‘Only Gold can Become Hope’: Resource Rushes and Risky Conviviality in Indonesian Borneo

ABSTRACT

This paper intervenes in recent works that have put hope and affect at the heart of their analysis to study development dynamics, particularly the exploitation of mineral resources. Framing hope as a modality of connecting with the world, I explore how villagers affected by a gold rush in Indonesian Borneo constantly refined and reworked their hope in dialogue with human and non-human others to create an affective, corporeal, yet highly risky state of conviviality. Guided by my ethnography, I develop the concept of risky conviviality to capture the contradictions involved in people’s engagements with the promises and pitfalls of capitalist developments and foreground the affective, interpersonal aspect of these developments as ends in themselves. By revealing the affective, embodied nature of hope’s end-point and the profoundly relational character of both hope and its end-point, risky conviviality expands anthropological understandings of what hope entails in people’s engagements with capitalist endeavours.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• conviviality
• resource rushes
• modernity
• Indonesian Borneo

Acknowledgements

A draft of this paper was presented at the Department of Anthropology at Brunel University. The author grateful for the participants’ comments and constructive criticism. The author also thank Nils Bubandt and Ethnos’ two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments and suggestions how to improve the initial manuscript. Further writing and analysis was supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant (no. 758494).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 All names used in this paper are pseudonyms.

2 The abbreviation ‘K’ refers for the local Kapuas dialect, the lingua franca of Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan Province. All terms in Indonesian are marked with an ‘I’.

3 Seeing that the concept of modernity is beset with various analytical problems, I follow Frederick Cooper’s (2005: 115) advice not to dig into the debate of how to best define this term, but rather to ‘listen to what is being said in the world’.

4 The Ngaju are said to have never built longhouses (betang), but great houses that were also solidly built, and accommodated extended families (Avé and King 1986). The difference between longhouses and great houses remains unclear, since most people in contemporary Central Kalimantan speak of longhouses.

5 As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, dreams are omens that inform everyday practices (Dove 2011). Through dreams the spirit of a dead parent or ancestor may make a request to a living descendant, reveal magical knowledge, or hand on special skills and powers (Schreer 2016b).

6 An encounter with a seductive female spirit asking for gifts in exchange for her magical powers indicates access to a dangerous and illicit source of wealth and power.

7 In 1875, the Dutch colonial government endorsed the Domain Declaration (Domeinverklaring) for Southeast Borneo (Knapen 2001), based on which the Dutch took possession of all assumed wastelands, unless land ownership could be proved.

8 The National Planning Board (BAPPENAS) for instance uses a ‘Village Development Index’ (Indeks Pembangunan Desa, IPD) that classifies villages into less developed, developing, and developed; the Ministry of Home Affairs applies a ‘Village Development Evaluation’ (Evaluasi Perkembangan Desa) to monitor the progress of villages.

9 Similarly, Adrian Vickers (1991: 92) noted in his analysis of Balinese ritual texts that ramé was the ‘fundamental energy’ created by mass royal rituals during the 19th century. Leo Howe (2000) moreover remarked the Balinese disappointment, if events were not ramé, a phenomenon I observed repeatedly during weddings.

10 Roy Ellen (2015, pers. comm.) has equally heard elders in Seram criticising proposal for youth dance as ‘too ramai’. The same holds true for Funar villagers in East Timor (Bovensiepen 2016, pers. comm.).

Additional information

Funding

This study was financed by a doctoral research grant of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.