STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 233

was mixed with sand. That is their "rule" (undang-undang), "always complain." When I interjected that even some UMNO members seemed to think that everyone, or at least the poor, should have been helped, he replied, "This is not village social relations. Politics is a little different. The world is like that. " 69 This was the closest Bashir came to recognizing openly that what village values required and what politics required were different and that, in this case, the fOrmer would just have to be ignored.

Finally, if one were to step outside the village altogether, even the semblance of homage to local norms tended to evaporate. In the course of a conversation with the penghulu Abdul Majid after hours in his office in Sungai Tongkang, I delicately raised the question of complaints about the RPK. His reply was as unvarnished as were his opinions about villagers replaced by combine-harvesters. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear that the RPK is, in effect, intended to starve out the "recalcitrants" (pembangkang). "Sooner or later they've got to weaken; the rich may be able to hold out, but the poor won't be able to last. " 70 Freed by his outsider status from any need to adopt a social mask or to prettify the facts, Abdul Majid can speak without guile.

The smaller and more partisan the audience, the more powerful and untouchable the speaker (Haji Salim and especially Abdul Majid), the less tongue-tied the explanations become. The largest landowners and the secure officials can, if they wish, dispense with the need to explain themselves or justify their action to those beneath them whose vital interests are at stake. Within Sedaka, however, the niceties are largely preserved and an effOrt is made, however lame, to justify the new opportunities fur profit and patronage. The normative raw material at their disposal, alas, is not quite up to the task. The winners are more or less obliged to distort the facts, to give patently bad-faith performances, to claim that their hands are tied, and to make do with whatever scraps of moral justification they can cobble together on short notice. Their behavior may serve a higher, or at least different, rationality, but in village terms, in terms of the moral givens of Malay rural society, it is not convincing.

ARGUMENT AS RESISTANCE

Taken collectively, the arguments that the village poor have been making have a striking coherence to them. They single out the most damaging economic and social consequences of double-cropping and mechanization. They assert a wide array of "facts" about income, combine-harvesting, land-tenure shifts, and employment to bolster their case. They promote the view that the well-off, by reason of custom, neighborliness, kinship, and race, are called upon to provide

69.Ini bukan masyarakat, politik lain sikit, dunia macham itu.

70.Lama-lama depa kena lembut. Orang kaya boleh tahan, tetapi, orang susah tak boleh tahan.

234 • STRETCHING THE TRUTH

work, land, loans, and charity when possible. Referring to these claims, they condemn those whose callousness and concern for profit has led them to violate what the poor consider their legitimate expectations. These themes, and the assertion of rights which they imply, are much in evidence in the disputes over the gate and the Village Improvement Scheme. In the first case, the owners of motorcycles-themselves comfortable families-successfully availed themselves of the logic that once defended the village poor. In the second case, the moral logic of tradition yielded to the logic of faction but at substantial symbolic cost and only because the co-optation of the UMNO poor secured their complicity or silence. Such attempts, partly successful, to preserve and promote a particular worldview, a style of normative discourse, constitutes a form of resistance that is much more than purely symbolic.

At a minimum, the worldview of the poor represents something of a symbolic barrier to another latent form of discourse that would openly legitimize the current practices of most well-off farmers. The latent furm of discourse would be the straightforward language of narrow economic interests, profit maximization, accumulation, and property rights-in short, the language of capitalism. As it is, such language has no moral standing in village life. This symbolic disadvantage under which the wealthy labor has, in fact, material consequences. The values promoted most vigorously by the poor, and given tacit recognition even in the discourse of the rich, confer reputation, status, and prestige on those who observe them. Conversely, they make those who systematically violate them the object of character assassination. Forced to choose, in effect, between their reputation in the village and the full profits of double-cropping, many of the wealthy steer a course that does not completely repudiate those norms. The choice is not, after all, a single choice, but one that must be made day in and day out in a host of small transactions. Thus, there are seven farmers in the village, four well-off, who are praised for not using the combine-harvester on part or all of their land, at least after the irrigated season. A few rent out to neighbors or relatives small plots of land, seldom more than a single relong, that they might otherwise farm themselves. Abdul Rahman is particularly notable for occasionally renting a relong or two to poorer friends and charging modest rents. Land rented within the village, as this and other studies have shown, is provided at lower rents than land rented to outsiders. Some comfortable villagers, among them Lebai Pendek, Haji Jaafar, and Bashir, are often praised for the frequency with which they hold feasts to which all villagers are invited. 71 At least ten villagers, not all of them wealthy, are known to be rather more generous with zakat to laborers and to give wages in advance. None of these facts should obscure the overall tendency fur wealthy villagers, and especially

71. In Basir's case this praise is tempered with a realization by villagers that his dual role as shopkeeper and political leader requires him to make a greater effurt than others-an effurt that, in large part, is seen to be self-interested.

STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 235

outside landlords, to pursue profit at the expense of their reputation. What they do suggest, however, is that the sanction of local opinion and custom continues to exert a small but perceptible influence on conduct. The desire to be thought well of, or at least not despised, is a material fOrce in the village made possible only by the symbolic mobilization of the poor around certain customary values. 72 Put another way, the delaying of the complete transition to capitalist relations of production is in itself an important and humane accomplishment. It is often the only accomplishment within reach of a beleaguered peasantry. 73

The values the poor are defending are all, without exception, very much tied to their material interests as a class. We would, however, mistake the full nature of the struggle here if we were to limit ourselves to its material effects alone. So long as men and women continue to justify their conduct by reference to values, the struggle fur the symbolic high ground between groups and classes will remain an integral part of any conflict over power. In this context, the conclusions of E. P. Thompson, in his discussion of eighteenth-century plebian culture and protest, are applicable, with a few adjustments, to Sedaka.

The gentry had three major sources of control-a system of influence and preferment which could scarcely contain the unpreferred poor; the majesty and terror of law; and the symbolism of their hegemony. There was, at times, a delicate social equilibrium, in which the rulers were fOrced to rriake concessions. Hence the contest for symbolic authority may be seen, not as a way of acting out ulterior "real" contests, but as a real contest in its own right. Plebian protest, on occasion, had no further objective than to challenge the gentry's hegemonic assurance, strip power of its symbolic mystifications, or even just to blaspheme. 74

If we understand that the "protest" in Sedaka is rarely openly manifested and that the "symbolic hegemony" of the wealthy class is far more tenuous, we are still in the presence of a "contest fur symbolic authority." By rewarding, if only symbolically, those whose conduct is more nearly in accord with their values and by slandering those whose conduct most blatantly transgresses their values, the village poor undercut the moral authority of their enemies by allocating virtually

72. That social pressure, of course, is not purely symbolic, since the labor of villagers is still necessary for some phases of paddy cultivation. Beyond that, as we shall see, the social pressure is reinfOrced by threats of violence and theft as well.

73.This effOrt to delay capitalist relations of production is often and, I believe, mistakenly used to demonstrate the superior historical role of the proletariat. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 59. For a critique of this position, see my "Hegemony and the Peasantry," Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977): 267-96, and chap. 8 below.

74."Eighteenth-Century English SoCiety: Class Struggle without Class," Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 158-59.

236 • STRETCHING THE TRUTH

the only resources over which they have some control: reputation and social prestige. In the process, they help unite most of those disadvantaged by doublecropping behind a particular version of the facts, behind a particular set of claims, behind a particular worldview-or perhaps "villageview" would be a more appropriate term. This symbolic barrier is hardly insurmountable, but it is nonetheless a real obstacle to the designs of the rich. 75

The symbolic resistance of the poorer villagers is as important fur what it rejects as fur what it asserts. It rejects, nearly wholesale, the characterizations the rich give to themselves and their actions. Haji Kadir may be called Pak Haji to his face, but he is called Pak Ceti behind his back. Rich farmers may explain their use of the combine-harvester by their inability to find local labor on time, but this account is rejected by those most affected, who see it as an avaricious desire for quick profits. Landlords may plead poverty when raising the rent, but the poor "know" it is a ruse and mock the perfOrmance. The list could be extended indefinitely but the point is clear; at virtually every turn the selfcharacterizations and justifications of the rich are contested and subverted.

Above all, the symbolic resistance of the poor rejects the categories the rich attempt to impose upon them. They know that the large farmers increasingly see them as lazy, unreliable, dishonest, and grasping. They know that, behind their backs, they are blamed as the authors of their own victimization and that, in daily social encounters, they are increasingly treated with little consideration or, worse, ignored. Much of what they have to say among themselves is a decisive rejection of the attempt to relegate them to a permanently inferior economic and ritual status and a decisive assertion of their citizenship rights in this small community.

To understand what is at stake here, we must begin with a far broader and more penetrating appreciation of the meaning of poverty in this context. I fear that I may have thus far contributed to a narrow view both by emphasizing the economic losses of mechanization and tenure shifts and by continually referring to "the poor" of Sedaka.

Poverty is far more than a simple matter of not enough calories or cash. This is particularly the case in Sedaka, where no one is in imminent danger of actually starving. For most of the village poor, poverty represents a far greater threat to their modest standing in the community. It is possible in any peasant community

75. Kessler, in his study of the social basis of PAS opposition in Kelantan, puts the matter persuasively by emphasizing the fusion of symbolic and material action: "It [this study] has also dispensed with the equally forced distinction between instrumental and symbolic political actions and goals, between material and ideal factors. Local issues are but national issues in a particular guise, concrete and immediately apprehendable, and the articulation of responses to them, in the distinctive dialects of particular contexts, is far from unreal. . . . Symbols and symbolic action are viable only when they relate to real issues and popular experience of them.

They have a real basis and also real consequences." Islam and Politics, 244.

STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 237

to identify a set of minimal cultural decencies that serve to define what full citizenship in that local society means. These minimal cultural decencies may include certain essential ritual observances fur marriages and funerals, the ability to reciprocate certain gifts and favors, minimal obligations to parents, children, relatives, and neighbors, and so on. Barrington Moore, Jr., places such cultural requirements at the core of his analysis of popular conceptions of justice:

If we confine our attention to the lower classes, who of course have less favorable property rights . . . , we find very frequently the notion that every individual ought to have "enough" property rights to play a "decent" role in the society. Both "enough" and "decent" are defined in traditional terms. A peasant should have enough land to support a household and enable its head to play a respectable role in the village community ...

Whenever an increase in commercial relationships has threatened this type of independence, it has produced an angry sense of injustice.... It is important to realize that there is much more to this anger than straightfOrward material interest. Such people are morally outraged because they feel that their whole way of life is under unfair attack. 76

All of these decencies, as Moore indicates, assume a certain level of material resources necessary to underwrite them. To fall below this level is not merely to be that much poorer materially; it is to fall short of what is locally defined as a fully human existence. It is as much a socially devastating loss of standing as it is a loss of income.

In Sedaka, the cultural and ritual standing of many poor peasants was seriously compromised even befure double-cropping. For example, the village has more than its share of poor women who have married late or not at all. Men sometimes refer to them as "unmarketable maidens" (anak dara tak laku), but they will also add that their parents can promise no farming land to the groom. During the feast of Ramadan (Hari Raya Puasa), a good many men from poor households remain at home rather than visit wealthier neighbors. A few will admit that they are absent because they are "embarrassed" (malu), since they "cannot affurd to reciprocate" (tak boleh membalas) the sweets and cakes that are expected fur this major Muslim feast day. 77 The feasts that the village poor do manage to

76.Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe,

1978).

77.Perhaps the comparable humiliation for poor Christian Americans is the in-

ability to provide their children with the presents that have come virtually to define what Christmas means. The sacrifices they will make, including mortgaging their own future, to achieve the minimal decencies are no less than what poor Malays will make to provide an acceptable Hari Raya fare. Along these same lines, it is frequently said that conversion to Protestantism in Central and South America appeals particularly to the poor, who are unable to finance the ritual cycle that has become associated with Catholicism. By doing so, they make a virtue of necessity and dignify their nonparticipation.

238 • STRETCHING THE TRUTH

celebrate are often abbreviated versions with less than the standard ritual, entertainment, and fuod. Their shabbiness is typically seized upon by the betteroff as a mark of the host's inability to acquit himself honorably. The poor find it difficult or impossible to contribute fuod fur the moreh [evening meals after prayer} during the fasting month. They actually avoid promising a feast in their prayers fur recovery from an illness or in their prayers fur a child of a certain sex (usually male) during a pregnancy, because they know they will be unable to fulfill that sacred vow. Kenduri that are frequently held by wealthier villagersfur example, kenduri berendul (or buaian) fur a young child, kenduri cukur kepala

(or rambttt) also fur a young child, kenduri to thank Allah fur some good fOrtune or to pray fur ancestors-are rarely celebrated by the poor. Aside from the obligatory ceremonies fur the dead, there are at least seven families who have held no feasts whatever fur the past six years. All are among the poorest twenty families in the community. Their loss of status in a culture where feast giving is perhaps the main coin of exchange is severe. 78 The poor are largely excluded, by their penury, from both the death-benefit associations and the groups that buy and share the crockery necessary fur any substantial feast. It is extremely rare fur a poor peasant family to be able to send any of their children beyond primary school, given the expenses involved. Their children, as we have seen, are far more likely to leave early and permanently, since there is no paddy land to hold them in the village.

It is in this larger context alone that poverty as it is experienced in Sedaka takes on its full meaning. Those with little or no land of their own have always been relegated to a rather marginal ritual position. But as long as tenancies and work were available they managed, if only barely, to achieve the minimal ritual decencies. The burst of feast giving during the first fuur years ofdouble-cropping when work was plentiful is an indication of the pent-up ritual deficit that was being remedied. In this brief boom, the poor were able to assert a claim to status and ritual dignity fOrmerly available only to middle and rich peasants. Now, with machine-harvesting, broadcasting, and the loss of tenancies, the resources to back those claims are either gone or receding fast.

The cultural and material consequences of double-cropping are, of course, inseparable here. The modest ritual status to which the poor could lay claim was predicated not only on their earnings but also on the fact that they remained essential to the process of paddy cultivation and hence essential to the large farmers who grew most of that paddy. If they were treated with some consideration, if they were invited to kenduri, if they were given small gifts of zakat after the harvest, if their requests for loans or advance wages were heeded, it

78. Quite a few of them who have no farming land-either rented or ownedare thereby excluded both from the practice of exchanging labor and from feasts such as kenduri tolak bala designed to pray for rain or ward off specifically agricultural disasters.

STRETCHING THE TRUTH • 239

was largely because their labor was required. While there is no mechanical relationship between the role of the poor in production (the "base" in Marxist terms) and their role in cultural life (superstructure), it is undeniable that, as the need fur their labor has plummeted, they have experienced a corresponding loss in the respect and recognition accorded them. Thus, when the poor speak among themselves, they emphasize far more their loss ofstanding and recognition than the loss of income per se. How else are we to understand the many comments about the humiliation of idleness at harvest time when, befOre, they would have been out working? How else are we to understand the bitter com~ ments about not being invited to kenduri, about not being greeted on the village path, about not even being seen, about being treated rudely or "pushed aside" (tolak tepi)? The loss of the simple human considerations to which they feel entitled is at least as infuriating as the drop in their household income. Much of the local furor over the Village Improvement Scheme, and even the gate opening, can be seen in these terms. In each case, what is being resisted by appeal to custom is the attempt to revoke the claim of one group of villagers to what are considered the normal rights of local citizenship.

Amidst the attention typically devoted by left-wing scholars to the economic privations of low wage rates, unemployment, poor housing, and inadequate nutrition among workers and peasants, more homely matters of ritual decencies and personal respect are frequently lost sight of altogether. And yet, fur the victims themselves, these issues appear to be central. One of the major resentments among the historically turbulent rural workers of Andalusia, fur example, is the "upper-class practice of social self-removal" called separaci6n. As Gilmore observes:

They denounce separacion because they feel it is a reflection of arrogance and contempt.... The bitterness of the working-class response stems partly from a deeply felt moral postulate: the poor people of the community feel that to ignore a man is actively to disparage and insult him, purposefully to treat him as something. less than a man. 79

Closer to our own terrain, Wan Zawawi Ibrahim's fine study of Malay plantation workers recently recruited from east coast villages deals at length with the

79. David Gilmore, "Patronage and Class Conflict in Southern Spain," Man (N.S.) 12 (1978): 449. In his detailed history of the German working-class movement from 1848 to 1920, Barrington Moore emphasizes how frequently the demand fur what he calls "decent human treatment" appears in the accounts of workers themselves. Writing of the workers councils after the First World War, he concludes:

The source of the workers' anger was essentially a combination of two things: certain material deprivations and what they themselves called lack of decent human treatment. Lack of decent human treatment offended their sense of fairness. In their terms it apparently meant the failure to treat the worker as a human being in the course of ordinary · routine contacts, such as excessive gruffness, failure to use polite furms, and the like.

240 • STRETCHING THE TRUTH

reaction to what the author terms "status exploitation. "80 Thus, an older Malay worker who would expect to be addressed respectfully as Fkk Cik was summoned by the Malay overseer with a rude, "Hey, you come here" (Hai, mu mari sini) and was deeply insulted at having been treated "like trash in the middle of the road." Many of the complaints of the ex-peasant work fOrce fOcused as much on such inconsiderate, rude treatment as on the standard issues of pay and working conditions.

If we are to appreciate the full dimensions of the ideological struggle in Sedaka we must at the same time appreciate the full dimensions of the threat they face. That threat has at least three facets: it is the palpable threat of permanent poverty; it is the no less palpable loss of a meaningful and respected productive role in the community; and it is the related loss of a great part of both the social recognition and cultural dignity that define full membership in this village. To call such matters bread-and-butter issues is largely to miss their significance. When the poor symbolically undermine the self-awarded status of the rich by inventing nicknames, by malicious gossip, by boycotting their feasts, by blaming their greed and stinginess fur the current state of affairs, they are simultaneously asserting their own claim to status. Even when, as frequently happens, a poor family holds a feast they can ill afford, it is a small but significant sign of their determination not to accept the cultural marginalization their scant means imply. It is in this sense, especially, that the war of words, the ideological struggle in Sedaka, is a key part of "everyday resistance." The refusal to accept the definition of the situation as seen from above and the refusal to condone their own social and ritual marginalization, while not sufficient, are surely necessary fur any further resistance.

80. Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, A Malay Proletariat: The Emergence of Class Relations on a Malay Plantation (Ph.D. diss., Monash University, 1978), 398 et seq.

7 • Beyond the War of Words:

Cautious Resistance and

Calculated Conformity

Whatever happens Schweik mustn't turn into a cunning, underhanded Sabo-

.teur, he is merely an opportunist exploiting the tiny openings left him. Bertolt Brecht, journal, May 27, 1943

The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working class socialist for his "materialism"! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the undispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. . . .

How right the working classes are in their "materialism"! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time.

George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943)

From the account thus far, one might justifiably assume that the struggle between rich and poor was largely confined to a war of words. That assumption would not be entirely wrong, but it would be misleading. For the poor and wealthy peasants of Sedaka are not merely having an argument; they are also having a fight. Under the circumstances, the fight is less a pitched battle than a lowgrade, hit-and-run, guerrilla action. The kind of "fight" to be described and analyzed in this chapter is, I believe, the typical, "garden variety" resistance that characterizes much of the peasantry and other subordinate classes through much of their unfortunate history. More specifically, however, we are dealing here with the undramatic but ubiquitous struggle against the effects of statefostered capitalist development in the countryside: the loss of access to the means of production (proletarianization), the loss of work (marginalization) and income, and the loss of what little status and few claims the poor could assert before double-cropping. Most readings of the history of capitalist development, or simply a glance at the current odds in this context, would conclude that this struggle is a lost cause. It may well be just that. If so, the poor peasantry of Sedaka finds itself in distinguished and numerous historical company.

After considering the major reasons why open collective protest is rare, I examine the actual patterns of resistance to changes in production relations: arson, sabotage, boycotts, disguised strikes, theft, and imposed mutuality among the poor. I then assess the role of coercion-of what might be called "everyday forms of repression"----::in producing such disguised forms of struggle

241