Its principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms—"involution".

[1][2] Written for a particular US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernisation theory of Walt Whitman Rostow,[3] Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia.

Sawah is the dominant form in both Java and Bali where nearly three-quarters of Indonesia's population live, and swidden more common in the less central regions.

This is his description of the process in Java where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.

[7] Late in his career, Geertz reflected that the book had become an "orphan," widely read and criticized without reference to his larger body of work.