Rubber, Cash, and Tenancy in the Village Economy

The majority of Bogang's households buy most of their rice, as well as virtually all of the fish, vegetables, tobacco, and other items essential to domestic maintenance such as condensed milk, tea, kerosene, cooking

utensils, clothing, and children's school supplies. All these purchases presuppose cash outlays. Furthermore, such items as mass-produced chairs, cupboards, kerosene stoves, and battery-operated radios have come to be regarded as basic furnishings and are also conspicuously present throughout the village. The same is true of household conveniences such as piped water and electricity. Twelve motorcycles and eight automobiles in the village—all privately owned—round out this list. The importance of cash in the local economy as a whole, and in terms of household living standards and prestige in particular, should be clear.

In these conditions, owning a moderately sized stand of rubber trees is of great concern to virtually all households in Bogang. A well-tended and high-yielding plot of three to four acres can net a conscientious tapper up to M$450 a month,^[7] assuming, of course, that the worker holds rights of proprietorship over the land. But while nearly all of Bogang's households rely rather heavily on earnings from rubber trees tapped either by their own members or by sharecroppers, only 51.9 percent (55 of 106) actually own rubber acreage. Tenancy involving rubber is thus extremely prevalent and of far greater economic significance than sawah sharecropping.

The very nature of tenancy in rubber tapping on the one side and rice cultivation on the other contrasts markedly. The idiom of rental is dominant in the former instance, with rigid and uniform terms of tenancy arrangements regardless of genealogical or other proximity between the principal parties. Moreover, households without rubber acreage are not necessarily headed by women who lack membership and kin in one of the local descent groups. As a general rule—and again in sharp contrast to the situation with sawah—the more rubber land owned by a household, the higher its income and economic status. Thus identification of "well-off" and "poor" households tends to rest on household ownership of commercially valued land planted in rubber. This fact might seem to suggest continuity in the traditional criteria for economic standing and prestige. But radical disjunctions are evident here: because most rubber plots are not formally designated as ancestral (or customary) and are not held by virtue of pedigree or descent group membership, they can in fact be (though usually are not) freely sold. This situation has helped to undermine the economic and cultural significance of social distinctions based on descent and origin point, and simultaneously has reinforced a competing and cross-cutting social taxonomy based on control of cash-yielding productive resources.

Significantly, however, many individuals who own rubber land and either cultivate it themselves or lease it out also labor as sharecroppers on other villagers' plots of sawah. These circumstances work against the cultural elaboration of social distinctions built up around notions of landedness and landlordism versus landlessness and tenancy. Similarly, even though it is fairly uncommon to find any one person or household whose rice and rubber lands are cared for by the same nonresident individual(s), it is nonetheless true that beneficent sharecropping terms in sawah production do counter community perceptions of such proprietors as uncaring or avaricious denizens of the community. The nature of productive relations centering around sawah thus tends to ameliorate the cultural, and to a lesser extent the social, impact of rigid tenancy arrangements in cashcropping (and the overall transformation of the local economy).

Bogang's community of rubber tappers consists of eighty-seven individuals distributed among sixty-nine households. This segment of the village population is younger and more predominantly male than the sawah labor force. If, moreover, we compare the extent of work undertaken by men and women in each of the two sectors (rubber and rice), the gender-based contrast would be more striking than the relevant figures indicate (see table 7). For one thing, females perform more sawah-related labor than males even when both participate in the same stages of rice cultivation. Furthermore, tapping, although obviously not confined to men, is generally considered a male activity since it falls within the rubric of cari duit (literally, "finding" or "getting money"). Hence, adult women tend to tap rubber only if they are widowed or divorced or if their husbands reside elsewhere. The few exceptions to this generalization lie with relatively low-income households in which both husband and wife must tap their own or someone else's trees to make ends meet.

Unlike rice cultivation, the tending and tapping of rubber trees is a highly individualistic and solitary endeavor. There are no peak labor seasons in which tappers seek out additional assistance to complete their work. Similarly, since rubber trees are perennials and yield for up to fifteen or twenty years after reaching maturity, seasonal preparations and maintenance of the sort required for the growing of rice are wholly unnecessary.

Villagers involved in tapping usually leave their homes shortly before daylight and walk or bicycle to the rubber fields, where they labor in solitude for three to six hours. These periods are not punctuated by much

conversation, since talk can be distracting and can lead to an imprecise paring away of the narrow strip of bark that allows the latex to flow into the collection cup. If cuts are too shallow, smaller volumes of latex will flow; if, however, cuts are too deep, vital tissues may be damaged, causing the tree to dry up prematurely and die.

The pace of tapping also prohibits casual socializing in the course of the morning's labor. Tappers must move quickly from tree to tree before the heat of the day thickens the latex. Then, after all trees are tapped the workers repeat their rounds, collecting the few ounces of liquid latex that have dripped into the cups in the hour or two since the strip of bark was first shaved off. Conversation only draws out this process. More generally, since tappers have work to do even after they have collected all of the day's latex, they are usually eager to return to the village as soon as possible.

The next phase of the tappers' daily activity is the only time they do seek the help of others—usually spouses or children. This is when they go to one of the village's two dozen or so rubber presses to complete the day's work. (These machines are privately held and made available to tappers either for a nominal monthly rent or for free, depending on the relationship between the press owners and the users.) Working at benches, the tappers pour their latex into metal containers resembling bread pans and mix in some formic acid, which transforms the liquid into a material the consistency of wet putty. They then dump the contents of each pan onto a smooth, clean surface and flatten it out by hand to prepare it for the manually operated press. The press squeezes out the excess water and further flattens each piece into a half-inch-thick sheet of uniform width and length. This phase of the processing requires two people, one to crank the wheel that turns the rollers and one to make sure the rough blocks of latex are properly fed into the press.

These tasks complete, the tappers return home with their sheets of latex and hang them out to dry. The sheets are left in the sun for a day or so before being placed for safekeeping beneath the house or on rafters in an interior room. They may be stored there for a few days or for months, depending on household cash requirements.

Latex can be converted into instant cash whenever the need arises. For this, villagers depend on Chinese brokers, who sell the rubber either to another broker or to a firm for further processing.

That no Malays are involved in the purchase of rubber from local producers is not particularly disconcerting to most villagers; residents of Bogang are acutely conscious of the broader pattern of Chinese dominance in virtually all entrepreneurial niches outside the village confines. Nonetheless, some men with whom I discussed the issue unabashedly preferred to do business with Chinese or Indians as opposed to Malays (cf. A. Wahab Alwee 1967, 31; Swift 1965, 32). One reason for this preference is that Chinese are explicitly businesslike, rarely disguising their priorities by gestures of hospitality or seemingly kinsmanlike behavior. Also, many villagers seem to welcome the possibility of pursuing self-interested interactions with non-Malays. This pattern testifies to a diffuse yet pervasive sentiment that considerations of material gain and self-interest should not figure into relationships among Malays. Although such ideals are increasingly difficult to uphold given the erosion of traditional norms and the concomitant monetization of much of the village economy, they are still central in rural Malay culture. This is partly due to the reluctant recognition of what might give way in circumstances in which the morality informing social obligation appears to impede individual or household gain.

Tenants, for instance, commonly emphasized that they sold their tapped rubber with the proprietors present owing to the proprietors' nervous concern that their workers might otherwise cheat them. In separate discussions, however, some of these same proprietors effectively disclaimed such anxieties, saying that their tenants handled all cash transactions on their own; a few also volunteered that they of course trusted their tenants, thus underscoring their reasons for not going along to the rubber agents' shops. Such delicate issues as trust and integrity are not openly discussed, but I suspect that flagrant abuses in this area are rare. Still, it is always possible that a tenant might deliberately underestimate the amount of rubber obtained from a proprietor's plot. I know of one Bogang resident who mistrusts tenants, and fellow villagers more generally, so much that he refuses to lease his rubber acreage at all, even though this results in the land lying unworked and hence in a substantially reduced household income. His position is that "(tenant) tappers end up with all of the meat, while the owners get only the sauce" (orang potong dapat daging, orang punya dapat kuah saja ).

Latent suspicions and tensions are additionally meaningful when we consider that 71 percent (39 of 55) of Bogang's tenant tappers work land

held by kin. Although the percentage of tenancy relationships between kin is larger in rubber tapping than in sawah sharecropping, this does not necessarily signify an across-the-board preference for entering into cash-based rental agreements with relatives (as opposed to "strangers"). Indeed, this comparatively high figure would seem to reflect limited, ambivalently realized tenancy options more than anything else. Of course, certain emotional satisfactions and other benefits, such as greater continuity in the relationship, may be derived from such arrangements between kin. The potential, however, for broad social disruption and spiritual discord is of much graver consequence when unresolved dissatisfaction exists with the relationship. Moreover, it seems true that villagers usually seek to separate ties of kinship from those based on the vagaries and self-serving nature of cash-based rental dependencies (cf. Swift 1965, 26, 62, 171). Thus, if a larger corpus of data and a broader range of tenancy opportunities were available, I would expect sharecropping arrangements focusing on rubber to involve more nonkin than they do at present.

In any case, most of Bogang's rubber tappers (63 percent, or 55 of 87) are tenants, and most of them labor for individuals categorized as kin. Here we see a radical departure from kinship and productive relations of the nineteenth century, which as a rule lacked the monetary coefficients of today, as well as the asymmetry emanating from differential access to scarce resources. Put differently, processes of twentieth-century economic development have entailed a profound restructuring of the bonds linking economic actors and all others once defined as social equals.

The infusion of cash into local economic relationships is manifest, then, both in the nature and incidence of rubber tenancy and in the way workers dispose of the product of their labor—that is, by selling it to agents of modern price-setting markets rather than using it for household consumption or intravillage distribution or exchange. Such dimensions of contemporary economic activity are profitably viewed alongside the essentially parallel trends in rice production. These trends in turn are best assessed in light of more encompassing processes that have witnessed the displacement of traditional subsistence pursuits and institutions by those centering on capital in the form of hard currency. The other side of this coin is the pronounced degree to which present-day households must rely on rubber tapping or other sources of cash income for the satisfaction of domestic needs.