Laborers becoming agriculturalists : counter-trajectories of development on a Sumatran Volcano
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- On the Aren Volcano in the Sumatran uplands lies the town of Casiavera, where twenty years ago a group of agricultural laborers reclaimed their land from a plantation company. Since then, they have gone on to create new forms of agriculture and livelihood. In place of working for a wage on the industrial plantation, Casiavera's rural workers established their own claims to the land, and then chose to cultivate diverse agricultural forests as basis for their emergent smallholder economy. Along the way, Casiavera's agriculturalists joined up with both national and global rural workers' political movements to work together to occupy and reclaim the land, and rehabilitate the damage done to it by almost a century of industrial abuse. In search of more autonomous livelihood, Casiavera's agriculturalists acknowledged industrial agriculture's many problems, but also moved beyond them with their own forms of rural nature, work, and politics. This study draws on ethnography and oral histories, archival documents and maps, and satellite photography covering a fifty year time series. Taken together, these sources offer an account of the agrarian changes that have unfolded in Casiavera. I find that that this collection of transformations, of Casiavera's agricultural laborers becoming smallholder agriculturalists, and the ruined, industrial plantation becoming agroforest, represent an especially modern elaboration of politics and ecology. With agroecology and political mobilization, agriculturalists reclaimed the land from an industrial agriculture to create a landscape of lively, collectivist agroecology, and political mobilization. They are a counter-trajectory of development, a form of eco-social change through time that challenges normative practices and values of rural industrialization.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gilbert, David E |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Durham, William H |
| Thesis advisor | Durham, William H |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Frank, Zephyr L, 1970- |
| Degree committee member | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Degree committee member | Frank, Zephyr L, 1970- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | David E. Gilbert. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by David Edward Gilbert
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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