Politics1, defined as a critical practice of world-making (Postero and Elinoff 2019), has a long history as an arena of anthropological inquiry and was the subject of a recent special issue of Anthropological Theory to which we contributed (Li 2019, Müller 2019). Political practice, as we understand it, occurs both in institutionalized forms (parties, unions, organizations) and in processes of everyday life. In this article, we used a common conceptual framework to explore how political practices in their mundane, broadly distributed forms do, or do not, evolve into strategies capable of challenging oppressive formations of power. We experiment with a form of ethnographic writing that foregrounds the actions and reflections of two interlocutors who are engaged in the practice of politics, and our own interactions with them. We argue that interlocutors such as these are a missing link in the anthropology of politics in two ways. First, anthropologists spend much of their time with people whose analysis informs and shapes our own; we quote them but we seldom introduce them in all their complexity or put their political practices center stage. Second, because an interest in politics tends to direct researchers towards movements and their leaders, it is easy to overlook politically engaged and critically reflexive individuals who are embedded in their communities.

Our two interlocutors, Don Juan in Nicaragua and Pak Abdul in Indonesia, have some of the characteristics Gramsci (1971) ascribed to “organic intellectuals” though we concur with Stuart Hall that to make more general use of Gramsci’s ideas “‘they have to be delicately dis-interred from their concrete and specific historical embeddedness and transplanted into new soil with considerable care and patience” (Hall 1986: 6–7). Gramsci writing in the context of Italy of the 1920s and 30s, maintained “that the peasantry does not elaborate its own ‘organic intellectuals’” (Gramsci 1971: 136). However, he also maintained that “non-intellectuals do not exist”. “Each man […] carries on some form of intellectual activity […] has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it.” The problem lies in the “critical elaboration of the intellectual activity” that exists in everyone.” (Gramsci 1971: 140-1) Writing almost one hundred years later, we engage with the critical elaborations of our interlocutors and consider them “organic intellectuals” in the sense that they contribute to a critical practice of world-making in which they attempt to engage others.

We both came to anthropology because of political commitments that could be summarized as a critical stance on the world as it is, and a desire to see it constructed otherwise. For Birgit Müller, this commitment was instilled growing up in Germany where high school teachers held up the memory of Auschwitz and made students read Adorno’s admonishment that it was their responsibility to make sure the past was not repeated (Adorno 1966). For Tania Murray Li it was triggered by exposure to conditions of extreme destitution in India where living conditions that to her were unthinkable - families living in drain pipes by the roadside - had somehow become normal. For both of us, horror stimulated empathy, a desire to understand how such horrors could happen, and a determination to effect change. Anthropology seemed to be a tool we could use for these purposes. It offered avenues for attempting to understand how the world came to be as it is, as well as insight into the multiple conditions of being and acting that are possible for humans, some of which might offer less oppressive alternatives. More specifically, it brought us into dialogue with people who reflect on formations of power and attempt to change things, often in small but still crucial ways. 

The two interlocutors we center are not leaders of movements; they are not heroic, nor have they been especially effective. Their stances are sometimes contradictory. They are not self-consciously attempting to theorize political action (Raza 2022). Nevertheless, we are drawn to them because we share their values - a subjective reaction and elective affinity that we acknowledge upfront. Awestruck by the ways they sustain a critical stance under duress, we want to understand their critiques of the world as they find it, to explore their ideas about what should be done to change it and attend to the steps they take to communicate these ideas and sometimes to act on them in concert with others, however ineffective their attempts may be. 

Critique is central to political practice, as we understand it. “Critique” means discovering in a formation of power its inherent possibility to be other than it is, opening a space to configure it differently. Critique is a capacity of all human beings. For us, critique becomes relevant when humans go beyond their strictly individual interests and actively engage with others in attempts to counter formations of power they find oppressive or unjust. These formations are not necessarily the formal structures of the state (its laws, voting systems, administrative arrangements). Rather, they are sedimented practices that our interlocutors encounter concretely, and in relation to which they develop their own critical analysis. Our two interlocutors, who hail from Nicaragua and Indonesia, identified continuities in unjust practices spanning different ruling regimes and we learned about their analysis contextually, through multiple conversations. Approaching political practice anthropologically leads us to ask three principal questions.

First, we ask: “what is the spark for political practice?” We characterize the starting point as Eigensinn: a stubborn, willful, impulse of someone set on their own course without paying heed to conventions or the opinion of others. It may not be formulated or subject to reflection: it is a gut feeling that something is not right or fair. Eigensinn is born out of experience, and structured by historical and social conditions. Drawing on Alf Lüdtke, Birgit Müller defines this Eigensinn as “giving your own meaning to things and acting according to the sense given” (Müller 2019, Lüdtke 1993). Everyone has this gut feeling but not necessarily the courage to take a stand and act on it. Eigensinn has no moral content. Lüdtke insists on the ambivalence of the term. It can become resistance but it can also be opportunistic when individuals move tactically to profit from structures of power (Lüdtke 1997:90; Lindenberger 2014). Eigensinn resonates with Gramsci’s conception of the spark for political action which begins in its “elementary and primitive phase”, as a “sense of distinction,” of “separation,” in an instinctive feeling of independence (Gramsci cited in Thomas, 2010: 378). For this spark to evolve into a critique of oppressive formations of power, the Eigensinn of an individual must be linked to empathy for others.

Second, we ask: “how is empathy felt and enacted?”  Empathy is both visceral (felt) and enacted, as someone turns towards the Other (human or non-human). For Adorno such turning means recovering “the live contact with the warmth of things” against excessive rationalization, oppression, and injustice (Adorno 1978: 43, Macdonald 2011: 671). Empathy may be enacted directly in care for soils and seeds or people, or in their defense. It is triggered by personal experiences or events but it is not self-conscious or necessarily articulated. Articulation comes later, with the sharing of critical insights.  

Third, we ask: under what conditions do individuals share critical insights with others and form social groups capable of identifying and challenging oppressive formations of power? We are especially interested in the emergence of collective responses that are, in de Certeau’s terms, strategic: they make connections between the concrete everyday, the structures of power that form it, and the kinds of action that might change it. Strategy, for de Certeau, differs from tactics which – like the infrapolitics studied by James Scott (1990) – may or may not reflect a critical sensibility but unfold within the confines of a formation of power that they do not, or perhaps cannot, explicitly identify or challenge. 2 Developing strategy requires the forging of spaces in which arguments and disagreements can be aired until a common action plan is identified.   For Gramsci, the key strategic space was the political party, its media and organizations, but we are interested in exploring the emergence of strategic spaces which may be informal or only lightly institutionalized.

The three questions we pose can be addressed in any research setting. We formulated these questions through a process of discussion as we reflected on our theoretical readings and our fieldwork, and the red threads we have each pursued through decades of research. We both tend to select topics and field sites that seem to us to have political relevance and urgency, and we pay attention to the political dimension in every topic we work on. Since the gut feeling that something is not quite right or fair is broadly distributed, the first question makes us alert to signs of Eigensinn in every encounter: “what is it that makes someone dig in stubbornly, in thought or deed, and take their own course?” The second question leads us towards particular people who may not have a formal role in a party or organization, but who are “spurred by empathy to turn towards others and take an interest in their plight”.  The third question leads us to examine “how these people develop a critical analysis of injustice and set out to change it, and how groups capable of strategy evolve”. 

Our encounters with the two interlocutors we describe in the pages to follow were highlights of our fieldwork, but they were complex for several reasons. First, as we noted earlier, subjective elements were necessarily in play. We were attracted to these interlocutors because their moral compass and political stance resonated with our own. Second, we did not agree with our interlocutors on all counts. We took their ideas seriously and tried not to judge them or instruct them on how to think or act differently. We took occasions when they surprised or disappointed us as opportunities to dig deeper to make sense of their reasoning, but withholding judgment was sometimes a challenge. Third, we did not have an agenda to advance, freeing us to listen to our interlocutors and learn about their insights, actions, and analysis of the formations of power they confronted. Yet there was a tension introduced by the fact that we took a distance as we conducted our own analysis, drawing on frames and scales that our interlocutors did not have available to them. We were not simply voice recorders. It was through conversation that we clarified ideas, and one of our goals in this paper is to recognize how much our analysis owes to these exchanges.  

The two men we describe, Don Juan in Nicaragua and Pak Abdul in Indonesia (pseudonyms) have in common a critique of unfairness and empathy for people who experience injustice. They live in rural communities and are engaged in farming. They are comfortably well off in village terms. At the time of our encounters, Pak Abdul held no formal leadership role, while Don Juan was an elected village leader and later became a member of the municipal council. No NGOs or political parties were active in Pak Abdul’s village and he pieced together his critical analysis from popular discourse, TV newscasts, and his own experience. His space for action was limited to the mosque committee, the local high school committee, and occasional public meetings convened by the village head. Don Juan was confronted with scores of development projects, evangelical missions, NGOs and the FAO which involved him in different ways in the position of broker. He sustained his critical stance through his exchange with fellow farmers engaged in a local environmental association, his engagement in Catholic base communities and attentive listening to radio broadcasts. 

These differences between the two men and their arena for action reflect the contrasting political histories of Nicaragua and Indonesia. Nicaragua experienced a civil war in the 1970s that ended with the overthrow of the dictator Somoza. Ten years of a socialist experiment in the 1980s involved wide ranging land redistribution and elements of a planned economy (Müller 2010). State support for a Green Revolution made cheap credit, fertilizer and pesticides widely available (Mechri Adler 2000). This period was also marked by the flowering of civil society in the form of women’s groups, trade unions, environmental organizations and social movements. From 1990 to 2007 various neo-liberal regimes held power, largely neglecting the interests of small farmers, opening a space for international NGOs and evangelical churches. Agro-ecological initiatives such as the de Campesino a Campesino network found followers, and the international peasant movement La Via Campesina issued its founding statement in Managua in 1992. In 2007 Daniel Ortega was re-elected, and his increasingly authoritarian government has restricted civil society organizations, media, opposition parties and universities, and in 2018 violently suppressed popular protest (Schmook, Radel, Carte 2022).

Indonesia’s current political regime descends rather directly from the New Order regime led by General Suharto that took power in 1965-66, after the violent suppression of the Communist Party. During the 1950s Indonesia’s Communist Party was the third largest in the world after the Soviet Union and China. It was electorally popular and unarmed. The communist-affiliated Peasant Front and the Plantation Workers Union had millions of members and made significant gains for workers and farmers (White, 2016). Their gains threatened military-crony-corporate interests and provoked a violent backlash. In 1965-66 the army and its allies ousted the populist president Sukarno and massacred an estimated half a million communists and union members. Intellectuals were jailed or silenced and from then on “an entire tradition of leftist thinking, writing, and political action” that had been formative of Indonesian culture and public debate since the 1920s was “decimated and rendered illegitimate” (Robinson, 2018: 301). Since 1966 there has been no labor movement, farmers’ organization or political party capable of checking the power of the military-crony-corporate regime. Villagers and workers have some legal rights but in practice it is very difficult for them to secure redress when politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies subject them to injury or neglect (Aspinall and van Klinken, 2011; Robison and Hadiz, 2004).

The different political contexts profoundly shaped the possibilities for action of our two interlocutors and shed light on opportunities and constraints that are sometimes occluded when we take the context for granted. Simply put, the wealth of institutional and discursive resources available to Don Juan throws the paucity of resources available to Pak Abdul into sharp relief. Yet Pak Abdul also became a critic, drawing on resources he found in his everyday world. In the pages to follow, we use our conceptual framework - Eigensinn, empathy, strategy - to examine what brought these two people to engage critically with formations of power and attempt to change them. We also reflect on our own positioning.

Don Juan

Birgit Müller met Don Juan at a gathering of subsistence farmers concerned with native seeds, where he stood out for his thoughtful comments. A few days later she climbed up to his farmyard on the steep fertile mountain slopes for the first of several visits during her long stay in 2009, when she also recorded two interviews. When she returned in 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2024 his place was always one of the first she went to, sometimes staying overnight when she got caught up in a rainstorm.

Don Juan’s father had moved in 1971 from Leon to Carazo and bought access to 50MZ of fertile volcanic ejido land. Formally owned by the municipality and rented out to farmers in long-term hereditary contracts, this land cost less than private land. Don Juan was a young man in the 1980s when the socialist Sandinista government conducted agrarian reform and experimented with a State controlled market until losing the elections in 1990. Paradoxically, the 1980s were also the period when small and medium sized farmers learned “to become entrepreneurs”. They had access to credit, and could purchase chemical fertilizer and pesticides. The Sandinista government, embroiled in the US-financed civil war, tolerated their sale of products in the grey zone of local markets outside the state distribution system. This allowed them to live quite comfortably (Zalkin 1986). 

Don Juan negotiated the credits for his father’s farm with the banks and thus developed a keen sense of how the change to market liberalism in the 1990s indebted and impoverished small farmers (Legovini 2003). When Don Juan’s father died, the land was divided among his three sons, each receiving 16 MZ. Contrary to his brother who embezzled funds as mayor of the municipality and grew vegetables drenched in chemicals for the market, Don Juan became a catholic lay priest inspired by grassroots ecclesiastical communities and head of the village council (Consejo comarcal). He listened avidly to the radio trying to make sense of what was going on in the world and could read and write.

Food sovereignty

Don Juan had Eigensinn. It was he who, for the one-and-only-time during Birgit’s fieldwork, brought up the concept of food sovereignty (Patel 2009, Trucchi 2007) in an informal discussion with his neighbor Ruben and an agronomist from an evangelical project promoting agro-ecology. He gave his own sense to food sovereignty, a concept he might have picked up on the radio, insisting that it required a change in farming practices. Farmers should give priority to subsistence, making sure that their families and the village remained as independent as possible from the market. His forefathers, the Indians, he argued not quite accurately, had not produced for the market. A subsistence farmer should not sell more than 25 percent of his production, should try to diversify, and should use as little chemicals as possible:

“I believe that there is still time, perhaps not for us but for future generations, to change our practices because sometimes we are ambitious and we say I can plant six hectares because we have chemicals. We have to be less greedy and ensure that family food is free of chemicals. Why? Because you cannot get enough from the merchants, today you buy ten liters of chemicals and tomorrow you get another twenty. It is as if the drinker thinks he is going to be done with the guaro (low quality rum) but in reality, he cannot quit. I think that we have to adopt a different practice.”

He concluded that chemical use created a dependency on purchased inputs that put the farmers into a spiral of ever-increasing debt. Sharing his insight with his neighbor Ruben they speculated about the class structure that was reinforced by this dependency on chemicals and identified four social and economic classes in Nicaragua: peasants, workers, merchant-entrepreneurs, and politicians. For Don Juan, entrepreneurs were from “a very high social stratum. Like gangsters they are just extracting.” He had a similar experience with bankers:

“Bankers are another stratum that has the capital that sucks up an interest at 50 percent. Just imagine, this year when I settled my debt to ACODEP for the 5000 (five thousand) córdobas that I had borrowed last year I had to pay almost 9000 (nine thousand) córdobas. [...] Almost 35 percent, almost forty percent! Thank God I am no longer in that spot! From now on we are going to look for programs where the interest is lower, less to the disadvantage of the poor.
Ruben
Now, who is going to end up with these forty percent?
Don Juan
Who will get it?
Ruben
It’s going to the owner of the bank.
Don Juan
What’s left for my family? …… bankruptcy!”

The two men agreed that classes of merchants and bankers were profiting from their heightened dependency on agrochemicals. As the population was increasing, the soil, more intensely cultivated, was getting “tired”. Don Juan was upset to see the treeless soil eroding. His empathy was tinted with pragmatism as an exhausted soil was incapable of producing unless it received a substantial dose of chemical fertilizer. He remarked that the temperature rise due to global climate change was accelerating where greedy landlords had cut the last remaining forest patches. Climate change began to affect the amount of time farmers would spend in the field. They were working shorter hours because of the heat, resorting to herbicides to make up for the lack of labor. From year to year the harvest became more uncertain:

“It (climate change) is a phenomenon that affects the labor process. Talking about the natural manifestations, it affects the yield because, let’s say, a hurricane destroys the harvest, a tornado causes you loss because it tears the leaves off the beans and corn. A loan at the bank and you lose the farm.”

Don Juan felt acutely the extreme precariousness of his existence, imperiled by economic structures of extraction and natural disasters. To put his analysis into practice, he attempted to preserve his own land by building stone retention walls to slow erosion on his steep volcanic plots; to secure food for his family he used his small irrigated plot exclusively to produce for subsistence. His wife, however, claimed a share of it for her small production of peppers that she sold on the market. 

Another danger he saw looming was the pending adhesion of Nicaragua to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Don Juan concluded that free trade was not for small farmers and when Birgit asked him, “What does this free trade agreement mean to you?” he answered:

“Let’s give an example: if in the market there is a segment that has products that come from diverse trading partners and there is another segment that has national products and if the free trade segment is cheaper, then people buy only there. If the national market is more expensive, then it does not sell. I believe that the treaty has not given very good results here in the region, it has not given excellent results I imagine because it only focuses on ‘blah, blah, blah....’ But yes, in other countries like Mexico, according to reports, Mexico is already regretting the free trade agreement. They are not competitive.”

Listening to the news on the radio he tried to make his own sense of what was reported, trying to distinguish idle “blah, blah, blah” from facts, looking beyond the borders of Nicaragua to the experiences of other Latin American countries and using his practical knowledge to understand complex connections. He had heard that big farmers in the US received subsidies for their production and that the free trade agreement had a quality clause for agricultural products traded. Realistically, he concluded, small Nicaraguan farmers would be unable to compete. On the other hand, he pointed out, simply relying on subsistence was not enough and the price fetched by the 25 percent of production he set aside to sell, determined whether he “would have to go to town in a ripped shirt and boots with holes in them, or decently dressed.”

Caring for Creole Seeds

Together with a few farmers Don Juan worked for twenty years with the local environmental association Tierra y Vida linked to the network of catholic grassroots ecclesiastical communities. He learned how to cultivate along the contours, using legumes to fix nitrogen and leaves from neem to produce natural pesticides. They discussed government programs like Libra por libra introduced in 2002 by the Ministry of Agriculture (Molina 2008) with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Libra por libra encouraged small farmers to exchange their native population varieties of beans and maize for chemical dependent higher yielding varieties or hybrids that could not be reseeded. When the farmers concluded that these chemical dependent seeds were endangering their food supply, Don Juan became actively involved in creating a seed network for “creole” varieties of beans and maize. The local group became a space for strategic action capable of challenging the status quo. Don Juan explained: 

“They (the technicians from the Ministry of Agriculture) would say to the villagers: ‘Give me 50 lbrs of the maize you are eating and we will give you 50lbrs to plant!’ What we were giving away was the native corn, and the seeds we were receiving were not going to multiply a hundred percent. So that’s when we got together. Some of us said, well, it would be better for us to secure the creole seed. It has been around since the Indians, since the ancestors more than five hundred years ago. It has been passed on through the hands of the peasant producers. So we saw the need to come and analyze. If we traded in our seeds, in ten-years-time, we would not have any creole seed left, and we would have to wait for the seed that comes from outside. [...] So among producers we met with Tierra y Vida and said why not create a network of producers?  And we began to defend the native seed, so that we could have it freely and be sure that whenever we wanted, we could take out our seed and sow it.”

The small group of farmers, not all of them able to read and write, who had known each other for a long time, was Don Juan’s group of reference; with them he could debate his thoughts and also make wide ranging plans for the future. Their local network for creole seeds stretched over two municipalities, and became connected to the national movement for Seeds of Identity (Semillas de Identidad) which organized regional and national seed fairs (Müller 2020). His farmer buddies did not always agree and sometimes got upset with one-another, but they had a common aspiration to manage their farms in tune with the environment.

Finding a common frame of reference was more difficult when he tried to convince his immediate neighbors to stop cutting down trees on the river benches which endangered the springs because dense root systems act as sponges to hold the precious water. Living on an extinct volcano with fertile and extremely fine soil, he was acutely aware of the dangers of an avalanche of mud forming when a hurricane drenched the bare soil. Although he was an elected leader he had a hard time convincing the villagers that “soil is more important than airplanes and machines.”

Autonomy from State and Market 

On many other issues however, Don Juan’s opinion counted in the village. In 2009 when a state program for growing black beans for barter with Venezuela in exchange for oil (Cusack 2019: 171) was promoted by the municipality, Don Juan was careful to weigh the pros and cons. Black beans were not habitually grown in the region, nor did they have a market in Nicaragua. They would occupy land that his neighbors with landholdings smaller than his own might need for subsistence. Although the price offered was better than the one fetched for red beans, he knew that prices fluctuate and contracting was risky. He was therefore relieved when the project did not come through.

Whenever a NGO or the municipality proposed to set up rotating funds to buy fertilizer or store grain, Don Juan supported it. At each harvest producers were selling at low prices because they had no silos to keep the crop in good quality. He saw these funds as part of a strategic space that protected small producers from the whims of the market.

In the past, mayors like his own brother had distributed cheap fertilizer to buy votes but when farmers had paid back and the mayor left office, the funds for fertilizer routinely disappeared. In 2009 when the new mayor proposed to set up a fertilizer fund which farmers could control themselves, Don Juan was thrilled. Drawing from his experience with market control during the Sandinista period of the 1980s, he concluded that setting up a harvest or fertilizer fund controlled by farmers needed good relationships with the authorities and should ideally go together with state price control and incentivization:

“It would be good if the government would say, we are going to stock up on beans at a better price than the market price. If there were a price of at least 800 córdobas per quintal I am sure that at least 80 percent of that input bill would be recovered and funds would be available for the 2010 production.”

His trust in state price control was surprising as in the 1980s, when the Sandinista government attempted to control prices, small producers of maize and beans were confronted with much lower state-controlled prices than those offered to rice producers operating on a large scale. From daily experiences and bits of news from the radio Don Juan had developed his own vision of the world and framed it with concepts like “autonomy” (autonomía) and “food sovereignty” (soberanía alimentaria). Birgit was impressed by the general optimism he showed in the midst of the 2009 world economic crisis and increasingly uncertain weather patterns.

Project Temptations

When she returned in 2011, she found Don Juan changed. He had become deeply involved with a development program, Food Facility, financed by the European Community and coordinated by the FAO (Müller 2013). The program advocated farming practices that were the exact opposite of those Don Juan had previously defended. Birgit recalled a conversation she had in 2009 with some FAO officials in Managua: they wanted to overcome “the outdated way of thinking widespread in Nicaragua”, encourage farmers to buy seeds every year and help them to “make business plans, so that they develop a more entrepreneurial vision of the activity as a whole.” By 2011 this program had reached Don Juan’s village. Down in the valley, the FAO had built a warehouse with a secure metal door and metal silos, which became in 2010 and 2011 (four growing cycles) the distribution point for hundreds of quintales of higher yielding, chemical dependent maize and bean seeds and fertilizer to the surrounding villages. FAO technicians told farmers to grow only one crop in the field at a time and to spray in-crop herbicides thus abandoning the labor intensive “three sister system” of seeding nitrogen fixing beans together with maize and pumpkins, that had sustained farmers in Central America for millennia (DeClerk 2013: 25). Don Juan had withdrawn from the work with Tierra y Vida and the creole seedbank.

Did he lose his capacity of independent thinking, or was his independent thinking evolving, shaped by the context he was living in, for reasons Birgit did not yet understand? By supporting the Food Facility project did Don Juan move from a strategic position to a tactical one?

Don Juan welcomed Birgit somewhat ceremoniously and thanked her for having brought the FAO project to the village. She felt uneasy. Mistakenly, she had become associated with power and money and was now in the midst of tensions. Some villagers were outraged because the project had bypassed the elected village council and instead a defunct cooperative was revived to administer it. Don Juan was one of ten members. Membership was biased as its secretary had registered his mother and absent wife and son to secure a larger share for himself. The hundreds of beneficiaries had to pay a small sum of 600 cordobas to the cooperative for the goods received, adding up to the substantial sum of 200 000 cordobas.

Don Juan told Birgit enthusiastically about his invitation to a regional FAO project meeting in Guatemala where he had exchanged ideas and experiences about how to build a harvest fund. The fund he envisaged would pay one share at harvest to cover production costs and a second share once the price had improved and the crop was sold. He was satisfied that villagers now had everything they needed to build this fund, which he saw as a step towards the autonomy he had been seeking for so long. Now they had a warehouse with a secure metal door, metal silos and the money needed to start buying from farmers. His vision was strategic: the harvest fund would protect villagers from market uncertainties. Fellow members of the cooperative were not opposed to his ideas but they had other plans: to buy cattle, to lend money to people who wanted to travel for migrant labor, to buy a pick-up truck for the harvest fund…

By 2014, the harvest fund had not been set up and money was evaporating. Don Juan’s attempts to persuade his fellow villagers to keep cereals from the first harvest cycle stored in the warehouse to secure subsistence and seeds for the second growing cycle, were unsuccessful. On his farm Don Juan had moved from a single herbicide 24D (Gramoxone) to experimenting with glyphosate and various in-crop herbicides brought by another, Canadian, project. Concerned about erosion he had gone back to seeding most of his hillside fields with espeque (a digging stick) and only used fire when he cut large regrowth of bushes and trees.

Conversations with Birgit about the long-term effects of glyphosate (Duke 2012, Müller 2021) brought back his dream of an organic farming system: the use of terciopelo, carnevalia and flor amarilla, fast growing legumes, as cover crops fixing nitrogen and suppressing weeds, the controlled integration of cattle in the rotation with maize and sorgo. He remarked self-critically that he had learned all these techniques but did not necessarily put them into practice because of the heavy additional workload they implied. Birgit realized that she had become part of the development game of judging and evaluating as she projected her preference for low-chemical farming techniques on Don Juan who was himself not free to practice the agriculture he wanted. Instead of holding Don Juan responsible for the tactics he adopted in relation to formations of power he could not control, she had to analyze the pressures and promises to which he was responding, the effects of FAO’s “will to improve,” and the new breed of extractive populism governing the country. He also had family constraints. Three of his sons still lived on the farm but two had their own projects beyond the farm. Labor was thus in short supply and it was a challenge to produce even for home consumption using minimal chemicals.

By 2017 Don Juan had entered into formal politics as an elected member of the municipal council. He was unhappy, however, about the decisions he now was a part of and about the lies and dirty tricks that were played on the council. “I am not a politician”, he said, “in politics you have to do good by doing bad.”  Again, in the run-up for the next elections, 1 million CS worth of fertilizer were distributed, to his dismay 500 000 CS of which were handed out without approval or control from the village councils. The advantage of being a counselor, however, was privileged access to health care, which proved important as he had serious health issues.

From Strategy to Tactics

While better-off than his neighbors, Don Juan felt responsible for them and compelled to move tactically when money, seeds and agrochemicals were being distributed by mayors and projects. Don Juan’s story mirrors how the fluctuations of state and international agricultural policy, market dependency and labor migration in Nicaragua’s recent history impact the conditions of possibility for agroecology and autonomy. In 2009 at the moment of the global economic crisis, a return to the countryside happened as young migrant laborers were laid off by the factories or returned from Costa Rica. Instead of chemicals bought with remittances, they brought their labor power. Don Juan owned sufficient land to make full-time farming an option at that moment, enough to provide food for his eight children and grandchildren. This was however not his long-term vision for the future, nor a prospect for his children. By 2017 most of his children had moved off the farm, married, received an education, helped only occasionally and bought herbicides instead. The farm remained however the main security net where daughters abandoned by their partners raised their children and sons turned to when in need. Like the smaller farmers in the neighborhood, Don Juan felt his family had to grab any opportunity (agarar algo) that presented itself when they risked being short of food or when creditors threatened to confiscate the farm. As a matter of fact, the entire grain production of the rural municipality was not enough to feed all its inhabitants in a less than average year, so food shortage always loomed.

But there was more. The increasing chemical dependency encouraged by the FAO and other projects pushed farmers to a switch point (Wood 2002; Li 2019) where their engagement with the market was no longer a matter of taking advantage of opportunities; rather, they were compelled by market discipline. Once Don Juan had entered the chemical treadmill encouraged by FAO’s Food Facility project, his preference for production techniques based on a long term, ecologically-sound calculus was set aside. The soils had suffered from chemical use under the strong tropical sun; to pay labor for weeding was far more expensive than applying herbicides. As family labor became scarce, Don Juan did not – indeed could not – afford to factor in soil depletion and intoxication when comparing the cost of labor with the cost of chemicals. Don Juan understood the farming practices that were needed to revive the soil but he also took into account contradictory expert advice. Concretely, once he had started to use the chemicals and taken on debt to buy them, the outstanding credit had a ratchet effect, tying him down. The pressure of loans urgently in need of payment intensified when the harvest failed, which happened more often as climate change made oscillations between severe drought and excessive rain – the El Niño effect – more pronounced and unpredictable.

When Don Juan shifted his engagement away from the group of farmers around Tierra y Vida who were stubbornly pursuing agroecological practices and saving their own creole seeds, he also lost the support of a strategic space of knowledge, planning and action outside the chemical-dependent farming system. All through the current period of political repression waged by the Ortega/Murillo government, farmers linked to Tierra y Vida have continued to build their network of seed savers. By 2022, a national network for defending “Seeds of Identity” in Nicaragua had consolidated. Under the seemingly apolitical label of agroecology the members continue to have a critical discourse about the world and attempt to change it with every creole grain they save and sow.

By entering the municipal council and promoting the harvest fund, Don Juan continued to try and sway the fortunes of his fellow villagers. However, moving tactically inside structures that were fundamentally corrupt or biased, his action was rather ineffective. Since 2014, municipal councils in Nicaragua have been brought increasingly under the control of the FSLN party structure and are no longer free to conduct their own municipal politics. By allowing a bogus cooperative to accumulate and administer the harvest fund and by sidelining the elected community council, the FAO had contributed to weakening democratic control over crucial economic resources. As Don Juan had a strong moral compass it seemed particularly difficult for him to deal with or even apprehend corruption. It was beyond his being in the world. The logical conclusion was thus withdrawal to the relatively safe moral ground of the Grassroots ecclesiastical communities where he could focus on spiritual connections and everyday solidarity towards his neighbors.

Pak Abdul

Tania Murray Li met Pak Abdul in 2010 and sometimes stayed at his house while conducting research on everyday life in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone (Li and Semedi 2021). In 2015 she had a long, recorded conversation with him during which she returned to various topics they had discussed over the years to explore them in more depth. The quoted material in the account below comes from that conversation.

Pak Abdul was born in 1954. He was one of 13 siblings in a family of modest rubber smallholders and started tapping rubber while attending primary school. In 1980, when a plantation corporation took over much of the village land to plant thousands of hectares of mono-cropped oil palm he applied for jobs there, first in construction and later as a full-time employee. He lived in company housing for a few years then moved back to his home village nearby. One task he had was running the company speed boats that transported children to school, picked up mail in the nearest town, and took plantation workers to market before roads were built. He also worked as a clerk in the transport office. He made good money with a sideline business buying refrigerators, furniture and clothing and reselling them to plantation workers on credit. By 2010 his main income came from 12 hectares of oil palms he planted on his own land and worked by hired labour. Villagers said that with 6 hectares of oil palm in production you could send a child to university: 2 hectares to feed the family, 2 hectares to feed the farm, and 2 hectares as an education and investment fund. With twice that amount Pak Abdul had been able to send three children to university and was saving for his fourth child so that she too would have an education fund when the time came.

Eigensinn is a concept Pak Abdul would readily recognize as he used equivalent terms to describe himself: he said he was outspoken, a “protest guy” (tukan protes) who was not afraid to challenge people in authority when something was not right. He often followed these observations with a reference to his limited education. In a profoundly hierarchical society like Indonesia, for a person with only primary education to give his own sense to the world and act on the sense given took courage and set him apart. Many villagers admired him but others treated him as a maverick because he made trouble and refused to go with the flow.

Pak Abdul was empathetic towards people less fortunate than himself, helping them when he could, and he judged right and wrong by a moral and religious compass. He believed God knew and would judge the evil in peoples’ hearts and actions. Searching for a keyword to characterize the formations of power that sparked Pak Abdul to take a stand, Tania came up with impunity: he characterized Indonesian society as a predatory arena in which the rich get richer and people in positions of power take what they want. He knew this arrangement was routine but he stubbornly insisted that it was profoundly unjust and must be challenged. He acted repeatedly to defend himself and others from injustice, usually alone, and he lamented the fact that it was so difficult to assemble others to act collectively to hold powerful people to account.

The forms of life that are possible in a plantation zone are severely limited: villagers cannot force plantation corporations out and the residual areas of land still in villagers’ hands are not sufficient for them to grow their own food. Their actions are thus tactical more than strategic: no one Tania encountered living in or around plantations had a vision of a radically different future free from plantation dominance. Nevertheless, Pak Abdul applied his analytical skills to make sense of the formations of power he confronted and tried to make changes.

Worker rights

Pak Abdul protested against plantation company hierarchy and poor treatment of workers, drawing on his sense of fairness.

“When I worked over there (at the plantation) I was the one who always protested. I was brave, even though I only went to primary school. In the transport office I was a clerk but I worked with no shirt on. Why no shirt? The top managers had air conditioning, so why did we workers, so many of us, not even have a fan? Or water to drink? I saw in the director’s office in Pontianak city they got free food. What is the difference? We have the same rights! The assistant managers aren’t even brave enough to complain. Managers who live here in the village get a subsidy for their electricity. It is not much but the point is we want the same treatment. If we let it pass it is as if we are just step-children (ie not full members of the family/corporation).”

Although he no longer worked for the plantation Pak Abdul made it his business to inform himself about company practices and he monitored the wages and conditions of workers, especially the most vulnerable. He noted that the company had casualized its workforce and the company housing blocks that were previously reserved for permanent workers had emptied out. New workers received at best two-year contracts with no family housing or benefits; landless women from his village were hired by the day to do hazardous work with chemicals, but received no health care or other benefits. His analysis referred to the national arena, which he also monitored closely, and he had a theory about how politicians made decisions that favoured their cronies: 

“Pak Abdul: yes, that [the shift to a casual workforce] is the fault of the 2003 Labour Law. I’m not an expert, just guessing, but that was the time when Yusuf Kalla was vice president and he is a businessman, right? There were others too. So they said to the parliament (DPR) ‘help us out, make this law’. That is how it could become like this.
Tania: it is so pro-business.
Pak Abdul: right, so our children and grandchildren have no hope of permanent jobs. After two years you are out. But for the children of bosses it is different.”

Pak Abdul was especially upset by the very low wages that the company was paying women casual workers. They received only Rp20,000 per day, much less than the legal minimum wage which was Rp60,000 at the time. Even then they were paid four months late.

“Tania: what can the women do about it? Could they go to the village head or the sub-district head for help?
Pak Abdul: well the village heads don’t care, and the women well …
Tania: so who could they run to?
Pak Abdul: report to the sub-district head? No way. The women don’t even have enough to eat with just Rp20,000. They can’t afford the fare to go to the office in town. So they just have to put up with it. How can they complain when just eating is hard enough?
Tania: so how can the company get away with paying such a low wage?
Pak Abdul: in the workers’ way of thinking it is better to work than not to work, not to eat, so that’s it. They complain but only in their hearts, they don’t have a way to make it go anywhere... Where can they complain? Really, oh, I worry about them, I feel sorry for them.”

Pak Abdul did not fault the women for their lack of collective action. They had his full sympathy but he had nothing concrete to propose to them. He saved his sharpest invective for foremen who he thought were an arrogant breed who used their petty powers to extort workers and lacked human feeling. Casual women workers depended on foremen to give them work; in return the foremen took a share of their wages, at least 10%. Foremen also cheated the company by declaring that the women had worked for 20 days when they had only worked for 10, then going to the women’s homes to take the unearned pay for themselves. Yet the idea of complaining to the labour bureau about extortion, coercion and wage theft never occurred to the women. Pak Abdul, who had studied the foremen’s tricks, recognized that their practices were systemic, entrenched, and protected by the normalization of impunity in the plantation zone. Many people, from company directors and politicians down to foremen in the fields were stealing both from the company and from people less powerful than themselves, and no one was holding them to account.

Hierarchy and impunity

Pak Abdul was appalled that the plantation company occupying most of the village land was not willing to help pay for important infrastructure. He waged a long, solitary campaign to try to get the company to contribute funds to rebuild the near-derelict village mosque, without success. He became a member of the mosque committee to bolster the legitimacy of his demand and in this role (at his own expense) he went several times to the District head’s office and the Department of Religious affairs in town to obtain official letters of support, but the company still did not respond. This experience confirmed Pak Abdul’s analysis that the company was immune: neither villagers nor bureaucrats were capable of holding it to account for the injuries it caused and it took no responsibility at all for meeting villagers’ needs.

“Pak Abdul: it is different for high ranking people. In the plantation, when the director shows up they put flags everywhere. They are busy all week cleaning up. But if we go there – well it seems to be like that all-over Indonesia.”

The link between hierarchy and impunity was not only a feature of plantation life. In Pak Abdul’s view it was entrenched in the Indonesian social order at every level. Although it was thoroughly familiar to him, he still viewed it critically:

“It is our tradition here, we help the big guys and despise the small people. That’s how it is. We can see it on TV – rich people get away with everything. Also with the company it is like that… When we have a small child, if it still wants to be carried we carry it around all day but if it doesn’t need to be carried any more, it ignores us, right? The company is like that, that is its character. If it wants to eat something we provide it but if it doesn’t need anything from us it ignores us.”

Pak Abdul was embarrassed by the level of corruption in Indonesia and in the plantation company which he saw as a barrier to progress.

“So how come the price of palm oil is so high now, but the company here is in collapse? Whatever we say they won’t hear it. Other places develop but here in Indonesia we are stuck with so much corruption. I saw on the TV, one District head was found embezzling Rp200 billion. That was just one person, not yet all the rest of it. No wonder public coffers are empty. I’m not an expert as I told you, I only went to primary school, but even I can see this, so people with education must be able to judge. Look at this company. It didn’t even pay for this land – it just had to plant palms and make a profit. Yet it makes only losses.”

Watching the TV with Tania one night when the news carried daily reports about high level corruption in Jakarta, Pak Abdul commented: “if our leaders behave like that you can’t expect too much from ordinary people; it makes us ashamed to be Indonesian”. Nevertheless, he did expect more and tried to hold himself and people around him to a higher standard.  When he worked at the plantation he rejected invitations to join collusive schemes such as stealing diesel fuel: “Come on Dul, it’s just us, only for our 4 eyes”. He was uncomfortable with the routine practice in which company managers took a 7% commission from contractors and distributed some of the money to staff. “Here Dul take it, it is your share”. Pak Abdul advised his son, a junior manager for a transnational plantation corporation, to retain his moral standards: “They asked him to sign blank receipts and I said don’t do it, just work and when you have saved some money, start your own business”.

Pak Abdul’s most significant, multi-year campaign was an attempt to remove the head of his home village. The man had been found guilty of fraud (selling land that did not belong to him) but had managed to buy his way out of a jail term and was still in office. Pak Abdul said the headman was also interfering in the work of the high school committee, of which he was a member. The committee was trying to get a toilet built for the school to save students the embarrassment of having to defecate in the river. At a village meeting Pak Abdul once grabbed the microphone to criticize the village head in public, calling him a tyrant. This breach of hierarchy and etiquette made the village head accuse him of being a terrorist and report him to the police. Pak Abdul said no witnesses came forward to testify against him, yet when he reported the headman’s misdeeds to the sub-district head there was no response. To advance the campaign he assembled 12 co-villagers who agreed to go with him to the District Head’s office to petition to get the headman removed, but officials sent the group away saying their report was incomplete.

“It is hard to get justice here”, Pak Abdul lamented. In Indonesia, the position of village head has been subject to election since the reforms of 2001 yet Pak Abdul and his village allies were not able to mobilize enough public support, judicial support, or support from leaders higher up the chain of command to get the head removed. Frustrated by the impasse, in 2015 Pak Abdul decided to abandon his home village and move closer to his children in the city. He said he wanted to lead a more peaceful life; it was exhausting to be in conflict with people all the time. His acts of individual refusal and his eventual departure protected his sense of himself as an upright man. He regretted that he had not been able to hold the village head or delinquent corporation accountable for their misdeeds but he said it was hopeless and he was tired of the fight.

No strategic space, no strategy

Pak Abdul had prospered since the plantation arrived in his hamlet as he found ways to take advantage of the opportunities it presented (for paid work, for his credit sales business, for the development of his lucrative oil palm smallholdings). Yet he was not satisfied with advancing the class status of himself and his family. He consistently adopted a critical stance motivated by empathy for the poor: “I feel sorry for them, for people who need protection, need many things”. He responded to their need in an Islamic spirit of charity: a widow mentioned that Pak Abdul periodically sent her a sack of rice and some money as he knew she was struggling to feed her children. But beyond charity, their plight sparked in him a stubborn refusal: he was convinced that corruption, predation and impunity were terrible ways to organize corporate and public life. He observed the impunity enjoyed by people in power with disgust but struggled to find ways to act on it. He lacked access to a political vocabulary and strategic space to translate his fury into effective collective action.

Pak Abdul had many visitors to his home, some of whom were present during his conversations with Tania and well aware of Pak Abdul’s critical analysis. Yet there were no village-level institutions that could help him develop his critique and devise collective strategies to transform the situation. Nor did he have access to a diversity of media (radio, magazines) offering fresh points of view: his only source beyond the village was the nightly TV news which he watched attentively. He made use of two modest institutional spaces available to him to try to hold people in power accountable for their neglect: the mosque committee and the school committee. He also tried to use the public forum of a village meeting to force the headman to resign. None of these spaces permitted the development of a sustained, collective strategy. Most of his campaigns were individual or involved a small group of his friends and they were ineffective: he did not succeed in getting the mosque built, or the village head removed, and he made no dent on the unfair treatment of plantation workers.

So why was it so hard for Pak Abdul to identify or forge autonomous spaces from which strategic action could emerge? One part of the answer lies in the intense presence of the corporations: every aspect of daily life in the plantation zone is shaped by corporate dominance. Not only do plantation corporations take up almost all the space, they turn many villagers into collaborators who betray neighbors and kin as they seek ways to protect their families and secure their own advance. The result is an atmosphere of distrust in which solidarity is hard to sustain. More broadly, it is the absence of organized counterforces – unions, parties, village co-ops, activist NGOs, religious organizations, or groups of villagers who have organized themselves to act collectively – that enables abuse of workers, predatory extraction and corruption to continue unchallenged.

Pak Abdul’s village has both Muslim and Christian residents, but faith-based organizations in Indonesia do not usually take an activist stance vis a vis injustice – nothing equivalent to the catholic base communities that are active in Nicaragua and elsewhere. NGOs promoting alternative agriculture and respect for the natural environment are active in Indonesia, but they have little interest in plantation zones where the forest has gone and villagers are virtually landless. These are ruined places where too much damage has already been done, hence NGOs deploy their scarce resources where there is still some hope of changing the situation. NGOs promoting human rights or offering legal aid are active at sites of egregious violence but they too are stretched thin; they have no presence or outreach in the thousands of villages where the slow violence of neglect and abuse are entrenched. There is still no replacement for the unions, mass organizations and parties that flourished in the 1950s and offered spaces in which millions of people in villages and towns across the nation were involved in political reflection and strategy-building.

Tensions in the encounter

The paucity of institutional resources that could stimulate and respond to the critical analysis of villagers like Pak Abdul is no accident. As Pak Abdul accurately observed, one reason “small people” have nowhere to turn is that the officials and politicians who are supposed to protect them are busy helping “big people’’ not the poor. This problem is especially acute in plantation zones where bureaucrats, politicians and village headmen are officially tasked with facilitating the activities of plantation corporations. Indeed, corporations and cronies have been closely allied since the massacres of 1965-66 which eliminated the counterforces capable of holding people in positions of power to account. Yet Pak Abdul knew little or nothing about this history. He was twelve years old when the New Order came to power and had lived his entire adult life under this regime and its successors. There were no massacres in his vicinity so the death and repression that ushered in the New Order did not leave an impression on him.  In high school, Indonesian students are taught the government version of these events in which it was the communists (not the army) who caused death and destruction, but Pak Abdul had not attended high school so he had not been subjected to this propaganda. Tania surmised that he probably knew little or nothing about what had taken place. He had also spent his entire adult life in a plantation zone where collaboration between corporations and government officials is routine.

Missing any knowledge of a crucial period in Indonesia’s national history, the only way Pak Abdul could make sense of the impunity and disregard he witnessed was with reference to Indonesian culture: “it is our tradition here”, as he put it, to let big guys kick small people around, an observation he found deeply embarrassing. He might have broadened his view of “Indonesian culture” and found a glimmer of hope if he had known that for half a century before 1965 Indonesians from all ethnic groups, classes, and religious persuasions were actively engaged in critical analysis of the form that Indonesian society had taken under colonial rule, and debated how to constitute it differently (Bourchier, 2015). He had a sense that citizenship should mean something - rights, recourse, recognition of peoples’ needs and aspirations - but he had no way to move from his sense that something was quite wrong with the world as he found it towards a more developed critique.

Yet Tania hesitated to insert lessons she had learned from reading Indonesian history into their conversations, as she recognized the profound insights Pak Abdul had come to on his own. Pak Abdul did not question the presence of the oil palm plantation that occupied most of the village land. He focused, rather, on the poor conduct of plantation managers and village leaders.  His horizon was shaped by the fact that the plantation was firmly installed and well supported by bureaucrats and politicians at every level from the village to the national capital. The set of powers he confronted – the physical presence of the plantation, its networks of support – were so solid that the alternative world he imagined was not one devoid of elites or plantations. It was, rather, a world in which powerful people obeyed the law and treated ordinary people with compassion, and ordinary people stood up for themselves and for others, refusing to be cheated, robbed or kicked around. From the perspective of Indonesia in the 1950s – the temporal horizon Tania was tempted to insert – this was a rather limited goal but in the context of Indonesia circa 2015, it was monumental: ending the regime of impunity would dramatically change the lives of Indonesians who are damaged by the fact that powerful people are not held to account for breaking laws or causing harm.

Pak Abdul had an analysis of class, which he framed in the terms that are common in Indonesia (big people versus small people). Despite his relative wealth he identified with the poor. In an acutely hierarchical society, his limited education and previous experience as a plantation worker positioned him at the low end; and his empathy made him quite unlike “big people” whose primary trait – from his observation – is their selfish disregard. He repeatedly drew attention to his limited education both out of modesty and to emphasize that he was making his own sense of the world because his betters – people with more education – could not be trusted. His critique was especially courageous in a context where villagers are expected to be silent and passive, an embodied stance that was forcibly imposed at the beginning of the New Order and became normalized. To Pak Abdul passivity was not normal at all; yet to the officials he challenged and to some of his neighbors he was simply a troublemaker who deserved to be silenced or ignored.

Conclusion

The question of where to find the spark for political practice and how to craft spaces for strategic action presented itself sharply in our account because we chose to examine ordinary places – a Nicaraguan village, an Indonesian plantation zone – that are not often examined from the perspective of political action. We did not study social or political movements, which are strategic spaces by definition. We sought to understand the political charge of mundane practices (like planting seeds) and the political analysis of critical interlocutors, people who did not hold outstanding leadership positions but nevertheless took a stand against formations of power they identified as oppressive and unjust. Don Juan struggled against debt and dependency and for autonomy (autonomía) so that he and his neighbors could sustain themselves on their own terms. For Pak Abdul, living in a plantation zone, autonomy in Don Juan’s sense was not even thinkable: he and his neighbors had no capacity to sustain themselves from their own food production, nor could they count on solidarity among neighbors and kin. The formation of power that he opposed was the impunity enjoyed by people in positions of power who were indifferent to the suffering they caused and broke laws for their own enrichment.

As a framework to guide the anthropological study of political practice in unexceptional times and places, we proposed three key questions. First, we asked: “what is the spark for political practice?” We identified the starting point in Eigensinn, a concept Birgit developed to mean giving one’s own meaning to things and acting according to the sense given. For this spark to evolve into a critique of oppressive formations of power, the Eigensinn of an individual must be linked to empathy for others. Second, we asked: “how is empathy felt and enacted?” Empathy is both visceral (felt) and enacted, as someone turns towards the Other (human or non-human) to offer care. Third, we asked: “under what conditions do individuals share critical insights with others and form social groups capable of identifying oppressive formations of power and devising strategies to challenge them?”

Using this conceptual frame, we centered our analysis on two interlocutors who are deeply embedded in the communities where they live, and spurred by Eigensinn and empathy to develop a critical analysis of injustice and attempt to change it. For Don Juan in Nicaragua, Eigensinn was triggered by the eroding soil of his fields, the high price of chemicals, and the treadmill of debt. His empathy was with the soil, which was treeless and exhausted and with his neighbors who were struggling with unmanageable debt. The sense he gave to his observations was that agricultural practices needed to change, an understanding he developed through his own interpretation of food sovereignty, a term he might have picked up on the radio. He worked with others to develop a space of strategic action in an organization dedicated to saving native seeds. For Pak Abdul, Eigensinn was triggered by the unjust treatment of his village neighbors who seemed unable to defend themselves against the plantation corporation that had occupied village land, their bosses in the workplace, or corrupt village leaders who stole with impunity. His empathy led him to analyze the sources of this injustice and take a stand against them, but he lacked access to a strategic space in which to further develop his critical ideas or devise collective strategies.

Our encounters with Don Juan and Pak Abdul were challenging in different ways. For Tania, the challenge was to keep a focus on Pak Abdul’s remarkable capacities for analysis and not rush to correct him by introducing her own frameworks, or be disappointed with the limitations of his thinking and action that derive from Indonesia’s political history and the plantation milieu. For Birgit the challenge was more complex as Don Juan took a path she found surprising and disturbing, notably his enthusiastic embrace of an FAO project bringing chemical dependent seeds and agrochemicals to his village, precisely the path he had so emphatically rejected. It took a great deal of reflection on her part, a deep dive into her fieldnotes, more contextualization in the national arena, and ongoing dialog with Don Juan to make sense of his choices: why he moved towards and then away from agroecology; why he dedicated himself to building a strategic space then abandoned it for tactical reasons.

What attracted us to Don Juan and Pak Abdul was their courage in making use of their powers of reason to conduct an analysis that exposed the causes of injustice, and their efforts to bring about change. Taking a critical stance on formations of power is especially courageous in a context like Indonesia where critics are often isolated, and strategic spaces to develop critical analysis through discussion with others (e.g. unions, party organizations) have been absent for many decades. In Nicaragua under the current government such spaces are also being closed down and critics of all kinds are severely repressed. Don Juan had some rich resources to draw on for his critical reflections because he had experienced the promises of the Sandinista revolution of 1979 in his youth, and inherited the thriving civil society that emerged at that time and is menaced today. Pak Abdul was raised under the New Order and lived his entire adult life under the domination of plantation corporations. No political party or organization had ever presented him with a vision of what society could become if fundamentally transformed. Both Pak Abdul and Don Juan, at different moments, were involved in collective actions but these actions were not sustained. Don Juan was caught between the utopian project of local food sovereignty, the actuality of fluctuating prices, labor shortage and FAO’s hegemonic project that promised the benefits of modernity and a free market. Pak Abdul attempted to challenge impunity in his village and on the plantation while building a prosperous future for his children. Their paths into and away from political practice were not heroic, nor were they straight.

Corruption in local affairs was a mundane but pervasive problem that disoriented Don Juan and Pak Abdul and threw them into profound doubt: if anyone could be diverted from good intentions to private appropriation, then a sense of political direction – a strategy, a common project – is constantly undermined. Don Juan struggled with the problem of corruption in his municipality and in the cooperative of which he was a core member. For Pak Abdul, a recognition that corruption was pervasive in Indonesian society left him in despair. He once observed that he could easily have become village head as people trusted him, but neither he nor any other competent and honest people wanted to take on this role. Even if they kept to a straight path, despite temptations for self-enrichment, they would be suspected of corruption; and they would be at odds with neighbors and kin who expected a village leader to offer favors. If it is the nature of politics that you can do good only by doing bad, as Don Juan noted, then what? For both men, corruption offended their moral sense and ran counter to the sense of empathy and collective responsibility that oriented their critiques and brought them to action.

Strategic action requires carving out an autonomous space in which to reflect and plan in concert with others but our research in ordinary villages shows how exceptional or ephemeral such spaces can be. Don Juan did have access to such a space in the seed savers network. Yet recognizing how much harder it had become for himself and his neighbors to make a living from farming, he was drawn into the FAO project which arrived bearing unimaginable resources he felt he could not responsibly refuse. As a result, he drew away from agroecology and the strategic space he had helped to craft, and could at most respond tactically to ecological and market pressures. Pak Abdul lacked an institutionalized space for strategic action beyond his living room, although for a brief period some co-villagers joined him in an ad hoc attempt to remove a corrupt village head. He engaged in farming and other small business ventures to create a livelihood independent of the plantation but he did not promote collective action along these lines. Both men acted tactically, responding to formations of power they were able to identify but not able to change: a rigged market, a state in which impunity has become normal. As the limits of tactical action became crushingly apparent to them, both men turned away from political action to find some personal peace.

In a historical period when movements and parties that we might want to support lack traction or are losing their way, we continue to be inspired and encouraged by our encounters with critical interlocutors who have an acute capacity for political analysis, a curiosity about the world, empathy for others, and a commitment to change. Without people like this, there would be no prospect for social or ecological transformation. Yet our search for politics in unlikely places has thrown the challenge of identifying and expanding spaces for strategic action into sharp relief. The three parts of the analytical framework we have presented – Eigensinn, empathy, strategy – offer a way for anthropologists to apprehend politics wherever people engage critically with oppressive formations of power.