Being the fifth largest producer of tobacco worldwide, Indonesia has been depicted in the media for taking advantages from children in numerous tobacco plantations and production houses. This phenomenon has gained worldwide attention especially after international humanitarian organizations did a report on the case, saying that children suffer and are forced to work in dangerous circumstances. Seen from a different scale, such practice has also been ongoing for decades among tobacco farmer societies and are seen as perfectly normal work children do.

Children in relation to work has always been an issue with layered complexities. While addressing working children might raise awareness on cases of child exploitation, it is more often than not that humanitarian approach to this sets aside the fact that children’s roles, statuses as well as desirable work are defined variedly by different cultures in the world. On the other hand, an extreme relativist approach will prevent us to see through exploitative practices, leading to the negligence of the human rights dimension.

Taking place in a tobacco farmer society in Temanggung, Central Java, this research aims to delve deeper into this dilemma of positioning self amidst issues of working children in tobacco farmer society. Using ethnography as the main method, I pose some main questions such as: how is the issue of working children in tobacco industry approached differently in anthropological discourse? How do these approaches create a dilemma within anthropological inquiry? What can we, as anthropologists, do in such state of methodological quandary?

This reasearch might not offer a definite and clear-cut solution. Instead, it should be seen as a way towards understanding that children who work can never be comprehended by a single way of thinking and will always be caught up in the tug-of-war between human rights discourse and local knowledge.

Keywords: children, work, tobacco, human rights, relativism