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This perspective is reflected in the prestige enjoyed by those few comfOrtable villagers (notably Abdul· Rahman but also Haji Jaafar and Lebai Pendek) who continue to honor the kenduri tradition. Moreover, according to fOlk beliefs among the poor, the punishment fur a failure of generosity is not confined to Allah's final judgment. Hamzah, with others, believes that generosity with feasts, zakat, and sedekah serves to protect rich people against such misfortunes as accidents and illnesses. This is why, he says, those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca always give a kenduri before setting out. When I wonder out loud how this applies to Haji Kadir, whose tightfistedness is renowned but who appears to enjoy robust health, Hamzah immediately reminds me of his wife's long stay in the hospital, her fall down the steps, and Haji Kadir's recurring back trouble. All of these misfortunes, he implies, are a sign of Allah's displeasure. It is hardly far-fetched to read into this interpretation an attempt, albeit feeble, by the poor to exert their own modest form of social control over the rich. Nor is it farfetched to suggest that there is only a very short step between believing that the miserly rich will be punished in this world and the next and actually wishing on them the misfortunes and judgments which, by their conduct, they have called down on their own heads.

THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE

As we listen to the rich and poor of Sedaka attempting to make sense of the massive changes they have all experienced over the past decade, we find ourselves in the midst of an ideological struggle, however small in scale. It is a struggle over facts and their meaning, over what has happened and who is to blame, over how the present situation is to be defined and interpreted. Having lived through this history, every villager is entitled, indeed required, to become something of a historian-a historian with an axe to grind. The point of such histories is not to produce a balanced or neutral assessment of the decade but rather to advance a claim, to levy praise and blame, and to justify or condemn the existing state of affairs.

As in any history, assessing the present forcibly involves a reevaluation of what has gone before. Thus, the ideological struggle to define the present is a struggle to define the past as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the accounts given by poor villagers, who have had the least to be thankful for over the past decade and whose current prospects are bleak. They have collectively created a remembered village and a remembered economy that serve as an effective ideological backdrop against which to deplore the present. 85 They remember when rents

85. Lest this seems a particularly peasant furm of consciousness, it is worth noting that Francis Hearn regards this imaginative appropriation of the past as a key element in the early solidarity of the English working class. Domination, Legitimation, and &sistance: The Incorporation of the Nineteenth Century English \%rking Class (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), chap. 1.

HISTORY ACCORDING TO WINNERS AND LOSERS • 179

were paid after the crop was in and reflected the actual harvest. They remember the time before mechanization, when large landowners sought them out as tenants and when rents were modest. They remember when harvest work was plentiful and larger farmers curried favor with them by giving advance wages, loans, and zakat gifts and throwing larger feasts to which they were always invited.

It is not that their memory is faulty. The older customs and practices to which they point did exist and worked to their advantage. Their memory is, however, quite selective. It focuses precisely on those beneficial aspects of tenure and labor relations that have been eroded or swept away over the last ten years. That they do not dwell upon other, less favorable, features of the old order is hardly surprising, for those features do not contribute to the argument they wish to make today. Their nostalgia, if one may call it that, is thus, like their memory, a highly selective affair. The central reason why the account of the village poor smacks of nostalgia is that so many of the innovations of the past decade have worked decisively against their material interests. They have ample cause to look back fOndly at older arrangements. The well-to-do of Sedaka, as we have seen, are not above nostalgia themselves. But it is not so pronounced precisely because they have a far greater stake in the current arrangements, which are decisively in their favor.

Such reconstructions of the past in the service of present interests recall Hegel's dictum that "the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk." There is no doubt, for example, that the losses suffered by Sedaka's poor in the last few years have inspired them to cast a new and sympathetic eye on the older arrangements. Ten years ago these arrangements would not, in all probability, have elicited such praise; they were then part of the taken-for-granted practices that had governed rice production for some time. It is only against the background of the new threats posed by double-cropping that such routines have been elevated to the status of revered customs, rights, and entitlements. It is only now that the revalued past has become necessary to assess a menacing present.

The ideological work of the poor can be seen as an attempt to right a world that has been almost literally turned upside down by double-cropping. Everywhere they look they see dramatic reversals of the traditional production rela- tions-all of which undermine both their sources of livelihood and their status in the village. Before, large landowners rented land out to poorer tenants; now they rent increasingly to wealthy entrepreneurs or farm their land themselves with machinery. Before, large farmers hired poorer neighbors to plough and harrow their fields with water buffalo; now they hire wealthy tractor owners to prepare theirland. Before, larger farmers hired poorer neighbors to transplant their paddy; now many of them broadcast their own seed. Before, these same farmers hired the poor to reap and thresh their crop; now they hire wealthy combine owners for the same job. BefOre, well-to-do villagers had good reason to provide advance wages and give zakat payments to their work force; now, if

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they have a work fOrce at all, they see no need to be as openhanded. BefOre, the village rich had good reason to build a reputation with lavish feasts; now many of them regard such large feasts as a waste of money. Taken together, these reversals call into question virtually every assumption that governed the social relations of production befOre double-cropping.

The new dispensation has also transformed the preexisting class structure of Sedaka and most other paddy villages on the Muda Plain. In that earlier class structure, rich peasants and larger landowners were joined to land-poor villagers in a symbiosis of dependency and exploitation. So long as land was reasonably plentiful and labor, at peak seasons, was reasonably scarce, there were limits to exploitation, although land concentration proceeded apace through moneylending and default. This symbiosis found expression in village ritual life--fur example, zakat peribadi, kenduri, advance wages--and also in political life, where local party leaders, who were invariably well-to-do, could be relied upon to bring most of their dependent tenants and laborers into the fold. The middle peasantry was, by contrast, somewhat more autonomous, since they were less reliant on the rich fur land to farm or fur wages and they rarely hired workers, preferring to use (or exchange) household labor.

The new relations of production have broken most of the direct dependencies that characterized the earlier class system. Economically marginalized by mechanization and shifts in tenancy, poor villagers increasingly find themselves ritually marginalized as well. Kinship and indirect patronage (distributed by the state through local elites) still tie many of them to the ruling party, but their subordination is no longer embedded in village relations of production. BefOre double-cropping, one might describe them as poor, second-class, citizens of Sedaka. Now, they remain poor-though spared the extremes of malnutrition and hunger-and certainly second-class, but it is increasingly difficult to justify calling them citizens.

The question naturally arises, in this or in any other economic transfOrmation in which a subordinate class has suffered a reversal in its fOrtunes, as to how such reversals are understood and interpreted. Later in my analysis I will want to examine the heavy consequences an answer to this question has fur the larger issues of class consciousness, false-consciousness, resistance, and ideological hegemony. Here, however, it is sufficient only to note the general tenor of the answer as reflected in the discourse of the village poor.

There is no way in which the participants' interpretation of the impact of the green revolution in Kedah can be deduced from the crude economic facts. Such facts are compatible with any number of intepretations: they could be accepted as fatalistically as a drought or flood; they could be seen as the fulfillment of prophecy or of Allah's punishment fur straying from the true faith; they could be seen as the malevolent effects of government policy or the result of the greed and resources of Chinese syndicates.

In fact, as we have seen, none of these interpretations figures very prominently,

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if at all, in the record. Instead, the poorer strata of Sedaka see the causes of their present distress as primarily personal (that is, a result of human agency), local, and largely confined to the Malay community. The increasing use of leasehold tenancy and the dismissal of smaller tenants, fur example, is seen as caused by the desire of large landowners (mostly Malays) to capture more of the profits of cultivation fur themselves. The growth of labor-displacing combine hire is similarly viewed as a result of large farmers hoping to save the money and bother of hiring harvest hands. The reduction in local charity likewise reflects the new willingness of the rich to protect their wealth at the expense of their reputation. In each case, the logic of blame and condemnation is much the same as that applied to the class of landowning Hajis who were held responsible fur the loss of mortgaged land. The more distant and impersonal causes that most assuredly play a role here are upstaged by a perspective that emphasizes moral lapses, selfishness, and the violation of social decencies. As the poor see it, the rich have callously chosen to ignore their obligations to their neighbors. How else are we to understand the tendency of the poor to focus at least as much on the disrespect and contempt they now confront as on the material losses they have suffered?

The poor are, of course, not the only ones in the village to make use of such logic. While wealthier farmers acknowledge the speed and profitability of com- bine-harvesters, they also insist that the poor have become unreliable, choosy, and indolent workers who are no longer entitled to their consideration. In this fashion, the rich, too, find a personal and moral rationale fur the dramatic reversals in village social relations.

Neither the rich nor the poor, however, fail to see the broader and more impersonal furces that have shaped their circumstances. The poor, and many of the well-to-do, understand that the desire for accumulation and investment lies behind the new dispensation. Both understand the new possibilities that doublecropping and mechanization have made available. Every villager carries in his head an impressive personal and collective economic history replete with time series fur fertilizer, seed, rents, paddy, rice, fish, consumer durable prices, wage rates, and crop yields that may, fur older peasants, go back as much as half a century. As in any oral history of this kind, the dates are tied to events-"the Japanese period" (masa]epun), "when my first child was born," "befure doublecropping" (se-belum dua kali padi), and the focus is on the consequences of these figures-fur example, income, access to land, the availability of work. The poor know exactly how much they have lost to the combines; the rich know exactly how much they have gained. Within the ambit of their local experience, they understand the workings of capitalism. Rich and poor alike see that Chinese entrepreneurs pay premium rents fur land leases because they own farm machinery and because they cannot let their capital lie idle. As they say: "the Chinese have to keep their money circulating (pusing duit)." They understand that the owners of the new means of production-tractors, combines, trucksnow capture the returns previously destined fur water buffalo owners, harvest

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laborers, and porters, and that part of the profit now goes to overseas manufacturers. The poor fully understand that many of them have been proletarianized as they have lost their tenancies. Rokiah is not by any means the only one who has noted that "they want to make coolies of us," though she adds defiantly, "They can't do it." The poor also understand that they are being progressively marginalized; they talk about having no work, of being pushed aside (tolak tepi), of facing the prospect of leaving the village altogether.

If the poor dwell upon the local and personal causes of their distress, it is thus not because they are particularly "mystified" or ignorant of the larger context of agrarian capitalism in which they live. They do not, of course, use the abstract, desiccated terminology of social science-proletarianization, differentiation, accumulation, marginalization-to describe their situation. But their own folk descriptions of what is happening: being made into coolies, the rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer, and being "pushed aside"-are adequate and, at the same time, far richer in emotive meaning than anything academic political-economy could possibly provide.

The choice-fur it is a choice-to fasten on the more immediate sources of their difficulties contains elements of both convenience and strategy. It is convenient fur the poor to blame those who are most immediately and directly responsible fur their recent reverses. They observe their Malay landlord taking his land from them to farm himself or to rent out to a Chinese entrepreneur; they do not directly observe the concentration of capital in land use. They observe the large farmer who stops hiring his neighbors and calls in the combineharvester; they do not directly observe the syndicates or government policies that have made this possible.

Their choice is also strategic because it fOcuses on precisely those human agents who are plausibly within their sphere of social action. 86 They have some hope of influencing their landlord or the larger farmer fur whom they work; they do not have a prayer of influencing either the Chinese commercial farmer or the syndicates of machine owners. After all, those who rented them land or hired them in the past described their action as "helping them out" (tolong), thus implying a kind of noblesse oblige in keeping with village norms. It is only

86. In this context it is worth recalling Simmel's analysis of the differences in class conflict in early capitalism as opposed to what he calls "mature capitalism." In the latter, labor conditions are, he claims, seen as the product of "objective conditions" or "forms of production." "The personal bitterness of both general and local battles has greatly decreased. The entrepreneur is no longer a bloodsucker and damnable egoist." To the degree that it prevails, this larger, more "objective," view is likely to reduce conflict. Whether it is a more "objective" view, however, is questionable; the "personal" view, however narrow, has the merit of recognizing that processes like the market and technological innovations are social creations. See Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), 88.