Afiff, S. - Lowe, C. - Claiming Indigenous Community - Political Discourse and Natural Resource Rights

Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political http://alt.sagepub.com/
Claiming Indigenous Community: Political Discourse and Natural Resource

Rights in Indonesia
Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2007 32: 73
DOI: 10.1177/030437540703200104
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Alternatives 32 (2007), 73–97
Claiming Indigenous Community:

Political Discourse and Natural
Resource Rights in Indonesia
Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe*
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 Sula-
wesi, 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 a way to affirm res-
idents’ 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 for-
mation of communities as customary or indigenous was a
response to the possibilities and limitations of political dis-
course in Indonesia, rather than a natural outcome of a cer-
tain affiliation between communities and land, place, or tradi-
tion. 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 knowl-
edge, customary law, class, Indonesia
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
*Suraya Afiff, Karsa Institute; Celia Lowe, University of Washington.
73
74 Claiming Indigenous Community
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 de-
pictions 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 eth-
nic peoples. Her desire to equate a fictional representation of
Native Americans with an equally imagined understanding of Indo-
nesia’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 aes-
theticize and depoliticize ethnicity during Suharto’s New Order
period.2 But unlike these official ways of framing acceptable cul-
tural 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 pro-
posal 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 expe-
rience 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 dis-
course 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
Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 75
and individuals. indigeneity has continued as an important rhetori-

cal 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 con-
cept 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 partic-
ipation in park formation was viewed as necessary, although agen-
das always included some form of separating people from the
“natures” they relied upon. Before Togean people could partici-
pate, 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 adminis-
tration 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 dif-
ference 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 particular-
ity 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 trans-
national 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 Indo-
nesia 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 com-

bines the disciplines of biological science and cultural anthropol-
ogy. Its purpose is to discover examples of the potential of biologi-
cal 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 bio-
logical resources which are directed at the effort of improving
conservation of natural resources. While from the lens of anthro-
pology, 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 “devel-
opment” of the people; and it explored the influence of govern-
ment policy on conservation. From this came a holistic multiplicity of
discursive objects with newly defined contours: ethnic identities, rela-
tions of school and work, settlement patterns and house structures,
religion and belief, childhood, infrastructure, medicine, social or-

ganization, life rituals, knowledge and technology, plants and tech-
nologies for their use, and so forth. These are the objects they cob-
bled together to form indigenous knowledge.
One of the most important of these objects was Togean peo-
ples’ knowledge of plants and sea creatures. The scientists divided
plants into six types: vegetables, building material, ritual plants,
cosmetics, craft plants, and medicinal plants. The numbers of each
type were counted and listed, with the names given in several
Togean Island languages: Togean, Bobonko, and Bajau. Notes were
made concerning the uses of each plant: “the inner part of the tip
of the plant is eaten as a vegetable”; “used for mattress filling”;
“indication: liver, malaria; technology: root and stalk are boiled.”
Sea products were divided into nine types: demersal fish, pelagic
fish, crabs and shrimps, turtles, shells, squids, sea cucumber, sea
plants, and mammals. The study of sea creatures began with an
extensive list of Latinate family names followed by Bajau, Togean,
and “trade” names.4
Togean people’s knowledge of nature further emerged through
the category “religion and belief”: “humans and nature bring to the
surface religion and beliefs concerning the power of invisible
nature.”5 Bajau people were described as close to nature and able to
read its signs: “They enjoy viewing the blooms of beautiful sea flow-
ers (lalamei/nambo) at the full moon. They look for currents, and
raise nets, and if there are many durian falling in the forest, then
many groupers will be in the sea.”6 There were special prohibitions:
“If a squid is blocking the way, it means that your earlier offerings
were not received by the sea spirit. This means they have to return
home so that they don’t encounter a disaster.”7 They possessed
unique abilities: “Bajau people have the ability to dive to 30 meters
depth and [for] several minutes without using tanks or compres-
sors.”8 And there were special knowledges: “Healing of sick people
can be done by an elder that can see sicknesses (Mawi).”9
Each of these inscriptions brought to life the idea of Togean
people as uniquely knowledgeable about Togean nature. Since
local people were often presumed to harm nature out of igno-
rance, to come down on the side of the existence of Togean exper-
tise was controversial within many conservation settings. It was also
controversial in relation to government representations of Togean
people, who were classified in state taxonomies as “still primitive”
(masih primitive) and “alien” (suku terasing). If Togean people could
be demonstrated through the practices of objective science to pos-
sess accurate knowledge about Togean land and marinescapes,
their claim to rights within the new park would be strengthened.
The scientists also wanted to make biodiverse nature and con-

servation practice comprehensible and desirable for Togean peo-
ple in order that they would adopt an ethical stance (preserving
biodiversity) in relation to Togean flora and fauna. To do this,
Togean people themselves would be analyzed, studied, classified,
described, and ultimately formed as an object upon which conser-
vation and state governmentality could act. They would become
“indigenous people.”
Nicholas Rose has described the practice of reflecting on char-
acteristics of populations in European history and the links be-
tween these reflections and the moral logics of governmentality.
He writes:
In European thought from at least the eighteenth century, one

can trace a variety of reflections on the special characteristics of
discrete “nations” and “peoples,” the possibility of writing the his-
tory of different peoples, anatomizing their differences, demon-
strating how each participates in a shared tradition of customs, a
shared descent, a shared language; how each has a set of habits,
beliefs, mores, systems of law, morality and politics which partake
in this common spirit. Over the course of the nineteenth century,
a mutation occurred in this way of apprehending the collective
existence of a people. Nations were now seen as populations of
individuals with particular characteristics, integrated through a cer-
tain moral order. But more significantly, this way of understanding
the subjects of rule as subjects of morality was linked to a plethora
of interventions into the economy, the family, the private firm and
the conduct of the individual person which sought to shape them
in beneficial ways whilst safeguarding their autonomy.10
Most of what Togean people knew or did was not described as

“destructive” by the scientists; the harmful techniques of blast and
cyanide fishing, for example, receive very short mention at the end
of their text on ethnobiology. Togean peoples’ engagements with
nature were also described in more than economic, instrumental,
or consumptive terms: “They enjoy viewing the blooms of beautiful
sea flowers . . . at the full moon.”11 In elaborating the Togean
knowledges they collected as both rational and moral, Laksmi,
Hari, and Yakup were beginning to build an argument for Togean
people as a particular kind of rights-bearing community. Thinking
with Rose’s observations on governmental rationality, we can see
the scientists engaging nature conservation biopolitically, includ-
ing confronting the plethora of state interventions into the struc-
ture of Togean peoples’ lives. Entanglement with state norms and
forms was compulsory, and yet the scientists also managed to make
an argument on behalf of Togean people that confronted the rea-

sons of state.
By May 1997, scientific investigations of Togean indigenous
knowledge had shifted into new spatial terms, and an articulation
of rights became more direct and explicit. Several changes in the
world of Indonesian conservation NGOs and in state-society rela-
tions had come together at once to make possible the idea of “spa-
tial planning.” First was a series of emerging laws, beginning with the
Spatial Planning Act of 1992, issued by the government of Indone-
sia.12 By 1997, the national legislature (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat,
DPR) had developed these laws to give communities an opportunity
to contribute to regional spatial plans. Second, international con-
servation organizations had begun to encourage mapping projects
that used geographic information systems (GIS) as a tool for con-
servation planning.13 Additionally, a discourse of “countermapping”
designed to use maps to argue on behalf of community rights, had
recently emerged within Indonesian NGO networks.14 Finally, scien-
tists had discovered sasi, an extensive system of property rights and
temporal and spatial resource exclusions in the Maluku Islands, and
many people were looking to find such a thing in other places.15
Conserving biological diversity involves the reorganization of
space through the tactics of gazetting park boundaries and creat-
ing use, nonuse, and buffer zones. Some spatial strategies that iso-
late flora and fauna from human use or connect wildlife across
corridors respond to the spatial needs of plants and animals them-
selves.16 As Hari explained, “Big charismatic animals have a wide
home range. For example, the elephant has a 90-square-kilometer
home range. If you’re protecting them, you’re protecting a lot of
small plants and animals.” Other spatial tactics, such as the cre-
ation of special areas for people’s engagement with natural fea-
tures, attempt to ameliorate the threat humans pose to nature by
limiting how people interact with their surrounding environment.
In this context, the form of Togean “indigenous knowledge”
changed, and the uses to which these knowledges were to be put
transformed. Hari described the new configuration this way:
Indigenous knowledge has gained substantial attention since last

decade. After it was neglected for decades, a movement to revi-
talize the knowledge is growing as a way to empower local and
indigenous communities and to improve or complement scien-
tific knowledge including those in natural resources manage-
ment. Indigenous knowledge on natural resources or ethnoecol-
ogy has evolved for decades or centuries as part of indigenous
cultures and much of it has been proven to be sustainable. The
knowledge includes how indigenous communities use space (land

and sea) with its philosophies behind it. 17
Hari’s question would be how to involve Togean people in the

planning process and how to incorporate “indigenous spatial knowl-
edge” into the plan. He wrote:
Sustainable use and conservation of natural resources is a major

issue in the last few years. Prior to the implementation of those
activities, spatial planning is a crucial stage to ensure sustainabil-
ity and justice. Unfortunately, in most cases, especially in devel-
oping countries, spatial planning is carried out merely by [the]
government with inputs from scientists. Local communities who
are the most affected part of the spatial plan, often in negative
ways, are usually excluded in the planning process. Therefore,
ways should be created to include local communities’ interests in
the plan.18
This new articulation of indigenous knowledge and sustain-

ability in terms of social justice brought into focus questions about
scientific management. Working on a whiteboard at a meeting in
Jakarta, the scientists came up with a series of “threats,” “pro-
grams,” and “priorities” for future Togean work and discussed how
to involve Togean people and the Sulawesi government as “stake-
holders” in the spatial-planning process. The conversation began
with the difficult problem of participation:
Hari: Traditionally the government has been planning from

the top down and neglecting hak ulayat (traditional rights). There
has been no community involvement.
Laksmi: But there is a tension between our role and the gov-
ernment because our work is trying to get the government to do
something it doesn’t normally do.
Yakup: Yes, the government can be suspicious of us working
with the community.
Hari: We have the problem of the government thinking we
are working too closely with the people, but also of the people
thinking we are working too closely with the government.
The scientists were walking a tightrope between the possibili-

ties of “trying to get the government to do something it doesn’t
normally do” and capturing the interest and imaginations of peo-
ple in Togean communities. Given the impossibility at the time of
directly mobilizing people around natural-resource rights, the in-
troduction of statements on justice in the move from ethnobiology
to spatial planning was significant. Hari, Laksmi, and Yakup were
developing a solution that involved “assisting” the state from within

(rather than confronting or opposing it directly), while attempting
to change it in the process. The aim of spatial planning would be
to resist state mandates using tools the state found acceptable. Hari
described what he saw as at stake:
Within the last twenty years big commercial companies have been
active in the archipelago and created conflicts with local commu-
nities. Those companies exploit terrestrial and marine resources
often within areas that have traditionally been extractive areas for
the communities. And recently, as tourism is growing, some com-
panies are building tourist resorts. New ventures are planning
their investments and are applying for plots of lands or sea for
their activities. These are growing rapidly while a detailed spatial
plan is still not available. If such a plan cannot be produced soon,
greater conflicts will occur which will harm local communities as
they are more vulnerable in such conflicts. 19
In the move from ethnobiology to spatial planning, Togean

people had been reconfigured from the owners of knowledge in
the form of “words for things” and particular “beliefs and customs”
into rights-bearing communities based on their status as indige-
nous. The form of indigeneity allowed the Togean Island person to
be reformulated from the “backward” and “alien” subject of the
Indonesian state to an Indonesian citizen with the right to partici-
pate in the political process of spatial design. Commercial activity
could be said to infringe on these community rights, thereby con-
travening the state’s valorization of big development. The work of
Laksmi, Hari, and Yakup in the Togean Islands reflected the milieu
of Indonesian NGO thinking at the time. We can witness the fur-
ther development of this approach to indigeneity through the con-
cept of masyarakat adat.
The Emergence of Masyarakat Adat
Throughout the 1990s, Indonesians were rethinking relations

between nature and nation, and one prominent discussion con-
cerned the concept of customary law communities (masyarakat
adat). The discourse of masyarakat adat was an attempt to legiti-
mate rural communities and defend their rights to land and other
natural resources against state and corporate action. The develop-
ment of this discourse was shaped by both the national context of
Suharto-era authoritarianism and by international conversations
about indigenous people. In examining these contexts, it becomes
evident that, rather than a problematic essentialization, the masya-

rakat adat framework should be understood as a flexible political
strategy that opened new possibilities for resisting the state in a rel-
atively safe and effective discursive register. We begin with some
history.
After Major General Suharto came to power by military coup
in 1966, the state quickly eliminated all independent civil-society
groups and brought all political parties, labor unions, student and
farmers groups, and so on under direct state control. The Suharto
government also eliminated the legal basis upon which indepen-
dent civic groups could participate in government decision-making
processes. By the 1980s, in part because the environment was per-
ceived by the state as a “scientific” rather than “political” issue and
in part because it considered certain environmental policies nec-
essary for its international image, the state had created a series of
legal loopholes that allowed for the claims of civil society to emerge
through environmental movements. The 1982 Environmental Law
and the 1989 regulation on Environmental Impact Assessment were
the first laws to reopen a legal framework through which NGOs
might exercise political rights. In this way, environmental regula-
tions became important instruments for promoting social issues
such as human rights, democracy, clean governance, and sustain-
able development.20 Environmental regulations also provided a
legal means for NGOs to take the government to court.
The state’s appropriation of land and natural resources for its
own enrichment was at the center of Suharto-era authoritarianism.
It was not coincidental, therefore, that environmental concerns
became a venue for social-justice initiatives. Beginning in the
1980s, Indonesian environmental groups such as WALHI, Indone-
sia’s largest umbrella environmental organization, were able to use
the seeming neutrality of scientific environmentalism to develop a
politically focused environmental-justice agenda. They were con-
cerned not only with ecologically sound resource management but,
more importantly, with the direct link between forests, other nat-
ural resources, and the survival of people whose lives depended
upon them.
Indonesian domestic contexts also overlapped with the rise of
international concern over rapid deforestation of tropical rain
forests and the role that “rain-forest peoples” play in the conserva-
tion of forests.21 As the country with the second largest rain forest
area in the world (after Brazil), Indonesia became a target of the
international rain-forest movement, and the rhetorics that rain-
forest alliances used to confront the problem of unsustainable for-
est-management practices included local people’s property claims,
indigenous communities’ knowledges, and traditional resource-

management.
A study funded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization in 1990 was among the first to recommend that the
state acknowledge people’s customary rights in local conflicts within
the forestry sector. The study argued:
Even after the Indonesian state asserted jurisdiction and author-

ity over forested lands in 1967, a great diversity of communities
continued, and still continue, to practice a variety of resource
management regimes based on regional community rights, prac-
tices, and customary law. . . . Indonesia’s forest management law
and policy has accorded a weak status to the communal and cus-
tomary rights of local forest cultivators. In practice, the policy in
several cases has resulted in exclusion or marginalization of local
communities. These policies have been inefficient for a variety of
reasons: forest concession areas are so vast as to make policing
the forest estate impracticable. State exclusionary policies have,
in effect, created alienated, disenfranchised local resource users
by legal fiat. . . . The result of not integrating these populations,
and not protecting their local systems of rights and resource man-
agement practices was: (1) increasing illegal extraction of forest
resources by communities; (2) unsupervised, un-monitored con-
ditions; (3) losses of environmental, biological and genetic capi-
tal; and (4) losses of national and provincial income. At the same
time it also generated social tensions between local forest com-
munities, logging concessionaires, and the forest service.22
The Indonesian environmental movement would link the in-

ternational conversation on customar y rights with the colonial-era
Dutch interest in Indonesian adat rights in order to frame the issue
of community-resource access as an issue of ecologically sound
environmental management. In so doing, they diminished the pos-
sibility that their discussion of “community” would be seen as a
threat to state power. Adat communities, they argued, had long-
standing knowledges and a genuine interest in protecting the envi-
ronment.23
During the International Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993,
the Network for Defense of Masyarakat Adat Rights (Jaringan Pem-
belaan Hak-Hak Masyarakat Adat: JAPHAMA) developed out of a
workshop organized by WALHI in Tanah Toraja, Central Sula-
wesi.24 This meeting was the first time the term masyarakat adat was
used to translate indigenous people. Up to this point, a variety of
words in the Indonesian language had been used to describe the
discursive object indigenous people, including masyarakat asli (original
people) and masyarakat pribumi (native people). JAPHAMA made a
significant effort to elaborate a precise working definition of the

chosen term. Masyarakat adat were “community groups who for
generations have lived in specific areas and have their own values,
ideology, economy, politics, culture, society, and territory.”
In 1994, the JAPHAMA statement was further clarified and dis-
tinguished masyarakat adat from other types of Indonesian peo-
ples. Activists chose masyarakat adat to differentiate between non-
Chinese Indonesians living in urban settings and Indonesians
living a “simpler” life in rural areas:
In Indonesia, the majority of people are indigenous society (bangsa

pribumi) but not all of them are masyarakat adat. . . . According to
article 1 (1.a.) [of the 1989 ILO convention], Tribal Peoples
refers to those people living in a free country whose social, cul-
tural, economic condition are different from the majority of the
population of that country and whose status is governed partly or
entirely by their customs and traditions or by special laws and reg-
ulations. We term such people masyarakat adat.25
After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the masyarakat adat move-

ment became more visible and spread out across Indonesia.26 In
March 1999, the first national meeting on masyarakat adat was
organized by twelve national and grassroots organizations and held
in the capital, Jakarta. Of the five hundred people who attended
this meeting, near half of the participants came as representatives
of “indigenous peoples” from twenty-six provinces in Indonesia. A
new institution, the Alliance of Masyarakat Adat of the Archipelago
(Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara: AMAN)27 was formed as a re-
sult of the meeting.28
AMAN activists contended that adat communities had man-
aged their lands for many generations, adat communities existed
long before the Indonesian state did, and therefore the state
should not presume to control adat lands. The thirty-five years
since Suharto had come to power, purportedly in the name of the
Indonesian people, AMAN argued, had only caused suffering for
many original landowners. AMAN insisted on the reinstitution of
property rights to adat communities and the abolition of all state
policies that assigned primary rights to the state. They argued for
revision of the relevant sections of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, the
1967 mining, forest, and foreign-investment laws. 29
As the idea of indigenous community transformed and devel-
oped in Indonesian discourse throughout the 1990s, the Togean
community knowledges described above became explicitly tied to
social justice as Laksmi, Hari, and Yakup moved from collecting
ethnobiological knowledge to participatory spatial planning. In
their efforts to construct a concept of community within the Togean
Island national park, we can see how they were influenced by na-
tional conversations on masyarakat adat and international conversa-
tions on indigeneity and how they found these ideas useful for con-
structing a knowledgeable and therefore rights-bearing community
of Togean people. The scientists were clear about the social-justice
issues at stake and did not form Togean community as indigenous
simply through a prior or naïve commitment to primordialism.
The rhetoric of indigenous community was not something
Togean people themselves found useful or adopted at the time,
however, and most were unaware of or unconcerned by the fraught
conversations then occurring about their right to continue to live
in and harvest the natural resources of the proposed park. In Sosa,
South Tapanuli, however, a different process occurred where resi-
dents deployed the term masyarakat adat to describe themselves.
In the choice to term one’s own community indigenous, we witness
a further example of the political maneuvering involved in claims
to indigeneity.
Sosa People as Masyarakat Adat
On May 8, 1985, the assistant minister of agriculture, Hasyrul Hara-

hap, visited the Sosa district of South Tapanuli regency, North
Sumatra, on behalf of a new oil-palm industry that wanted to turn
Sosa lands into oil-palm plantations. Harahap himself was from
South Tapanuli, and he used his deep connections in the commu-
nity to promote the oil-palm project. He peppered his speech with
phrases in the Sosa language to communicate with an older gener-
ation not fluent in Indonesian, and he convinced many people that
the oil-palm industry would bring prosperity to the region. His visit
marked the first establishment of oil-palm estates in Sosa, and by
2000 almost no forested lands were left there. Instead, all that was
visible from the road were the extensive tracts of oil-palm planta-
tion under the control of six private and one state-owned oil-palm
estates.
At the time of Harahap’s visit, more than half of the total land
in Sosa was classified as forest area claimed by the state, although
from the view of Sosa people all of those lands were communally
owned. Indonesian regulations acknowledge customary land rights,
yet access to communal lands can be taken through eminent
domain when the state decides to appropriate the land for the
“national interest.” Forestry projects, oil-palm plantation, mining
concessions, dams, and transmigration projects are examples of
Suharto-era projects that fell under the banner of “national inter-
ests” and were said to benefit the “Indonesian people.” In practice,
however, the government granted investors close to Suharto, his

family, and his political and military allies primary access to natural-
resource wealth.30
As in many other parts of Indonesia, land ownership in Sosa
district is controlled by clans (marga) rather than individuals. Indi-
viduals have only usufruct rights to plots of land they themselves
have opened. In theory, these plots can be inherited by children,
particularly by sons, but should not be sold to outsiders. Within the
state system of administration, Sosa district is divided into several
village territories. Sosa people also recognize a traditional system
of land tenure called luhat, and there are four luhat in the region:
Sosa Jae, Sosa Julu, Mondang, and Pinarik. Luhat leaders still
play a recognized role in endorsing access to customary lands in
Sosa, despite the divergence between the customary and the state-
sanctioned systems.
The new oil-palm estates in Sosa have recognized the role of
luhat leaders in organizing compensation for land, even when the
companies were already in possession of government permits. In
return for allowing use of the land, the state-owned company
PTPN IV promised to plant the land with oil palm and give two
hectares of this productive land to each household in the luhat. A
luhat leader from Sosa Julu described how PTPN IV, the first oil-
palm company established in Sosa, gained land access:
In 1984, a representative from the [state] company came to us.

That person said to me, “You are the person who has rights to this
land. If you agree with me that this area is suitable for oil palm,
how can we [from the company] acquire a piece of land around
here to use for oil-palm production? Should we buy or lease the
land or is there any other way to get the land?’ And I said to him
that we collectively owned this land. So then a meeting was held.
Our people in that meeting wanted to divide the plantation into
two. We decided to allow the company to use our land but half of
the plantation had to be given to us to harvest and the company
could have the other half. And we would only accept the agree-
ment once the trees were bearing fruit; that is, once the company
had properly invested in the planting of the land. Then this man
went to other rajas [luhat leaders] to propose a similar idea. All
of the rajas also wanted a similar solution to the one we proposed
in Sosa Julu. Then the man from the company went to talk to the
Bupati and Camat [local and regional state officials]. No written
agreement had been made with us, but a special traditional fes-
tivity was held all night long to honor the agreement.
Sosa people interpreted these kinds of ceremonies as affirm-

ing a company’s legal obligation, even though they did not receive
written contracts at the time. When the oil-palm companies failed

to fulfill their promises, people, especially luhat heads, began to
resist. Starting in 1989, still during Suharto times, protests by luhat
leaders were met with increased security measures and police
patrols to guard the plantations. By the time Suharto stepped down
in 1998, plantation estates had caused widespread and severe social
tensions throughout Sosa.
In June 1998, only a month after Suharto resigned, popular
demonstrations against land appropriation and failed compensa-
tion schemes broke out. The earliest protest was against PT VAL
(Viktorindo Alam Lestari). Hundreds of villagers from Sosa went to
the local parliamentary office in the regency capital city in Padang
Sidempuan to protest against PT VAL and to demand that the com-
pany return its estate land to the people. There was little response
from the company, and another protest was held one month later.
The July demonstration was less peaceful than the first one. Thou-
sands of protestors who were frustrated and skeptical of the whole
process saw no other hope than to turn their anger against the
company. They burned and destroyed many company buildings,
including houses, the estate office, and a warehouse owned by PT
VAL. As a result of this incident, the government arrested a num-
ber of villagers, and further street protests were hindered by police
enforcement.
The first post-Suharto protests in Sosa were spontaneous, but
they quickly became organized through the involvement of the
North Sumatra Peasant Union (Serikat Petani Sumatra Utara:
SPSU), one of many farmers’ organizations that sprang up in Indo-
nesia after 1998. The involvement of the peasants’ union shaped
the way villager’s collective actions against oil-palm estates were
organized from that point forward. SPSU was especially significant
in Sosa becuae the young head of the organization hailed from the
region—a man to be known by his pseudonym, Ridwan. SPSU con-
sidered their movement class-based and they campaigned under
the slogan “land for the tiller,” a slogan last heard in peasants’
struggles in the 1960s.
Ridwan attended the first AMAN conference as a representa-
tive of SPSU. This was his first experience of being identified as
“masyarakat adat” rather than as a “peasant.” Upon returning to
Sosa, Ridwan held a meeting with fifty representatives from four
luhat at which he described his experience at the AMAN confer-
ence. Several months later, Ridwan and a number of others decided
to set up the Sosa Forum for Masyarakat Adat (Forum Masyarakat
Adat Sosa: FORMASA). The goal of FORMASA was to unite peo-
ple’s efforts to voice their demand for the acknowledgement of
their customary rights to land. SPSU supported the formation of
FORMASA because they saw it as a good strategy to mobilize peo-

ple. One SPSU member in Sosa explained:
It is more suitable to foster a rural movement in Sosa through

FORMASA than through a class-based argument. The issue of
masyarakat adat can be used as a mechanism to unite people in
South Tapanuli. It has made all the luhat leaders involved in
FORMASA feel that their social status has increased. It has also
accelerated the peoples’ support for our movement, helped our
effort to develop a network among people, and expanded per-
sonal contacts and our access to information.
In a very short time, FORMASA gained the ability to mobilize

people in Sosa to fight against the state and oil-palm estates.
FORMASA activists claimed the capacity to organize five thousand
people from at least twenty-six villages to participate in various pro-
tests in front of government offices, parliament buildings, or oil-palm
company offices. Besides street protests, action to pressure the oil-
palm estates also included interrupting the production process. In
one action, villagers dug a ditch in one of the roads, thus blocking
company trucks from passing and preventing all harvesting from the
area for a period of two months. Another protest, one against PTPN
IV in June 2000, involved people from at least eighteen villages in a
road block. For more than one month, members of FORMASA block-
aded a plantation road to pressure the company to compensate vil-
lagers. The blockade ended only when PTPN IV had been persuaded
to provide financial compensation for appropriated lands.
Throughout North Sumatra, the Peasants’ Union called for the
return of the populist land-reform initiatives that had been trun-
cated during the Suharto period. The institution of FORMASA was
a locally relevant adaptation of SPSU aims. In other parts of Suma-
tra, SPSU supported farmers from every ethnic background,
including Javanese descendents of former Dutch plantation work-
ers.31 Despite SPSU’s desire to organize peasants through a class-
based movement, FORMASA’s emphasis on indigeneity was what
made their movement possible in Sosa. The appeal of indigeneity
there can only be understood through the way histories of Suharto-
era violence played out in Sosa district.
Masyarakat Adat and “Class” Communities

in Historical Context
After Indonesian independence in 1946, “antifeudalism” (along

with “anticapitalism and imperialism”) became a rallying cry for the
nationalist movement. Rather than “adat” or “indigeneity,” in the

Sukarno period Indonesian social movements were strongly class-
based and inspired by the transnational redistributive ideas of
socialist peasant movements, especially ideas coming out of China.
In the 1940s and 1950s, support for the idea of adat would have
been viewed as support for the Dutch colonial system since many
aristocrats and some tribal chiefs had benefited from the Dutch
use of customary adat law for the purposes of indirect rule.
Under Sukarno, the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai
Komunis Indonesia: PKI) was the largest Communist Party outside
of China and was a legal and officially recognized party. During the
late Sukarno period, the Indonesian Farmers League (Barisan Tani
Indonesia: BTI), associated with the PKI, was effective in mobiliz-
ing farmers to fight to have former Dutch plantation lands redis-
tributed to farmers, rather than to state and private corporations.
In 1963, in order to speed up the land-reform process, the BTI
began to encourage landless peasants to carry out “unilateral action
movements” (gerakan aksi sepihak) against landlords. The main goal
of this initiative was to encourage peasants themselves to redistrib-
ute land that they were entitled to under the law. The PKI sup-
ported this action and President Sukarno endorsed the movement
in August 1964.32
In 1965, however, through a coup sponsored by the army,
Suharto took power and began a Communist purge that terrorized
the population. An estimated one million people were killed in the
army-instigated violence. This violence was acute and is well re-
membered in Sosa district. For this reason, the majority of the peo-
ple in Sosa were not members of SPSU or interested in joining
such an organization. Even if Sosa people were willing to fight to
reclaim their lands after Suharto’s downfall, they were unwilling to
organize on the basis of the class-based rhetorics of the former BTI
and PKI. As events unfolded in Sosa, it became clear that this cau-
tion was well warranted.
On August 25, 2000, a violent incident erupted during a huge
protest in front of the office of a private oil-palm company, PT PHS
(Permata Hijau Sawit). As FORMASA had gained more power in
Sosa, estate owners and managers began to work closely with the
district police in Padang Sidempuan. While the police accused the
protesters of starting the August riot, participants claimed that it
started after a handful of police officers in civilian dress had
attempted to kidnap one of the luhat leaders. Although their kid-
nap attempt failed, it caused the protest to turn violent. Aside from
property damage, one person was killed and a handful were in-
jured when police opened fire on the protestors. Two days later,
the district police traumatized the villagers with a house-to-house
search in one of the protest villages. They dragged all the men they
could find out of their houses, including even one who was found
sleeping. The police made many arrests, and people said this event
reminded them of 1965 when the army came to search for mem-
bers of PKI.
After the arrests, a number of men left the village and went
into hiding in Medan, and the incident called into question the
ability of the state and particularly the police to maintain accept-
able respect for human rights. At that point, the rhetoric of masya-
rakat adat enabled SPSU to publicize the incident and draw sup-
port from national and international allies. One SPSU leader
described the outcome of the violence: “We will gain more inter-
national support if we frame our struggles from the perspective of
indigenous people. I don’t like it that way but international sup-
port especially is hard to get if we say that we are just regular farm-
ers.” Numerous domestic and international human-rights groups
protested the police violence in Sosa. Indonesia’s National Human
Rights Committee (Komnas HAM) also made a visit to Sosa to
investigate the case, and Amnesty International circulated infor-
mation about it through their e-mail list, encouraging readers to
send protest letters to the Indonesia government and the police in
Jakarta and North Sumatra.33
Claiming Indigenous Community in Indonesia:

New Interpretations
In 1975, Indonesian playwright Rendra published The Struggle of the

Naga Tribe, a play in which he described the efforts of a fictional
rural tribe that “does not—I stress once again, does not—take
place in Indonesia” to combat foreign mineral speculators freely
doling out bribes to gain the government’s “understanding,” par-
liamentary factory chairmen each complaining of gout or piles,
and internal village divisions in which some want to sell their land
to the mining engineers. Abivara, the inspired son of the village
head, leads his people to resist through exhortations of ancient
indigenous wisdom, refusal to be turned into a tourist attraction,
and the assistance of Carlos, a foreign ally who publicizes and bears
witness to the tribe’s struggle, at least until his visa is revoked. With
considerable wit, Rendra manages to capture the assemblage of
material and ideal forces arrayed against the Indonesian populace
in its resource struggles with the state.
How can we interpret the shift to indigeneity in the 1990s when
a class-based peasant movement had been the means to deal with
unjust land distribution and inequality immediately following Indo-

nesian independence?
On the one hand, critiques of the strategic essentialization
involved in indigeneity are important to consider.34 Many in the
Indonesian NGO community itself have been critical of AMAN’s
definition of masyarakat adat, for example. One North Sumatran
activist, Rita Simatupang (a pseudonym), was concerned by the way
masyarakat adat was delimited based on racial and ethnic differ-
ences. This definition, she said, contradicts her understanding of
the situation in North Sumatra. Unlike in some long-forgotten
past, rural populations in North Sumatra are no longer ethnically
homogenous. Thus, she says:
Masyarakat adat should be defined as those people, despite their

ethnic background, who live in a particular place such as in a vil-
lage, who follow and respect the local customs, and whose liveli-
hood depends upon the natural resource around the place where
they live. A person, despite his or her ethnic background, could
no longer claim to be part of a particular masyarakat adat if he or
she no longer lives in the village anymore. This means, even a
Javanese person could be part of masyarakat adat [in the North
Sumatra village context] if this person lives in the village and
respects the local customs. . . . In this new definition of masya-
rakat adat, therefore, anyone who already lives in a particular
place has the same right to obtain benefit from the natural re-
sources there.
Simatupang, like many other NGOs activists, was also aware of

the potential for elite manipulation of claims made under the ban-
ner of masyarakat adat. Many rural communities have a hierarchi-
cal structure, and elites can use so-called “traditional” structures to
gain and control power for their own benefit. The successful pro-
motion of the masyarakat adat movement in North Sumatra, for
example, has triggered a Melayu sultan and several aristocrat fami-
lies to take control of former colonial plantation lands along Suma-
tra’s eastern plantation belt. Simatupang is among a number of
activists and scholars in Indonesia and elsewhere concerned about
the unintended consequences of promoting community through
the concept of indigeneity.
Canadian scholar Tania Li has expressed similar reservations in
her extensive writings on indigenous community and masyarakat
adat in Indonesia.35 Through comparisons from separate regions
of Central Sulawesi, she has demonstrated that the idea of adat
community creates opportunistic potential for some communities
and community members, while leaving others behind. In linking
rights to the existence of particular kinds of traditional community

formation, Indonesia’s rural people are left hanging if they cannot
exhibit ideal forms of traditional community. Moreover, articula-
tions of rights made through primordialism do not always reflect
the ambitions many express to claim a set of fully modern rights as
Indonesian citizens. Furthermore, migrants in communities expe-
riencing agrarian differentiation are unable to make claims through
indigeneity. Li views masyarakat adat as filling a discursive “tribal
slot” that limits the possibilities for representation and recognition
of a variety of kinds of resource and property claims. Li explains:
The absence of clear boundaries to the categor y masyarakat adat

provides advocates with important room for maneuver, but it also
permits a rather formidable array of forces to narrow and limit
the places of recognition that masyarakat adat may fill. When the
international environmental lobby and donors connect biodiver-
sity with indigenous people, they probably have in mind some
famous exemplars, such as the Kayapo of the Amazon. . . . Their
images and expectations resonate readily with support for espe-
cially remote and exotic people, assumed to have large and
unique reservoirs of biodiversity knowledge. They resonate less
readily with the tens of millions of rather ordinary farmers who
also have “customary” resource management practices and could
well be considered masyarakat adat. Yet, so long as definitions re-
main vague and the compromise agenda focused on conservation
can be invoked, support for the latter is not ruled out. Around
the edges of consensus and compromise, struggles continue to be
waged, often discreetly, over the meaning of key terms as well as
their applicability in particular contexts. Meanings are fixed, con-
tingently, at the level of the “case.”36
Our work has covered much of the same terrain as Li’s, yet we
interpret events from a different angle. While the contours of the
indigenous tribal slot are open to debate and negotiation in Li’s
framework, she is very clear that she finds the idea deeply problem-
atic. The weight of her critique, based on the superiority of analyti-
cal hindsight, addressed to “the redress of incoherence,” 37 presup-
poses a political subject who might make better choices with a
clearer understanding of the inherent weaknesses of indigeneity. We
are interested in pushing beyond both Simatumpang’s efforts to sim-
ply refine the definition of masyarakat adat and the rationalist cul-
tural and political economy critique of many international scholars.
We begin by taking Indonesian scientists and social activists seri-
ously as people able to debate the limits of their own frameworks.
Laksmi, Hari, and Yakup were able to articulate many limitations of
their own scientific methods. They were cognizant, for example, of

the failure of ethnobiology to contest the limitations placed on
Togean people’s resource use by both the international conserva-
tion community and the Indonesian state. The idea of participa-
tory spatial planning was a remediation that allowed them to base
their work in the legal framework of the Spatial Planning Act of
1992, and their methods would continue to evolve. They were also
well aware that commercial enterprise was the biggest threat to
both nature and people in the Togean Islands. At the same time,
the Togean Islands are a remote place where state terror would be
easy to initiate and difficult to defend against. It was impossible to
treat the state as anything other than an ally in their work. As such,
indigeneity was a solution that emerged as a necessary accommo-
dation of the state.
The relationship of Laksmi, Hari, and Yakup to the inter-
national conservation organizations who funded them can also be
viewed as a flexible manipulation of their relationship with the
international sphere. Togean people could easily be made to live
up to an international understanding of indigenous authenticity
because the scientists designed their representation specifically to
meet this need. The production of Togean indigenous knowledge
was never a mimetic representation of Togean understandings of
nature, whatever such a thing might look like. Rather, it was knowl-
edge structured in the form of an argument designed to align fun-
der’s expectations with the scientists’ own political ambitions. For
this reason, Togean people’s participation or lack thereof in the
creation of a representation for international consumption was
moot as well.
In post-Suharto Sosa, on the other hand, direct political action
in the form of organized mass protests, roadblocks, petitions, and
other mobilizations of civil society proceeded under the self-
assumption of the masyarakat adat identity. In this case, rather than
confine Sosa people to a limited primordial political sphere, indi-
geneity acted as a kind of heat shield within which a largely Marxist,
class-based peasant movement blossomed. This did not mean that
the claims of some ethnically Javanese peasants were not weakened
in the process. Yet there is not an exterior space of greater freedom
to which one might take recourse in this case in order to evaluate
Sosa peoples’ choice to claim masyarakat adat status.
To follow the development of Indonesian thought on indi-
geneity in this way is not to imagine Indonesian activists or com-
munity members as the fully sovereign individuals of liberal politi-
cal theory. Indigeneity emerged at the intersection of a series of
state and institutional practices and ways of knowing that shaped
the possibilities for what science, advocacy, and community could

be in Indonesia. Decisions about representing community were
made in particular contexts: the Togean Islands were isolated and
vulnerable, while Sosa was intimately familiar with a regime of state
terror. To argue that Indonesians were actively negotiating particu-
lar problems facing them at the turn of the millennium should not
prevent us from understanding the problems in-and-of-themselves
as constitutive of a particular subjectivity. It is precisely this track-
ing of solution-seeking thought, in fact, that reveals the subjectivi-
ties and processes at stake.
Contrary to many of its critiques, indigeneity on the ground did
not necessarily serve to incarcerate Indonesian peoples within a
dangerous and determinable form of political community. The
most deadly form of political community in modern Indonesian his-
tory, in fact, has been community formed on the basis of class. In
addition to the roughly one million Indonesians who died under
the sign of class in 1965–1966, estimates are that yet another one
million factory workers, small landholders, East Timorese, Papuans,
and Achenese unfortunate enough to live near mineral holdings,
among other “classes” of people, perished as well in the struggle
against Suharto’s thirty-two-year reign. No form of “community”
provides absolute security or equality in Indonesia even today.
Political theorist Wendy Brown writes, “Human freedom is
finally, always a project of making a world with others.”38 The way
we might productively understand this world-making is through
what Paul Rabinow39 has described as anthropological problemati-
zation. The approach which we have taken here conceives of
Indonesian scientists and NGO activists as thinkers who are neither
independent of their situation, fully cognizant of all its contours
and parameters, nor naïve. Instead of asking whether it is reason-
able to think using indigeneity, we have asked how it was possible
to invest in this form of community. Indonesian scientists and
activists worked under the constraints of turn-of-the-twenty-first-
century biosociality, including new forms of ethical scrutiny and
scientific and administrative rationality. The Cold War and the
transnational turn away from community formed on the basis of
labor and toward communities of identity was a second milieu that
made indigeneity possible. Identitarian communities have fit into a
variety of political projects and exhibited radically divergent out-
comes, from the tragic to the liberational.
In our analysis we have developed the idea of indigeneity as a form
of rationality involving an activation of past and present political con-
ditions, rather than a cultivation of ideal historical communities.
But maybe indigeneity is both of these. As Rendra writes in his dia-

lectical ending to The Struggle of the Naga Tribe:40
Defending life brings serenity

Yesterday and tomorrow are today
Disaster and good fortune are the same
Horizons beyond us
Horizons within us
Uniting in the soul
Notes
1. Tania Li, ”Marginality, Power, and Production: Analyzing Upland

Transformations,” in Li, ed., Transforming the Indonesian Uplands (Amster-
dam: Harwood Academic, 1999).
2. Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales
of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Toby A. Volk-
man, “Visions and Revisions: Toraja Culture and the Tourist Gaze,” Ameri-
can Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 91–108; John Pemberton, On the Subject of
“Java” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
3. Susi Yuliati, S. Akbar, Y. Hutabarat, C. Mohammad, Salahuddin,
Laporan Studi System Pengetahuan dan Teknologi Pemanfaatan Tumbuhan dan
Hasil Laut: Penelitian Etnobiologi Kepulauan Togian (Report on the study of
knowledge systems and the useful technology for using plants and sea
resources: Togean Island ethnobiology) (Depok: Yayasan Bina Sains Hay-
ati Indonesia, 1994).
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. Ibid., p. 15.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 16.
10. Nicholas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11. Yuliati et al., note 3.
12. Government of Indonesia (GOI), Law 24/1992: Spatial Planning
(City & Press, 1992)
13. Emily Harwell, “Remote Sensibilities: Discourses of Technology
and the Making of Indonesia’s Natural Disaster,” Development and Change
31, no. 1 (2000): 307–340.
14. Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods Are These?: Counter-mapping For-
est Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27, no. 4 (1995): 383–406.
15. Charles Zerner, Legal Options for the Indonesian Forestr y Sector (Ja-
karta: Minstry of Forestry and UN FAO, 1990).
16. For example, to the question “How large should a park be?” John
Terborgh answers, “As a rough guide, the area should be the size needed
to sustain genetically viable populations of top predators”: Terborgh,
Requiem for Nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).
17. IFABS concept paper, “Participatory Spatial Planning in Togean

Islands,” Jakarta: IFABS, 1997.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 1.
20. Colin MacAndrews, “Politics of the Environment in Indonesia.”
Asian Survey 34, no. 4 (1994): 369–380.
21. Li, note 1; Tania Li, “Masyarakat Adat, Difference, and the Limits
of Recognition in Indonesia’s Forest Zone,” Modern Asian Studies, 35, no.
3 (2001): 645–676.
22. Zerner, note 15.
23. Arimbi Heroepoetri, ed., Proceedings of the Seminar on the Human
Dimensions of Environmentally Sound Development (Jakarta: Wahana Lingkun-
gan Hidup Indonesia [Friends of the Earth Indonesia], 1993); Sandra
Moniaga, “Toward Community-Based Forestry and Recognition of Adat
Property Rights in the Outer Islands of Indonesia,” in Fox, ed., Legal
Frameworks for Forest Management in Asia: Case Studies of Community/State
Relations (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1993).
24. JAPHAMA, ”Notulensi Pertemuan Jaringan Pembela Hak-Hak
Masyarakat Adat,” paper presented at Lokakarya JAPHAMA, January 15–
18, 1998.
25. Stefanus Djuweng and Sandra Moniaga, ”Kebudayaan dan Manu-
sia yang Majemuk. Apakah Masih Punya Tempat di Indonesia?” Konvensi
ILO 169: Mengenai Bangsa—Bangsa Pribumi dan Masyarakat Adat di Negara—
Negara Merdeka (Jakarta: ELSAM & LBBT, 1994), pp. 5–17.
26. Li, note 21.
27. The acronym AMAN means “safe” in Bahasa Indonesia, which is an
intended irony for a sector that was very unsafe in Suharto’s Indonesia.
28. BSP-Kemala, “KMAN: Memecah Kebisuan, Merintis Jalan Menuju
Keadilan,” www.bsp-kemala.or.id/kman, accessed May 12, 2001.
29. Sandra Kartika and Candra Gautama, eds., Menggugat Posisi Masyarakat
Adat Terhadap Negara: Prosiding Sarasehan Masyarakat Adat Nusantara Jakarta,
15–16 Maret 1999 (Jakarta: Panitia Besama Sarasehan dan Kongres Masyarakat
Adat Nusantara 1999 and Lembaga Studi Pers dan Pembangunan).
30. Richard Robinson, Power and Economy in Suharto’s Indonesia (Manila:
Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers, 1990); Richard Robinson,
Indonesia: The Rise of Capital (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
31. Colonial planters brought thousands of Javanese, Indian, and Chi-
nese laborers to work in the plantations along Sumatra’s east coast. After
independence, many of the laborers and their families stayed in North
Sumatra. The children of these former plantation workers view themselves
as North Sumatran. For the history of colonial plantations in Sumatra’s
East Coast, see J. Karl Pelzer, “Planters Against Peasants: The Agrarian
Struggle in East Sumatra, 1947–1958,” Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk
Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde ‘S-Gravenhage—Martinus Nijhoff
(1982); J. Karl Pelzer, “Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrar-
ian Struggle in East Sumatra, 1863–1947,” Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk
Instituut voor Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde ‘S-Gravenhage—Martinus Nijhoff
(1978); Ann Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,
1870–1979 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Thee Kian
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Claiming Indigenous Community: Political Discourse and Natural Resource

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Alternatives 32 (2007), 73–97

Claiming Indigenous Community:

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe*

In late Suharto-era Indonesia, “indigeneity” became a solution

*Suraya Afiff, Karsa Institute; Celia Lowe, University of Washington.

74 Claiming Indigenous Community

When she was a girl growing up in Java, Laksmi, an Indonesian

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 75

and individuals. indigeneity has continued as an important rhetori-

Ethnobiology and Participatory Spatial Planning

The Togean Islands are a small archipelago in the Gulf of Tomini

76 Claiming Indigenous Community

subsist in the park, Indonesian scientists had to be able to describe

a study about the people’s uses of biological resources that com-

Their ethnobiological project engaged scientific disciplinarity

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 77

religion and belief, childhood, infrastructure, medicine, social or-

78 Claiming Indigenous Community

The scientists also wanted to make biodiverse nature and con-

In European thought from at least the eighteenth century, one

Most of what Togean people knew or did was not described as

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 79

an argument on behalf of Togean people that confronted the rea-

Indigenous knowledge has gained substantial attention since last

80 Claiming Indigenous Community

knowledge includes how indigenous communities use space (land

Hari’s question would be how to involve Togean people in the

Sustainable use and conservation of natural resources is a major

This new articulation of indigenous knowledge and sustain-

Hari: Traditionally the government has been planning from

The scientists were walking a tightrope between the possibili-

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 81

developing a solution that involved “assisting” the state from within

In the move from ethnobiology to spatial planning, Togean

The Emergence of Masyarakat Adat

Throughout the 1990s, Indonesians were rethinking relations

82 Claiming Indigenous Community

evident that, rather than a problematic essentialization, the masya-

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 83

indigenous communities’ knowledges, and traditional resource-

Even after the Indonesian state asserted jurisdiction and author-

The Indonesian environmental movement would link the in-

84 Claiming Indigenous Community

significant effort to elaborate a precise working definition of the

In Indonesia, the majority of people are indigenous society (bangsa

After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the masyarakat adat move-

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 85

Sosa People as Masyarakat Adat

On May 8, 1985, the assistant minister of agriculture, Hasyrul Hara-

86 Claiming Indigenous Community

however, the government granted investors close to Suharto, his

In 1984, a representative from the [state] company came to us.

Sosa people interpreted these kinds of ceremonies as affirm-

Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe 87

written contracts at the time. When the oil-palm companies failed

88 Claiming Indigenous Community