Project description
A study of Indonesian tobacco smallholders
While tobacco is one of the world’s most profitable industries, little attention has been paid to the social conditions, economic inequalities and moral dilemmas faced by the people who cultivate it. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TOBACULT project aims to study the social life of tobacco farmers in upland Central Java in Indonesia. Specifically, it will explore how the advantages associated with growing tobacco are balanced against its moral and social dimensions. With the use of archival methods and ethnography, the project will examine the impact that wealth and gender, in addition to colonial and post-colonial agricultural policies. The findings will shed light on the structural inequalities behind this controversial global commodity.
Objective
Even though tobacco is the leading cause of preventable deaths worldwide and its consumption has received considerable scholarly attention, little is known about the social conditions of the crop’s production. This is especially the case in countries of the Global South such as Indonesia, the fourth biggest producer of tobacco globally. TOBACULT explores the lives and livelihoods of tobacco farmers in upland Central Java, Indonesia. By focusing on Javanese smallholders’ understandings and practices related to tobacco agriculture, the central aim of this project is to examine how smallholders navigate morality and economy in the context of cultivating a crop that they perceive as profitable yet morally ambiguous. This is a social anthropology project that is informed by an interdisciplinary approach connecting perspectives from colonial history, gender studies and agrarian studies. The objectives of this project are: (1) to develop an innovative relational approach to wealth as it underpins the ambiguous moral economy of tobacco agriculture; (2) to investigate how gendered relations of power pervade Javanese smallholder farming and shape the rural inequalities prevalent in the lucrative agro-industry; (3) to analyse how the history of colonial and postcolonial interventions into Javanese agriculture continues to shape smallholders’ experience of tobacco farming. These aims will be reached through one month of archival research in The Hague and seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Temanggung Regency in upland Central Java. I will conduct fieldwork based on participant observation, visual recordings, and interviews with smallholders, non-farming residents, bureaucrats, and businesspeople. My methodology will be honed through pre-field training and the research results will be disseminated through an academic and public engagement strategy that includes two journal articles, an academic workshop, and a public blog series.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences political sciences public administration bureaucracy
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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1010 Wien
Austria
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