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Abstract
Smallholders are key political figures produced or reproduced in resource frontiers where new forms of property or land use emerge. In this paper, I present what I call the ‘smallholder slot’, as read off state practices and small-scale miners’ and farmers’ histories of work in plantations and mines in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The smallholder slot has been transformed through changes in patterns of land use and land control, racialized and violent land politics, and geological and geopolitical accidents that have located smallholders in sites of commodity booms. By expanding the definition of ‘agrarian’ beyond agriculture, I show that the smallholder slot can be occupied by small-scale gold miners as well as small farmers. It is a powerful discursive category that has had critical material, symbolic, and political effects.
Notes
1 ‘Nek’, or ‘Nenek’ is an honorific used to indicate a person is a grandparent.
2 Their then-small family was one of the 40 randomly selected households I interviewed about land use and property relations in 1991.
3 Rides like these, through landscapes of inches-deep sand and hills of tailings, the round-shaped canopies of young oil palms visible in the distance, surrounded the sandscape, creating sharp contrasts with scenes of rubber plots, fruit gardens, small houses and rice fields lining other rural roads of MonSingSel. In the course of this research, I had many guides. Simon, Afong and Julius traveled with me to MonSingSel's many sites of active gold mining for seven months in 2014–2015, collecting individual, plantation and mining site histories. The life histories miners told more often than not linked their livelihood histories to farming and mining. In addition to individual farmers and miners, we talked with formal, informal and customary leaders in the villages and urban neighborhoods where mines were located, mining bosses, financiers, dredge manufacturers and importers. We interviewed most of the medium to larger scale investors in gold mining in the eastern areas of MonSingSel and followed these key actors to Ketapang District where a number of them had moved most of their operations. We also interviewed former miners about their transitions between mining and farming, trying to understand their household livelihood and employment histories. Julius, Julia and I stayed in a gold mining camp in Ketapang for three weeks of this time, in the back of a MonSingSel friend's shophouse, conducting interviews almost non-stop through blistering heat and heavy rains, learning about the life in the mining camp and various settlements in and around an oil palm transmigration area from crew bosses, shopkeepers, sprayers and diggers – most from MonSingSel. We met many of the itinerant traders selling vegetables, clothes, diesel oil and drums of water, and learned of the local entwined histories of plantations and mines in that region. During this seven months of fieldwork, I traveled all over MonSingSel with Regina, Afong and Simon to conduct in-depth interviews with historical actors who experienced and helped build the landscape of the region: through forced and voluntary engagement with the Indonesian military, to the contractor who cleared the land and built transmigration houses, to bankers, loan agents, rubber and oil palm farmers, plantation employees, mining entrepreneurs of all types, origins, and scales, pit sprayers, shaft diggers, crew cooks, ‘canteen girls’, and spirit mediums. The checkered histories of surface cultivations and subsurface extractions presented here provide a taste of what we pieced together from their stories. These seven months of fieldwork built on two and a half decades of close association with people in MonSingSel.
4 I do not use Lahiri-Dutt's term ‘extractive peasants’ for two reasons. First, all smallholders referred to in this contribution are integrated into a capitalist economy as commodity producers – thus differing from at least some of the ‘peasant’ extractors on whom she focuses. Second, the ‘smallholder’ slot here is a relational category, comparing actors in mining to those in industrial agriculture and small-scale farming.
5 Robert Elson, in Citation1997, declared ‘the end of the peasantry in Southeast Asia’, only to see it resurge through a panoply of self-proclaimed ‘peasant’ and ‘indigenous’ movements within and across national and subnational borders after the Asian Economic Crisis. At the time, the importance of the peasant as a politically potent discursive – and globalized – category was illustrated to me by the fact that agrarian activists in Indonesia, for example, decided to translate ‘petani’ into English as ‘peasant’ rather than ‘farmer’, because the category ‘farmer’ had been adopted by agribusiness leaders (Peluso, Afiff, and Rachman Citation1999; Rachman Citation2008).
6 These rural-by-definition subdistricts (kecamatan) in West Kalimantan are: Samalantan, Montrado, Selakau Timur, and Lembah Bawang. Note that there are no explicit boundaries for MonSingSel. The ‘map’ of it in is inclusive of the boundaries of these subdistricts, but it is a region that I constructed.
7 These 17 villages now comprise Singkawang Timur (East), Singkawang Barat (West), Singkawang Utara (North) and Singkawang Selatan (South).
8 In the mid-eighteenth century, gold first attracted migrants from China to western Kalimantan. They settled in the interior spaces of MonSingSel, and many who married locally set up households and became miners and farmers at the same time (Irwin Citation1955; Jackson Citation1970). These first mining-farming smallholders and their descendants globalized western Borneo by bringing its subterranean wealth to global/regional markets. They not only brought home the gold and money they collected in the region of MonSingSel (the whole region then being referred to as ‘Montrado’; Yuan Citation2000; Somers-Heidhues Citation2003), but also constructed a settler landscape of mobile miners and farmers – smallholders by practice and definition – based on agrarian dreams that included productions and property in farming and mining.
9 These have been discussed by Peluso (e.g. Citation2008, Citation2009, Citation2016).
10 The word ‘canteen’ or ‘kantin’ (Indonesian spelling) is used to refer to a drinking establishment with ‘entertainers’ who sit with the men and encourage them to drink.
11 This affected the districts of Sanggau, Sambas and northern Pontianak.
12 They did allow one local Dayak man to marry a Chinese woman and live in the village. This was in part influenced by the way ‘ethnic’ or ‘racialized’ identities were decided under colonial rule: a child of mixed marriage ‘followed’ the identity of the father (Cator Citation1936) and most married women were assumed to ‘become’ (masuk) the ethnic identity of their husbands.
13 Parts of this section have been published elsewhere (Peluso Citation2008, Citation2009, Citation2016; Peluso and Vandergeest Citation2011) and are combined with new information I collected during the course of fieldwork in 2014 and 2015.
14 An Indonesian word that translates literally as ‘son of the soil’, and a way of indicating that all Indonesians are ‘indigenous’.
15 The estimate of evictees is Douglas Kammen’s (pers. comm., 2007). More than 52,857 hectares of land were abandoned during this period (‘Penertiban tanah-tanah pengungsi tjina di Kalimantan’ [Securing the land of Chinese refugees in West Kalimantan], manuscript in the author’s possession, dated December 1970, 13).
16 In many places, local pribumi had staked claims on land as soon as Chinese were evicted. Yet some local informants insist that the Special Forces and covert officers who came through the region before the Demonstrasi did not tell them that the Chinese were not going to be allowed to come back.
17 ‘Penertiban tanah-tanah pengungsi tjina di Kalimantan Barat’ [‘Securing the land of Chinese refugees in West Kalimantan’], manuscript in the author’s possession, dated December 1970.
18 President Suharto's ‘recognition’ of all non-Chinese Indonesians as ‘indigenous Indonesians’ rendered all of the over 600 language groups within the country instantly ‘indigenous’ to everywhere inside Indonesia (Li Citation2000). It is worth noting that while this discursive and policy move gave rise to a new racialization of rural land as the domain of pribumi, it also provoked the rise of the indigenous movement, which insisted on differentiating those groups they considered different than and colonized by the larger Indonesian ethnicities (especially Javanese, but in certain Indonesian islands the colonizers might include other large and mobile groups such as Bugis and Bataks). In other words, the making of the racialized smallholder slot I describe here led eventually to the rise of what Tania Li called the ‘tribal slot’ (Citation2000).
19 On the PPKR scheme in West Kalimantan, see also Penot (Citation1995), Potter and Badcock (Citation2007) and Peluso (Citation2009).
20 Some of these ‘mixed’ folks identified as Dayak – they lived under the radar after the violence, in villages, speaking local Dayak languages, and ‘becoming Dayak’. Unfortunately their stories are beyond the scope of this paper.
21 In other regions, where it spread a bit later, rubber was part of indigenous identity – for Malays and Dayaks; indeed, the crop experienced a number of identity transformations, from exotic to almost native as ‘jungle’ rubber (Penot Citation1995). It fit well with swidden cultivation in other regions (Dove Citation1996 and others).
22 The assumption nationally (promoted by both colonial and Suharto governments, and widely held by the army) was that Chinese were all rich entrepreneurs (Anderson Citation1983), but this did not fit the lived experience of most of West Kalimantan’s rural Chinese (Cator Citation1936; Coppel Citation1983). Chinese in Java had been forced to move to cities and towns during much earlier colonial times (Suryadinata Citation1978; Cator Citation1936).
23 Resettlement programs such as the Indonesian transmigration program would be considered land grabs today; but this project was implemented well before the term was coined.
24 In other parts of the province where mature tropical forests were still intact, transmigration settlements were carved out of newly designated state forest (hutan negara), (Brookfield, Potter, and Byron Citation1995).
25 At the same time, much wider areas than just MonSingSel had been the home spaces of people of Chinese descent in Sambas, Sanggau and Pontianak (rural) districts who were evicted. The PPKR project and PTPs XII and XIII extended through those rural districts as well.
26 I visited MonSingSel seven times between 1990 and 1998, and there was no question that villagers in general were unhappy with the Suharto regime.
27 There are two kinds of gold deposits: eluvial or alluvial placer deposits which are carried by water to settle on or just below the surface; and lode or vein deposits.
28 Soelistijo, Santoso and Suseno (Citation2014, 17) dispute this, claiming that PT MMM had a commercial production permit from the Directorate General of Mining.
29 Their mining engineers were also from West Java – like the experts and ‘engineers’ who had come to convince the village leaders of the region to join the transmigration scheme a decade earlier, and the Special Forces troops who searched the villages for Chinese. All were associated with the Suharto regime and considered ‘outsiders’ despite efforts to Indonesianize the character of the region.
30 The Indonesian pronunciation of the letters making up Eskade was an utterance of the consonants of Sekadau, the name of the market town where the machine shop (bengkel) that made the special dredge was located: Es = S; Ka = K; De = D.
31 In collecting oral histories in 2015, I found that the development and widespread use of the Eskade occurred before the more commonly known (today) small dredges called dompeng (after the brand name, DongFeng) began to be imported from China.
32 I was doing fieldwork nearby a few months after the attack. We rode by the burnt dredge, sitting in the middle of the manmade lake, a rusty testimony to the failed largeholder's efforts.
33 Other citations on the violence include: Peluso and Harwell (Citation2001), Petebang (Citation1998), Davidson and Kammen (Citation2002), Somers Heidhues (Citation2003).
34 In interviews years later, former managers still claimed it was the ethnic violence and not their own mismanagement that had ‘caused’ the company's demise.
35 Although some smallholders did not receive their titles for some 30 years after the PTP project began, the goal of titling the majority of the land was meant to be achieved in 2016, the state's deadline for auctioning off the remaining plots with debts outstanding.
36 Though in the late 1990s, Indonesia had become the world's biggest producer of plantation natural rubber, the crop was being taken up across Southeast Asia and southern China, as well as in Africa and elsewhere. Thailand took over as the world's biggest producer, and the world market was becoming saturated. In early 2009, the global price of rubber dropped; Indonesian rubber farmers were hurting. Food prices were rising and world rubber prices fell to radically low levels (Potter Citation2016; Cramb and McCarthy Citation2016).
37 Bengkayang (parts of Montrado, Samalantan, and Lembah Bawang), which broke off from Sambas district in 2000, Sambas (parts of Selakau Timur), and 17 villages that were previously part of Sambas and annexed into metro Singkawang with its expansion in 2001.
38 Post-decentralization Singkawang had sizeable tracts of land already in agriculture/agroforestry because of the annexation of 17 villages around the city's borders in 2001.
39 Anyone living in the vicinity can register to work on the plantation; wages were Rp 48,000 (about USD 4) per day in 2014, rising to Rp 72,000 (USD 5–6) per day in 2015.
40 The company calculates the farmers’ share of profits, but this is not done transparently (Li Citation2015).
41 In some ways, we can consider these West Kalimantan gold-mining areas to be governed by ‘shadow states’, as Erman (Citation2007) and Syarif (Citation2007) have argued for tin-mining areas in Bangka and gold in West Java, respectively.
42 ‘Bu’ or ‘Ibu’ is an honorific for a woman of childbearing age.
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Nancy Lee Peluso
Nancy Lee Peluso is Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy in the Division of Society & Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley. She is author or co-author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles; co-editor, with Christian Lund, of New frontiers of land control (Routledge, 2012); with Joseph Nevins, of Taking Southeast Asia to market: Commodities, people and nature in a neoliberal age (Cornell University Press, 2008); with Michael Watts, of Violent environments (Cornell University Press, 2001); and with Christine Padoch, of Borneo in transition: People, forests, conservation, and development (Oxford University Press, 1996, second edition 2006); and author of Rich forests, poor people: Resource control and resistance in Java (University of California Press, 1992).