Gender at the margins

Women's Studies Int. Forum, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 373-390, 1994 Copyright © 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/94 $6.00 + .00

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GENDER AT THE MARGINS Paradigms and Peasantries in Rural Malaysia MAILA STIVENS Women's Studies, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia; E-mail: maila-stivens~/0historyO/[email protected]

Synopsis-This article looks at the difficulties facing feminist scholars in conceptualising the fate of womencaught up in agrarian transformations and passages to modernitythroughout the world. It is argued that while the dominant discourses dealing with peasantries have been able to marginalise or excludegender, the attempts to displace those discourses have proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped: a deconstruction of the received categories leaves scholars facing the awkward and difficult task of reconstructing and reclaiming gender from the edifice of concepts that implicitly include it but exclude any real consideration of its workings. Against a background of ethnographic research in Rembau, Negeri, Sembilan, Malaysia, the article explores the implications of these issues for 'peasant studies', with special attention to the debates about the application of western mainstream/malestream and feminist theories to the 'periphery'. Arguing that merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating 'effectson women',will not necessarilyadvanceour understanding of the operations of gender in history, it suggests that we need to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. But to do that we need to rethink many of the categories used in such analyses to overcome the obfuscation produced by gender absence.

The two decades since the publication o f Ester Boserup's pioneering Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970) have seen a proliferation of writing about the fate of women caught up in agrarian transformations and passages to modernity throughout the world. Before Boserup and the growth of the recent wave of western feminism, the dominant discourses dealing with peasantries had usually been able to marginalise or exclude gender. The attempts to displace those discourses, however, have proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped. Western feminist theory in recent years has increasingly expressed its dissatisfaction with trying to understand gender relations using the inherited paradigms o f western thought. The add-women-and-stir approach, which characterised some earlier secondwave feminist approaches to the ' W o m a n Question', soon revealed its inadequacies. It was rapidly realised that to bring gender back into history involved a far more difficult

task, an awareness of the gendered nature of paradigms, even a reinvention of social theory itself. (See, among others, Benhabib & Cornell, 1987; Harding, 1987; and Nicholson, 1990). As its advocates note, this ambitious project has only just begun. Feminist studies of the periphery faced similar difficulties: merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating 'effects on women', would not necessarily advance our understanding of the operations o f gender in history. We needed to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. But to do that has required a serious rethinking of the concepts employed in talking about peasantries. I argue here that this rethinking process will inevitably leave us with much more untidy pictures of concrete situations than simply adding 'women' to the various dominant paradigms o f peasant studies. This article looks 373

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at these issues with special reference to my own research relationship with Malay peasantries. FEMINIST THEORY AND 'WOMEN' IN THE PERIPHERY

The theoretical turmoil in western feminist thinking complicates the task of those involved with analysing concrete, empirical situations on the periphery. There are two main problem areas: first, the application of both malnstream/malestream and dissident western feminist theories to objects outside the 'West'; and second, the application of already constituted theories to new questions, such as the highly political questions thrown up by western feminist challenges to the academy and polity. I have discussed elsewhere (1992) the conditions under which knowledge about 'women' in Malaysia has been produced over the last five decades. Entering into some of the postcolonial debates, I argue that there are sizeable theoretical difficulties standing in the way of anyone trying to write about women in peripheral societies like the one I studied in Malaysia: these include problems faced by women scholars in the periphery, (both 'locals' and 'expats'), who are compelled to operate with discourses emerging out of often highly Eurocentric feminist categories. Much second-wave western feminist writing, as many acknowledge, has been basically uninterested in anything beyond the First World. Although the socialist feminist writing of the 1970s and early 1980s was somewhat more internationalist in perspective, its 'Women-in-Development' (WID) branches had problems in their own: much production of the 'Third World Woman' tended toward universalising views of women as victims of 'development' (cf. Mohanty, 1988). As I argue, merely exposing the undoubted androcentrism of previous work does not in itself provide any simple answers about how to do research and write about women in countries like Malaysia. But a deconstruction of received theories leaves scholars facing an awkward and difficult task of reconstruction, of reclaiming 'gender' from the vast edifice of concepts that implicitly include it but exclude any real consider-

ation of its workings. Such problems are acute for feminist scholars researching in what was once called the Third World. (See Fox-Genovese, 1986; hooks, 1984, 1991; Lazreg, 1988; Mohanty, 1988; Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991; Moore, 1988; Ramazanoglu, 1989; Spivak, 1987; Strathern, 1985, 1987). These intellectual contexts have produced inevitable awkwardness in the WID literature. Much of this body of writing over the last two decades has been cast firmly in a materialist mode: this reflects both its appropriation of models for understanding 'development' from mainstream 'political economic' thought, (much of it deriving from work on Latin America) and the role of the consulting industry in setting highly utilitarian agendas. This literature was beset in the 1970s by a central tension between, on the one hand, a continuing conviction by many practitioners of a need to hold on to the understandings of political and economic contexts provided by the materialist theoretical heritage, and, on the other hand, arguments stressing the primacy of sexual politics, the specificity of women's oppression. Some of the difficulties in the relationships between material perspectives and feminism were rehearsed in the literature on the 'unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism', but have been further unpacked in the debates about feminism and postmodernism (Nicholson, 1990) and about the destablisation of feminist theory (Barrett & Phillips, 1992). The dominant WID perspectives have clearly become vulnerable to the turn away from the social toward the cultural in the humanities and social sciences; this has left much WID writing, including writings about peasant women's lived experiences, relatively neglected within international feminism. One product of the tensions between materialism and feminism in the WID literature was some writers' division of the world into productive and reproductive spheres, albeit in varying configurations (Beneria, 1981; Deere, 1979, 1982; Edholm, Harris, & Young, 1977). A number of authors with different theoretical orientations have been drawn to the more productionist arguments, seeing women's situation as automatically declining with imperialism and capitalist penetration (e.g., Mies, 1988). Following Engels, many saw women as excluded from produc-

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tion with growing class differentiation (cf. Sacks, 1982). Yet such assumptions have proved to be highly problematic. They not only overlooked the continuing importance of women's family labour, but also generalised from the highly specific western experience of the development of the housewife form to the rest of the world. (See discussions in di Leonardo, 1991; Moore, 1988.) In any case, it became obvious that women's involvement and subordination in mainstream industrial and service sectors was not only rising very significantly in the First World, but also in the periphery, especially in Newly Industrialising Countries. The variability of women's relation to capitalist development processes throughout the world suggests the need to look at highly specific, local histories. 'Reproductionist' schemes on the other hand have seen women's subordination as ultimately deriving from the social relations of kinship, marriage, and mothering. Thus it was argued that women's reproductive activities are the primary determinants of women's subordination. In the final analysis, men's control over reproduction was seen as the crucial factor explaining gender subordination (Beneria, 1981; Chodorow, 1978; Meillassoux, 1981). Many accounts saw these reproductive relations as operating outside direct economic determination, although some saw the demands of the capitalist system as structuring the empirical forms these reproductive relations take (e.g., Meillassoux, 1981). A link between women's subordination and the dominant system of production was made by suggesting that these dominant relations reproduce the conditions of existence of the capitalist mode of production (as in the Domestic Labour Debate). In the underdeveloped world context, a further link was often proposed, suggesting that women's labour was increasingly withdrawn from social production with intensifying capitalist production and transferred to private household use (reproduction) or to subsistence production. Both forms of production were seen as reproducing the dominant relations in the system. The concentration on the household as the key site of women's subordination revealed further conceptual problems. As a number of feminist writers argued (Harris, 1984; White-

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head, 1984), we cannot treat the household as a 'black box' residential and productive unit, automatically viewed as male-headed. Such calls to deconstruct the concept in terms of its internal power relations are by now familiar, but often still not heeded. Formulations about women's reproductive roles, as critics have pointed out, did address the specificities of gender relations but did not in the end explain them. They conflated different meanings of the term, relying on an essentialist meaning of mothering. The theoretical vagueness of some of these formulations often ended up arguing very little beyond the generalisation that gender subordination supports capitalism. They also tended to produce the common dualistic line of argument that sees women as occupying more marginal areas of society, relegated by capitalism to subsistence production, the socalled informal sector and other marginal activities, while men engage in production proper. Most importantly, such schemes can totally overlook history, tending to stress how the system is reproduced and how women's 'roles' reinforce that system, rather than exploring women's places within history. As I argue, women must be seen as more central to agrarian formations than such pictures might suggest. Not surprisingly, western feminist thought in recent years has withdrawn from the search for key determinants of women's situation, judging debates about whether production or reproduction has the edge in producing feriaale subordination as pointless. The explosion of feminist anthropology has left such singular narratives behind (cf. di Leonardo, 1991). Critics have argued that dividing societies into 'male' productive spheres and 'female' reproductive spheres is dualistic and part of a tainted western inheritance (see the discussion in Moore, 1988). But the recognition of the need to deconstruct such problematic intellectual inheritances has emerged within the already noted general retreat from the social in the humanities and social sciences; I would argue that we need to return to more explicitly sociological approaches to deal with social change and women's oppositional practices within it (cf. Felski, 1989). In my view, we need to look at the construction of gender as the outcome of complex and highly specific historical pro-

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cesses in which both men and women have played a part as gendered subjects. That is, gender relations are not just an 'effect' of the continuously evolving social transformations set in train by imperialism and colonialism but are intimately involved in producing those transformations. This is not to argue, however, that we have yet evolved satisfactory alternative models that somehow resolve current feminist dilemmas in thinking about peasantries on the periphery. To begin this task of reconstruction within 'peasant studies', feminist writers have had to take on a whole body of unreflected assumptions about gender relations in production processes and productive units, as in discussions of the 'household'. The use of the male subject in all theoretical discussions of the past, present, and future of peasantries has been particularly problematic. Thus the 'Malay farmer' has been and continues in many cases to be assumed to be a man, in spite of the fact that Malay women's participation in agriculture and their possession of agricultural land have been extensive throughout the periods for which we have records (cf. Heyzer, 1987). To recast agrarian questions in Malaysia to include questions of gender leaves us having to unpack most of the key inherited concepts, including the 'Malay farmer', the 'household', 'family' and 'kinship', 'tenancy', 'class', 'differentiation', 'tradition', and 'custom'. The androcentrism of'peasant studies' has had serious consequences: gender as an analytical object has been pretty much absent from mainstream/malestream theoretical discussions about the characterisation of agrarian societies on the periphery, and Malaysia is no exception. Many mainstream studies of Malay peasantries have proceeded as if gender difference was not an integral part of the system and have until recently almost totally failed to take account of Malay women's sometimes significant rights to land and their extensive contributions to labour. As I have argued elsewhere (1992), it is interesting that in spite of some (albeit problematic) importation of western feminisms to do Malaysian intellectual work, there has been very little work looking at rural women's land ownership-and few published accounts of Malaysian rural society actually counted the number of female as well as male owners of

land. (The exceptions include Azizah Kassim, 1988; Fett, 1983; Gibbons et al., 1981; Peletz, 1988; Stivens, 1985b.) This is perhaps a measure of the force of the dominant models of agrarian society, which left little room for even conceiving of female landholding. The whole conceptual apparatus developed to analyse peasant societies could not 'see' gender relations and collapsed women into households headed by men. Gender relations never appeared explicitly in most studies, because they were hidden within concepts that excluded any consideration of their workings. This had especially important implications for debates about rural differentiation: attempts to characterise the links between agrarian sectors and dominant capitalist sectors in many parts of the world have been blind to the significance of gender differentiation within so-called peasant sectors. (See Goodman & Redclift, 1981, whose comprehensive discussion of these theorisings illustrates the point clearly.) Discussions of rural class differentiation in particular have failed to consider women as class agents, basically because their conceptual schemes ignored women's ownership and inheritance of land. (See Fatimah Halim, 1980; Kessler, 1978; Scott, 1985; Shamsul, 1986; Syed Husin Ali, 1975; and Wong, 1987.) We cannot begin to understand agrarian change in peripheral countries without looking at the dynamics of inheritance and the relationship between male and female landholding in given systems. A P P R O A C H E S TO GENDER IN STUDIES OF MALAY PEASANTRIES

The last two decades of resurgent feminism have brought a new focus on women in studies of rural Malays. (For a bibliography covering a considerable volume of this work, see Hing Ai Yun et al., 1984. See also Hong, 1983; Fan Kok Sim, 1982; and Stivens, 1992.) This interest has built on a preexisting if small body of work on women and gender in Malaysia mainly by anthropologists, dating back to Rosemary Firth's pre-World War II classic (1966). This inherited discourse about women has been important in setting recent agendas for research, especially for arguing for a degree of autonomy for Malay women.

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There is, for example, a direct line from Firth's to Strange's later study of a Trengganu village, which again argues for considerable parity of the sexes within the domestic domain (1981). The power of malestream and imported dissenting paradigms, however, left scholars with little intellectual room in which to move. For example, given the prevailing androcentrism of malestream studies, it was predictable that anthropologists (including women) would not count how much land women owned. As suggested, there was literally no conceptual space for them to do so. And, again, given the power of imported paradigms, it is not surprising that Firth's colonial discourse was so powerful in setting research agendas for those wanting to disrupt the androcentrism of Malay peasant studies. It was to be expected, perhaps that the discourses dealing with the Malay peasantry were able to marginalise gender. Some of the WID writing has produced its own marginalising practices, however; as suggested already, peripheral scholars have difficulties in finding an independent voice: it is easier to slip into a compensatory mode of 'adding women' rather than attempting the more demanding task of theorising gender as part of the processes of rural class differentiation, land tenure, and fragmentation, as part of all the processes constructing and transforming social forms. As noted, I have discussed elsewhere the character of the growing body of work on Malaysian women, suggesting that although much of it has often been extremely rigorous, well-researched, and innovative, it has also often been highly empirical in character, struggling to put women back into a social science that has been cast in paradigmatic terms that exclude gender (Stivens, 1991a, 1991b, 1992). I see those struggles as structured by a number of factors, including the hegemony of imported paradigms, both the prefeminist androcentric and western feminist Eurocentric versions, and the conditions of intellectual production in the country. The latter have included consultancies, which play an important part in setting intellectual agendas in many present-day postcolonial situations: in Malaysia, consultants, the direct heirs of the earlier colonial report industry, produce much material in response to

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priorities set by various external agencies. (As, indeed, I myself have been involved in an ILO consultancy on Malay women's land, which has produced first a report and then a monograph, Stivens et al, 1994). Such consultancies often import western feminist agendas into local research milieux, compounding the already present western intellectual imperialism. There is also the highly political national ethnic situation, which sees most work directed at Malay women rather than at women of other ethnicities. (Again, see Stivens, 1992.) WID collections and materials on women workers in Malaysia have both called for a consideration of women as gendered subjects, with the latter taking an increasingly critical view of women's situation. Drawing explicitly on western feminist ideas, a developing body of writing has begun to stress male control and exploitation of women's labour, particularly in the newly industrialised Malaysian factories (cf. Ackermann, 1980; Fatimah Daud, 1985; Ong, 1987). This writing often depicts young women as heavily controlled by institutionalised patriarchy at home and work. It has also clearly imported a workerist discourse into Malaysian studies: the mass of material on industrialisation and urbanisation concentrates to an inordinate extent on women in the industrial workf o r c e - a s factory workers- with little attention to the other forms of female labour marking Malaysia's entry to modernity and postmodernity, such as the mass of legal and illegal Indonesian migrant labour working in the domestic and service sectors. Ong, 1991, is a partial exception in her recognition of out-work as part of the labour politics of postmodernity. The model of the autonomous Malay rural women deriving from Firth has continued to have some force, but there are echoes of the more critical approach in some writing on rural women (cf. Maznah Mohamed, 1990; Ng, 1985, 1986; and, especially, some of the imported feminist studies such as Couillard, 1987; Massard, 1983; and McAllister, 1987). 'Autonomy', relative or not, is clearly a highly problematic concept: Those using it have usually not confronted the inheritance of modernist ideas about the possibility of attaining a free and autonomous self inherent in its use. This relativisation of autonomy can

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be seen as predicated on the male as the reference p o i n t - i t seems to me that in many of the discussions about autonomy, women are being judged as to how closely their state approximates that of the allegedly free and autonomous male subject/agent. Moreover, this is clearly the White, middle-class male of the liberal, humanist imagination. My own prejudice for not entirely discarding the 'autonomous Malay woman' model, however, is no doubt coloured by my research experiences in Rembau, in the famous 'matrilineal' state of Negeri Sembilan2: women there can easily be seen as having been relatively more 'autonomous' than women in many other parts of the peninsula. A crucial point about the ways in which the Negeri Sembilan peasantry has been represented, both in the past and present, is that gender did escape from its epistemological confines on occasion: gender relations were seen as a critical part of the way the society was seen to work by a whole range of observers and participants alike, including colonial officials and some latter-day anthropologists. Such gendering of Negeri Sembilan studies as did occur, however, was a legacy of the exoticising discourses representing the state's 'matriliny'. One solution to the problem this gendering of discourses posed for androcentric scholarly thought was to accentuate the orientalist vision: Negeri Sembilan and its parent Minangkabau society often found their way into anthropological text books as an exotic among exotica. But the 'scientific' functionalism of anthropology easily returned to gross androcentrism. In Michael Swift's study in Negeri Sembilan in the late 1950s, the forms of gender absence are interesting-he fails to provide even the most basic data about male and female land and labour contributions and gets rid of the problem of apparently anomalous gender relations by pretending they were in fact almost 'normal'. Thus he suggests that he will treat rubber land as if it is owned by men without telling us whether he had counted the sex of owners (Swift, 1965, p. 36)! Women have been shown in a number of subsequent studi e s - some influenced by feminism--to have held significant numbers of land titles right through the 20th century (Fett, 1983; Peletz, 1988; Stivens, 1985b).

CONCEPTUAL ABSENCES In the light of the preceding discussion, I now turn to look at the difficulties surrounding some of the key concepts used in the debates about the past, present, and future of Malay rural producers. I try to contextualise my critiques with reference to the problems of placing 'women' in the Rembau agrarian economy. Talking about Negeri Sembilan women's role in agriculture has become something of a historical exercise, with the almost total disappearance of rice cultivation in the state in the last decade and the mass exodus of most able-bodied young rural dwellers, female and male, to land settlement schemes and the newly industrialising cities, as the state-led industrialisation process has accelerated. Malaysia has experienced stunningly high rates of economic growth over the last decade. Pressures toward commoditisation of agricultural production, combined with pressures brought by industrialisation, have proved untenable for many villagers, especially for the ageing women living in the villages. This marginalisation of the rice economy has robbed women of a great deal of the relative economic independence accorded them under the precolonial and colonial operations of 'matrilineal' ideologies and practices. Contradictorily, perhaps, these rapid changes only underline the argument made here, that women have to be seen as central to agrarian transformations. THE'PEASANTRY' In many of the complex and sophisticated theoretical debates in the world literature about the definitions of 'peasant', and the relation of peasant economic forms to wider economies, there has been an inherent assumption that the peasant is a male farmer with dependent 'family' labour. (See discussion of these debates in Goodman & Redclift, 1981. Feminist interventions have included Young et al., 1984; Afshar, 1985; Afshar & Agarwal, 1989; and Agarwal, 1988.) Concern about the relations of exploitation within the peasant household were largely left to feminists, with little attempt to bring such issues into mainstream discussions of agrarian transformation. Feminist critiques

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pointing this out appear to have had little impact in altering the paradigms of Malaysian peasant studies, in spite of their having been in the public domain for up to two decades. Work on rural women is ghetto-ised, and 'women' usually only rate a few mentions in most of the larger studies (as in Fujimoto, 1983; Scott, 1986; Wong, 1987). When they do appear, they occupy a role within another imported paradigm, that of the reserve of labour, which the 'peasant' sector is alleged tO provide; this sector is seen as acting as a producer of labour for urban industrial workforces (as in Ong, 1983, although she later autocritiqued this in Ong, 1989). As I argue later, this fleeting appearance of women within the so-called characterisation debates places them in a functionalist scheme that explains rural social forms as functions of the capitalist development process. (See my discussion of this in Stivens, 1985b). THE STATE The role of the state, especially the capitalist state, is often represented as being inherently patriarchal and as securing the conditions both of 'reproduction' (in its multiple meanings discussed earlier) and of women's subordination. At the least, we have a growing world literature on the 'effects' of state action on women, which usually equates the 'state' with a bureaucratic, administrative apparatus. (See for example, Ng & Maznah, 1988; Jomo & Tan, n.d., for Malaysian discussions.) Personally, I prefer to see the state as an arena of contested relations, as does Alavi (1982; see also Pringle & Watson, 1992). Much of the literature on western women and the state seems to me to assume a high level of effectiveness of state control and an extreme degree of functional fit between state forms and the dominant mode of production. I have argued elsewhere that even some of the more subtle accounts that suggest that the state creates a space in which forms of male dominance are acted out exaggerate both the unity of a reified state and its effectiveness (1987, 1991a). The export of these models to the periphery can be dangerously ahistorical and essentialist. I have also argued that state intervention

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played a powerful role in reconstituting Negeri Sembilan's 'matrilineal' peasantry in Rembau (Stivens, 1985b). Land legislation set in motion by colonial polity may have inadvertently strengthened women's land rights, albeit in somewhat contradictory ways. This was only one of many interventions in the uneven capitalist development process by the disparate elements forming the Malayan and later Malaysian state. At the risk of reifying the contemporary Malaysian state, we need to emphasise its authoritarian nature. The Malay(si)an economy has been marked by high levels of such interventions by state institutions and, in the last 20 years, by virtual state management of areas of the rural economy. The Rembau rural economy in the last two decades has presented a picture of a heavily subsidised, increasingly marginal economy. Women were virtually neglected as 'women' in these interventions, although as the main landowners in my study villages, they in fact received a large proportion of the replanting aid made available by the Rubber Industry Smallholders' Development Authority (RISDA), the state agency helping rubber smallholders. Such scenarios of neglect in rural development are, of course, familiar from the WID literature (e.g., Rogers, 1980). THE HOUSEHOLD The by now numerous feminist critiques of the household as a concept seem to have had little impact in many Malay peasant studies outside WID circles. This has had serious repercussions beyond the so-called domestic domain. Many mainstream studies have assumed that households were male-headed, elementary family households, although they have to varying degrees acknowledged the effects of developmental cycles and other factors, such as kinship relations (see, for exam~ ple, Kuchiba et al., 1970). This model of the natural male-dominated household is only one step short of assuming a natural sexual division of labour both within domestic boundaries, as in housework and childcare, and in the fields and small holdings. Yet, once the analysis of the household is seen as problematic, it is much less easy to accept many of the previous accounts of the sexual

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division of labour, which obscured women's part in agricultural labour. 'DIFFERENTIATION', LAND

OWNERSHIP, AND 'CLASS' Commoditisation Issues of class differentiation in Rembau can only be addressed after a short consideration of commoditisation of peasant production over the last few decades. Negeri Sembilan rice holdings historically have been among the smallest nationally on average, characterised by generally low levels of productivity. In the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural advisers had waged a campaign to try to get villagers to plant HYVs, but the crops failed for a number of reasons. Villagers claimed that there was little incentive for them to persist-their complaints about the massive rise in inputs required by the doublecropping varieties clearly came from the strains placed on an ageing workforce with many female-headed households. Under half of the village households grew enough rice to feed their households in the mid-1970s, and the next decade saw the complete collapse of rice growing in the state. The absence of young able-bodied villagers from the early 1970s meant that middleaged and elderly people, particularly women heading households, had to rely on commoditised inputs. One woman, for example, told me in 1976 how she had spent $100 the year before for ploughing, but her crop had failed. (Bailey, 1983, calculated that inputs for an average 2-acre holding cost up to $300 at the time of my initial research; See Kahn, 1981.) This illustrates the precariousness of many households' livelihood, with average annual incomes of M$1,200 at that time. As Kahn argues, while productivity figures in the state had remained static over at least some decades, and the 'peasant' economy during the colonial and postcolonial periods had been generally characterised by small-scale individual enterprises, the determinants of productivity had altered beyond recognition: the technological environment within which paddy farmers were constrained to operate changed from nonmarket to market reproduction of the peasant enterprise. Greater inputs made it easier

for smaller labour units to be productive, in what we might see as a 'peasantising' trend (which has occurred in parts of the peninsula, cf. Wong, 1987). But, as Kahn suggests, when farmers began to base their decisions on money costs of production, even within subsistence production, we might in fact expect to find a decrease in rice output per household (1981). Commoditisation made it possible for farmers to compare the costs and returns of different forms of economic activity, such as rubber tapping, fruit production, or, most likely, for young people, work in the capitalist economy. Commoditisaton had also produced individualisation in production: "It's so lonely working in the rice fields today. In the old days women all went down together to weed and to do other w o r k . . . If you needed a lot of people to help you, for example to make an attap roof, you went to everyone's house and asked them to come. There's no menyeraya nowadays [communal labour] . . . Everyone has money, except I don't have (any)!" Lacking money, the speaker could not get her roof repaired at all. This general tendency toward individualisation, however, did not preclude some 'helping out' by neighbours and kin, and some instances of collective work, as when seven women made their rice plants nursery together and transplanted together. The state ideology of tolongmenolong, in which collective labour works together on government projects, was seen as an artificially imposed togetherness, and no substitute for the 'real' thing. Of course, such remembrances of a golden past may be somewhat romantic inventions of 'tradition', but we need, I think, to take them seriously. In my view, this changed rationality within the peasant enterprise has had a close connection to evolving gender relations in Rembau. Growing commoditisation might bring higher productivity, but it also imposed considerable burdens on women, who had less access to family members as l a b o u r they had m i g r a t e d - and less access to cash in an economy where such access increasingly relied on capitalist labour markets. Rubber production provided income of some sort for about half of all village households in the 1970s, but there were extensive problems with production. (See my earlier accounts, 1985a, 1985b). Thus although women rubber

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land owners might have some cash for inputs (especially if they 'headed' their household), many other women were dependent on husbands' or children's remittances. Class Commoditisation has been seen by many writers on the Malay peasantry as producing growing 'class' differentiation. But as I argue, we have real problems with the essentialising of the concept of class and allegedly accompanying resistance in accounts such as Scott's (1985), and the neglect of gender in these discussions is a central issue. Does the question of gender have relevance for an analysis of class and status relations within village society? This question has not been asked in any published studies of the Malay peasantry of which I know. As I have pointed out, many have assumed that Malay farmers and 'landlords' were male, or at least genderneutral. This assumption allowed them to apply the differentiation debates from classical accounts of the 'agrarian question', assuming rural households to be simply maleheaded units which were seen to behave in certain ways depending on the theoretical predilections of the analyst. Thus, in a widely quoted discussion of class within Malay peasant society, Scott unvaryingly talks about the Malay peasant class agent as 'he', in spite of the fact that a group of women are described as active agents of a boycott designed to deny transplanting services to employers who hired a harvesting combine (1985). But it is not a simple matter of adding women to the old paradigms; as I have suggested, importing paradigms into Malaysia has been at best an awkward and ambiguous affair. But we also face a new set of problems with the 'new times' postmodernist arguments about class as a category in the West: that class is no longer a central social division and that we have moved into an era of increasingly complex political and cultural cleavages (Walby, 1992). The assumption of uniformly maleheaded households produces other problems. A number of studies of Malay peasantries have drawn conclusions about class from tables based on snap-shot pictures of social structure (for example, Syed Husin Ali, 1975; Jomo, 1986; Kessler, 1978). But such tables, while obviously useful, can also be mislead-

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ing for a number of reasons: they tend to reify the household as a property owning unit, when it has often been a quite unstable grouping, with changing membership due to migration and divorce in particular; the tables also do not consider either the movement of land over time through inheritance or the need to look at male and female landowning separately (but see Gibbons et al., 1981). 3 For example, while appearing 'landless' at a point of census, my 1976 female informants in Rembau could gain formal access to their mother's rice land as they grew older (and would, in any case, work it in an informal family arrangement as long as it remained in cultivation). 'Everyday' ownership--informal arrangements governing day-to-day u s e - d i d not necessarily accord with the records in Land Offices. Often land had not been formally transferred for some years after the holder's death, or a woman had given her land to her daughter for cultivation because she was too old to go on. Thus, in actuality, only two households (in one village of 26 households) did not have 'access' to rice land, one because they were too old to cultivate and the other because they were too 'comfortable to bother'. Such equalising influences of family arrangements over time suggest that simple measures of land ownership at specific times will not necessarily convey a helpful picture. Even the very small figures from local studies such as this one can nonetheless undercut some of the studies trying to fit rural social relations into borrowed European models of emerging class differentiation and class relations to suggest a uniform trajectory of class differentiation across Malaysia. In fact, the locally reconstituted 'customary laws' ('matrilineal' and nonmatrilineal), which have constantly remade themselves through the colonial and postcolonial periods in a complex dialectic between colonial impost and local practices, have a close relationship to gender relations through the operation of inheritance. The equalising influence of 'family arrangements' for rice land among my female informants was quite considerable. Almost all my 'landless' informants would eventually inherit rice land, (which was mainly 'ancestral' and therefore passed down the matriline), although those processes would often

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intensify fragmentation and productivity problems (again see Stivens, 1985a, 1985b). And there were also 'sharecropping' arrangements between kin which increased the intertwining of kinship and economy. As I discuss later, 'sharecropping' is a highly problematic concept in itself. While these relationships imply and perpetuate some degree of inequality, we should be careful about assuming that the local term bagi dua (two equal shares) always refers to the same phenomenon and therefore is evidence of differentiation per se. Analytically, there is a possible range of relationships covered by the term, from 'landlord' and 'tenant' to an arrangement between two kin to swap land because their holdings are inconveniently located (see Bray, 1986). On the other hand, only 3% of study households held rice land holdings larger than 4 acres, the majority being between 1 and 2 ½ acres in size. But no woman was cultivating a parcel of land larger than 3 acres, although several women owned larger holdings. For example, one 70-year-old woman had divided her 7-plus-acre holding with her daughter. Family arrangements also had considerable force in property relations outside the 'matrilineal' system, especially rubber ownership. A key statistic emerging out of this research was the high level of female ownership of rubber land, in spite of popular and scholarly suggestions that men were the main owners of 'acquired' (nonancestral) land. Fiftyseven percent of the owners of censused village rubber holdings in the study villages in 1976 were women, and they were among the largest landowners, as noted (Stivens, 1985b). My study (see 1985b) and two others (Fett, 1983; Peletz, 1988) have all shown that the longer land is held, the more likely it is to move into female ownership. In spite of the fact that male ownership has been favoured by government schemes to offer marginal land for cultivation over the last decades, the underlying structural pattern has been one of slightly greater female ownership and slightly higher female per capita average acreage. (By 1976, a fifth of the 27,000 acres of smallholdings in Rembau were this fringe-alienated land-- 13% of owners in one village, 12% in the second, and 32% in the third had received such land.) Most owned rubber land of a few acres- 15% of households owned more than

4 acres, with only 1 out of 99 households owning more than 20 acres (28 acres belonging to a woman and to her long-dead husband), and only 3 others owning more than 8 acres. In discussing land ownership, I would stress the complex relationship between formal legal precepts and everyday practices, especially the way rice land has been used mainly according to family arrangements and rubber land has been transferred through mechanisms outside formal 'matrilineal' transmission, mechanisms which I have termed 'feminisation'. Thus, men would often transfer land to a wife, sister or daughter, and at the formal division of land at the Land Ofrice, men inheriting land sometimes directly passed it on to a sister. (Also see Tan Ju Eng, The Star, Dec. 22, 1988, p. 4, where an unnamed Rembau lawyer suggests that formal Islamic division [at the Land Office] may be followed directly by the gift of the land to female kin. See also Azizah Kassim, 1988; Stivens, 1985b). Orchard ownership, mainly ancestral, seems also to have been feminised when newly pioneered land was transmitted or transferred. The few households with large holdings of both rice and rubber land in the 1970s and 1980s might point to some degree of inequality, if not differentiation. But we need to consider a historical dimension in discussions of contemporary patterns of land concentration. Thus, one of the 'richest' families in the villages had acquired most of their land in the 1920s. Such accumulation as had occurred during the colonial and postcolonial decades appears to have been the result of men buying land for their wives or daughters with the proceeds of earnings outside the village economy (for example, a8 members of the Malay Civil Service). It has not been generally the result of accumulation through forfeiture on debt and hence differentiation within the village economy. I have seen no evidence of such processes during my association with the area, although it may have happened at earlier points, and poverty has obviously produced some forced sales. Indeed, the major issue in village economies over the last decade has been the extent of unused land as villagers all head for the city. Rembau village sector land ownership has thus shown a clear central tendency toward a

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constant transfer of male labour and resources into female property, at least until the 1980s. I see these transfers as structurally embedded processes relegating land to its 'traditional' keepers, women, processes as much created by political responses to the colonial order (women's and men's) as by colonial fiat (Stivens, 1985b). TENANCY

Rice sharecropping The relationship between family labour and wider economic processes in Rembau emerges as a central issue, one that probably played a large part in the ultimate demise of rice production. It is almost impossible to apply the 'normal' categories of the debates about agrarian relations to this case, once we give due weight to the significance of the family developmental cycle in which issues of gender are deeply embedded. The dominant form of rice production in the area throughout the period for which we have material appears to have been owner cultivation, although a significant proportion supplemented their production with sharecropping as well as cultivating their own family holding. The crude outlines of rice production in the mid- to late 1970s were remarkably similar to those reported for 30 years before (Swift, 1965). But, as noted, the received categories of 'landlord', 'sharecropper', and 'tenant' become problematic, once we look a bit more carefully at the household. The majority of my informants found themselves in two or even more categories. And Rembau had none of the large landlords dominating a class of rice-growing sharecroppers to be found in some other areas of Malaysia, nor did any villagers directly rent land (apart from a quarter-acre holding rented from the local school by one woman; again see Stivens, 1985a, 1985b). These examples show how a tradition of applying concepts from European-based discourses on the peasantry presents a Malaysian social science with many problems. To use the term sharecropper implies a class relationship between owner and cultivator. Certainly, some of these relationships resembled class relations, in that some appropriation of surplus occurred, but it would be misleading to see them as full-blown class relations. For

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example, many cases of sharecropping occurred when a woman decided to supplement her very small holding by sharecropping the land of a kinswoman too old to continue cultivating, or by cultivating land that was nearer her house than her own lot (cf. Bray, 1986, for an analogous argument for a study in the Malaysian state of Kelantan). We can only hold on to the categories in any simple way by thinking of them as referring to ideal-type male-headed elementary family households supported by male farmers. As suggested, households in reality are linked by complex ties to other kin. The fact that a husband and a wife may have separate holdings often means that one household may well fall into at least two categories simultaneously. We could perhaps more usefully look elsewhere for the sources of such inequality as did occur. The commoditisation of inputs already discussed may well have increased inequality because those with smaller plots were forced to spend more on inputs to try to raise productivity (Kahn, 1981).

Rubber tenancies Owner tapping has been the predominant form of production in the study villages, but bagi-dua sharetapping, in which the tapper and owner share the proceeds has also been common. Again, however, I would argue that it is misleading to see the 'landlords' (who include many women) as a homogenous class extracting surplus (cf. Bray, 1986). There was a handful of 'rich' villagers who looked a lot more like the classic landlords of the differentiation debates dating back to Lenin. Clearly, considerable inequalities have existed within the village economy, but sew eral points can be made, in two of which gender intrudes quite definitively: first, 'landlords' did not form a uniform group; second, those with large landholdings mostly obtained these with male earnings outside the village, rather than from the generation of surplus within the village economy. Especially significant are the numbers of retired bureaucrats who had accumulated larger holdings which have passed to wives or daughters; and third, as noted, women have been amongst the largest landholders. This suggests the need for some rethinking of the classic debates about peasant classes, which assume that only men as the unproblematic

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representatives of households are the social agents within class relations and women are hidden away in domesticity and 'family labour'. I have already, however, indicated my misgivings with the application of the term class to Rembau rural social relation. I have the same worries about importing the concept of resistance, which has been so popular in much contemporary western social theory. In the Malaysian context, it has been somewhat essentialistically identified as a given of the alleged class structures (Scott, 1985, or of the operation o f power, Ong, 1987). T H E SEXUAL DIVISION OF L A B O U R I have already suggested that assumptions about women's place in households permeate most work on Malay peasantries. It is true that all the 'standard' malestream studies and ethnographies usually describe, if sometimes briefly, a sexual division of labour in Malay agricultural work, usually drawn from local ideologies on male and female work. But careful empirical observation will often produce a different picture from that presented by local ideology. This was certainly the case in Rembau. Actual productive practices did not follow ideology very strictly, varying with demographic, ecological, and economic conditions.

planting along with their wives. They were 'helping'. Weeding was considered women's work, but actually men were often involved, while harvesting involved both men and women, although people often said that only men were strong enough to use the threshing box (banting); this was not, in fact, the case. Older women preferred to use the hand knife (tuai) rather than the sickle (sabit), because it was less wasteful, but it also lessened their reliance on wage labour, as they could thresh by foot the smaller heads o f rice cut with the knife. Women did most of the winnowing and drying of rice. The perceptions o f gendered tasks formed part of a series of assumptions about femininity and masculinity: males were stronger, women weaker, women were more deft at transplanting, women as nurturers were also the protectors of the paddy spirit. Even though paddy cultivation has ceased, women still take this role as protector of the land very seriously indeed. It is noteworthy that this ideological mystification did not greatly disadvantage women. They were not supplying a great deal of labour which was unrecognised or represented as 'male'; instead, male labour contributions were also being mystified. We should note, however, that women's workload was greatly intensified by the growth o f out-migration and that this appears to have been one o f the forces leading to the demise of the rice economy.

Rice production The most commonly expressed ideology about Rembau agriculture has been that rice growing is 'women's work'. But villagers also saw the tasks attached to cultivating rice as being part o f the work of men whose occupation was kerja kampung- village work. A resume of the sexual division o f labour will show how men in fact did more work than ideology suggested in this sphere: in accordance with ideology, women usually made the nurseries, but women did more hoeing than men, even though it is often thought to be a 'male' task; this might have been a reflection of the high number o f female-headed h o u s e h o l d s - w o m e n with less access to cash were forced to hand hoe, rather than hire mini-tractors. (A few plots were inaccessible to mini-tractors.) Transplanting was always represented as a female activity, but, again, I observed a number of men in the area trans-

Rubber production In spite o f significant rates of female ownership of rubber holdings, rubber production in the 20 years up to the 1960s has been universaUy represented as a 'male' activity, by locals and scholars alike. But it is evident that the actual practices have been more flexible than ideology. Admittedly, men in the study villages were the main tappers and most women 'did not know how to tap'. A main reason given was that as many o f the holdings were up the mountain, women were too frightened to tap there alone. I found only two women tapping (out o f nearly 100 households) during my first census. Nonetheless, I suspect that women's labour contributions were consistently underestimated within village discourse. It appeared that more women in the villages had been involved when the price was higher. The issue of work repre-

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sented as 'helping' is important here. Women harvest was seen as women's; in the past, evoften 'helped' with weeding and clearing ery woman had her own granary. They also holdings and with processing latex. had far greater ownership of rubber land and Women were also not owners in name control of production than either local or only. The high proportion of female-headed scholarly discourse has suggested. These dehouseholds meant that many women had sole grees of 'autonomy', or at least economic incontrol of their own (and sometimes dead dependence, contrast with the accounts of husband's) holdings. Such women organised women in some other parts of Malaysia, the sharetappers, and supervised the sharing which underlines the need to stress the speciof the proceeds from the sale between the ficity of Negeri Sembilan. owner and the tapper. They did, however, often feel at a disadvantage in dealing with GENDER A N D THE DEMISE OF male sharetappers and sometimes leant on A RICE ECONOMY sons' and others' advice about continuing to cultivate the land. Women also made the We have seen so far that increasing commodloudest complaints about the sharetapper's itisation and out-migration can be seen as honesty: such tensions have often been re- having produced a collapse of the rice econported in the literature on rural Malay life, omy in Negeri Sembilan. I suggested that but not the added complication produced by women had borne the brunt of many of these the gender of the 'landlord', as was the case changes. here. Although a couple of women were inNegeri Sembilan peasant economy was volved in sales, again the clear male domi- dominated by household production right up nance in the marketing of rubber made to the 1980s, as we saw. Levels of tenancy women feel at a great disadvantage in dealing showed little tendency toward increased difwith male (Chinese) middlemen in the local ferentiation. Yet other dramatic changes town. were in fact bringing about the demise of this The average number of rubber tapping form of production. First, the rising levels of days in Malaysia is usually quoted at about inputs had seen the peasant enterprise in20 days a month (given rest days and average creasingly reproduced within the market. I loss of rainy days). In 1976, I followed a sam- have already stressed a point made here in ple of 7 tappers for 35 days, and found wide other discussions of the Green Revolution, variations in the actual number of days that women are seriously disadvantaged in tapped, with the 6 men ranging from no days comparison to men in obtaining cash for into 16 days and the 1 woman tapping 16 days. puts. The Malaysian gender order restricts Men's reasons for not tapping included their access to off-farm work and to control mainly other pressing agricultural tasks, vis- of some household resources. Of course, iting kin, funerals, and Friday prayers. The Rembau social arrangements probably gave woman's included wedding preparations, women greater control over such resources, looking after a sick child and grandchild, and compared to other Malay women, so they cooking food in preparation for a fasting might have been relatively less disadvantaged month. The sexual division of labour im- in this respect. Second, arguments about the posed a 'female' set of constraints, with do- characterisation of Third World agrarian mestic tasks taking clear priority over 'pro- economic forms have pointed to the way ductive' tasks. commoditisation of production leads to inAs feminists have long suggested, the sex- creasing competition between, and individuual division of labour is less about who does alisation of, households. My informants in what and more about control of the labour the 1970s and 1980s, especially women, emprocess and appropriation of the product, es- phasised the world they had lost, in which lapecially within the household. Rembau bour sharing and communal work groups women up to the late 1970s had extensive ac- had been replaced by highly individualised cess to rice land and a high degree of effective household production: we saw the comments control in decisions about cultivation, in- above about the decline of communal labour. cluding dealing with sharecroppers. More- Villagers clearly perceived the dominant over, practically and ideologically, the rice trends in the village economy, and many felt

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alienated and deprived by the changes they had brought. While the elementary family household appears to have been the main unit of production in rice cultivation over at least the last century, it has not been the only one. Households presented themselves in my 1976 census as much more untidy than the model that has dominated most writing on Malay peasantries. Although this may have been in part a result of recent industrialisation, my migration histories suggested that femaleheadedness, for example, long predated the 1970s. But it is clear that the colonial and capitalist social processes had set in motion a number of forces leading to a tendency toward greater individualisation within rice cultivation. The breaking down of interhousehold cooperation was evident in the decline in communal labour. These trends had been intensified by state action, especially the intercession of the state into production processes at all levels: state structuring of production, for example, replaced some of the previous more community-based ideological structuring, especially the ritual ordering of the cultivation cycle and practices. As noted, villagers had resisted the stateimposed incursions of the Green Revolution, refusing to undertake double cropping because the labour demands were beyond them. Agricultural extension services had met a lot of foot-dragging, in spite of expanding subsidisation. Thus, subsidies aimed at helping the small cultivator appeared only to intensify the pressures on an often ageing workforce to cultivate. In the face of exhortation, villagers in fact curtailed production. In 1976, 24070 of the rice land was uncultivated. My 1982 visit found most village rice land uncultivated, a situation that has persisted through a number of subsequent visits. As noted, by 1988, most rice land in Negeri Sembilan was dormant. The demise of rice production, then, was probably due to a combination of social, economic, and political reasons. Advancing age and labour shortages, themselves the product of the wider social processes of industrial capitalist development, combined with a related set of pressures deriving from commoditisaton, pushed the struggling villagers out of rice production. Other factors may also underlie this collapse, with suggestions that

the degradation of forests has led to widespread silting. As well, pollution from a rubber factory has caused problems in the study villages. The implications are clearly profound. As noted, Negeri Sembilan rice growing has contrasted with national patterns, with small holdings, low rates of tenancy, and little evidence of increasing differentiation over the previous 30 years. But even there, rice growing, however marginal, has been a central symbol of Malay rural life. Up to the mid 1970s, a majority of villagers were engaged in some form of rice cultivation on land totally owned by women. Women have been particularly affected. The agricultural administration has recently produced various plans for alternative uses for the women's ancestral land, including cocoa cropping, plans which my female informants have so far vigorously resisted, even though some of their husbands have been becoming convinced by government propaganda- "It's rice land and you should not grow anything but rice on it!" said the women. If such inroads were to take place, a cornerstone of women's continuing relative lack of disadvantage (at least economic disadvantage) could be under enormous threat. CONCLUSIONS By using some examples from my own research in Negeri Sembilan, I have tried to suggest some of the ways that gender relations have played a significant part in developments within a Malay agrarian economy. A cornerstone of my argument has been the need for studies of Malay peasantries to rethink many of the categories used in such analyses, to overcome the obfuscation produced by gender absence. I suggested that we needed to do more than rectify androcentrism-merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating 'effects on women', would not necessarily advance our understanding of the operations of gender in history. I argued that we should try to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail how they are embedded in the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. As I suggested, this rethink-

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ing process inevitably leaves us with much more untidy pictures of concrete situations than simply adding 'women' to the various dominant paradigms of peasant studies. The above discussion of Rembau, by breaking out of androcentric assumptions about the household can, I hope, give us a better understanding of a range of issues, including class differentiation, or at least some better questions to ask! I especially highlighted the importance of looking at the relationship between gender and inheritance patterns in understanding patterns of landholding and differentiation. Although there is comparatively little growth in class differentiation in Rembau, women have been among the largest landholders in the study villages. 'Tenancy' again, was revealed to be tied up in complicated family arrangements over time, arrangements in which gender was deeply embedded. The categories employed in the debates, such as 'landless', 'tenant', and 'landlord' obscured these cycles. The peasant 'farmer' emerged clearly as being not solely male. I stressed the relative absence of large 'landlordism,' which was associated with the dominance of small production forms and indeed, the emergence of 'peasantisation' for some of this period (Kahn, 1981; cf. Wong, 1987). Ultimately, this trend in Rembau has collapsed with the demise of the rice economy, as shown. I emphasised the central role of women in all these developments, as both producers and landowners. I have particularly stressed the need to have a long-term view of land inheritance. I recalled my earlier discussions of Rembau, which criticised attempts to reduce the impact of colonialism and capitalist development on women's property relations to a simplistic picture of men gaining individually and personally through misogynistic colonial ideology. The interpenetration of gender relations on the one hand, and, on the other, colonial imposition and capitalist development, has produced highly uneven, complex, and contradictory results. My work on Rembau has suggested that the reconstitution of a 'matrilineal' peasantry, the wholesale appropriation of the best land and political action against rubber smaUholders by large capitalist interests mediated through the colonial state have all been key elements in structuring Negeri Sem-

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bilan society and women's situation within it. Land legislation acted to reconstitute a matrilineal' peasantry, supporting and indeed augmenting women's rights to land, albeit land in backward and declining sectors. Contradictorily, perhaps, I linked the continuing 'feminisation' of land with the marginalisation of the village economy (Stivens, 1985b). But these were not mere 'effects'- women were active agents in fighting for their 'custom' on occasion (Stivens, 1985a). The dialectic of colonial and capitalist behest and local response have been crucial in constantly recreating the 'matrilineal' system and women's situation within it. Some of the material discussed in this article clearly demonstrates a central contradiction in Rembau gender relations. On the one hand, we have a set of data which suggests considerable masculine 'responsibility' in the area of property relations, sustained or indeed enforced as it may be through complex social structural supports. Unlike many parts of the world, where male appropriation of female labour is widespread, Negeri Sembilan men over the last century at least have expended much labour on women's (in many cases represented as the clan's) property. The infinitely more common appropriation of female labour by males in the majority of advanced and peripheral capitalist societies was not seen as problematic in anthropology until feminist interventions questioned the received analytic categories. Thus, to point to Rembau practices as needing explanation is in some ways to accept the androcentric view of female-centred practices as deviant. On the other hand, I also have evidence (Stivens, 1985a) more closely in accordance with modernist western feminist analyses of patriarchy, of some degree of social support for masculine irresponsibility, of a proportion of husbands who are alleged to be 'lazy' and exploitative, and to avoid maintenance payments and parental responsibilities. The marginality of the village economy has clearly emerged in the picture drawn here of a declining and backward economy, one that had, by the early 1980s, taken on the character of a highly peripheral 'retirement base' for many of its inhabitants. Rice production had collapsed completely, rubber was extremely marginal, and fruit was erratic. By the end of the 1980s, these trends

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had b e c o m e entrenched. This is not the place to extensively analyse the linkages between this noncapitalist enclave and the d o m i n a n t capitalist sector. In m y view, however, this sector has been increasingly reproduced by remittances, a l t h o u g h w o m e n ' s labour in the v i l l a g e - p r o v i d i n g child care, other services, and foodstuffs for absent k i n - i s also an important link between the sectors. (See Stivens, 1987, for further discussion o f the relationship between what I call the remittance family e c o n o m y and kin relations.) A n understanding o f w o m e n ' s place in the rice e c o n o m y is, I have argued, crucial to understanding w h y it finally collapsed, and to understanding the present precariousness o f the other village sectors. Increasing c o m m o d itisation o f female-dominated p r o d u c t i o n and village labour shortages have p r o d u c e d a crisis in agriculture for m y female informants. I have argued all t h r o u g h this article that w o m e n have been m o r e involved in c o m moditised p r o d u c t i o n t h a n local and scholarly discourse suggested. It is h a r d l y surprising that an ageing p o p u l a t i o n faced with the exodus o f y o u n g labour f r o m the villages should have increasingly a b a n d o n e d p r o d u c tion. For the large n u m b e r s o f female-headed households, the problems were acute. T h o s e with close kin working in the capitalist sector o n w h o m they could depend were better o f f t h a n those who for d e m o g r a p h i c reasons had no such support. In these circumstances, land holding has b e c o m e an insurance policy. W o m e n ' s apparently 'illogical' determination to hold on to their ancestral land is yet a n o t h e r instance o f their continuing social agency. Clearly, 'matrilineal' Negeri Sembilan as it has been constantly recreated over the last century represents a highly specific case, one that is likely to particularly challenge malestream models. But I hope that this discussion o f the difficulties in using such models to analyse Rembau rural social relations can begin to illustrate some o f the problems with the paradigms. ENDNOTES 1. The definition of 'peasant' has, of course, occupied a great deal of space. See discussion in Goodman and Redclift (1981). I favour Friedman's (1979) and Bernstein's (1979) definitions. 2. My original research in Negeri Sembilan, reported in my doctoral thesis Women, kinship and economy in Rembau, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia (London Univer-

sity) was carried out in three adjacent villages in Rembau district, Negeri Sembilan, from 1975 to 1976 funded by a studentship in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, from the then SSRC (UK). Further visits were made in 1982(the latter funded by the Hayter Fund), 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987-8 (the latter funded by the Australian Research Grant Scheme). The focus of the original research was on gender and transformation of the agrarian economy. (The results of this research have been reported in my various publications listed in the bibliography and in Matriliny and Modernity: Agrarian transformation in Rembau, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia [forthcoming]). Later research visits have centred more on macro-level change. The 1987-8 research involved an investigation of the formation of the Malay middle class, research being further developed with an Australian Research Council grant from 19901992. I should like to thank Joel Kahn for all his help during this research and also Lucy Healey, Goh Beng Lan, Hah Foong Lian, and Zainab Wahidin for much help and discussion about Malaysian social issues. 3. Peletz claims that few studies of the Malay peasantry apart from his own, mine, and Khadijah binte Haji Muhamed's (1978) have addressed the social processes of their study area diachronically, a claim not without some foundation (1988, p. 3). But he could have included Norhalim's (1976) study, which is explicitly historical, although it does not deal with feminist concerns. REFERENCES Ackermann, Susan. (1980). Cultural processes in Malay industrialisation: A case study of Malay factory workers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California. Afshar, Haleh (Ed.). (1985). Women, work and ideology in the third world. London: Tavistock. Afshar, Haleh, & Agarwal, Bina (Eds.). (1989). Women, poverty and ideology. London: Macmillan. Agarwal, Bina (Ed.). (1988). Structures of patriarchy: The state, the community and the household. London: Zed. Alavi, Hamza. (1982). State and class under peripheral capitalism. In Hamza Alavi & Teodor Shanin (Eds.), Introduction to the sociology o f developing societies

(pp. 289-207). London: Macmillan. Azizah Kassim. (1988). Women, land and gender relations in Negeri Sembilan: Some preliminary findings. Southeast Asian Studies, 26, 132-149. Bailey, Conner. (1983). The sociology of production in rural Malay society. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Michele, & Phillips, Anne. (1992). Destabilizing theory. London: Routledge. Beneria, Lourdes. (1981). Accumulation, reproduction, and women's role in economic development: Boserup revisited. Signs, Winter, 279-298. Benhabib, Seyla, & Cornell, Drucilla. (1987). Feminism as critique: Essays on the politics of gender in late capitalist societies. Cambridge: Polity.

Bernstein, Henry. (1979). African peasantries: A theoreticai framework. Journal of Peasant Studies, 10, 60-73. Boserup, Esther. (1970). Women's role in economic development. New York: St. Martin's Press.

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