Tani utun means traditional farmers that live humbly, conservatively, honestly, surrender their life and hard to accept new values. Tani utun can be found at Dieng Plateau, and other villages in Central Java or Yogyakarta. They live unlike common people in the middle of the information era, and modern way of thinking, that this will sound weird.
Tani utun are humble can be seen from their house, the way they dress, they eat, speak and often they ignore information around them, and this becomes very unique when they socialize or mingle with other people. They spend most of their time in their farms, from 6 am to 4 pm. They socialize only at night, by going to their neighbour to chat, or other village event. Their humbleness sometimes becomes problem for other people that ask them to think beyond their daily activities, or event to introduce new technology.
Usually if they are asked to change they will say this life should be lived and no need to do or be something that is unusual, they surrender to their life. Not every tani utun is hard to suffice their daily need. Many can get much money for their hard work, and economically spend their money. Though they have much money for luxury things, they still watch their expenses carefully and only spend for something really necessary. Money they get from crop usually kept under their mattress and only known by husband and wife, their children usually do not know anything about this. There was true story when one day when children clean parents who just dies, they found large amount of money under their parents mattress.
Their humbleness of thinking and behaviour is part of social life and interesting especialy in Dieng region. They really carefully spend their money, honest and sometimes this behavior may seem like they are stingy. This money spending behavior is a way to respect their hard work along the weeks, days and year.
Tani utun has an amazing way to survive, maybe we can see it as unique that they consume vegetables from their farms, with corn or nasi jagung and sometimes with rice, or mix of rice and corn called as grontol. They eat sweet potato, potato, and casava as rice substitute.
Tani utun’s house usually is used as place to save their farming uquipments such as pacul,kawuk,gendhek,krundu,keranjang, krindik, panja,garu etc. They also store manure, and crops inside their house.
When potatoes Dieng was in its glorious day, many tani utun that has their own farms became very rich and their life started to shift, from humbleness to more modern style. They renovate their houses, with parabola antenna, but they keep the way they dress with sarung hang on their neck, jacket, shocking colors socks, flip flops. As they wear humble, and maybe weird for common people, when they enter car showroom, sometimes theie appearance manipulates the car showroom staff. Once there was Dieng farmer went to car showroom, and he brought two ugly plastic bags, the staff thought he was a beggar while actually he was intended to buy new car with 2 plastic bags of cash.