Many scholars have debated Geertz's characterization of Java as a site of social and economic involution, in which impoverished peasants worked ever harder to achieve static results. Fewer have taken up his characterization of Indonesia's Outer Islands as a zone of extremes: islands of dynamic export production, often dominated by indigenous smallholders, surrounded by ‘a broad sea of essentially unchanged swidden making’. Taking Geertz's analysis as a point of departure, I use comparisons across distinct conjunctures to explore the conditions under which smallholder production becomes dynamic, and to reflect on the role of culture in social and economic change.