Communal Land Tenure in Nineteenth-Century Java: The Formation of Western Images of the Eastern Village Community. This anthropological/historiographical essay on communal land tenure in 19th-century Java was written in the 1980s by the brilliant Taro Goh who tragically died in 1988 at the age of 30. 19th-century Western accounts of the tenure of cultivated land are overviewed along with the accounts and ideas of 20th-century scholars. The author's critique shows the ways in which Western views of land tenure, law, property and village structure were inappropriately applied to the Javanese rural context. Bibliography.