A Close Examination on Involution’s Origin, Structure, and Impact Público
Zhou, Yujie (Spring 2022)
Abstract
Although involution was a newly reformed word, it has shifted its meaning from originally describing the stagnant ecological progress in Indonesia's rice cultivation to defining today's common social phenomenon that most people are practicing. While Clifford Geertz and Philip C Huang discussed involution in an agricultural view, I believe that such a phenomenon was generated as a value system born from the capitalist system and ourselves. This thesis examines the recent case of involution and argues from a perspective of seeing it as a value system. First, I focused on how scholars from different fields evaluate involution, trace the origin, and weigh its structure based on various scholarly evidence. Then, I propose a combining concept that involution is an exception in human history as the core principle weight on the essence of a sort of internal consumption waste as it repeats without innovation. Later, I concluded that involution was catalyzed by a unique interpretation or shift of capitalism through our inner self due to the value system created through changes in time. Finally, I propose several possible solutions for people to jump out of involution and construct such solutions based on internal and external approaches.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Origin of Involution 3
Geertz's Agricultural Involution 3
Involution as A Self-Conquering Process 7
Combining the two: My Thoughts 10
External Structure of Involution 14
Marx's means of production and capitalist competition 14
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser 17
Internal Structure of Involution 23
Hegel Master and Slaves 23
Mark Elvin's High-level Equilibrium Trap; A trap in the current Status Quo 25
My interpretation of Involution 28
Involution as an exception in Human History 28
Lacking reverence to life/job 30
Unification Vs. Diversification 31
Capitalism might not be the only faulty party 34
Resolve Involution 35
Possibly Systemic Change 35
Possible Self Change 40
Boggs' Dialectical thinking of flowing within the change 40
Brown's self-change based on ten emergent strategies 44
Bibliography 47
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