Abstract
This essay represents an attempt to question and revise the conceptualisation of village Java‐especilally prevalent in the colonial literature‐which represents it as an endless number of homogeneous communities of cultivators, living closely and harmoniously together, with a high degree of institutional self‐sufficiency. The emphasis in the essay is upon the pattern of vertical relations and horizontal diversity. The existence of considerable internal differentiation is stressed, and it is argued that the Javanese village has never been marked by the homogeneity and static rigidity which has been ascribed to it so often.

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