Framework

Pravda (Правда) is Russian for “truth.” It is also a newspaper, one of the most circulated and read media in Russia since its origin before the Bolshevik revolution. Back in the Soviet days, the joke was “Правде » нет извёстий” — Pravdy– net izvyëstij; there is no news in the truth (Известия/ Izvyestiya, lit. news, is the name of a Russian national newspaper; est. in 1917, still operating). There is no news worthy enough in plantations to self-destroy. They remain in spite of the truth(s).

But also: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Of course, it can be more difficult and less sober than that. But that dictum accounts for changes without dogmatism. The truth(s) cannot stop itself from showing up. And rural change, or agrarian studies in Indonesia specifically, is a sobering reality, is as truthful as it is.

This is my ethnographic blog. A materialist love for the method that rarely accounts for the connection between the ethnographer’s body and field notes, especially if the body is disabled and queer. Ethnography has been my vehicle to understand environmental justice, socioecological remedy, postcolonialism and third-worldism better, all embodied in palm oil plantations. Most of my plantation thoughts stem from Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Edgar Thompson, Clyde Woods, and Sidney Mintz; and my agrarian studies from Pudjiwati Sajogyo and now-annihilated-and-banned Indonesian Peasants’ Front & Plantation Workers’ Union. I am a sucker for geographers and historians.

We don’t have to talk about agrarian studies only here. We can talk about drag (the gay one, not the car race). And we can, absolutely without a doubt, talk about our favorite scenes in Bulgakov’s Мастер и Маргарита/Master and Margarita.