Appendix
A Note on History and Ethnographic Method

During one of my first visits to the Tengger mountains in the summer of 1977, I hitched a ride with a truck driver to the village of Ngadiwono, where he was picking up a shipment of cabbages. With great excitement, he explained to me that the people of that village—the most prosperous in the Tengger highlands, and eventually one of my field sites—were "just like Americans; they like to earn lots of money the capitalist way, then spend it real quick on things like televisions and motorbikes." By contrast, the people of a nearby community, he insisted, "like the socialist way better; they do everything together and nobody gets rich, except the village officials."

Though the truck driver's assessment was far too simplistic, our conversation that afternoon provided me with an introduction to the excitement and difficulties of historical ethnography. At the time, the Tengger highlands were still in the early stages of their economic transformation, and were barely a decade removed from the bloodshed of 1965-66. Although I did not realize it then, new changes were reviving old tensions in villages. Over the next years, as I became involved in village life, I became an unwitting player in a struggle to define what had happened in this region, and what it should become.

Collecting the oral histories that underlie important sections of this book, then, was not just a matter of tapping shared public truths. Some people were unwilling to enter the fray; for that matter, many felt awkward expressing their opinions on any topic. Though education and travel are bringing great change, these mountain Javanese place much less emphasis on verbal skills than their lowland counterparts. There is here no real tradition of storytelling, and in conversations it is considered impolite for any single individual to talk too forcefully. These qualifications

aside, in my first months in the highlands it gradually became apparent that a good deal of behind-the-scene discussion was going on, and many villagers were partisans in a contest to define their history.

For some of the topics addressed in this book, such as agricultural techniques and labor organization, this controversy presented few problems. Other topics, such as the bloodshed of 1965-66, were more delicate, however, and required that I have an intimate relationship to the speaker. Even then, people disagreed on important details of history. To ensure both qualitative depth and comparative balance, then, I decided to use several different interview techniques in the course of my fieldwork, hoping that, in the end, they would provide me with some measure of ethnographic balance.

The most comprehensive historical accounts I gathered came from extended interviews with sixty village elders. Most of these were with men and women from the three main villages in which I lived, and four adjacent ones I regularly visited (see Preface). Interviews were conducted in several sittings over the course of many weeks, usually in the late afternoon and evening, but occasionally in the early morning, sipping sweet coffee or hot water. Focusing on a particular topic such as labor organization or village history, I used each interview to construct a general narrative with which to ask more informed questions of other villagers. Slowly, I made my way around a network of informants until, weeks later, I returned to talk to the first interviewees again, posing new questions in light of other people's accounts.

Having established a network of informants in my base villages, I then went into neighboring communities to raise similar questions and compare accounts from different villages and social groupings. In addition to the sixty core interviewees, then, I had extended interviews with another fifty or so individuals in the twenty villages that I visited for briefer, two-to-four-day stays (see Preface). Inevitably, the quality of these interviews was often poorer than my core interviews. In most instances, however, I was able to route my visit through a local villager whom I already knew, usually from prior visits or encounters while dancing at upland festivals. Though I got to know these people less well, their accounts proved to be an important source of comparative information for this study.

In addition to these in-depth interviews on history and culture, I also conducted 492 structured interviews on household economy (chs. 4-6). Though my sixty key informants were included in this interview, I knew most of the other interviewees less well. This was a highly structured interview, with over two hundred question items. Nonetheless, I took advantage of the occasion to ask open-ended questions as well. I conducted these interviews with my Javanese assistant, a middle-aged man from the lowlands. Before our interviews, we always divided our responsibilities.

One of us would record answers to our questionnaire on household economy, while the other would write down whatever unexpected information came up in the course of discussion. The household interviews thus provided both statistical and qualitative information. Equally important, they brought me in contact with individuals whom otherwise I might not have met.

In addition to these interviews, I met with a number of people from outside the highlands who were familiar with regency history and government. Among the most helpful were four Indonesian agricultural extension officers currently working in the highlands, and a fifth, now retired, who had worked under the Dutch. I also had the good fortune to interview three retired district officers who had first worked in the highlands during the 1950s, and another who had worked in the Forestry Department under the Dutch.

In all the interviews, my concerns were influenced by background materials that I had read prior to my research. Pasuruan has an unusually rich body of historical and archival commentary on both its uplands and lowlands. I drew heavily, for example, on Egbert de Vries's (1931) wonderfully comprehensive study of history and agriculture in the Pasuruan regency. His study is one of the finest of its type in all Java. It directed me to historical sources and presented a rich firsthand account of events during the first decades of this century. Robert Elson's (1978a, 1978b, 1984) masterful economic history of lowland Pasuruan also shaped my understanding of nineteenth-century political economy. Jan Palte's (1984) ecological history of upland Central Java, finally, cued me to many of the ecological problems of mountain agriculture. All this literature played a vital role in the formulation of my research program.

As my sense of history and culture sharpened, it seemed imperative to push beyond my core and household-economy interviewees and seek out individuals who had played central roles in different events. Three of the "merchant-farmers" who had migrated to the midslope region in the first two decades of this century were still living in the 1980s, and they provided me with detailed descriptions of their first years in the highlands. In the upperslope region there were eight elderly merchants who had been active over the same years. I was able to interview six. They provided me with accounts of the 1920s expansion, and the disastrous impact of the depression and great potato blight on trade.

Since this period left few written records but many bitter memories, my information on the Japanese and early independence periods came largely from local villagers, especially my sixty core interviewees. But I was able to draw on other voices as well. The native assistant-administrator to the Japanese-organized cooperatives (kumiyai ) was still living in Tosari in the 1980s. After coming to understand that my purpose

was not to criticize, he talked frankly about his work under the Japanese. Unlike most highlanders he still spoke admiringly of Japanese accomplishments. A lonely man, he was anxious to refute villagers' charges that he had been a party to their exploitation.

I was also able to interview eight men who had been active in the organization of militias just prior to the Japanese collapse; my interviewees included representatives from Muslim, nationalist, and leftist groupings. My best information on this troubled period, however, came from three individuals: one an upperslope farmer who had been active in the leftish Pesindo militia, the second a lowland gentleman who had played a central role in the Nationalist Party's upland initiatives, and the third a midslope villager with ties to Nahdatul Ulama.

The most difficult period on which to gather materials was that from 1959 to 1966, the period of party factionalism that ended with the destruction of the Communist Party. Sensitive to villagers' concerns that talking would only open old wounds, I decided at first not to ask questions about the violence. During 1977 and 1978-80, then, almost no one spoke to me in any detail about what had happened between 1959 and 1966. Though surprised by the great silence, I, too, preferred not to raise painful memories.

When I returned to Java in 1985, I sensed that my relationship with villagers had changed. People confided in me more regularly. In fact, they seemed to seek me out to discuss issues. Part of this no doubt was owing to the simple fact that I was older and thus, from a Javanese perspective, more deserving of respect. The change was also related to my returning to the highlands after an absence of several years. As many ethnographers can testify, returning to an earlier field site can have a profound effect on personal ties. It did in my case.

But there was a broader influence at work as well. Between the late 1970s and 1985, the changes that I had earlier seen in income, class, and social attitudes had taken hold throughout the highlands. By 1985 everybody was aware that the old ways were dying. The belief that, whatever their differences, villagers shared a common ancestry and collective tradition had been shattered. The crisis of tradition that I had noted in the 1970s had passed into popular awareness. Its force surprised even me.

I was especially struck by the change in attitude among members of the village elite. Though I developed close ties with many of them, in the 1970s most still adopted "official" lines in talking with me about sensitive matters like politics. By 1985 this had changed. To my astonishment, people on opposing sides of village disputes—like families with ties to the upperslope Communist Party, on one hand, and Nationalist Party leaders, on the other—sought me out to talk about what had happened. Over the years, of course, my assistant and I had developed a reputation as people

interested in local history. Somehow our role now seemed clearer to villagers and we seemed more trustworthy. Many people approached us with their stories. Fearing that we might learn things that called their own positions into question, other people sought us out to legitimize their role in events. My assistant and I were, I feel, widely regarded as neutral observers. But it was clear that long-suppressed tensions were re-emerging, and that, in a minor way, we had become jurors in a trim of opinion. We had been drown more firmly into village life, and our presence seems to have heightened the debate.

Tensions were particularly acute in some of the midslope communities in which I worked. One had been the site of a Nationalist Party land scare, in which European lands occupied by squatters were confiscated by a corrupt PNI village chief (see ch. 7). The openness with which poor villagers expressed their anger at the loss of their lands astounded me. It seemed to violate all of the standards of interactional harmony that I had learned in Java. I later realized that recent events had contributed to this spirit of openness. In this community the village chief who had ruled since 1946—and who had engineered the 1960s theft of squatter lands—had just been voted out of office and replaced by a younger Golkar leader. The new village head was not from an elite family and was popularly (and, I felt, correctly) regarded as uncorrupt.

What I was witnessing in this village, then, was the fall from power of the old elite. In many upland villages, of course, there was no such transfer of power with the arrival of Golkar; PNI leaders maintained their dominance by transferring into the government party. Subdistrict officials in this region, however, were sensitive to the old chief's unpopularity. They decided to let him go, allowing a younger man untainted by corruption to run against him. Villagers reacted to the change of regime with an explosion of goodwill. A key figure of the old village order had fallen, and people celebrated by speaking more freely of what had happened in the 1960s.

I was fortunate to have social ties to individuals on all sides of the 1965-66 violence. I was able to interview most of the leading PNI officers of the era (twelve men in all), who then put me in contact with three district-level PNI officials living in the lowlands. I unwittingly developed strong ties among ex-communists as well. The closest friendships I developed during all my months in the mountains were with the members of an extended family with whom I ate daily during 1979 and 1985. One evening, many months after accepting me into their family, they revealed to me that their father had been among those arrested and executed in late 1965. Through them, too, I met other people touched by personal tragedy. Now adult men, the elder sons in this family were the custodians of a veritable counterhistory of the village. Though politically leftish, they

were now anticommunist, and felt that the PKI had used their father. Nonetheless, they demonstrated their independence from village leaders by converting to Christianity and talking enthusiastically about American-style democracy.

After several encounters at slametan festivals, I also became acquainted with two army officers (both from urban East Java) involved in district security operations since the early 1960s. I received my most detailed "government-side" accounts of the 1965 bloodletting, however, from an urban Muslim whom I first met during one of his vacation trips to the mountains. By an odd series of coincidences, this gentleman and I developed a friendship and met with some regularity. It was only after many months of interaction, in fact, that I learned that he had a bitter story to tell. As the leader of a Muslim student group, he had played a central role in the arrests and executions of communists in the highlands. Whatever his convictions, the memory of that period's human suffering haunted him. He seemed to use his conversations with me to relieve some of its burden. At first I was shocked to learn the grisly details of his involvement. But the honesty he showed in relating his story, and his moral pain, challenged me to understand his position.

My assistant, a devout Muslim, developed a close friendship with two key NU families in the midslope district, both of whom had been active in the 1950s and 1960s. Through him, I made their acquaintance and was treated with the utmost cordiality. They provided a frank assessment of their side of the conflict during 1965-66. I was also able to interview lower-level NU officials in two lowland villages just below the highlands. I was introduced to them by members of their family who worked as merchants in the highlands and had befriended my assistant and me.

There is no final guarantee to the comprehensiveness of historical ethnography. The best one can do is interview as many parties to an event as possible. Then one must check the plausibility of different accounts against each other, available written testimonies, and similar circumstances in other world areas. Ethnographic history, then, is not a matter of opening oneself to the straightforward inscription of others. Choice of informants, formulation of questions, and one's own identity in the community all powerfully constrain the dialogue.

I was interested in my research not only in local ethnohistory—the categories and narratives through which actors interpret temporal change—but also in determining what had happened and why, whether it figured in villagers' narratives or not. This concern for events was not motivated by commitment to an epistemologically naive conception of history or culture. Ultimately, it originated in what I can only describe as my sense of awe, and occasional sadness, in the face of what I was privileged to witness and hear. There was something larger and more compel-

ling here than any single person's subjectivity, least of all my own. I felt it in the pain of my adopted family, who had lost their father in the 1965 killings, and in the moral doubt of my Muslim friend who had participated on the other side of those events. Moved by these conflicting perspectives, my hope was that the history I wrote would, somehow, speak to the truth of both their experiences.