A Mining Theme Park—Cultural Competition and the Politics of Identity Claims in an Indonesian Mining Town

Abstract

The Wallacea–Sawerigading Mining Park (Taman Tambang Wallacea Sawerigading) in the mining town of Sorowako in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has been created by the mining company whose operations dominate the landscape and the local economy. The theme park juxtaposes the distinctive flora and fauna, and the pre-colonial history of the region, with the modern mining operations, creating a thematic stamp for regional identity. This article discusses the park and related tourism and leisure activities to illuminate processes of identity formation and identity-based competition in this cosmopolitan town. The voices of the original inhabitants (the orang asli Sorowako—autochthonous people of Sorowako), who have deployed their resistance identity in articulating rights claims, today are in competition with multiple foci of identity-making—from the mining company, governments, and migrants to the mining region. The paper draws on the author’s long-term research (from 1977 to now) following the social transformations associated with the mine.

Keywords:

• Mining
• Rights
• Identities
• Tourism

Introduction

The Taman Tambang Wallacea Sawerigading¹ is a theme park in an unlikely place. Located in the mining town of Sorowako in the rugged interior of South Sulawesi Indonesia, on the edge of Lake Matano, it is a manifestation of the spread of cultural and heritage theme parks in Indonesia in the post-Suharto era of decentralised government (after 2000). In the mining town of Sorowako, the theme park and related cultural practices express an outburst of identity politics in the post-Suharto era. The quasi-clandestine expression of an autochthonous identity expressed by the people displaced by the mine from the 1970s is now in competition with a range of identity claims and sources of identity making in this complex social environment.

Indonesian Theme Parks

These parks take as their inspiration the Mini Indonesia Park in Jakarta. This was established by the wife of former president Suharto following a visit to Disneyland (Pemberton 1994); she saw the Disney model as a way to present Indonesia’s cultural diversity—albeit tamed versions—in the service of centre-dominated national unity (Acciaioli 1985). In this model, the nation is deemed to contain a set of discrete ‘cultures’, each represented by characteristic houses (and costumes)² (Schlehe et al. 2010). Paul Michael Taylor (1994) terms this the ‘nusantara concept’; it has become a standardised model of cultural display in Indonesia, a way of expressing authorised versions of constituent sociocultural identities that has been adopted by provinces and districts all over Indonesia. In South Sulawesi, for example, the Suharto-era provincial government established its own theme-park cultural microcosm, Sulawesi Selatan Dalam Miniatur (South Sulawesi in Miniature), whose representation strategy struggled between representations of authentic (actually existing) houses as cultural icons and the official designation of the provincial population divided into four ‘etnis’ (ethnic groups) each with a standardised housing type (Robinson 1997).

In decentralised Indonesia there has been an efflorescence of such locally themed parks, as newly empowered districts enjoy the ability to express local cultural practices but also imagine the possibilities for culture-driven tourism to boost district budgets.

The Mining Theme Park

Taman Tambang Wallacea Sawerigading translates as the Sawerigading Wallacea Mining Park.³ The park, established in 2010, is a hybrid community–company application of the ‘theme park’ model. While it has been developed by the mining company, and is within its concession area, I was informed by local people that the idea emerged from a group representing the local Indigenous people who felt emboldened anew to press their unresolved grievances after the 1998 fall of Suharto and the consequent implementation of decentralisation of political authority (Robinson 2016). They began discussing alternative economic enterprises to mining with a view to creating new fields of employment and providing a foundation for the development of a diversified economy for the region. The park has also been supported by the local government.

It is situated at the foot of the mountains, on the edge of the areas from which the company mines lateritic nickel-bearing soil. The gated entrance is inside a securitised area and patrolled by company guards.⁴ The park encompasses a special zone, Bumi Tambang, or Mining World, where seven gargantuan machines ‘retired’ from the mine and the refinery are arranged in a grassy park. The metal giants have been transformed into playground equipment: the cabins are accessed by fixed metal ladders and children can climb in to turn the massive steering wheels and flick switches. This leisure space, in the urban enclave where mining employees live, expresses a ‘symbolic narrative process’ (Gottdiener 2001, 16, 19) that links the modern mine, Sulawesi’s historical heritage, and the distinctive environment of the region.

Historical Invocations

Sawerigading is the name of the ambiguous hero of an epic poem, the La Galigo.⁵ Both the culture hero (Sawerigading) and the mythic narrative are principle cultural icons of the province of South Sulawesi. It circulated in global culture through a stage production by New York Producer Robert Wilson in 2004, and more recently the La Galigo has been listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World. What is the connection to Sorowako? Lake Matano–Sorowako is geographically located within the borders of the pre-colonial Bugis kingdom of Luwu, claimed to be the original complex polity in Sulawesi (Bulbeck & Caldwell 2000). The La Galigo epic depicts the divine origins of this kingdom—and hence Bugis⁶ culture—in which heavenly beings descend to earth so as to found the royal lineage. The epic locates the events in Cerekang, some 40 kilometres from Sorowako. The name of the theme park thus invokes the special place of the region in Bugis and Sulawesi heritage. But it is noteworthy that while the name of the park indexes this well-known heritage, truly ‘local’ pre-mining culture and history are not (yet) displayed. In taking a Luwu-wide view, it does not reference pre-industrial smelting of iron ore by the ancestors of the Indigenous inhabitants, from about 1500 (Bulbeck & Caldwell 2000). The Indigenous people of Sorowako have smelted iron and fashioned iron tools since at least the fifteenth century (Bulbeck & Caldwell 2000), and they paid tribute to the Luwu rulers in iron weapons and tools. Lake Matano is believed to be the source of the famous ‘besi Luwu’ used in the parmor keris (ceremonial wavy dagger) of Javanese courts. A narrative that would link the master smiths to modern mining is nowhere in the park, reflecting an ongoing theme of cultural denigration of the local population (discussed below).

And Wallacea? The leisure park is located in the company nursery area, where seedlings including endemic local plants are raised for reforesting the strip-mined hills. From the 1990s, the nursery has exhibited labelled plantings of endemic tree species alongside a paved walking track, and the theme park has grown out of this earlier leisure site. Wallacea is a biogeographical concept named for the geographer Alfred Wallace, who identified a trench that divides the Indonesian archipelago between the ecozones of Asia and those with Australian-type fauna and flora—known as the Wallace line. The region Wallacea is the islands on either side of the line. The island of Sulawesi is in the middle of Wallacea but is anomalous as it has types of flora and fauna found on both sides of the line. A company brochure mentions the intention to display endemic animal species in the park but when I visited it only displayed one specimen of a distinctive species, an anoa—a midget buffalo (bubalus) endemic to Sulawesi, which is endangered. Invoking Wallacea links the company to the natural world while obfuscating the destruction wrought by mining.

Bumi Tambang, in the Wallacea Sawerigading Nature Park, is one of the ‘objects’ frequently represented in the many social media sites—travel blogs and social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook—that present this mining town in the jungles of Sulawesi as a tourist, indeed an ecotourist, destination. These sites usually make no direct mention of the mine that has transformed the local environment by strip mining hills and developing a modern factory. The mine is represented by the fantastic images of the gargantuan machines, displaced into their grassy wooded setting, and by images of the ordered suburbs of the mining town and their associated recreational areas on the lake shore.

Bumi Tambang reflects a modern engagement with themed leisure spaces in the urban environment. Through removal to the leisure site, the industrial machines have been transformed from objects that produce value (capital goods) to sites of pleasurable consumption,⁷ where children—many of them, of mine workers—can have an immersive experience of adult ‘work’. The park supports the genesis of identities as workers, and ‘humanises’ the face of the foreign company by acknowledging a link with its workers and their families and by framing the work of the mine in a themed leisure park alongside iconic cultural values (Sawerigading) and the distinctive ecology of the region (Wallacea). This gives rise to the lateritic nickel ores that the current contract-holder, Brazilian company, Vale, mines over an extensive area. Its iconography presents a wide and distant view of the operation.

Bumi Tambang is a popular photo destination: the mining machines provide a dramatic backdrop for photos posted on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. They provide a framing for self-representations of modern, urban subjects within a narrative of power represented by the machines.

I visited there with a local Indigenous family comprising husband, wife, and two young children; the parents are both skilled professionals at the company refinery. The wife explained to me that people cannot go and visit their family members in the plant site or the mine site as these are restricted places for safety and security reasons. Hence, she said, Bumi Tambang provides a way for employees’ families to gain some insight into their workplaces, as well as a destination on leisure days.⁸ Students in the company-funded school for employees’ children are taken on excursions to the park: a kindergarten teacher gave a similar explanation, of the utility of surrogate experiences of work for her students, children of company employees. On the occasion of my visit, the two little boys ran into the park, climbing up into the giant vehicles on display and, in particular, playing in the Haulmaster, a massive machine used to dispose of red-hot slag in the process plant, which was their father’s work. The park experience helps build a sense of belonging to an industrial work force. With regard to the family visit above, when the children had satiated their pleasure in the giant vehicles, they ran down to the enclosure with the captive anoa, another hard-to-see object, part of the natural environment that is also not easily accessed.

Decentralisation and the Adat Revival

As noted above, the concept for the mining theme park grew out of a discussion initiated by young leaders of the orang asli Sorowako concerning economic diversification in the single industry town, with an eye on transition after mine closure—still probably decades away at that time.⁹ These discussions involved a newly empowered district government, fixed on eco-tourism as one alternative industry for the region (also on the agenda of orang asli Sorowako young leaders). The beautiful landscape around Lake Matano held promise for attracting both nature lovers and water sports enthusiasts. The mining town has a small airport which can provide access to an otherwise remote region. Oddly enough, the juxtaposition of mine sites and ecotourism (often associated with reclamation) is not uncommon (Davidov 2012). The theme park celebrates history, nature, and conservation values alongside the iconic representation of emerging ‘heritage’, the industrial exploitation of the region. In the case of reclaimed parks on the sites of closed mines, they commonly incorporate industrial machinery at the request of former miners, who value the representation of their former working lives.

Lake Matano–Sorowako has a strong presence on social media sites promoting leisure activities that engage with the beautiful and distinctive natural environment. The places promoted include the magnificent lake—a natural wonder that offers water sports, beautiful views, and picnics; a waterfall in nearby Wasuponda; and a mountain lookout over Lake Matano (Gunung Butoh), which is a reforested mined area reached by a running track. Thus the mining region as a tourist destination has a coherent narrative promising mainly nature-based leisure activities (Bryman 2004, 34). In these social media promotions of Lake Matano–Sorowako tourism, the developments associated with the mine are limited to images of the ordered suburbs of the mining town and the lakeside leisure locations the company has developed in the town site—and the Sawerigading–Wallacea park. But, usually, these tourism promotion sites make no direct mention of the mine that has transformed the local environment by strip mining hills and building modern smelters. The mine is represented by Bumi Tambang, by the fantastic images of the gargantuan machines, displaced into their grassy wooded setting.

Cultural Festival

The reimagining of Sorowako and Lake Matano as tourism destination is encompassed in the activities of Indigenous people of Sorowako (orang asli Sorowako), who have been seeking ways to rediscover their cultural heritage, their ‘native’ culture. Also within the framework of developing tourism as a post-mining industry, a committee of young, educated orang asli Sorowako organised the Festival Danau Matano (Lake Matano Festival), held for the first time in 2012 (Robinson 2019, 27). The committee obtained financial and logistic support from the mining company as an aspect of its community relations strategy, and the local government. The festival showcased music, dance, and material culture of the Indigenous people who live in villages around Lake Matano.

Customary fishing and boating practices were ‘rethemed’ as competitive sports in the context of the festival. Like many regions of Indonesia, the end of the authoritarian New Order and its enforcement of cultural styles allowed for rediscovery or representation of customary activities, practices, and beliefs long submerged. The cultural festival became a common way to celebrate culture and history (Robinson 2011).

This renaissance of local cultures was experienced across the region of the former Luwu sultanate (Robinson 2011).¹⁰ This performative expression of culture signifies an important shift in the way new generations of orang asli Sorowako express their rooted identity. For the people originally disposed, the emphasis on autochthony, or links to land, was a protest—against the moral and economic injury of the loss of their land, livelihoods, and way of life. It occurred in a political climate where protest was dangerous and punished by the government including arrest and imprisonment (Robinson 1986).

But while they protested and strove to have compensation for land and access to company benefits and services (such as privileged access to employment; access to company health and education services for all orang asli Sorowako, including those who were not employees), the Indigenous people also accommodated to the new world in which they found themselves, prioritising an education for their children that anticipated a future based in industrial employment.

The young, educated generations still embrace the unfinished business of the compensation for dispossession, but many of them are interested to understand their history and ancestral culture as an aspect of identity-making. The Festival Danau Matano was an expression of this interest in cultural preservation and revival, and their sociocultural identity as orang asli Sorowako.

Culture as Resistance

In the early days of the project, the orang asli Sorowako were subject to derision by the educated migrants, mainly from Java and Sumatra, who flocked to the mining town. The migrants saw the ‘locals’ as lacking in culture as they did not have any specific cultural forms that conformed to the prevailing government models for expressing suku/cultural distinctiveness (Robinson 1986; 2014b). At that time, orang asli Sorowako expressions of a distinctive identity focused on their lost land (Robinson 2019); in Manuel Castells' (1997) terms, a resistance identity. The newcomers’ derision has fed into the contemporary politics of claims for local cultural distinctiveness that we see in events like the Festival Danau Matano. Subsequent iterations of the festival, in 2015 and 2018, saw the event gradually taken over by the local government head (bupati) and the agenda proposed by the orang asli Sorowako youth set aside. In 2018 the young Indigenous people protested their marginalisation from the planning of what they saw as their event, and they boycotted it. In their view, the district chief took over and chose to emphasise the cultures of the district’s many migrants, as well as providing some professional entertainers—while ignoring the distinctive cultural forms that had been promoted in previous Festival Danau Matano. This cultural agenda went hand in hand with a further erasure of identity and rights. For decades the orang asli Sorowako had pressed claims for compensation and recognition of moral rights on the basis of their forced dispossession, as the autochthonous landowners. But the district government has put in place an agenda to require the mining company to privilege in employment practices a group they refer to as orang lokal (local people), defined as people who are native inhabitants of the four sub-districts that are in the mining company’s footprint. This surely garners him some electoral support, but this redefinition of rights-bearers is resented by the orang asli Sorowako, who retort that only they suffered displacement and dispossession by the mining company and, furthermore, many of the other communities further from the centre of operations have experienced only positive direct impacts, as they have benefited from the development of the region.

A posting on the Indonesia travel blog Travenesia forcefully defends the local identity being promoted in Bumi Tambang using the language commonly deployed to describe cultural difference in the Suharto era (ciri khas).

Kata siapa daerah tambang tidak bisa punya theme park? Sorowako punya ciri khasnya sendiri! Taman yang umumnya dikenal dengan nama Mining Park ini memiliki banyak koleksi mobil-mobil operator khas daerah tambang yang umumnya digunakan di perusahaan Vale Indonesia. Di sini kita bisa sepuasnya berfoto bersama mobil-mobil besar dan masuk ke dalamnya. Tidak hanya itu, kita juga bisa bertemu Anoa, hewan endemik langka khas Sulawesi yang dipelihara dan merupakan ikon dari lambang PT INCO, Tbk.

Who says a mining area can't have a theme park [which in Indonesia tend to be used to display cultural distinctiveness]. Sorowako has its own unique character (ciri khas sendidiri)! This park that is usually known by the name Mining Park has a collection of large vehicles used in the mining operations that are used by Vale Indonesia. Here we can enjoy taking photographs with the large machines and climb into them. Not only that, we can also meet an Anoa, an endemic and distinct species of Sulawesi, which is cared for [in the park] and which served as the symbol of PT Inco [the original operator of the mine].

This somewhat ironic posting invokes the common trope of theme parks in Indonesia which display local cultural distinctiveness—ironic, as it unintentionally draws our attention to the presumption of a cultural vacuum, or lack, in Sorowako. This is a judgement that the local Indigenous people have struggled with, an argument deployed to contest their demands for recognition of their rights and privileged access to the benefits of the mine development. Indeed, the young people organising the Festival Danau Matano had a strong desire to contest that perception of lack. In the view of this poster quoted above, the ciri khas (unique character) of Sorowako today is the modern industrial development, the theme of the recreational park. However, it also speaks a truth regarding new kinds of local distinctiveness, as the Indigenous people have wholeheartedly embraced the culture of industrial employment and life in an industrial town. Young people whose parents struggled to educate them have returned with qualifications and are increasingly finding work as skilled professionals. Some local people have become affluent working as sub-contractors. Hard hats, work boots, and vis-wear are common in the town. An important function of Bumi Tambang (as the above quote recognises) is to provide a backdrop for photography, and residents of Sorowako, including the Indigenous people, love to fashion images of themselves wearing the accoutrements of mine work and against the backdrop of mining paraphernalia, like the huge machines.

The Indigenous (orang asli) identity is still important and, post-Suharto, has taken formal shape in a number of organisations that struggle for recognition of rights and implementation of promises made over time by the mining company. But they express a range of identities in addition to that of orang asli Sorowako. Many are proud to be industrial workers, as noted above, and they are proudly Muslim, expressing the piety associated with Indonesia’s Muslim middle class. The mining town is today an urban enclave in a region otherwise remote from urban centres, with an educated middle-class population. This includes several generations of the Indigenous inhabitants of the area, whose lives and livelihoods were totally reshaped by the development of the mine (Robinson 1986). These contemporary identities, which are shared by many residents of the mining town, regardless of ‘suku’ (cultural–linguistic identity), are being expressed in the online images shot, for example, in Bumi Tambang in front of giant machines. The elements of the ‘uniform’ of the industrial worker (hard hats, work boots) are iconic elements in the performance of new forms of identity in Sorowako. The uniform attests that one is ‘penduduk Sorowako’ (Sorowako resident), an identity that sits alongside other language- or place-based identities of both Indigenous people and immigrants. There are strong elements of everyday lifeworlds that unite the identity group ‘penduduk Sorowako’, in particular their occupational relationships to the mine and associated economic activities, and their embrace of middle-class aspirations and lifestyle. The complex social environment of the town means the orang asli Sorowako feel bonds of community with many migrants (pendatang) who they have grown up with, and work with. Many of these people are considered to occupy and express a new identity ‘penduduk Sorowako’ (population/people of Sorowako), acknowledging a sense of common experience and common fate.

New Identities: Urban Workers and Pleasure Seekers

The mining town is now a small urban enclave in a mountainous region otherwise remote from the main urban centres of the province, with an educated middle-class population that includes—as a large minority—people descended from the Indigenous inhabitants of the area, whose lives and livelihoods were fundamentally reshaped by the development of the mine, as well as migrants and their descendants from all over Indonesia.

Industrial employment shifts identities in ways that go beyond the engagement with the symbols of industrial employment. For those in employment, the discipline of industrial work exposes them to ‘the methodical way of life of industrial capitalism’ (Thompson [1963] 1979, 443) and a ‘distinct cultural pattern … a rhythm of work and leisure’ (Thompson [1963] 1979, 305).

Part of the company’s spatial ordering of the mining town has involved the development of leisure sites, such as grassy parks on the edge of the lake, and jetties for swimming, diving, and boating. The development of leisure sites is an aspect of the company’s community strategy, and workers’ leisure is an aspect of the rhythms of industrial working life. The Sawerigading Wallacea Botanical Park is one of the leisure sites that has been developed within the mining town Sorowako to support the middle-class lifestyle of industrial employees. The younger educated generation celebrate their historical and kinship ties to place and have a strong connection to the natural world of the region around the lake. The imagining of Sorowako and Lake Matano as eco-tourist sites goes hand in hand with the development of novel dispositions regarding leisure in the modern industrial environment (Robinson 2014a).

Living in the Environment

Prior to the industrial transformation of the landscape, the people of Sorowako lived by directly extracting its bounty. Although they had established settled wet rice fields after 1906, they continued to also live from the jungle through slash and burn cultivation of rice, corn, and other food crops; and through hunting and collection of jungle produce (including products destined for global trade like resin and rattan). They fished the lake and collected shellfish (Robinson 1986). People enjoyed their beautiful natural environment but as an adjunct to their quotidian work activities. They took pleasure in walking or going by boat to their fields, staying overnight in their mountain or lakeside field huts, enjoying the cool night air, eating freshly picked corn and vegetables. At times of peak labour demand (planting, harvesting) the fields were places of great festivity: cooking and eating together, eating special foods.

Boating on the lake was also both a mundane activity and a source of pleasure—elderly women, for example, would paddle their canoes to favourite places on the lake shore, catch fish and collect shellfish, and ‘kasih lurus badan’ (straighten the body) in the water. Children’s after-school time included swimming in the lake, exploring its shores, and seeking out aquatic life to eat. However, trips on the lake (or walking along jungle paths) were for fishing, collecting water, or to visit neighbouring settlements where one had relatives or kinship-based business. There was not a disposition to go out and embrace/enjoy the beautiful environment as a purely leisure activity but, rather, pleasure in the environment was experienced as an adjunct to the conduct of livelihoods.

The mining company’s activities not only dramatically transformed this taken-for-granted environment, but its employees (especially the ‘expats’) introduced new dispositions regarding leisure activities and the environment to the Indonesian residents of the mining town. The suburbs for elite employees were built to afford lake views and easy access for water sports (Robinson 1986). In the late 1970s, for example, when most workers had only Sundays free, the Indonesian workers living in the village would spend their day in livelihood activities, such as assisting in the rice fields, or were called for community volunteer labour for village maintenance (gotong royong); whereas the ‘expats’ could be seen in their locally built watercraft in festive groups enjoying leisure activities on the lake. As ‘expats’ left, their rafts were bought by locals, and now many are made and used locally, an addition to the canoes and small watercraft they previously made and used.

For farmers, or people in irregular/informal sector employment, differing temporalities are in force; for example, the seasons, which dominate agriculture and the rhythms of the religious calendar, that determine when ancestral graves should be visited. But the passion for leisure is gripping many people in this town. Many of the employed and their families, and the successful local contractors, have made the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca or for the mini-haj or umroh. Travel is now a common experience and pleasure for the young people who go away for education and often post-education employment. They embrace the passion for domestic tourism of Indonesia’s middle classes, and student experience has exposed many of them to travel and to the ‘nature lover’ student culture described by Anna Tsing (2005, chapter 4).

The Genesis of ‘Ecotourism’

The popular leisure activities, especially for young people, are those associated with the urban middle class and occur in the leisure spaces provided by the mining company. Teenagers congregate in parks on motor bikes; young working families take their children to the lake on Sundays to bob about on recycled truck tyres; family groups gather for picnics in landscaped parks on the lake shore; and locals and migrants play competitive volleyball and soccer. Following examples set by expatriate employees decades ago, groups of people go boating on the lake and many of the Indigenous youth have taken up water sports like water skiing, and scuba diving.

In this contemporary period, young educated people who identify as Indigenous Sorowakans are increasingly interested in exploring their place-based cultural identities; while they do not abandon the material claims of their forebears, to receive special treatment in education and employment on the basis of material loss, they are engaged in a ‘re-theming’ of their ties to place in terms of the beauty and leisure possibilities of the natural environment, and the possibility of ‘spectacle’ in revitalised cultural performances¹¹ (noted above). Many young people in Sorowako are participating in the promotion of Lake Matano region as an ecotourism destination, as both an expression of their local cultural identities and with the hope of developing tourism as an alternative economic activity in this industry town.

The social media sites promoting ecotourism in Sorowako are predominantly blogs, either personal blogs or semi-official sites, which give advice to tourists and review destinations, such as Travenesia.¹² There are several locations promoted as sites of natural beauty and for leisure (water sports, hiking, and enjoying the distinctive flora and fauna). The sites these posts present, and the iconic images they use, tend to be very similar and provide what has become a common ordering (Franklin 2004) of the locality as tourist destination. This ordering offers an itinerary that locals and visitors alike can follow. A young woman recounted meeting some foreign tourists who asked her about local transport options—and she was surprised to learn they already had an itinerary of the places they wished to visit. On a day out on the lake with some young ‘locals’, we stopped to swim and dive in a limestone cave on the lake shore: they had brought a go-pro camera with them and shot images that they told me replicated postings they had seen on Youtube, of people diving in the cave.

Making Identity Claims—Who Are Indigenous?

The orang asli Sorowako have for 50 years pressed identity-based claims for compensation for lost land and livelihoods; and in the twenty-first century young people have spearheaded a drive for cultural revival and preservation. These claims have been resisted by governments that have the power to order localities. The New Order brutally put down their claims after dispossession, but in the contemporary world both local and national governments have not supported, even resisted, many of their identity-based claims. The current Jokowi presidency (2014–24) has proclaimed its support for Indigenous peoples and their claims against forcible dispossession, but this government, like the New Order, is using ‘authorised scripts’ to test local claims. Indigenous rights are not being supported against claims by more powerful groups. In Sorowako, these groups include the mining company but also the regional elites that have come to power since decentralisation.

When I visited Bumi Tambang in 2014, mine employees were using less gargantuan equipment to build up a speed bump in the middle of the road. As we approached, my companions identified a woman standing in animated conversation with the mining company workers as one of the residents of the squatter settlement that has sprung up on the parks’ borders. The squatters are the Karongsi’e people who were also displaced from a village on the shores of Lake Matano—but by the Darul Islam rebels who occupied this region from 1952–65.¹³ The speed bump was constructed to create a delineation between the gradually encroaching squatter settlement and the theme park, both situated in the area claimed by the company as its concession.

The squatter settlement that has emerged on the edges of the theme park has its own iconic display reminiscent of the kind of cultural iconicity found in Taman Mini Indonesia. The returned Karongsi’e refugees have a wood and bamboo meeting hall, wooden replica spears and shields conjuring up their headhunter past, and a replica rice barn which is the symbol of the Karongsi’e (their name means ‘source of rice’ in the local languages but, also, they are currently claiming their lost rice lands) (see Tyson 2010).

The Karongsi’ese people have gradually returned from their places of refuge in Central Sulawesi since the fall of the Suharto government in 1998. Christian converts, they were forcibly taken to a refugee site by the Darul Islam rebels in the 1950s. Rescued by the Indonesian army, they then escaped to Central Sulawesi until the new political era. Their return and claims for recognition of lost rights reflect the trend to the expression of local and regional identities that has emerged since Indonesia’s Big Bang decentralisation post-1998. As Anthropologist Parsudi Suparlan (2000) put it, Reformasi meant that the national motto ‘Unity in Diversity (Binneka Tunggal Ika)’ was reinterpreted: whereas the New Order stressed Unity, the following political period (Reformasi, or Reform period) stressed Diversity.

The Karongsi’e case has been taken up by the non-government organisation Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Indonesia or Alliance for Indigenous People’s Rights (AMAN). This group was established by political activists in the Suharto era to promote the claims of people following rural agrarian lifestyles whose land rights were being ignored by the government in the name of development (pembangunan), a key ideological term of the ‘repressive developmentalist’ (Feith 1978) Suharto regime. The dispossession of the Indigenous Sorowakans was an expression of this ideological thrust, a version of ‘trickle-down’ economics at the end of a gun.

AMAN has come to express an orthodoxy in the definition of masyarakat adat (custom community), the term they use as a gloss of the global concept of ‘Indigenous peoples’. Former AMAN activist Arianto Sangaji (2007, 321) is critical of the conceptual broadness of the definition: that Indigenous peoples have distinctive value systems, ideologies, politics, economics, cultures, and territories. It amounts to ‘the creation of an “essence”’ designed to produce a thematic coherence’ (Dicks 2004, 93–94). In effect, the construct demands that people who wish to claim their rights using this rhetoric engage in a performance of ‘indigeneity’ as defined by AMAN. The orang asli Sorowako, all Muslim, increasingly succeeding in formal education, and aspiring to middle-class lifestyles, do not fit this model. Even though they have unresolved grievances at their dispossession, their loss of land and lost rights as the Indigenous people, their case is not being pressed by AMAN. It is an irony of history that the model of indigeneity promoted by AMAN reflects the ideological approach of Suharto’s New Order, its folkloric approach in its imposition of uniform expression of material culture elements as the definer of a distinct identity (Robinson 2019).

Perhaps because their claims have emerged in a different political moment, the more open politics of democratisation post-Suharto, the Karingsi’e have had some success in pressing their claims and, at least, receiving recognition from the local and national governments. For example, they have been supported in claims against the mining company by one of the new political entities established after the fall of Suharto, The National Commission on Human Rights (KOMNASHAM), and the district head (bupati) supported their claim to be THE Indigenous people in the area of the Sorowako mining lease (Robinson 2019).

The presence of the Karongsi’e and their contemporary expression of backward looking and folkloric identity, in their quest to redress the wrong they have experienced, contrasts with the fluid and developing expressions of identity by the orang asli Sorowako, who seemingly are constantly facing new challenges to their rights claims—including expression.

Conclusion

The extensive area of mine concession, the growing installations at the refinery site, and the sprawling suburbs for workers developed along the lake shore mean the mine and its infrastructure physically dominate the landscape. But the industrial enterprise also dominates the social environment. The original village has been squashed into a road-locked high-density space containing the residences of the Indigenous people and the many migrants not eligible to live in the company suburbs. The Indigenous orang asli Sorowako people retain a strong relationship to the locality. They resisted moves to enforce involuntary resettlement in the early 1970s, and the compromise with mining company and local government was the concession of their delimited residential space. In a gesture to their prior occupation of the region, the mining company has used names of former farming hamlets for the townsite suburbs, and names of ancestors have been used as street names in the original village as well as the market in the company townsite. The orang asli Sorowako people continue to remember their heritage in this landscape, caring for ancestral graves, keeping place names alive, and remembering the histories of rice fields now turned into suburbs, urban infrastructure, and a golf course. Trees and other natural features are markers of these memories. In the last decades, some of the rice fields have been planted again, in the interstices of company activities, for example between golf fairways. Truly a heterotopia ‘capable of juxtaposing in one real place several different spaces’ (Soja 1995, 15), these sites may be ‘incompatible’ or foreign to one another but are nonetheless entangled.

The entangled spaces of the mine, facilities, town, and original village are spatially ordered by the needs of the enterprise. This heterotopia is linked in turn to ‘heterochronies’ (Soja 1995, 15) that impose rhythms on daily life.

In a complex social environment where cultural identity provides the language for rights claims, Bumi Tambang expresses the theme of a common contemporary local identity that unites diverse cultural groups: that of worker. This theming is evidenced in the leisure site which provides a venue for that very modern form of expression of self-identity: photographs of oneself in juxtaposition with iconic objects, in this case, the industrial implements of the modern mine and smelter. Bumi Tambang and its presence on social media points to cultural expression and identity as aspects of the industrial transformation of the local economy and the local environment that includes a new reflexivity and pleasure in leisure pursuits.

The theme park is designed as part of the company ‘stamp’ on the local environment, contained within the area of the nursery that supplies endemic plants for reforestation, making the equation between the mining company and care for the unique environment—indexed in the notion of Wallacea. ‘Wallacea’ is represented by trees and the endemic animal species, anoa. Bumi Tambang represents the mine that dominates the locality. Sawerigading conjures up a glorious past. It does not have a concrete realisation within the theme park, but its invocation of cultural distinctiveness instantiates, in an abstract way, the four etnis ‘model’ of Sulawesi Selatan Dalam Miniatur (Robinson 1997) in that it uses an icon of Bugis culture, Sawerigading (Robinson 2011). The alignment of these elements in the park provides a ‘visitable’ entity that represents the company’s theming of the region. The juxtaposition of the Karongsi’e squatter settlement, which rehearses forms of cultural distinctiveness, underscores the way in which Bumi Tambang expresses a new kind of shared identity in relation to the mine (from which the Karongsi’e are by and large excluded). As a leisure site, it grounds new shared identities expressed through novel dispositions for leisure and work that are significant aspects of the social transformation wrought by the mine.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This article reflects on research conducted in Sorowako over more than four decades. Two Australian Research Council projects facilitated return fieldwork: DP 130102021 “Community Rights in an Age of Footloose Capital: Mining in Decentralised Indonesia” (2013–2018); and DP0663600 “Ambivalent Adolescents in Indonesia”(2006–2009).

Notes

1 The park has a strong presence on social media sites and is variously labelled a ‘Nature Park’ or ‘Botanical Park’, but this is the name inscribed on the entry gate.

2 It also represented a version of history that validated Javanese cultural preeminence and domination.

3 Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out taman can mean ‘park or garden’, but also ‘place of learning’.

4 The mine and refinery were developed in the 1970s by PT INCO, a subsidiary of the Canadian company international Nickel, which was bought out by Brazilian miner Vale in 2012.

5 ‘Ambiguous’ because, although the subject of many famous stories, he commits incest and other crimes in his travels. The epic poem is a foundational cultural text of the Bugis—the most numerous cultural-linguistic group of the Southwest peninsular. The old Bugis Kingdom of Luwu was once dominant in this region.

6 The Bugis are the dominant cultural-linguistic group (suku) in South Sulawesi province. Sawerigading is a peripatetic hero, and Bugis are famous as migrants and sojourners in coastal regions of Southeast Asia.

7 According to the company, the machines were in working order but had reached the end of their working lives. They were disabled before being relocated to the park.

8 Indeed, in the 1970s, I found that wives of employees had great difficulty explaining or describing where their husbands worked or what they did all day.

9 The volatile world nickel market, which has delivered some shocks in the form of retrenchments over the years, is now booming due to the developing EV industry and the need for nickel in batteries. Whereas it was once an isolated mine in the mountainous interior, Sorowako and its airport are now the gateway to a region straddling three provinces dominated by nickel mines and smelters.

10 My first encounter with the revival of customary music and dance in Sorowako was at a cultural festival in the neighbouring district of North Luwu (Robinson 2011).

11 Lake Matano was in the area occupied by Darul Islam rebels in the 1950s and up to 1962. The rebels banned practices that they labelled ‘unIslamic’.

12 Travenesia is now on a number of social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook.

13 The Indigenous Sorowakans were also displaced, but they lived out the rebellion in the area under the control of the rebels and returned to their location on the shores of Lake Matano once the rebellion ended. The Christian Karongsi’e were fearful of returning until the end of the Suharto era.