Frontier formation in an Indonesian resource site

This article examines the role of transmigration in the formation of a frontier in the Indonesian province of Sulawesi. The "KTM" (Kawasan Terpadu Mandiri – Integrated and Self-Sustained Settlement) initiative, which is funded by the government, provides the primary context. Using ethnographic methods, we identify the first Bugis migration in Indonesia that was funded by the government. The Bugis who settled in Baras were the only ones for whom the state had any involvement in the planning, sponsorship, or endorsement of their relocation from other locations like Sumatra or Kalimantan. We argue that the KTM of Baras has evolved from an agricultural frontier to an economic frontier and, most recently, a frontier focussed on the core issues of political ecology. This focus has arisen because the settlement has taken on the characteristics of an intersection of various types of frontiers. Empirically, this intersection of frontier and the oil palm industry have contributed to transforming the north-western region of Sulawesi

Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology

Grounds of Conflict, Idioms of Harmony: Custom, Religion, and Nationalism in Violence Avoidance at the Lindu Plain, Central Sulawesi

Page range: 81-11

From Economic Actor to Moral Agent: Knowledge, Fate and Hierarchy among the Bugis of Sulawesi

Page range: 147-180Analysts of the Bugis, from Alfred Russel Wallace to Andrew Vayda, especially when concentrating on those Bugis living in the periphery outside their homeland of South Sulawesi, have often invoked predominantly economic motivations in explaining their migration decisions, livelihood choices, and other aspects of their interaction with the environment. This paper emphasizes instead the importance of their beliefs and values related to mobility, foregrounding the quest for various types of knowledge, often esoteric, that underlies various behavioral patterns. This quest is contextualized in terms of basic tenets of cosmology and aspects of ethnopersonality that contribute to Bugis evaluations of ways of acting, including a commoner ideology that contrasts with noble notions of hierarchy that are often presented (e.g. by Shelly Errington) as the basis of Bugis sociocultural structure

Impacts of marine protected areas on livelihoods and food security of the Bajau as an indigenous migratory people in maritime Southeast Asia

Over the last decade, the global conservation agenda has increasingly recognized mobility as an important livelihood and management strategy for indigenous people, acknowledging the need to secure their ongoing access to natural resources within territorial waters and transboundary regions. A growing policy framework exists to support equity, indigenous rights, access to natural resources, participation in management of conservation areas and compensation resulting from loss of access to resources. The rights of indigenous peoples, including sea nomadic or migratory peoples,1 were recognized in 1989 under Article 4 of the International Labour Organization Convention. Various resolutions, recommendations, declarations and principles, formulated at conservation meetings, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Parks Congress (WPC), have acknowledged the need to secure ongoing access for indigenous mobile and nomadic peoples to natural resources within local and transboundary protected areas in order to enable them to continue to hunt, gather and fish for both subsistence and income-generating purposes.