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Article Excerpt
In late Suharto-era Indonesia, "indigeneity" became a solution to the problem of political representation in popular natural-resource struggles. Using examples from Sumatra and Sulawesi, we examine how the concept of indigeneity was used as a means to strengthen community rights over and against state and corporate claims. In Sulawesi, scientists studied Togean Island peoples' "indigenous knowledge" as away to affirm residents' rights to inhabit a new national park. In Sumatra, Sosa people became "customary law" peoples (masyarakat adat) as a means to claim rights to oil-palm lands that had been taken over by state and private corporations. In each case, the formation of communities as customary or indigenous was a response to the possibilities and limitations of political discourse in Indonesia, rather than a natural outcome of a certain affiliation between communities and land, place, or tradition. The political nature of this solution becomes apparent in comparing this contemporary strategy with the way claims made during the early Sukarno years in newly independent Indonesia. In 1950s Indonesia, "class" was the rubric that united communities in land struggles. KEYWORDS: indigenous knowledge, customary law, class, Indonesia
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I ask how we might conceive and chart power in terms other than logic, develop historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgment in terms that depart from moralism and conviction. --Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History
When she was a girl growing up in Java, Laksmi, an Indonesian biologist, had read German novelist Karl May's fictional accounts of Native Americans of the western United States. Unlike the depictions of the valiant cowboy and treacherous Indian of US film and literature, May painted a picture of a noble Indian under siege by the savage cowboy. Laksmi sympathized with Winnetou, the Native American protagonist in May's books, and she began to compare him in her mind with Indonesia's many marginalized ethnic peoples. Her desire to equate a fictional representation of Native Americans with an equally imagined understanding of Indonesia's marginal groups was facilitated by the Indonesian state's own framing of permissible forms of ethnic difference of the "song and dance variety." (1) Many scholars of Indonesia have written about the state's instrumental use of "culture" and of its efforts to aestheticize and depoliticize ethnicity during Suharto's New Order period. (2) But unlike these official ways of framing acceptable cultural difference, Laksmi's imagination was also informed by a deep dislike of inequality.
In the minds of many Indonesians, the Native American and the Australian Aboriginal stand in for the "remote" and "backward" peoples of Indonesia, especially those agrarian and fishing peoples found outside of Java, Bali, and Sumatra. In Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi, when one author presented her research proposal at the Department of Social and Political Affairs, she was told, "You have your Indians, and we have our Bajau." Yet, among some Indonesian scientists and activists, the Native American experience was also a guide to what should not happen in Indonesia. Many Indonesians with populist concerns were aware of how Native Americans had been expelled from park lands by the United States Army to create spaces of Arcadian wilderness, and they used this as evidence that Indonesia needed different solutions to the problem of nature conservation. Scientists like Laksmi were interested in how it might be politically feasible to fight for popular resource rights in the face of authoritarian state rule.
Claims to resource access and land tenure necessarily entail acts of political representation and the conceptual articulation of forms of community empowered to make claims. In this article we explore "indigeneity" not as a mimetic description of a real kind of people in the world but rather as a deployment of political discourse and a framework for political action. Indigeneity emerged as a solution to the problem of corporate privatization and state control of Indonesia's natural resources in the context of late-Suharto-era authoritarianism, where opposition to the state could incite the use of violent military and police power against groups and individuals. indigeneity has continued as an important rhetorical form into the post-Suharto period of decentralization, although there are signs that the concept of class struggle is reemerging as a competing discourse.
We describe here two instances where indigeneity helped to frame communities that could make claims to resources. In the first instance, based on Celia Lowe's research in the Togean Islands of Sulawesi, scientists used the idea of "indigenous knowledge" to produce Togean people as both knowledgeable and possessing rights within the context of the newly emerging Togean Island National Park. In our second example, Suraya Afiff's study of the creation of a masyarakat adat community in Sosa, South Tapanuli, indigeneity was used as a way to organize collective action against corporate oil-palm plantations. We conclude our argument with a historical comparison from the newly independent Indonesia of the 1950s. During the early Sukarno period, "class" was the concept around which rights-bearing communities were formed and around which claims to land and other resources were made. With the rise of Cold War-era anti-Communist sentiment after 1965, however, class disappeared as a viable option for the construction of Indonesian community.
Ethnobiology and Participatory Spatial Planning in the Togean Islands
The Togean Islands are a small archipelago in the Gulf of Tomini that came to prominence in the 1990s as the location of the new Togean Island National Park. Within the norms and standards of international biodiversity conservation at the time, popular participation in park formation was viewed as necessary, although agendas always included some form of separating people from the "natures" they relied upon. Before Togean people could participate, however, scientists needed to know who lived in the park and what kinds of contributions residents might make. Togean "society" became visible through the anthropological study of ethnobiology and a project of spatial planning, each designed to include Togean peoples' ideas of nature, space, and place into the park's administration and design.
The way Indonesian scientists approached Togean people was informed not only by international norms for the scientific analysis of culture, however, but also by the particularity of how social difference was structured in Suharto-era Indonesia. In order to ensure that Togean people would have rights to continue to reside and subsist in the park, Indonesian scientists had to be able to describe them as having rational knowledges that could contribute to the maintenance of a scientifically based conservation program. In the process, both ethnobiology and spatial ideas were viewed as forms of "indigenous knowledge," and Togean people gained particularity as "indigenous people." Once the people were framed as an indigenous community with relevant local knowledges, Indonesian researchers were able to argue with both the state and with transnational conservation groups for the scientific basis of Togeans' resource rights within the emerging park.
Laksmi, Hari, and Yakup (pseudonyms) were scientists from Jakarta trained primarily in biology but also in some techniques of social analysis, and they began to study Togean people and their relationship to Togean nature as early as 1993. Working in three Togean villages, they interviewed "mainly old fishermen," observed the species Togean people used, watched how plants and animals were harvested from seas and forests, and fished and farmed with people there. From the beginning, the ethnobiology project was directed toward solving particular political problems within Indonesia that distinguished it from the abstract forms of cognitive anthropology upon which ethnobiology is based. They described their ethnobiology as
a study about the people's uses of biological resources that combines the disciplines of biological science and cultural anthropology. Its purpose is to discover examples of the potential of biological resources, the role of natural resources for people by recording biotic species, the useful technology of biological resources, along with researching the influence of government policy/wisdom in the management of conservation of biological resources. Through the lens of biology, ethnobiology can be seen as those uses of biological resources which are directed at the effort of improving conservation of natural resources. While from the lens of anthropology, ethnobiology can be seen as a system of knowledge which bridges patterns of culture and is aimed toward developing the people without damaging the potential of natural resources. (3)
Their ethnobiological project engaged scientific disciplinarity (merging biology and anthropology); it aimed toward conservation of biological resources; it discovered things about Togean people (such as how they harvest resources); it was concerned with "development" of the people; and it explored the influence of government policy on conservation. From this came a holistic multiplicity of discursive objects with newly defined contours: ethnic identities, relations of school and work, settlement patterns and house structures, religion and belief, childhood, infrastructure, medicine, social organization, life rituals, knowledge and technology, plants and technologies for their use, and so forth. These are the objects they cobbled together to form indigenous knowledge.
One of the most important of these objects was Togean peoples' knowledge of plants and...
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