198 • STRETCHING THE TRUTH

Mat Nasir, a landless laborer, in much the same terms for only wanting work at high wages when it suits him. "He's difficult, stingy, and proud; we [villagers} shouldn't be so calculating," he concludes.

It is a fairly simple matter to construct, from these accusations and others we have heard, something of a portrait of "the good poor" according to wealthy villagers. In fact, Shahnon provides a sketch of this "ideal type" in the course of praising a man who comes seasonally from his mother's village to work for him. This man, a distant relative, always comes when Shahnon needs him to thresh; he works carefully to thresh each sheaf thoroughly; he returns every day until the harvest is completed, he never asks what the wage is and when it will be paid but leaves that up to Shahnon; and he never asks fur a zakat bonus, leaving that, as well, to Shahnon's discretion. For workers from Sedaka itself, the criteria are similar but more extensive. A good worker should not only take any work at any wage when an employer asks, but, unlike many of the poor, he should not be given to slandering the rich behind their backs. He should be deferential, that is, not sombong or payah.

That this composite sketch of "the good poor" is an "ideal type" of which any actual poor person is a pale reflection becomes evident if one classifies the village poor by their reputation among the well-to-do. The category of "good poor" is, then, nearly empty! Abdul Rahim, Hamzah, Mansur, and Pak Yah have the best reputations fur being willing workers who defer to their employers; but even here, opinion is divided. A good many more poor villagers have an unambiguous reputation fur being proud and choosy, including Mat Nasir, Dullah, Taib, Mat "halus," Rokiah, Rosni, Omar, Sukur, and, ofcourse, Razak. As one might expect, the most deferential poor are not so highly thought of by their poor neighbors as by. the rich. I have heard other wage laborers in the village disparage particularly Abdul Rahim and Mansur as "yes men" or slaves (tukang suruh, hamba) who simply do the bidding of their employers.

Here again, in the petty realm of pride and arrogance, we encounter a small ideological struggle over the social control of poor village workers. The traits of deference and loyal service that are necessary to qualify as one of the "good poor" in the eyes of the well-to-do are traits that are seen as demeaning by other wage workers. Inasmuch as the poor have few jobs or charity to offer one another, the struggle is an unequal one in which public behavior, at least, conforms largely with the expectations of the well-to-do.

BENDING THE FACTS: STRATIFICATION AND INCOME

The normative context is just that: a context and not a stra,ightjacket. It provides the setting fur conflict between winners and losers in Sedaka. The parties to this conflict are all bricoleurs with a given set of tools or a set of variations on themes that are, fur the time being, largely given. Those themes include the normative expectations that those who are comparatively well-off should be generous to

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their less-well-off neighbors and kin, that such generosity should take nondemeaning (to!ong) forms, and that neither rich nor poor should conduct themselves in an arrogant or shameful manner. Just who is well-off, just how generous they should be, just what forms their generosity should take, just which forms of help are compatible with dignity, and just what behavior is arrogant and shameful are questions that form the substance of the drama.

Within these broad confines, both rich and poor have developed working strategies designed to make the normative principles serve their interests as much as possible. 23 The rich, whose interests are most directly threatened by these values, attempt to bend them so as to minimize their obligations and to place themselves in the most favorable light. Of course, at some level, they are increasingly able simply to impose themselves-to use machines, to forego taking on tenants and laborers, to trim back their ceremonial and charitable burdens. They are, however, concerned with justifying their behavior, not only to others but to themselves, for they too work within the same moral confines. For the village poor, somewhat less bending and squeezing of existing understandings is necessary, if only because these understandings already work, symbolically at least, to their advantage. They seek, more straightforwardly, to maximize the obligations due them under the existing rules.

The more or less constant ideological struggle that ensues is fuught out, always inconclusively, on several terrains. One such terrain, the central one in some respects, is the terrain of stratification and income. Unless it is first known who is rich and who is poor and just how rich and poor they are, it is impossible to evaluate their conduct. Thus the first issue, the first terrain ofconflict, is precisely over the facts that, once established, furm the framework in which social expectations are played out.

The resounding and insistent battle cry of Sedaka's wealthy families across this terrain is, "We are not rich." It is repeated and repeated in a bewildering, but consistent variety of furms-forms that go well beyond mere modesty. For example, the rich are never caught referring to themselves, individually or collectively, by the term "rich" (kaya). In fact, they only rarely use even the term senang, or "comfOrtable," which is most often applied to the modestly well-off in the village. To take what they say about their economic status purely at face value would lead to the conclusion that they were barely making ends meet.

23. For an interesting analysis. of a French village in which the social ideology of patron and client are treated as symbolic weapons in a continuing conflict, see Alain Morel, "Power and Ideology in the Village Community ofPicardy: Past and Present," pp. 107-25 in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Rural Society in France: Selections from the Annates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977). As Morel notes, "These two ideologies, that of the 'deserving worker' and that of the patron-employer as 'father of the village,' are part of a consensus, a framework that permits both parties to develop their strategies, since each can count on certain predictable reactions." P. 118.

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Thus, they typically describe themselves as having enough to eat (boleh makan) or just enough to eat (boleh makan sahaja). Cik Yah, a divorced woman fairly well-off considering her small household, describes herself as "just hanging on" (tahan duduk). Lebai Pendek, head of the second wealthiest family in the village, who farms 13 relong and owns a tractor, allows that he has just "a little paddy land" (bendang sedikit sahaja). If he is a large farmer, a man emphasizes how much of his land is rented in rather than owned. If he owns a sizable plot, he emphasizes how poor the land is and how many children he has. 24

Wealthy villagers, in other respects as well, took great pains to emphasize that they were fundamentally no better off than the generality of their neighbors. Thus they lost no opportunity to point out that they, like everyone else, were farmers and that they, like everyone else, planted rice. This was, to be sure, largely true providing one was willing to equate the planting of 20 relong with the planting of half a relong and to ignore quite a few villagers with no land at all to plant. Here they took full advantage of the slender facts that still provide for the conceptual equality of all villagers so as to avoid standing out as privileged.

The local terms of stratification are not, however, symmetrical. While the rich portray themselves as barely managing, the poor describe them as "rich" (kaya) almost without exception. They take care never to do so within earshot, but only privately or in the company of other villagers of modest circumstances. The public stage is once again controlled by wealthy villagers but, offstage, the poor lose no time in calling a spade a spade. A few, like Bakar "halus," speak of the wealthy collectively as the "group"-or class-of"haves" (golongan berada).

24. Questions of wealth and income are of course inherently comparative, and to some extent the rich in Sedaka have a standard of comparison different from that of the poor. Compared, say, to really big outside landowners such as Haji Broom, to government clerks with a steady salary, or to Chinese storekeepers and traders, they are, indeed, not so comfOrtable. Although something of the kind is involved in their modesty, it is, as we shall see, neither the only nor even the main reason for their self-description. One might also imagine that much of this pattern was simply an effort to throw dust in the eyes of a naive outsider regarded with healthy suspicion. Yet the pattern continued long after wealthy villagers knew that I had become familiar with their actual economic circumstances, and it was sustained, especially in any situation in which other villagers were present.

A small number of wealthy villagers, notably Haji Jaafar and Haji Kadir, would, when talking privately with me, drop the pretense and occasionally boast of their holdings. This I took to be an effurt to match or outdistance the stranger, who was paid, it seemed, a princely salary. Whenever the situation was public, however, the guarded financial modesty resumed. The occasional exception to the pattern of minimizing income and property is when the question of paddy yields is involved. Here a man's reputation as a good cultivator is at war with his desire to minimize his wealth, and the former occasionally wins out.

STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 201

That the poor should call wealthy villagers "rich" is not merely a consequence of their standard of comparison, although the wealthiest in Sedaka are, as the poor see them, quite rich indeed. The poor, as we shall see, have a vested class interest in emphasizing, and exaggerating, the income and property of their wealthy neighbors.

If the rich consistently understate and downplay their economic comfOrt, the poor in Sedaka fOllow a parallel strategy of emphasizing their own poverty. They insist, "We are extremely poor." Thus they describe themselves to others, and especially to the rich, as "hardup" (susah) or "extremely hardup" (sangat susah). Instead of using the standard Malay word for "poor" (miskin), they avoid this Arab loanword, with its demeaning connotations of begging, and use susah. As part of a contrasting pair with senang, susah fOcuses on the quality of life--on how difficult it is to make ends meet-rather than on a fixed economic status. They avail themselves of every opportunity to reiterate that they have little or no land to farm, that they cannot find enough work, that they have to buy some of the rice which they eat, that the prospect of renting in more land at a rent that would leave them some profit has all but disappeared.

Well-to-do villagers emphatically reject this self-description of the poor as fraudulent. Haji Salim provides, in this context, what might be termed the gospel according to the rich:

BefOre we had hard-up people--really hard-up people. So much so that they couldn't eat. Before 10 percent had to buy rice, but now no one has to buy rice. BefOre, the hard up were many and the comfOrtable, few. Now we still have some hard up, but they are not so many and not so hard up. When we want to call them [fur work} we can't find enough. They have enough (cukup banyak) and with the new comfOrts (kesenangan), even if they don't work, they can get enough to eat and wear. [That's why} they are less diligent (rajin) about working.

The link here between an alleged labor shortage and the prosperity that must account fur it is particularly important, for it is Haji Salim who is bitterly criticized by the poor for having gotten permission to bus in Thai laborers last season to transplant his rice. In one furm or another, however, his views are echoed by nearly all the comfOrtable farmers of Sedaka. They seize on the fact that a few small tenants now hire combine-harvesters as evidence of both their prosperity and their laziness. Daud, the son of headman Haji Jaafar, thus notes that Rosni and Taib hired the machine once and calls them lazy, because "It's proper (sepatutnya) that those who farm only 2 or 3 relong should do their own work." "If they really needed money, they'd do the work themselves." Whenever a poor man is seen eating in a coffee shop, whenever poor men or women are seen in new clothes or shoes, whenever they buy anything but the cheapest fish, whenever they go off by bus to visit relatives, it is taken as further evidence that those who claim to be poor are dissimulating.

STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 203

claimed, say, a yield of thirteen gunny sacks per relong from 8 relong, they might disagree and put the yield at fifteen gunny sacks per relong and perhaps even point out that the man had an additional relong or two in another village, which he had failed to mention. The men offering the revised figures, I soon realized, were invariably from the poorer stratum of Sedaka, and they invariably offered figures that further elevated the income and wealth reported by betteroff villagers. When it came to the zakat peribadi which the large farmer said he had given to laborers, the poor-often the laborer in question-would invariably insist that the zakat gifts were below what had been claimed. 27

The fact that rich and poor peasants alike should make themselves out-to me and to each other-as somewhat poorer than they are is hardly of much interest. This is nothing more than the usual dissimulating pose of a class that is historically subject to onerous claims which it seeks to minimize. What is of note, however, is the clear pattern fOund both in each local class's view of the village stratification and in disputes about income. The economic gap between rich and poor is dramatically different depending on which point of view one adopts. As seen by the rich, the gap is quite small; they themselves are barely making do, while those who claim to be poor are actually doing quite nicely. Consistent with this perspective is their insistence, evident in their view of the impact of double-cropping detailed in the last chapter, that their gains have been modest and the gains of the poor, substantial. The view of Sedaka's stratification which they promote is one of a rather egalitarian setting where all plant rice, where neither real destitution nor real affluence exists, and where those who do have a bit more are generous to a fault. As seen by the poor, the economic gap is much greater; the rich are much better off than they let on and the poor are very poor indeed. The view of Sedaka's stratification that they in turn promote is one of great inequities, where a few privileged monopolize the land and income, where· the poor live from hand to mouth and are without prospects, and where generosity is rare and insignificant. 28

27. Again, the truth of such matters was not simple to determine, although the differences were small. As I remained through fOur crop seasons in the village, however, much of this infOrmation could be directly or indirectly ascertained. Thus, by observing actual zakat peribadi gifts, I could normally infer the most likely level fur a previous season with a given yield and given paddy price. It was, in fact, in the matter of zakat peribadi that the claims of the well-to-do were most inflated, although the inflation declined as they realized I was increasingly familiar with village patterns.

28. In summarizing these opinions I have looked back over my fieldnotes to verify that these views were in fact held by a substantial majority of rich and poor, respectively. As many as eleven of the poorest thirty-seven households could not be counted as part of the consensus among the poor; among these eleven, seven household heads did not actually disagree but were reserved or silent on many of these issues. Among the wealthiest fifteen households, only fOur were substantially out of line with the general view.