Communal land tenure in nineteenth century Java : the formation of western images of the eastern village community

This thesis is meant to be an anthropological discourse upon the discourse concerning the so-called communal land ownership (tenure is a better word) in nineteenth century Java. Though some of my remarks made in this thesis may be interpreted as if I am attempting to come up with the actual situation, as far as land tenure is concerned, in nineteenth century Java, that is not where the real purport of the present thesis lies. It would be presumptuous of me to attempt such a thing, which properly belongs to the realm of historians, and besides I do not think that there is enough data from the middle of the last century and earlier to make any conclusive statements about land tenure in Java, especially as to whether there was a change from an individual system of tenure to communal tenure as is often claimed. In fact, when I started to work on this thesis, it was my intention to either prove or disprove whether there was actually a shift from individual to communal land tenure in nineteenth century Java. If the present thesis still gives the impression of being a history thesis, rather than an anthropology thesis, it is only so in the sense of being a historical analysis of the European image of Java, as expressed in the literature about communal land tenure in Java, but not in the sense of being a historical work about Java