Peasant.blog

This video of agricultural workers somewhere on Java engaging in a pre harvest ritual prayer led by Google’s Siri went viral a couple of years ago on social media with tens of thousands of likes and many comments.

Comments often ranged from amusement to condescension about the apparent low level of Islamic knowledge held by laborers participating. For the latter, that Siri was leading the prayer suggested participants had a superficial understanding.

But as this recent fascinating paper by Aarti Sethi in American Ethnologist about cotton production, gender, and harvest rituals in Vidarbha, Central India suggests (among many other insights), harvest rituals are not necessarily linked to religious identity but are instead connected to labour relations. Where I did fieldwork in rural Indonesia that was certainly the case: people could internalize religious ideals that rejected such rituals but nevertheless participate in them.

Rather than reflect a lack of religious knowledge, nominating Siri to lead the prayer may more reflect the participants in that video, mostly middle aged, did not feel they were in a better position to do so. For instance, ritual prayer propitiations pre or post harvest are often undertaken by elderly men who have ceased to have desires that could undermine their integrity when making requests to the rice goddess Dewi Sri for success on behalf of the family or community. Already elderly, they have experienced life’s trials and tribulations and are meant to no longer have wants that could supersede a desire for the family’s wellbeing. Or in other words, desires that Dewi Sri could address at the expense of ensuring a good harvest for all. Siri, without any conceivable desires as the voice of a machine, could thus be the voice most suited to effectively negotiate on behalf of those present for a good result. Alternatively, a much simpler explanation could be that nominating Siri to lead the prayer was just a novelty for a spectacle.

Whatever the actual case may be, such changing dynamics of technology, spirituality, and generation in longstanding ritual practices are where new forms of agrarian differentiation can be seen. Such new forms of differentiation appear to be lost on those expressing condescension about a supposedly homogenous peasantry’s backwardness — itself a practice of long-term continuity.