Response to “Rice-Eating Rubber and People-Eating Governments”

In “Rice-Eating Rubber and People-Eating Governments: Peasant versus State Critiques of Rubber Development in Colonial Borneo“ Micheal Dove places international policy in conversation with local cultural legend to show the links between local and global histories along with the link between symbolic and political-economic systems, using the idea that “peasant societies” segrate cash crops from food crops as a basis. The majority of rubber production on Borneo is run by “smallholder” farmers, ordinary local farmers who cultivate food crops to meet subsistence needs and cultivate rubber to meet market needs. These smallholders slowly encroached upon “the estates” market share, even with the government historically backing the estate sector. The Dayaks view dreams as omens, with Dove claiming the rubber eating rice dream, a dream where rice goes missing and is later found inside a tree that has just been felled, is a manifestation of “the sensitivity to potential competition between the rice and rubber sectors.” The International Rubber Regulation Agreement (IRRA), an agreement that greatly regulated smallholder farming to increase colonial market share, represented a governmental anxiety to exert control over the people and resources of Borneo. Whenever a natural resource became economically appealing, the government would take control away from the people in order to bolster colonialist pockets. The IRRA failed, with Indonesian smallholder rubber production increasing, partially because the IRRS was motivated by commitment of the estate, rather than by efficiency and productivity. Dove argues that to colonial officials, rubber was produced by the estates, seeing small holders as minor and inefficient and even believing that smallholdings spread root disease to justify the IRRA despite estate farms being more conducive to the disease. Europeans believed that the cultivation of export crops would destroy native food production if native populations didn’t destroy the export crop first. However, the tribespeople see rice and rubber as distinct yet complementary. They supplement each other in times of stress, with local stress meaning a reliance on rubber in global markets, and global stress meaning a reliance on local rice production. Dove says the rubber eating rice dream shows how the overinvolvement in rubber production can dangerously lead to less rice cultivation if one is not careful. He says that the tribespeople who fell their rubber trees were overly literal in their interpretation. The most common response was just to balance the sectors of rubber and rice, something that other ethnographers ignored allowing them to come to a conclusion that the dream was not in the interest of the smallholders. Dove also claims that the dream’s opposition of rice and rubber displays how they are two distinct indidenous sectors, cash crops versus food crops, and some fear comes from the convergence of the two. Dove says that the IRRA and rubber dream occurred at the same time because they addressed a competitive and threatening production environment, with estates threatened by smallholders and smallholders threatened by estates and regulation.

 

Dove’s argument points to a conclusion surrounding how we might tend to conceptualize other peoples as illogical and how we might think of similar people as more sound through roundabout and wrong justifications, something that anthropologists should be hyper-aware of. However, I think Dove falls into this trap when he seems to give the colonizers the benefit of the doubt in his claim that they believed that the IRRA was best for rubber production in general, and that they truly believed that the minimization of smallholders was truly justified. He says that they seemed to genuinely believe what they were doing was best for rubber production, however I wouldn’t discount the idea that they just knew they were less efficient but still wanted to maintain market dominance by controlling regulation. I am especially skeptical of their ignorance when they don’t have a definition of efficient production while using efficient production to justify their oppressive behavior. Yet Dove still does a great job of exposing the apparent contradictions and absurdity of the IRRA while displaying the logic behind the spreading of the rubber eating rice dream, yet his argument was a bit long winded and repetitive at some points to me.

 

Questions:

To what degree did the IRRA stem from a colonial ignorance based in otherism vs just plain ignorance?

 

Does ethnography need to also focus on outliers, like those who fell their rubber trees, or should it focus on larger patterns and broader systematically based ideas? What might we accurately anthropologically learn from those who fell their rubber trees?

 

Key Quotes:

“…most colonial officials appear to have sincerely believed that the IRRA supported not a particular class of rubber producers but rather rubber production in general.”

 

“The indigenous societies of Borneo also see rice and rubber as separate and distinct, but the relationship between them is conceived as - ideally - one of complementarity, based on exploiting two distinct arenas.”

 

“The literal meaning of the rubber dream is that rubber can eat rice, meaning that overinvolvement in rubber production could lead to less rice cultivation-if sufficient care is not taken.”

 

“The ethnographers who took a negative view of the dream’s impact on smallholders looked for its origin in an external, malign agency.”