ABSTRACT
As administrative and territorial units Indonesian villages and hamlets have, for the last decade or so, increasingly come within the sphere of interest of both national and regional planners for the simple reason that a balanced and effective development strategy has to account for the rural hinterland where the majority of approximately 130 million people live. There seems to be a growing consciousness among both planners and other less professional policy makers that sustained economic development of the country would only be possible if villages and hamlets are successful in skillfully exploiting their resources and potencies, and thus becoming growth centres themselves. Therefore, in order that hamlets and villages be enabled to deploy and accelerate the pace of development appropriate measures will continue to be taken by the government. Its interference, having been a long accepted principle, is not the problem. However, where the shoe pinges is in the relative ignorance and lack of data about a good many aspects of rural life, in national and regional level planning boards, encompassing specific patterns of interacting social categories, e.g. institutions and more formal groupings as associations or corporate organizations. There is, moreover a lack of knowledge