Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the Agro-Economic Survey, a late 1960s effort by social scientists at Indonesia's two largest agricultural universities to render rural Indonesia "more" legible. This survey grappled with the contradictions of agricultural modernization during an important political juncture.

Paper long abstract:

Rural Indonesia remains characterized by significant inequality and injustice. On the one hand, levels of agricultural productivity have increased over decades, boosting exports especially of oil palm and leading to approximately 90% self-sufficiency in rice, the country’s most significant food staple. Nevertheless, the benefits of this reality are not well distributed amongst Indonesia’s rural population today. In this presentation, I explain how important characteristics of the country’s contemporary agricultural economy are linked to intellectual battles that involved social scientists associated with Indonesia’s two largest agricultural universities, Bogor Agricultural University and University of Gadjah Mada. I focus on their involvement with the Agro-Economic Survey, an effort during the late 1960s that attempted to derive robust methodologies to measure rural development. Importantly, even as this effort to “improve” how rural landscapes and rural populations were rendered legible to the state began in the late 1960s as the right-wing regime of President Suharto intensified, it brought together experts of meaningful ideological diversity. I argue that these debates were not primarily aimed at developing neutral ways of measuring and classifying rural change. Rather, they allowed for different visions of agricultural modernization, and ultimately agrarian democracy to be articulated. In effect, the Agro-Economic Survey was a crucial site to define the proper role of scientific knowledge and the state in rural Indonesia. The contradictions of the Indonesian agricultural economy today therefore stem in part from unresolved questions regarding the relationship between intellectuals and rural society as well as the nature of legitimate rural statecraft.