. And yet, as we shall see, there is enough of a cumulative impact at the top and at the bottom of the village stratification to provide the existential basis fur the generation of something like a class point of view.

The "poor" fur the purposes of this analysis will generally mean the thirtyseven households with the lowest per capita income. The "rich/' in turn, refers to those twenty-five households with the highest per capita incomes. 4 While per capita income is, by itself, a better measure of local class position than total

4. In practice, however, a disproportionate amount of the actual material comes from the poorer strata of "the poor" and from the richer strata of "the rich." This is the case, I think, both because the class interests of those at opposite ends of the class spectrum are less ambiguous and because I chose to devote more time listening to the poorest and the richest.

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 141

income or the amount of land owned, it nonetheless produced a few anomalies that ran square against local perceptions. In such cases, I followed local opinion, as it appeared in each case to be accurate in a larger sense than my numbers. 5 The divergent points of view examined below represent, then, what appeared to be the most salient differences in perspective between rich and poor. Apart from a "zone of agreement," only those views of double-cropping and its consequences that divided the rich and the poor and that were held by a substantial number of either group are discussed.

In a village deeply embedded in a larger economy, where a share of the local paddy land is owned by outsiders and where villagers seek work and land outside the community, class issues can hardly be confined to the local sphere alone. Most of these issues, however, have a clear local manifestation. Thus, fur virtually every change in production relations that the poor have come to resent-fur example, mechanization, rents in advance, decline in charity, shifts in wage rates-there are local, as well as outside, targets for their resentment. For a few matters-most notably leasehold tenancy:._which are most definitely class issues, there are few local antagonists. Here the "winners" are largely outside the village, and most of the local population is largely in accord although, as we shall see, at quite different levels of enthusiasm.

SHIPS PASSING-AND SIGNALING-IN THE NIGHT

Two brief commentaries on the present state of affairs in Sedaka will serve to illustrate how the facts reported in the previous chapter can take on widely divergent meanings. I have chosen them to highlight a style of argument and fur the contrast they provide. But they are neither the most divergent examples available nor the least. They are, in fact, fairly representative. Presented here with a minimum of interpretation, their meaning in the larger discourse between winners and losers will become apparent only later.

Pak Yah, a landless laborer with eight children, has always been hard-pressed to make ends meet. His situation is reflected not only in his house, which is a better maintained version of Razak's, but in his nickname. He is called Yah

5. For example, Hamid (#38) is in the middle of the income distribution, but nearly all villagers think of him as well-to-do since he owns nearly 10 relong and a tractor. It is his gambling, they say, that has fOrced him to lease out his land, thus making him appear temporarily poorer. Fadzil (#42) and Abdul Rahman (#41) are analogous cases, each being a substantial landowner; the fOrmer, however, has had to lease out some of his land to pay for a recent purchase of paddy land while the latter has had a string of crop failures. Both are considered among the well-to-do. Another anomalous case is Tok Mahmud (#56), who has always been a fairly poor man but is now a widower with only a single granddaughter at home. His per capita income is thus rather high, but villagers, taking a longer view of his life history, place him among the poor.

142 • HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS

Botol (Yah-Bottle). 6 The reference is to the sound made by the bottle of cooking oil rattling in his bicycle basket as he pedals back and forth nearly every afternoon to his house near the far end of the village. It is at the same time a reference to his poverty, since he can seldom affurd more than the 30¢ minimum purchase and must therefore buy oil daily. Unlike Razak, he is widely r~garded as an honest and reliable worker. I have heard him complain bitterly before about the difficulty of finding work and about his futile efforts ·to rent in even a small piece of paddy land. On this occasion, however, he is angrier than usual about having been denied any of the funds recently distributed by local UMNO leaders as part of the Village Improvement Scheme (RPK). Spurred on by a couple of neighbors (Nor and Mat "halus"), who were also ignored at the handout, he launches into a more global assessment of the situation.

"The well-to-do are throwing those who are hard up aside." "The more we want to lift ourselves, the more we are pushed down, the more cruel [they are to us}." "They want to bury us." 7 As he says this last phrase, Pak Yah thrusts the heel of his hand toward the ground at his feet as if pushing something into the earth and adds, "We want to be higher." To illustrate what he means, he notes that in the past it was possible to get loans of rice from well-off villagers. But now, he claims, they sell their rice for cash and then claim they have no money.

This last charge, which I had heard several times before from other poor villagers, deserves some comment. The traditional medium fur loans and advances was, fittingly, paddy or polished rice (beras), the basic food staple. Loans of cash were exceptionally rare, as they are today. The poor appear to believe that the sale of paddy for cash is, in part, an attempt by the wealthy to avoid being importuned for loans. Having sold most of their harvest; the rich can now claim that they have only enough paddy to feed their own family and that their cash is spent. This procedure has the added advantage of concealment, for while it is generally possible to know whether a man's granary is full, it is not possible to know whether he has any cash. 8

6. Malay nicknames are typically furmed by the last syllable of the given name: thus, Osman becomes "man"; Zakariah becomes "Ya"; Ahmad becomes "Mat." Appended to these nicknames is usually a reference to some personal characteristic of the individual or to his father or grandfather. Thus Mat Din is known, behind his back, as "Mat Kabur" (kabur is a coconut palm beetle that he is said to resemble); Mat Sarif is known as "Mat Rabit" (rabit means "torn" and is shorthand fur his harelip); Jamil is known as Jamil Pak Ngah (Pak Ngah is a reference to his father, who as middle son was called Ngah, a shortening of tengah meaning "middle").

7.Orang senang tauk orang susah ke-tefi. Lagi mau angkit, !agi da!am," !agi kejam. Nak bubuh dalam bumi.

8.They can surely guess that a man is rich from the bounty of his harvest, but they are generally not in a position to know the debts that he may have had to pay off. Thus in one respect the widespread use of cash marks a shift to a village in

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 143

The refusal to give loans, Pak Yah adds, shows that "As they see it, those who are hardup are despicable." "They don't want us to speak up." "They don't want us to be clever." "[But] now the poor are acting up a bit [and when] the rich see that, they are even more angry. " 9 The comment about "acting up" almost certainly refers to the open complaints that greeted the partisan distribution of government funds fur house repairs.

He continues, "They say we are lazy, but we don't get the chance to continue school or to get government jobs [fur example, government settlement schemes)." "They say we don't want to work, but it's hard to find work." Here, as elsewhere, Pak Yah and other poor villagers conduct what amounts to both sides of a debate, a dialogue, in which the accusations the rich make against them are first stated and then refuted. This debate is, moreover, cast in terms of rich and poor, although the immediate issue that has aroused Pak Yah's ire is one between UMNO members, by no means all of whom are rich, and PAS members, by no means all of whom are poor.

On an afternoon nearly a month later, I am listening to much the same group assembled below Pak Yah's house, and the anger at the partisan distribution of patronage is still rife. Their anger is fOcused particularly on what they regard as· a fraudulent survey of households conducted before allocations were made. One of the questions the clerk asked was, quite literally, "Where do you shit?'' Pak Yah's reply was to squat on the ground, flick his heel, and then to add that he even "had to shit on someone else's land." This expression is the standard, in village parlance, fur real poverty. 10

When the money was handed out, however, it was clear that the survey had been a mockery. As Pak Yah says, it was "thrown in the trash." He then does a short pantomime of a clerk checking a list of names with his index finger. "They say Pak Yah is well-to-do, even Dullah is well-to-do, even Sukur is well off. " 11 Those assembled find this hilarious as they know that these three house-

which wealth is more easily hidden. Knowing how rich a family is, moreover, is no idle pastime in peasant villages; it is vital information that forms the basis of claims and obligations among neighbors. Zola might have been describing any peasant village when he wrote, "They went on endlessly, evaluating every inch of land, for they knew how much everybody in Rognes was worth, down to the value of the bedlinen." The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 194. The wealth of a paddy-growing family could in the past have been inferred from the amount of paddy stored in the granary. As the Malay proverb puts it: "If the granary is empty, so is the stomach" (jelapang kosong, perut pun kosong).

9.Depa pandang, orang susah, hina! Cakap, tak mau, cerdik, tak mau. La ini, orang susah berlagak lebih; orang senang tengok, lagi marah.

10.Kena berak tanah orang. This is almost precisely equivalent in meaning to the American slang expression that someone is so poor that "he doesn't have a pot to piss in."

11.Depa kata Pak Yah, senang; Dullah pun, senang, Sukur pun, senang.

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holds, all PAS supporters and among the very poorest in the village, received nothing. Pak Yah continues his sketch: "They say Lebai Pendek is hard up, Shamsul is so hard up they have to give him house paint, Abu Hassan is hard up." These three men are, of course, from among the wealthiest UMNO supporters in the village, and all received assistance. The ridicule is so biting in large part because the village UMNO leadership wantonly disregarded its own facade of fair, impersonal procedures in order simply to reward themselves and their fOllowers. Once again, however, the issue is cast in terms of rich and poor and the distortion of the facts by wealthy UMNO leaders.

If we listen briefly to other villagers, however, we hear a very different story. The occasion for this story was special. It was· not, like most of my conversations with villagers, simply a casual encounter. When Haji Kadir, his brother-in-law Tok Kasim, and his son-in-law Ghazali sat down to talk with me one evening, it was clear that they had something to say which they had worked out together. The context in which they came was undoubtedly significant. I had spent much of the previous two weeks threshing paddy along with many of the poorer men in the village. 12 In the·course of the work I had come to know quite a few heads of poor households whom I had known only slightly befOre. Their concerns about the loss of work to combine-harvesters and the decline of"charity" payments (zakat peribadi) previously given to threshers had found its way into the questions I had begun to ask other villagers. These three men appeared to be concerned that I was getting the wrong picture; they had come to set me straight. 13 All three were, as one might expect, well-off by village standards. Haji Kadir (Pak Ceti) is, of course, the richest man in the village; his son-in-law farms 8. 5 relong, much of which he can expect to inherit; and. his brother-in-law farms 6 relong, most of which he owns.

Haji Kadir begins with a rhetorical question: "Why is it," he asks, "that we call some people poor when they are really well-off, and others well-off when they are really poor?" He then proceeds to answer his own question with some

12. The rhythm of hand threshing normally requires that two men work at each threshing tub; while one is fetching a bundle of paddy stalks, the other is flailing the grain into the tub. Whenever I found that there were an odd number of threshers I would join the "odd man out" when invited. Although I was a good deal slower at threshing than most, my partner benefited since he collected the piece-rate (then M$2 per gunny sack) for the grain we both threshed.

13. It is of course true that my presence is the stimulus for their small "presentation." The argument they are making to me is not an argument they would bother making directly to Pak Yah. In this sense, what they say is artificial-an argument designed to impress and convince an outsider who might be powerful. What is notable, however, is that in making their case they must necessarily fall back on the values and standards embedded in· village life and make more explicit-for someone quite ignorant-what could perhaps be conveyed among them by a mere gesture or phrase.

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 145

strategically chosen examples. "Like Kamil, he doesn't have any property, but he manages because he is resourceful. "14 "Or like Mat Khir, who has no land but is also resourceful." These two illustrations are both apt and selective. They are two of only five heads of household who own no paddy land and have no prospect of inheriting any but ·nonetheless have incomes that put them well above the median fur the village. Kamil has, fur decades, been the largest tenant in Sedaka and now farms 15 relong of productive paddy land; while Mat Khir rents in only two relong but has a stable and coveted job with a successful Chinese shopkeeper and paddy dealer in the nearby town. Both. men are able to provide comfOrtably fur their large families. They are striking exceptions to the general rule that landowning is the basis of wealth in the village. And yet, as Haji Kadir implies, their income is more precarious than that of a landowner and each must work unstintingly to achieve it.

Having cited two cases of families who are poor in property but nevertheless manage to do well by virtue of their resourcefulness, Haji Kadir takes up the opposite side of the coin. Here the examples he uses are Hamzah and his older brother, the ever-serviceable Razak. "They have property, they have land," says Haji Kadir, "as much as 2 or 3 relong, so much that they rent it out like big landlords." With the vigorous assent of his companions, Haji Kadir notes that, if Hamzah and Razak were clever and thought ahead, they could plant this land and harvest twenty to thirty gunny sacks of paddy a year, enough to feed their families. The fact that they do not is not because they are poor but because they are not "resourceful." Again, the illustrations are carefully selected. Only five of the poorest fOurteen villagers own any paddy land at all, and Razak and Hamzah are among them. Strictly speaking, neither actually owns the land, inasmuch as they do not have the capital to pay the fees and Islamic inheritance tax (jaraid) required to transfer·ownership from their long-since-deceased father. u Nor is it clear that Hamzah would get tide to the 2 relong his mother has let him rent out, as there are claims on the land by two additional sons who live outside the village. At the moment, Hamzah rents out his 2 relong as does Razak his .25 relong. Both claim that the loss of work during the droughtcancelled season, their large families, and their reduced wage-labor earnings make it impossible fur them to finance a rice crop through till harvest. Hamzah actually planted a crop in the irrigated season of 1977 but claimed that he had to sell the standing paddy in the field befOre harvest to feed his family. But Haji Kadir and his friends obviously believe that it is improvidence, not poverty, that

14. "Resourceful" seems the best translation for pandai pusing, which literally means "clever at moving around." "To hustle," "to be diligent," or "to shift for oneself' also capture the spirit of this verb.

15. This process, known locally as ambit kuasa (to take legal title), costs roughly M$50 for legal fees plus 1 percent of the estimated market value of the land for the Moslem inheritance tax.

146 • HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS

accounts for Hamzah and Razak becoming petty landlords. Who is correct is a matter of charged opinion that no resort to financial evidence alone could settle.

Tok Kasim and Haji Kadir then address themselves to the case of Hamzah in particular, taking it for granted that Razak's reputation speaks for itself. Although they stop short of calling Hamzah lazy, they do claim that he is "not very industrious." 16 "That's why," Tok Kasim says, "we don't much want to give him assistance or work all the time." "He has property; he's like us." When I ask who, then, is really poor in the village, they manage, after some discussion, to come up with three possible candidates-Pak Yah, Mansur, and Mat "halus," all of whom, they say, would be "finished" if they fell ill and could not work. The rest, they claim, are either not so badly off or are not resourceful.

Warming to the main theme after having been sidetracked momentarily by my question, Haji Kadir returns to the problem of those who ask for work and alms in bad faith. As an exhibit, he offers his nephew Hashim, from Yan. He regularly comes shortly before the harvest, Haji Kadir claims, to announce that he will help thresh and to ask for a portion of his wages in advance. When threshing time comes, however, he often goes to Megat Dewa in the neighboring state ofPerlis where the wages and zakat gifts are better. Once, he adds, Hashim told him in the evening, after having been given an advance, to have the coffee ready early next morning as he would be coming to thresh. Early next morning Haji Kadir spied him walking along the canal to the south of Sedaka, but he turned off to work for someone else. He also suspects that the rice he and two other relatives had given Hashim before Hari Raya (Ramadan) was sold rather than eaten, and he once told Hashim that he should beg rice only from those fur whom he threshes. Still, he continues, Hashim has come begging every year fur the past decade like clockwork. When Haji Kadir offered to rent him nearly 2 relong he owns in Megat Dewa fur a couple of years, Hashim declined. "He wasn't that interested," concluded Haji KadirY

Hashim is thus assimilated to the cases ofRazak and Hamzah. None of them, by this account, are particularly interested in work; none are particularly resourceful, except perhaps when it comes to asking fur alms or fur wages in advance. Some, if not all of them, are pretty well-off after all. And certainly none of them, to judge by their conduct and resources, are worthy of the sympathy and help they have gotten.

The discourse, at a distance, between Pak Yah and Haji Kadir is as remarkable for what it ignores as for what it includes. The material facts of the present situation-wage rates, the loss of fieldwork, actual loans and charity given and received-are conspicuous by their relative absence. Perhaps this is merely because they are taken fur granted as common knowledge. What is emphasized, however, are the social facts, the quality of human relations. Thus Pak Yah,

16.Yak berapa rajin.

17.Dia tak beringat sampai !a.

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 147

when he talks about the refusal to give loans, fOcuses not on the material loss but on the attitude of the rich who regard the poor as "despicable." Thus Haji Kadir, when he speaks of being importuned fur loans, is less openly concerned with what it costs him and more concerned with what he sees as the moral lapses of those who ask fur help. Just as in the stories of Razak and Haji Broom, there is a text here on what decent and seemly social relations should be.

What is also striking is the attempt in these opinions to "place" people both in terms of their actual economic situation and in terms of social reputation. Pak Yah derides the village leadership for willfully distorting the "facts" of poverty and affluence to serve their own purposes. Haji Kadir devotes a great deal of effOrt to showing how it is that many of the poor are responsible fur their own poverty and to distinguishing real destitution from feigned destitution. Why this struggle over the "facts" should be such a central feature of the dialogue between rich and poor in Sedaka will become clearer as we proceed.

TWO SUBJECTIVE CLASS HISTORIES

OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION

At the core of the social experience of class is the growth of a distinctive and shared understanding of history-an understanding that sets one class apart from others. Taken collectively, these perspectives amount to a shared worldview embodying both standards of justice and their application to events past and present. One could, fur example, capture a great deal of the worldview ofdifferent classes in France from an examination of their outlook on the major watersheds of French history: the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the Paris Commune, the Popular Front, Vichy, and May 1968. In the tiny world of Sedaka, the shifts in production relations associated with double-cropping define such a historical watershed. What makes these shifts decisive for class relations is simply the fact that their impact has marked out winners and losers largely along class lines. As a set of historical experiences they have provided both the basis and the occasion fur muted struggles between rich and poor.

Despite the painful setbacks the poor have suffered in the past few years, there is no question of a class war developing on the Muda Plain now or in the fOreseeable future. The prospect is rather one of continuing class struggle, sporadic resistance, and the war of words we have already witnessed. There are several reasons why escalation is unlikely. First, it is undeniable that nearly half the village is better off than they were before double-cropping. Whatever their residual dissatisfactions and fears, they can be counted, by and large, as winners. Second, those who have seen their fOrtunes reversed are rarely at the brink of a crisis that would threaten their livelihood or subsistence. The options they face of belt tightening, temporary and permanent migration, a marginal subsistence in the village are surely painful but are nothing like the draconian choices faced by their counterparts in Indonesia or India. Third, the social structure of Sedaka