Background
In a 1983 essay Clifford Geertz points to the importance of gotong royong in Indonesian life:
An enormous inventory of highly specific and often quite intricate institutions for effecting the cooperation in work, politics, and personal relations alike, vaguely gathered under culturally charged and fairly well indefinable value-images--rukun ("mutual adjustment"), gotong royong ("joint bearing of burdens"), tolong-menolong ("reciprocal assistance")--governs social interaction with a force as sovereign as it is subdued.
Anthropologist Robert A. Hahn writes:
Javanese culture is stratified by social class and by level of adherence to Islam. ...Traditional Javanese culture does not emphasize material wealth. ...There is respect for those who contribute to the general village welfare over personal gain. And the spirit of gotong royong, or volunteerism, is promoted as a cultural value.
Gotong royong has long functioned as the scale of the village, as a moral conception of the political economy. However, as the political economy became more privatized, capitalistic, and individualistic, gotong royong has probably waned. Pottier records the impact of the Green Revolution in Java: "Before the GR, 'Java' had relatively 'open' markets, in which many local people were rewarded in kind. With the GR, rural labour markets began to foster 'exclusionary practices'... This resulted in a general loss of rights, especially secure harvesting rights within a context of mutual cooperation, known as gotong royong." Citing Ann Stoler's ethnography from the 1970s, Pottier writes that that cash was replacing exchange, that old patron-client ties were breaking, and that social relations were becoming characterized more by employer-employee qualities.
Read more about this topic: Gotong Royong
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