Agricultural Involution
1963 non-fiction work by Clifford Geertz
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. Its principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms involution.
Content
Written for a particular US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernisation theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia. The two dominant forms of agriculture are swidden and sawah. Swidden is also known as slash and burn and sawah involves irrigated rice paddies. The geographical location of these different types is important. Sawah is the dominant form in both Java and Bali where nearly three-quarters of Indonesia's population live, and swidden is more common in the less central regions.
Having looked at the agricultural system, the book turns to an examination of the system's historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution". This is his description of the process in Java where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4693899. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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