Generations of Change’ discusses everyday life in Rikmokèri, a Javanese village. The main question is how the villagers, in all their heterogeneity as expressed in their socio-economic, gender, and generational backgrounds, make sense of the rapidly changing world they live in and are part of. This rapidly changing world is characterized by the development ‘philosophy’ of the former New Order and by the growing rural-urban migration of particularly the younger generations. Covering the time-span of the 1940s till the late 1990s this book examines livelihood (including migration) practices, and family and personal life of villagers from different generations and explicitly zooms in on their perceptions and aspirations. To arrive at a better understanding of these perceptions and aspirations and their practice, the generational-cum-ethnographic approach is used as the focal method in the research and in the analysis.

With the position of certain groups of villagers, i.e. those involved in rural-urban migration, in new and other spaces the diverging ideals of the generations have become more pressing and more pronounced and they have become crucial to the question of identity formation. The book points out that it is precisely the differences in perceptions and aspirations and, more importantly, the realization of such aspirations and the application of such perceptions, which make a difference. For the realms analysed here, livelihood, and village, family, and personal life, the conclusion has to be that the generations diverge and have managed differently. The key to this conclusion lies very much in the younger generation. By including their voice, a voice hardly heard in village studies, this book adds a new dimension to the field of Java studies.

Juliette Koning is a social anthropologist and obtained her Ph.D. (1997) at the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her thesis discusses changing village, family and personal life in a Javanese village under the influence of out-migration and rural transformation. Since 1997 her research interests concern the Indonesian economic and political crisis in relation with questions of land, labour and social security. She currently works as assistant professor at the department of Culture, Organization and Management at the Vriie University Amsterdam with a special interest in Asian business networks, religion and (ethnic)entrepreneurship. She co-edited Women and Households in lndonesia; Cultural Notions and Social Practices (2000); Sumber Daya Alam dan Jaminan Sosial di Indonesia [Natural Resources and Social Security in Indonesia] (2001); and is editor of the forthcoming publication Reciprocity in Indonesia; Local Ways of Managing Insecurity.