Reply to Geertz and van de Walle

Abstract

Famine control, better hygiene, and fewer wars, referred to by Clifford Geertz (1973) and Etienne van de Walle (1973) in their comments on my article "Demand for Labor and Population Growth in Colonial Java" (White, 1973), are undoubtedly conducive to population growth, but they seem inadequate as explanations of Java's population growth if the Javanese, like most other peoples of the world, have had always at their disposal various methods (both technical and social) of counteracting their influence. It therefore seemed important to ask why none of these alternatives were adopted and to examine the possibility that although population growth contributed to the impoverishment of successive generations of Javanese, the production of large numbers of children might have remained an economic imperative for successive generations of Javanese parents; for it is parents, after all, who make fertility decisions if any such decisions are made. In examining this possibility, I was criticized by Geertz for brushing aside the increasingly, complex interrelationships of the evolving, or stagnating, Javanese ecosystem in my blind and apparently unsuccessful search for the holy grail of Coontz' "demand for labor." Far from denying the importance of such interrelationships (and I apologize for major omissions in my attempt to summarize others' descriptions of them), I tried to follow the not uncommon ecological practice of examining the effects of the evolution of the total system on a single variable within that system, namely, the demand for children as potential laborers at the level of the family. I postulated that the removal of land, labor, or produce from the subsistence sector made it necessary for the Javanese to increase production on the remaining land despite the loss of adult labor; the response was the spread of irrigation (aided by the Dutch), the adoption of more labor-intensive methods, and the emergence of a high level of dry-season palawidja production. Both van