Development and its meanings in the upland Citanduy River Basin, West Java, Indonesia

This thesis approaches critically the meaning of development and related practices as understood by local rural people in Indonesia. In particular, it describes how the people in upland Citanduy River Basin, West Java, Indonesia, have responded to and incorporated into their everyday lives the new "knowledge" disseminated by various development practices. As the nature of development is primarily rooted in the ethos of a global market economy, this thesis is mainly concemed with effects resulting from the reshaping of the local economy and community attributable to the changes brought about by various development practices. In particular, it argues that the imposition of a globally based economics into the upland Citanduy community has brought about new patterns in the routine lives of the local rural people as those material changes are rearticulated through the cultural values of the uplanders. As an anthropological study, this thesis articulates economic changes from a non-economic perspective. It attempts to develop an understanding of the local social meanings of those changes resulting from development activities implemented through the Citanduy River Basin Development Project introduced to the upland around the beginning of the 1980s. Both the Cigaru and Nanggewer hamlets were chosen as appropriate research areas because they offered an opportunity for a comparative study, as each was developed by different institutions implementing a different method, that is, the so-called participatory action research (Cigaru) and the "guided" approach (Nanggewer). Fieldwork was conducted from August 1992 to July 1993 and involved local activists and non-activists from both hamlets. Although two different development approaches were applied, the local people experienced and responded to the effects of these development interventions in similar ways. What appears to have occurred with the introduction of development into upland Citanduy is that the projects provoked the local people into producing new "knowledge" at the intersection of their socio-cultural life. Local actors who were instrumental in facilitating and implementing the transformative practices of development maintained close relationships with the "specialists" (developers) who were trained in designing and directing the efforts, although the local activists would interact with the other members of the community in a totally different manner. Undeniably, what occurs is that the "real" becomes structured by and materialized into subject/object relationships where the local people find themselves the object.