In this article I want to discuss a number of issues that have arisen out of my research into the structures of underdevelopment in Indonesia. First, some concepts that have been used in the analysis of Indonesian social structure will be examined. I shall show that these concepts, used in many cases as analytical tools are, in fact, aspects of peasant ideology. As such they should be objects of analysis rather than tools for analysis. The three concepts discussed in the first section of this paper are: the aliran, or vertical alliances described by Geertz and other members of the Modjokuto research team; ethnicity; and patron–clientage.

Everywhere a disparity can be observed between the socioeconomic composition of the electorate and the composition of the elected, representative body, which acts as a legislature for the society. Microcosm and macro- cosm are never identical; the legislature never mirrors the population at large. This is a universal generalization. It holds true for all representative systems at all times. It is furthermore true that the character of this disparity differs cross-nationally and over time: each legislature is unique in this sense.

The subject of this paper is the question of the stem family, in the sociological literature and in anthropological studies of Ireland. The notion of the stem family is said to derive from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frederic Le Play (1806–82). Le Play divided the history of the family into three stages. Ancient societies were supposedly characterized by what he called the ‘patriarchal’ family, in which all the sons were retained within the household, over which the oldest member of the family ruled and in which any number of generations resided. Most of the world's population were said however to have experienced their primary socialization in the ‘stem’ family. The stem family was a threegenerational structure which functioned to retain its original location (land and/or house) by means of dispersing most younger members, while preserving the main family stem by a principle of single inheritance. Parents married off and kept within the group only those children nominated as successors. Finally, there was the modern, ‘unstable’ family which formed upon marriage and dissolved upon the death of the parents.

Primitive societies and barbarous societies and the historical societies of Europe and the East exhibit almost every conceivable variety of institutions, but in all of them, regardless of the form of social structure, men are always in the ascendancy, and this is perhaps the more evident the higher the civilization … so far as I can see, it is a plain matter of fact that it is so. Feminists have indeed said that this is because women have always been denied the opportunity of taking the lead; but we would still have to ask how it is that they have allowed the opportunity to be denied them …

The Industrial Revolution transferred both food production and home based manufacture from the family to larger nonkinship corporations. But, contrary to what is said by historians of the family, industrialization has not brought about the demise of ‘home-based’ family labor. Probably the most often cited premise in the study of the Western family is that ‘A fundamental characteristic of the world we have lost was the scene of labour, which was universally supposed to be the home’ (Laslett 1971: 13). Those who study the transition of the family from a peasant type of production to wage-labor production unquestioningly accept this view of post-peasant family labor (for example, see Mendras 1970: 238).