Indigeneity as a sphere of differences: State enclosure and counter-enclosure of rural spaces in Indonesia

Introduction

This paper proposes grasping indigeneity as characteristically spatial and demarcating socio-environmental landscapes. This framework is derived from analysis and comparison of various working discourses of indigeneity in Indonesia, drawing from my fieldwork as well as from other anthropological and historical works based on empirical materials. When we think about indigeneity, it is easy to recall a certain group of people who are culturally distinct, predating others in a given region, and who frequently face marginalization. Indigeneity is conceived as the salient criterion that we associate with this group of people, distinguishing it from others (Barnard, 2006). Governing institutions like the United Nations have persistently come up with such criteria, defining indigenous communities, for instance, in terms of those who are historically related to their territories from precolonial times and distinct from others who now settle on those territories (Göcke, 2013).

Works in anthropology focus on how this criterion emerges from differences. Situating their arguments against the conventional notion of indigeneity as an inherent property of those referred to as “indigenous,” anthropologists contend that indigeneity, as a distinctive cultural characteristic, arises from specific social formations and being distinguished from others (Merlan, 2009), similar to arguments on other cultural identities (Barth, 1969; Friedman, 2008; Keesing, 1989). In contrast, anthropologists conceptualize indigeneity through salient identifying features that are shaped by the relationships of indigenous groups with others, whether it be the state (Maybury-Lewis, 1997), international bodies (Muehlebach, 2001), or non-indigenous others (De la Cadena and Starn, 2007). Often, these relationships involve dynamics of hegemony and counter-hegemony (Burman, 2014). Indigenous communities which cannot escape such criteria strategically differentiate themselves in their struggle for recognition and special rights (Arizona et al., 2019).

I wish to expand on the above argument about indigeneity emerging from relations of difference. As this paper examines how indigeneity is articulated in Indonesia, we will discover that it is a matter of the production of space as much as a matter of inventing identity. Indigeneity, in particular, is a discourse invoked in the creation and maintenance of a sphere of differences, which encompasses not only the people of a specific locality but also the land and their unity with it. Within this sphere of differences, things are meant to be organized differently. Keeping it from being assimilated into generic modern spaces is considered inherently moral. ¹ The background against which this idea develops is the full spatial hegemony of the modern state, which threatens the preexisting living arrangements of rural communities everywhere. Indigeneity, to paraphrase Tsing (2020), develops as a promise of diversity of spaces without assimilation.

This can be seen in the fact that adat (meaning roughly custom or tradition), the word most associated with indigeneity in Indonesian, is most frequently used to challenge the state's and extractive capital's enclosure of territories where local communities seek resources to sustain their livelihoods (Henley and Davidson, 2007). This expectation of indigeneity typically carries with it the expectation that territories supposedly belong to the locals and should be managed in the way that they have historically been managed—sustainably and in harmony with nature (see also Duile, 2017). In other words, these territories should be left alone in the sphere of adat, fenced off from the moderns who seek to exploit them. Adat provides a counter-enclosure measure against state attempts to enclose rural territories. A similar imagery of indigeneity is also at the heart of many other critical affairs involving politics of spatial claim, ranging from the imposition of territorial supremacy over neighboring communities to climate funding schemes aimed at impeding deforestation.

Some readers may be reminded of Tania Murray Li's (2010) remarkable comparative ethnohistorical essay, which argues that indigenous collective land management, commonly viewed as representing the ancient nature of indigenous communities, emerged alongside capitalism rather than preceding it. In this essay, Li demonstrates how this tenurial formation was shaped by colonial governments’ insistence on protecting rural segments of the colonized population from the perils of the market. These governments, believing it was their duty to keep the indigenous communities intact, restricted land transactions between individuals that previously had been common, thereby making land ownership collective and inalienable in new ways. This eventually contributed to the creation of rural and indigenous groupings as they exist today across Asia, and I believe it to be a historical precedent demonstrating how discourses of indigeneity entail generating separate domains in countering modern sweeping enclosure of territories. Ironically, this shielding from the influence of state and capitalism alters rural social arrangements rather than preserving them. The actors pushing for this separation can also be anyone; the process does not necessarily need to involve communities themselves. In fact, as Li has shown, farmers of the indigenous communities may grow frustrated when restricted from participating in the wider commodities market or from buying and selling land.

I believe that the sphere of differences can be a more proportional framework for grasping the dynamics of indigeneity, and this is the argument I will make throughout this essay. As numerous studies on adat have emphasized, the articulation of indigeneity in Indonesia is closely tied to struggles for land control (Van der Muur et al., 2019), suggesting that the regional dynamics of indigeneity are primarily spatial. However, the way masyarakat adat (adat community) is consistently brought up in these struggles further indicates that it is effectively imagined as a bounded socio-territorial unity within which rules, norms, and ways of life are fundamentally different, and the influences of capital, state political control, or recent settlers have to be restricted or limited. Despite the struggle not always ending well, the opposing parties tend to address adat as an obstructing bubble as well, contesting it by scrutinizing the legitimacy of cultural differences contained within it. External interests wishing to hamper the transformation of rural landscapes, usually environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but more recently climate funders, also attempt to do so by strengthening the local sphere. They back not only the local communities’ claims to the land but also foster their societal differences with the generic modern others, even to the point of embellishing them.

Here, briefly put, the sphere of differences is the working imagery of indigeneity in Indonesia, the normative reference point, as well as the corridor from which related discourses or endeavors, cannot easily escape. At the very least, it is a concept that is useful to recall when dealing with the dynamics of the concept. As mentioned, the intuitive framing of indigeneity is as an identity. It is not without reason that Jonas Bens (2020) called identity framing the “straightforward theory” of indigeneity. Indigeneity immediately appears to us as the distinguishing attribute of a certain group of people. This approach has been criticized by Marxian analysis for being oblivious to the totality of social existence (Duile, 2023). What may appear to be independent and separate phenomena can actually be embedded in the making of affairs. In this respect, when we frame indigeneity as an identity, basing the analysis on a relational approach that treats it as constituted by relationships, we may nevertheless fail to grasp its inseparability from the politics of spatial imagining. The division between the distinctly indigenous and the generic modern is a ubiquitous feature of indigeneity discourses, but it does not only apply to the subjects. It also implicates space, and the separation process generates a distinct socio-territorial unity that is so captivating and enduring that important political projects are compelled to be carried out using its imagery.

The production of imagined indigenous space

Indigenous space itself has been the subject of numerous studies and has even become a field of scholarship. However, the direction of these studies diverges from the direction taken by indigeneity research, warranting a comparison. The exploration of indigenous space, particularly in the northern academic sphere, highlights how it is produced from indigenous ontologies, practices, and socialities (Dahl, 2012; Iralu, 2022; Miggelbrink et al., 2016). These elements cannot be easily accounted for within the settler framework or incorporated into its formation. Therefore, this scholarship gives equal attention to how indigenous space collides with the predominant settler space and how it is being reproduced amid various challenges (Burow et al., 2018; Dahl, 2012; Simpson, 2014). At the heart of this scholarship, the differences between indigenous and settler spaces are material and practical. It is a scholarship that corresponds to theorization of the social production of space, such as that of Lefebvre (1991) or de Certeau (1984), which treats space as “a practiced place” and is sympathetic to the decolonization project. Some scholars have indicated their commitment to dismantling subtle colonial legacies by making them visible through their writings (Iralu, 2022; Simpson, 2014).

On the other hand, key debates on indigeneity view it as constructed (Chua, 2008; Guenther et al., 2006; Livingston, 2007), although this phrasing may be somewhat crude. A more appropriate term, following de la Cadena and Starn (2007; see also Trigger and Dalley, 2010), would be that indigeneity is in the process of becoming, constantly negotiated with non-indigenous others, and takes on different forms in various localities. These theories share with Orientalism and other post-structuralist approaches the assumption that differences are constitutive (Said, 1978). This focus, shared by studies of indigeneity, is more relevant to this paper, seeing the concept as assembled in the present through juxtaposition rather than persisting from the past. The sphere of differences is constituted by imagined difference cast and maintained for practical and political reasons. This form of indigenous space emerges when juxtaposed to modern, standardized, and predominating representation of self and space. It exists simultaneously with what we consider the modern, rather than preceding it. Even if some of the representations of differences correspond to practiced actuality, the portrayal tends to be caricatured, focusing on and exaggerating contrasts with the modern. For instance, communal land tenure is constantly being romantically promoted as an exemplar of indigenous wisdom, despite the fact that it was often imposed top-down and there is often a preference to adopt a market in place where it is applied (Ellen, 1997; Li, 2010).

Interestingly, such a juxtaposition, which requires rendering indigenous space dimensionally commensurate with modern space before distinguishing between them, causes indigenous space to lose its actual singularity—a singularity that emerges from bodily and local social engagements with places. In eastern Indonesia, the customary practice of boundary drawing remains prevalent and serves as the working principle for territorialization in everyday life. Territories are demarcated by owners’ cultivated trees; ownership of the land is relinquished as soon as the trees die or are eradicated (Adam, 2010). This differs from the concept of ownership in the imagined sphere of difference, where possession is envisioned as enclosing a certain plot of land, not unlike the modern state's notion of land ownership. Another example can be seen among Seram's upland communities, where territories are marked by their association with livelihood activities or specific clans (Ellen, 1978). Living dispersedly, adjacent to areas where each clan is allowed to seek a livelihood in agreement with others, their territories are awkwardly translated within the modern cartographic framework. Their territories become disproportionately large in comparison to their sparse population, and this spaciousness is occasionally invoked in official claims (Central Maluku Subdistrict Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018). Similar situations are found across Indonesia and have repeatedly proven to be problematic for the government, as concessions granted for extractive capital or development projects overlap with these territories (Fujiwara, 2020).

Critiques have been raised against using indigenous space boundaries, particularly in modern cartographic terms where spatiality is precisely defined. The implications of these arguments align with what is being highlighted here. They suggest that such endeavors undermine the open and dynamic character of local resource tenure practices. Indigenous conceptions of space which maintain ambiguity and allow for easily redefined boundaries enable fluid intercommunity interactions and resource sharing. The introduction of rigid boundaries threatens this dynamic nature and fosters a problematic sedentary and bounded imagery of rural communities, portraying them as immobile and isolated (Fox, 2002; Peluso, 1995; Rundstrom, 1995; Sletto, 2009). Other frameworks, aware of the misrepresentation of everyday rural spatial practices in modern mapping, strive to be more responsive to their constant navigation and movement. For instance, they prefer the notion of places as nodes in a matrix of movement rather than as statically defined space (Roth, 2009). It is also clear that indigenous territories imagined within the framework of modern space are problematically sedentary. Communities that traditionally do not consider land as property to be demarcated, due to their engagement in nomadic or semi-nomadic living, are being classified as fixed to specific areas when we employ this conception of space.

Historically, the existence of indigenous space, as an idea arising from the juxtaposition with modern space, goes hand in hand with the existence of the modern state. Biolsi (2005), who examines the imagined geographies of American Indians who resist the nation-state's exercised sovereignty over them, immediately points out the adoption of the nation-state form as the initial context of their marginalization. The modern state asserts totalized territorial sovereignty and, as Benedict Anderson suggests compellingly, its claim is “fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory” (1983: 19). Everyone who inhabits the territory is to receive the same treatment as citizens, which, in terms of territorial ownership, means no one may hold traditional territorial privileges over others. The myriad histories upon which indigenous communities grounded their territorial claims have been replaced with a single historical continuity, namely the “empty homogenous time.” The American Indians themselves have created modular forms of indigenous space to contend with the occupation by the settler state. However, the modern concept of land ownership must be the guiding framework. As Bens (2020: 2) so compellingly notes, indigeneity is a paradoxical formation in which its claimants reject the state while depending on its recognition and apparatuses for the preservation of their rights.

This situation is illustrative of the emergence of hybrid modern-indigenous space in general. Faced with the ascendency of the modern state as a form of governance, where almost no plot of land remains uncontrolled and unclaimed, and where aerial mapping has become “the ultimate objective representation” (Kaplan, 2017: 138), communities with their own concept of territories have no choice but to resort to the predominant framework, demarcating and imagining their territories in a way that would allow them to gain political recognition (Lund, 2017; McDermott, 2000). Indigeneity, as a defining marker, assumes particular importance when it signifies the people who predate the modern state, yet are suddenly undermined by its swift and complete territorial control. This association links the emerging powerful institution—the state—to the inherently immoral act of appropriating what does not rightfully belong to it, which is necessary to compel people in the first place. Indigenous countermapping is the perfect example of how resistance to the predominant power entails acceptance of the predominant framework. In specific cases, the indigenous boundary drawing may be more intricate, although in general, it is a process of counter-enclosure to the state's flat control of land under its jurisdiction. There are cases, for instance, in which legal pluralism was the norm and advocates of indigenous land rights were colonial settlers and officials, including in Indonesia. This situation will be explained shortly.

Thonghchai Winichakul's (1994) seminal work on this theme offers a robust critique of hegemonic colonial mapping practices while also building on Benedict Anderson's theory. It is worth revisiting this work here as a further illustration of the violent displacement of preexisting spatial frameworks. The way of thinking about the world in premodern Siam was as a multitude of centers, where each polity did not rule over a clear-cut territory but instead had a range of influence that could overlap with others. In places where these influences overlapped, authority might be shared, resulting in the coexistence of multiple overlords with different degrees of power. Scholars recognize such a power relation as a mandala, a concept distinctive to Southeast Asian polities. The modern mapping of sovereign space, which the Siamese royalties had to implement to comply with to protect themselves from surrounding colonial powers, not only diminished this multiplicity conceptually but also in reality; minor chiefdoms had to be conquered by the emerging Siamese state. Indigenous knowledge of political space was lost in the face of the abrupt ascension of modern geography. Winichakul (1994) is particularly clear in maintaining that the adoption of mapping technology represents a violent displacement of older conceptions of space, asserting that the process is far from gradual and smooth, as suggested by earlier studies. The fact that the indigenous actors did the mapping by themselves hardly means the colonial conception of space is being adopted voluntarily, since they had to follow colonial models to persist.

One specific remark made by Winichakul, in which he discusses the space of the past, particularly inspires the endeavor undertaken in this paper. He states, “the ability of modern geographic technology to invent the space of the past, to control it, and then to put it on paper has been praised” Winichakul, 1994: 154. This remark refers to a historical set of maps in a referred atlas, depicting the territories of various Siamese kingdoms in different time periods. Despite the popularity of the atlas and its captivating effect on readers’ imaginations, the depicted territories did not practically exist. According to Winichakul (1994), mapping creates memory, implying that the past is defined by present spatial knowledge. In relation to our topic, the assertion of indigenous territories does not represent the past. Rather, it creates a new form of space in which clearly enclosed territories are inventions of colonial states and the post-colonial world order. When the Huaulu of central Seram, Indonesia, boast about the vast extent of their territories across the region, they are likely recalling memories of their past movements during a time when enclosed territories were unknown and the region was sparsely populated. These memories, transcribed by local mapping officials who likely also revered the Huaulu as the ancient people of Seram, have created a novel form of enclosed territory instead of preserving their traditional conception of space. ² This vast enclosed territory now serves to remind the people of Seram about the historical predominance of Huaulu in the past.

I believe the threat of capitalist accumulation and commodification of lands, which Li (2010) points out as responsible for the emergence of indigenous collective land tenure, is also an important contributing factor to the emergence of indigenous space. It is not until land is actually enclosed and exploited by capitalistic means that enclosure becomes a real threat, leading to initiatives from farmers, activists, occasionally from officials, and others to make ownership communal, fixed to the local inhabitants, and inalienable. For example, in the case of the Dayak of Tanjung, Sanggau, West Kalimantan, it was after 1980, when a state-owned plantation corporation and some private companies cleared all the land to establish palm oil plantations, that the Dayak began to feel colonized and laid claims to the area as their customary land. The Dutch colonial government issued the first concession for the territory in 1899, but the early rubber plantation companies, which did not utilize the entire concession area, chose to coexist peacefully with the Dayak. They even encouraged the Dayak to cultivate profitable cash crops, to which the Dayak responded positively. The Dayak referred to the period before 1980 as the good time (Li and Semedi, 2021). In the absence of capital disruption, adat structures and land arrangements can be maintained despite adjusting to the modern state's tenurial setting (Van der Muur, 2018).

Regardless of the above sketch from the pre-1980 Tanjung era, capitalist accumulation may lead to enclosure, even when those engaging in productive farming activities are smallholders. Capitalism from below has occurred, even in Indonesian frontiers (Li, 2014); some farmers have been stripped of their lands while others accumulated them. This tends to happen in places where demographic pressure is higher and people lack the opportunity to be creative in exploring their surrounding spaces. Where indigenous land claims are possible, indigenous groups may try to reverse the trend by reclaiming land from entrepreneurial migrants, as this paper will demonstrate later.

Emerging indigenous spaces in Indonesia

As expected, in Indonesia, the colonial idea corresponding to indigenous space was conceived after the establishment of widespread political control by the Dutch. However, since the Dutch adopted a dual legal system to govern the incredibly diverse Indonesian archipelago, it was the Dutch who became preoccupied with developing a framework amalgamating modern and indigenous land law or allowed the two sets of laws to coexist—despite actually altering the local framework. The Dutch administration issued the Agrarian Act of 1870, which declared all land without a recognized civil code of ownership to fall under the direct control of the state. When rights over lands cultivated by local communities known as “not free” state land were granted, local communities were entitled to receive recognition money, although this amount did not equal fair value compensation (Harsono, 2003). Nevertheless, when the push for Netherland Indies legal unification flared at the beginning of the twentieth century, threatening the removal of indigenous tenurial rights, it was the scholars of the Leiden School who thwarted this plan. During the period following the Dutch's consolidation of power, local land control began to be perceived as enclosing, and rural communities were considered fixed to the territory, left to govern and be governed by their own arrangements. As the government regulation for the Netherlands Indies of 1854 stated, natives were to be subjected to their own “religious laws, institutions and customs” (Fasseur, 2007: 50). Meanwhile, Van Vollenhoven, one of the leading Dutch legal scholars of the early twentieth century, compared rural communities to local jurisdictions in Europe, which were obviously territorial. Furthermore, Van Vollenhoven maintained that Indonesia was divided into 19 customary law areas, consisting of a host of territorial and kin groups. Customary laws from each area contained a distinctive set of indigenous rights over land (Burns, 2007).

Notably, Van Vollenhoven would be criticized by Van Royen in a way that revealed the common modern sedentary bias in understanding and governing Indonesian indigenous communities (Burns, 2007). Van Royen turned to the Kubu, Anak Laitan, and Rejang of South Sumatra to scrutinize Van Vollenhoven's concept of the distinctive set of indigenous rights over land or beschikkingsrecht. ³ The Kubu were hunters and gatherers instead of peasants, meaning that they did not develop territorial-based communal rights. The Anak Laitan had only recently shifted to sedentary farming, and the argument that they already had exercised long-existing rights over land would not be valid. The Rejang had a history of a farming economy, but even they did not have customs that corresponded to every feature of beschikkingsrecht as elaborated by Van Vollenhoven. This is not to argue that this “right of allocation” or its elements had never existed in any form, but that the rights developed in response to economic circumstances. Therefore, Van Vallenhoven's claim that beschikkingsrecht reflected a legal-cultural phenomenon that manifested all over the archipelago was misguided, indicative of his ideology that equated indigenous groups with a European-based socio-legal unity.

After Indonesian independence, legal arrangements regarding indigenous land rights were revisited in the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law. However, this marked an ironic shift that would adversely affect the interests of indigenous communities, since the law heavily favored the unification of jurisdiction in agrarian arrangements. The law recognizes adat law as the agrarian law that applies to land, water, and airspace, but in the same article (No. 5), it is immediately asserted that adat law should not be in conflict with national and state interests. This means that adat law can be overridden at any time with the consideration of the broader interests, or as the term was frequently used from then on, “the national interests.” Seven years later, the Basic Forestry Act was passed, building on what was established as the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law. The Forestry Act declared forest land to be state-owned and bestowed upon the state the rights to issue logging concessions without compensating or consulting the affected local communities. Article 7 of the Basic Forestry Law even explicitly states that “ulayat [customary] rights shall not hinder the fulfilment of the aims of this Act.”

Hence, indigenous communities in Indonesia were politically undermined during the majority of the New Order rule from 1965 onwards. ⁴ The introduction of these sweeping laws also coincided with the new regime's developmentalist and growth-first orientation. A flood of extractive capitalist enterprises often locating their operations adjacent to indigenous communities’ living spaces, adversely affecting traditional livelihoods or even driving those communities away. When agrarian conflicts occurred, especially with logging, mining, or plantation companies, or with state officials, indigenous communities could be easily dismissed with the claim that their territories belonged to the state. Plantation surveyors told local villagers in South Kalimantan, whose fallowed swiddens and planted orchards overlapped with the concession area, “Indonesia owns this land, not you” (Tsing, 2002: 127). Although communities could obtain temporary land use rights through informal negotiations with local government officials, and local land arrangements could be reproduced if no development projects or intrusion of capital took place (Acciaioli, 2007; Lee, 1997), most remained deeply vulnerable to land appropriation.

Early on in the New Order period, indigenous communities were unable to organize resistance or assemble a broader network of support due to state oppression, a lack of resources, and a lack of momentum. Nevertheless, there was an underlying urgency to assert the claim of indigenous space as a counter to the intensifying state enclosure of rural lands. A satirical 1975 play directed by W.S. Rendra, titled The Struggle of the Naga Tribe, captured this urgency very well. The Naga tribe is described as an isolated indigenous community that has carried on a nature-oriented lifestyle inherited from their ancestors. The play focuses on the endeavors of the son of the tribe leader, along with his foreign friend, to protect the Naga tribe's village from a mining project. Due to criticism of the government and its modernization program, the play was banned. First staged in 1975, the play predated the rise of indigenous movements in both Indonesia and other parts of the world. Rendra, more of an artist rather than an activist, was nevertheless inspired by his sympathy for indigenous people.

The opportunity to articulate the claim for indigenous space in Indonesia came with the rise of transnational indigenous movements and networks in the 1980s, coinciding with a decrease in NGO monitoring due to international pressure (Moniaga, 2007). This development of transnational indigenous movements and networks was a response to several high-profile conflicts around the world between indigenous people and development projects and extractive investments (Gray, 1998). Recognizing the emancipatory potential of the indigeneity discourse, circles of NGOs, even in regions where the political concept of indigeneity was still largely unknown, adopted it in their campaigns and advocacies. This included Indonesia, where the momentum was being seized by environmental NGOs which typically advocated for rural communities victimized by corporations and government land grabs. At this juncture, Indonesian civil society movements also began using the term masyarakat adat to advocate for indigenous people. ⁵

The period following emergence of the New Order was one of democratization and liberalization, known as Reformasi, starting from 1998. When it comes to the period's indigenous policy achievements, that time is best described as a mix of hope and disappointment. Democratization gave the indigenous movement the chance to influence policy-making and to mobilize the masses in ways never seen before. However, more recently activists feel they have hit a wall, unable to pass laws that protect fundamental indigenous rights (Bedner and Arizona, 2019). The grassroots reality is grim, with rising commodity prices since the late 2000s. This trend has led to a boom in palm oil plantations, with intensifying conflicts and land grabs throughout the archipelago. These developments mean that the discourse of indigenous space continues to prevail, fueled primarily by the hazard posed by extractive interests along with the new developmentalism, as the government focuses on inviting more and more investments and increasing infrastructure development.

For rural communities with limited legal and political means to defend themselves (Afrizal and Berenschot, 2022), and for NGOs trying to support their stakeholders, adat becomes the avenue through which they can act on grievances caused by the enclosure or expropriation of rural land. It serves as a hub through which connections are made with a wider political network and is occasionally capable of disrupting ongoing projects that harm communities (Berenschot et al., 2023; Li, 2000a). The establishment of AMAN (Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago) in 2000 holds significance as it evolved into a pivotal lobbying group and resource network for the indigenous groups it represents. AMAN's stance is noteworthy here; during their inaugural congress, they proclaimed their refusal to recognize the state if the state did not acknowledge them. However, they subsequently utilized state-recognized judicial and legislative avenues extensively to advocate for indigenous people (Afiff and Rachman, 2019).

While adat, in this respect, is instrumental, it still hinges on the ideology of differences. In many instances of rural land conflict, the clash is reduced to conflict between the indigenous communities and powerful institutions or corporations seeking to seize land. Significantly many of these conflicts affect more than just one community or ethnic group; they also impact the recent settlers who are equally, if not more, invested in resisting plantation expansion or government projects. Places that become associated with indigenous space are actually inhabited by various communities. In some cases, the affected indigenous groups are relatively new to the area, and their own communal history acknowledges this recent arrival. Yet these nuanced details fade away due to indigenous reductionism. What remains is a straightforward but salient opposition—the relentless and insatiable expansion of modern development against the marginalized indigenous people. Moreover, not only is the related territory linked to the indigenous group, but the indigenous group may also develop a sense that the territory exclusively belongs to them, despite contradicting their previous concept of space. In the next step, groups begin to demonstrate and emphasize their cultural differences, as will be depicted in the next segment.

Doing counter-enclosure, becoming indigenous

An illustration of indigeneity and indigenous space-in-the-making can be seen in the way the Lindu people have become the adat community of Lore Lindu in Central Sulawesi, as part of a massive resistance to a government mega-project. In 1988, the Governor of Central Sulawesi announced plans to build a hydro-electric power station that would flood thousands of hectares of the Lore Lindu National Park. This meant thousands of residents would have to be relocated. According to Sangaji (2007), one of the activists heavily involved in advocating for local residents, NGOs became involved following the announcement of the plan and organized the people to take action against the project that would displace them. NGOs informed residents of their rights and encouraged them to specify local natural resources as under their customary control. Within a few years, the Lindu people began asserting themselves as masyarakat adat Lindu. They told NGOs that they would choose death rather than being separated from their ancestral lands.

There are several facts that should interest us. The Lindu were only one among several communities to be affected by the project. Around Lake Lindu, there were also a large number of Bugis people from South Sulawesi and other non-Lindu settlers who also participated in the fierce rejection of the dam construction. However, the protest became associated primarily with the Lindu, who had gained a reputation as the ancient people of the land. Despite the rarity of media opposition to the government in Indonesia, media coverage at the time focused on how the project would sever the Lindu from ancestral lands and result in the loss of their traditional ties with that land (Li, 2000a: 15–20). It was the Lindu who were brought to Jakarta by NGOs to speak with ministries and parliaments. The campaign succeeded in cancelling the entire hydro-electric scheme. Yet according to their own oral history, the Lindu themselves arrived in the region relatively recently. When the national park was first established, and local inhabitants were removed from the part of the area where they traditionally sought their livelihoods, the Lindu did not take part in the resistance. This was because the appropriated territory, upon which other local people engaged in collecting and farming forest commodities, did not hold much economic significance to the Lindu themselves (Sangaji, 2007).

When Acciaioli (2001), who conducted his doctoral fieldwork in the area during the 1980s, returned to Lindu in 2000, a Lindu friend commented on the renewed plan to construct a hydro dam, drawing parallels between the local situation and that of the indigenous communities in the Amazon. Lindu now identified themselves with the previously unfamiliar transnational archetype of indigenous peoples, fighting to remain on and keep their ancestral territory. The Lindu developed and embraced this identity through their interactions with NGOs, as well as through continuous recognition of their marginalization by others, including the media and the government. The NGOs portrayed them as endangered indigenous people, and this representation pervaded the media. In documents presented to the public and to policy makers, the Lindu were depicted as having led an autonomous traditional life for centuries. There was minimal acknowledgment of the impact of Dutch rule or the plight of non-Lindu settlers living nearby. NGOs also facilitated meetings between Lindu and other rural communities affected by similar dam projects elsewhere in Java, creating opportunities to share experiences and develop a broader indigenous identity (Sangaji, 2007). Although the Lindu had previously asserted their ancestral land claims when settlers began arriving in the area much earlier (Acciaioli, 1989), it became evident in the 2000s that they had actually become the indigenous people imagined by the modern global mindset following the conflict of the 1990s.

This transformation speaks volumes about the process of indigenization. Rural communities become indigenous when the threat of enclosure looms and becomes a reality, and their adoption of an identity as the true people of the land can be initiated by others projecting it onto them. We should recall here that the indigeneity that emerges at such a juncture is an ideology as much as it is a resistance gambit. As an ideology, it forms a discursive terrain that involves various actors, hindering total control by any one party. Instead, ideological identity has to be enacted through constant role-playing and mutual acknowledgment between actors. It is interesting that the Lindu conflict was followed by an unprecedented resurgence of adat among the Lindu, who started to revitalize the adat institution after it had been greatly undermined under the New Order government. For instance, they now resort to customary authorities in local conflict resolution previously were handled by the police (Acciaioli, 2001). They also devised customary regulations to identify those settlers with more than 2 hectares of land and to reallocate land to impoverished Lindu individuals (Li, 2007). The invocation of adat for strategic purposes has led to its ascension as a normative reference in communal lives. Additionally, these communal normative references can feed back into assertions of group territorial rights, as communities demonstrate their unique and ancient ties, as bounded communities, with the land.

Other notable examples are the Dayak of Kalimantan and the Suku Anak Dalam of Jambi (also known as Kubu). Certain rural Dayak communities were initially swidden cultivators, whereas the Suku Anak Dalam were nomadic, making their livelihoods by collecting forest resources and hunting animals. Naturally, these groups’ concepts of space were distinct. What was considered property among the nomadic Suku Anak Dalam were trees instead of land (Forbes, 1885), and this was the case as well in some other Dayak groups (Peluso, 2005). Having to grapple with the expansion of extractive capital, these groups developed land ownership based on territorial enclosure, particularly after they associated with NGOs and embraced the rapidly spreading idea of indigeneity. The Suku Anak Dalam, whose living space overlapped with palm oil company territory, were expelled in the 1990s but later returned, living inside the company's concession area while claiming it as their adat land, alongside agricultural activists (Steinebach, 2013). The Dayak also faced constant intrusion from logging companies around the same time. During this period, the Kalimantan Review, a magazine published by the Ford Foundation-supported Institute of Dayakology Research and Development, consistently exposed the Dayak to news about how the state and companies appropriated their lands, establishing the concept of land as territorially owned and enclosed (Davidson, 2003).

Kalimantan Review, in particular, has succeeded in shaping the political consciousness of Dayak communities across Kalimantan (Davidson, 2007). The emerging realization of the Dayak as an indigenous group suffering removal from ancestral lands contributed to a series of violent episodes that resulted in the killing and expulsion of Madurese migrants, the shifting of important regional governing positions to the Dayak, as well as a wave of mass resistance against logging and plantation companies. Kalimantan Review, still published today, clearly sets the Dayak apart as an indigenous group distinct from the modern others. Its February 2010 issue published an article about how the principal values of the Dayak prioritize diversity and sustainability, collective cooperation, organic practices, ritual spirituality, effective processes, domestic subsistence, and local customary law. The magazine also includes Dayak folk stories, facts about Dayak languages, and information about local medicines, further highlighting its focus on instilling and maintaining a sense of cultural difference among the Dayak.

To provide a view of the process of indigenization from the standpoint of NGOs, whose interests clearly revolve around wresting territorial control away from the state, we can examine the role of the Ancestral Domain Registration Agency (BRWA). This initiative, established in 2020 by several agrarian and indigenous rights NGOs, aims to register indigenous community landholdings across Indonesia in response to inquiries from communities seeking to register lands and validate their indigenous status. BRWA's role is to verify the documents submitted by these communities and to conduct field visits confirming that lands in question are indeed customarily owned by them. In some exceptional cases, BRWA will take the initiative, as when the group moved to advocate for rural communities affected by the development of the new national capital in Eastern Kalimantan. BRWA began the visiting and recording process itself. Ultimately, if investigation and data collection go according to plan, BRWA will issue certificates attesting that the lands belong to the communities by custom, and the territories will be registered on the BRWA map. As of 2022, a total of 17.6 million hectares of indigenous land have been registered with BRWA. This project can be seen as a form of countermapping. However, it is also evident that the founders expect the initiative to prompt more widespread state recognition of customary lands.

The documents that communities have to submit for registration with BRWA are noteworthy. These include not only community history, territorial claims, and tenurial management, all expected when challenging the state's mapping; communities must also specify their adat laws and institutions. BRWA requires these documents to comply with Minister of Home Affairs Regulation Number 52 of 2014 on Guidelines for Recognition and Protection of Indigenous Communities’ Legal Rights, commonly used among NGOs to identify indigenous communities. The registered descriptions of adat laws and institutions often appear idyllic, impractical, and even extreme. For example, one of the adat laws listed in BRWA's registry system for the Lindu community is the prohibition on uttering profanity or inappropriate, insulting, and belittling words, considered to violate the harmonious relationship between humans and nature. On the other hand, the Sawoi Hnya in Papua has customary sanctions for serious transgressions like adultery, which may involve death sentences. The descriptions also make significant efforts to establish adat institutions as unique, emphasizing how community life is oriented toward communal interests and attuned to nature. The tenurial arrangements of the To Lindu are described as dual, so that land can be owned by individuals or by the community, but both forms are emphasized as being in harmony with nature.

Some readers may already suspect that the documentation process of adat laws is technically problematic, in the sense that those who carry it out already hold romantic or pragmatic a priori beliefs about adat. This is indeed the case, as evidenced by Zakiah's (2023) research. During the information-gathering process by BRWA, their staff spent only a few days among the communities. Staff used focus group discussions to gather community representatives to provide data about their customary territory, history, adat institutions, and laws, relying as well on interviews and field visits. As a result, what is recorded tends to reflect an imagined adat rather than the actual adat in action. Furthermore, the imagined adat is made to fit into predefined categories. The visited communities may not have effective present adat institutions or laws. In such cases, BRWA staff will have to probe creatively to find answers, for instance, by asking if people remember any adat laws practiced in the past. The information about the adat of the past can also be an invented memory but will be used as an indication of the existence of customary institutions and laws. It is a process of indigeneity construction as much as it is inquiry about adat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, BRWA staff, consisting of people who are trained in social research, are aware that they engage in a problematic process regarding knowledge collection. However, they believe it must be done to help rural communities protect their living spaces. The existence of historical adat is considered necessary to assert contemporary belonging and attachment to the area. In the face of the modern state's flat control over space, assertion of difference becomes a claim to territorial belonging and may spark for some members of visited communities the first consciousness about the need to protect their adat and territories. Interestingly, there was an instance where a visited community in Mentawir, East Kalimantan, refused to be identified as masyarakat adat using the name of the indigenous ethnic group (Zakiah, 2023). They expressed concern about the potential risks associated with such identification because indigenous and settler groups have coexisted in the community for a long time. There was concern that such a label would imply the indigenous group's exclusive possession of the area and create potential disruption of community relations. The name was eventually modified to incorporate the settlers as well. I believe this response is noteworthy, a recognition that declaration of indigeneity is easily seen as an act of enclosure, or more precisely, counter-enclosure. There is fear of disrupting established egalitarian social ties, especially for groups with weaker claims of indigeneity, potentially weakening their access to land and resources and introducing more competition.

Thus, NGOs identify indigeneity as a matter of spatial politics, and in the process, cultural differences are highlighted to assert territorial rights. This becomes even clearer when we consider local NGOs’ connection with global environmental funding. Indonesian indigenous NGOs were initially established through the initiatives of environmental NGOs (Moniaga, 2007), and they continue to maintain affiliations with them. This alignment is expected because transforming state-controlled space into indigenous space is considered beneficial for conservation purposes. Part of adat cultural difference is that indigenous communities are believed to utilize the land sustainably. Consequently, NGOs hold that jurisdiction over land should be transferred from the state to adat community, making it inalienable as well. Recently the idea of entrusting care of the forest to indigenous people has gained more global traction due to growing climate urgency. Within certain circles of NGOs and international donors in Indonesia, I have observed a push to secure tenurial land rights for indigenous communities with the clear purpose of halting deforestation. Of course, the notion that intact forests are best preserved under the control of indigenous people is problematic. Many indigenous communities live in remote areas with limited access to necessary infrastructure, making it challenging to capitalize on forest resources or to participate fully in the monetary economy (Demmer and Overman, 2001). Other communities, better positioned, do utilize the forests—to grow commodity crops, deeply disappointing the conservation actors in the process (Li, 2007).

The anxiety of counter-enclosure

The anxiety of counter-enclosure, like the one felt by people in Mentawir, is prevalent, and people hold it for various reasons. For the Indonesian state, counter-enclosure has been a clear threat to its sovereignty since the very beginning. Officials have consistently denied customary land rights, notably by disregarding the distinctions between indigenous people and other Indonesian citizens. In a sense, they adhere to the idea that without cultural differences, without indigenous identity, there is no indigenous privilege to enclose land. In a 1993 NGO forum on indigenous people and customary land rights, Minister of State for Environment, Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, argued that the term “indigenous,” as used in the West, is inappropriate in Indonesia, because the country is governed by and for indigenous people (Li, 2000b). Later, when a vote was called on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, the Indonesian government reiterated its argument that the concept of indigenous people is inapplicable since all Indonesians are indigenous and therefore entitled to the same rights. Despite voting in support of UNDRIP, Indonesia has avoided adopting it on a national scale or creating a binding legal framework to implement it to this day and is unlikely to do so.

The anxiety of counter-enclosure is undoubtedly felt among the Butonese of Maluku, the subjects of my doctoral fieldwork in the late 2010s and early 2020s. That research provides us with a more detailed sketch of the issue. The Butonese are settlers in a region where the norm of inalienable land ownership is still upheld, although not consistently. Like other parts of Indonesia, this norm was imposed by the Dutch, regardless of whether it is considered the manifestation of pristine Malukan tradition today. In order to compensate for the labor of local populations commonly deployed in clove growing and other cash crop production, the Dutch allocated lands to farmers to grow staple crops. The land was allocated to a customary governing institution they appointed, namely the dati (Benda-Beckmann and Taale, 1992).

Later, villages that had similar established governing institutions were given jurisdiction over surrounding smaller enclaves for effective governance, resulting in the authority of tenurial management becoming centered around these customary villages (negeri adat) (Manse, 2021). In the face of constant population influx of Butanese from Sulawesi, such a tenurial arrangement persists, making the newer Butonese settlers unable to obtain land. Nevertheless, due to the scarcity of population, the need to make the lands more productive, and the need to establish protective buffer zones against enemy raids (Tihurua, 2019), the negeri adat of Maluku allowed an earlier generation of Butonese migrants to establish enclaves around them. Today, Butonese are still unable to own the land they cultivate, making them in limbo as permanent guests who must constantly seek permission to cultivate land.

As expected, this kind of arrangement is not ideal for the Butonese. They escaped from the harsh living conditions of their original islands, which are mostly unproductive coral soil, in order to lead better lives in Maluku. They are known to be submissive, hard-working, and have generally coexisted cordially with the local population. Although many of these Butonese were born in Maluku and are now unable to speak the languages of their home islands, they are still regarded as strangers living on others’ land. This situation certainly did not improve with the outbreak of the 1999–2002 Maluku sectarian conflict. Although primarily framed as a religious conflict pitting Christians against Muslims, resentment toward the migrants played a significant part in fueling tensions. As a result, many Butonese were expelled from Maluku, only to return with a bitter realization that they were never truly considered as Malukans despite all the time they had lived there.

What is noteworthy about the perpetual tension between the Butonese and their indigenous hosts is how each group represents the other. Their indigenous hosts, including the local Malukans and the residents of negeri adat under whose jurisdiction Butonese enclaves fall, perceive the Butonese and other migrants as threats, a group which may foster land appropriation by the Indonesian state. This fear of Indonesian appropriation emerged early on, following the departure of the Dutch colonial administration. Many middle-class Malukans are Christians, and churches hold a central role in the community. Additionally, a significant portion of the local population thrived as officials in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. The sudden shift of state power into the hands of Muslim elites in Java triggered anxiety among the Malukans. This led to an early period of resistance and the declaration of the RMS (Southern Maluku Republic) in the 1950s, during which Muslim migrants were often viewed as Indonesian spies (Chauvel, 1990).

Later, the indigenous Malukans, particularly the Christians, consistently felt marginalized and uneasy about assimilation into Indonesia. Indonesia's centralistic policy-making, with significant local effects, such as the Village Law that replaced governing adat structure everywhere, worsened this feeling. The fear was especially felt when communities contemplated the possibility of being ruled by recent settlers, such as the Butonese or Javanese (Lee, 1999). A national transmigration policy, which aimed to move people from overpopulated Java to outer islands, was seen in a similar light. The policy relocated predominantly Muslim Javanese into rural areas of Maluku, leading to a sudden enclosure of these areas from the indigenous population (Al-Qurtuby, 2016; Platenkamp, 2001). This fear of annihilation became evident during the sectarian conflict. Not only were rumors rampant about how the Indonesian government was plotting to estrange the Malukans from their own land, but Malukan Christians also began to interpret the conflict as signs of the end times, further fueling the intercommunal violence (Bubandt, 2001). In the midst of the violence, indigenous communities started targeting settlers in Maluku for expulsion. This act can be seen as a counter-enclosure to the state's enclosure of Maluku.

While the indigenous Malukans attempt to defend Maluku territory from outsiders, and the adat governing bodies, which survived the New Order's Village Law, continue to make this possible, the discontented Butonese align themselves with the Indonesian state and subscribe to the notion that land in Maluku belongs to the Indonesian government. The Butonese have even adopted state symbolism when expressing their resentment at being constantly treated as outsiders without entitlement to the land. They argue that the adat of Maluku villages should comply with the 1945 Constitution of Indonesia (UUD 1945). Additionally, they emphasize that the land should be used for the welfare of the people, unwittingly citing Article 33 of the constitution, ⁶ which has long been debated by legal scholars and NGOs supporting indigenous rights. These sentiments were often expressed by my rural Butonese interlocutors, if not always articulately.

Siding with the Indonesian state on the subject of national enclosure is found as well, for instance, among the Bugis in Lore Lindu. During the time Li was there in 2003, the Lindu were about to appropriate the lands cultivated by the Bugis. The Bugis obviously did not respond positively. They noted that as citizens of Indonesia, they have the right to move at will and to prosper through their labor. The lands, after all, were abandoned earlier by the Lindu, and the Bugis have gone on to make them productive (Li, 2007). This alignment with the state was certainly shared among the Butonese in Ambon, Maluku, in the 1970s, who contested attempts by nearby negeri adat residents to claim a share from the crops they grew (Benda-Beckmann, 2007), something that likely continues happening to this day. These Butonese were arguing firstly with the negeri adat residents, and later in court, that the lands they used belonged to the state. Such tensions should be expected, as migration is the norm instead of the exception in social lives around the archipelago. It is common for multiple communities arriving at different times to coexist in an area, and the order of arrival serves as the basis for ranking the privilege of resource access among these communities (Bellwood, 2006; Fox, 1995, 2009). The transnational discourse of indigeneity is built on this older form of precedence but has mutated, resulting not only in the tendency of counter-enclosure by the earlier settlers but also in the later settlers’ preference for state territorial control.

In contesting the indigenous Malukan claim of territorial control, the Butonese often scrutinize their opponents’ cultural distinctions as well. This is their way of asserting that the land where the Butonese live and work is not a sphere of differences, and that therefore indigenous communities have no more rights to the land than the Butonese. This is evident in the common mockery Butonese of North Seram direct toward the Wahai, their host negeri adat. Butonese hold a grudge due to their long-standing treatment as freeloaders. Butonese also perceive the Wahai as lacking their own culture, noting that they only speak Ambonese Malay, and no longer have their own language, essentially undermining their claim as the true indigenous people of the area. As one Butonese once told me, “mereka orang tidak jelas!” (They are people with unclear origin!)

In a sense, the anxiety of counter-enclosure, primarily expressed by later settlers, actually highlights the conservative nature of indigeneity in Indonesia as well as the progressive nature of the modern nation-state. State enclosure ideally allows rural lands to be equally accessible to both the earlier and later settlers, the “native” communities and the migrants. As much as it is easy to sympathize with indigenous communities, especially when they experience land grabs by powerful and ruthless institutions without historical connection to the land, the indigenous counter-enclosure may adversely affect others who depend on rural lands for their livelihoods. These negative effects and conservative nature can be rather inconspicuous when we envision counter-enclosure as a maneuver against the state. However, they become clear when we consider the risk of later settler communities losing their lands, being treated as permanent outsiders and freeloaders, or even being expelled.

Conclusion

This article argues for a reassessment of how we think about indigeneity around the world through cases of closure and counter-closure of rural lands and communities in Indonesia. The discourse, or at least one of its predominant forms, invokes space as much as it claims cultural difference as identity. It emerges alongside the sudden—and often brutal—total territorial enclosure by the modern state. Although resistance against this mass appropriation comes in various forms, the resistance which articulates premodern indigenous unity with the land becomes one that swiftly captures the global imagination, prompting many agricultural conflicts to be simplified into the struggle between the dying indigenous Others defending their space from the homogenizing forces of capitalism and the modern state. However, Winichakul is right when he mentions how indigenous knowledge of political space is the ultimate loser of this process (1994). Despite such resistances carried out in the name of preserving distinct traditional socio-territorial unity, movements and events are guided by modern forms of territorial control, ones that enclose space and supersede the indigenous conception.

There are at least two dominant forms of the modern-indigenous space framework in Indonesia, and both suggest that the emergence of indigeneity pertains to the imposition of spatial enclosure, despite different assemblages of actors involved in each affair. The first emerged much earlier, following the establishment of Dutch power. It mainly stems from the colonial imagery of cultural differences among “the natives,” and the perceived need to preserve them. This became its own ideology during that period. Colonial officials found themselves both pushing for and resisting flat territorial unification. Ironically, the idea began to fade in the Indonesian post-colonial state, as the state favored the unification of jurisdiction to encourage extractive capital investments. The second framework is essentially what we grapple with today, and it has been rapidly multiplying throughout the globe through the transnational network of NGOs. It is a strategy to wrest territorial jurisdiction away from the state in order to protect both land and people from the rapidly expanding intrusion of capital. This framework is employed by rural communities, activists, and environmentalists alike.

It must be remembered that the enactment of indigeneity is simultaneously pragmatic and ideological. It may be initially adopted as a tactic of counter-enclosure, but it will also develop into something much more, as cultural differences become normative references. Along with their resistance, rural communities are compelled to embrace their indigenous attributes (real or imagined, lived or simply ascribed) to declare their differences, and thus their connections to, and rights of access to, the land. Further exploration of this theme will be interesting, as many Indonesians have previously abandoned traditional practices in turning to Christianity (Ardhianto, 2022; Grzimek, 1991), as a result of state intrusion (Acciaioli, 2001), or because traditional practices are perceived as impractical (Ellen, 2014). The narrative of rural conflicts—full of ambiguities—becomes homogenized. Those who are anxious about counter-enclosure dismiss indigenous cultural differences or side with the state. Additionally, the fact that indigenous communities engage in modern lifestyles, clearing supposedly pristine forests to grow cash crops, may profoundly dishearten conservationists.

This paper focuses on ethnographic and historical examples from Indonesia. Further rigorous comparative work is needed to establish its framework as a more compelling general argument about indigeneity. There are important historical differences between Indonesia and other parts of the world, some of which have been hinted at. For example, Indonesia cannot easily be classified as a settler state like those found in the global north. Indonesian indigeneity is often linked to national identity or, more commonly, to province-level identity, since the indigeneity discourse often aligns with issues of political decentralization (Tyson, 2010). This is in stark contrast to the situation in other countries, although there may also be parallels in still other parts.

A point of commonality, however, is the way the violent globalization of the nation-state has forced everyone to adopt the state's conceptions of space, just as it has created resistance everywhere. Some of the works cited here (Anderson, 1983; Biolsi, 2005; Winichakul, 1994) offer telling comparisons. The erection of spheres of difference is a maneuver that rural communities everywhere must undertake to counter spatial assimilation and associated cultural obliteration. There is good reason to believe that the deployment of indigeneity as an effort toward counter-enclosure is both a widespread and local phenomenon with distinct manifestations wherever it occurs.