Does the post-colonial plantation enable the community to deal with its underpinning power, namely world capitalism? This is one of several questions that will be discussed in Wednesday Forum this week, with a topic “Drinking with the Devil: Plantation Community and World Capitalism in Java, 1870s-2000s”. The speaker of this forum is Dr. Pujo Semedi Hargo Yuwono. We invite you to join this forum. Brief information about this forum can be read as follows.
Date: Wednesday,25 February 2009
Time: 12.30 pm ? 2.30 pm (free lunch)
Venue: Room 306, UGM Graduate School Jln. Teknika Utara Pogung YKT
Speaker: Dr. Pujo Semedi Hargo Yuwono
Abstract:
This historical ethnographic research focuses on Indonesian plantations in the post-colonial era. The plantations were established in the colonial time for the benefit of European owners. Apparently the emergence of the post-colonial state should not be interpreted as signalling the demise of colonial’s mode of production. Both the post-colonial regime and its colonial predecessor were confronted with similar burdens: securing income for the state budget and providing jobs for its citizens. Plantations possessed a great potential to serve these functions. Yet, the extent to which these functions are still met in post-colonial Indonesia remains unclear. Can companies that flourished under direct and indirect protection of the colonial state, survive in the post-colonial era simply by-as Alec Gordon said-reducing themselves into “ordinary capitalist estates”? If this was the case, is this post-colonial “ordinary capitalist estate” capable in bringing the plantation and its community into a better position? Does the post-colonial plantation enable the community to deal with its underpinning power, namely world capitalism (source:http://www.iias. nl/index. php?q=node/ 260)
About the speaker:
Mr. Pujo Semedi Yuwono Hargo graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1991 with an MA in Anthropology. He was part of the Program?s Batch 4 and was one of the more active participants of the 1998 DSA-IPC seminar-workshop dubbed as Participatory Development in Southeast Asia, Selected Experiences. Pujo completed his bachelor?s degree in Cultural Anthropology at the Gadjah Mada University. After his masteral studies in the Philippines, he returned to his Alma Mater where he has filled in the following positions in the last decade: Vice Chairman of the Graduate Program of Anthropology, Assistant of Vice Dean for Student Affairs in the Faculty of Humanities, and Chairman of Graduate Program. In June to August 2003, he became a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Sciences Research. A year later, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Culture in Tokyo University. He later went on to earn his doctoral degree from the Department of Anthropology of Radbound University and IIAS in the Netherlands in 2005. The year after his postdoctoral studies, he was a researcher of the Bintuni Bay Project of the Cenderawasih University and then a research fellow of KITLV in the Netherlands(source: http://dsa-ipc. net/index. php?option= com_content& task=view& id=)
Registration:
The forum is free of charge and on a first-come-first basis. If you want to be speaker in Wednesday Forum, please contact us.
Contact person:
Maufur ipung (ICRS): maufur_nd@yahoo.com; Mustaghfiroh Rahayu (CRCS): mth.rahayu@gmail.com
