Economies of Feeling and Blood

Cash Crop Production and Trade in Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Indonesia

Abstract

This article describes how the beginning of cash crop production transformed social relationships in a village in Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Indonesia. For this purpose, the author analyzed the relation between a middleman and cash crop farmers as a relation with indigenous notions of kinship.

From the late 1990s at the field site, people began to produce gambir, a natural ingredient taken together with the chewed betel (Piper betle L.) leaf. The main factor associated with this new production was the return of village communal land from the central government as a result of the movement for revitalization of customary laws. In Suharto's New Order regime, traditional villages in Indonesia were disaggregated into small administrative units for national development policy. In some areas, including West Sumatra, village communal lands that had been controlled by traditional villages had been taken by central government because of dissolution of the village structure. After collapse of the New Order regime, a corresponding decentralization policy was enacted: people in these areas claimed the return of these communal lands based on the logic of customary law. Gambir production at Teluk Dalam, the field site chosen by the author, was conducted on village communal land that had been returned.

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