Brief Communications: Food and Factions: The Local Politics of Selako Agricultural Development

Abstract

This paper is an examination of the interaction of Selako Dayak village factionalism with a government-sponsored agricultural development project.' It contains two prinicipal threads in that it is both a history of factionalism in one village, later two villages, and an effort to account for differential acceptance and success of the development project within the community. This study has significance both for government policymakers seeking to effect agricultural change through the use of cooperatives, and for social scientists striving for an improved understanding of the genesis and functions of factionalism in modernizing societies. The Selako Dayak are an ethnic group of approximately 10,000 persons who live in western Borneo along and on both sides of the international border between Indonesia and Malaysia. Many Selako are longhouse dwellers, but for at least the last century, and increasingly during the past two decades, some Selako families have resided in unattached single family houses or in small, twoand three-door longhouses. Villages comprise several widely scattered hamlets of longhouses and/or single houses and a few isolated houses. Villages usually include 20 to 60 or more families and have populations of from 100 to 400 persons (Schneider 1978). Like most of the other non-Muslim peoples of Borneo, Selako are cultivators of swidden fields of dry rice and other crops. Selako have also traditionally farmed lowland fields of swamp rice, and in recent years have irrigated rice with government assistance. Rice and its cultivation are principal concerns of the Selako, constituting a primary theme in Selako religion and intruding into and shaping some of the most important Selako social forms. Throughout the century-long history of the Selako Dayak village examined in this paper, political schisms have structured the social and economic life of the villagers even to the point of determining residential patterns and work groups. The fact of a binary structure of factionalism is no doubt due to ecological and psychological factors. However, the actual lines of division traditionally have been based partially on kinship, which among Selako is reckoned bilaterally, and partially on the leadership abilities of individuals. One prevalent cause of factionalism in small-scale societies is the introduction from the state level of programs which bring into play new sorts of political resources that existing groups cannot handle (Bailey 1970; Bond 1976; Vincent 1978). With modernization, ambilineal kin groups among the Selako appear to be waning in importance, but the leaders of the new political factions which are replacing them are individuals who have been leaders in the kin groups, and bilateral kin ties are still of great importance. Factions, unlike descent groups, are neither permanent nor enduring, but the literature suggests that the leadership and membership of successive factions remains tied to historically determined groups (Bailey 1970; Robinson 1975). The flexibility afforded by the structure of factions explains their formation in times of rapid social change. Nicholas writes that factions: