Minangkabau social formations: Indonesian peasants and the world-economy

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights. generated by recent Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries old European domination of Indonesia.

The most striking feature of the Minangkabau Seconomy is the predominance of petty com modity relations in agriculture, handicrafts, and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organisation, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. By establishing the predominance of this form of economic organisation in this area, Dr Kahn shows that what is frequently taken to be the typical response to peripheral isation within the modern world-economy, that is, the emergence of a dominant class of large landowners and the more or less rapid differentiation of the peasantry, is in fact specific to certain regions. He analyses the preconditions necessary for the emergence of petty commodity relations of production within the world capitalist periphery, and the regional economy with the modern world capitalist system.

explains their predominance in Minangkabau both in terms of the nature of Dutch colonialism in the area, and in terms of the articulation of Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-East Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology.