Reflexivity in 20th Century American Rural Social Science and the Non-Deterministic Trajectories of Indonesian Agricultural Modernization

Zhe Yu Lee, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In the three decades following the Indonesia's independence, policies regarding agricultural modernization was influenced in large part by a tightly knit epistemic network. It consisted of American and Indonesian rural social scientists moving in and out of American (land-grant) universities, Indonesian agricultural universities, various government ministries in both countries as well as patrons at the Agricultural Development Council and Ford Foundation. On the one hand, Cold War geopolitical forces contributed to the scientization of knowledge regarding rural Indonesia and hence the ensuing focus on agricultural productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, meaningful heterogeneity existed within this epistemic network regarding not only the overarching direction of rural development that Indonesia should take, but also the adequacy of relevant epistemological frameworks to describe, support and/or critique these transformations taking place. I argue that these contestations were impacted by uncertainties regarding how state institutions should appropriately use social science to engender, regulate and/or manage rural social change. Crucially, these uncertainties did not only manifest themselves in the mid-20th century Indonesian context when institutional capacity regarding agricultural problems could be described as “weak.” They also persisted within the very American institutions present in Indonesia, which from the 1920s-1940s were primarily responsible for the intellectual and policy response to the contradictions emerging from early US industrial agriculture. This paper analyzes non-formal writings/reflections of specific Indonesian and American experts from the 1950s-1980s regarding how they contended with issues of trust in and legitimacy of social scientific knowledge production and state intervention. In doing so, I contextualize formal sources and government reports that at times aim to minimize interpretive flexibility about social change in rural Indonesia. This analysis will account for the positionality of the author as a critical social scientist affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a crucial institutional node in the history described above.

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 Presented in Session 54. State Environment-Making in Historical Perspective