Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia: Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence [1 ed.] 9781003368182, 9781032436364, 9781032436340

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Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia

This book draws on ethnographic studies in Southeast Asia to provide new insights into human–environmental relationships and ecologies, together with a set of theoretical innovations. Contextualizing ecologies in this region as pluralizing or hegemonic, con­ flictive or cooperative, the case studies in these chapters bring into dialogue ontological approaches, the issue of distinct worldviews and concepts of nature on the one hand and political ecology and power relations on the other. They discuss plural ecologies in diverse settings, reaching from urban Vietnam to the Javanese coast and the dense forests of the Southeast Asian highlands. Southeast Asia is one of the most biodiverse and culturally diverse regions in the world. Thus, what occurs in this region is vitally important to the future of Earth. Documenting the plurality and dynamics of ecologies in Southeast Asia, this book provides prime examples for the potentials of alternative human– environmental relationships and sustainable development. It will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sus­ tainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies. Timo Duile is a researcher at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. Kristina Großmann is a professor at the Department of Southeast Asian Stu­ dies, University of Bonn, Germany. Michaela Haug is a substitute professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Freiburg, Germany. Guido Sprenger is a professor at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Southeast Asia. NGOs and Civil Society in Thailand Metagovernance and the Politics of NGO Funding Theerapat Ungsuchaval Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh Kathrin Eitel Public Expenditure and Income Distribution in Malaysia Mukaramah Harun & Sze Ying Loo Territorial Change and Conflict in Indonesia Confronting the Fear of Secession Ratri Istania Marginalisation and Human Rights in Southeast Asia Al Khanif & Khoo Ying Hooi Fake News and Elections in Southeast Asia Impact on Democracy and Human Rights Robin Ramcharan & James Gomez Islam, Education and Radicalism in Indonesia Instructing Piety Edited by Tim Lindsey, Jamhari Makruf, & Helen Pausacker The Art of Environmental Activism in Indonesia Shifting Horizons Edwin Jurriëns Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence Edited by Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, Michaela Haug & Guido Sprenger For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Rou tledge-Contemporary-Southeast-Asia-Series/book-series/RCSEA

Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence

Edited by Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, Michaela Haug and Guido Sprenger

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, Michaela Haug and Guido Sprenger; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, Michaela Haug and Guido Sprenger to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-43636-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43634-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36818-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Plural Ecologies: Beyond ontology and political ecology in Southeast Asia

vii viii x

1

GUIDO SPRENGER, KRISTINA GROßMANN, MICHAELA HAUG AND TIMO DUILE

2 Ontologies of Possibility: Future-oriented indeterminacy in Southeast Asian animism

28

GUIDO SPRENGER

3 Conflicting Ways of Dealing with Invisible Human-like Beings: Including – Neglecting – Ignoring

47

SUSANNE RODEMEIER

4 Home of Spirits and Loggers: Plural Perspectives on the Forest in Indonesian Borneo

65

MICHAELA HAUG

5 Animism and Indigenous Movements in Indonesia

83

TIMO DUILE

6 Negotiating Plural Ecologies of adat Land in Indonesia

98

KRISTINA GROßMANN

7 Ecological Disturbances: Negotiating indigeneity and access to land in Indonesia

112

BIRGIT BRÄUCHLER

8 Entrepreneurial Ecologies in a Javanese Fishery KATHARINA SCHNEIDER

132

vi

Contents

9 The Reinvention of Moral Ecologies in Indonesia

149

THOMAS REUTER

10 “Talking” Trees: Urban Ecologies in Late Socialist Hanoi

169

GERTRUD HÜWELMEIER

11 A Positive Other? Comprehending the Hope in Animism’s Overcoming the Capitalist Socio-ecological Crisis

187

MICHAEL KLEINOD

Index

206

Figures

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

Remnants of Traditional Food Culture in Java: Gunungan,

Yogyakarta Royal Palace, 2017 Photograph by the author. Indonesia Rice Import Fluctuations. Adapted from Index

Mundi 2017 A shelf in Mr Udik’s farmer laboratory An SPI-run organic catfish farm threatened by its own success

157

158

162

163

Contributors

Birgit Bräuchler is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, Melbourne. Her research interests include media and digital anthropology; conflict and peace studies; human and cultural rights; activism and brokerage; Southeast Asia, esp. Indonesia. Timo Duile is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of South-East Asian Studies at Bonn University. He was guest researcher at Tanjungpura Uni­ versity in Pontianak and Hasanuddin University in Makassar. His research focuses on indigenous identities, processes of (de-)democratization, reli­ gion, and atheism, as well as human–spirit relations in Indonesia. Michaela Haug is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests cover environmental anthro­ pology, political ecology, and gender relations. Her recent research explores how different visions of the future influence forest use changes and related social, economic, and environmental transformations in the forested hin­ terlands of Indonesian Borneo. Gertrud Hüwelmeier is an anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She published widely about religion, transnationalism, media, and materiality. Michael Kleinod is postdoctoral researcher and coordinator at the Global South Studies Center of the University of Cologne. His research interests include critical social theory, political ecology, and transformation studies; more specifically, Michael is interested in how the manifold nonidentities with capitalism might add up to its meaningful overcoming. Thomas Reuter is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne's Asia Institute. His current research on “Food System Resilience in Indonesia” is funded by the Australian Research Council. He is a trustee of the World Academy of Arts and Science and on the executive of Future Earth (SSCP).

List of contributors

ix

Susanne Rodemeier is curator of the Museum of Religions at Philipps-Uni­ versity Marburg. She is doing research on those religious objects in the Museum that originate from colonial and Christian missionary contexts in Indonesia and Oceania. Her interest lies on human–object interrelation and possible ways to visualize that, be it as publication or exhibition. Katharina Schneider is an affiliated lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Hamburg University with research interests on gender, political economy, and fisheries in Indonesia, extending her earlier research on Papua New Guinea. Kristina Großmann is a professor for anthropology of Southeast Asia at the University of Bonn, Germany. Recently, she published her book, Conflict­ ing Ecologies. Human-Environment Relationships and Politics in Indonesia at Routledge.

Acknowledgments

This volume emerged out of the network “Contested Plural Ecologies – Anthropological Perspectives on Southeast Asia” (Plurale Ökologien im Widerstreit: Ethnologische Perspektiven auf Südostasien), which was funded by the German Research Foundation from 2016 to 2021 (SP 946/6–1). The network brought together 12 anthropologists with a common inter­ est in human–environment relations in Southeast Asia, with the aim of developing a framework that would bring together two strands of theory – political ecology and the anthropology of ontologies. The resulting concept of Plural Ecologies has been developed in field studies in both insular and mainland Southeast Asia, as well as in rural and urban settings. Among the countries covered are Indonesia (Java, Bali, Kalimantan, the Moluc­ cas), Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. From 2016 to 2018 the academic network met twice a year. Each of these workshop-like meetings was dedicated to a specific topic on which the group members presented their latest research results and received comments from experts in the respective field. First of all, we would like to express our gratitude to the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) for funding the net­ work. Joining the different network meetings as experts, Christoph Antweiler, Anna-Katharina Hornidge, Martina Padmanabhan, Stefanie Steinebach, Keebet Benda-Beckmann, Gregory Acciaioli, Andrew Alan Johnson, Chris­ tina Schwenkel, Abigaël Pesses, Judith Schlehe, Rebecca Elmhirst, and Mia Siscawati contributed much of their expertise to inspiring discussions in the course of the workshops and simultaneously assisted in developing the ana­ lytical framework. We thank each of them for their valuable support of the network. Our deepest thanks go to all participants of the network, which inclu­ ded Guido Sprenger (who also served as speaker of the network), Judith Beyer, Birgit Bräuchler, Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, Volker Gotto­ wik, Michaela Haug, Annette Hornbacher, Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Thomas A. Reuter, Susanne Rodemeier, and Katharina Schneider. For various reasons, not all network members were able to contribute to this book,

Acknowledgments

xi

while other authors joined. However, each network member has made his or her own specific contribution to shaping the idea of plural ecologies. Furthermore, we wish to express our thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. And last but not least, we sincerely thank Elena Schaeffer for her most valuable assistance in preparing the book manuscript.

1

Introduction Plural Ecologies: Beyond ontology and political ecology in Southeast Asia Guido Sprenger, Kristina Großmann, Michaela Haug and Timo Duile

Western-modern relationships with non-humans like animals, plants, or landscapes are paradoxical. Modern-naturalist ontologies distinguish between humans as thinking and acting beings with culture, and “nature” as a kind of clockwork composed of instinct-driven automats or inert objects governed by unchangeable laws (Descola 2013). From this view of nature, we have come to know about climate change, the decrease of biodiversity, and the potential ecological collapse, and we also know what to do about it. But the same view of nature also furthers the objectification, exploitation, and destruction of non-humans for short-term human benefits. Thus, we find ourselves in a double bind. We need a calculable, predictive, and scien­ tific approach to nature and have to reject it at the same time. The difficul­ ties we are experiencing when it comes to implementing the measures needed to protect a badly damaged environment suggest that the core issue is one of values, motives, and moral attitudes. If we do not want to reduce non-humans to a means of human survival we need a moral relationship with them, but one cannot have a moral relationship with a clockwork. This dilemma calls for a broadening of the idea of “social life” – and the values that sustain it – to include nature. To this end, there is much to learn from other-than-modern ecologies. Anthropology has records of myriad social and cultural configurations in which humans relate to non-humans as moral beings, as persons or powers one needs to address, respect, and care for. Can a scientific view of nature coexist with a moral relationship between humans and non-humans? Both the scientific and the moral views construct sets of relationships that tie humans and non-humans together. A scientific set of relationships tends to identify non-humans as objects that can be observed, measured, and analyzed. It also encompasses non-humans, such as laboratory equipment or measuring devices. A moral view involves notions of care and respect and allows for the possibility to treat non-humans as – possibly partial or graded – persons. Both sets of relationships should be equally considered, even if this leads to inevitable conflict. This volume explores how these different perspectives can coexist, and perhaps come to DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-1

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complement one another, based on concrete case studies as well as a theore­ tical model for the study of plural ecologies. Ecology in our understanding refers to the interaction and interdependence of humans, animals, plants, land, spirits, and technologies. We define ecolo­ gies as sets of relationships between humans and non-humans that include and exclude certain beings by acknowledging their existence, their relational qualities, and the possible relationships between them (Sprenger and Großmann 2018, see below). While the development of a new plural ecology within Western modernity is an unfinished and possibly utopian project, the present book shows that it is not unusual for ecologies to coexist. Their relationships may be pluralizing or hegemonic, conflictive or cooperative. The ability to accept different and sometimes even contradictory conceptions of non-humans, however, does not sit well with Western modernity’s desire to represent a single coherent worldview, as Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007, 10–11) argue. In contrast, for many people in the Global South or other-than-modern societies, switching back and forth between different ontological assumptions is a part of their everyday reality. In this book, we specifically document the plurality of ecologies in Southeast Asia, a region, as we will argue below, that is particularly apt for their study. To analyze their dynamics we use two central terms: pluralization and hegemonialization. Pluralization is the process by which ecologies differ­ entiate, multiply, and coexist in specific settings. Hegemonialization occurs when one ecology attempts to constrain all others, even to obliterate them. This implies the elaboration of some relationships and identifications, while others are neglected. However, as ecologies always multiply, complete dom­ inance is exceptional, maybe even impossible in the long run. The same goes for balanced coexistence. Relationships between entities thus vary widely across – and possibly within – ecologies ranging from hierarchy to equality, from production to consumption, and from protection to destruction. To better grasp plural ecologies, we link to concepts and approaches from different schools of thought. Our main inspiration comes from political ecol­ ogy, the anthropology of ontologies, and political ontology – an intersection that has started to produce important syntheses only in recent years (e.g. de la Cadena and Blaser 2018, Escobar 2020, 2018, Green 2013, Smith, Murrey, and Leck 2017). Still, these strands of theory often enough operate in dis­ tinction to each other. We argue that both local conceptualizations of environment and translocal power structures are decisive factors for the understanding of plural ecologies. To this end, we refer to the politics that are involved in shaping ecologies and to the conflicts which result from their interaction when they strive for hege­ mony. We not only elaborate on the multifocal power relations at play but also describe different modes of relations to the environment that underpin different ecologies.

Introduction

3

In this introduction, we will briefly sketch some of the central ideas of political ecology and the anthropology of ontologies before we review some recent attempts to overcome their division. We will then argue that Southeast Asia provides a rich source of new models if we consider our efforts as attempts to capture the implicit and explicit theories of sociality and cosmol­ ogy that inform ecological practices in the region. We will explain the basic terms of our approach and finally show how the chapters of this book map some exemplary variations of plural ecologies.

Political ecology, the anthropology of ontologies and political ontology Political ecology As a critical, interdisciplinary approach, political ecology seeks to demon­ strate the embeddedness of human–environment relations in relationships of power and its negotiation. In its classical form, this approach presupposes a distinction between “culture” and “nature” and aims to demonstrate their interconnection. Rather than investigating ecological questions as a mere subject of natural-scientific knowledge and technical management, Political Ecology investigates the political aspects of environmental conflicts, social movements, or environmental discourses. Environmental phenomena are seen in relation to their economic and political conditions; in addition, there is a strong actor orientation, a multiscalar analysis connecting local and translocal relations, and a historical perspective (Robbins 2012). The early phase of political ecology was mostly informed by Marxist approaches such as dependency theories, peasant studies, and world system theories (e.g. Blaikie 1985, Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, Hecht 1985, Redclift 1987). Later, these Marxist-materialist models were supplemented by postmodernist or “idealist” positions that engaged with discursive theories (Tetreault 2017). This way, and ironically, the nature–culture–divide was reproduced as separate strands of theory within Political Ecology. Today, Marxist positions – focussing on class relations or the distribution of means of production such as land – coexist with poststructuralist approa­ ches more concerned with the social construction of what is understood as “nature” and “environment”. However, several scholars (e.g. Harvey 1996, Peluso and Watts 2001) have attempted to bring both tendencies together. Blaikie, for instance, defines Political Ecology as “an emblem, with the pos­ sibility of a closer and more fruitful engagement of natural and social sciences than hitherto, of new and innovative ways of understanding alternative con­ structions of nature and society, and of critique of authoritative knowledge and unequal power, both discursive and material” (Blaikie 1999, 144; empha­ sis added). Current political ecology links to geography and anthropology and aims to understand “the complex relations between nature and society through a careful analysis of […] access and control over resources and their

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implications for environmental health, sustainable livelihoods and explaining environmental conflict” (Watts 2000, 257). In this framework, Michael Dove (2011) showed how forest dwellers in Borneo managed a fragile balance between local autonomy based on subsistence and production for the world market. Pinkaew (2001) has documented similar practices of ecological autonomy among Karen in Thailand. For the destruction of these worlds by incoming economic concepts and practices, Anna Tsing (2005) has coined the notion of “friction”. Tania Murray Li (2007, 2014) has shown how local societies embrace these concepts, even when they lead to their disadvantage. The anthropology of ontologies The anthropology of ontologies (Kohn 2015) – part of an interdisciplinary ontological turn originating in science and technology studies – developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s from a synthesis of radical cultural relativism and postmodern and poststructuralist approaches. Its common denominator is a critique of anthropocentrism and classic Western-modern dichotomies, like nature-culture and object-subject. Ontological approaches argue that these dichotomies are only one of many possible ways for building worlds. While the term “ontology” used to denote, in philosophy, the investigation of being itself, its pluralization and historicization (e.g. Hacking 2002) radica­ lizes the earlier notion of cultural difference prominent in anthropology (Viveiros de Castro 2015). The ontological approaches relevant here hold that worlds are made through practices and identifications that are historically, culturally, and con­ textually specific (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). This resonates with Tim Ingold’s (2011) notion of human–environment relations as a pre-semiotic, and mutually constitutive flow of life which he exemplifies by contrast to a more scientific modern ontology. The anthropology of ontologies tends to focus on indigenous peoples and the most conspicuously non-modern aspects of their lives, leading to a strong emphasis on alterity. At the same time, it aims at transcending the othering discourses of cultural relativism with a notion of the mutually productive complementarity of identity and alterity (e.g. Hol­ braad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014, Viveiros de Castro 2019). This suggests that while worlds are multiple, they are not mutually exclu­ sive, bounded entities. Thus, the ontological approach posits a common world of diverging identifications of agents and patients, persons and non-persons (Escobar 2020, Latour 2014). Philippe Descola (2013) has categorized all possible identifications of nonhumans by humans into a fourfold scheme. Each of them may become dominant for certain people or contexts, while the others remain as implicit, unrealized potentialities. We retain here Descola’s notion of identification but disagree with his argument that identification precedes relationships. Our Southeast Asian material (see below) suggests the reverse.

Introduction

5

For Viveiros de Castro, the differentially constructed worlds can be bridged by a relationship of “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2004) and become “transcontextual interfaces” whose function is to represent – in the diplomatic sense of the term – the others in the midst of the own. We diverge from Viveiros de Castro, however, regarding his stress on the difference between worlds. Along with Nadasdy (2021) we argue that variations in relationships with non-humans do not so much constitute different worlds, but rather that identifications may be multiple and indeterminate. Plural ecologies, as all these approaches suggest, emerge from everyday practice. Some practices may be coherent with different ecologies. Growing rice may be meaningful both in a naturalist and an animist framework. Only certain practices within a complex set of relationships make a divergence between ecologies visible – for instance when the aim of an abundant harvest is pursued either by rituals or by chemicals. The use of each of them implies a different quality of a relationship, a different notion of efficiency. However, such cases do not necessarily imply their mutual exclusivity – you can use rituals and chemicals alike. Both approaches, political ecology and the anthropology of ontologies have been criticized, often for the lack of those aspects that define the other. Therefore, recent years have seen attempts at overcoming the difference. The current book contributes to this project.

Towards unified models of ontology and politics Bruno Latour has pointed out how the division of nature and culture effec­ tuated the removal of “natural” actors from the political arena (Latour 2008). This distinction locates the distribution of power, its negotiations and deci­ sion-making within the human sphere, while ecology would be a matter of access to quantifiable resources and a mechanistic interaction among non­ human beings. Although political ecology criticized the hegemony of capital­ ist understandings of nature from early on, it often failed to extract itself from the concomitant concepts of politics and to treat local or indigenous concepts as serious alternatives. The ontological approach thus suggests that political ecology should be wary of “translating” other-than-modern representations into terms of secular politics and natural science. Taking into account how beings matter and relate differently in ecologies can shed new light on issues at the heart of political ecology. In contrast, ontological approaches have been criticized for ignoring the politics and power relations constituting their fields (Ramos 2013). Often, the anthropology of ontologies provides exemplars of alternatives which seem disconnected from history and global power. Owing to their focus on local or indigenous cosmologies, ontological approaches hesitate to investigate the damage done by environmental exploitation that can only be understood from a translocal perspective. Pollution, deforestation, mining, or oil

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production damage relationships in multiple ontologies but cannot be prop­ erly addressed by just a single one of them (Bessire and Bond 2014, 446). The way ontological approaches highlight alterity has thus been criticized as a new form of exclusionary exoticizing (ibid., Todd 2016). The coupling of local, regional, national, or global factors that we advertise allows considering local collectives not as preserving animist or otherwise distinct ontologies in isolation, but as people embedded in a multitude of political and ecological regimes such as states, companies, conservation agencies, or non-governmental organizations (NGO). The coproduction of ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern worlds’ In the literature on ontologies, it often seems that small, local settlements, their neighbours, and surrounding forests are sufficient to conceptualize them. This may not just be a matter of ignorance or false romanticism on the part of the ethnographers, but an artifact of the way these communities conceive of their realities (see Descola 1994). Nevertheless, ontological approaches propose “a plurality of ontologies” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 7) as a caveat against the portrayal of local ontologies as homogeneous, firmly defined units “as normatively shared uniformly among members of a group” (Harris and Robb 2012, 668). In fact, local and indigenous communities often accommodate various ecologies through practice. The challenge is therefore to theorize how individuals or groups appropriate and engage with different and partly contradictory ontological assumptions. The actor orientation of political ecology and its focus on social differentiation (class, age, gender, etc.) might help to not only highlight “modes or moments of alterity” but also “the complexity and contrasts that exist throughout peoples’ lives” (Harris and Robb 2012, 669). Recent work on Latin America like that of de la Cadena (2015) or Escobar (2018, 2020) but also Africa (Sullivan 2017) or Melanesia (Chao 2020) seeks ways to bring together the coherence and resilience of local ontologies with translocal connectedness and political power. These connections can take various forms. One of the most prominent is that of conflict and contrast. Most models that merge ontological approaches and political ecology have adopted a focus on conflict from the latter. We agree that the very divergence of plural ecologies often becomes visible when things go wrong. Still, the structures of these conflicts are only partly understood. This points to several limitations in the present debate. First, most of the prominent attempts to integrate ontological and political-ecological perspectives construct their argument along with a distinction of “indigenous” vs. “modern” categories of people, thus replicating the structure of classical relativism. Mario Blaser (2009), for instance, has shown how a hunting agreement between indigenous Amazo­ nians and conservationists failed, owing to different concepts of what causes scarcity or abundance. This led to a conflict between the local and the

Introduction

7

biologically informed ecology of conservationism. In a similar line of thought, Naveh and Bird-David (2014) differentiate between animist and capitalist relations that the same actors engage in. The question of whether non-humans are recognized as persons or as resources is a matter of con­ texts, not always of actors. A less conflictive model that focuses on negotiation and multiplicity is represented by Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) work on Andean peasant acti­ vists. She conceives the opposition of indigeneity and modernity as mutually constitutive. In her setting, indigenous politics encompasses negotiations with governments and landowners on the one hand and the recognition of sentient “earth beings” on the other. De la Cadena argues that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive but fractalized or folded into each other. Similarly, Michaela Haug documents the ability to accept the simultaneous relevance of alternative assumptions about the world among the Dayak Benuaq in Kali­ mantan who employ different concepts of nature in a context-sensitive manner (Haug 2018, this volume). Other examples in this volume are by Schneider and Großmann. A third mode of connecting is present in cases where people with diverging ontological assumptions consciously form alliances with each other for poli­ tical reasons. The cooperation of conservationists, local activists, and adher­ ents to specific religions and rituals, reported by Bräuchler (2018), Hüwelmeier (this volume), or Reuter (this volume), demonstrate ontological practices that are shaped by political conflicts. Indigenous ecologies seem to be original features of indigeneity but are also shaped by historical and con­ temporary political-economic circumstances. A number of these accounts of cooperation suggest that care and respect for non-humans in local ecologies easily ally with globalized forms of environmental protection in their shared opposition against capitalist and developmentalist exploitation. Here, the relation between ontologies is a matter of transduction, most importantly in the language of modern law (Salmond 2015, Surrallés 2017). However, other studies show that such attempted alliances do not obliterate the distinctions between local and environmentalist ecologies, leading to almost ironical misunderstandings of local concepts (Swancutt 2016), partial failure (Palmer and McWilliam 2019), or outright alienation of former human-non human alliances (White 2021). In some contexts, indigenous ecologies do not have to emerge in opposition to hegemonic ecologies while in others they can, in their otherness, serve as a means of struggle (Chao 2020, Duile, this volume). Our concept of plural ecologies that intersect with each other accounts for these situations better than the assumption of diverging ontologies. Several authors noticed that some indigenous actors handle the coex­ istence of diverse ecologies, ontologies, or cosmologies with much more ease than modern Westerners. De la Cadena’s main informant had no problem with equating the wrath of the earth beings with climate change (de la Cadena 2015, xxii), and Salmond’s (2014) Maori friends easily shifted

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between Maori and modern legal worlds. Our findings, however, suggest that the contrast between the ‘universe’ of modernity and the ‘pluriverse’ of indigenous peoples, as Escobar (2020) proposes, needs to be overcome as well, as modern ecology is one of many, even though it is engaged in hege­ monialization possibly more than others. Therefore, we need to rethink plural ecologies from the vantage point of Southeast Asian ethnography.

Theorizing inspired by Southeast Asia The contributions to the present volume develop the idea of the pluraliza­ tion and hegemonialization of ecologies from research conducted in South­ east Asia. They are thus informed by a specific research tradition, just like some of the core models of the anthropology of ontologies are informed by studies of Amazonian and circumpolar hunting. We suggest that models from research in Southeast Asia are relevant for general anthropology in a comparable way. In Southeast Asia, different ontological identifications do not necessarily imply a rupture between worlds. Rather, ecologies consist of practical fields of fine-grained differentiation in which even contradictory identifications may shift into each other – for instance when resources turn into spirits and back – or form unlikely alliances. This might be due to the fact, as we argue below, that Southeast Asian concepts of sociality are often based on a distinction between inside and outside that are at the same time mutually constitutive. Therefore, the kind of translocal relationships that political ecology is inter­ ested in, is already part of local ontologies and cosmologies. We thus derive our model of plural ecologies from a series of general­ izations on Southeast Asia. None of these is exclusive to the region. We do not claim to capture its ‘essence’ or universal validity for all its diverse socie­ ties. Still, these generalizations are recurring themes in research on the socie­ ties, past and present, of this region, cultivating our ethnographic attention and suggesting models that transcend its regional limits. If Viveiros de Castro (2019, 20) is correct and anthropological theories are indeed versions of the knowledge practices of the people we study and work with, Southeast Asia may prove to be a particularly rich source of insight for the issue at hand. The three aspects of Southeast Asian studies that we consider here are relation­ ships between humans and non-humans, translocality as a dominant form of the inside-outside distinction, and hierarchy and power. Relationships between human and non-human beings All socialities and collectives in Southeast Asia encompass human and non­ human beings in mutual dependence, blurring the differentiation of “reli­ gion” and “nature”. Besides animals, plants, or landscapes, the interface of ontology and environment in Southeast Asian studies is occupied by less­ than-visible beings commonly called spirits, deities, or life forces (Århem

Introduction

9

2016). In most instances, these beings are connected either to the dead and to specific social entities like houses or villages, or to the land and the earth. In some cases, these two categories are closely connected, even inter­ changeable (Mus 2012). The term “spirit”, however, is often infused by Western-modern concepts of mind vs. body or immanence vs. transcendence. High (2022) thus prefers “powers”, Valeri (2000) speaks of “occult powers”, and Baumann (2022) argues for the term “numinals”. However, we tend to employ the term “spirits” in this book to stress the person-like nature of human–environment relationships, albeit with qualifications. The study of environmental relations and religion imply each other, insofar the study of religion in Southeast Asia is structured around the question of how translocal and scripture-oriented religions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity relate to the address of local deities, spirits and potencies, often labelled “animism”. However, Work (2020) has argued that these “chthonic powers” have less to do with religion than with politics and local economies. Thus, when we explore plural ecologies that integrate spirits, we touch upon world religions only occasionally. “Animism” can be minimally defined as the recognition of life beyond biology and personhood beyond Homo sapiens (Sprenger 2016). It indicates relational ontologies in which life, agency, and personhood are distributed among humans and non-humans. The relationships that Southeast Asian collectives cultivate with their non-human members and their environment are continuous with those that tie their human members to each other; com­ parable rules apply to both. For Southeast Asia specifically, Kaj Århem speaks of “hierarchical ani­ mism” (Århem 2016) – an animism that does not symmetrize actors as in Amazonian ontologies, but in each moment defines them as superior or inferior. This applies most prominently to god-like beings and ancestors, but also spirits of the earth commonly called “owners” or “lords of the land” in local languages. Paul Mus (2012) has argued that these beings emerge at the intersection between the diffuse fertility of the land and human efforts to access and control it. His model has been reassessed in recent years and explicitly linked to ecological concerns (High 2022, Work 2020). In terms of relationships, lords of the land and other spiritual beings are aligned with categories of humans like political rulers or strangers (e.g. Sil­ lander 2016). However, the former often do not have ontologically fixed qua­ lities. Spirits may be dangerous or benevolent according to context; some beings may be impersonal potencies or invisible persons, again according to context; what is more, doubt and the denial of their existence is not necessa­ rily an indicator of scientific modernity. Rather, talking beings out of exis­ tence is part and parcel of Southeast Asian ontological strategies (e.g. Spiro 1967, 41, 56–57). We thus suggest that Southeast Asia harbors ontologies of possibility (Sprenger, this volume). The question is not so much if gods or spirits exist or not. Rather, relationships are practiced in a way that allows for their

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possibility to exist. This indeterminacy makes Southeast Asian ontologies connective to a wide range of external influences, including translocal reli­ gions like Buddhism or Islam (Duile 2020), naturalism, and various techni­ ques of government. As we argue below, animism is not a hallmark of traditionality but can be co-produced along with and within modern capitalist ecologies. If this local theory could be transducted into anthropological analysis, an ontology of possibilities enables an understanding of plural ecologies in practice. Our approach neither assumes that people exclusively relate to the non-human environment in a single way nor does it rely on categories like modernity or animism. In some cases, such labels for the difference between ecologies may be useful, while in others, they might detract from more com­ plex and context-dependent networks of relationships that cannot be sub­ sumed under such dichotomies (Kleinod, this volume). Autochthony and translocality In many ways, the anthropology of ontologies focuses on an inside view of local ecological worlds, while political ecology provides an outside perspective on the embeddedness of localities within wider national and globalized regimes that local actors are often only partly aware of. We argue that a dis­ tinction of inside and outside is crucial for Southeast Asian socialities but is by no means seen as irreconcilable. Southeast Asian communities conceive of themselves in terms of a com­ plementation of internal and external relationships, which Sprenger (2011) has termed endo- and exosociality. In this local theory (or knowledge prac­ tice), any social entity – from relational persons to households, villages, and towns to historical kingdoms and modern nation-states – is defined by boundaries. However, boundaries are not stable givens but need active main­ tenance. Recurring dualisms in this process are village and forest, health and illness, autochthonous and immigrant people. The difference between humans and non-humans can thus be mapped upon the difference between inside and outside, although the two are not identical. There are inside (domestic) animals and outside (wild) animals, inside and outside spirits, etc. At the same time, there are also internal and external modes of relating, from the point of view of any given social entity, e.g. kin­ ship and trade, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ people. Thereby, Southeast Asian exosocial relationships include the very kind of influence that political ecology is interested in. In this sense, Southeast Asian models of human-environment relationships encompass translocal powers, governments, long-distance trade, and remote sources of cosmological knowledge, including doctrinal religions and modern science. Therefore, local worlds that enable the identification of non-humans and translocal powers or markets do not constitute mutually exclusive domains. Especially in the historical peripheries of states, people have diverse

Introduction

11

livelihoods which include different economic strategies (agriculture, agrofor­ estry, animal husbandry, hunting, etc.). Some of these strategies focus on subsistence, others are linking people to local networks and international trade. The latter mostly applies to non-timber forest products, but also select cash crops like spices, resins, and opium. Historically, these combinations of strategies allowed people to maintain their autonomy and cultural distinc­ tiveness while at the same time being connected to the outside (Dove 2011, Grabowsky and Wichasin 2008, 30, 100, Großmann 2018, this volume, Hanks and Hanks 2001, xxv, Haug, this volume, Jonsson 2014, 50, Tapp 1989, 152–153, Wadley 2005). Today, however, threats to these diversified economies constitute not only an economic constraint but undermine the selfdetermination and self-conception of forest-dependent communities (Arenz et al. 2017). These economic relationships – both subsistence and trade – are also cos­ mological. Bonds with spirits enable the production for export, like the “marriages” that divers on the Aru Islands, eastern Indonesia, had with sea spirits to collect pearls (Spyer 2000, 137) or the “souls of cotton” that the Rmeet of Laos invoke alongside the rice souls, referring to a past era when they produced cotton for export (Sprenger 2006). Translocal religions should also be considered under this aspect, even though we touch upon them only fleetingly (Rodemeier and Schneider, this volume). Brahmanism/Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity have been imported from outside of the region, often first by traders. China, too, is an important source of influence. The ideological and cosmological implica­ tions of nationalism, socialism, and modern science could tentatively be added, as well as developmentalism and environmentalism. The external origin of these orders served to install the internal-external difference at the core of local polities and communities (Rehbein and Sprenger 2016). Defining any community (village, state, ethnicity…) as Buddhist, Muslim or Christian situated a translocal potential within the very definition of the social entity. On the state level, they have been indigenized in the political processes of nation-building. In this sense, they do not obliterate, but rather unite the difference between autochthony and translocality. This is important for the way ecologies are generated – elements of auto­ chthony may be coupled with elements of translocal systems. An example is the tree ordinations by Thai Buddhist monks that employ Buddhist, envir­ onmentalist, and animist relationships (Darlington 2012). While Southeast Asians continuously differentiate between inside and outside, these classifica­ tions not only shift contextually and over time but always complement each other (Work 2020, 128). In any given context, inside and outside are variously hierarchized. The outside may be a source of power that is morally neutral, this way valorizing external influences; but it may also be considered a threat (Anderson 1972, Tooker 2012).

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Hierarchy and power In contrast to Western-modern values of egalitarianism, concepts of relation­ ships in Southeast Asia seldom appear in the literature without a stress on hierarchy. Hierarchies may be pyramidal and transitive, with definite tops and bottoms, or intransitive and cyclical. Concepts of equality do exist as well, but often in the form of a shared position within a hierarchy. Here, hierarchy is the condition of equality (see also Gibson and Sillander 2011). However, these hierarchies do not necessarily imply cultural streamlining and hegemony. Instead, they may even guarantee diversity, as hierarchical difference implies a certain autonomy regarding the parties connected. A wellknown form this takes is the galactic polity, often found in mainland South­ east Asia (e.g. Tambiah 1985). In this local model, rulers at the center sub­ ordinate rulers in the periphery, but do not exert immediate power over the latter’s subordinates. This scaled model of the polity allowed for considerable autonomy, both politically and culturally, on the local level. The structure also was lined up with powerful land-owning spirits (van Esterik 1982, Tanabe 1988). Island Southeast Asia similarly has a long history of emerging and declin­ ing centres. Only through colonial politics and subsequent processes of nation-building major centres of influence with fixed boundaries emerged (Haug, Rössler, and Grumblies 2017). Struggles for domination, often cou­ ched in terms of religion, were always present but seldomly resulted in longterm supremacies. Decentralization and local autonomy remain as a powerful value and important option, exemplified by post-Suharto Indonesia (Bräuch­ ler and Erb 2011). Superiority and subordination are rarely stable, and this informs ecological relationships as well. External authorities, imported and local techniques of state centralization, and governmentality, international donors, religious actors, and companies influence the way in which people deal with nonhumans, but so do powerful land-owning spirits and chthonic powers. People manage these relationships in a way that speaks to their awareness that hier­ archies are inevitable and ontological in general, but any specific hierarchy can be dissolved, reversed, or evaded. State power and spirit power can be played out against each other (N. Århem 2016, Beban and Work 2014). While local hierarchies are often not hegemonic, they can open pathways for hege­ monialization, as we define below. These are some of the recurring themes that inform the literature on Southeast Asia. If we look beyond the refractions caused by the functional differentiation of the academic models shaping this literature – differentia­ tions of economy, politics, religion, and ecology, for instance – we may cap­ ture local Southeast Asian theories of sociality, expressed in words and practices. In these theories, humans and non-humans form collectives struc­ tured by inevitable but unstable hierarchies. These collectives reproduce and change through differentiating inside and outside, autochthony and

Introduction

13

translocality, in a way that synthesizes them at the same time, giving the outside a place on the inside. These expanding horizons of cosmology, the constant shifts of boundaries, this potential for re-ordering and reinterpreting relationships under circumstances of shifting local and translocal powers provides a seedbed for the pluralisation of cosmologies and ecologies. This suggests a new model that overcomes the tensions between an analy­ tical focus on local ontologies and one on translocal political ecology, between classifications of modern and non-modern ecologies. Southeast Asian ecologies encompass the difference between local and translocal, between autochthonous and imported, and between non-modern and modern. There is no need to take political ecology models and add ontology on top or vice versa. In Southeast Asia, the political is ontological.

Ecologies, pluralization, hegemonialization Ecologies are sets of enacted, practical relationships between humans and non-humans that acknowledge or deny certain beings, the possible relation­ ships among them (hierarchy, equality, reciprocity, care, production, con­ sumption, protection, destruction, etc.) and their qualities (e.g., as things, actants, persons…) – qualities here also understood as potentials for relationships. In this respect, our concept of ecologies stresses human involvement. Developing a specifically anthropological viewpoint, we take seriously the implication of the Anthropocene in that no ecological relationship can ignore the presence of humans on this planet. However, ecologies in our sense range from those that comply with the classical focus of the term on “nature” to those which also acknowledge machinery, state laws, or agentive abstractions like “the market”. Still, describing these relations as ecological fosters a dis­ tribution of agency and attention for non-humans that would be easily missed if they were described merely in terms of economy and human action. The recognition and identification of entities are thus crucial factors in the composition of ecologies. They may occur explicitly and generally, when, for instance, certain non-humans are consistently named and addressed as per­ sons (or their personhood consistently denied). But it may also occur in forms that DeVore (2017) has called “ontological commitments” – presuppositions implied by rules and actions. In his study, tappers of a specific tree sap do not identify the tree as sentient but express an ontological commitment when they behave as if it could hear them. Here, relationship precedes identification (pace Descola 2013), which is therefore a result of practice and open to change. The range of presuppositions indicates that these relations are less about the unidirectional application of cognitive concepts, lodged in the mind of human beings, but about practice. This point has been made by several authors who have stressed the malleability and processuality of ontologies (Bird-David 1999, Scott 2013, Willerslev 2007). To this, we may add Pierre

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Bourdieu’s notion of practice (Bourdieu 1979). While his theory is restricted to human interactions, its extension to ecologies highlights the dynamics of power, marginalisation, and hegemonialization within ecologies. A Bourdieuan approach also accounts for the implicitness of habitual assumptions about ecologies. In everyday life, presuppositions about nonhumans do not need reflection nor explanation. Only when ecologies clash, at their points of frictions, for instance, when beings can be interpreted as inert or conscious and active, does the necessity arise to explicate the implicit and to take a stance (see Bourdieu 1979). It is in these moments of divergence that differences in ecologies become visible for actors. An important feature of an ecology is a certain degree of coherence and systematicity, even though its components – relationships, identifications, beings – may be quite heterogeneous. This means that if one relationship in an ecology is acted upon, other relationships are affected. An illustration is the notion among Katu in Vietnam that a mountain spirit will retaliate when a villager breaks the rule not to hunt on its slopes, but its retaliation may not necessarily hurt the perpetrator, but any fellow villager. This indicates that the relationship with the mountain spirit in turn creates binding relationships among villagers (N. Århem 2015). In this way, relations between villagers, animals, plants, and spirits constitute an ecology in which one action influ­ ences others. Coherence and systematicity can thus only be observed in pro­ cessual emergence. They are never complete and may not even be very durable; still, they can be experienced and observed in the way they play out. Again, this becomes particularly pronounced when ecologies come into con­ flict. New elements and changing relationships may affect habitualized pro­ cesses and produce new ones, transforming systems and thereby highlighting their systematicity (see Rodemeier, Bräuchler, both this volume). At the same time, the validity of ecologies – that is, the extent to which the systematicity of relationships and identifications is binding – is a question that remains (see also Bräuchler 2018). Ecologies may be tied to communities or collectives, to persons, to local or translocal organizations, institutions like the state, and functional systems like science, but also to more diffusely defined chains of relationships. In some cases (e.g. Großmann, Haug, and Schneider, this volume), ecologies may refract even within a very specific local level – the ontologies of possibility and the diversity of translocal relationships provide conditions for producing this multiplicity, even between persons in the same community or context. For the dynamics of their refraction, we propose the terms pluralization and hegemonialisation, thus going beyond our earlier formulations (Sprenger and Großmann 2018). Pluralization denotes the coexistence and intertwining of different ecologies in a single setting. As mentioned above, pluralization often appears as a jux­ taposition of modern-scientific, tendentially capitalist ecologies and nonmodern animist ones in the current literature (e.g. Chao 2018, Naveh and Bird-David 2014). However, this is not the only type of ecological plurality. We suggest that the pre-eminence of these cases is due to the concerns that a

Introduction

15

modern perspective – employed both by international and local actors – brings to the field, and not because they are the only or even the most common cases. Rather, it seems that ecologies tend to proliferate and plur­ alize along lines that are quite diverse (Rodemeier, Duile, Bräuchler, and Reuter, this volume). As Bräuchler (2018) has shown for a conflict over land development in Bali, different ecologies with their diverging acknowledgment of relevant actors and forces produce different alliances. However, this does not imply that conflicts are absent. Harwell (2011) describes how Muslim Malay fishermen and non-Muslim Iban agriculturalists relate to the same seasonally changing landscape in Borneo in entirely differ­ ent ways. Thus, it is not just a conflict about the use of resources that is at stake here but a conflict between different sets of relationships that either highlight fish in the water or the growth of plants on land. These moments when conceptual divergence becomes enacted are an important focus in the present volume. A second point about relationships between ecologies follows our insight into Southeast Asia. A Western-modern point of view may suggest that the acknowledgment of the existence of beings and their hierarchization are separate and subsequent factors. However, acknowledgment often implies hierarchization. In a different way, this also applies to ecologies. Rarely a single ecology is in place and rarely their co-existence is on equal footing – there are dominant sets of relationships and identifications that constrain the operation of the others. This is where the political-ecological attention for power and translocality comes into play. The second dynamic that we identify in plural ecologies is hegemonializa­ tion. Hegemonialization denotes processes in which one ecology attempts to become superior to the others. Our concept loosely follows Antonio Grams­ ci’s term “hegemony”. Gramsci argued that political leadership is based upon consensus, achieved through the popularization of the ruling classes’ worldview (Bates 1975, 352). Hegemony is not executed by direct command and force – it is a historical consent to a certain form of class dominance (Gramsci 1999, 145). As Gramsci understood hegemony as a culture of the ruling class which becomes the acknowledged standard for all classes – and thus obstructs the development of an independent culture and class con­ sciousness among subalterns – hegemonialization here denotes a process in which a certain ecology attempts to establish itself as “common sense”. It aims to appear as something that everyone takes for granted. In so far as ecologies are stabilized by ontological habitus and identifications, their rela­ tionships expand and grow towards hegemonialization. This process is at once a power struggle between social alliances of diverse actors, including humans and non-humans, and a competition of concepts. Socially speaking, an ecology may be bolstered by powerful institutions like the state, religious networks, transnational companies, NGOs, or interna­ tional regulations. In conceptual terms, discourses of one ecology may claim that the knowledge of others is just belief, superstition, immorality, or

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Guido Sprenger, et al.

falsehood; that certain beings do not exist, or that its own truth is universal or at least binding for all actors involved. Hegemonialization also includes the formalization of an ecology in institutions. In this sense, hegemonialization is not necessarily identical to Southeast Asian hierarchies. Hegemonialization often implies the obliteration of certain beings – like the denial that spirits exist. Hierarchization, however, implies their subordination, which in turn allows for contexts in which the sub­ ordinated are necessary and important – and for potential reversals (Dumont 2013). Yet, there is also no contradiction between the two, as hegemonializa­ tion may result from hierarchies – for instance, when Southeast Asian power holders adopt hegemonial techniques of power from Western modernity to stabilize their positions. However, as we show in this volume, the absolute universalisation of a specific ecology is never achieved. Hegemonialization never reaches the point where only a single ecology remains. Just as the Gramscian subalterns resist, to some degree, the hegemony of the ruling class, subaltern ecologies also persist in, for instance, rituals, economic practices, narratives, memories, or political strategies. Even if certain ecologies disappear or transform beyond recognition, the dynamics of pluralization themselves would produce diversity even within a dominant ecology (see Bräuchler, Haug, this volume). The diversity of prac­ tices and their ontological implications and commitments would develop along with historical changes in human-non-human relationships. These changes will necessarily lead to new practices and thereby to new relation­ ships. Pluralization is inevitable. Thus, Hüwelmeier (this volume) stresses anthropogenic changes in the urban landscape such as felling hundreds of old trees, while both Bräuchler and Großmann (this volume) deal with different apprehensions of land conflict. This, in turn, will foster new ontological alli­ ances that may not be conflictive in the beginning but develop into conflicts later. Therefore, pluralization and hegemonialization are not exclusive fea­ tures of specific situations, nor are they normative terms. Rather, the dynam­ ics of the emergence of plural ecologies and their hegemonic tendencies are mutually reinforcing – inevitably so in moments of conflict.

The structure and dynamics of plural ecologies The contributions to this volume provide a small lexicon of examples of how pluralization and hegemonialization vary within the region. Besides these two dynamics, several concerns run through the chapters: what are the units of ecologies – groups, actors, contexts? What are the conditions for conflict between ecologies or alliances across them? And how do relationships inte­ grate or exclude beings? First, we have to return to our observation that much of the literature on the pluralization of ecologies is structured around the faultlines between local, perhaps “animist” ecologies and modern, capitalist, and naturalist

Introduction

17

ones. Capitalist and naturalist ecologies restrict agency mostly to living human beings while non-humans appear as things to be acted upon. “Ani­ mism”, in contrast, forms a large residual category covering relationships in which non-biological beings may appear as alive or non-humans as persons. While this dualism is plausible as a first step, it is informed by a distinction of tradition and modernity as central values of modernist self-description. Important as they often are for both state-driven discourses and indigenous strategies, dualisms brush over many important differentiations. While they do have both empirical and conceptual validity, we show their limits in the course of the book. Pluralization and hegemonialization produce a much richer analysis. Guido Sprenger’s chapter identifies the inherently plural characteristics of what he calls Southeast Asian animism as one of the conditions of ecological pluralization. Skepticism about spirits, he argues, is not simply an effect of naturalist influence, but rather a condition for dealing with invisible forces more generally. It is grounded in an ontology of possibilities, in which spirits are not fixed in their existence but rather assumed and experimentally addressed. This potential of ontological openness provides connectivity for other, imported ecologies. The multitude of interfaces with other ecologies that emerge from the contradictions of identifications, commitments, and relationships make ecologies inherently diversified, instead of countable, welldefined entities. This also helps to explain why the units of ecologies are so varied. This allows the analysis of various configurations of connections between translocal ecologies and differentiations of local ones. Susanne Rodemeier’s chapter about the unexpected death of a ritual leader who had ignored rela­ tions with spirits in Alor Kecil, eastern Indonesia, gives a seemingly straight­ forward example of the dichotomy between local, animist ecologies and those connected to development and the modern economy. However, she compli­ cates this dualism by showing how it depends on the interpretation of unpre­ cedented events. People deliberate about possible understandings in respect to the different ecologies at hand, without coming to an unequivocal decision; however, the animist interpretation seemed most convincing for a majority of them. Rodemeier suggests a tripartite classification of including, neglecting, or ignoring beings. Including involves the acknowledgment that certain beings not only exist but also play an agentive part in ecologies. Neglecting implies that a certain being is thought to exist but does not have any influence on the relationships at hand. Ignoring means the denial of the existence of certain beings – naturalists know spirits by name but consider them as illusory. A series of studies from Borneo demonstrate how the relationship between naturalist and animist ecologies may reconfigure. If Rodemeier’s chapter sug­ gests that animist ecologies are incompatible with modernity, Haug’s exploration of plurality among the Dayak Benuaq exemplifies the opposite. Here, different practices of and different perspectives on the forest come to

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the fore which “are underwritten by different ontological assumptions” (Harris and Robb 2012, 672). While in some contexts those relationships between humans and non-humans are emphasized which resemble an animist ecology and a close personal attachment, in others the forest appears as an exploitable and alienable resource, resembling naturalist ecology. Exemplify­ ing the ontologies of possibility, the Dayak Benuaq acknowledge that trees can potentially be the home of spirits, but most are not. Haug reminds us not to be too quick in attributing a particular ecology to a particular ethnic group, not even to particular individuals. Similarly, Timo Duile in his chapter argues that capitalism/naturalism and animism do not represent opposed worlds that are insurmountably alien to each other in indigenous activism. Rather, indigeneity and globality co-pro­ duce ontologies. Indigeneity in Indonesia is not always evoked against the state and its economy. While in the conflictive setting of West Kalimantan, indigenous activists subscribed to an ecology which stresses their distinctive­ ness to state and development, indigenous activists in South Sulawesi do the opposite when embracing modernist Islam and the state-sponsored notion of entrepreneurial development. Still, as Duile shows, the common globalized understanding of ecologies in terms of the capitalism vs. animism dichotomy recursively shapes local ecological and political projects from the actors’ point of view. The notion that plural ecologies emerge as responses to government poli­ cies is also prominent in Kristina Großmann’s chapter. She shows how three different ways of relating to land intermingle in Kalimantan, one external to the locality, two internal, but one of them integrating external ideas. The government considers land as a resource that can be owned individually, while the indigenous peoples stress their essential relationship with it. How­ ever, the latter are not united in their conceptualizations. Some Dayak leaders treat land like the government does but claim priority for Dayak. Opposing the full alienability of land, they aim at ethnically specific ownership. Other leaders however consider land as a relational and spiritual entity that cannot be owned privately. For them, the land is a complex actor in its own right. The two groups see the two types of Dayak identifications of land as con­ flictive. These identifications go along with relationships. People relate to actor-like land less hierarchically than to thing-like land. Großmann distinguishes between the attachment and the detachment of certain beings in ecologies, according to how they appear within the con­ ceptual range of the practices that make up the ecology in question. In her case, both are local identifications that emerge from the differentiation of local and governmental ecologies. The question is though if the thing-like Dayak identification is an extension of hegemonializing efforts of the gov­ ernment. The comparison of these cases suggests that differences between ecologies may appear stark and contrastive in some cases or slight and negotiable in others. This also shows how ecologies are not isolated worlds.

Introduction

19

They intersect through their practices, including the practice of interpretation that leads up to further actions. These cases also show that conflicts over human and non-human relations is not a definite indicator for the difference between ecologies. This raises the question what the “units” of ecology are. We argue that ecologies are a matter of lived relationships and thus of practices rather than of mindsets, “culture” or groups of people. Sure enough, when conflicts demand taking sides, groups of people may emerge as actors and thus as bearers of an ecology – but, as some of the preceding chapters suggest, this may not be always the case. Animism vs. naturalism or similar divides do not tell people apart, but con­ texts of action do. These “staggered” differences between localized and globalized ecologies warrant the introduction of another term, as sometimes conflicts on envir­ onmental issues evolve without differentiating ecologies. Birgit Bräuchler’s chapter exemplifies such a situation. The government-induced development of the Aru Islands, Indonesia, leads to a hegemonializing conflict of ecolo­ gies, as in others of our chapters. However, there is also local competition over land ownership among traditional kin and landowning groups. These agree among each other on the ontology of land but disagree about the his­ torical accounts of its assignment. Such conflicts are part of the range of conflicts and coexistence covered in this volume, but Bräuchler suggests the term diversification for them. Diversification thus differs from pluralization insofar as conflicts arise within the same ecology, based on the same identi­ fications. Conflicts of diversification occur in Bräuchler’s field over tradi­ tional land allocation, while conflicts of pluralization and hegemonialization play out between different NGOs that compete about definitions of indigeneity. This pluralization of ecologies on the local level may suggest that naturalist or capitalist ecologies are monolithic. Katharina Schneider’s chapter, however, indicates that capitalist ecologies equally pluralize. In her account of boat owners on the Javanese sea, ecologies multiply based on singular persons. The actors summoned in these ecologies may be quite different – some people consider Allah as a major actor in their business, while others do not – but in none of them, fish appear as a major variable. Possibly boat owners consider fish simply as a given. Fish are thus an example of neglecting in Rodemeier’s sense, necessary for the business but of no consequence as actors. This indi­ cates that sets of relationships that are seemingly about humans and nonhumans may marginalize some of the latter considerably. Besides differentiation within localities, there are also alliances across ecologies and identifications, as the following two chapters demonstrate. Thomas Reuter, writing on farmer’s opposition to industrialized agriculture, suggests that naturalist ecologies do not necessarily imply capitalist exploi­ tation. Javanese sustainable farmers draw on natural science knowledge and experimentation, as well as on local ecologies. Reuter shows how the destructive ecology of the green revolution provoked a response in which

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various attempts at designing alternatives ally. These alternatives, while all decidedly local, selectively connect to traditional practices, religion, and modern scientific knowledge. However, their diversity is held together by their unified stance against industrialized agriculture, thereby forming a “moral ecology”. The alternative ways of food production he describes propose alternative, locally inflected forms of naturalism and modernity that allow a variety of local farmers to organize into larger, nation-wide organizations. Reuter also mentions issues of hegemony and equality. While knowledge is transferred top-down in the capitalist ecologies of the agro-industrial green revolution, it is shared laterally among alternative farmers. In the face of a hierarchy that had become hegemonic and exploitative, they practice antihegemonic equality. Gertrud Hüwelmeier’s chapter on an environmentalist movement for the preservation of thousands of old trees in Hanoi shows comparable alliances in an urban context. Diverse identifications of trees are summoned in the face of a shared antagonist. Trees are considered animated by many urban residents. Others, however, consider them as witnesses of the past and sites of memory, placing them in a decidedly “culturalist” frame of heritage. Still, others value them for economic purposes such as places for making a small business or appreciate them, owing to their positive environmental effects. Each identifi­ cation comes with different ontological commitments and sets of relation­ ships, but this does not imply conflict. These alliances harbour a diversity of ecologies that emphasize pluralization in a non-exclusive, non-hierarchical way, in the name of resistance against hegemonialization. The adaptability of local ecologies, especially the malleability of animism, is a central concern of Michael Kleinod’s concluding chapter that goes beyond a specific locality. The potential to adopt and adapt to new circum­ stances may look like a weakness of animism, but Kleinod shows that it may be a strength as well. Animism thus appears as a “positive other” to capital­ ism. Kleinod argues that animist experiences and identifications can be found beyond the range of the localized cosmologies we are mostly presenting here. Insofar as animism is an “other” of capitalism, it can be located wherever the capitalist and naturalist identifications reach their limits. Animism coagulates as a category along lines of differentiation that naturalist science and expan­ sive capitalism draw around themselves. Their relation itself is structural, and thereby productive of further differentiation. Animism today is not a hege­ monic term anymore that demotes the other, but rather an empty form that lets those in who push against the boundary from the “other” side (Sprenger 2021).

Conclusion In this introduction, we have assembled several theoretical suggestions for a better understanding of how ecologies emerge, compete, and coexist. They

Introduction

21

develop by the interaction and integration of relationships marked as internal or external to localized socialities. Practice keeps up ecologies as realities that may be constantly changing. In their practical relations, ecologies encompass identifications of a multiplicity of beings. Hierarchies and equality connect them. Pluralization creates new varieties of ecologies, diversification differ­ entiates positions internal to them, hegemonialization sees some of them trying to marginalize and obliterate the others. This operates through rela­ tionships of attachment and detachment, inclusion, neglect, and ignorance. Thus, ecologies may conflict or coexist. Conflicts may erupt over integrating, relating, and positioning beings. Integrating, however, also implies cultivating the changing differentiation of inside and outside, making the external part of the inside. There is thus a constant installing of beings in ecologies, and by the conflicts among them, they develop boundaries and draw allies together. Certain identifications of non-humans in Southeast Asia shape the pluraliza­ tion of ecologies through ontologies of possibility. The dichotomy of global, naturalist, and capitalist ecologies on the one hand and local, sustainable, and animist ones on the other is just one possible framework that these processes can be interpreted by – both by academic observers and by actors who recursively shape the situation, seeking alliances and attempting to hegemonialize their respective ecologies. Apart from these efforts, hegemonialization is often a matter of habitus and knowledge regimes rather than of intentional struggles for supremacy. This way, dichotomies become more real. However, academics and actors involved are not neatly separable sets of people. Academic knowledge may open up new, yet unac­ knowledged relationships between beings. It may serve as a medium for communication, even controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) between ecologies. It may become part of the game of infusing the inside with the outside on all sides involved, as relationships from both local and translocal ecologies lead to further pluralization. In this sense, academic theories and knowledge practice may transform ecologies by stabilizing some relationships and de-centering others. Academic projects become part of the constant oscillation between pluralization and hegemonialization. This raises the question of by which values academic intrusion, may it be ever so slight, should be governed. What are the utopian, future-oriented dimensions of fostering plural ecologies through the disper­ sion of knowledge? It is difficult to answer this question beyond some universalist catch­ phrases. Among these are obvious candidates such as sustainability, respect, and care. Sustainability is a necessity for any future-oriented action, as sus­ tainable ecologies are the foundation of any future planning. However, as numerous scholars have pointed out, to define sustainability merely in terms of resource use reduces the problem to a dimension in which it is bound to worsen. Continuing to see non-humans in terms of their exploitability and expanding the notion of “human resources” reinforces making them objects. Respect and care thus add sociality to sustainability. What is thus needed is a

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moral relationship with non-humans that complements and occasionally – though necessarily – conflicts with scientific objectification. The latter comes with its own necessities, as it supports long-term sustainability with its predic­ tions and probability calculations. However, its effect will only hold in a social project that aims at relations of mutual care and attention between humans and non-humans. Care and respect tie potential persons to each other who cultivate a sense of shared boundaries. As we learn from Southeast Asia, these bound­ aries are neither exclusive nor blurred. They are at hand when they are needed, and they signal that other communities exist just beyond the boundaries of one’s own. Various ecologies, some localized and some translocalizing, intersect in any given place. These ecologies complement each other and actors moving within this pluralized field have access to them when they need to. However, access comes with commitments. With a balanced sense of the local and its tentative, shifting boundaries, we may thus achieve a sense of the “terrestrial” that Latour (2018) has called for, of those relationships within reach on the earth’s surface that we need and need to care for. Studying plural ecologies promises a kind of loose and just “good enough” meta-ecology for this project – a level of the interaction of ecologies in which they may split, merge, stabilize and destabilize, trying to become hegemonic and failing at it. There is hope in this perspective on a world that is certainly already damaged and often seems to be on the verge of destruction (Tsing et al. 2017). The non-humans around us can be calculable things in some respects and actors in a conversation of mutual care in others. Both views have their merits and their necessity. The shifts of hegemonialization and the dogged pluralization of ecologies as we find them among Southeast Asians may pro­ vide inspiration.

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Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2014. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cul­ tural Anthropology Website, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-onto logy-anthropological-positions. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive, Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Jonsson, Hjorleifur. 2014. Slow Anthropology, negotiating difference with the Iu Mien. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program. Kohn, Eduardo. 2015. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 44(1): 311–327. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127. Latour, Bruno. 2008. Wir sind nie modern gewesen: Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie. Translated by Gustav Roßler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Another way to compose the common world.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1): 301–307. Latour, Bruno. 2018. Das terrestrische Manifest. Translated by Bernd Schwibs. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Li, Tania Murray. 2014. Land’s End, Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mus, Paul. 2012. India as seen from the East: Indian and indigenous cults in Champa. Edited by Ian Mabbett and David Chandler; translated by Ian Mabbett. Caulfield, Vic.: Monash University Press. Nadasdy, Paul. 2021. “How many Worlds are there? Ontology, practice and inde­ terminacy.” American Ethnologist, 48(4): 357–369. doi:10.1111/amet.13406. Naveh, Danny and Nurit Bird-David. 2014. “How persons become things: economic and epistemological changes among Nayaka hunter-gatherers.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(1): 74–92. Palmer, Lisa and Andrew McWilliam. 2019. “Spirit Ecologies and Customary Gov­ ernanca in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volk­ enkunde, 175: 474–505. Peluso, Nancy Lee and Michael Watts, eds. 2001. Violent Environments [from a Workshop on „Violence and the Environment“ Held at the University of California, Berkeley, in September 1998]. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pinkaew, Laungaramsri. 2001. Redefining nature: Karen ecological knowledge and the challenge to modern conservation paradigm. Chennai: Earthworm Books. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 2013. “The Politics of Perspectivism.” Annual Review of Anthro­ pology, 41: 481–494. Redclift, Michael R. 1987. Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions. 1st Ed. London: Routledge. Rehbein, Boike and Guido Sprenger. 2016. “Religion and differentiation: three Southeast Asian configurations.” In Configurations of religion – a debate. A DORI­ SEA network discussion opened by Boike Rehbein and Guido Sprenger, edited by Peter J. Bräunlein, Michael Dickhardt, and Andrea Lauser, pp. 7–19. DORISEA Working Paper Series, No. 24. Robbins, Paul. 2012. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. 2nd. Ed. Critical Introductions to Geography. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Salmond, Anne. 2014. “Tears of Rangi: Water, power, and people in New Zealand.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(3): 285–309.

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2

Ontologies of Possibility Future-oriented indeterminacy in Southeast Asian animism Guido Sprenger

Among the puzzling features of plural ecologies is the difficulty to clearly iden­ tify any single ecology with a specific category of people or even of contexts. Conflicts and contradictions between them are quite real, and these conflicts gather groups of people around them. Especially conflicts on the scale of global interventions in local life worlds suggest that there are indeed a difference between ontological identifications or relationships. However, as the chapters in this volume show, detailed ethnography questions these seemingly stark con­ trasts. It is not only that conflicting ecologies elicit conflicting parties that have never before operated as coordinated groups with a shared identity (e.g. Bräuchler 2018). Sometimes, people do not appear to be fully decided about what kind of beings they are involved with when being involved in ecologies. They treat certain beings as persons in some contexts and as things in others. They assert and deny the existence of spirits within the space of a few minutes. Even when taking context into account, the cleavage between such ontological statements seems profound. Either people take their words and actions all too lightly, or an altogether different notion of being is at stake. This chapter attempts to put in words the conditions for this ontological indeterminacy. I propose that the potential to pluralize ecologies does not solely emerge from “culture contact”, “frictions” of global and local forces or a clash of naturalism and animism as monolithic constructs. It is not about the disruptive encounter of previously isolated, “authentic” and balanced cosmologies. Rather, I ask if ecologies have an inherent potential to pluralize. Just like “culture”, they produce diversity and variation in the relationships they consist of. From these possibilities, ecological plurality unfolds or forms links across cultural differences. In some ecologies, this potential is quite explicit, in the sense that there is a certain leeway in selecting the way to relate to specific non-humans, and this is obvious to actors and observers alike. I propose that these ecologies share features with an ontology I call Southeast Asian animism. People operating in these ecologies seem to act upon contradictory assumptions. They relate to certain entities sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, as if they were different beings. This chapter offers the term “ontology of possibilities” to address some of the instances in which contradiction and coherence do DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-2

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not appear to be opposed. An ontology of possibilities does not so much make propositions of the kind that certain beings do or do not exist, but that they are possible. People enact this ontology by selecting communica­ tions and actions according to their potential to realize or avoid certain possibilities. For this reason, care for the future explains more about these ontological identifications than orientation to the past – even when experi­ ence and traditional knowledge are important as well. I use the term ontologies here in the sense of Philippe Descola’s “modes of identification” – an identification, though, that subverts the very notion of identity. Descola argues that human beings first need to identify another being – e.g. as having a similar or different interiority or physicality – in order to relate to them in a specific way – e.g. entering a reciprocal, hierarchical, predatory relationship etc. (Descola 2011). Southeast Asian ethnography, however, suggests that identification itself is the sometimes unstable result of a relationship (e.g. Remme 2016, Sprenger 2017, see also Århem 2016). This is certainly true for beings which are not consistently accessible to the senses. Sometimes, a number of events need to be identified as encounters with them, before a being can be properly identified. Identifications in an ontology of possibilities do not constitute a stable “world” but are – often reflexive – selections of possibilities. Therefore, the ontology of possibilities does not apply to just any being. It would be absurd to claim that Southeast Asians continually contest the exis­ tence of their shoes or their sisters. Most categories of beings in this ontology are commonly translated as spirits, ghosts, souls, deities, potencies, powers, or life forces – beings that Baumann (2022), following Levy, Mageo, and Howard (1996), suggests calling numinals. This ontology does not constitute a coherent cosmos in which all beings share the same kind of existence. The ontology of possibilities does not apply to any given being. However, owing to its experiential and experimental (future-oriented) character, it expands the operations and practices of so-called animist ecologies, that is, sets of relationships between humans and non-humans that overall do not restrict personhood to humans or life to cells. This also means that its initial limitation to specific beings may expand as well. I will first present some of the ethnographic puzzles from my own and others’ ethnographies that lead to my choice of the ontology of possibilities. These concern doubt about the existence of spirits but also other forms of ontological indeterminacy, related to place, ritual, and proper identification. I will then discuss uncertainty, doubt, and ambiguity as helpful concepts before I elaborate upon my own proposal. Finally, I will situate the concept as an important building block of the plural ecologies approach.

Doubtful animism Since 2000, when I started fieldwork among the Rmeet of Laos, I recorded instances of ambiguity about spirits time and again. The Rmeet are among

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the 30 percent of the population of Laos that do not identify neither with Buddhism nor with any other world religion. They associate themselves with “spirit religion” (sadsana phi), an inofficial residual category for what is con­ ventionally called animism. Early on in my work, I enquired about the origins of the klpu, soul-like beings, and their relations with spirits (phi). Khamjan, my host father, told me with a smile that there are no spirits. I reminded him that he himself had advised me not to go to certain places close to the village, as these were haunted by spirits of those who had died by accidents or violence. Well, he admitted, there are a few spirits – but not many. On another occasion, a group of men offered to show me the ancient graveyard, arguing that the spirits there had left long ago. When they asked my father to join, he visibly retracted and refused. This was not uncommon. In another occasion, one of the village headmen told me how they once dug up old graves, and there were no spirits, no klpu. This, he argued, showed that spirits do not exist. Still, I saw him participating in the frequent rituals addressing them and also performing them himself. Several others quite spontaneously argued that spirits do not exists, as they had never seen any. These observations suggest a range of possible explanations or rather transductions into theory. At the time of my initial fieldwork, I assumed that such utterances were governed by a divide between “tradition” and “moder­ nity”. According to this line of argument, people in a rural place in an underdeveloped country with high aspirations for development have inter­ nalized some of the markers of being modern. They want to be seen as rational and enlightened, especially by a German academic like me. But then again, the argument would go, they are bound to tradition and their local interpretations, to which they fall back as soon as daily practice requires it. Their denial of spirits would thus appear as mere lip-service to the expecta­ tions of modernity. Their sense of what we call “theory” or “philosophy” would be entirely subordinated to another abstract category we call “practice”. In the course of time I realized that there was more to such instances of apparent contradiction. People were certainly aspiring to be modern, and the Lao government was eager to tell them so, in its “secular fundamentalist” stance (Evans 1998), and actively discouraged and suppressed spirit venera­ tion (e.g. Bouté 2018, 102). This would, for instance, explain why the village headman emphasized his disbelief in spirits. However, as Remme (2016, 124) has shown for the Philippines, modernist aspirations can widen the gap between humans and spirits, but this, in a way, corroborates the very rela­ tionship of distance that defines them. In any case, modernism alone did not explain the ease with which people shifted position. Just consider the first anecdote. My father did not appear to bother to move from claiming that spirits do not exist to claiming that a small number of them do. From a modern naturalist perspective this should

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be a profound contradiction. My father, however, behaved as if it was minuscule. This apparently cavalier manner to treat the existence of beings expanded to entire categories of spirits. Some spirits were mentioned by just a few interlocutors, like the “money spirit” (phi gemuul), while they were unfamiliar to others. Details about certain kinds of spirits varied greatly. The “widow” (yaa gemeai), the owner of the forest animals, was said to be a single spirit by some people and a class of spirits by others. Some said she was the spirit of a dead human being while others denied this. Again, others said, that the widow is male. This kind of indeterminacy is not unique. A number of other studies in mainland Southeast Asia have noted similarly counterintuitive statements. Anthony Walker (2003, 113) observed that Lahu in Thailand consider all details concerning spirits with doubt. Among the Lisu, Paul Durrenberger (1989, 39) found many skeptics who nevertheless performed spirit rituals, for lack of an alternative in times of illness and misfortune. At times, Lisu would deny the existence of spirits while giving examples of their encounters with them soon after (Durrenberger 1980). These apparent contradictions are not restricted to so-called animists. Southeast Asian Buddhists commonly relate to spirits, even when there is a significant hegemonializing drift in modernist Buddhism that attempts to deny these relations. For over a century, the Thai government and the more modernist-minded branch of the Buddhist monkhood fed the public with evidence that spirits do not exist (Pattana 2002). Yet, this enactment of enlightenment did not bring about the desired effect. Recent years have seen a proliferation of spirit practices, even among monks (Visisya 2022). The Thai saying that Pattana (2002) quotes, “You may not believe, but never offend the spirits”, captures this quite neatly. Belief here does not seem to be about deep conviction. Rather, it is always balanced by doubt, and this coupling addresses the possibility of spirits more accurately than a modern notion of religious belief, as Tooker (1992) has argued for the Akha. Before Pattana, Melford Spiro (1967, 41, 56–59) recorded among Burmese that more women than men profess belief in spirits. However, he found that the men’s denial simply meant that they, as good Buddhists, are less vulner­ able to spirit attack, while women’s bodies are more permeable. Therefore, the issue about spirits for Burmese was not so much the question of their exis­ tence, but of possibilities to relate to them. More recently, Benjamin Bau­ mann has recorded interviews with Khmer-speaking Thai who deny the existence of spirits in general terms and minutes later detail personal encounters with them (Baumann 2022, 165). While moving from general statements to specific events, they exchange denials of spirits with the asser­ tion that some of them have affected them or people they know. To say that locals who claim not to believe in spirits merely want to make themselves look good, while they really can not get away from their tradi­ tional views, is an incomplete account of such observations, as Baumann

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(2022) points out. Foregrounding hegemonic incentives overestimates the attractions of modernity. It mirrors a modernist occupation with the tradition/modern divide, framed by an individualist dichotomy between individual desires and social pressures. However, it leaves unexamined the underlying flexibility of ontology that makes the contradictory statements so provocative in the first place. If people would be modern in the Western way, they should stick to the ontology of naturalism or at least rationalize their apparent contradictions. I did not instigate them to do this, and they never did.

Dimensions of variability Such pronouncements of uncertainty, doubt or ambiguity indicate several dimensions of the indeterminacy of numinals – their identification and the conditions of communication with them, such as ritual, locality and cultural belonging. Numinals come in a multitude of appearances, ranging from lifeforces and potencies that can be manipulated by ritual to fully fledged per­ sons. Some beings, conventionally called spirits, are independent of human bodies, while others, often called souls, have more durable relationships to humans (Benjamin 1979). Quite a number of these beings are able to shift between forms that are more person-like or less so, thus producing unstable identifications (e.g. Bovensiepen 2014, Remme 2016). These shifts of ontological status are shaped by the interpretation of events and by communication. For instance, dreams or illness are seen as signs of the spirits, and each ritual act, each communication with them adds to their relational existence (Sprenger 2017). The contingency of these beings is linked to the contingency of the multiple ways of addressing and, as it were, pro­ cessing them. If rituals are acts of communication with numinals that are themselves partially consolidated by rituals, differences in rituals imply differences in numinals as well. While the Rmeet hold ideas that rituals should be per­ formed according to “tradition” (riid, or the Lao loanword hidkong), there is no ultimately correct and reliable way of addressing the spirits. While the knowledge of ritual experts is recognized, people kept discussing how to do things best, even while a ritual was ongoing. In addition, they considered ritual practices as quite contingent, in certain respects even as experiencebased experimentation. This does not only show in the elaboration of spirit pantheons in urban possession cults (Brac de la Perrière and Jackson 2022). Among non-cen­ tralized groups such as highlanders no one has the ultimate authority to determine the truth about spirits. Therefore, new spirits keep emerging (see also High 2022). This is particularly pronounced in healing. Ritual healers stress that they have learned from numerous experts, prominently including those from neighboring countries or ethnicities (Sprenger 2011).

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In other types of rituals, like those for house and village spirits, “tradition” and the repetition of past practices is valorized more highly. Still, the pro­ scriptions that regulate relations with these beings – like, for instance, against removing cobwebs in the house or leaving it through a different door than entering it – are often subject to negotiation and variation. In addition, Rmeet often differentiate kin groups and villages by their ritual practices. Every village has its own rhythm of annual sacrifice to the village spirit, just as every household has different observances regarding its house spirit. This is, in fact, to be expected. The needs and personal traits of a spirit emerge through experience, observation and ongoing communication, partially through dreams or divination, partially through perceived spirit responses to what people do. This applies more generally to highland Southeast Asia, a region often described as a cultural patchwork. It could equally be called a patchwork of ontologies or onto-practices. Walker, for instance, observed that there are strong variations regarding which entities are considered animate and which are not across different local groups of Lahu (Walker 2003, 117–118). As David Marlowe has shown for Karen and their neighbours in Thailand in the 1960s, each settlement had its own rules and rituals, and this is to be expec­ ted: They were founded by different people, his interlocutors told him, and why should they all share the same ideas? (Marlowe 1979, 190). Thus, what outsiders label as ethnic differences are not the limits of homogenous groups but are quite continuous with the differences of village, clan, or region. There is an inbuilt variability to these cosmologies that translates into a flexibility of ontological status. Variability and change are reinforced by a widespread notion that rituals are bothersome, time-consuming and expensive (Tooker 1990, 283, Uk 2016, 179). This may be a specifically modernist evaluation of sacrifice shaped by the perception of time as a limited resource, the availability of alternatives, especially in healing, or the comparison with other forms of status building that spread across cultural differences, such as Buddhist merit making. Nevertheless, it is a specific form of ritual dynamics not restricted to modern contexts. Mobility enhances these dynamics further, and again, variability in ethnic belonging plays into ritual. While the most important marker of ethno­ cultural difference for Rmeet is language, the differentiation of ritual is another means to tell people apart. Many Rmeet I talked to stressed travel when explaining why they do not observe cosmological proscriptions as strictly as they used to in the past. We travelled, they argued, and we saw that other people do not keep these taboos; so we abolished them. These other people are thus distinguished from the Rmeet by the way they address – or ignore – spirits. Doubt and denial of spirits are communicative strategies that belong to the same order as variability, experimentation and negotiation. While negotiations may look like cosmo-political diplomacy, in Southeast Asian

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animism they belong to a continuum of the communicative emergence of and response to spirits. This does not mean that human beings can entirely control numinals just because they control their own communications. In a sense, they control them just as little as they control the grammar of their own languages. Humans are not the sole agents of communication. They perceive themselves as entwined in networks of beings that become articu­ lated in the tensions between danger, crisis, and protection – the contexts in which spirit agency becomes a palpable experience. Numinals thus emerge at the interface between past communicative experiences that have sedi­ mented into local identifications and possibilities of the future that are shaped by ongoing communications.

Uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the indeterminacy of num­ inals, and a number of terms have been proposed to address it. Each of them carries a load of interdisciplinary meanings, and I am unable to discuss these in all their complexity. I will thus restrict myself to those meanings that lead up to my own argument. Scholars tend to rationalize the “belief” in spirits as an attempt to control an uncertain world, but this ignores that the spirits themselves can be the source of considerable uncertainty. The term captures the unpredictability of spirits (e.g. da Col 2017, Stolz 2018). As Johnson has argued, Thai Lao con­ sider spirits as hallmarks of a world that cannot be fully known. Complete knowledge, as the Buddha has attained, leads to disappearance (Johnson 2020, 15). Epistemological uncertainty is thus built into human existence, and this applies to the numinals around them. The term suggests a deficit, but also stands for its opposite. For Niklas Luhmann (1984, 252), uncertainty denotes an excess of complexity of infor­ mation in the environment of a system. There is not just a lack of knowledge but too much to know. In the present case, the system of relationships between living human beings operates upon the assumption that spirits in its environment cannot be related to properly. Therefore, it is impossible to know with ultimate certitude how many of them and what kinds there are, or how they relate to each other and to humans. The inaccessibility of the spirit environment raises the complexity of this environment, in comparison to relationships among humans. Uncertainty stresses the difference between beings that are relatively predictable – living human beings, presumably – and those less easy to make out. Any information from the environment thus comes with uncertainty. However, structures of communication are also structures of expectations. Uncertainty is a condition for expectations to emerge as more-or-less possi­ ble selections of future events. Any communication comes with expectations of its effects, of its follow-up communications. If expectations are too precise and strict, it is highly unlikely that they will be met. The less precise

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expectations are, the higher the certainty that they will become true (Luh­ mann 1984, 418). This is what Evans-Pritchard (1988, 227) has observed regarding Zande oracles – they are formulated sufficiently vague as to allow for a great range of expectations to be met. Something similar applies to communications with Southeast Asian numinals (e.g. Poonnatree 2022, 205). As numinals are hard to observe, expectations multiply. This in turn makes spirits ontologically uncertain. It often becomes a matter of open debate if an event is a spirit’s communication or just coincidence. This actually raises the degree of uncer­ tainty, but with the effect that more expectations, including unlikely ones, become possible. The more expectations regarding the sequence of commu­ nications are possible, the more they are structuring (Luhmann 1984, 436). In this sense, uncertainty in numinals is a specific form of a general condi­ tion of communication. Communication requires variation and selection. People choose from options when they communicate, and the excess of information in the environment provides them with these options (Luhmann 2008). This manifests as uncertainty. As spirits – and, strictly speaking, human persons as well – are established communicatively, they are the proper loci of such uncertainty. Doubt is another term in the current debate. Doubt also has a future aspect to it, as it suggests a suspended decision. Its epistemological conundrums have been prominently elaborated by Nils Bubandt (2014) in his account of Buli ideas of witchcraft in eastern Indonesia. Witchcraft, he argues, gains its power and importance through the very doubt about it – in its constant hovering between absence and presence. „Yes, believing what people say is difficult. But not believing is difficult, too“, Bubandt (ibid., 55) quotes one of his interlocutors. For Bubandt, witchcraft is aporetic in the sense that it constitutes an irre­ solvable conundrum that is not just moral, but epistemological. Witchcraft pervades everyday life while at the same time evidence for it is hard to attain. It gains its power by being invisible and forcing its victims to forget about its attack. When their memory returns, it is conveyed by the witch for malicious reasons – knowledge does not make free, but seals the victim’s fate (ibid., 40). The reasons for the witches’ attack are equally opaque and may be minuscule (ibid., 47). The very logic that requires witchcraft to exist also makes it vir­ tually untraceable. In this context, denial and affirmation gain practical and performative importance. Even though everyone is aware that the question of witchcraft – its existence, effects, and source – cannot be resolved in any ultimate way, Buli do make witchcraft accusations, perform preventive measure, or ask for compensation. In a way, when selecting communications that confirm witch­ craft, they make it more of a reality. This performative aspect makes doubt important for my argument. The notion of ambiguity has recently been considerably refined and dee­ pened by Benjamin Baumann (2020, 2022), for Southeast Asia. For him,

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Southeast Asian language games – that are constructive of reality, in Witt­ genstein’s sense – allow for, even necessitate epistemological multiplicity. See­ mingly paradoxical statements such as those regarding spirits appear contradictory in a habitus framed by Western philosophy and naturalism. In Thailand, Baumann argues, there is a sense of appropriateness for the appli­ cation of ontologies (Baumann 2020, 113). Ontological identifications are thus not so much a matter of essential truth but of context. These contexts are defined by relationships themselves. Therefore, people have access to diver­ ging truths that seem mutually exclusive. This emerges from two levels of non-exclusivity. First, different ontological regimes or language games, such as Buddhism, animism, and naturalism, are available for Thai people. Second, as spirits are subject to this ontological diversity, they are defined by their ambiguity between existence and non-existence (Baumann 2022, 10). Ambiguity is thus a genuine third position in a practical and conceptual system that is not exclusively structured by binaries. Baumann shows how Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participation helps addressing this multi­ plicity – the possibility that beings, human or otherwise, participate in each other. They are thus identical and different at the same time (Baumann 2020, 122–123). This internal difference of beings contains both the risk of driving a being apart as well as the complementation that constitutes it in the first place. The ecological intersection of humans, numinals, animals, plants, and landscapes exemplifies this relationship. I suggest that ambiguity operates on the level of possibilities. Baumann argues on the level of being, which I propose to render dynamic by spreading ambiguity across time. Ritual, for instance, is a way of creating ambiguous realities through a process that addresses past and future, as Remme (2022) has pointed out. Therefore, the synchronicity of possibilities bears upon the present from the future. When not just current “facts” are acknowledged to exist but as-yet unrealized and maybe never-to-be-realized possibilities, onto­ logical ambiguity gains a clearer shape – or, at least, easier translatability into academic models.

An ontology of possibilities The terms discussed here all say something about the indeterminacy of num­ inals and the problem of knowing them. At the same time, they imply a future dimension, an ongoing need to make selections for future commu­ nication and thereby the emergence of numinals. The concept of ontology of possibilities builds upon these ideas and carves out their future orientation. The anthropology of the future (e.g. Bryant and Knight 2019) posits that social life cannot only be explained by matters past – like socialization, tradition, history – but also by the future orientation of any social action. People act because they expect their acts to produce results. They have cer­ tain ideas about what the future may bring, in the long and short run. In a

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way, social action is movement along the lines that connect the present with what has been thrown forward. Seen from this viewpoint, what is important is not only what has been experienced already, but also what is possible. Possibilities raise the question which actions will lead to which results, accounting for the limitations of human knowledge of the ultimate outcome of their actions. This is because, as Arjun Appadurai (2013) has observed, possibility is not probability. Prob­ ability, he argues, is a matter of calculation. Possibility, in contrast, cannot be quantified. It is a matter of qualities that are inherent to the present situation and may contingently unfold in the future. Speaking of probability implies that people cannot know for sure what is going to happen, but still can make predictions that are more or less likely to occur. Speaking of possibilities qualifies the latter condition. While there are lots of unknowns, people themselves can make a difference. I posit that the numinals of Southeast Asian animism represent such ontologies of possibility. People treat these beings at once as real and as pos­ sibilities yet to become real, yet to be revealed1 – and these two options are maybe less distinct than they may seem at first. As Durrenberger (1980) has argued for the Lisu of Thailand, statements about spirits help to make sense of differences in fortune and the potentialities of productive powers. They thus indicate possibilities that could equally be denied. The animist commu­ nications I and others documented take this general option and apply it to select situations and beings. This approach helps accounting for several peculiarities of the data. Let me come back to my host father’s statement about there being either no spirits or a few of them. For a naturalist ontology, the difference between none and a few would be rather profound. It is much less so when we consider that both utterances ultimately say something about potential relationships between humans and spirits. Going to a place where dangerous spirits reside opens up the possibility of having unwanted relationships with them, with spirits entering a person’s body and feeding upon him. While knowledge and past experience might suggest this will happen, it is nevertheless no strict predic­ tion. It is an expectation that structures communication (of spirits) and action (of avoidance). From this point of view, the difference between non-existence and the existence of a few turns into the difference between denial and selec­ tive admittance – two communicative options that are much closer to each other in an experiential world. Possibilities can be apprehended in various ways. In the second anecdote above, my interlocutor took the fact that nothing visible turned up when opening a grave as evidence against the existence of spirits. Among Rmeet, this is a common argument. If people want to make the point that spirits do not exist, they often mention that they have never seen them. However, like in Khamjan’s statement, there is considerable ambiguity here. Spirits are invisible, this is what virtually every Rmeet agrees upon. However, my interlocutor turned this into an argument against their very

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existence. This seems contradictory – invisibility appears as an ontological quality of spirits and at the same time as evidence for their non-existence. Visibility, however, is an index of relationships. Spirits indeed become visi­ ble occasionally, in dreams, for example, and more rarely to the waking eye. These events are moments of danger, as they indicate that people involunta­ rily get involved in relationships with spirits that may lead to disease and death (Platenkamp 2006, 83). Invisibility, in contrast, makes sure that spirits stay away. Statements about their invisibility, combined with their non-exis­ tence, thus represent common knowledge but also actively diminish the pos­ sibility of spirit presence. By reinforcing what is known about them, these utterances take up a communicatively stabilized ontology, and then turn it around, so that the possibility of spirits existing is curtailed. They use past experiences to reverse future consequences. These ontological statements are not ultimate claims about the nature of the world – after the fact, as it were – but actions that help shaping it. They perform ontology. They do not necessarily assume an unchanging external world separate from the opinions and “world-views” of humans, as a moder­ nist epistemology would (Latour 2008). Rather, these statements are actions in respect to possibilities that are shaped mutually by humans and nonhumans. Such statements may not work for any given entity, but numinals are among those beings to which this kind of ontology applies. Here I develop my theorization of animism as communication (Sprenger 2016, 2017). Persons in general but more specifically spirits that are difficult to observe emerge from a step-by-step reading of specific events as commu­ nication. Recognition of communication comes first, while the slots of sender and receiver are filled in the course of consecutive communication. The shape, personhood and personality of the being addressed is thus slowly pieced together by the experience of communicating with it. The other thus becomes what it is due to ongoing engagement with it. This process may turn into different directions or break off at any point, thus rendering a being non-existent, person-like or force-like. In this sense, numinals are real and external in a way, not despite but because communication brings them into being. Drawing a contrast with modern naturalism elucidates the point. Ruth Benedict (1931) has argued that “animists” treat non-humans with “person­ techniques” instead of “thing-techniques” because of their own mastery of social relationships. They are conceptually opposite to the modern mastery of dealing with objects and employing “thing-techniques” in relationships with non-humans. While Benedict ceded that the “animists” were wrong, she dip­ lomatically admitted that moderns are equally wrong when treating people with “thing-techniques”. Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) similar argument evades Benedict’s implicit ontological fixations. He argued that animists treat the space between humans and non-humans as social, while naturalists conceive it as natural. The importance of Benedict as a predecessor of Viveiros de Castro lies in her

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attention to communication styles. Communication reveals spirits, life forces and souls as responsive, even person-like, and as able to commit to agree­ ments. But communication may also deny such possibilities and ignore these beings. This has to do with the ontological status of communication. Commu­ nication at once is real and contains a range of possibilities. Social relation­ ships are real, even though they only consist of volatile, temporary communications. The reality of relationships thus lies partially in memory of past events, but even more so in the prospect of future communication. Social structure thus is mostly the expectation that certain communicative events will occur in the future (see Luhmann 1984, chapter 8). Every communication contains the difference between sender and receiver. What is more, each actual communication is a selection from a myriad of potential ones that provide a background of unrealized possibilities. These possibilities are always contingent – no communication is without its alter­ natives. In this respect, communication diverges from a notion of truth that suggests that there are facts out there that only need to be properly described but cannot be changed by their description.2 The reality that communication references, as Luhmann (2008) argues, is communication and is thus con­ tingent. Each new communication does not undo past communications but adds to them. Therefore, the manipulation of communication also manipulates the very being of numinals. For this reason, doubt, denial, or ridicule are important performative aspects of animist relationships (see Willerslev 2012). They do not always work – mind you, communication is real – but they provide legit­ imate and plausible attempts of keeping spirits at bay. When people say that spirits do not exist or are powerless, they communicate against the commu­ nicative reality of spirits. This does not make spirits disappear for good but restricts their potential to become real for people. For this reason, spirits and other invisible beings are possibilities that people reckon with when they operate in an animist framework. They are as real as communications are – stabilized in the past, selections among myriad options in the present, possi­ bilities in the future. The ontology of possibilities operates from a future perspective.

Possibilities and plural ecologies The ontology of possibility can be considered at once as a theoretical tem­ plate for the emergence of ecological plurality and as a condition that brings plurality about. One of the major factors differentiating ecologies in South­ east Asia, as this volume demonstrates, are beings subject to an ontology of possibilities. As numerous examples demonstrate, naturalist categories of natural environment and animist categories of numinals overlap. The word “forest” references a category of the natural environment as well as the

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domain of spirits outside civilized space. It is in these contexts that ecologies reveal themselves as plural. Ecologies, first of all, consist of relationships and practices. It is not so much that categories of people – like “the Akha” or “peasants” – may internally divide in those acting upon one kind of ecology and those engaged in another. In fact, there are numerous cases in which people act upon one kind of ecology in one situation and another in a different one. They may treat a tree like a venerable person and proceed to fell it for sale (e.g. Haug, this volume, and Naveh and Bird-David 2014, ). As the examples above indicate, Southeast Asians do not perceive this as contradictory. I propose that the ontologies of possibility provide a lens through which these seeming contradictions are less pronounced, even plau­ sible. The animist treatment of the surroundings and of non-humans provides a set of techniques by which to proliferate ecologies. Southeast Asian ani­ mism thus contains the possibilities of various identifications that may fit into several ecologies. Each operation of an ecology, each interaction (like communication) between humans and non-humans is selective, contingent and could be rea­ lized in a different way. The process of selection is not strictly determined and thus produces its own internal difference between the actual and the possible (Remme 2016). Only some actualizations form stable relationships over time, for instance through their antagonism to other relationships (see Luhmann 1984, Viveiros de Castro 2019). Thus, the question why ecologies pluralize may point into two different directions. One type of answer considers at least two different “traditions” that historically developed in separation. “Tradition” refers to con­ ventionalized relationships between humans and non-humans that stabilized identifications. The means of these routines are Benedict’s (1931) “techni­ ques”. At some historical conjuncture, the two ecologies meet and start to compete over the interpretation and control over non-humans. This perspec­ tive presumes relative previous isolation, identity, and mutual mis­ understanding. While not unrealistic, it does not explain why human actors are able to shift from one ecology to another sometimes while they reject and confront them on other occasions. The second answer is the one I am emphasizing here. It is based on rela­ tions and difference. It thus transfigures the previous perspective with an input from animism. As argued above, at least some beings are constituted by communication and therefore by an internal difference. While this may be a general statement, animist ontologies make this point quite obviously. Fur­ thermore, the internal difference unfolds in a perspective that sees social life from the future. It therefore emphasizes possibilities over identities. Identities in this ontology are always identifications in the making, drawn from the differentiation of possibilities. Interactions select from these possibilities and realize the selections. For beings that exist as possibilities of communication, there is thus no essential identity.

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In this sense, ecologies tend to pluralize through their own dynamics of selecting communications from possibilities. At least, ecologies based on principles of Southeast Asian animism seem to do so. Interactions with trees, for instance, may reveal the presence of powerful spirits within them (e.g. Johnson 2012), or various interaction techniques with trees relate to them as sites of spirits or as natural species to be protected (Darlington 2012, 58). These ecologies make obvious the operation of interaction as selection from possibilities. Ecologies based on stable identities are still possible, but raise the question by which work of purification, by which conventionalizing traditions this stability is achieved (Latour 2008). In this respect, even naturalist ecolo­ gies that appear to fortify the boundaries between what is communication (human society) and what is cause and effect (nature) are confronted with selections and problems of boundary crossing. They are thus not immune to pluralization as an immanent potential.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates how the cosmology of the Rmeet and some other Southeast Asians enact ontologies of possibility. I interpret both rituals and verbal statements as a local theory of being, following Viveiros de Castro’s assumption that “any non-trivial anthropological theory is a version of indi­ genous knowledge practices” (Viveiros de Castro 2019, 20). My own render­ ing of them as ontologies of possibility is just one possible translation, apart from uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity, or others. There is always a gap between different renderings of ontologies, both anthropological and local – a differ­ ence that continually brings forth new translations, just as ecologies keep pluralizing. As mentioned above, plural ecologies emerge most clearly when they con­ flict, but there is also the question why they do not conflict all of the time. Wouldn’t we expect to have permanent conflict when, say, naturalist and animist relationships with non-humans like mountains or trees clash in practice? One of the advantages of the concept of plural ecologies is that ecologies do not constitute separate “worlds” as in some of the arguments made in the ontological turn (e.g. de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). Even if these ontologi­ cal worlds are not supposed to be hermetic, the very term suggests mutual exclusivity. However, we observe time and again that certain people – in par­ ticular from indigenous societies – do not seem to see much of a problem in shifting from a naturalist to an animist frame of reference (e.g. de la Cadena 2015, xxii, Salmond 2014). Where does that effortlessness come from? Is world-jumping such an easy exercise? I suggest that it is not so much worlds that are the issue here but com­ municative relationships that – at least for some places in Southeast Asia – are based upon ontologies of possibility. For this reason, animist ontologies are open to naturalist or other ontologies. This has been argued in respect to

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the encounter with so-called world religions (e.g. Macdonald 1992, Picard 2017, Shepherd 2019), but I suggest that it applies equally to the way people entangled in local, animist relationships may agree with naturalist ones. People who are experienced in applying animism see naturalism or worldreligions as new possibilities that are not in contradiction with their general orientations. The difference between them is a matter of inclusion, not of essence. Somewhat simplistically, it goes like this. A self-confessed naturalist observes an alleged animist denying spirits and takes this as a sign of growing nat­ uralism. Here, the naturalist thinks that the animist believes in the limitations and ontological fixations of her ecology just as firmly as the naturalist does in her own. However, this is probably not quite the case. The animist treats ontological propositions differently – as possibilities. She does not confess a creed but manipulates her relationships. Indeed, the identifications that naturalism posits are partially contained in the animist possibilities as well (see Baumann 2020, 97). There is an equivo­ cation here in the sense of Viveiros de Castro (2004), the use of the same term from the point of view of two different reference systems. Someone may say: “There are no spirits” within either an animist framework or a naturalist one. The statement is the same, but it entails different implications. A naturalist voice would mean to say: “Spirits are impossible, they have never existed and will never exist”. An animist voice would say: “Spirits are possible, so I work on a situation that makes them less likely to relate to me”. Note that the stark contrast I draw between these positions is already a heuristic transduction into an academic language built on identities and closed worlds. It would be more appropriate to say that the statement “There are no spirits” contains a multiplicity of references, again in the sense of Viveiros de Castro (2019) – a multiplicity being a phenomenon that is delineated by its internal relational differences. When naturalist stances and relationships enter the horizon of animist possibilities, new connectivities arise for animist ecologies. Here, the above understanding of “tradition” as a stabilized, conventional form of identifi­ cation and relationship, comes into play. Spirit denial is part of the stabi­ lized relationships in naturalist ecologies. The animist stance will receive a stronger connection to naturalist ecologies when engaging in the denial of spirits while there will be conflict when it commits to cultivating them. Thus, in circumstances in which naturalism is bolstered by powerful institutions such as the state, science, or international companies, there are certain incentives to speak “naturalese”. This is not necessarily “conversion” as it were, even though this is true in the case of some people. Rather, denial is a contextual act. In this moment, in this communication, naturalism, and animism appear as indistinguishable. However, they connect to different possibilities in the future, especially when their encounter involves huge environmental changes, includ­ ing plantations, infrastructure building, or massive resource extraction.

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At this point, the question arises how hegemonializing each ecology is. Animism is hegemonializing by reading all other ontologies in its own image, as possibilities that can be helped into being or be avoided. However, nat­ uralism and its related (though not identical) ontologies of capitalism or developmentalism – as prominent in Southeast Asia – becomes hegemonial through truth claims, state force and promises of material wealth. Still, in a sense, animism is encompassing naturalism. At least, it is able to contain some of the standard claims of naturalism. From an animist stance, these are not claims to absolute truth, but claims of possibilities.

Notes 1 This is notwithstanding the fact that people often treat numinals like the lords of the land as ancient and primordial, as Work (2020) has shown for Cambodia. In any case, these beings have to reveal themselves, and this is a matter of contingent communication and interpretation. 2 Heisenberg’s quantum physics are an important exception where mathematical for­ mula do not describe being but possibility (Heisenberg 1971, 28). Notions of inde­ terminacy from physics have served as inspirations in the current debate (Nadasdy 2021) but are potentially misleading and probably unnecessary.

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Bräuchler, Birgit. 2018. “Diverging Ecologies on Bali.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 33(2): 362–396. Bryant, Rebecca, and Daniel M.Knight. 2019. The Anthropology of the Future. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The Empty Seashell, Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. da Col, Giovanni. 2017. “Spirits of Uncertainty: Eventologies of Nature on China’s Frontiers.” Anthropological Forum, 27(4): 307–320. doi:10.1080/ 00664677.2017.1410920. Darlington, Susan M. 2012. The Ordination of a Tree: The Thai Buddhist Environ­ mental Movement. Albany: SUNY Press. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. de la Cadena, Marisol and Mario Blaser, eds. 2018. A world of many worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2011. Jenseits von Kultur und Natur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Durrenberger, E. Paul. 1980. “Belief and the logic of Lisu spirits.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 136: 21–40. Durrenberger, E. Paul. 1989. Lisu Religion. Northern Illinois University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Occasional Paper, 13. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1988. Hexerei, Orakel und Magie bei den Zande. Edited by Eva (gekürzte und eingeleitete Ausgabe); Translated by Brigitte Luchesi Gillies. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Evans, Grant. 1998. “Secular fundamentalism and Buddhism in Laos.” In Religion, Ethnicity and Modernity in Southeast Asia, edited by Oh Myung-Seok and Kim Hyung-Jun, pp. 169–205. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Heisenberg, Werner. 1971. “Die Plancksche Entdeckung und die philosophischen Grundfragen der Atomlehre.” In Schritte über Grenzen: Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze, 20–42. Munich: Piper. High, Holly. 2022. “Living with new gods: Power encounters in Sekong Province, Lao PDR.” In Stone Masters: Power encounters in Mainland Southeas Asia, edited by Holly High, pp. 49–74. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2012. “Naming chaos: Accident, precariousness, and the spirits of wilderness in urban Thai spirit cults.” American Ethnologist, 39: 766–778. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2020. Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death along a Changing River. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2008. Wir sind nie modern gewesen: Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie. Translated by Gustav Roßler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Levy, Robert I., Jeannette Mageo, and Alan Howard. 1996. “Gods, spirits, and his­ tory: a theoretical perspective.” In Spirits in culture, history, and mind, edited by Jeannette Mageo and Alan Howard, pp. 11–28. London and New York: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frank­ furt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 2008. “Was ist Kommunikation?” In Soziologische Auklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch, 3rd Ed., 113–124. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

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Macdonald, Charles. 1992. “Protestant Missionaries and Palawan Natives: Dialogue, Conflict or Misunderstanding?” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 23(2): 127–137. Marlowe, David H. 1979. “In the Mosaic: The cognitive and structural aspects of Karen-other Relationships.” In Ethnic Adaptation and Identity; The Karen on the Thai frontier with Burma, edited by Charles F. Keyes, pp. 165–214. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Nadasdy, Paul. 2021. “How many Worlds are there? Ontology, practice and inde­ terminacy.” American Ethnologist, 48(4): 357–369. doi:10.1111/amet.13406. Naveh, Danny and Nurit Bird-David. 2014. “How persons become things: economic and epistemological changes among Nayaka hunter-gatherers.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(1): 74–92. Pattana, Kitiarsa. 2002. “’You May Not Believe, but Never Offend the Spirits’: SpiritMedium Cults and Popular Media in Modern Thailand.” In Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, edited by Timothy J. Craig and Richard King, pp. 160– 175. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Picard, Michel, ed. 2017. The Appropriation of ‘Religion’ in Southeast Asia and beyond. New York: Palgrave. Platenkamp, Josephus D. M. 2006. “Visibility and Objectification in Tobelo Ritual.” In Reflecting Visual Ethnography -using the camera in anthropological fieldword, edited by Peter Crawford and Metje Postma, pp. 78–102. Aarhus: Intervention Press & Leiden: CNWS Press. Poonnatree, Jiaviriyaboonya. 2022. “Looking for Fortune in the City: The Enchant­ ment of Divination, Magic and Spirit Rituals in a Cambodian Urban Culture.” In Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia: Worlds Ever More Enchanted, edited by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson, pp. 188–210. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Remme, Jon Henrik Ziegler. 2016. “Chronically Unstable Ontology: Ontological Dynamics, Radical Alterity, and the ‘Otherwise Within’.” In Critical Anthro­ pological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference, edited by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Synnøve Bendixsen, pp. 113–133. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Remme, Jon Henrik Ziegler. 2022. “The Problem with Presence: The Ambiguity of Mediating Forms in Ifugao Pentecostal Rituals.” Ethnos, 87(4): 696–712. Salmond, Anne. 2014. “Tears of Rangi: Water, power,and people in New Zealand.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(3): 285–309. Shepherd, Christopher J. 2019. Haunted House and Ghostly Encounters. Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975. Singapore: NIAS Press. Spiro, Melford. 1967. Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering. Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall. Sprenger, Guido. 2011. “Differentiated Origins: Trajectories of transcultural knowl­ edge in Laos and beyond.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 26(2): 224–247. Sprenger, Guido. 2016. “Dimensions of animism in Southeast Asia.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 31–51. London and New York: Routledge. Sprenger, Guido. 2017. “Communicated into being: Systems theory and the shifting of ontological status.” Anthropological Theory, 17(1): 108–132. Stolz, Rosalie. 2018. “‘Spirits follow the words’: Stories as spirit traces among the Khmu of Northern Laos.” Social Analysis, 62(3): 109–127.

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Tooker, Deborah E. 1990. “Customs and Christian conversion among Akha high­ landers of Burma and Thailand.” American Ethnologist, 17: 277–291. Tooker, Deborah E. 1992. “Identity Systems of Highland Burma: ‘Belief ’, Akha Zan, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethno-Religious Identity.” Man (London), 27: 799–819. Uk, Krisna. 2016. Salvage Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Visisya, Pinthongvijayakul. 2022. “The Buddhist-Mediumistic Pantheon in Northeast Thailand (Isan): A symbiotic Relationship.” In Spirit Possession in Buddhist South­ east Asia: Worlds Ever More Enchanted, edited by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson, pp. 98–118. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspecti­ vism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4: 469–488. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2(1): Article 1. Doi: available at http://digitalcommons.tri nity.edu/tipiti/vol2/iss1/1. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2019. Kannibalische Metaphysiken: Elemente einer post­ strukturalen Anthropologie. Translated by Theresa Mentrup. Leipzig: Merve. Walker, Anthony J. 2003. Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People. New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing. Willerslev, Rane. 2012. “Laughing at the spirits in North Siberia.” E-flux Journal, 36 (July 2012). Work, Courtney. 2020. Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia. Asian Anthropologies, 10. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

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Conflicting Ways of Dealing with Invisible Human-like Beings Including – Neglecting – Ignoring Susanne Rodemeier

Introduction This contribution uses a ritual to demonstrate certain special features of plural ecologies. The corresponding ritual took place in March 2014 in the village of Alor Kecil in eastern Indonesia when road construction work began. Visible to all, this ritual ended abruptly with the sudden death of the ritual leader. This makes it one of the failed rituals described by Uta Hüsken (2007). But the sudden death of the ritual leader was not the only disturbing incident. Even more disturbing was the fact that while people tended to the dying, the food prepared for the workers disappeared without a trace. As I will show, examining this failed ritual makes it possible to identify core aspects of hegemonization (Hüsken 2007, 132). As always with unforeseen and therefore shocking events, explanations are sought. Some villagers believe these events were caused by non-humans, in this case either ancestors or their allies living under the sea (hari). Underlying this notion is the inherited knowledge (Indonesian: adat) that ancestors should not be ignored. A good life is only possible if ancestors are included in all thoughts and actions. For several centuries this idea was in harmony with the Muslim faith. But this has gradually changed in recent decades. At first, when all villagers turned to Islam (Indonesian: agama-Islam), they still included into their belief the inherited knowledge of their ancestors. In the meantime, for more and more villagers, Allah is becoming the most impor­ tant non-human, who alone decides about life and death. This change is accompanied by the fact that the ancestors are increasingly ignored. These developments are taking place in an environment where some villagers neglect both ancestral (adat) and religious (agama) norms. Instead, they tend to follow supposedly rational rules imposed by the state (Indonesian: pemerinta). The specificity of the pemerinta set of rules means that a discourse is also conducted with pemerinta as with other non-human beings. The village is clearly divided, if not split, into three currents with diverging ecologies. However, and this is what is special about the example from Alor Kecil, people not only assign themselves to different non-humans and thus to different ecologies, but they do so in reference to or differentiation from DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-3

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those non-humans in which their ancestors believed. Adat followers include ancestors in all their thinking, including in their explanations of the irritat­ ing events of the aforementioned ritual. A sufficient number of agama fol­ lowers (religion) ignore the ancestors in their explanations, amounting to a denial of their existence. The followers of pemerinta (government), for their part, neglect their inherited knowledge of the ancestors. They still seem to be undecided as to whether secular and medical explanations can always be found for unfortunate events. Both agama and pemerinta “followers” tend not to talk about things that cannot be explained by their preferred ecolo­ gies. Silence is therefore chosen as an adequate form of dealing with some­ thing like the missing food. The study of the concrete handling of knowledge concerning the non-visi­ ble world during a crisis like a failed ritual makes it possible to identify divergent ecologies brought about competing social groups. On this basis, it becomes possible not only to understand the reasons for social problems, but also to comprehend what pluralization of ecologies may be based on.

Village-setting Alor Kecil1 is a village of about 1,000 inhabitants, only a minority of whom live there permanently. Their ancestors received a settlement permit next to the beach but hold no land rights from the landowners, the nearby inland inhabitants of Alor Island (Wellfelt 2016, 248). Therefore, they make their living only from the sea but not from agriculture. In their inherited ontologies there is “another dimensional level (…), where sea people (Alorese: hari) live in underwater villages” (Wellfelt 2016, 243). This idea puts inherited knowl­ edge in relation to marine ecology. Everyone knows that everyone in the vil­ lage depends on the sea. The ancestors of Alor Kecil took this dependency into account by building a special house. Although it is a bit inland on a hill, it is connected to the sea by a blowhole. In this clan house (Alorese: uma lipo) those living today can meet their ancestors (Indonesian: leluhur) and the hari. When everyone is present in this house, some are invisible. But there are people who can feel or smell their presence, either as a breeze or the smell of the sea. This particular uma lipo is named Pelang Serang because it was built by Mau Pelang. The house Pelang Serang is the house of clan Baorae, the one with highest status (Scarduelli 1991, 78). This house is also a ritual center for rituals that affect the whole village. There are several clans, each with its own clan-house in the village. Each villager sees himself as a member of a clan-house because of his descent, but not because of his actual place of residence. Clan-houses are only inhabited when rituals are taking place. Within the village, all clan-houses are arranged hierarchically according to the principle of seniority. This is always important when there is a ritual involving the whole village. In these situations, first, everyone gathers in their respective houses. From there they go together to the community-house for the whole village, the Pelang Serang. However,

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each house-community must ensure that it only arrives in the Pelang Serang when the hierarchically higher house-community has already arrived there. The house community follows imaginary connecting paths between the houses. Then the eldest man of a house must inform the eldest man of the hierarchically directly subordinate house that he is now going to the ritual. In doing so, he clears the way for the next visitor, for the next house, to go there as well (Scarduelli 1991, 81). These visits ensure that nobody comes before hierarchically higher clans or houses have arrived. This regulation defines a specific path through the village for each clan house, which does not always correspond to the village topography. This peculiarity is important in relation to the road building ritual. Because if one follows the inherited rules (adat), then the ways of the house-hierarchies must be observed in a communal ritual. But if you want to build a new path through the village and invite ancestors and hari to do so, then this is a community ritual in which the path has been prescribed for generations. This knowledge of inherited rules, and the knowledge that disregarding them will be sanctioned by ancestors, raises the concern that road building could lead to problems. In terms of religion, Alor Kecil is special in that it is one of the coastal villages where all residents have been Muslims for centuries (Rodemeier 2010, 27–42). Most of the other islanders followed the rules of their ancestors until the first half of the 20th century, which changed during the Dutch colonial period when they adopted the Protestant faith (Fox 1980, 242, Rodemeier 1993, 28). The people on the coast remained Muslims. Christianization did not change anything in the relations between the inland and the coastal population. The only striking thing is that from now on, in a ritual context, explicit reference is made to what unites them, namely to the (adat)-rules that were agreed upon by the ancestors of both sides and to which they still feel bound – at least so it has seemed until now. Since the early 2000s a young man from Alor Kecil has been indirectly influencing this relationship. He brings children to Java to supervise their school attendance and teach them Muslim religion (Rodemeier 2010). At about the same time, itinerant preachers from other parts of Indonesia began using loudspeakers in the vil­ lage to spread their ideas of Muslim teachings throughout the village and throughout the day. All day electricity, which has only existed for a few years, opens up this possibility for them. Since the late 1990s there have been changes in the region that also affect Alor Kecil. The Indonesian state joined the international agreement for the protection of biodiversity in coral reefs in 2009 (Coral Triangle Initiative 2022). As a result, the reefs and coasts between Alor Island in the east and Pantar in the west were declared a Marine Protected Area (Stanley 2022). The region is now receiving international attention, both from those seeking to implement and comply with the International Coral Conservation Agree­ ment and from dive tourists from around the world. Consequently, interest in marine life has become more diverse and international. In addition, the

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presence and desires of the foreigners attracted to the park have created new (income) opportunities for the villagers but have also created new desires. This brings me back to the road construction in Alor Kecil, which, not yet prop­ erly started, ended abruptly with the sudden death of the person in charge of the construction and was accompanied by the disappearance of large quan­ tities of food. The explanations of these events are also influenced by the changes instigated by the establishment of the marine park.

Village life in transition The description of the current village environment with all its innovations and foreign influences suggests that the village is in a situation of transformation. Since I first visited Alor Kecil in 1989, there have been many visible changes in the village. The small pier has been fortified and became a harbor; many houses are no longer built of bamboo with tamped clay floor, but from bricks with a cemented floor. The through road along the coast has been asphalted, and the village has been provided with a permanent electricity supply and, more recently, an excellent cell phone signal. A mosque was also built in an exposed location near the coast. The director of a bank in the archipelago capital Kalabahi, who comes from Alor Kecil, donated it. However, what has changed in social relations, in thinking and acting of the villagers cannot be seen by a short visit. To learn something new about it as stranger, participa­ tion in daily life, rituals, and time for extended conversations are essential. In 2014, when I was in Alor Kecil for the last time, changes became parti­ cularly clear in the context of the aforementioned ritual. It was a ritual in the sense Ute Hüsken mentions in her publication “When Rituals go Wrong” (2007) and Edward L. Schieffelin (2007) discusses in the book’s introductory article on “‘Ritual Failure’ as an Independent Topic in Ritual Research”. He goes back to Clifford Geertz’s (1957) “Ritual and social change, a Javanese example” when he points out that “his [Geertz’s] analysis showed that the conflict that arose in the ritual had its origin in emerging social changes in the local community outside the ritual, changes that had outstripped the tradi­ tional-cultural receptivity of the villagers.” Hüsken (2013, 132), in a further article on “Ritual Errors”, emphasizes that the lines of argumentation in contexts characterized by rivalry come to light precisely in the mutual accu­ sations of having committed ritual errors. The internal evaluation of deviation from ritual norms reveals the role of rituals as arenas for negotiating hier­ archies. As Hüsken points out, the failure of a ritual can also be a sign of drastically altered social structures. Ritual failures may even serve to dis­ solve social relations and reorder hierarchies (ibid.). Moreover, since the reasons for ritual failure are interpreted differently by competing parties, it may help to be able to observe local power relations in the first place. Moreover, if one pays attention to how people deal with different categories of non-humans, one may recognize different coexisting ecologies. I agree

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with Hüsken’s argumentation and claim that all this can be observed particu­ larly well when the parties involved hold similarly strong positions of power. The ritual in my example from Alor Kecil is closely related both to the interrelationship between humans and non-humans, and to various inter­ pretations of the relationship initiated by the village ancestors with certain non-humans, with the hari under the sea. In categorizing those non-humans, I follow Timo Kaartinen’s (2016, 219–235) summary of the multiplicity of spirit beliefs in eastern Indonesia. I will look more closely at one of these cate­ gories—at those spirits that are believed to have always been in the area. Their permanent residence is in the realm that all villagers must constantly visit for survival, the sea. In the village of Alor Kecil, these invisible nonhumans living under the sea (hari) become visible to humans as fish. Their chief looks and behaves like a human but can transform into a shark. Many generations ago, ancestors of Alor Kecil established a treaty-like relationship with him. In gratitude for the healing of the leader of the hari, the humans should permanently not have to suffer hardship, always catch enough fish and be safe from attacks by sharks. In addition, the two sides have promised that they will invite each other to rituals in their villages and will follow these invitations. This incident and the resulting contract are commemorated in a myth.2 I will first give a rough summary of the narrative and then outline the ritual process which, after its forced interruption, had to be followed by a further ritual, a funeral. In the third part, I will focus on different local ways of interpreting the connection between the myth and the ritual. Possible reasons for these differences are following.

Deeds of the ancestors In Alor Kecil, the narrative of a lost fishing hook has been passed on for generations. It helps to remember the beginning as well as details of a contact that was installed between village ancestors and those spirits (hari) that sup­ posedly are living in as well as under the sea. The narrative was told to me several times with very little variation. I heard it the first time from Baba Sere3 in 1999. I summarize the narrative as follows: Many generations ago, two brothers lost their fishing hook while fishing near a rock4 that can only be seen at low tide off the coast of the village of Alor Kecil. At this point, the sea current is particularly strong. For fishermen, this has the advantage that large fish are washed past by the current. At this point, the younger of the two mythical fishermen dived to search for the lost hook. He closed his eyes as he dived, and when he opened them again he was sitting in a tamarind tree over a well. There a young woman drew water. The woman told the man that her king had

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Susanne Rodemeier fallen ill. The man suspected that he could heal the king. So he asked to be allowed to visit him. As soon as he saw the king, he saw that the missing fishhook was lodged in his cheek. Now he asked everyone to close their eyes. Thus, he managed to remove the fishhook without anyone noticing that he was poking it, showing instead another wood as the source of the evil. As a token of gratitude, the king promised that the fisherman and all his des­ cendants of all generations would always catch enough fish and be safe from shark attacks. It was also agreed that they would invite each other when rituals were taking place in their villages. Then the king brought him back to shore. To do this, he turned into a shark on which the man could sit and travel safely. Some time later, during a ritual in Alor Kecil, this relationship was broken. Guests of the village saw a red fish5 lying on the bank, fried it and ate it. It later turned out to be the visible newborn of the otherwise invisible guests from the underwater world. The baby’s loved ones were extremely upset by what they understood to be cannibalism. They haven’t invited humans into their kingdom since, but they continue to provide good fishing and protection from sharks. They also continue to partici­ pate, albeit invisibly, in the village’s rituals and then enjoy sumptuous meals prepared for them.

The narrative’s meaning for village life This narrative of the lost fishing-hook is very rich in motifs and symbols that are worth an in-depth discussion on local ontologies and pluralizing ecologies. In a brilliant analysis, David Hicks (2016, 257–276) compared seven similar narratives from Eastern Indonesia and East Timor based on seven central motifs6 to examine the relationship between visible and invisible worlds. All know that spirits stay in permanent contact with the living people. For the people who live in Alor Kecil today, direct physical contact with the hari is ambivalent, an advantage and a threat at the same time. Like ancestors, hari are part of the village community, are in close contact with the ancestors and can be influenced by the living with ancestor support. Both can be communicated with as if they were humans. Even if they are not visible to humans, they can hear very well what humans say. Hari and ancestors only help the living descendants, if they keep to the agreements that the ancestor initiated. In an event of disregard, the living must reckon with punishment. The eldest male heir of the Lakaduli clan, whose founder started the con­ nection with the hari, has to look after the correct keeping of the agree­ ments.7 Disregard will be sanctioned by the ancestors. Famine, infertility, sickness, or sudden deaths are considered typical sanctions. If the person responsible for a ritual dies during the ritual, in our example the eldest of the Lakaduli clan, then no one doubts that his death is a punishment from the

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ancestors. The bereaved must then find the error, which is possible through oracle consultation or dream analysis. One must find out why the person died, although everyone believed that everything had been done correctly: ancestors and hari had been invited and there was enough food for their proper entertainment. In order to clarify the cause of death, the sequence of events is carefully observed. When the man passed away the route of the road was completely marked with bamboo sticks. Therefore, the assumption was that the course of the road contradicted the rules of the ancestors. Scarduel­ li’s (1991, 81) research concerning the ritual routes between clan houses seems to confirm this. All the inhabitants of Alor Kecil know this narrative. They also know the rules of conduct for all villagers resulting from the events recounted in the narrative. This is important background knowledge for understanding the events that took place in March 2014 when people prepared to build a new road.

Road construction work organized as ritual In March 2014 a new road (jalan) was to be built along a new road course through Alor Kecil and many workers came to the village. To feed everyone adequately, large quantities of food were prepared. All the food was stored in uma lipo (Alor language: clan house) Pelang Serang. This is the house belonging to the clan at the highest level in the local hierarchical order. Rituals affecting the entire village are always held here. The fact that the food was stored in that clan house indicates that the entire village was involved, and that the road construction was to be a ritual according to the rules of the ancestors. Consequently, the villagers had to assume that the ancestors as well as those living under the sea (hari) were present, albeit invisibly. This point is important not only because more food had to be prepared than would have been necessary for the visible guests but also because the ritual community feels controlled by non-visible forces. Special vigilance is required to ensure that no one upsets the ancestors by misbehaving since sudden death of the person responsible for the ritual could result. The correlation between the course of a road and a ritual is not at all unproblematic in Alor Kecil. As I mentioned, the houses of clans are connected in such a way that the higher clan must always invite the one directly below him to come to the ritual. In this way, connecting tracks through the village correspond to the local hier­ archies (Scarduelli 1991, 81). This rule is part of the local adat as it was invented and therefore also controlled by the ancestors. However, it remains unclear why road construction must be a ritual. Community work (kerja bakti) without a ritual context is quite common and is encouraged by the national government (Indonesian: pemerinta). In the case of community work, however, the food for the helpers would be kept in another place, not in a clan house. A large tree at the harbor would have

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been suitable for this purpose or the large, new mosque. Why neither was chosen remains unclear. In March 2014 everything was prepared for a ritual road construction. During the initial surveying, extensive and loud discussions about the ideal route took place. Thus, everyone knew the exact course of the road, even the spirits and ancestors who can only hear but not see (Rodemeier 2006, 131). The main person responsible for the construction, i.e., the eldest male of clan Lakaduli, was sitting in the circle of helpers. Suddenly, he lost consciousness and fell off his chair. Although a car was quickly organized to bring him to the hospital in Kalabahi, he did not survive the trip. Still shocked by the sudden death of the person responsible for the ritual, the villagers postponed the road construction. A funeral had to be organized instead. My friend, who told me what had happened, clearly expressed her dissatisfaction that the deceased had not paid attention to tradition. She was certain he died only because he dis­ regarded adat. She undoubtedly understood his death as punishment from the invisible world. But, she complained, not all the villagers shared her inter­ pretation. Others interpreted it as purely a health problem or as punishment from Allah for adhering to traditional rules. In the terminology of our anthol­ ogy, her interpretation can be translated into either those who view the non­ human ancestors and hari as part of their own community, or those who make a turn toward other non-humans, either according to their religion, the Muslim faith, or according to secular medical explanations. Since the village chief died during an event that affected the entire village, everyone in the village now had to participate in organizing the funeral, which had to take place within 24 hours because the deceased was a Muslim. More­ over, everyone had to be informed about his death, particularly anyone who had any family connection with the village. This meant that, most likely, more people would be arriving, and appropriate food would be needed. The villagers thought they had a small advantage as they could use the food that they had already prepared for the work crews. A great shudder went through the village when they realized all the food had disappeared. Only then did some people remember that they observed a village member, who was considered mentally disabled, standing outside the community house, shouting and gesticulating excitedly, as the clan chief first fainted. No one had paid attention to him because everyone was preoccupied with the ritual leader. Only in retrospect did they realize the man was not trying to draw attention to himself, but to what was happening in the communal house. As I said before, it is common knowl­ edge that mentally handicapped people, as well as small children, can perceive the presence of spirits.8 It was therefore likely that he had noticed the dis­ appearance of the food, but no one paid attention at the time.

Pluralizing ecologies For me, the assumption seems obvious that the hari and ancestors were dis­ satisfied with the road construction. Did they want to indicate for all to see

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that they had been present when the ritual leader died? Did they perhaps even kill him? Why else would they have left the village and taken all the food with them? The triad of this article’s title: “including, neglecting, ignoring” refers to three different ways of dealing with what has happened and how ancestors and their invisible allies, the hari are recognized. These divergent responses to the ritual events illustrate forms of a general trend in dealing with one’s own past in regard to inherited knowledge about nonhumans. Either one includes the hari in one’s thoughts and actions, or neglects the knowledge of their existence, or ignores them altogether. Neglecting and ignoring inherited knowledge creates space to turn to other non-humans. The pluralization of ecologies becomes possible. To make it a little clearer: There are different ways to explain a sudden death. The interpretation that either the ancestral spirits or the spirits from the sea (hari) punished the ritual participants for doing something wrong is only one possible interpretation. Another one understands the situation as punishment by God or Allah as a conceivable explanation. A third party regards the sudden death as caused by cerebral apoplexy. But how does one explain the disappearance of considerable amounts of cooked food? The dif­ ferent explanations help to recognize the pluralization of ecologies. Core differences between these ecologies can be found in the external influences on which they base their thoughts and actions. The largest ecology with most followers so far draws its strength from its inherited local faith (adat). The second ecology, which has been growing particularly strong since the 1990s, sees its monotheistic faith (agama) – in this case its belief in Allah – as core to its ways of thinking and acting. The third group is oriented toward secular ideas of progress, as propagated by the nation-state (pemer­ inta) with international support. All three ecologies differ in the rules and normative orders to which people feel strongly bound and which they use to justify their actions. What all three ecologies have in common is that everyone is knowing all three ecologies but has different ways of dealing with it. All villagers are Muslims, everyone takes advantage of state sponsored infrastructure and (inter-)national development aid and all of them grew up with the inherited normative order of adat. But the described ritual makes clear that the relations to spirits are eval­ uated differently – namely according to the pattern including, neglecting, ignoring. People can contextually orient themselves to different ecologies, and since some do this with increasing intensity, they become representatives of an ecology that is meanwhile also represented by them. Nevertheless, each con­ tinues to have access to the characteristics of the respective ecologies but evaluates the respective hegemonic relationships differently. How this can be imagined becomes comprehensible in the context of the ritual.

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Three ecologies emerged already for some time Three ecologies have existed side by side for some decades. Everyone knows that they compete and that each believer in an ecology strives to expand its respective hegemony with the aim of reducing the influence of the others. The current conflicts in the village are largely related to this struggle for hege­ monic influence. It is a struggle over divergent beliefs in non-humans that is being fought out in this or similar ways in many villages in Indonesia. Therefore, it is worth focusing attention on it. The ritual described serves here only as an example to see these conflicts more clearly. My observations began in 1999 with a year-long research visit to Alor Archipelago. During this time, at each meeting attended by more than one nuclear family, care was taken to ensure that one person from each influential group was present and well entertained. Therefore, special attention was given to those who paid attention to the observance of the inherited and ancestralcontrolled legislation (adat) and to the state-recognized religious groups (agama), as well as to people in government service (pemerinta). Care was always taken to ensure that representatives from all three realms were invited and present. If a position remained unoccupied, the planned ritual could not take place. The change in meaning of these three realms is reflected in a new termi­ nology, as well as in changing the order in which the respective terms are mentioned. This observation is important because hierarchies in the Alor archipelago have so far followed the seniority principle. This is the case even though, or precisely because, society is organized within clans. Here, seniority principle means that the one who has been in a place the longest enjoys the highest prestige and influence. What the eldest person of a clan is saying is done by all clan-members. In traditional texts, this rule is explained by the relation that hearth­ stones have to each other. A hearth must always consist of three stones to hold a pot. All stones were “planted” (Alorese: mula) by the builder of a ritual house. During my 11 months of research (1999–2000) in the Muna­ seli9 region on Pantar, the hearth stones (Alor language: lika) were named with terms of local kinship terminology: lika makèng, lika aring, lika napureng (eldest son, younger brother, youngest brother) (Rodemeier 2006, 275–276). At about the same time, the Swedish anthropologist Emilie Wellfelt encountered the designation of the hearthstones on the small island Ternate, an island with inhabitants coming from Alor Kecil as well as Munaseli. She stresses that: In Ternate, a metaphor is used to envisage the local model for society and governance. According to this, society is like a cooking pot standing on three hearthstones by a fireplace. The hearthstones are: Adat (custom and tradition), Agama (religion) and Pemerinta (government). To

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prevent the pot from falling over and spilling – i.e., society collapsing into chaos – the support from all three stones is necessary. (Wellfelt 2004, 7–8) The hearthstone metaphor is used to emphasize the need for cooperation between different types of authorities. That these authorities are changing is clearly shown by the changes in the naming of the three hearthstones away from kinship terminology to the terminology of spiritual, religious, and poli­ tical authorities. This primarily illustrates the adaptability of social orders to a changing society. So far, it was a discourse of equality rather than one that implied hierarchy. The metaphor emphasizes that every stone must be the same size for a pot to stand well on it. Nevertheless, the new terminology corresponds to the shift in socio-political influence away from kinship to legal systems (traditional, religious, and governmental). Now it is no longer a question of who has been present in the place the longest, but which group enjoys the highest prestige. I argue in the following that prestige can be sub­ stantially increased by the strength of the “non-humans” to whom one refers.

Balance between adat and agama becomes disturbed The agents of the current regulations regarding agama Islam have subscribed to the government’s stipulation that a religion is accepted as agama only if it is practiced according to international customs. The Muslims of Alor Kecil also face this requirement. Here on the coast, the population adopted Islam10 about 400 years ago, while the inland population accepted the requirement to follow an agama only much later, since they turned to Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century. In the region, a variety of Islam developed that is closely interwoven with local tradition and trade. Today, this is not wel­ comed by many representatives of a modern Indonesian Islam. They are anxious to separate Islam from local tradition. Moreover, it is important to them that all five pillars of Islam be practiced as strictly as possible. In Alor Kecil, two of these five pillars are currently putting people under pressure: the requirement by the Indonesian Ministry of Religion that, since 2006, demands that men must regularly attend the Friday prayers in a mosque and, second, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Mutual appreciation and acceptance came out of balance in Alor Kecil several years ago. At first, it seemed to be a dispute between two people. One is a respected man who sees the adat as a crucial survival factor and behaves accordingly. The other is a man who planned his pilgrimage to Mecca. Although the villagers have been Muslims for centuries, it is impossible for them to make the pilgrimage because there is nothing in the region that can generate enough money. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was different. At that time, money could be generated by engaging in the slave trade. By the end of the 20th century, it is only the illegal sale of shark fins that earns the locals enough for them to travel.

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The guardian of adat regarded himself as the heir to a treaty his ancestors had made with the hari people under the sea. As their chief can transform into a shark and he had promised the village’s ancestors that they would always catch enough fish and never be threatened by sharks, shark protection is of high importance. This legacy was recently supported by international regulations to protect species in the marine reserve, including sharks. The guardian of adat now saw this agreement of his ancestors with hari threatened by the Mecca pilgrim. The pilgrim did shark finning, i.e., cutting off the fins of sharks while they are alive and selling only the fins. This is prohibited11 by international and national law as well. The guardian of adat saw the interna­ tional outlawing of shark finning as an opportunity to put a stop to the Pil­ grim’s illegal actions. He filed a complaint against him with the provincial police. At that time, in the 1990s, the complaint resulted only in a warning by the police but not in a penalty. Nevertheless, the Mecca Pilgrim felt publicly humiliated. Years later, when he was back in the village as a highly honored Hajji, the long-ago complaint developed into an ongoing enmity between the two men. The beginning of their enmity seems to be forgotten by all but those directly involved. The Hajji was celebrated upon his return from Mecca and elected to the influential political position of village headman (Indonesian: RT – rukun tetangga). The adat leader reacted to this situation by simply ignoring the existence of the Hajji. He neither participated in the celebrations, nor did he accept the Hajji’s position as village headman. During that time, his wife felt sick with a very painful but incurable headache. He believed that it is caused by a curse by the Hajji against him and his family. The adat leader finally seemed to relent; during my last stay in Alor Kecil in 2014 he attended the mosque every Friday noon like any other male villager. Furthermore, he no longer went to the place by the sea where he used to lay down offerings to communicate with the hari. When I asked him about that change, he explained that he is old now and had chosen the less elaborate form of con­ tact to the hari. Since no one hears what he says, when visiting the newly built mosque, he asks Allah as the head of all beings to take over the commu­ nication with the beings under the sea in his name.

Hegemonialization observed All three parties have some things in common. They all share the inherited narrative of the non-humans (hari) living under the sea. Furthermore, they are in direct competition with each other, vying for their own recognition. To gain influence themselves, they try to weaken the others or in other cases ally with just one of the other two parties against the third. Hegemonialization has been latent for some time; it became omnipresent in the respective inter­ pretation of the events at the road-building ritual and the subsequent funeral ceremony and could therefore be observed particularly well.

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All three events – road construction, sudden death, and the disappearance of food – can be put into relation, but, they do not have to be related to each other. The fact that everyone in the village witnessed all these events does not change this.

Adat interpretation – including ancestors and other spirits The representatives of adat clearly see it as their task to ensure that the rules of the ancestors are observed. The deeds of the ancestors are recalled in mythical narratives dealing with their lives, for their lives are considered the script of behavioral norms for all generations. Therefore, in any ritual, those alive today must make sure first and foremost that it is organized by the “right” person and that the “right” guests are invited, but also that all other inherited rules are observed. A ritual in Alor Kecil that, like the road building ritual, involves all villa­ gers, has only one possible host. It must be the eldest living descendant of one of the younger brothers who brought back the fishing hook in mythical times. Also, both the ancestors and the hari must be invited and entertained as spe­ cial guests. Cooked food must be available in the adat house for all visible and invisible participants. The invisible participants from the sea have direct access to the house and food through the blowhole in the floor of the house without having to move around the village. The fact that the food was stored in the clan house makes it clear that all the clans in the village were involved in the preparation of the food. So they all agreed to perform the road-build­ ing ritual and joined in the immediate preparations, including marking the road with bamboo sticks. For those who take the adat as the main guide for all behavior, they also take ancestors and hari as reality. To them there is no doubt, the sudden death12 and disappeared food are signs of non-human punishment. The adat suggests the penalty is related to incorrect route choice that ignored tradi­ tional connection routes. Death could have been prevented if road construc­ tion plans had followed ancestral rules. My research in the nearby Munaseli region has revealed that it is entirely possible to adapt ancestral defaults to current circumstances. For this it is necessary to obtain the consent of the ancestors (Rodemeier 2006, 99). It is quite possible that the ancestors of Alor Kecil could have been convinced of the need for a new route if all the elders of all clans had requested this change. However, for Alor Kecil, attempts by some villagers to get rid of the adat‘s recognition made unified action impossible. The tragic events are a powerful warning from the invisible world for adat‘s followers. From their point of view, adat is an essential part of life, which must always be involved in thoughts and actions. Without adat there will be no progress. On the con­ trary, disregard for adat will lead to massive problems, if not the downfall, of the village.

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Agama interpretation – ignoring ancestors and other spirits When looking back at that day’s events, it is surprising that the road-building ritual was prepared as a traditional ritual and that the food for the helpers was not kept in another place, e.g., in the newly built mosque. Possibly the mosque was not chosen because women would have been excluded. However, they are an important part of the ritual because they are preparing and dis­ tributing the food. Devout Muslims have managed to ignore and tried to erase adat obliga­ tions, starting as early as 1999, by simply not joining any rituals. Ignorance and silence helped to ignore the missing food and thus make the dis­ appearance – at least seemingly – insignificant. I suspect that if they are compelled to take a stand, they will explain the sudden death, as well as the disappearance of the food, as a punishment from Allah for including the ancestors instead of following the rules of a devote Muslim to worship only Allah. In the Alor Archipelago, it is common to make any kind of inconvenience appear to be undone by the fact that no one talks about it.13 Not saying something makes sure that the (blind) non-humans do not know anything about what happened and, thus, do not punish anyone. This means that what is said aloud becomes true.14 Allah, however, sees and knows everything. As a devout Muslim, one is therefore well advised not to do anything that might displease him. It is therefore better to ignore the existence of ancestors and other non-humans. If one must, nevertheless, follow a village ritual, as was the case with the road-building ritual, the sudden death might be explained as Allah’s punishment for the illicit turning to “spirits” and worshipping ances­ tors. Whether these “spirits” exist or not is irrelevant to a Muslim believer. The best way to avoid ancestral worship in a village where others are practi­ cing it is by ignoring these practices and turn to Allah instead as he is, for a devote Muslim, the strongest non-human.

Pemerinta interpretation – neglecting ancestors and other spirits Pemerinta or dinas (Indonesian term for government or “official”) is the term of the third group from which, according to local custom, at least one person should participate in rituals. By mentioning pemerinta a person is meant who holds any government position. People with such positions supposedly are more modern and educated than other villagers. Pemerinta people tend to explain even a sudden death with medical terminology, and they also do not relate the time of death to other events. In the given case, for them it was rather a coincidence that the person responsible for the ritual suffered a cere­ bral stroke at the beginning of the ritual but not a punishment by the ancestors. It is very likely that the planned road construction was made possible by government funds. Beginning in 2010, these funds have been reaching more

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and more villages to build basic infrastructure throughout the country, i.e., power supplies, wells or water pipes to supply drinking water, elementary schools, and connecting roads. It is seldom comprehensible to the villagers who is behind this funding. Therefore, these forces can also be assigned to non-humans who actively interfere in village life and to whom one must respond in a prescribed manner. In most cases, money is promised and only paid out when the village implements the measure with a large contribution of its own. In the case of the road construction in Alor Kecil, the donors had pre­ sumably not been concerned with the specific implementation and were not interested in the context of the construction work. Consequently, they were not interested in the fact that food had been placed in the adat house. Nevertheless, when large quantities of food disappear without trace, it is always a problem in Alor Kecil, a remote area of the dry tropics, where sea­ sonal hunger is well known. The government demand to neglect ancestors and other spirits is strength­ ened by the disappearance of food. According to government policies that maintain adat prevents progress, no rituals should be carried out in which food is wasted. Rituals should be secularized, and ancestors and other spirits should not be provided with large quantities of food. While it is still permis­ sible to eat and celebrate together, the place of performance should not be associated with ancestors, which then reduces the amount of food prepared. This is a repeated argument by the government against adat (Rodemeier 2014, 137).

Conclusion The hegemonial competition between people putting non-humans of adat, agama or pemerinta in the center of their thinking and doing, is well known in many villages in eastern Indonesia. Nevertheless, local values as well as nor­ mative orders connected with adat are under massive pressure. More and more often, rituals are abolished in favor of an increasingly fanatical mono­ theistic religion. But we must also remember that state-sponsored nature conservation puts adat under pressure, too. The very fact that in the described ritual a huge amount of food dis­ appeared without a trace makes it clear that there are events that neither Islam nor the government or westernized science can explain, but the local population must deal with it. There are countless examples of how the ignorance of adat contributes to social and political insecurity and religious fanaticism but does neither lead to a peaceful coexistence nor to a preserva­ tion of natural resources. For the people of Alor, the war between Christians and Muslims in the nearby Moluccas that escalated in the year 2000 is a shining example of this. It spurs to control hegemonialization in the own community at least to the extent that it does not lead to bloody fights. Until now, the inhabitants of Alor try to counteract latent hostility by granting

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adat, agama and pemerinta an equal place in rituals. Ignoring and neglecting of inherited obligations might permanently destroy this already unstable bal­ ance, whereas a communal decision to adapt adat to today’s challenges might stabilize a community – this at least was the assumption of many people in the Moluccas after the fights (Bräuchler 2015). Only broad lines can be drawn here that address the different interpreta­ tions of events. The differences depend on the particular ecology to which one feels close. Adat, agama as well as pemerinta derive their power from their believe in support of non-humans. What all three have in common is that they are aware of each other’s non-humans. However, it is a conscious decision to turn to a particular side and use only that side’s narrative to strengthen and justify the own position. This stabilizes the pluralization of ecologies and supports hegemonialization at the same time.

Notes 1 My first visit to Alor Kecil was in 1989, followed by yearly visits starting from 1999 until 2014. 2 The gist of that myth fits into a series of myths also known on the nearby island Timor. It always starts with two fishermen, a younger and an older brother, and the disappearance of their fishing hook. A red fish is also often mentioned in the myth (Hicks 2007, 39–56, 2016, 257–276). 3 Baba Sere is a fisherman in Alor Kecil. He is regarded and regards himself as being in charge to keep good contact with hari. He regards that contact as essen­ tial for the survival of all village people. 4 International divers know the stone as Kal’s Dream because Kal Muller mentions it in a dive guide for Indonesia (Muller 1995, 171–173). 5 In the local language, the word “red child” (Alorese: aku meang) means newborn baby. A “red fish” is therefore a newborn, a still red baby from the realm under the sea. 6 Hicks analyzes the following motifs: “(a) water; (b) life and plentitude/abundance; (c) an instrument of impalement or entrapment, an arrow, sword, rope, fishing line, or – usually – a fishing hook; (d) the quest, usually circular; (e) the social rela­ tionship of the older brother/younger brother; (f) deception (successful or unsuc­ cessful) or an error; and (g) visibility/invisibility, as indexed by the opening and/or shutting of the eyes” (Hicks 2016, 258). 7 Wellfelt (2016, 248) mentions the clan Lakaduli of being special insofar as it arrived in Alor Kecil from Munaseli on the nearby Island Pantar when there happened to be an earthquake in the late 16th century. This was the event that was remembered in narratives I researched in nowadays Munaseli. I learned to know that the former realm was destroyed by Javanese (Rodemeier 2006, 166). 8 A few years ago, the French couple Anne and Cédric Lechat, together with their daughter Lila, who was still quite young, participated in a ritual in Alor Kecil. Lila danced around and chanted that she could smell the sea. At the time, one of the villagers told Anne that this is a common behavior among children. Children and disabled people are more sensitive than adults. That is why they can sense the invisible visitors. (Anne and Cédric have been running a small resort since 1998 with the permission of the people of Alor Kecil. Anne and her housekeeper and cook Bibi Nenek have occasionally told me about their experiences in the village

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and discussed them with me. Both played a major role in making this article pos­ sible at all. I would like to thank them for their openness in our discussions.) In Munaseli, a dialect of the Alor language also known as Lamaholot is spoken. There exist close family relations. Rodemeier (2010, 27–42). Ocean Mimic and Booth (2020). Rodemeier (2006, 121–122); Sell (1955). Rodemeier (2006, 331–333). People whose words come true are considered to have a “hot mouth” (Indonesian: mulut panas). Therefore, they must always choose their words carefully so as not to unthinkingly cause a disaster.

References Bräuchler, Birgit. 2015. The Cultural Dimension of Peace. Decentralization and Reconciliation in Indonesia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coral Triangle Initiative. 2022. Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security, shortly known as the Coral Triangle Initiative; www.coraltriangleini tiative.org/about; (accessed 18 September 2022). Fox, James J. 1980. “The ‘Movement of the Spirit’ in the Timor area: Christian tra­ ditions and ethnic identities.” In Indonesia: Australian Perspective, edited by James J. Fox, Ross Garnaut, Peter McCawley, and J. A. C. Mackie, pp. 235–246. Can­ berra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. Geertz, Clifford. 1957. “Ritual and social change, a Javanese example.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 59(1): 32–54. Hicks, David. 2007. “Younger brother and fishing hook on Timor: Reassessing Mauss on hierarchy and divinity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1): 39– 56. Hicks, David. 2016. “Impaling spirit: Three categories of ontological domain in East­ ern Indonesia.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 257–276. London and New York: Routledge. Hüsken, Ute, ed. 2007. When Rituals go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Hüsken, Ute. 2013. “Ritualfehler.” In Ritual und Ritualdynamik, edited by Christiane Brosius, Axel Michaels, and Paula Schrode, pp. 129–135. Göttingen: UTB Van­ denhoeck & Ruprecht. Kaartinen, Timo. 2016. “Bounderies of humanity: Non-human others and animist ontology in Eastern Indonesia.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 219–235. London and New York: Routledge. Muller, Kal. 1995. Underwater Indonesia: A guide to the World’s greatest diving. Sin­ gapore: Periplus Editions. Ocean Mimic and Hollie Booth. 2020. Shark fishing in Indonesia. https://ocean-mimic. com/shark-fishing-in-indonesia;(accessed 19 June 2022). Rodemeier, Susanne. 1993. Lego-lego Platz und naga-Darstellung; Jenseitige Kräfte im Zentrum einer Quellenstudie über die ostindonesische Insel Alor. http://nbn-resol ving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus-875 (accessed 18 September 2022). Rodemeier, Susanne. 2006. Tutu kadire in Pandai – Munaseli. Erzählen und Erinnern auf der vergessenen Insel Pantar (Ostindonesien). Berlin: LIT Verlag.

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Rodemeier, Susanne. 2010. “Islam in the Protestant Environment of the Alor and Pantar Islands.” Indonesia and the Malay World, 38(110): 27–42. Rodemeier, Susanne. 2014. “Mubeng Beteng. A Contested Ritual of Circumambula­ tion in Yogyakarta.” In Dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Moder­ nity, edited by Volker Gottowick, pp. 133–153. Global Asia (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 2. Amsterdam: IIAS Publications Series, Monographs. Scarduelli, Pietro. 1991. “Symbolic Organization of Space and Social Identity in Alor.” Anthropos, 86: 75–85. Schieffelin, Edward L. 2007. “Introduction.” In When Rituals go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual, edited by Ute Hüsken, pp. 1–20. Leiden and Bosten: Brill. Sell, Hans Joachim. 1955. Der schlimme Tod bei den Völkern Indonesiens. Den Haag: Mouton & Co. Stanley, Morgan. 2022. Definition of MPA: Marine Protected Area. https://education. nationalgeographic.org/resource/marine-park (accessed 18 September). Wellfelt, Emilie. 2004. “Diversity & Shared Identity. A case study of interreligious relations in Alor, Eastern Indonesia” (unpublished Master’s thesis). Wellfelt, Emilie. 2016. “Historyscapes in Alor: Approaching indigenous histories in eastern Indonesia” (manuscript of PhD thesis).

4

Home of Spirits and Loggers Plural Perspectives on the Forest in Indonesian Borneo Michaela Haug

Introduction The Indonesian rainforest is associated with various images. It is often refer­ red to as one of the remaining “green lungs” of our planet, a carbon sink indispensable for the global climate; it serves as a habitat for countless animal and plant species, and finally, yet importantly, it constitutes the basis of life for millions of forest-dependent (indigenous) peoples. In her widely received paper “What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment?”, Li (2014) demonstrates that different people have “distinct views on what land is (its ontology), what it can or should do (its affordances) and how humans should interact with it” (ibid., 590). This is true for the forest as well. Views about what the forest is and how one should relate to it may differ greatly, for example, between a climate activist, a timber tycoon and an indigenous forest dweller. This is not surprising, as these people represent apparently different interests and a kind of plurality that most people are familiar with. In this chapter, however, I want to foreground a less familiar plurality by drawing attention to different perspectives on the forest that occur within an indigen­ ous society. Taking the Dayak Benuaq of Indonesian Borneo as an example, I demonstrate that what the forest is varies, allowing for different uses and enabling different ways of relating to it. Exploring plural perspectives on the forest among the Dayak Benuaq, I challenge the (unfortunately still widely prevalent) dichotomy between a Western/naturalist/scientist ecology on the one hand and a non-Western/ animist/indigenous ecology on the other. I show that, among the Dayak Benuaq, different perspectives on the forest and different practices of relat­ ing to it come the fore that are based on different ontological presupposi­ tions. While in some situations and contexts relationships between humans and non-humans are emphasized that resemble an “animistic ecology”, in others the focus lies on the forest as an exploitable economic resource, which resembles more of a “naturalistic ecology”. Building on her research in Central Kalimantan, Kristina Großmann (2022) highlights such varying ecologies by contrasting the sharing, attached ecology of Dayak commu­ nities in Uut Murung with the resource-based, detached ecology of mining DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-4

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communities in Laung Tuhup. Kenneth Sillander (2016), working among the Dayak Bentiatn in East Kalimantan, for his part, emphasizes the shift­ ing perspectives within a Bentiatn community. He writes that “[i]n some contexts an animistic tendency … comes to the fore, while in others spirits are ignored and a more pragmatic and naturalistic attitude toward the world and events prevails” (ibid., 158). I have encountered such “fractures”, or what might at first glance seem like “contradictory” behaviour, repeatedly during my research among the Dayak Benuaq. The more I paid attention to these apparent contradictions, the more I realized that they do not con­ stitute a contradiction for my Dayak Benuaq interlocutors at all. On the contrary, the Dayak Benuaq have the ability to move quite effortlessly “among contexts in which different forms of practice are underwritten by different ontological assumptions” (Harris and Robb 2012, 672). While the modern, science-based ontology is an ontology in which “only one set of propositions about reality can prevail” (Salmond 2014, 301), the Dayak Benuaq do not necessarily feel the need to adhere to a single set of assumptions about the world. The importance and presence of spirits and the invisible realm, as well as the meaning of trees, and nature more gen­ erally, can differ greatly from one context or situation to another, which makes it easy for the Dayak Benuaq to engage in plural ecologies. High­ lighting the co-existence and intertwining of different ecologies within an indigenous society, I show that conceptualizations of “nature”, which here is mostly synonymous with “forest”, are not necessarily clear and fixed categories. Instead, they appear to be much more fluid, context-dependent and flexible. I argue that living within a context of plural ecologies is not a new phenomenon within Dayak Benuaq society. In my understanding, recent changes, like the expansion of state control and neoliberal capitalism, have not introduced a new, alternative ecology that stands in opposition to an indigenous one, but rather have engendered an increasing pluralization of ecologies, multiplying the variety of elements that end up co-existing, intertwining, and conflicting in Dayak Benuaq everyday lives. My ethnographic example aims thus to encou­ rage us to perceive ecologies (and ultimately also ontologies) as constitutively plural and to focus our interest on how this plurality manifests itself in every­ day life, in concrete actions and practices, and how the implications of this plurality can be perceived as free from contradictions by the people involved. I see such an approach as much more promising than the attempt to carve out the ontology (or the ecology) of a particular (indigenous) group, as it does not focus on “modes or moments of alterity” but rather on “the complexities and contrasts that exist in people’s lives” (Harris and Robb 2012, 669). Methodologically, my contribution builds on what Signe Howell and Aud Talle (2012) have termed “multitemporal fieldwork” (ibid., 2), as I have repeatedly conducted anthropological field research among the Dayak Benuaq since my first visit to East Kalimantan in 2000. The present paper is based on data collected during three months of field work in 2001, 22 months of field research between 2004 and 2007 and eight months of field

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research between July 2016 and March 2017. My methods comprise a vari­ ety of qualitative and quantitative approaches. However, intensive partici­ patory observation – and especially the ability to witness how people move around in the forest, work in it and talk about it in different situations – has provided me with the insights I draw on here. I start by exploring the aforementioned dichotomy between a Western/nat­ uralist/scientist ecology and a non-Western/animist/indigenous ecology, before considering the implications of its persistence in the Indonesian context in more detail. After setting the scene, I substantiate my argument by exploring diverse situations and contexts within the Dayak Benuaq lifeworld in which different uses and different ways of relating to the forest come to the fore. I close by highlighting the unanticipated and sometimes surprising ways in which different ecologies can be woven together, opening the way for ever new forms of pluralization.

Beyond dichotomous ecologies Trying to overcome the widely dominant and rightfully criticized dichotomy between nature and culture, ontological approaches have reinforced other dichotomies, above all that between “Western” and “indigenous” ontologies (see Bessire and Bond 2014, 442). This dichotomy and the tendency to see ontological beliefs as uniformly shared among the members of a group is particularly evident in the works of the French anthropologist Philippe Descola (e.g. 2009, 2013), who attempts to divide global ontological diversity into four central categories: animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. The tendency to reinforce the dichotomy between “Western” and “indigenous” ontologies is also mirrored in recent attempts to bring ontological approaches and political ecology into dialogue, as for example in the “political ontology” promoted by Mario Blaser (2009, 2013). While Blaser convincingly enriches political ecology and political economy by showing how ontological differ­ ences contribute to major misunderstandings and environmental conflicts, his approach does not challenge but rather consolidates a dichotomous picture where a scientific, rational conception of nature stands in opposition to an indigenous one. Analyzing conflicts around a sustainable hunting programme in Paraguay, he emphasizes the contrasting understandings of sustainability held by the indigenous Yshiro people and the biologists involved (ibid., 2009). His ethnography hints at some heterogeneity among the Yshiro as he men­ tions the influence of Christianity and different factions within the commu­ nity, but he neither explores these any further nor takes them as a reason to question ontological homogeneity among the Yshiro (cf. Bessire and Bond 2014, 443). In Indonesia, the contrast between a “naturalistic” ecology on the one hand and an “animistic” ecology on the other is deeply ingrained in the struggle of indigenous peoples and indigenous rights groups, particularly the Alliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, against the neoliberal developments

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pushed forward by the Indonesian government. “Development”, in Indonesia, is mainly understood in terms of economic growth and follows the paradigm of pembangunan (BI)1 (for a detailed analysis see Heryanto and Lutz, 1988). This term, which simply translates as “development”, stands for a central paradigm of Suharto’s new order regime (1966–98) – the development of the Indonesian nation through the domination and exploitation of nature (Duile 2017, 145), a notion that is still very powerful today. In this context, “nature” is merely seen as raw material for the construction of the Indonesian Nation and land and forests serve as resources to attract (foreign) investment (see Li 2014). This is contrasted with various indigenous ecologies throughout the Indonesian archipelago, which are characterized by deep and complex spiri­ tual and moral relationships between humans, land and forest, plants, ani­ mals, and spirits. Environmentalists and indigenous rights activists build on elements of these indigenous ecologies to foster the image of indigenous groups as living in harmony with nature as a “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988) to support the struggle of indigenous peoples for customary land, selfdetermination and economic participation. Tania Li (2000) rightfully reminds us that: “a group’s self-identification as tribal or indigenous is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted, or imposed. It is, rather, a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle.” (ibid., 151) Nevertheless, specific strategic attributions and simplifications remain a cru­ cial element of the struggle of indigenous peoples, and they are often neces­ sary for them to gain access to global support networks. As useful and effective as it might be, this strategic essentialism contributes to consolidating the dichotomy between a “naturalistic ecology” pursued by the state and by national and transnational corporations, and an “animist ecology” practised by indigenous local communities, while little attention is paid to the great complexity and flexibility that de facto characterizes indigenous lifeworlds. The persistence and perpetuation of this dichotomy has two major effects. First, it emphasizes the alterity of indigenous communities. Whether they are essentialized for the good, as romanticized savers of the environment and bearers of hope for a sustainable future, or for the bad, as remnants of the past, in need of development and modernization, they are imagined in con­ trast to modern development in Indonesia. However, indigenous communities are very much part of “modern” Indonesia. Their struggles for customary land and their resistance to large-scale development projects are in most cases not aimed at preserving a traditional lifestyle, but rather against what John McCarthy (2010) has called “adverse incorporation”.

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Second, it promotes an image of indigenous communities as homogeneous units with uniformly shared ontologies – which neither corresponds to their long histories of translocal relationships, nor to the present complex reality of their everyday lives. Indonesia’s indigenous societies have been affected by missionary work, colonial rule and state policies. Having experienced the most severe and systematic economic, political and social marginalization during the new order (see Duile 2017, Duncan 2004), the downfall of former president Suharto, the subsequent democratization and the implementation of regional autonomy in 2001 (Aspinall and Mietzner 2010) offered them new opportunities for political self-determination (Haug et al. 2017). At the same time, regional autonomy stimulated the increased exploitation of resources in many rural areas of Indonesia and produced manifold new inequalities. Research among various Dayak communities in Indonesian Borneo has shown that how individuals and collectives experience, perceive and respond to these recent processes of change can thus vary significantly by age, ethni­ city, education, economic status, and geographic location (Arenz et al. 2017, Meijaard et al. 2013, Schreer 2016). This great heterogeneity corresponds to a plurality of different ways of relating to the world and the co-existence of different, partly contradicting conceptions of “nature”, “forest” and “devel­ opment”, which to some extent simply exist in parallel, to some extent con­ flict with each other and which can also, as I will show later, be creatively interwoven. Individual and collective actors live and (re)produce this plurality by immersing themselves in different ecologies in a context sensitive manner. A good example of this is Kakah Ipa2, who grew up in a small village, where religious life is characterized by the co-presence of Dayak Benuaq auto­ chthonous religion and the Catholic Church. He ventured out to study biol­ ogy and finally received his forestry doctorate from a German university. Over the years I had the opportunity to meet Kakah Ipa in different contexts – conducting rituals in his home village, praying in church, presenting his research findings in front of an academic audience and being in charge for a local reforestation programme. In each of these contexts, a different concep­ tion of “nature” prevails, engendering different sets of relationships between humans and animals, trees, plants, land, spirits, and technologies. Based on these observations, I argue that it is not a worthwhile endeavour to try to assign a specific ecology to a particular ethnic group or society, not even to particular individuals. Instead, I see it as much more revealing to aim to understand how people deal with a plurality of conceptions of beings and relationships and to analyze how such a pluralization of ecologies is brought into being by particular practices, performances, and manifold interactions that make up people’s everyday lives.

Setting the scene The communities that I write about here are located within the regency of Kutai Barat, which stretches along the Mahakam River, including the

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lowland areas around the Mahakam lakes and the highland regions of the Middle Mahakam. With the creation of the regency in 1999, the various Dayak groups together became the ethnic majority and the leading political force in Kutai Barat. Major economic sectors of the regency are timber, oil palm and coal mining. While income from timber was of central importance during the 1970s to 1990s, it has recently declined as Kutai Barat has lost most of its remaining valuable forests in late 2012 when its five north-western districts split up and formed the new regency of Mahakam Ulu. The Indo­ nesian oil palm expansion reached the area in the mid-1990s and has been expanding ever since, although it has been hampered by many controversies and some severe conflicts (see Gönner 2017, Haug 2010, 2014). Coal mining gained increasing importance during the recent Indonesian coal boom, which peaked in the early 2010s. During this period, many small (and some alleg­ edly illegal) coal mines operated all over the regency. Coal mining continues, as 83 percent of Indonesia’s proven coal reserves are located in Kalimantan (Lucarelli 2010, 40), but it is now limited to several large open pit mines in the hands of international corporations. Most Dayak Benuaq practise a highly flexible and resilient combination of swidden agriculture, animal husbandry, small-scale estate crop production (with the most important one being rubber), trading of (agro-)forest products and wage labour. This diversified economic strategy is characteristic of many Dayak societies and historically has grown out of the trade in non-timber forest products. Their advantageous position on the major trading route between China, the Philippines, Sulawesi and Java attracted Arabic and Chi­ nese merchants to the kingdoms of Kutai from very early on. Trade in med­ icinal camphor (Dryobalanops aromatic, LT) and eaglewood – a dark, aromatic, resin-embedded heartwood which Aquilaria (LT) and Gyrinops (LT) trees produce when their wood gets infected with a specific kind of mould – is documented since the 2nd and 3rd century CE. Other Bornean trading goods included rattan, pearls, jade, rhinoceros horns, and tortoise shells. They were exchanged for Chinese gongs and porcelain, tiles, drapery, brass goods, forged iron, weapons, munitions, and sugar (Fried 1995). Present religious and, to a large part, social life among the Dayak Benuaq is dominated by their autochthonous religion, which contains many char­ acteristics identified as central to current animism theory (see Århem and Sprenger 2016). The continued extraordinary vitality of the Dayak Benuaq autochthonous religion can be (at least partly) explained by the location of the Middle Mahakam, which formed a kind of “buffer zone” between the coast, where Islam started to spread from the early trading centres, and the Bornean hinterland which was the major target of Christian missionary work (Gönner 2001, 62f). Despite this specific constellation, many influences have shaped Dayak Benuaq autochthonous religion, as it is practised today, over the course of the centuries. The foremost of these are Hinduism, Islam, colonial policies and most recently the Catholic Church, which has been present in East Kalimantan since the beginning of the 20th century, as well

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as a great variety of charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which have taken up their missionary work in East Kalimantan since the 1990s. To trace the exact impact of these different influences on current ritual practices and conceptualizations is simply impossible. Oliver Venz, who has done a very comprehensive analysis of the Dayak Benuaq pantheon, shows this, for example, in relation to the names of various numinous beings. He states that it is very difficult to trace whether foreign terms (such as Sanskrit or Arabic terms used to designate particular spirits) were borrowed directly or con­ veyed through other regional languages and whether only the foreign ter­ minology or also the corresponding foreign concepts were incorporated (Venz 2012, 89). Looking back at the Dayak Benuaq’s century-long engagement with downriver kingdoms, their involvement in international trading networks and the manifold technologies, goods, and ideas that they have appropriated along the way makes clear that living in a context of plural ecologies is not a new phenomenon within Dayak Benuaq society.

The forest as a landscape in flux My first insights into the Bornean rainforest originate from extended walks with my foster mother Itaq David. I regularly followed her through the widely ramified network of paths that meander through patches of primary forest (bengkar mentutn) and old secondary forest (bengkar), that lead along forest gardens (simpukng), past distinctive landmarks such as magically altered rock formations, fallow fields of different age (uraat), cash crop gardens (kebotn), and rice fields (umaq), some of which contain field huts. Sometimes there was no path and she had to cut one for us through the dense vegetation with her machete. In this way she took me to rice fields that she had many years ago cultivated together with her husband, most of which had since become so overgrown – taking on a forest shape again – that my eyes would never have recognised them, while particular trees allowed her even to locate the exact locations of her previous field huts. Itaq David, already a grandmother at that time, enjoyed sharing memories and stories attached to these places. On our way, we sometimes passed the site of a former longhouse that had once been located between her village and the neighbouring one. While no remnants of the longhouse remained, not even wooden poles, Itaq David was able to determine precisely the former position of the longhouse because she recog­ nized the trees that had flanked the building when she was a child and the concentration of fruit trees behind the former kitchen annexes. Some places we passed required us to brush soil from the ground or moss from rocks along the way against our foreheads – so that the spirits that dwelt in these places would recognise us as co-inhabitants of this dense landscape and abstain from harming us. There were also places Itaq David would avoid. These included, for example, what the Dayak Benuaq call simpukng sakaah, places in the forest where an accident had occurred and someone had died. Wooden statues mark these places and the surrounding trees must not be

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uprooted as long as the statue is present and the place maintained by the victim’s family. Only when the statue has rotted and the place is no longer honoured by the descendants of the deceased can the forest area in question be cleared again and put to other uses. All these different elements of the landscape cumulatively constitute what the Dayak Benuaq call lati tana kai, ‘our forest and our land’. Conducting research among the Dayak Bidayuh in Malaysian Borneo, Liana Chua (2015) emphasizes that this kind of dense landscape is “more than a physical land­ scape”. Instead, she writes, it is “a constantly shifting spatial, social, and temporal field” which entails “the complex networks of histories, kin rela­ tions, and place-based genealogies that link the villages in this vicinity” (ibid., 647). She therefore calls the forest a landscape of “memory and morality” (ibid., 646). This image captures very well what is also true for the forested mosaic landscape of the Dayak Benuaq. It is more than just a forest; it is a landscape full of diverse relationships, full of stories and numerous individual and collective memories. Most importantly for our concern here, however, it is a landscape in constant flux. The forest of the Dayak Benuaq is continuously changing its appearance; dense forests get converted into rice fields, then fal­ lows, then forest gardens, then grow old and might finally be reopened to become rice fields again. Even “sacred sites” like the simpukng sakah may over the course of time become a field or a forest garden again – offering new possible ways of using and relating to them.

The forest as a place to make a living According to the Dayak Benuaq creation myth, Taman Rikukng, the spirit being from whom all other spirits, non-humans and the ancestors of humans descend, is created from a remnant of the primordial matter from which heaven and earth emerged (see Gönner 2001, Hopes et al. 1997). Humans, spirits, animals, plants, heaven, and earth thus form an encompassing unity in which all beings are interwoven within the framework of a great geneal­ ogy. Despite this religiously anchored consciousness of an all-encompassing kinship, which forms the basis for a deep spiritual and moral relatedness with the surrounding world, particular trees and forest areas, as well as other land, can also be entities that are owned, inherited, given away, or sold. In other words, the forest is not only seen as a spiritual entity, but also as an economic resource and a place to make a living. The Dayak Benuaq distinguish between different categories of land and forest areas that can become objects of different kinds of property relations, involving different (groups of) persons and extending over different time periods. By way of example, I briefly introduce two basic categories: rice fields (umaq) and forest gardens (simpunkg). The production of rice on annual swiddens forms the core of Dayak Benuaq subsistence. Most families till one field per year, where they cultivate rain-fed upland rice along with a wide range of vegetables and spices. Most

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swiddens are used for one or two, or at most for three years before, owing to declining yields, a new field has to be opened. The old swidden is either left fallow and reused after a certain period, or it is planted with rubber or fruit trees and transformed into a forest garden, which can also be reopened for agriculture by the time the trees are no longer productive (cf. Gönner 2001). By clearing a piece of primary forest, individual ownership rights to the resulting field are established, mostly by husband-and-wife units. Individual ownership rights to a rice field extend to the subsequent fallow, including the establishment of forest gardens. When the next generation inherits these rights, they may become their common descent group ownership, called rempuuq. Alternatively, if the initial owners decide to divide their property among their children, it will become the children’s individually held property. Property rights to land, as well as to individual trees or plants that arise from one’s own clearing, planting, or tending, are referred to as upuutn tampatan kami, which literally means ‘possession directly from the hand’. Human labour – the work of one’s own hands – serves here as the basis for establish­ ing property rights. This corresponds to the “labor theory of property” (Li 1998, 264), which underlies the practices of other shifting cultivators throughout Indonesia. Moreover, by working the land and planting and caring for individual trees or plants, personal connections of varying quality can be established to specific trees, or forest sites. However, such a deep attachment does not form with all the fields a person opens up in her life, or all the trees she plants. Itaq David, for example, clearly has favourite places, such as the former fields mentioned above, which she farmed with her hus­ band when their children were still young. She fosters a special relationship with them, visiting them regularly during her walks in the forest and immer­ sing herself in joyful memories there. She would never part with these. How­ ever, there are former fields to which she has no special relationship. She has even told her children that they could sell these pieces of reforested land if they wanted to (which they have not done). Itaq David’s readiness to give away these plots corresponds to the findings of Tania Li, who conducts longterm research among the Lauje, an indigenous group living on the northern peninsula of Sulawesi. Li tells of men who liked to live on the forest frontier and routinely cleared land to trade it with others who moved in behind them. She stresses that the plot cleared by a man would be “fully his and also fully separable from him, as alienable as any commodity” (Li 1998, 684). In addition to rice fields, forest gardens (simpukng) play a major role in the Dayak Benuaq’s economic portfolio. The Dayak Benuaq word nyimpukng corresponds to the Indonesian word melindungi (BI) and means ‘to protect, to care for something’. A simpukng is therefore best understood as a group of trees that is consciously protected for various reasons (see also Haug 2010). Most commonly, a simpukng denotes a forest garden consisting of fruit trees, which are planted on a fallow field by the individual owners of that field. Simpunkg are mainly tended during the high-yielding years of the fruit trees and at other times are left to their own devices, following a natural

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succession. Their structure and biodiversity thus resemble the surrounding forest. Products gained from simpukng are mainly fruits and nuts, but also include wild growing vegetables and spices, honey, timber and firewood, rattan, medicinal plants, poison, glue, dyestuffs, and plants used for rituals (Sardjono 1990, 76). Simpukng are usually inherited in the form of rempuuq, which provides all descendants of the initial owners with equal rights to har­ vest their fruits or to reopen them and convert them into new fields. As competing interests among the co-owning descendants are becoming an increasing source of conflicts, many parents are beginning to divide their simpukng up among their children. Apart from this common type of simpukng, which are increasingly turning into individually owned pieces of forest, there are others, enabling different kinds of ownership – and relationships. The simpunkg sakaah mentioned above, for example, constitutes a piece of forest that is only temporarily linked to particular people, as it is considered the individual possession of the family of the person who died in this place for as long as they tend the place. Even if this relationship only exists for a relatively short time, it can be particularly intense and emotional.

The forest as home of spirits In late autumn 2016 Tinen and Taman Ehaq planted a huge rice field, as their daughter’s wedding was approaching, and they wanted to make sure they would have enough rice to host all the guests. During the clearing, Tinen and Taman Ehaq left out an area of about 25 square meters at the north­ eastern edge of the field because an omen – a python that had not gone away when they approached it as a python would normally do – had shown them that this place was already inhabited by spirits. Relationships with a broad variety of spirits play an important role in Dayak Benuaq everyday life and are mainly maintained in the form of frequently performed rituals. Attempts to classify the great variety of spirits that play a role in Dayak Benuaq everyday lives have been undertaken for example by Michael Hopes et al. (1997), Christian Gönner (2001), and most comprehensively by Oliver Venz (2012). Roughly, spirits can be distinguished according to their human or non-human origin, whether they are well or ill disposed towards people, where they live, and what shape they can take. While some spirits can take the form of animals, like, for instance, the nyahuq, which often appear as birds, others manifest themselves in the sounds of nature, like the tiger-like timang, who is associated with the roll of thunder. The majority of spirits, however, are characterized by an anthropomorphic appearance. They are described as acting individuals, whose naming follows Dayak Benuaq kin­ ship terminology (Venz 2012, 403). This gives the impression that most spir­ its simply live invisibly alongside humans, while pursuing lives that resemble the Dayak Benuaq lifestyle. This enables not only collective relationships between humans and spirits, but also individual relationships and even

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friendships between specific persons and individual spirits. Taman and Tinen Ehaq’s respectful recess of a part of their planned field testifies to the great importance that is placed on omens when opening up a new field. The python they encountered was a rather unusual omen; much more often, people orientate themselves by birdcalls that can be heard as they start the first preparations for clearing. For example, if the song of the seset bird (Arachnothera longirostra) is heard during the first thinning (nokap), this is an unmistakable sign that it is better to look for a new site (Gönner 2001, 83). However, there is also the possibility to compensate for unfavourable omens – at least partly – by purification rituals. In other cases, omens are simply passed over unnoticed – especially when it is too late in the agri­ cultural year to look for a new field site (cf. Gönner 2001, 83) or when land has become so scarce that there are no alternative forest plots that could be opened up. Furthermore, there are great differences in the way people deal with omens, owing to the fact that some families no longer care for them as much as previous generations did, for example, because they are more firmly anchored in the Christian faith. It also happens that younger people who have spent longer periods of time away from the village in order to gain higher education simply no longer have the necessary knowledge and skills to recognize the great variety of bird calls and thus are not able to interpret (the full variety of) omens. These rather diverse and flexible ways in which Dayak Benuaq individuals respond to, circumvent, and willingly as well as unknowingly ignore omens during the opening up of a new rice field shows the inherent potential of their ecology for pluralization. It does not prescribe a single coherent way that is considered the proper one, but rather offers quite a lot of leeway in choosing how the relationship with non-humans is acted out in concrete situations. Although the Dayak Benuaq do not ques­ tion the existence of the spirits that co-inhabit the forest with them, they allow for different possible ways of relating to them. This resonates well with what Guido Sprenger (this volume) calls “ontologies of possibilities”. Spirits, however, do not only inhabit particular spots in the forest that one might come across by chance when opening up a new field. There are also larger forest areas and special geographic features, such as mountain ridges or rock formations, that are considered to be the habitat of spirits and thus are either completely avoided by humans or only occasionally used for hunting, but not converted to other uses. This is the case, for example, with a forested mountain, which belongs partly to the village area of Muara Tinai, where Tinen and Taman Ehaq live, and partly to the neighbouring village of Muara Tekeq. As an outstanding landmark, this mountain is of great cultural value within both communities. It features prominently in local history, is the subject of several local legends and is inhabited by various benevolent as well as dangerous spirits. The villagers of Muara Tekeq are currently work­ ing together with an Indonesian non-governmental organization to for­ malize their customary rights to this mountain area. Thereby, they are very skilfully emphasizing their customary culture, and therewith ultimately

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alterity. This is necessary for them, as they have to prove that they qualify as a “proper indigenous community” in which customs still exist and continue to be practised, if they want to claim the mountain area as customary forest (hutan adat; BI) (for a detailed description see Haug 2018). I wish to emphasize here that the villagers of Muara Tekeh are not simulating a deep spiritual connection to the mountain for strategic reasons. There is no “invention of tradition” at work here, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) have called it. Their spiritual and moral relationship to the mountain constitutes a significant part of everyday life in Muara Tekeh. However, the way in which the villagers present their ecology in front of the camera is tailored to the common motives, jargon, and desiderata of the international indigenous rights support network. To put it differently, they are willing to engage in “strategic simplifications” (Li 2002, 272) in order to secure their customary rights to the mountain.

The forest as a source of timber When one listens to how the Dayak Benuaq speak about the forest, one inevitably comes across the term lokasi. Lokasi is a borrowing of the English word location and can be found all over Indonesia. Tania Li, for example, describes how the term first appeared in her field in Sulawesi during the 1990s, when Lauje villagers started to plant cacao and with it “started to treat land as commodity and a site of investement” (Li 2014, 590). The term lokasi gained prominence in Muara Tinai and Muara Tekeh during the logging boom that followed regional autonomy in the early 2000s. Unclear task sharing and overlapping authorities concerning natural resource management created a temporary situation of great legal uncertainty in which local com­ munities enjoyed largely free access to their forests while local governments handed out small scale logging licenses in large quantities. During this period, the villagers co-operated with a local logging company to get one of these new small-scale logging licences, under which fees paid to the customary owners rose from a previous IDR 3,000 (USD 0.36 [1999]) to IDR 65,000 (USD 7.15 [2004]) per cubic meter of timber. After initial plans to share the fee payments equally among all families failed, the villagers formed descentbased groups who share customary use rights to certain parts of the largely unopened old growth forest that belongs to their respective village territories and divided it up into different lokasi. Each of these groups was represented by a partly self-appointed leader who was responsible for the arrangements with the logging company and the distribution of the fee payments among all the group members. As a consequence of their de facto open access to the forest, some villagers also started to set up their own small logging operations along the new and abandoned logging roads which meander through the village area. The logging boom came to an abrupt end in November 2004, when the central government increased its control, and new forest policies and new decentralization legislation drew back authority

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over the forestry sector to the central government. However, logging activ­ ities continue in Muara Tinai and Muara Tekeq until today, and fee pay­ ments (although they have dropped in the meantime) still constitute an important source of income for the villagers. I thus often had the chance to observe how people negotiate with the company’s employees about every cubic meter of wood that is taken out of their respective lokasi and the corresponding fee payments; in this context, a very distanced and pragmatic relationship to the forest comes to the fore. When I asked my interlocutors about this, I received the reply: “Of course … not every tree is inhabited by a spirit and not every place is associated with a narrative” (Taman Gauq, Muara Tinai, 2 January 2017). This is reminiscent of Irving Hallowell (1960) who, in his research among the Ojibwa in North America, concluded that while a stone always has the potential to be animated, most stones are not. Accordingly, I argue that among the Dayak Benuaq, every tree has the potential to be the home of spirits, but most trees are not. This enables the Dayak Benuaq to foster deep moral and spiritual relationships to particular trees, while others can simply be chopped down. In contrast to Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David (2014), who argue that the arrival of capital­ ism and modernization paved the way among the South Indian Nayaka to turn previous sentient co-dwellers into objects, I argue that among the Dayak Benuaq the option to view a tree simply as a tree has always existed. The increasing penetration of capitalism into even the most remote corners of East Kalimantan, however, reinforces the option to perceive the forest as an economic resource, as mirrored by the term lokasi. Before closing this chapter with some concluding thoughts, I would like to draw on another ethnographic example to illustrate how different ecologies can be neatly interwoven in rather unexpected and unanticipated ways. This example takes us deep into the remaining old growth forest of Tinen and Taman Ehaq’s village to an unusually large variant of the ritual makaatn lati tana, which literally translates as ‘feeding the forest and the earth’. This ritual is usually preformed when someone opens up a field in a location that is quite likely to be inhabited by spirits. Before starting to clear the place, the spirits are offered a meal, for which usually a chicken or a pig is slaughtered. The person tells the spirits about his or her plans to open this particular site, offers them special parts of the slaughtered animal and kindly asks the spirits to not disturb the opening of the field and to move to another site. Back in 2001, however, it was not a pig that was slaughtered to feed the forest and the earth, but six cattle. And there was no field to be opened up but an entire forest area to be opened for selective logging3. What had happened? After the local log­ ging company had started operations in the particular forest area of concern here, several accidents occurred – too many accidents for it to be a coin­ cidence. Vehicles and tools broke down all the time, lorries overturned, brakes failed for no explicable reason, frequent collisions occurred and finally a worker was killed by a falling tree. In addition, several cases of spirit possession occurred within the logging camp, which manifested

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themselves, for example, in the fact that the adolescent children of a security staff suddenly started eating raw meat and raw fish. Obviously, the invisible inhabitants of this patch of forest were interfering with the logging work. The existence of the spirits and the reading of the accidents as expression of their anger was shared among all the people involved: Dayak Benuaq indi­ viduals working at the local logging company and Christian and Muslim staff from other parts of Indonesia, as well as the (ethnic Chinese) company management. This is not surprising, as the co-existence of humans and spirits is a well-known phenomenon throughout Indonesia and both rural and urban Southeast Asia (cf. Duile 2020, Hüwelmeier, this volume). When more and more workers refused to work in this particular area, the company management decided to hold a makaatn lati tana ritual. Since it was a large forest area and in order that all staff, including Muslim workers, would be able to eat from the sacrificial animals, six cattle were sacrificed. After the ritual was performed, damage to vehicles and machinery returned to normal levels, work was not disrupted by any more major accidents, and there occurred no further cases of spirit possession in the logging camp. The spirits had apparently accepted the offering and moved to another part of the forest. This example challenges the often almost automatic and exclusive association of capitalist extractivism with a naturalist ontology, as the practice of the ritual shows that extractivism is also very compatible with animist ontological presuppositions. The example further shows that nat­ uralist and animist ecologies do not necessarily end up in conflict or mis­ understandings – they can also be interwoven in creative and productive ways, here based on the joint interest of villagers, workers, and company management in ensuring smooth logging activities. The villagers of Muara Tinai and Muara Tekeq did have some conflicts with this logging company, mainly about incor­ rect fee payments, but not about the fundamental decision to fell trees in this forest area. The forest here is at the same time considered to be a place where spirits dwell, but despite this fact rendered an economic resource that can be cut down without people perceiving this as contradictory.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have taken the reader to the dense, fluid, mosaic landscape of East Kalimantan, a forested landscape in continuous flux. Moreover, I have shown that just as the forest is subject to constant change, so too is the way people use and relate to it. The forest constitutes the basis of Dayak Benuaq livelihoods, it houses a multitude of spirits and many places of indi­ vidual and collective memory, and finally it is a natural resource open to exploitation. My ethnographic examples illustrate how different ways of relating to the forest come to light in different situations and contexts, involving different entities and nurturing different kinds of relationships among humans and between humans and the non-human world. At some points, elements of a Western/naturalistic ecology come to the fore, and at

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others an indigenous/animist ecology, in which people continuously engage “with the land and with the beings […] that dwell therein” (Ingold 2000, 133). However, the complexity and contrasts that characterize Dayak Benuaq engagements with the forest clearly show the limitations and short­ comings of the persisting dichotomy between a “naturalistic” ecology on the one hand and an “animistic” ecology on the other. The Dayak Benuaq’s creative and highly context sensitive ways of relating to the world are not the result of two ecologies, two homogeneous building blocks that are cur­ rently colliding. Dayak Benuaq ecologies encompass a plurality that is much richer than that and one that has much deeper historical roots. I thus argue that Dayak Benuaq society always had a great potential to pluralize and that recent processes of change rather engender an increasing pluralization. The glimpses that I have provided into the complex contemporary lifeworlds of East Kalimantan also underline that the communities I portray are far from being homogeneous entities and that the Dayak Benuaq are very much a part of modern Indonesia and not its other. Although they are able and (under particular circumstances) willing to engage in simplifications so as to fulfil the expectations of environmental or indigenous rights organizations, they are not natural born savers of the environment. Just because they utilize the tools and concepts offered by the state, like the hutan adat scheme, as a means of formalizing their customary rights, this does not mean that they adopt the notions of people-land relations inherent in these tools. Nor do they abandon their deep spiritual and moral relationship to the forest altogether just because they are willing to cooperate with a local logging company, in order to exploit parts of their forest to get hold of cash. None of these onesided images does justice to their highly situational and context sensitive practices. I rather see them as skilful navigators, in and between different ecologies, whose ability to pluralize is a most valuable, yet largely unnoticed, capability. Amiria Salmond, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (2007) emphasize the Western need for a single truth about the world in their book Thinking through Things when they write: “In keeping with its monotheistic origins, ours is an ontology of one ontology” (ibid., 10–11). This volume wishes to stress that “Western” ways of relating to the world are also much more diverse than they seem to appear at first sight, and indeed various scholars have shown that modernity comes with many facets and, more than that, with its own enchantments (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1998, Dube 2022, West 2001). However, within the naturalist ontology, heterogeneity is hidden, or shunted off into the private realm, rather than being openly acknowledged or even valued. What is valued and aspired to is a rational narrative, one essential truth. The Dayak Benuaq ontology, for its part, accepts and enables heterogeneity, acknowledging different propositions about the world and viewing them as being of equal value and validity. It thus allows for co­ existence and creative intertwinement, juxtapositions, and convergences, as well as collisions and clashes of different conceptions, nurturing what Anne

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Salmond (2014) calls “ontological creativity” (ibid., 296). If we want to figure out how a scientific view of nature can coexist with a moral relation­ ship between humans and non-humans, an ontological creativity such as can be found in pluralizing ecologies might be a most valuable inspiration.

Notes 1 When expressions or quotations are given in another language, they are set in italics and marked with the following abbreviations in brackets: BI for Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and LT for Latin. Expressions in the language of the Dayak Benuaq (Bahasa Benuaq) are only set in italics but not followed by an abbreviation. 2 The names of all interlocutors and villages mentioned in this article have been changed to prevent their identification. 3 Selective logging in this context refers to a logging practice of cutting only selected trees, such as particular species and trees above a certain diameter, in contrast to clear cutting.

References Arenz, Cathrin, Michaela Haug, Stefan Seitz, and Oliver Venz, eds. 2017. Continuity under Change in Dayak Societies. Wiesbaden: Springer. Århem, Kaj and Guido Sprenger, eds. 2016. Animism in Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Aspinall, Edward and Markus Mietzner, eds. 2010. Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions and Society. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Bessire, Lucas and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.” American Ethnologist, 41(3): 440–456. Blaser, Mario. 2009. “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustain­ able Hunting Program.” American Anthropologist, 111(1): 10–20. Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” Current Anthropology, 54 (5): 547–568. Chua, Liana. 2015. “Troubled Landscapes, Troubling Anthropology: Co-presence, Necessity, and the Making of Ethnographic Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21: 641–659. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1998. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist, 26 (2): 279–303. Descola, Philippe. 2009. “Human Natures.” Social Anthropology, 17(2): 145–157. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago, IL and London: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press. Dube, Saurabh. 2022. “Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity.” The South Atlan­ tic Quarterly, 101(4): 729–755. Duile, Timo. 2017. “Being Dayak in West Kalimantan: Constructing Indigenous Identity as a Political and Cultural Resource.” In Continuity under Change in Dayak Societies, edited by Cathrin Arenz, Michaela Haug, Stefan Seitz, and Oliver Venz, pp. 123–140. Wiesbaden: Springer.

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Li, Tania Murray. 2002. “Engaging Simplifications: Community-Based Resource Management, Market Processes and State.” World Development, 30(2): 265–283. Li, Tania Murray. 2014. “What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Invest­ ment.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(4): 589–602. Lucarelli, Bart. 2010. The History and the Future of Indonesia’s Coal Industry. Free­ man Spogli Institute for International Studies, Working Paper 93. McCarthy, John F. 2010. “Processes of Inclusion and Adverse Incorporation: Oil Palm and Agrarian Change in Sumatra, Indonesia.” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37 (4): 821–850. Meijaard, Erik et al. 2013. “People’s Perceptions about the Importance of Forests on Borneo.” PLoS ONE, 8(9): e73008. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073008. Naveh, Danny and Nurit Bird-David. 2014. “How persons become things: economic and epistemological changes among Nayaka hunter-gatherers.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20(1): 74–92. Salmond, Anne. 2014. “Tears of Rangi: Water, power, and people in New Zealand.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(3): 285–309. Sardjono, Mustofa Agung. 1990. “Die Lembo-Kultur in Ost-Kalimantan: Ein Modell für die Entwicklung agroforstlicher Landnutzung in den Feuchttropen.” Dissertation, Universität Hamburg. Schreer, Viola. 2016. “Longing for Prosperity in Indonesian Borneo.” PhD Thesis, University of Kent. Sillander, Kenneth. 2016. “Relatedness and Alterity in Bentian Human-spirit Rela­ tions.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 157–180. London and New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ed. 1988. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge. Venz, Oliver. 2012. “Die autochthone Religion der Benuaq von Ost-Kalimantan: Eine ethnolinguistische Untersuchung.” Dissertation, University of Freiburg. West, Harry. 2001. “Sorcery of Construction and Socialist Modernization: Ways of Understanding Power in Postcolonial Mozambique.” American Ethnologist, 28(1): 119–150.

5

Animism and Indigenous Movements in Indonesia Timo Duile

Introduction The idea of indigenous identities in Indonesia has a long history and yet it is a very modern phenomenon. It emerged in the colonial context though the dichotomy between colonizers, inlanders (who later became the autochthon population, the pribumi) and other Orientals, especially with regard to differ­ ent forms of law (Benda-Beckmann 2019, Davidson and Henley 2007). It was then neglected until the late phase of the authoritarian New Order regime. Indigeneity as a term for particular identities of autochthon groups distinct from mainstream society came to Indonesia in the 1990s from transnational discourses and was translated into local contexts as masyarakat adat, literally meaning customary society (Moniaga 2007, 281–282). Since the mid-1990s autochthon communities have organized under the banner of masyarakat adat in order to fight for cultural recognition and, most of all, land rights. Since land rights and access to resources have become a major focus of the move­ ment (Bedner and Arizona 2019), one could argue that these communities and activists have applied the idea of indigenous peoples in a pragmatic way: they have become indigenous to facilitate their struggle since other political entities based on class-based approaches are impossible (cf. Affif and Lowe 2007). Animism, in this view, has become discursive capital as it not only suggests a close relationship between indigenous people and nature but also a worldview distinct from mainstream society. The idea that activists and peasants pragmatically refer to indigeneity and animism is tempting and probably true to some degree since valuable natural resources are at stake. It does, however, imply that people consciously choose the tribal slot rather than taking indigeneity and animism as their identity and world view. In this contribution I suggest viewing indigeneity and espe­ cially animism as possible constituents of indigeneity as a result of local, national and global discourses as well as political and economic practices that affect the idea of animism and indigeneity in local contexts. These ideas, however, are not precisely options that people simply choose and thus establish a rather instrumental relationship to indigeneity (and to animism). They emerge as fixed, natural foundations of the people. Indigeneity, both as DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-5

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an identity and as a potentially distinct ecology (that is, a set of relations between humans and non-human entities) can unfold differently in different contexts, as I want to demonstrate in the case studies. It is, however, always embedded in power struggles and in processes of hegemoniality in which ecologies are involved. Before shedding light on two local examples, the concepts of indigeneity and animism within the Indonesian context are explained. In my case studies, the contribution draws on Dayak activists in the West Kalimantan-based Institut Dayakologi as well as on the local branch of Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) in Enrekang, South Sulawesi. For indigenous activists, animism plays different roles, and this is not just because of the fact that they are from different indigenous groups. Rather, the animisms in these contexts are shaped by historical, political, economic, and religious circum­ stances. Moreover, recent animism is negotiated through the relationship between indigenous people and state actors.

The concept of indigeneity in Indonesia The idea of the distinctiveness of the original inhabitants was prominently introduced during the colonial period when the Dutch distinguished between Europeans, natives (inlanders) and “other Orientals” such as Arabs and Chinese. The colonial government introduced a legal pluralism for these distinct groups as a means to ensure indirect rule over the archipelago. However, this implied at least partial recognition of autochthon customs (adat) (Fasseur 2007, 50, Moniaga 2007, 276–277). In the struggle for inde­ pendence and in independent Indonesia, the idea of indigeneity arose as a source of Indonesian identity in opposition to everything that stood for colonial oppression: An Indonesian identity was applied against the West, imperialism and colonialism. As David Bourchier (1998) argued, the state first adopted a populist version of indigeneity and, in the so-called New Order, a conservative one. Both versions put an emphasis on Indonesianness as a unifying identity and neglected particular indigeneity. They sought original notions of Indonesian-ness as indigeneity, for instance in gotong royong (mutual work and collaboration) as a populist stance and later in the azas kekeluargaan (family principle as a form of organizing all of society) as a conservative, hierarchical notion of indigenous Indonesian identity. Parti­ cular indigeneity or distinct ethnic groups were less addressed. They played a certain role, however, for the management of cultural diversity and nation building. During the Sukarno era, the notion of volksgemeenschappen, a Dutch term for ethnic groups, played a role. It was mentioned in the 1945 constitution along with the term orang Indonesia asli (native Indonesians), also in regard to the traditional land ownership that the state respects (Moniaga 2007, 277, Pichler 2014, 126). Therefore the new nation relied on this colonial legacy. Cultural characteristics from all over the archipelago continued to play a role in the so-called New Order, but particular

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indigeneity was depoliticized as it represented a potential threat for the state. Relying on ethnicity in political struggles was seen as a threat to national unity and as an opposition to the development ideology (Safitri and Bosko 2002, 5). The New Order regime rather put an emphasis on the idea of national development (Arnscheidt 2009), referred to in Indonesian as pembangunan. As a result, it was in search of what the notion of pemban­ gunan actually meant, and here autochthon groups in the periphery were constructed as passive objects of development. Labelled masyarakat terasing or masyarakat terpencil (estranged or isolated communities), these groups also became the opposite of Indonesia’s developed center (Li 2000, 154). While the government applied a negative stigma to these groups, the very idea of isolated people still living traditional ways of life became the basis for the emerging indigenous movement in the 1990s (Ernie 2008, 377–378, Moniaga 2007, 281–283).

Animism and indigeneity in the Indonesian context Indigeneity is often associated with animism. Indigeneity in transnational discourses often appears as the opposite of modern, mainstream society, that is, as the marginal, the isolated. This is especially stressed within African and Asian contexts where usually most of the population are “indigenous” in the sense that they are not of European descent (Mende 2015). Markers of dif­ ference from mainstream society are therefore crucial. Indigeneity is therefore often perceived as an identity drawing on worldviews other than Western ones, such as belief in spirits in order to stress special relationships to land. In Indonesia, however, animism is a controversial issue. On the one hand, belief in spirits is widespread throughout society. It is not uncommon even for edu­ cated Indonesians to believe in spirits. On the other hand, officially acknowl­ edged religions play an important role for most Indonesians and the relation between official religions and animism is often a source of conflict. The state recognizes Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism as religions (agama). All religions are conceptualized as mono­ theistic beliefs so that they fit with the fist sila (pillar) of the national ideology of Pancasila which declares Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa (one almighty God or divine entity) as the prime principle (staatsfundamentalnorm) of the state (Sinn 2014, 231). In large parts of society which do not refer to themselves as indigenous peoples, the relationship between sprits and official religion is subject to negotiation. Sometimes, spirits are rather ignored since especially modernist interpretations of Islam (represented by the mass organization Muhammadiyah) and Protestantism view engagement with sprits as something that drives people away from proper religion. That does not mean, however, that adherents of Muhammadiyah and Indonesians of Protestant faith deny the existence spirits. Other forms of religion respect belief in spirits and also human-spirit interactions. For instance, traditionalist Islam, represented by the organization Nahdlatul Ulama, incorporates

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traditional Javanese mysticism and animist rituals in its version of Islam. Also, Catholicism often tolerates autochthon belief in spirits and human-spirit interactions as long as these do not contradict Catholic teachings. How­ ever, it is an undeniable fact that throughout Indonesia’s history, indigen­ ous beliefs have been subject to discrimination. Not only have they not been acknowledged but they have also become a prime marker of differ­ ence between the civilized, developed part of the nation and the margins. The pejorative phrase orang yang belum beragma (people who do not have a religion yet) was (and still is) used to refer to people that adhere to animist beliefs rather than to officially recognized religions. It implies that a conversion to “proper” religion is only a matter of time (MonningAtkinson 1983, 688–689). Beside concepts of deities (which nevertheless had to be brought into a hierarchical order with one almighty God at the top in order to gain com­ patibility with acknowledged religions), there are basically two categories of spirits in Indonesian traditional believe systems: ancestor spirits on the one hand and what Århem (2016) called “owner spirits” on the other. The latter are the original inhabitants of a certain place, often associated with out­ standing features of the natural environment such as rocks, tall trees, or river confluents. Adherents of traditional believes in some places engage with these spirits as a means to keep them under control or simply because they consider them as non-human persons embedded in social relations. Engagement with ancestor spirits is also common throughout the archipelago. In Indonesia, the world animisme implies backwardness and so does kepercayaan, an umbrella term for autochthon beliefs. However, it has been noted that the notion of animism is unsuitable as a translation of keper­ cayaan, it reinforces the idea of non-modern, yet-to-be-civilized people. Therefore, some suggest the term “indigenous faiths” (Fachrudin 2017). This is certainly apt in the context of developmentalist discourses, but it has to be taken into account that animisme and kepercayaan are still often used as synonyms. The notion of kepercayaan is much more common than animisme and I argue here that it is a specifically Indonesian concept of animism, even though the meaning of kepercayaan is much wider than animism (keper­ cayaan also includes non-animist aspects of autochthon religions). The notion of kepercayaan covers many distinct belief systems throughout the archipelago, for instance the well-known Aluk Todolo of the Toraja, Malim (or Parmalim) of the Batak, or Kejawan among the abangan Javanese, but also numerous autochthon belief systems of far smaller groups. Most adherents of these kepercayaan identify themselves also as adherents of acknowledged religions: Abangan, for instance, are Moslems and most Toraja are either of Catholic or Protestant faith but still carry out Aluk Todolo ceremonies. Another strategy to cope with the state’s requirement to submit to an acknowledged faith is to subscribe as a branch of an acknowledged faith. In the case of kepercayaan it is usually the Dharma Hindu religion, since Hinduism acknowledges several deities, a concept that fits well

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with many kepercayaan. A prominent example is the Hinduization of the Ngaju Dayak religion (keharingan) in Central Kalimantan. In order to be acknowledged as a variant of Hinduism, keharingan adherents stressed similarities between their concepts of deities and the Balinese concept of the supreme deity of Sang Hyang Widhi. They also emphasized early con­ tact with Hindu civilization and committed themselves to official books of the Balinese Hindu religion. Thus, in 1980 keharingan was acknowledged by the state as Hinduism (Herrman 2015, 64).

The kepercayaan controversy When it comes to important legal issues for indigenous peoples in Indonesia, the 2013 Constitutional Court decision in which the court ordered that tra­ ditional land ownership has to be respected is often mentioned (Arizona and Cahyadi 2013, 53). However, there was another important, yet in some respects surprising decision, by the court that has drawn less attention. On November 7 in 2017, the court decided that kepercayaan should become one of the options for religious affiliation that is displayed on Indonesian identity cards. Six adherents of kepercayaan had launched the lawsuit since they felt discriminated against. If people’s identity cards did not show a religious affiliation, they argued, those people faced discrimination (Faiz 2017). In its decision, the Constitutional Court highlighted Article 29(2) of the 1945 Constitution, which declares that “the state guarantees all persons the free­ dom of worship, each according to his/her own religion (agama) and keper­ cayaan.” However, the judges did not interpret agama and kepercayaan as two distinct categories. Rather, and despite the “and” (dan) between religion and kepercayaan, the latter was seen as a part of religion. In this view, kepercayaan does not emerge as oppositional to religion and thus is not a threat to them. The decision to allow kepercayaan as an option on the identity card was nevertheless important in preventing discrimination (Fachrudin 2017). Also in 2017, the case of a community of Orang Rimba in Sumatra drew the attention of both national and international media (Firmansyah 2017, Henschke 2017, Nugraha 2017). Media coverage differed widely in its takes. An article for the conservative Republika newspaper, for instance, provided room for a cleric from the notorious Front Pembela Islam (Front of the Defenders of Islam), known for its vigilante actions. The cleric explained how he was concerned about the Orang Rimba. According to him, the Orang Rimba had “no guidance in life and just followed their instincts, whereas with Islam “their lives gain meaning and direction”. The article also states that the Orang Rimba first embraced Islam because of pragmatic reasons, but that they now feel grateful as religion “makes them more equal to others that live in ‘brighter’ modern areas.” This narrative not only drew on religion but also on the New Order legacy of progress. The autochthon belief is entirely disregarded, and the “savage life” viewed as little more than the

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life of animals (Firmansyah 2017, translation of the quotes by the author). In more liberal news coverage, a different stance was taken, and the conver­ sion was portrayed as a matter of force. Since the forests that the Orang Rimba used to live in had been destroyed to a large extent, they were forced to adopt modern life and, in order to get access to health services and education, they needed to be affiliated with an official religion. In order to send their children to school, for instance, the parents needed documents such as marriage certificates. For them, a religious affiliation is necessary (Henschke 2017). Conversion from animism to official acknowledged religions is, however, not a new phenomenon. It often occurred during the New Order era when the state expanded its control over Indonesia’s margins. In West Kalimantan, for instance, the number of people who professed “other religions” instead of the officially recognized ones (most of them probably Dayak animists) was 655,097 in 1971. That number dropped to 116,665 in the 1980 census and to 16,059 in 2000 (Tanasaldy 2012, 197). The state contributed much to the stigma of being an animist. In 1978, the Minister of Religious Affairs said that the government would not consider aliran kepercayaan as religion, a step that was meant to appease religious leaders (Crouch 2016, 100). The view of religion and kepercayaan not only as distinct but as incompatible is still of relevance and therefore the 2017 decision by the Constitutional Court was quite surprising. Not surprising, however, was the fact that the Constitu­ tional’s Court decision to make kepercayaan an official religious affiliation was seen by many as a threat to religion and, as the state relies on religion, as a means to weaken the very foundation of the Indonesian state. One of the strongest criticisms came from the Council of Indonesian Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI), an Islamic umbrella organization that is supposed to represent different currents in Indonesian Islam but in fact became a highly influential and conservative organization in post-New Order Indonesia (Ichwan 2013). Only a few days after the Constitutional Court’s decision, the MUI declared that they would submit their concern to the Ministry of Reli­ gious Affairs. MUI chairman Ma’ruf Amin (who became vice president in the 2019 presidential election) referred to the close relationship between mono­ theist religions as outlined, in his opinion, in the Pancasila and the state (Alfarizi 2017). The MUI and other Islamic organizations thus argued that acknowledged religions needed a concept of a monotheistic God, a scripture, and prophet-like figures, and therefore kepercayaan were cultural practices rather than actual religion (Fachrudin 2017). In January 2018, the MUI even suggested issuing different kinds of identity cards for adherents of keper­ cayaan, a suggestion that drew harsh criticism from human rights activists and also from indigenous people. Rukka Sombolinggi, the recent chair of AMAN, declared that distinct identity cards would probably maintain dis­ crimination against adherents of kepercayaan. Sombolinggi’s utterances were also surprising since AMAN usually does not engage in conflict with officially recognized religions.

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Case studies: animism and indigenous activism at the grassroots Do indigenous activists apply animism as a part of their indigenous identity? When does it matter and how do they conceptualize animism? As I will demonstrate, there is no general way for indigenous activists in Indonesia. Rather, local circumstances play an important role in negotiations for indi­ genous acknowledgement and self-ascription. In the following, I will draw on two case studies, namely on indigenous activists of the Institut Dayakologi in West Kalimantan and on ANAN-activists in the regency of Enrekang, South Sulawesi. I will not only demonstrate how indigeneity is negotiated with and against hegemonic religion, but also will discuss some political and ecological implications that derive from indigeneity/animism as a product of concrete political conditions at a grassroots level. The first case to consider is the Pontianak-based Institut Dayakologi, the largest indigenous non-governmental organization (NGO) in West Kali­ mantan. It was founded in 1990 as the Institut Dayakologi Research and Development by activists from a credit union network (Tanasaldy 2012, 283). In the beginning the institute dealt mostly with folkloric and cultural issues but became involved in political activities from the mid-1990s, owing to palm oil expansion and land dispossessions affecting rural communities. Today, the Institut Dayakologi explicitly rejects palm oil cultivation (Potter 2009, 106). It advocates in favor of (extended) subsidence which its members view as the authentic economy of Dayak people. Dayak activists from the institute engage in projects with rural Dayak communities, for instance establishing community radio stations in Dayak languages and carrying out community mapping in order to make land claims. During my visits and field work at the Institut Dayakologi it had a staff of about 30 people. The activists regularly embark on trips to Dayak communities throughout West Kalimantan where they usually provide consultancy for empowerment projects. During these trips they also aim to educate rural communities and try to strengthen their Dayak identity. The activists themselves, however, also stress that they learn a lot about their Dayak identity in return when they keep in touch with people in the villages. Religion and animism play certain roles in this process of identity forma­ tion. Dayak activists stress that adat (local custom) does not refer to law but that “adat is the overall beliefs, systems, practices, worldview, values and norms of the indigenous peoples governing their life from generation to gen­ eration” (Bamba 2008, 268). But what do Dayak activists mean by “beliefs” and “worldview” and how do these terms relate to religion and the state? First, one should distinguish between claims made regarding the general public in publications and utterances when dealing with Dayak in rural communities. In the case of the former, the activists apply concepts from global discourses and stress the importance of rituals and spirituality in opposition to Western and modern rationality (Duile 2017a, 241–242). This is also in order to refuse the development paradigm of the state and to

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position them against the state. What the activists mean by spirituality, however, remains rather obscure in their publications. The term is probably chosen in order to evoke the image of mystical animism. It becomes more concrete, however, when one looks at activists’ strategies during their field trips. Before dealing with the specific issue of the field trip, the activists usually talk about general issues and what threatens the Dayak. This can be described as a strategy to define the constitutive outside of Dayak indi­ geneity. In PowerPoint presentations, for instance, they refer things like palm oil monoculture as threats to traditional Dayak livelihoods, but also men­ tion the introduction of new religions (agama baru masuk) as a threat to Dayak identity. They remain quite general in their discussions, but in inter­ views the activists declared that the notion of “new religions” actually means Islam and, most of all, Protestantism. These religions are said to be not in line with Dayak identity since they do not acknowledge their indi­ genous beliefs. In the case of Islam, conversion usually means that the Dayak become Malay (masuk Melayu) and thus abandon their Dayak way of life. However, a considerable number of Dayak are Protestants. Protes­ tantism is potentially at odds with Dayak “spirituality” (which is an acti­ vist’s term for autochthon beliefs) since it restricts contact with both ancestor and owner sprits. The latter sprits are usually referred to as penunggu by Dayak activists and are important for their ecology. The main difference between an ecology of rationality and spirituality is, as activists outlined in our discussions, the recognition of spirits that live in a certain place. When their land is subject to use, for instance when a swidden is established, the community is obliged to carry out a ritual in order to ask the spirits whether they approve or disapprove of the land clearance. Through the sounds of animals or in dreams the community can know whether the spirits approve or disapprove of the community’s plans (Duile 2017b). Even though the activists never use the term animism (anmisme), probably due its derogative meaning in Indonesian, the concept of spirits is juxtaposed against religion to at least a certain degree. Activists prefer the notion of kepercayaan. Most activists are of Catholic faith, and they stress that Catholic religion does not deny the existence of spirits, nor forbid engagement with them. It has to be emphasized here that the roots of the Institut Dayakologi are in Catholic credit unions, and it was the protection of the church that enabled the activists to operate in the repressive New Order era. For the activists, Dayak animism complements religion as a form of kepercayaan rather than being a religion of its own and in this view, they are quite close to the view of the Constitutional Court outlined above. On the other hand, Dayak animism is also a means to position Dayak identity against certain forms of religion that are associated with modernity, rationality, and the developmental state. I exemplarily want to show that dis­ course by drawing on an interview with a Protestant cleric. The reverend has served in Landak regency for a long time, a region in which the Dayak are the majority but which is also a hot spot for palm oil agriculture. When I

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met the reverend in Pontianak, he stressed the need to protect nature, but also heavily criticized belief in spirits. Interestingly, he did not address the spirits as penunggu, as Dayak activists did, but as Jubata. The term Jubata derives from Katayatn Dayak language and is usually used to denote the Creator or translated into the hegemonic concept of Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa, an almighty divine entity. Accusing someone of acknowledging many Jubata is to accuse them of not being in line with monotheism. For indi­ genous activists, however, Jubata is the indigenous concept of an almighty God, which is not at odds with belief in spirits. Animism as a concept that acknowledges place-bound spirits (owner-sprits, to use Århem’s term) is crucial for the indigenous activists’ idea of ecologi­ cally friendly, sustainable use of natural resources. This is what they describe as “spirituality” in some of their publications. To them, the acknowledgement of penunggu ensures sustainable use of resources as penunggu would not allow the community to cut down forest to an unsustainable extent. In the Dayak communities I visited, however, people often applied a rather pragmatic ani­ mism and simply moved spirits when they wanted to establish a swidden or a palm oil plot (Duile 2019, 212). Their pragmatic animism is less concerned with environmentalism, but for both the concept of place-bound spirits is crucial. However, the activists’ concern is less about the Dayak applying ani­ mism pragmatically but that they are abandoning it altogether. On the field trip mentioned above, for instance, the activists asked the village chief whe­ ther people in the village still believed in the existence of penunggu and ancestor spirits. Even though a part of the population had become adherents of Protestantism, animist rituals were frequently conducted. In order to stress and maintain belief in animism, the activists carried out a ceremony to ensure the spirits’ support for the project, in this case the establishment of a radio station in Dayak languages. They conducted the ceremony according to local customs (for which they consulted local shamans) and bought alcoholic bev­ erages as well as meat to share with the spirits in a forest considered a sacred place. As we have seen, the concept of owner spirits can play different roles in Dayak settings: They can become tokens of environmentalism, they can be dealt with pragmatically, or their existence can be denied, but for the indi­ genous activists, animism is crucial in this case. In other places and other contexts animism plays a different role or no role at all for indigenous move­ ments. Enrekang in the province of South Sulawesi is another example I will draw on in the following. The regency, located between the Toraja uplands and the Bugis-dominated lowlands in the province of South Sulawesi, is proudly called a “trendsetter” by the local AMAN activists since six com­ munities have been officially recognized as indigenous communities by the regency and two of them have already received land certificates for their cus­ tomary land. Unlike the neighboring regencies, which are mostly quite homogenous in terms of ethnicity, the population in Enrekang consists of three smaller ethnic groups (Enrekang, Duri and Maiwa). These groups all

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claim to be indigenous, and occasionally they refer to each other as a single ethnic group, the Massenrempulu (literally “the edge of the mountains,” since the area is a transit space between the lowlands and the highlands). The local AMAN branch in Enrekang was established in 2009. It gained local recog­ nition, especially after 2013, when the AMAN chairperson also engaged in local politics. He is a member of the Partai Anamat Nasional (National Mandate Party), a party with an affiliation with the modernist current of Islam in Indonesia. The modernist current is represented by the mass orga­ nization Muhammadiyah, which outnumbers all other Islamic organizations in South Sulawesi. In 2016 the government of Enrekang regency passed a local regulation (peraturan daerah) in order to acknowledge indigenous com­ munities. Enrekang was among the first regencies to issue such a regulation. During deliberations in the Enrekang parliament, however, Islamic clerics from Muhammadiyah raised concerns about the proposed legislation since they were concerned that recognition of indigenous communities would also strengthen animism at the expense of Islam. Almost all citizens in the regency are Muslim, but rumors of animistic practices in remote villages are still common. However, through lobbying and political ties, the AMAN activists succeeded in persuading the Islamic clerics and even members of the con­ servative Islamic Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party) that indigeneity does not mean a revitalization of animism or kepercayaan but that in Enrekang all communities that identify as indigenous are “proper” Muslims too. The AMAN chairperson advocated for indigeneity without any animism. As he explained to me, there used to be animist remnants in Enrekang, but most of them were wiped out when Darul Islam troops occupied the area in the early 1960s. They cut down large trees which were associated with the presence of spirits in order to prove the nonexistence of spirits and to keep people from further interacting with them. Even though this is a bloody part of the area’s past, the AMAN chairperson did not mention any negative aspects of the Darul Islam rule but rather depicted it as a time in history in which proper Islam was established. The view was different when I talked to other AMAN activists, who occasionally blamed Islam for weakening local traditions. However, they never voiced such con­ cerns in public. A few days after having a long talk with the AMAN chair in which he outlined his concept of indigeneity without animism, I paid a visit to Kalu­ pini, an indigenous Enrekang community only a 30-minute ride from the regency’s capital. The community is known as being traditional with strong adat institutions and has applied for indigenous community status and land rights. I was accompanied by a politician from an Islamic party who was going to the community in order to persuade the adat chiefs to vote for them (which he hoped would also ensure the votes of many members of the com­ munity). In their discussions, they spoke about the community’s aim not only to be recognized as indigenous, but also to gain customary land rights and to maintain their traditional festivals as the cornerstone of indigenous

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Enrekang identity. After their discussions, the politician said that he would fully support the communities’ aims when elected and held the evening prayer along with the elders. Thus, not only do AMAN activists stress their Islamic identity, but so do people in the villages who are now beginning to identify as indigenous. Animism does not seem to play a role for them. During my stays in Enrekang and Duri villages that have already been recognized as indigenous communities, people sometimes mentioned their belief in spirits and just as it is common among Dayak communities, there are ceremonies held when clearing forest plots in which spirits are asked for permission (minta permisi, tabé). However, in my interviews with adat chiefs, they rather stressed the Islamic notions of rituals, leaving belief in spirits completely unmentioned. Since the state – represented by the regency’s government – began to engage with AMAN activists and developed rules for recognition and indi­ geneity, religion has played an important role. Acknowledgement of indi­ geneity in Enrekang is gained in cooperation with the state rather than in opposition to it. And since religion is a basic constituent of the state and there are strong ties between politics and modernist Islam, indigenous identity does not refer to animism. When asked what defines a community as indigenous, AMAN activists refer to the 2016 local regulation that lists some criteria for indigeneity. In the regulation, indigenous people are first of all characterized as Indonesian citizens with “special characteristics.” These special character­ istics are features of indigeneity usually referred to in transnational discourses and also adopted by AMAN. Indigenous communities are defined as com­ munities which live in harmony according to customary law (harmonis sesuai adatnya), hold ties to their origin (ikatan pada asal-usul leluhur), have strong relations to the land and environment (hubungan yang kuat dengan tanah dan linkungan hidup) and have a system of norms for their economic, social, political, cultural, and legal matters (system nilai yang menentukan pranata ekonomi, sosial, politik, budaya, hukum). Distinctive beliefs are not men­ tioned. One could assume that they are included in the wider term of culture. However, the local regulation rather puts an emphasis on the existence of adat institutions. Consequently, the Enrekang regulation labels indigenous communities as masyarakat hukum adat (societies of customary law), and not as masyarakat adat (customary societies). John Bamba, head of the Institut Dayakologi, has rejected that term since it only stresses the aspect of law (Bamba 2008, 262), and so do AMAN activists in South Sulawesi. However, during the process of recognition in Enrekang the concept of indigeneity underwent a formalization that put an emphasis on adat institutions. There, the term masyarakat hukum adat was adopted and this can also be found in different state laws (for the process of indigenous recognition in Enrekang, see also Sukri and Duile 2020). In my interviews with state officials, they usually stressed their hope that indigenous communities would make better use of the land when it is handed over to them. As land not in permanent use had previously been considered

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state forest, it was forbidden for indigenous peoples to extract resources from these forests. This concept of state forests, however, has proven quite ineffi­ cient in Enrekang. Some land was used for timber production, but much was simply unproductive. With the land in the hands of indigenous communities, policy makers in Enrekang hope for economic growth. This is also stressed by indigenous activists. The pembangunan ideology serves here as a common denominator for state and indigenous peoples, and animism clearly does not contribute much to this discursive connection. Indigenous activists in Enrekang nevertheless apply the concept of the environmentally friendly indigenous people. Recently, AMAN established an indigenous enterprise in Enrekang which sells coffee from indigenous pro­ duction. Acknowledged members of AMAN can sell their coffee beans there, as long as the beans have been produced “in accordance with indigenous knowledge.” AMAN has conducted workshops in Enrekang together with transnational environmental NGOs in order to develop indigenous criteria for sustainability to turn their indigeneity into symbolic capital for the coffee market. When I asked the activists what “indigenous production” meant, they stressed environmentally friendly production such as the avoidance of herbi­ cides and pesticides and the use of traditionally produced fertilizer, but they were quite vague in general. Never did they mention engagement with spirits or even rituals like the Dayak activists in West Kalimantan did.

Conclusion Animism can become a constitutive part of indigenous identity. The fact that in Indonesia the state relies on recognized religions makes animism a marker of difference, but as we have seen in the case of Enrekang, indigenous identity might also be evoked by referring to sameness rather than difference. In this case, animism does not play a role. Animism usually implies alternative ecol­ ogies as it suggests the existence of non-human persons such as owner spirits. Such ecologies might conflict with the state ideology of development (pem­ bangunan), but as the case of West Kalimantan shows, animism can be applied quite pragmatically. The idea that animism as another ontology pro­ vides room for alternative ways of interacting with natural environments might rather be motivated by Western images of the environmentally friendly noble savage, an image occasionally applied by indigenous activists. Com­ paring the different cases, we can see how the plurality of ecologies unfolds or the singularity of an ecology is maintained within indigenous activists’ strug­ gles for recognition: In the case of West Kalimantan, there is clearly a plur­ ality between state-driven developmentalism, Protestant denial of spirits and different ways of engaging with spirits. In Enrekang, religion and common economic aims rather seem to support a singular ecology or, more pre­ cisely, ensure the hegemoniality of Islamic, developmentalist, and marketoriented approaches, albeit enriched with concepts from sustainability discourses. In contrast, indigenous activists from the Institut Dayakologi have

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embedded their animism in what I have elsewhere called a symbolic strategy of subsistence (Duile 2017c) rather than an actual concept of how the economy should be organized. In all cases, political economy plays a role. Indigenous struggles are never merely struggles for recognition of distinct identities but usually go hand in hand with land claims and other resource claims. Whereas West Kalimantan is a highly contested province in terms of land tenure, owing to palm oil expansion and land grabbing, considerable areas of land in Enrekang, espe­ cially in the rugged Duri upland areas, has delivered limited productivity when under state control. Allocation of land to indigenous communities therefore fits into strategies to expand production. Animism as a symbolic distinction against the state or capitalism is of no use here. Rather, this dichotomy is applied by Dayak activists in West Kalimantan. However, a dichotomy between state or global capitalism on the one hand and local ani­ mism on the other suffers by not being structural. Animism is not an eco­ nomic mode. It has the potential to challenge economic processes but might equally be an integral part of them.

References Affif, Suraya and Celia Lowe. 2007. “Claiming Indigenous Community: Political Dis­ courses and Natural Resource Rights in Indonesia.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 32(1): 73–97. Alfarizi, Moh Khory. 2017. MUI Tolak Putusan MK Soal Aliran Kepercayaan di Kolom Agama. KTP. 15 November 2017: Tempo. https://nasional.tempo.co/read/ 1034071/mui-tolak-putusan-mk-soal-aliran-kepercayaan-di-kolom-agama-ktp/full& view=ok. Århem, Kaj. 2016. “Southeast Asian animism: a dialogue with Amerindian perspecti­ vism ” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 279–301. London and New York: Routledge. Arizona, Yance and Erasmus Cahyadi. 2013. “The Revival of Indigenous Peoples: Contestation Over a Special Legislation on Masyarakat Adat.” In Adat and Indi­ geneity in Indonesia. Culture and Entitlements between Heteronomy and SelfAscription, edited by Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, pp. 43–62. Göttingen: Uni­ versitätsverlag Göttingen. Arnscheidt, Julia. 2009. ‘Debating’ Nature Conservation: Policy, Law and Practice in Indonesia. A Discourse Analysis of History and Present. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Bamba, John. 2008. “Recognition “in Kind”: Indonesian Indigenous peoples and State Legislation.” In The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia. A Resource Book, edited by Christian Ernie, pp. 257–274. Copenhagen/Chiang Mai: Interna­ tional Work Group for Indigenous Affairs/Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation. Bedner, Adriaan and Yance Arizona. 2019. “Adat in Indonesian Land Law: A Pro­ mise for the Future or a Dead End?” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 20 (5): 416–434.

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von Benda-Beckmann, Keebeth. 2019. “Anachronism, Agency, and the Con­ textualisation of Adat: van Vollenhoven’s Analysis in Light of Struggles Over Resources.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 20(5): 397–415. Bourchier, David. 1998. “Indonesianising Indonesia: Conservative Indigenism in the Age of Globalisation.” Social Semiotics, 8(2/3): 203–214. Crouch, Melissa. 2016. “Legislating Inter-religious harmony. Attempts at Reform in Indonesia.” In Religion, Law and Intolerance in Indonesia, edited by Tim Lindsay and Helen Pausacker, pp. 95–112. London and New York: Routledge. Davidson, Jamie and David Henley, eds. 2007. The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian politics. The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism. London and New York: Routledge. Duile, Timo. 2017a. Grüne Differenz: Naturkonzepte, indigene Identität und ökolo­ gische Konflikte in Indonesien, Zur einer postkolonialen Theorie von Natur am Beis­ piel Kalimantans. Berlin: EB-Verlag. Duile, Timo. 2017b. “Naturalizing the Native Subject: Indigenous Activism, Dis­ course, and the Meaning of Nature in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 142: 1–22. Duile, Timo. 2017c. “Subsitenz, Kapital und Identitäten. Revitalisierung sub­ sitenzwirtschaftlicher Ansätze im Kontext der Konstruktion indigener Identität in West-Kalimantan, Indonesien.” Berliner Blätter – Ethnographische und ethnolo­ gische Beiträge, 57: 81–93. Duile, Timo. 2019. “Re-evaluating Birdsong in a Contested Environment. Dayak Activists and Acoustic Ecology in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.” In Hearing Southeast Asia: Sounds of Hierarchy and Power in Context, edited by Nathan Porath, pp. 202–227. Copenhagen: NIAS-Press. Ernie, Christian. 2008. “Country Profile Indonesia.” In The Concept of Indigenous peoples in Asia. A Resource Book, edited by Christian Ernie, pp. 377–382. Copen­ hagen/Chiang Mai: Indigenous Working Group for Indigenous Affairs/Asia Indi­ genous Peoples Pact Foundation. Fachrudin, Azis Anwar. 2017. “‘Religion’ and ‘belief ’ in Indonesia: what’s the differ­ ence?” New Mandala, 20 December 2017; www.newmandala.org/religion-belie f-indonesia-whats-difference/. Faiz, Ahmad. 2017. “MK Putuskan Aliran Kepercayaan Masuk Kolom Agama KTP.” Tempo, 7 November 2017; https://nasional.tempo.co/read/1031506/mk-p utuskan-aliran-kepercayaan-masuk-kolom-agama-ktp/full&view=ok. Fasseur, Cees. 2007. “Colonial dilemma. Van Vollenhoven and the struggle between adat law and Western law in Indonesia.” In The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics. The deployment of adat from colonialism to indigenism, edited by Jamie Davidson and David Henley, pp. 50–67. London and New York: Routledge. Firmansyah, Teguh. 2017. “Saat Orang Rimba Bersyahadat dan Memilih Masuk Islam.” Republika, 21 November 2017; www.republika.co.id/berita/dunia-islam/ islam-nusantara/17/11/21/ozqmn8377-saat-orang-rimba-bersyahadat-dan-mem ilih-masuk-islam. Henschke, Rebecca 2017. “Orang Rimba masuk Islam demi KTP: ‘Kini mereka mengenal Tuhan’ kata Menteri Khofifah.” BBC Indonesia, 17 November 2017; www.bbc.com/indonesia/majalah-41937911. Herrman, Isabell. 2015. Ritual Retellings: Luangan Healing Performances through Practice. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

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6

Negotiating Plural Ecologies of adat Land in Indonesia Kristina Großmann

Introduction The increasing resource extraction such as coal mining in the remote and forested northeastern part of the region of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, is gradually leading to conflicts over land. Countermeasures such as indigenous or customary (adat) land management schemes aim to secure the access and rights to the land of indigenous Dayak people. However, different Dayak individuals conceptualize adat land differently. Dayak peoples’ rights activists, villagers’ representatives, and adat leaders who are involved in the imple­ mentation of programs to secure adat land, approach and relate to the land in a different manner. They constitute plural ecologies in regard to adat land and practice diverse relationships with forested areas, which inhabit eco­ nomic, social, and spiritual dimensions. In this context, ecologies refers to relationships and interactions with land and forested areas by the Dayak people. These constitutions of land and forest become plural, such as plural ecologies, insofar as different aspects are included or excluded, or privileged or subordinated, in different contexts. For semi-nomadic Dayak villagers in the remote northeastern subdistrict Uut Murung and for Dayak adat leaders, forests not only provide “gifts” but also are extensions of the social realm as spirits and the mediating factor in animals’ lives in remote forested areas. I link villagers’ relation to adat land to Tim Ingold’s (2011 [2000]) descrip­ tions of a relational, attached mode, what can be linked to animism, in which individuals continuously engage “[…] with the land and with the beings – human and nonhuman – that dwell therein” (ibid., 133). However, for the Dayak rights activists who established the Dayak land management scheme “Dayak, Wake Up” (Dayak Misik) throughout Central Kalimantan, adat land is primary a resource that should be utilized by the Dayak people to establish industries and thereby enhance their welfare. Therefore, land has to be mapped, bounded, and privately owned. In the course of this Dayak ter­ ritorialization, a detached, resource-based approach has prevailed, in which land is there to be occupied (Ingold 2011 [2000]). In the course of conceptualizing and implementing adat land management schemes, activists, villagers, and adat leaders negotiate between ecologies. I DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-6

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show that in the case of the “Dayak, Wake Up” scheme, representatives of the program resemble state territorialization processes and enact a detached ecology. However, the enactment of a detached ecology coexists with the awareness and practice of a relational ecology, as I show with the example of Degut, a “Dayak, Wake Up” representative. Villagers and adat leaders in Uut Murung who practice a relational mode to land reject the “Dayak, Wake Up” scheme and have developed an alternative adat land management agreement that recognizes and reflects their relationship with the forested area. However, this scheme has not been acknowledged by state institutions, because the formal requirements have not been fulfilled. Thus, hegemonial ecologies linked to territorial state structures such as in the case of the “Dayak, Wake Up” scheme dominate, whereas relational alternatives are subdued and ignored. I developed this contribution based on seven ethnographic fieldwork phases in Central Kalimantan of 12 months in total between 2014 and 2020, which I conducted in the frame of the transdisciplinary research project FuturEN. The research included participant observation and interviews in three villages in the sub-district Uut Murung, in the most north-eastern region of Murung Raya. Some data regarding adat land management schemes also refers to discussions in the course of a scenario-workshop which I conducted in Puruk Cahu, the capital of Murung Raya. In one workshop session, the invited Dayak’s rights activists and villagers’ representatives discussed the imple­ mentation of different adat land schemes.

Relational and attached ecology Semi-nomadic people defining themselves as Punan Murung1 living in three villages in the remote, densely forested north-eastern region of Central Kali­ mantan practice a relational and attached ecology. These villages are acces­ sible only by boat via the river Murung and the journey from the provincial capital Palangka Raya takes, depending on the weather, between three and ten days. Today, the overall number of inhabitants living in those settlements exceeds 1,500 and has more than doubled since the 1980s. Today, their liveli­ hood strategy follows what Christian Gönner (2001) calls “extended sub­ sistence” (ibid., 171) and what Michael Dove (2011) understands as a “dual” or “composite economy” (ibid., 149). Villagers practice small-scale agri­ culture in forest gardens (ladang), as well as hunt and gather gem stones, animal parts, birds’ nests, and gaharu (agarwood) in the forested areas. Additionally, some villagers engage in wage labour according to need and opportunity. Most of the villagers are excluded from large-scale resource extractions like mining and logging. Because of their generally low formal education, they are also excluded from obtaining higher positions in compa­ nies, the district and regency administration or environmental and indigenous peoples’ rights organizations. Thus, exclusion and discrimination lead to mis­ trust and hostility among them against the regency government, state

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officials, companies, and organizations as well as against people living in the city who discriminate against them (what is also described by Kenneth Sil­ lander 2004). Flexible boundaries in a sharing economy Today, people in the villages, as also throughout Indonesia, mostly access land based on rights conferred by hukum adat (customary law), which in most respects differs vastly from Indonesian state law. Throughout Indonesia, adat laws concerning land differ by region. No consistency regarding how people and institutions define, apply, and practice adat laws exists (Barr et al. 2006). Nevertheless, the main character of most adat laws is the acknowledgement of the legitimate claims of individuals, families or communities to use certain areas of land for a certain period of time. Although adat laws were violated under the former Suharto regime (Bedner and van Huis 2008), they are still frequently practiced. Thus, people access land without having formal land rights to it. As the region is remote, the boundary of the three villages are not yet delineated by GPS data or codified on maps. Most villagers of the settlements see no necessity to do so as they access the forested area around the villages without conflicts. Some land along the river is used for forest gardens (ladang). This land is usually redistributed among community members and administered under the supervision of family heads, adat leaders and mem­ bers of the village administration such as the village head, the village secre­ tary and the villagers’ representative body. Individuals and families gain the legitimation for opening a ladang for a specific period of time. Thereby, the land is regarded neither as individual property, nor authenticated by certifi­ cates. The densely forested areas around the village serve villagers as water reservoirs, hunting grounds, and are used for gathering plants for medical and ritualistic purposes and for collecting trade products such as gaharu. The logging of small trees for firewood is generally possible for everyone. Felling bigger trees for building a house has to be discussed with other community members who might have also claims on these particular trees (see also Peluso [1996] for the connection between trees and sociality). Devi, one inhabitant of a village, compared the forested area to a super­ market in the city where she can get everything she needs like food, materials for building houses and products for trade. The main difference is, she explained, that she does not need money to buy all these things. She merely needs knowledge and luck (rezeki) to find and gather them. I link the placebased ecology of the villagers in Uut Murung to Nurit Bird-David’s (1992) concept of the “cosmic economy of sharing” (ibid., 28). Villagers perceive humans and non-humans as being in a network of sharing where natural agencies unconditionally provide everything that is needed. Humans need only knowledge and good fortune (rezeki) to receive these gifts.

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Spirits, mediating animals and the forest as extension of the social realm The forest not only endows villagers with staple products on which rely for sustaining their livelihoods, but it is also of mythological importance as the place where trans-humans and spirits dwell. Spirits are an important presence in the villagers’ lives that are involved in a variety of social events and cere­ monies, as well as influencing the enactment of everyday practices. Spirits are thus an integral component of the villagers’ world-making practices. Spirits are closely connected to forests, where many dwell, together with the other creatures living there what forms another dimension of relatedness between them and the forest. For villagers, the forest is densely populated with all kinds of creatures such as mythological and transhuman beings like giants, ghosts (hantu), half-human/half-ghost beings and half-human/half-animal beings. Likewise, anthropomorphic spirits (roh) inhabit the forest. Spirits usually live in the proximity of big trees, rivers or lakes in the forest. They can be associated with a large individual tree or several trees in a particular arrangement. Thus, the tree itself is not animated but it acquires a special status through its connection to a spirit (also described by Duile, 2020). Spirits who live in the forest are usually disturbed by the smell, voices and activities of humans entering their area. Thus, there are special rules for how to behave near the places where spirits live, in order to not disturb and annoy them; for example, it is important to keep quiet and to not urinate or leave litter. Spirits also need to be appeased by gifts such as tobacco, salt or food. If a spirit resides next to a tree from which villagers want to take fruits, they usually ask the spirit for permission and in some cases also provide small gifts as an exchange for the fruits. Thus, in the valuation of specific trees or places in the forest, spirits are the pivot. Special spirits (sangiang) support humans and, as companions (sahabat), are able to help a shaman (dukun) in healing and guiding humans. When the shaman calls a spirit during a ritual, the spirit usually comes in the form of an animal like as a dog, which leaves the forest and enters the house where the ritual is performed. For villagers, corre­ sponding to Descola’s (2013 [2005]) approach to animism, there is no absolute boundary between humans and the non-human realm but rather an ontolo­ gical permeability, whereby metamorphosis remains possible. The villagers’ relationship to spirits and mediating animals embodies an extension of the social realm into the environment. Relational and attached mode Villagers constitute the land where they live by overlapping areas for settle­ ments, travel routes, plots for shifting cultivation, spirits dwellings, conces­ sions, as well as forested areas for hunting and gathering. For them, land and the forest are not something ‘out there’, but in the sense of an attached mode they provide abundant food, shelter, products for trade and also play an important role in villagers’ relation to spirits. Villagers perceive the land

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where they life as being used flexibly by humans, animals and spirits in which little fixed rules and borders exist. Therefore, territoriality and boundaries are neither static but fluid and negotiated. In the description of villagers’ relation to land, I draw on Ingold’s (2011 [2000]) term of the ‘relational model’ in which people continuously engage “[…] with the land and with the beings – human and non-human – that dwell therein.” (ibid., 133). Ingold states that: “A founding premise of [this] model is that life, rather than being an internal property of persons and things, is immanent in the relations between them. It follows that the land, comprised by these relations, is itself imbued with the vitality that animates its inhabitants.” (ibid., 149) Accordingly, land and its inhabitants are not dichotomous along the axis of the animate and the inanimate but constituted by a continuous engagement dependent on the situational context. In a relational model, land contributes to the constitution of its occupants. This relational and attached mode of relating to land and forested areas is familiar to and practiced vibrantly by Punan Murung, however, in the pro­ gram “Dayak, Wake Up”, the representatives of the scheme applied a resource-based and detached ecology, as I will outline in the following.

Resource-based, detached ecology In the reformation era after the fall of the authoritarian former president Suharto since 1998, indigenous identities and adat laws have been revitalized. Strengthened by decentralization which gives communities and local govern­ ments more authority and rights, indigeneity in Indonesia has become a means to contest state and corporate claims (Li 2000). Ethnicity is thereby currently a central asset for improving the bargaining power in struggles over land and natural resources. In this vein, the Dayak in Kalimantan con­ structed a specific Dayak identity that is utilized for political mobilization (Duile 2017, McCarthy 2004). In struggles over the access to land and natural resources and to raise land claims against the state and corporations, adat laws have been more and more important.

“Dayak, Wake Up” Scheme: Adat land with clear boundaries and privately owned In 2014, a Dayak farmers’ organization in Central Kalimantan developed the indigenous forest management scheme “Dayak, Wake Up” (Dayak Misik). The program was founded to counter increasing resource extraction such as mining, logging and palm oil production and thereby massive processes of territorialization and exploitation by the state and investors in Central

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Kalimantan. The Dayak farmers’ organization speaks out against the national state and companies, as it wants to secure Dayak farmers’ land rights, which are not recognized by state law. This adat-based counter-move­ ment against land conversion and dispossessions promised that the indigenous Dayak will get formal rights to land and forests. The organization thereby aims to own as much adat land as possible in order to prevent expropriation. Most of the adat land should thereby be ‘owned’ by individuals (pemilik tanah adat). In practice, each farmer should receive a certificate for the pos­ session of five hectares of land, which may not be sold for 25 years. The Dayak farmers’ organization requests that the land under the scheme should be cultivated or that a business should be established there. According to Degut, a founding member and representative of the Dayak farmers’ organi­ zation, the exploitation of resources should improve the economic and social development of the province. The adat land authorized by this scheme may also include ten hectares of adat forest (hutan adat) for hunting, gathering or spiritual purposes which would be administered collectively. Although adat land authenticated by the Dayak Misik scheme comprises both (individually and collectively owned land) the notion of privately owned land for agri­ culture is dominant. In the conception of the Dayak farmers’ organization, resources should be extracted for the profit of Dayak and adat land should have clear boundaries, be mapped and be owned by Dayak. Resource-based and detached mode The approach of land being mapped, certificated, and privately owned thus is similar to the conception of land by the national state and companies. Link­ ing to Ingold (2011 [2000]), land in this ecology is approached in a detached, resource-based mode in the course of a territorialization process, where land is there to be occupied. In Ingold’s words, “[…] land is merely a surface to be occupied, serving to support its inhabitants rather than to bring them into being.” (ibid., 135). This Western and modern mode of relating to land is enacted, according to Ingold, by colonialists. Thereby: “[…] colonialists – by the very fact of their occupation of the land – inevitably establish their domination over indigenes, just as culture is bound to dominate nature. Land is there to be occupied, but does not itself contribute to the constitution of its occupants.” (ibid., 135) This apprehension of land includes a notion of terra nullius that means empty land which is ‘waiting’ to be conquered and occupied. Also, (Li 2014a) describes that in an ‘indigenous frontier’, land is increasingly assembled as a resource for investment. For that process of transformation of space into property for exploitation, she explains, representational and inscriptive

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technologies, such as maps, satellite images, fences, and property titles are needed (Li 2014b). Rejection of “Dayak, Wake Up” in Uut Murung The area of the villages in Utu Murung overlaps with parts of the megamining project Adaro Met Coal. Still, today natural resource extraction, such as coal mining, is one of Indonesia’s major foreign revenue sources (Devi and Prayogo 2013). The north-eastern part of Central Kalimantan is hereby the new frontier for coal extraction as most parts of the mega-mining project Adaro Met Coal are situated in the most northern district of Murung Raya. Adaro Met Coal covers an area of some 350,000 hectares, allowing for the extraction of 20 million tons of coal in the next years. Whereas some largescale logging and mining companies have been operating for decades in the north of Central Kalimantan, villagers state that recently explorations of coal deposits have taken place in the forested area around their villages. Thus, access and the right to land will become increasingly contested in the future. The Dayak Misik scheme could have been one possibility to secure the access to land by villagers in Uut Murung who practice a relational access to land and forested area against land dispossessions by the mining company in the future. However, villagers declined participation in the program. The detached apprehension to land formulated by representatives of the Dayak Misik scheme resembles state territorialization processes where land is mapped and owned collide with villagers’ relational mode with land. Their attached concepts and apprehensions of land and ownership were given no attention in the scheme. Consequently, villagers’ approach to land would have been absorbed by the dominant ecology and approach to land, thereby losing plurality, flexibility and relationality. Co-existence of different ecologies Degut, a founding member and representative of Dayak Misik, lives in the provincial capital Palangka Raya. Several years ago, he travelled to the remote region of Uut Murung and also visited one of the villages. This jour­ ney was an extraordinary positive experience for him, and he is still very enthusiastic about the pure and clean nature that he experienced ‘up there’ and the friendly semi-nomadic people whom he met. Degut joined villagers working in their forest gardens, strolling through the forest for hunting and gathering and also participated in rituals. Thus, he experienced and joined the relational mode of apprehending land and forests by villagers in Uut Murung and their flexible and dynamic approach to land. According to these encounters and experiences, Degut is aware of villagers’ relational approach to land and flexible access to forested areas. However, in designing and implementing the Dayak Misik program, the prevailing ecology which he follows is informed by a detached relation to land. Degut thereby switches

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between different and sometimes even contradictory conceptions of land enacting a relational ecology and a resource-based ecology. The co-existence of different ecologies enacted by one person and a flexible practice between an attached and a detached mode is also stated of other indigenous groups in Kalimantan and elsewhere in Asia. Sillander (2016) describes how the Bentian people living in East Kalimantan practice a “[…] pendular movement between a subjectifying and objectifying stance to non­ human beings, entailing, respectively, continuity and discontinuity with them” (ibid., 173). Similarly, Naveh and Bird-David (2014) describe situationally changing conceptions of forest, animals, plants and land among Nayaka hunter-gatherers in South India. In some instances, animals and plants are sentient co-dwellers and persons whereas in others they are treated as things, which can be exploited and harmed. Naveh and Bird-David (2014) argue that these alterations are not rooted in a transformation of the essence of co-per­ sons but are the manifestation of a process of decreasing immediacy in the production–consumption nexus, in which animals assume a less vivid pre­ sence and are associated with a more specific utilization: We propose that the incipient emergence of animals and plants as things among Nayaka occurs in contexts where there is a departure from immediacy in an expanded socio-economic sense of the term. In other words, not only in Woodburn’s emphasis on the temporal sense – that is, when the return is consumed – but also in the social-relational terms of who consumes it and, furthermore, in the purpose of the production. Departures from immediacy, thus, can take place incrementally along each or a combination of these routes. Put in simple terms, we propose that this occurs if a yield is not consumed shortly after its production, and/or by those with whom the producer has immediate relations, and/or in its original form, and/or by being procured as a means to obtain something else through barter or sale (with selling being an additional stage of departure from immediacy than bartering) – all these we argue, each alone and in different combinations, act as routes of departure from immediacy that involve the ‘coming into being’ of animals and plants as things, not persons. (ibid., 83) Thus, “utilitarian pockets […] have emerged within the Nayaka relational epistemology/ontology.” (ibid., 81) in which contextual objectification of nonhumans occurs according to when their yield is consumed and in what form, who consumes it, and the means by which it is acquired. In this sense, Degut practices a detached mode of relating to land in the ‘utilitarian pocket’ of implementing the Dayak Misik scheme, and thus argues for fixed borders, private ownership and the economic value of adat land, although he experi­ enced and joined the relational, place-based ecology practiced by villagers in Uut Murung.

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Attempts to formalize a relational ecology: Alternative agreements for adat land Rejecting this resource-based and detached ecology in the conceptualization of adat land management schemes, several years ago, a group of people in one village in Uut Murung started to establish an alternative way for securing their access and maintaining their relation to land and forest. Salim, who occupies the position of the village secretary (sekretaris desa) in one village, was one of the initiators. Before being village secretary, he worked for a local indigenous peoples’ rights organization on honorary bases as program man­ ager in the field of the implementation of indigenous land management schemes in Murung Raya. After two years, he quit the position because in his opinion, the director of the organization was corrupt, most of the staff pre­ dominantly were seeking own profit and the schemes which they promoted were not according to villagers needs and hardly implemented in a participa­ tive process. Motivated by his negative experiences, Salim initiated meetings in the village including the village head, the villagers’ representative body (BPD), shamans (dukun), and village elders in order to develop an adat forest management agreement which should reflect and include villagers’ concep­ tions, ideas, and needs concerning land and the forested areas. For them, the most important point of the agreement is to secure the current flexible access to land and forests around the village for all inhabitants of the settlement in the next decades in order to be able to sustain their livelihoods and practice the sharing environment. For that purpose, the group ‘defined’ two different areas of land and forests: Firstly, land along the river and close to the vil­ lage for small-scale agriculture and forest gardens (ladang) which can be accessed by families. This agricultural land should be accessed flexible in order that families are able to negotiate with other community members about the purpose and periods of time they want to use this land. Secondly, forested land which is further away from the village and which can be accessed by everyone living in the village for hunting and gathering. The process of ‘defining land’ included that the villagers discussed and specified the two areas of land by referring to certain geological markers such as rivers, mountain ranges and caves as well to trees, existing forest gardens, or other characteristic in the environment. In this way, villagers attempted to determine their ‘indigenous’ way of accessing and approaching land and forests what I described as relational ecology. In their agreement, borders of certain parts of adat land are defined as being flexible and negotiable. Also, there is no private property of land as generally all land can be accessed by all villagers. The dilemma of privately owned and certified land Salim agrees that obviously, if villagers want to claim and secure access to land against corporations or the state, land has to be defined and

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administered somehow in order to be acknowledged by state institutions. However, he asserts that the process of formalizing adat land has to follow and reflect the way in which villagers perceive and access land and forests. Salim states that “villagers have to be aware about what land means to them, they have to formulate what they need and how they negotiate access.” He explains that according to his experiences, representatives of organizations or companies who meet with villagers tend to push them towards an individua­ lized and monetarized thinking of land as private property by promoting land certificates or offering personal compensation for land. Once villagers per­ sonally own land and obtain a certificate, some of them start thinking about selling it in order to get as much compensation as possible. However, usually the access to land and forest is negotiated orally between community mem­ bers. Consequently, if the access to land changes, it has to be newly negotiated by the community members. These oral agreements cannot be sold like a privately owned land certificate. Referring to Li (2014b), property titles thus are one feature in the frontierization and commercialization of space that entail a different apprehension and relation to land. Certificates generally fix borders of land what differs immensely to the way how villagers in Uut Murung perceive and access land. Additionally, a signed paper is connected to power and money and thus is imperative and essential. Therefore, the process of certifying land on the base of private ownership bears the risk that land is monetarized, sold and withdrawn of villagers’ access. Lack of legal acknowledgment The newly discussed adat land agreement is acknowledged by villagers as it reflects what they practice anyway. However, it is not yet acknowledged by governmental institutions. In Indonesia, the process of acknowledging adat land is a long and complicated process for which villagers have to fulfil cer­ tain categories such as being an adat community comprising of a joint his­ tory, communal land, adat rights and adat leadership. Salim explains that the process of collecting and producing all necessary documents for the acknowledgment of adat land and forests is very complicated and exhausting and hardly possible without the support of indigenous peoples’ rights organi­ zations, legal advisers and politicians at the provincial and national level. He himself had contacts to several Dayak indigenous peoples’ rights organiza­ tions with whom he worked together several years ago. However, he did not maintain the contacts because he was disappointed with their, in his eyes, unreliable work. He also argues that in his opinion, these activists were not open to alternative adat land management schemes besides the programs which they promoted. Salim explains that “they promote the formats which are referring to the schemes proposed by the state for example adat land or adat villages. They are only focusing on these ready-made schemes and are not flexible for other approaches or forms of adat land.” Salim also stresses that he and other villagers also lack access to the political realm. In order to

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implement adat schemes however, they would need the support and recom­ mendation from the district head (bupati). Besides that, the bupati is more interested in advancing economic development schemes such as establishing rubber tree plantations rather than developing adat land schemes. The problem of representing relational ecologies In the eyes of villagers, the adat land agreement should be administered and controlled by a representative body of the community, which, however, is not yet established. The group is still in the process of developing a sustainable organizational structure including that each family sends one representative to an organizational body which then enforces and controls the program. The biggest discussion among villagers is the establishment of an organizational structure that is not dominated by the village head and the damang. Rudin, who is a member of the villagers’ representative body (BPD) and of the group initiating the adat land agreement, explains that he is afraid that the domi­ nant members of the village elite would follow their own economic interests and not the interests of the villagers. The question of who should represent villagers’ claim on forests and an alternative approach to adat land is a recurring issue. Villagers strongly express the need for a pemangku adat who should represent and control adat land. Pemangku adat is the general term for adat leaders at village level (kepala adat) and at sub-district level (damang). According to Salim, the damang in Kalimantan once was elected by the vil­ lagers in order to be their representative and was a respected and capable person. Today, however the damang is appointed by the adat leaders at village level and approved by the district head (bupati); thus his position and repu­ tation has changed. Rudin asserts: “Formerly, the damang was a community leader (tokoh masyarakat) and today, it is a political position. He is pre­ dominantly enforcing the political interests of the district head. Today, the damang is usually loyal to the government and is not representing the inter­ ests of the community anymore.” However, there are no new tokoh masyar­ akat at sub-district or district level who are elected by the community.

Conclusion Acknowledging and including relational approaches to nature and to the non­ human world when designing and implementing adat land management schemes is a vibrant and hotly debated process in today’s Central Kali­ mantan. The indigenous Dayak activist Degut would be able to negotiate and bridge between different ecologies in the described case of the “Dayak,” Wake Up scheme, because he is familiar with the state’s procedures of acknowl­ edging adat land and also practices a relational relationship to the envir­ onment. However, while implementing the scheme, he follows the hegemonial resource-based ecology of ethnically framed territorialisation. It seems to be impossible to step out of the default system. In his endeavor to

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secure adat land for Dayak, he links adat land to state structures as it seems to be the only availability of a solution. Salim and a group of villagers in Uut Murung initiated the process of establishing an alternative adat land management agreement in which a rela­ tional approach and flexible access to land are reflected and integrated. However, this agreement is not yet recognized by the state. In order to get this recognition, villagers would have to cooperate with indigenous peoples’ rights organizations. However, based on their exclusion, marginalization and dis­ appointment in regard to civil society organizations and state institutions, villagers are reluctant to initiate collaboration. Currently, the fixation of bor­ ders drawn on maps and the private ownership of land stated by written cer­ tificates are the most problematic issue for villagers. They perceive these as restrictions on their way of relating to land and fear increasing capitalization. Another problematic issue is how to represent plural ecologies. Villagers call for a person who inhabits a respected position in the village community and is legitimate to represent non-human entities such as spirits. However, the existing positions are coopted by the state, and villagers have little trust in them. In the course of the establishment of adat land management schemes which are acknowledged by the state, it is not possible to circumvent the state’s norms, structures and institutions. Other approaches to land are either exclu­ ded or have to be moulded in order to fit in. In the same vein, Noah Theriault (2017, 124) summarizes the dilemma that indigenous groups face when deal­ ing with the state: How to include relations with the invisible into the lan­ guage of law? Would that mean that people have to reduce their lived reality and adapt to the state’s apprehension of land? Or would that mean that the national law by ignoring indigenous epistemologies proceeds in reinforcing territorialization rather than acknowledging and securing peoples’ rights to land. The difficulties of transmitting indigenous knowledge is also addressed by Sarah Hunt (2014): “Its relational, alive, emergent nature means that as we come to know something, as we attempt to fix its meaning, we are always at risk of just missing something. If we accept the alive and ongoing nature of colonial relations, and the lived aspects of Indigeneity as critical to Indigenous ontologies, any attempts to fix Indigenous knowledge can only be partial.” (ibid., 31) In the case of the Dayak Misik, the recognition of plural land ecologies takes place in a very neoliberal context and the tools and language of a neoliberal framework are used and replicated. Thus, the hierarchization of the ecology of state territorialization, intertwined with epistemological and political power until now lead to the exclusion of either people or plurality. Thus, the

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question remains: Who is able to negotiate between plural ecologies and how can different human/non-human relationships be translated?

Note 1 The term Punan refers to forest-dwelling, hunting-and-gathering nomadic or for­ merly nomadic groups living predominantly in the interior part of Borneo.

References Barr, Christopher M., Ida Aju Pradnja Resosudarmo, Ahmad Dermawan, John F. McCarthy, Moira Moeliono, and Bambang Setiono, eds. 2006. Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia: Implications for Forest Sustainability, Economic Development and Community Livelihoods. Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research. Bedner, Adriaan and Stijn Cornelis van Huis. 2008. “The return of the native in Indonesian law: Indigenous communities in Indonesian legislations.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 164(2/3): 165–193. Bird-David, Nurit. 1992. “Beyond ‘The Original Affluent Society’: A Culturalist Reformulation.” Current Anthropology, 33(1): 25–47. Descola, Philippe. 2013 [2005]. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Devi, Bernadetta and Dody Prayogo. 2013. Mining and Development in Indonesia: An Overview of the Regulatory Framework and Policies. International Mining for Development Centre. Dove, Michael. 2011. The Banana Tree at the Gate. A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Duile, Timo. 2017. Grüne Differenz: Naturkonzepte, indigene Identität und ökologische Konflikte in Indonesien., Zu einer Postkolonialen Theorie von Natur am Beispiel Kalimantans. Berlin: EB-Verlag. Duile, Timo. 2020. “Kuntilanak. Ghost Narratives and Malay Modernity in Pontia­ nak, Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 176(2/3): 279–303. Gönner, Christian. 2001. Muster und Strategien der Ressourcennutzung: Eine Fallstudie aus einem Dayak Benuaq Dorf in Ost Kalimantan, Indonesien. Zürich: ETH Zürich. Hunt, Sarah. 2014. “Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept.” Cultural Geographies, 21(1): 27–32. Ingold, Tim. 2011 [2000]. The Perception of the Environment., Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Li, Tania Murray. 2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(1): 149–179. Li, Tania Murray. 2014a. Land’s End, Capitalist Relations on an Indegenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Li, Tania Murray. 2014b. “What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Invest­ ment.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(4): 589–602. McCarthy, John F. 2004. “Changing to Gray: Decentralization and the Emergence of Volatile Socio-Legal Configurations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.” World Development, 32(7): 1199–1223.

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Naveh, Danny and Nurit Bird-David. 2014. “How persons become things: economic and epistemological changes among Nayaka hunter-gatherers.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20 (1): 74–92. Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1996. “Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Ethics of Access, Property Zones, and Environmental Change in Indonesia.” Com­ parative Studies in Society and History, 38(3): 510–548. Sillander, Kenneth. 2016. “Relatedness and Alterity in Bentian Human-spirit Rela­ tions.” In Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger (eds), Animism in Southeast Asia, pp. 157–180. Abdingdon: Routledge. Sillander, Kenneth. 2004. ““Dayak” and “Malay” in Southeast Borneo: Some mate­ rials Contesting the Dichotomy.” Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 29 (4): 35–47. Theriault, Noah. 2017. “A Forest of Dreams: Ontological Multiplicity and the Fan­ tasies of Environmental Government in the Philippines.” Political Geography, 58: 114–127.

7

Ecological Disturbances Negotiating indigeneity and access to land in Indonesia Birgit Bräuchler

Introduction Indonesia’s current president Joko Widodo wants to develop Indonesia from its margins, with mixed results so far. Next to new infrastructure like trans­ port and telecommunication, the idea is to make remote areas attractive to investors and wrest the local population from poverty. One such target area is the Aru Islands in the southeast of Maluku Province, Eastern Indonesia, where capitalist investment aims to open up large-scale plantations or cattle breeding or exploit Maluku’s vast fishing grounds. Such investment plans rarely cater for cultural needs or analyze their social compatibility. Govern­ ments, investors and local population groups invoke ‘diverging ecologies’ (Bräuchler 2018) that entail diverging interpretations of relationships between humans and nonhuman entities, most prominently land. Government and investor argue that nature must be adapted to the islanders’ economic needs so that the area can finally prosper. For many people indigenous to the area, such capitalist intrusions cause the disturbance of an ecological balance that is deeply ingrained in the cultural and societal set-up of their livelihoods. Given the weak legal standing of indigenous people in Indonesia, such clashes are often reduced to a hegemonic state against oppressed marginalized people and a scientific versus an indigenous ecology. Such dichotomization overlooks or ignores internal power struggles and divergent interpretations, which lead to diversification and hegemonialization within specific ecologies. This chap­ ter focuses on tensions within Aru’s indigenous ecology. It looks into clashes between those who want to turn land into an economic resource and those, who want to defend land as a cultural asset where ancestral claims can be asserted, and into broader and longer-term power struggles within these communities. It argues that it is rarely a matter of either or, of being for or against investment, but involves complex negotiations and politics around culture and history, access and entitlements to land, as well as efforts to position oneself or one’s group within the Indonesian nation or a local/global indigenous rights discourse. To grasp these complex negotiation processes in Aru conceptually, I first reflect on notions of indigeneity and culture. I then introduce the regional DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-7

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setting and a case, where a business conglomerate wanted to open up most of Aru’s land mass for sugar cane plantations but met massive resistance until it had to stop its plans – for now. The case was celebrated by indigenous rights and environmental activists throughout Indonesia and beyond. Key to success was that a majority of Aruese people had united against the overarching threat and that their resistance was effectively multiplied by activists with extensive networks within and outside of Indonesia who skillfully tapped into the international rhetoric of environmentalism and indigenous rights (Bräuchler 2019a, b). To get there, the movement had to overcome various hurdles. The chapter argues that simplified dichotomies and seemingly united resistance often ignore rather complex and conflictual negotiation processes behind the scenes that challenge the notion of plural, but homogenous ecol­ ogies. Often this has to do with complicated land ownership or management systems. Adat, a term for tradition and customary law in the Indonesian context, figures here as prominently as culture politics on various levels to be outlined in separate sections: 1) within and between villages; 2) between overarching adat bodies; and 3) between newly created adat organizations. Being pro or contra investment is only one element shaping a broader dis­ course and contributing to the internal diversification of ecologies. The chap­ ter closes with reflections on the future of indigenous ecologies and culture politics in Aru and beyond. The article draws on my long-term engagement in/with Maluku from 1996 and related research on conflict, peacebuilding and social justice (e.g. Bräuchler 2015) that also included field trips to Aru in 2016 and 2018. A closer analysis of the dynamics outlined in this chapter asks for repeated longterm fieldwork in Aru in the future.

Challenging indigeneity from within To make sense of seeming contradictions between united indigenous resis­ tance against outside intrusion on the one hand and internal conflict and long-term enmity on the other, indigeneity needs to be conceptualized as relational and culture as flexible. Indigeneity is commonly used to describe the original population of a land, often politically, economically, and socio­ culturally marginalized in a national context. At the same time, indigeneity is the construct and projection of an international discourse. Only in relation to non-indigenous people do indigenous people identify as such, which gives expression to their embeddedness in larger sociopolitical dynamics and fields. Indigeneity stands for both oppression and empowerment and its articulation can change depending on changing sociopolitical circumstances, opportu­ nities and across the generations (Li 2000). In contexts of unequal power relations, indigeneity can become a vehicle and political tool for marginalized people and their allies to mobilize support, express solidarity and fight for their collective human rights. Linking to a global indigenous rights move­ ment can enormously leverage a group’s cause. However, it also opens up

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space for homogenization or ‘flattening epistemologies’ (de la Cadena and Starn 2007, 12), when groups adopt others’ strategies, try to match a certain rhetoric, and when expectations by, e.g. international bodies or national governments, are formulated accordingly. In the Aru case, indigeneity became an important asset for activists and Aruese people to frame their struggle and topple the investment project. It crystallized the clash of diverging ecologies and the role of nonhuman beings in indigenous ecologies through its translation into a globally intelligible rhetoric, such as the contrast between greedy exploitation that would destroy local culture and environment and an essentialized indigenous ecology seeing indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature and as victims of outside aggression (Bräuchler 2018). This made it easy to mobilize supporters from human rights and environmental movements across Indonesia and the globe (Bräuchler 2019a). The movement here engaged in what Spivak called ‘strategic essentialism’ that she differentiates from an essentialism that is blind to internal difference and criticism (Pande 2017). However, strategic essentialism can still ‘obscure differences and make it difficult to maintain the kind of ethical negotiation that is critical to democratic inclusion’ (Wolford and Keene 2015, 579). It raises issues of representation with indi­ genous groups often being represented by non-indigenous activists or by indigenous spokespersons who do not necessarily have the relevant backing within their respective sociocultural systems or who cannot or do not want to convey different views held within their communities (Brysk 1996, 51–53). Such strategies often feed into an essentialization of indigeneity, indigenous ecology, and culture that contradicts the concepts’ inherent multiplicity and change. This chapter takes a look behind the scenes and follows critical reflections on internal conflicts by movement activists, villagers affected by them, and people and organizations trying to mediate – dissonances that were strate­ gically put aside for united resistance. The chapter is thus less interested in construction, articulation and mobilization processes surrounding indigene­ ity in view of outside threads or a global human rights rhetoric (Bräuchler 2019a, 2021), but argues that both strategic essentialism and frankness about internal conflicts are legitimate. For short-term outcomes, essentiali­ zation might make sense. For longer-term change, we need to look beyond such de/construction processes and into the challenges they face when con­ fronted with indigenous people’s conflict-ridden realities. The chapter is interested in internal conflicts, where details of being ‘indigenous’ and of indigenous ecologies are negotiated in very different ways than when com­ municating and negotiating with cultural outsiders, using a different rhetoric that draws on local mythology and ancestry and the various land and resource claims attached to it rather than a rhetoric of human rights and envir­ onmental protection. In relation to outside intrusion and the regional government, the majority of Aruese identified as indigenous in the recent case and promoted a unified indigenous ecology that opposes large-scale resource exploitation.

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However, this is contested on the ground, where a clan’s claims to land and cultural heritage can be challenged by other clans and narratives. In the 1950s, Edmund Leach (1970 [1954]) provided an interesting reinterpretation of what a myth means for a specific group or society. Challenging notions of myths as something that confirms, supports and maintains a society’s state of affairs and culture as argued by early anthropologists (Weiner 2010, 492), Leach (1970 [1954], 278) described myth as a ‘language of argument’. He argues that the value and meaning of myths are less determined by their consistency, but by their internal contradictions and inconsistencies that are constitutive of the societies he was looking at in Burma (ibid., 265). Each individual version of a myth is then used to ‘uphold the claims of a different vested interest’, to assert seniority (ibid., 266, 271) or make hegemonial claims. Such diverging claim-making based on different interpretations (or manipulations) of a distant mythical or more recent past plays a key role in the conflict-ridden realities in Aru that hid behind unitary resistance when faced by a threat that would endanger a majority of, if not all livelihoods. Whereas such dynamics are inherent part of any adat system and indigenous ecologies, they can get severely aggravated through outside intervention. As the global indigenous movement was gaining momentum, so-called local or indigenous knowledge has become an important asset in environ­ mental activism to counter neoliberal resource exploitation and promote alternative sustainable developments. Including documents such as the 1992 Rio Declaration of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, indigenous peoples are often depicted as living in harmony with nature and guardians of the environment, in other words, representing an essentialized indigenous ecology. Such tendencies are amplified by envir­ onmental groups and institutions using those ideas for political aims and by indigenous peoples for empowerment (Simic´ 2014, 89–90). The de-essentiali­ zation and internal diversification of culture and indigeneity opens up space to diversify such stereotypifications of indigenous peoples and their ecolo­ gies – not saying that there is no truth to it (e.g. Ellen 1986, 2005). As Mar­ isol de la Cadena (2007, 13) emphasizes, ‘becoming indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of culture and history’. This is illustrated by Li’s (2000) work in Indonesia, where she describes people’s choices to frame themselves as locals (usually local farmers) or indigenous, depending on the development schemes or rights talks that they want to become part of or benefit from. In her long-term research among a group of farmers in Sulawesi Li also challenges the idea of indigenous environmental wisdom as these farmers make conscious decisions what to plant for better income, thus explicitly ending collective land management practices, promot­ ing private land ownership and creating inequalities within their communities (Li 2007, 106, 2014, 2–3). Resistance to investment and development plans is just one option for local communities or indigenous people, with alternatives including land deals, compensation, or contract work (Hall et al. 2015).

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In Indonesia, until now, the government has not been treating its indigenous peoples very well. Trying to build a nation out of thousands of islands and a sense of belonging, the government’s policy was to impose a national culture on its citizens. While the government drew on Indonesia’s cultural diversity, thus the state’s motto ‘Unity in Diversity’ (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), it essentially led to the folklorization and depoliticization of local cultures and the margin­ alization or destruction of adat structures (Acciaioli 1985). National leaders perceived indigeneity to imply backwardness and hindrance to economic development, which was one of the major objectives of Indonesia’s authoritar­ ian Suharto regime (1966–98) and based mainly on exploiting the archipelago’s abundant natural resources, mostly found on lands populated by indigenous peoples. After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, a democratization and decentralization process set in and indigeneity became an important asset for local communities to fight for their rights. As on a global scale, the portrayal of indigenous people as guardians of the environment figures prominently in this quest for legitimacy. This is happily picked up by international conservations, in particular given uncontrolled deforestation in a country with the third largest tropical forest cover in the world and many indigenous groups depending on it for their livelihoods and culture (Bettinger et al. 2014). The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, AMAN) was founded in 1999 and plays an important role in encouraging such images. The Indonesian version of the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples (2007) translates ‘indigenous peoples’ as masyarakat adat or adat communities. AMAN estimates that Indonesia is home to about 50–70 million indigenous people and sees their ancestral ties to the land they live on as a key defining criteria (AMAN 2010, 2013). Among the many struggles fought by indigenous people in Indonesia is their fight against the central government’s claim that all forests are state forests. Land that nobody uses in ways that are obvious to outsiders, through settlements or per­ manent farming, was considered state land, thus denying hunters and gatherers, swidden farmers, and followers of indigenous belief systems collective rights to their ancestral domains or sacred grounds. Only in 2013, after many years of lobbying, did the Constitutional Court reclassify such land as owned by indi­ genous peoples – in case relevant evidence is provided – that they can use according to their aspirations and needs without ignoring other applicable laws and regulations (Decision No. 35/PUU-X/2012; issued May 2013). However, with indigenous communities usually lacking the legal knowledge and funds and with different government levels involved, including Indonesia’s president, the process of granting forest tenure to indigenous peoples and local commu­ nities has been a very slow one (see also Sawitri 2018).

Setting: Aru The Aru Islands – since 2003 a separate district (kabupaten) within Maluku province – are at Indonesia’s easternmost edge, located in the Arafura Sea

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between New Guinea and Australia. The islands are overgrown with dense forest, except for Trangan Island in the south with large stretches of savan­ nah. Aru’s six main islands are divided by a network of narrow channels and wider rivers with extended mangrove forests at their shores (e.g. Burger 1978, Forest Watch Indonesia 2015). Aru’s population of roughly 94,000 lives in 117 villages, two urban villages and one town, Dobo. It is by majority indi­ genous, mostly living in rural areas of hunting, fishing, harvesting sea pro­ ducts and small-scale farming, with no easy access to markets, public transport, health and education services or telecommunication (Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru 2018, Pemerintah Kabupaten Kapulauan Aru 2006). However, historically and at present, Aru is important and the local has for long been closely entangled with the national and international (Spyer 2000). Alfred Russel Wallace travelled the islands in the mid-19th century and collected crucial evidence for his theory of evolution, indepen­ dent from Charles Darwin (O’Connor et al. 2006, Wallace 1857). But Aru is also important for the Indonesian state and an international market as indi­ cated above. The sea around the islands has always been a rich source of fish and pearls and Aru is one of the few places worldwide that is home to the bird of paradise and other rare species. Whereas Wallace described Aru as a place of peaceful trade (Wallace 2013 [1896], 215–216), others describe fierce resistance against the Dutch trade monopoly and Buginese traders, and a place where the entanglement in global trade triggers or reinforces internal conflicts over access to land, sea and specific collection sites (Beversluis and Gieben 1929, Brumund 1845, Healey 1996, Hoëvell 1890). Such contestations continue until today, among others, owing to increasing immigration, with indigenous people often losing out, e.g. against newcomers’ more efficient (and more destructive) technolo­ gies for pearl diving or fishing (Elmas 2004, 214–216, Spyer 2000, 23) or other large-scale intrusions. The Aruese have to deal with legal and illegal largescale fishery and modern slavery, illegal trade in sea turtles, shark fins and birds of paradise, plantations, and land grabbing – often backed up by the government. However, indigenous people in certain parts of Aru have been involved in international trade for ages and have taken over complicity in exploitative ecologies, including the trade of pearls and sea cucumbers (Osseweijer 2003, 174, 2005, Spyer 2000). A large part of marine resource production and marketing is controlled by Chinese merchants, foreign com­ panies and local elites though (Compost 1980, Elmas 2004, Healey 1996, 21, Riedel 1886, 256). And even for those living at the coast, the forest remains important, at least as a backdrop for seasonal fluctuations and as a reminder of their ancestral roots (Spyer 2000, 67). As became public in 2013, the business conglomerate PT Menara Group wanted to turn large parts of the Aru Islands into sugar cane plantations, with 90 out of 117 villages lying in that area (Tim AMAN Maluku 2016, 618). Whereas the investor claims that this would create jobs, improve infra­ structure, community welfare and human resources (Menara Group –

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Jakarta 2013), it would obviously destroy a sensitive ecological system and its indigenous people’s culture and livelihood that all shape Aru’s indigenous ecology (e.g. Forest Watch Indonesia 2015). One major problem was that neither the business nor the district government provided proper informa­ tion for villagers to make informed decisions. What makes this case inter­ esting is that despite all the infrastructural limitations a well-organized resistance movement called #SaveAruIslands emerged and toppled the pro­ ject plans (Gecko Project and Mongabay 2019). As I argued elsewhere, they were successful because local activists entered strategic alliances with villa­ gers and a range of peace and human rights activists and artists at the local, national, and international level (Bräuchler 2019a, b). After revealing that the licensing process did not follow legal requirements, their main strategy was to link the case with national and global indigenous rights and envir­ onmentalist movements and depict the Aruese as people living in harmony with nature and being criminalized for defending their land (Forest Watch Indonesia 2016, Satriastanti 2016). Through strategic intermediation and mobilization in the villages, the region, Indonesia’s capital and inter­ nationally, these activists managed to unite the Aruese and successfully resist the plantation plans. The death of people, including Aru’s regent and deputy regent who were involved in the issuing of PT Menara licenses, has been attributed to the fact that they had violated traditional resource protection signs called sir (Aru) or sasi (Maluku), aiming to sell adat land (Syam et al. 2015). Next to signing rejection letters, villagers conducted rituals, held deliberation meetings and took up their bows and arrows to prevent PT Menara envoys from entering their land for surveys or soil samples. The manifold conflicts within Aruese society could easily have risked the endeavour. Whereas the majority of villages seems to have been opposed to the plans from the start, others were undecided because of lack of information and some villages were torn, which often had to do with existing internal conflicts. This challenges a simplifying divide between outside aggressors and local victims, or capitalist and indigenous ecologies, and prevents more nuanced reflections on local people’s different experiences, perceptions and agencies and complexities involved in land disputes in and between villages (see also Chancellor 2017).

Ancestry, migration, and land At the heart of these internal negotiation processes are the complex ways indigenous people in Aru relate to the land they live on, which is inherent part of Aru’s indigenous ecology and related to how their society evolved and spread over the centuries. Whereas transport and telecommunication infra­ structure is very limited, people connect via traditional networks including clan networks based on shared ancestry, migration histories and related mythology (matabelang), kinship networks (marga), hunting alliances, tra­ ditional alliances between villages (e.g. pela, tarfei or jabo), networks

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based on a traditional bipartition of Aruese society (ursia and urlima) and, more ‘recently’, school networks (most children having to leave their vil­ lages if they want to continue education after primary school) and reli­ gious ties (with religious affiliations crossing family, village and clan boundaries). Locally the Aru Islands are called Jargaria and society is made up of two parts or moieties (Wellfelt and Djonler 2019), the group of nine (ursia) and the group of five (urlima), both needed for a functioning society. This is common throughout Maluku (Bräuchler 2015, 107–110). Generally, there are two types of explanation, a historical and a mythical one. The historical nar­ rative sees the divide as a result of the former expansion policy of the north­ ern sultanates Ternate and Tidore (Pattikayhatu et al. 1993, Riedel 1886, 246). Mythical explanations trace the societal divide back to some canonical event, an ancestral war between two brothers or ‘the mythic shattering of the paired islands of Karang and Enu at the southernmost extreme of the archi­ pelago’ that was also the ‘impetus to the exodus of Aru’s ancestors and their subsequent travels and dispersal throughout the island group’ (Spyer 2000, xviii), or both (Osseweijer 2003, 181). As an adat elder in Trangan told me, the people who shared one boat (belang), but also other mounts such as fish or birds (later becoming their clan emblems), to escape the disaster and in search of a new place to live, formed one clan (matabelang). On their journey to the north, through the Aru Islands (still uninhabited at the time), they got off at different places. People initially did not live in permanent settlements, but rather lived as nomadic hunters and gatherers or changed settlements or island whenever the ceasing of local resources such as water required them to do so. One day, the two elders leading Urlima and Ursia, in their continuous quest who the more powerful is, set out for a competition who could conquer more villages. One rode a shark, one a whale who was too big to enter shallow waters so that Raja Ursia was able to conquer more land and villages, Raja Urlima more ground in the sea (Crawford 1971, Djonler and Gordon 2016, 7– 8) – a story of competition, but also how they complement each other as brothers to make up Aruese society. Dutch colonial interference and Indone­ sian governance after independence forced clans and family groups to form larger communities, thus consolidating today’s villages (Osseweijer 2003, 182). As a result of that history, clan members today can be spread out over different villages and islands. Each village that I went to and each adat elder whom I spoke to had a migration history to tell. Some villages only settled in their current localities a few decades ago, with village clans still holding land claims in their previous territories (kampung lama) and islands, where they occasionally work and harvest their gardens. To further complicate things, some clans changed their names or merged with others in the course of this history. In some villages, certain clans hold most of the land (petuanan), whereas others, who only joined the village later, might only have use rights. In other villages, it is a minority that has their petuanan on the spot, with most villagers having joined more recently. In any case, it is the ancestors

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who are considered to be the owners of the land and need to be consulted for any transfer of land use rights. The migration histories of Aruese clans make land ownership issues complicated and explains why there is no ‘empty’ land in Aru; all land is claimed by families or clans and must not be sold to outsiders (Osseweijer 2003, 182, Riedel 1886, 260, Soumokil et al. 2004, 32). In the villages I visited in Aru’s centre and south, clans usually kept their land open for use by members from other clans – we eat jointly from our land (makan di tanah ini bersama), as an adat elder said – with the exception of certain resources such as caves for the collection of birds’ nests or birds of paradise (see also Healey 1996, 19–20). Another complicating factor is that land deals between clans and villages, e.g., are based on oral agreements, often in a distant past, which allows for reinterpretations over time and questions of prior occupancy that have led to numerous conflicts in the past and today (for sea products see Spyer 2000, 75–76). Outsiders such as foreign investors usually ignore complex local land con­ ditions, thus often enforcing or retriggering existing conflicts. I heard many stories and read various reports where investors came in, negotiated only with few villagers, if at all, who might have no authority to negotiate access to land, or pit villagers against each other, trying to push those fancying eco­ nomic gains, be it through logging, plantations, or the exploitation of sea resources. What Aruese people learned from past cases, plantations are sometimes taken as an excuse for deforestation, e.g. in the case of coffee plantation plans in Loi on Trangan Island (in the 2000s). In no case did such projects ever result in the community thriving and becoming economically well off. The prolongedness and the further complication of conflicts required new means. As Osseweijer (2003, 184) outlines, whereas ‘in the past, property rights conflicts were solved within the community … since the 1980s, Aruese have been taking these issues to court and from then people have started drawing artefactual maps of their customary property to use as “evidence” in lawsuits’. On top of that, villagers started using colonial maps to provide even stronger evidence for their claims – usually without any knowledge of the context, in which the map was produced. Such maps can hardly depict the complex reality of land ‘ownership’ (ibid., 190). AMAN is trying to support current land mapping initiatives, but ongoing conflicts, lack of funds and the fact that the provincial government has not translated the constitutional court’s decision into regional regulations yet, makes their work hard and protracted.

Conflictual culture politics The scale of PT Menara’s plantation plans and the fact that preparations had taken place in the hidden, without seeking any informed consent by the Aruese people, triggered enormous resistance in Aru and beyond. I often heard how villagers were confronted with the sudden arrival of an interna­ tional delegation that asked for access to their land with the promise of

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community development and economic well-being. Those delegations often got in touch with the village head (kepala desa) as the lowest representative of the Indonesian government structure to negotiate entry, thus ignoring adat authority in charge of land management and the required inclusive deliberation processes (see also Chancellor 2017, 27); or they contacted only selected clan heads without considering complex land relations; or had negotiated with vil­ lagers living in Dobo Town, who were up for quick money and promised to prepare the ground in the villages, which often did not happen. However, as land mapping more generally, such large-scale mobilization can only be sustainable if the manifold internal tensions and conflicts that were hushed away to unite against investor and government, are addressed. These are struggles about interpretational and representational authority and hegemony in adat worlds, including conflicts 1) within and between villages; 2) between Urlima and Ursia; and 3) between more recent overarching adat organizations. In other words, we need to acknowledge how plural ecologies can enforce diversification within indigenous ecologies and diverging inter­ pretations of some of its core principles such as the ancestors as owners of land, and the inclusion of elements that are not usually associated with indi­ genous ecologies, such as maps and court orders. 1. Conflicts within and between villages To get a better understanding of the dynamics and how local interpretations of history and land management are entangled with colonial interventions and national legalistic processes, I here unpack one internal conflict that was reinforced by the PT Menara intervention. Village names used are pseudo­ nyms. We are now looking at a territory reaching from the West coast of Trangan Island into the interior. Two villages A and B form an adat union called AB and claim to have adat authority over the land; other inhabitants are seen as passengers (penumpang). Having to manage a large territory, AB claims to have strategically positioned two villages on their customary land (tanah adat) as guards, who seem to accept this interpretation of history, at least in a formal declaration in 2000. Yet the fifth village in that area, C, the only one located in the interior, is openly opposing the claimed supremacy and the conflict has already been carried out on various levels, with the Menara intervention adding yet another level of complexity and escalating the tensions. A particular point of contestation is that both AB and C claim the strip of land lying between their villages, an area that PT Menara group was keen to access. With diverging claims of who has authority of regulating access, this was predestined to trigger conflict. A story that I was told by both sides is that a long time ago, a woman from A (allegedly from the first clan in the area) married into C (or maybe better into a clan living where C is today). As her family could not afford to pay the pride price (or since she gave birth to no children, as another version goes), they gave the land on which C is now based to fulfil their adat

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obligations. According to C elders, the transfer is based on an adat decree and cannot be undone. Moreover, the woman’s clan has no more descendants today. C also refers to a stone (batu noit) set by a colonial officer to confirm the boundary between the two villages. A elders, in contrast, argue that the disputed land was given so that husband and wife can live on and from the land (bisa makan di situ), but it never ceased to be under A’s adat authority. They also refer to a colonial map from 1907, on which both A and B, but not C are to be found, and claim that C has manipulated the boundary stone in the past. But given the ancestors’ adat agreement, C cannot be driven from the land. This colonial map has also been used to substantiate land claims between other villages on Trangan (see Osseweijer 2003, 189). However, when reading the colonial report to which this map is attached, this turns out to be a tricky issue. The map is the outcome of a discovery trail by a colonial officer and his delegation on Trangan Island. They obviously could only put down those villages that they were able to reach at the time; their stay was limited and not long enough to engage in diverging land claim debates between villages (Tissot van Patot 1908). A village and its specific composition might be only a quite recent phenomenon, whereas cer­ tain clans might have resided in the area for much longer, but would prob­ ably not have been included in that map. In 1890, e.g., in his geographical, ethnographic, and commercial sketch of Aru, Hoëvell (1890) mentions a vil­ lage located in the interior of Trangan, which carries the name of one of C’s big clans. It would need a longer-term engagement with colonial archives and local oral histories to reconstruct further details, if possible at all. The conflict flares up again and again, also in 1964, when someone from AB killed a bird of paradise in C’s territory, where they have no hunting rights accord­ ing to C, which almost escalated into larger-scale violence. As no solution could be found through adat, the case was brought to court and AB lost. Whereas the maps both sides produced were considered to be too vague and no strong evidence, the boundary stone and related eyewitness reports by C elders were considered con­ vincing by the District Court (1973). I also heard stories about other incidents in the 1980s where the conflict escalated and that have not found their way into the court books. Up until today, the villages have not yet managed to get all adat elders together to deliberate and find a consensual and sustainable solution. In this setting, the impending investment plans triggered reactions from outright rejection, to indecisiveness, to an in-principle openness. C in the interior was holding deliberative village meetings and rejected the plans: ‘Our whole life is about the forest, this would slowly kill us’ (Katong cuma punya hidup di hutan … bunuh katong pelan-pelan), as a clan elder told me. Such outright rejection is also due to the negative experience they have had with the Indonesian Navy that has opened up an air base on their territory in the early 1990s, without providing proper compensation and with ongoing attempts to extend the base. In AB, the response to the plantation plans were not as clear-cut. A’s lord of the land, e.g., was critical about some of his

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people accepting money and guiding the investor: ‘It is all about money, they forget their clans; it is only about their own benefit’ (Ada uang di depan, lupa marga … untuk dia sendiri makan). Whereas some were worried about the plantation plans destroying their land, others were open for new economic ventures. A unified response was also undercut by village internal quarrels about adat authority and which clan and village section does have the final say, and about power games in village and district politics. Opinions and attitudes also changed over time, when new information became available. PT Menara had recruited people from various villages in Dobo for its survey team. This had effects on how information was channelled back to the villages, how different families and clans reacted and how the team was received. The survey team on Trangan also involved AB people to guide them through the terrain and as soon as it approached C for taking samples, it triggered long-held feelings of distrust and hostility. It led to some violent encounters and, again, the 1907 map was used by some to make claims. If it would not have been for the deliberation and intervention of some elders, this could have easily escalated into serious fighting – not only in the villages, but also in Dobo, where many people originating from these villages live. Such incidents provided the investor an even better excuse to involve security forces in its missions (various versions of this and related incidents circulate, see also Tim AMAN Maluku 2016). What all this shows is that shared notions of human-nonhuman relations as the basis for an indigenous ecology in which land and resources need to be maintained for future generations, do not necessarily imply a unified response to outside interventions. In this case, it looks, this mainly results from lack of information required for informed decisions about an intervention that would destroy the very basis of Aruese indigenous ecology. 2. Conflicts between Urlima and Ursia Colonial sources seem to be ambivalent about the role of Ursia and Urlima. Whereas earlier sources of the 17th century report continuing warfare (see e.g. Wellfelt and Djonler 2019), later sources stated that the heads of Urlima and Ursia have not much to say, which could be indebted to colonial politics itself as the colonial powers did not accept any overarching structures potentially challenging their power (Brumund 1845, 288–289, Hoëvell 1890, 77). However, competition over who is more influential and powerful remains a sensitive topic until today. As I was variously told, it still reminds people of the first ancestral war that led to the division of society and the exodus of Aruese people from Eno Karang and the divide is (mis)used in different circumstances, including pride price negotiations, party politics and election stra­ tegies, or supporting investment plans through the leaders’ adat and political mandate. The commodification of land, as a worker for a non-governmental orga­ nization from Aru’s south said in Dobo, also seems to push traditional leaders

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in Aru to no longer see themselves as managers, but as owners of land and thus challenge a principal feature of Aru’s indigenous ecology. At the same time, we see continuous efforts to raise awareness about the unity of the two groups as more important than the fighting (Crawford 1971). Adat elders I spoke to emphasized how they are closely linked and inter­ twined with one moiety being the older (kakak), one the younger brother (adik), and with various matabelang or clans crossing the group boundaries; how each side can eat from the other’s land as they are both integral parts of a functioning Aruese society; and how they are all Jarjui, Aru people, living on the Land of Aru called Jargaria. A lot of the disputes in Aru’s indigenous society are about adat authority: village internal, between clans, between villages and between Urlima and Ursia. It is about who is the more powerful and influential and who has what authority in the shared space all Aruese inhabit. This involves diverging his­ torical claims and who has the authority to solve disputes. In the course of political developments and a context of increasing insecurities, among others caused by interventions such as the plantation plans, different people were claiming leadership and representational authority, which also enforced ten­ sions between members of Urlima and Ursia. In all this, adat and politics are closely linked, not only at the village but also at the regional level. The more recent foundation of two overarching adat organizations exemplifies this. 3. Conflicts between new adat organizations To mitigate tensions on all levels, two competing organizations were recently called into life, the LMA and the DAA. Both claim to represent Aru’s adat community and aim to overcome the Ursia-Urlima divide for a more stable and prosperous future, which has enforced representational claim-making as highly political matters. LMA: Mass violence and autonomy In the early 2000s two incentives triggered work towards the foundation of an overarching adat body in Aru. One was the violent conflict that had raged in central Maluku for more than four years. The mass violence was preceded by an incident in Dobo, but here violence could be contained within few weeks, owing to influential traditional leaders. This background has asked for con­ tinuous investment in the strengthening of adat and traditional conflict reso­ lution mechanisms (Bräuchler 2013, 2015). The other incentive was the desire to upgrade Aru from a subdistrict (kecamatan) to a district or regency (kabupaten), which required a stable and peaceful society. The fact that by 2000 Aru was still only a subdistrict in the Indonesian government structure despite its large territory speaks volumes about the ‘marginality of these islands within both the provincial and the national setting’ (Spyer 2000, xi). The demand for a separate district was driven by a non-elite community

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to foster a more equal economic growth in the area that also benefits villa­ gers living on far-away islands (Syam et al. 2015, 24). A short while after the first decentralization laws were passed in Indonesia in 1999, a group of concerned citizens built a Committee for the Formation of Aru Islands Regency. In an effort to unite the masyarakat adat’s struggle for the new district, two ex-military officers and a civil servant, all of them having lived outside their respective villages for decades, had founded the Alliance of Masyarakat Adat Aru (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Aru) in 2000. It was renamed into LMA or Lembaga Masyarakat Adat Jargaria Aru (Adat Council of the Indigenous People of Aru) in 2006 and legalized by a notary in 2007. The LMA is supposed to represent both Urlima and Ursia and at the same time, as out­ lined to me by its head in 2018, reactivate their leadership that has failed to address major challenges within and from outside Aruese society. It is meant to represent interests of the masyarakat adat and smoothen the interface to the government and possible outside investors. The law underlying the foundation of the new District Aru Islands in 2003 (Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru, UU 40/ 2003) explicitly states that it considers customs and culture as important assets in the development process. As it says in its statutes, through education and awareness raising, the LMA is meant to empower Aru’s indigenous people, channel their aspirations, fight for their rights, their culture and land as well as an intact nature, and thus protect and develop adat values and local wisdom, including traditional conflict resolution mechanisms. It shall also play an important mediator in cases, where long-lasting conflicts could not be settled by village functionaries or official security forces (Lembaga Masyarakat Adat Jar­ garia Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru 2016). In one of the few cases that the LMA did get active, members descended to the villages and, over ten days and nights, tried to mediate and solve conflicts over a contested piece of land through adat means, a process they recounted to me on various occasions. It included the holding of adat trials, recording of village histories, compensation payments in the form of gongs, adat pledges, and mobilization of traditional alliances such as pela or jabo. The process ended with placing sasi on the contested land thus denying access to both parties. It put an end to the violence, but is not seen as a viable long-term solution. With few exceptions, the LMA has not come up to expectations yet, e.g. regarding implementation of the new constitutional regulation on adat and state forests – mainly blaming the government for a lack of support and funding. Wanting to support Aru’s majority, the LMA decided to oppose PT Menara’s sugar cane project as it would destroy Aru’s forest and deprive current and future generations of their livelihoods. This is quite different with the other adat council, the Dewan Adat Aru (DAA). DAA: Adat for economic development Years later, the DAA was founded as another attempt to unite the masyar­ akat adat, but this time to mobilize it for economic development, not in

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support of PT Menara, but its rival PT Nusa Ina, owned by Indonesia’s ‘king of palm oil’, Sihar Sitorus. According to the LMA secretary, it was quite controversial to establish a rival adat institution in 2013 as this would inevitably cause more problems. The DAA is headed by one of the founding members of the LMA, who, unsuccessfully, tried to get more LMA people on board. Party politics were integral part of this. Aru’s district head (bupati) at the time, Teddy Tengko, had issued principal licenses for PT Menara to explore the area for their plantation plans, before he went to prison for corruption charges, where he died in 2014. The vice district head and caretaker, Umar Djabumona, had supported PT Nusa Ina, was then himself charged of corruption and died in 2015 (for a timeline see Forest Watch Indonesia 2015, Tim AMAN Maluku 2016, 640, Tomsa 2015). Both businesses obviously used the chaos to push forward their interests. Sitorus financed the launching of the DAA in January 2014, after inviting potential DAA functionaries to Jakarta. The meeting and the inauguration of DAA officials took place in government buildings, but with the Bupati in prison and the caretaker not showing up, government support was limited. A similar big meeting aiming to bring adat representatives from all over Aru together was organized several years earlier, in 2006, by Tengko, in an attempt to unite Ursia and Urlima and put an end to ongoing land disputes and power struggles (Pemerintah Kabupaten Kapulauan Aru 2006). In that seminar, the government warned the people of Jargaria to not instrumentalize adat for personal interests – obviously forgetting to clean up its own backyard first. As one adat elder supporting the DAA told me in 2016, Sitorus’ motto was that ‘this area will not advance without investor; but it must be done in an adat way, via customary law’. Sitorus is known throughout Indonesia as investor who tries to instrumentalize adat figures to get permits and smoothen access. In Aru, his strategy seems to have failed, at least for now. The foun­ dation of the DAA is remembered by its opponents through an amusing anecdote, in which Sitorus was chased away by protestors and had to flee out of the backdoor of the house, where he was supposed to be awarded an hon­ orary adat title; his flight was filmed and widely circulated in the media (e.g. Siwalima 2014). As the case shows, Aru became a pawn in political and economic interests that threaten to destroy its adat system by playing the masyarakat adat against each other. The foundation of a second overarching adat body trig­ gered competition about who has better legal foundations, governmental support and more followers in Aru and is thus more authoritative and repre­ sentative. Whereas adat obligations prevent the LMA from opening up adat land to foreign investment, DAA members use their adat position and ancestral ties to legitimize this. In the places I visited in Aru, neither LMA nor DAA were well known, if at all. It confuses villagers to have two councils, both based in Dobo, with unclear responsibilities, dismissed as political cam­ paign tools and money affairs by most. Rather than soothing existing ten­ sions, it challenges traditional leadership even further and undermines the

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principles of their indigenous ecology. Both LMA and DAA have, to cer­ tain extents, tried to co-opt the leaders of Ursia and Urlima or tried to manipulate them, without ever consulting their base, which is not received well by most adat elders. The government seems to acknowledge neither as the legitimate representative body of masyarakat adat, or is confused itself, at least when judged after the lack of financial support, which is said to be the reason why there has been no proper socialization in the villages yet. Currently, there are efforts to divide Aru District into two and add a new Kabupaten called Aru Perbatasan (Aru Border), comprising mainly Aru’s vast southern island Trangan. For those promoting the new district, reasons include prospects of a better infrastructure, new jobs, better ways to control and protect the coast and the sea, e.g. from illegal fishing, and to strengthen the security of Indonesia’s border zone. Interestingly, the district government sees ‘local culture and customary law’ threatened by ‘outside cultural influ­ ences’ (Pemerintah Kabupaten Kapulauan Aru 2006, 80), rather than its own policies. The DAA seems to be in favour of a new district thus continuing its developmentalist line. Others, among them AMAN, are concerned that it will drive yet another wedge into the masyarakat adat or is another strategy by investors, to re/enter the islands, thus continuing the government’s sales and divide et impera policy (e.g. AMAN Maluku 2016, Syam et al. 2015). Such fears are highly legitimate given the long list of businesses that want to enter and exploit Aru’s resources. Zulkifli Hasan, forestry minister at the time, declared Aru unsuitable for opening up plantations in 2014. Nonetheless, in 2015 the Minister of Agriculture announced that the Indonesian government had identified three areas for the development of large-scale sugar cane plan­ tations, including Aru (Tempo 23 June 2015; Kabar Timur 24 June 2015). In 2017 the government started yet another attempt to open a cattle farm and sugar cane plantations in Aru’s south, with SaveAru activists immediately collecting hundreds of signatures and rejecting the project (Maluku Post, 27 October 2017).

The future of indigenous ecologies in Aru The SaveAru movement successfully mobilized the majority of Aru people to resist plantation plans as analyzed in more detail elsewhere (Bräuchler 2019a, b). However, the above analysis of culture politics on various levels illustrates that perspectives were by far not as clear-cut. Investors and government policies make use of such diverging opinions, internal divides, the grey zones between different legal systems, and the inexperience of villagers in order to get access and impose their idea of a functioning ecology. In his opening speech for an international Maluku Conference that I attended (Dobo, 2018), Aru’s vice governor praised the importance of culture and identity and pro­ moted investment, without explaining how the two go together. In the same year, initiators of the Aru Adat Alliance and various adat elders started

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another attempt to organize a big adat meeting that would bring together representatives from Urlima and Ursia, all clans and villages and from LMA and DAA. At the meeting, they would discuss how to overcome the various divides, build a strong and unified base for future challenges, pro­ gress without losing their adat and what a future indigenous ecology could look like. Within such developments and disputes, indigeneity is a highly political and contested concept. It is a tool to sideline marginalized people as obstacles to economic development and resource exploitation, and it is a tool for the empowerment of indigenous people and their allies. However, indigeneity criteria are also contested from within so-called indigenous communities regarding who has precedence and the authority to define tradition and the relationship to land, thus challenging essentialist notions of indigenous ecol­ ogies. At the same time, indigenous people have to constantly renegotiate their own identity and the way they represent themselves to the outside world in order to adapt to and cope with changing government policies and inter­ national activism and jargons. Whereas in relation to outside intrusion the majority of Aruese identified as indigenous in the recent case, this is very much contested on the ground, where different families and clans challenge each other’s claims to land and cultural authority. Strategic essentialism might make sense for short-term outcomes and to defend indigenous ecolo­ gies from outside threats. However, rather than buying into and accepting it as a necessary means, for longer-term change we need more close analyses of the conflict-ridden realities of ‘indigenous’ people’s lives that put homogeniz­ ing and harmonizing ideas of indigeneity and indigenous ecology into perspective.

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8

Entrepreneurial Ecologies in a Javanese Fishery Katharina Schneider

Introduction At Kali Sambong (pseudonym), a fishing port and adjacent village in north­ ern Java, government efforts at regulating the highly exploitative local Danish Seining fishery between 2015 and 2018 met with fierce resistance from local fishers.1 It might be tempting to employ a binary, “clash of civilizations” analytic mode for studying plural ecologies and to hypothesize that fishers’ resistance was an expression of two antagonistic ecologies running up against each other. The first would be a conservationist ecology in which the gov­ ernment situated its efforts at protecting the fishery. Relevant entities in this ecology would be declining stocks, a ravaged seafloor, and fish from the bottom of marine food-webs ending up, alarmingly, as duck feed or as “shrimp sticks” in supermarket freezers. In such an ecology, banning Danish Seining would be urgently needed for the survival of the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants. The hypothetical antagonist of this ecology would be a capitalist one, in which fish would be dead matter worth exactly as much as their rapidly fluctuating market price. Competition between boat owners would be fierce, capital bound up in boats, owners heavily indebted, and the dis-continuation of the fishery in its current form would imply tre­ mendous financial losses for already struggling households. Regulating the fishery would thus obliterate the year- or decade-long efforts and hard work of people who transformed themselves from rural poor into maritime entre­ preneurs and would throw fishers and their dependants into an uncertain future. While such a hypothesis of two antagonistic ecologies may appear plau­ sible, ethnographic research at Kali Sambong between 2013 and 2019, both before and after the government’s intervention, suggests that matters are more complex, at least on the fishers’ side. Different people evoked not one shared ecology, but several different ones when explaining their resistance to gov­ ernment interventions. This paper is concerned with the ecologies articulated by a relatively small but important group of people in the fishery, the boat owners who were active in the local Danish Seining fishery at the time of my fieldwork. They had benefitted disproportionately from the rapid DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-8

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growth of the fishery and resisted the intervention fiercely, in spirit if not necessarily in the streets. For better understanding boat owners’ grie­ vances, and eventually, for including them more constructively in decisions about the future of the fishery, it is necessary to understand their business strategies, including their underlying assumptions and motivations. A closer investigation of the ecologies in which boat owners situate their business histories, and with reference to which they explain their invest­ ment strategies is one step toward such an understanding. Boat owners’ business decisions formed an important node in the processes that had led to overcapitalization, overcapacity2, and progressive overfishing3 of the Java Sea demersal species since the early 2000s. Other troubling signs of an overheating fishery included conflicts over infringements of fishing zones, intense competition over fish between boats at sea, and increasing income inequality, between boat owners and crewmembers as well as between more and less successful boat owners. Exploring boat owners’ ecologies can help to ground an understanding of their continuing investment, despite these warning signs. This approach might also be useful beyond this specific eth­ nographic case, to better understand the dynamics of rapidly developing fisheries. In the following section, I introduce the working definition of “plural ecologies” employed in this paper, as well as the ecological plurality among Kali Sambong’s fishing people. Zooming in on the relatively small and homogeneous professional group of the owners of Danish Seiners, the second section provides a brief outline the three types of boat owners’ ecologies that emerged from my ethnographic data.4 I argue that they are “baroque economies” (Gago 2017) purposefully assembled from affor­ dances of Java’s spiritually rich history to meet the needs and aspirations of the neoliberal present, as boat owners perceived them. In the following section, I posit and specify a connection between the resulting ecological plurality and certain practices of entrepreneurship. To this end, Kali Sambong is contrasted to another ethnographic case, in which incipient entre­ preneurship appears to have coincided with a reduction in ecological plurality (Rudnyckyj 2010). The main, ethnographic part of the paper is taken up by an in-depth description of three boat owners’ contrasting ecologies, as they emerge from their accounts of their business histories and explanations for business strategies and decisions, and as they play out in their day-to-day work. In the conclusion, I indicate how boat owners’ antagonism toward govern­ ment proposals to regulate their fishery can be understood more fully if their ecologies are taken into account. While the confrontations do not map onto a binary ecological divide, knowing the different ecologies in which boat owners situated the government’s proposals clarifies their grievances and indicates possibilities for engaging them more constructively in the management of the fishery.

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Plural ecologies in Kali Sambong’s fishery For the purposes of this paper, ecologies are defined formally and, following Sprenger and Großmann (2018), as “more or less coherent set(s) of relation­ ships between humans and non-humans” (ibid., ix). Ecologies are the sets of human and non-human entities and relations that people attend to and reckon with in their everyday life. The sets of entities and types of relations that particular people at Kali Sambong were most concerned with matched their specialist role in the fishery, as boat owners, captains, crew members and boat managers, or as fish traders, processors, boat builders or owners of supply shops. For instance, captains are responsible for boat, crew and catch at sea, on fishing trips that last between ten and thirty days, depending on the size of the boat. Their explanations of their work indicate an intimate knowledge of different species of fish and their characteristics, both while alive and in frozen form, as part of the catch of up to ten tons per trip for a large boat. At the same time, expert captains know the marine environment with its currents and weather by heart, but they also know the men they work with very well and maintain strong social networks in the village to be able to replace crewmembers quickly, if necessary. Finally, experienced captains understand the boat as a workspace and its dangers, such as the heavy net that can pull crewmembers overboard, the hauler that can cut off human limbs, and the engines that are notorious for failing in the worst possible moment. Boat owners sometimes say that if the captain’s main task is to find fish, then theirs is to find money. They must secure the necessary capital for boats (about €25,000 for a second-hand and €75,000 for a new boat in 2014), gear and repairs; for operating costs (between €5,000 and €9,000, depending on the duration and anticipated range of the trip); to pay the crew their share within two days of their arrival in port, even if fish traders run late with their pay­ ments;5 for annual taxes and the renewal of permits; for bonuses and extras for captains and crewmembers, and for emergencies. Boat owners were con­ stantly seeking out, tending to, and tinkering with relationships that they argued were crucial to good catches, good prices for one’s fish at the auction place, low operating costs, high turnover and profits, creditworthiness with the banks, a content and therefore stable and hard-working crew, and, in the long term, a sufficiently high and ideally not too volatile income from their boats, with manageable levels of debt. Consistent with those priorities were two commonalities across boat owners’ ecologies. First, fish figured in them as dead matter with a price tag, and second, banks played a very prominent role and were sometimes spoken of as animate beings, not unlike spirits and that one might appeal to for support, but whose conditions one had to accept.6 Beyond dead fish and the prominence of banks, however, the sets of entities and relations that boat owners engaged with for “finding money” differed significantly. Boat owners’ ecologies were thus plural, again in Sprenger’s and

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Großmann’s (2018) sense. They constituted different worlds (e.g. de la Cadena and Blaser 2018) in which owners situated their decisions and actions. These differences will be introduced below.

Baroque ecologies Based on accounts of their life and business histories during semi-structured interviews with 20 of Kali Sambong’s boat owners, as well as on informal conversations with many others between 2013 and 2019, I distinguish between three main types of boat owners’ ecologies. The first type was the most common among Kali Sambong’s boat owners. The majority of them appealed for support in their businesses and family life to spiritual beings who could be approached through dukun, knowledgeable people, some of them at shrines and grave sites all over Java Island. They interpreted successes and failures of their own and competitors’ maritime businesses as the result of spiritual interventions summoned in this way. The degree of elaboration of these ecol­ ogies varied. While six owners were diligent in cultivating relations with spiritual beings and their intermediaries during my fieldwork and interpreted their fortunes consistently as an outcome of these beings’ interventions, nine others provided much less detail. In three cases, this was most likely the case because I knew the owners less well than the others. In another two cases, boat owners had handed over the spiritual care of their boats to one main dukun and did not become involved in the details of the dukun’s work. Finally, four others indicated that they left those matters to a family member, their captain, or in one case, the boat manager. I will use the life and business history of Pak Guru (pseudonym), one of the six owners with an elaborate spiritual ecology for introducing this type of ecology. The second type of ecology was found in only four of the 20 boat owners’ life and business histories. I include it here because among them were three highly respected owners of many boats, and one highly respected owner who was struggling financially during the period of my fieldwork. These owners situated their businesses in relationships that were firmly monotheistic. They appealed to Allah directly for support, and they interpreted catches, business success and blessings in life as His response. Working days were structured around prayer times; re-investing money from boats in religious projects was important to these owners, and the geographical centre of their cosmopolitan Islamic ecologies was Mecca. One of these owners was Bu Haji, a lively woman in her fifties, whom I only met a year and a half into my fieldwork, after hearing a lot about her from others in the village, because her religious schedule was so busy. Finally, there was one exceptional boat owner in her 30s, Bu Titik, who narrated her life and business story as grounded in her educational experi­ ences. She cited lessons from accounting school, her own calculations, and information acquired through online research when explaining her business decisions, appealing to notions of economic rationality throughout. While

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she was exceptional among boat owners, a similar ecology to the one that emerged from her narrative and explanations appeared in my conversations with younger women in fishing households, including boat owning house­ holds. Many of them had achieved higher educational levels, not only than their parents, but often also than their brothers, who had left school earlier to go to sea. Being young women, either about to get married or with young families, they lacked the time and financial resources to play a prominent role in the fishery, but this typically changes with age. Their ecologies are included here, represented by Bu Titik’s, because they will likely be relevant for the future of the fishery. The resonances of the first and second of these types with social divides that mid-20th-century ethnographers of Java described as composites of reli­ gious (traditionalist versus modernist Muslim) and class (rural and urban lower versus urban trading class) would be difficult to miss.7 However, I could detect no correlation between a boat owner’s type of ecology, her or his per­ sonal statements of sympathy for prominent historical figures, and family affiliations. More generally speaking, boat owners emphasized discontinuity over continuities between their apprenticeship and early career in the late 1990s to early 2000s and earlier periods. At a time of rapid economic development, their opportunities and challenges differed significantly from those of their parents’. If anything, they said, older relatives learned from them, in incidents that some recalled with great humor. For example, Pak Guru was tasked once as a young boy with taking a windfall profit from his father’s boat to the bank that was larger than the family’s usual income in six months. After some deliberation, his mother wrapped the money in a cloth bundle, and he recounted being so nervous about losing it that he arrived at the bank shaking all over. Today, observed Pak Guru dryly, he handled much larger sums regularly, in his wallet rather than wrapped up, and when he had to go to the bank, he went by car. In this new world, Pak Guru and other boat owners said that they had had to “look around” and take advise from peers in the village, further afield and abroad, and most recently online, for developing their business. They gradually forged connections of their own, established “cooperation” with entities from different layers of Java’s rich spiritual past, as well as with a cosmopolitan Islamic God and the banks, and tested what worked well over time. Taking my cues from this, I will examine their ecologies below as “assemblages” in Li’s (2014) specific sense of “ensemble(s) pulled together for a human purpose” (ibid., 194). If they contain entities from different provenance – Javanese, Middle Eastern, or European – then this is because they were drawn together from different layers of northern Java’s rich and varied political, economic and spiritual history. Boat owners’ ecologies form what Gago (2017) in a different post-colonial set­ ting has called “baroque” assemblages, patterns that bear the traces of their elements’ different histories, as well as of the needs and aspirations of the present.

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Entrepreneurial ecologies The needs and aspirations of the present are those of a generation of boat owners that successfully transformed themselves, individually and collectively, from rural poor into maritime entrepreneurs. I label their ecologies entrepre­ neurial, partly because the term is close to boat owners’ self-descriptions. Beyond that, academic arguments about entrepreneurship in Java that have long been dismissed in anthropology nevertheless help to understand these self-descriptions, including their presentism, as outcomes of Java’s recent politico-economic history, as I will argue below. Finally, ethnographic and comparative attention to the specificity of experiments in neoliberal entrepre­ neurship in different settings can help account, among other things, for understanding the plurality of ecologies among boat owners at Kali Sambong. This will be demonstrated in the end of this section with reference to just one example. In colonial and early post-colonial times, arguments about entrepreneur­ ship in Java’s “plural economy” (Furnivall 2010) were infused with ethnic stereotyping, pitting Chinese entrepreneurs against Javanese farmers (Alex­ ander and Alexander 1991, see also Alexander 1987). A sequel to these colo­ nial discourses emerged during Indonesia’s post-independence economic challenges and its New Order transition (e.g. Hill 2000, for fisheries see Krisnandhi 1969), then in terms provided by modernization theory. A famous anthropological example was Geertz’s (1963) Peddlers and Princes. Geertz set out to answer Rostow’s (1960) questions about the preconditions for eco­ nomic take-off based on ethnographic evidence from “Modjokuto” in Java and Tabanan in Bali. He was hoping to detect and explain the conditions for promising entrepreneurship and economic capacity among people who, qua colonial-era stereotyping, were not supposed to have either. Peddlers and Princes has been heavily criticized, mostly for the uncritical application of modernization theory (e.g. Wertheim 1995) and blindness to class (e.g. White 2014). From a different angle, McVey (1992) argued that entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia should be studied as an “elite occupation” (ibid., 24) and dismissed studies such as Geertz’s of “petty and middling entrepreneurs” (ibid., 9) outright. Her assumption of a stable opposition between elites and others, capitalism and culture have since been challenged on empirical grounds (Kahn 1980, 1999, Robison and Hadiz 2004). Moreover, her narrow definition of entrepreneurship has been overtaken by New Order devel­ opmentalism (Feith 1980, Aspinall and Fealy 2010) and post-New Order neoliberalism. Kali Sambong’s boat owners’ entrepreneurial self-descriptions can be read, and their ecologies can usefully be approached against the backdrop of these layered arguments about entrepreneurship. To begin with modernization the­ orists’ ideas of progress, those may have been dismissed in anthropology but nevertheless resonate powerfully in boat owners accounts of the recent his­ tory of the local fishery and their role in it. At Kali Sambong, progress

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emerged during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the export earnings of local fish traders and fishers involved in bottom-long-lining for export species remained relatively stable. They re-invested those earnings, and after some tinkering, hit on a highly profitable combination of fishing technology (Danish Seining), new processing methods and trade connec­ tions. This local modernist narrative of progress closely corresponded in form to that of the New Order government, which fishers supported. At the same time, sentiments not so different from McVey’s (1992) elitist arguments surfaced in their narratives. Boat owners pointed out that in the 1980s, when the government ran the first loan schemes for fishers, their seniors had correctly anticipated that bank loans were for rich people. They themselves, with their small boats, seasonal gear, and fluctuating catches, would not be able to keep regular loan repayment schedules. By the 2000s, however, this had changed. Danish Seiners could operate almost all year round, demand was strong and stable, and sources of capital accessible for fishers had multiplied. What used to be a dream of running a productive, profitable, and socially beneficial business of “providing protein for the nation” far beyond the reach of small fishers, had become true at Kali Sambong in the form of new fisheries products, lively trade, higher profits for boat owners and a rapidly growing fleet. Kali Sambong’s boat owners proudly called themselves entrepreneurs (wiraswasta) or maritime entrepreneurs (pen­ gusaha kapal). Many enjoyed reflecting on their personal business principles (prinsip usaha) and on economic theory in general (ilmu ekonomi). Some expressed pride in the local fishery being run entirely by local (pribumi), Javanese and not Chinese owners and capital, unlike the large trawling and purse seining fisheries in northern Java in the past. Entrepreneurship had thus turned from a set of economic policies and a demand imposed on fishers “from above” into an aspiration “from below” at Kali Sambong, as Gago (2017) has argued neoliberalism has among urban dwellers in Argentina. But how did shared entrepreneurial aspirations generate distinctive types of ecologies? Beyond the rich affordances of the local setting, I suggest that a key reason for ecological plurality is the informal economic setting and the self-taught development of entrepreneurship, which imposed few external constraints on boat owners’ ingenuity. This may best be demonstrated with reference to a contrastive example from the ethnographic literature, the coer­ cive constitution of entrepreneurial subjects and single ecologies in formal, top-down learning processes at Krakatau Steel in West Java in the early 2000s (Rudnyckyj 2010). When Krakatau Steel was under duress, the management organized compulsory workshops for workers to learn about the entrepre­ neurial virtues of self-responsibility, accountability, and pro-active behaviour. These virtues were presented to them as their duties as good Muslims. The purpose, from the perspective of the management, was to increase pro­ ductivity and perhaps prepare the workers for privatization. The result, as Rudnyckyj (ibid.) describes it, was a single “spiritual economy”, a business ethic infused with Islamic spirituality shared by the workers who

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had undergone the training. One might also describe this spiritual econ­ omy as an entrepreneurial ecology that was self-consciously spiritual and Islamic. If one contrasts this case with that of boat owners Kali Sambong, one may conclude that different, respectively more and less top-down, closely con­ strained, and managed entrepreneurial learning processes generate more or less singular or plural entrepreneurial ecologies. That is, singular ecologies arise where entrepreneurial activities and understandings are tightly regulated and coordinated by top-down processes. Plural ecologies, by contrast, emerge where self-taught entrepreneurs pragmatically grasp opportunities that pre­ sent themselves, and where constraints, coordination from above or a common “framing” of their activities and aspirations are weak. Kali Sam­ bong’s fishery falls in the latter category. Below, I outline the baroque entrepreneurial ecologies in which the boat owners whom I call Pak Guru, Bu Haji, and Bu Titik, respectively, situated their business histories and current activities. I draw on narratives and chunks of narratives from semi-structured interviews and social visits to their homes, in informal conversations on the edge of the auction hall during nights of unloading and selling fish, on a car on the way to buy supplies and during early morning walks on the beach. On those occasions, they narratively re­ assembled the assemblages of the entities and relations that made or broke their businesses. They did so at my request, as an outsider who wanted to understand what mattered to them; as will become apparent, however, in talking to me they were also carrying on a conversation with others at the village. They were responding to what they knew or supposed others at the village were saying about them, suspecting them of or criticizing them for. Presented below are cuttings of these assemblages, edited for the purpose of this volume to highlight the plurality of boat owners’ ecologies.

Pak Guru If one asks Pak Guru about his recipe for ongoing success, he puts a good captain first, followed by a strong net kept in good repair and a strong, stable, and spirited crew, which he tries to maintain with treats of coffee, cigarettes and snacks. In addition, working hard is important, and he does, indeed, spend a lot of time running errands for his boats, organizing spare parts, vis­ iting the bank, checking the engine, or calculating incomes against costs. The final factor for success, he says, is the ability to maintain and expand strong relations of cooperation with one’s bank. This requires punctually in repaying one’s loans, and purposefully increasing one’s trust with the banks by taking out progressively larger loans. Amidst all these duties and concerns, Pak Guru attends to other entities and relations that he is more circumspect in talking about. He sets time and money aside for the spiritual care for his boat and his family, as is common among fishers on the Java north coast, especially those whose work is physi­ cally or financially risky but promises high profits or incomes (Semedi 2003,

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291–313). Pak Guru maintains close relationships with several dukun (e.g. Woodward 2011, 61–112, see also Woodward 1985), also called wong pinter, clever people with connections to the invisible world. Three local dukun pro­ vide regular and routine support against a small fee per trip and occasional larger gifts. They bless the boat before an outing and provide the crew with incense and instructions for burning it at sea. One dukun also includes his boats in weekly night-long prayer sessions held on behalf of several owners and their boats, either at his home or at tombs of various ancestors and saints. The dukun visits the sites in turns, each when its power is at a peak according to the Javanese calendar. Thus, through his dukun, Pak Guru’s boats are inserted into the dynamics of spiritual power and blessings that animate the Javanese landscape, where powers are tapped at innumerable larger and smaller, more and less popular sites (Chambert-Loir and Reid 2002, 270–279: Pemberton 1994), by Muslims, Catholics (Laksana 2014), and those who claim no particular interest in either doctrinal creed but engage with local powers ostensibly pragmatically, for securing particular outcomes (e.g. Pemberton 1994, 270–286). Few boat owners are keen to talk about who exactly their dukun are. Where they pray and make offerings and to which spiritual beings is not something that boat owners are keen to talk about, either. One reason is that they are not willing to share the sources of their success with immediate competitors. Besides that, especially highly successful owners who are known to “go through” dukun risk inviting village gossip about using occult powers for competitive purposes, such as sending “sorcerer’s missiles” (Beatty 1999, 4) to block a competitor’s engine or bring illness to family members. Pak Guru and his siblings can recount many instances of such attacks directed at them, and like other owners, deny ever retaliating in kind. For Pak Guru, continuously aligning his business with the pulsating power of the dynamic spiritual landscape of Java is necessary rather than optional, not the least because he perceives of his business as having emerged from just such an alignment in the first place. Among several origin stories of his busi­ ness, two involve a mysterious stranger, a figure familiar from ethnography in the Austronesian world (Rutherford 2003).8 In one that Pak Guru and his family members enjoy telling, Pak Guru’s father, then a poor fisherman working a small boat without engine, helped another fisherman, an East Javanese whose boat had broken, to safely return to shore. From then onward, the father’s fishing luck improved. Thanks to his wife, an energetic businesswoman,9 he could save enough money for buying a bottom long-liner, the most profitable kind of fishing boat at Kali Sambong in the 1990s. Again, his wife saved his profits, and soon, Pak Guru’s father bought another boat, went on the haj, enlarged his house, and supported his children in founding their own businesses. He never forgot about the poor fisherman from East Java, who had since become a dukun in his home village, regularly visited and provided spiritual support to Pak Guru’s family. This dukun has also put them in contact with other healers and knowledgeable men and

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women all along the Java north coast, from Jakarta in the west to Sur­ abaya in the East, whom they draw on when in need.

Bu Haji The houses of Bu Haji and Pak Guru are less than two hundred meters apart, they are distant relatives, and they meet occasionally at the fish auction place when greeting their boats. Beyond those occasions, however, their daily lives unfold amidst different sets of human and non-human beings, important places, and activities. Less interested than Pak Guru in the technical details of boats, which she leaves to designated relatives to look after, Bu Haji is inten­ sely interested in those aspects of her business that transcend the technical. Unlike Pak Guru’s, however, her spiritual ecology is a transnational Islamic one. Bu Haji was abandoned as a child by her parents, grew up with an older sibling and escaped from an abusive first marriage by becoming a domestic helper in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, long before labour migration to the Middle East became common at Kali Sambong. She married a Saudi, and he set her up with her first boat. Although he remarried and they were divorced, he financed her second boat, as well. With two boats, Bu Haji had no difficulties accessing bank loans. In 2013, aged 53, she owned five Danish Seiners, two small, two medium-sized, and one fairly large. Bu Haji’s busi­ ness motto, which she offered spontaneously in conclusion of a chron­ ological account of her investments in boats one day in 2014, is the following: “As long as we are close to God, he will give. All that remains for us is to be grateful.” Bu Haji elaborated that the key to her success was that she continuously asked God for help in her prayers, and He had always granted her success. She had always used His blessings, the profits from her boats, for showing her gratitude, and for bringing herself and others yet closer to Him. He had always responded by giving yet more, and Bu Haji, in turn, had intensified her prayers. Her days were structured by daily prayers, set Qur’an reading times in the morning, followed by time for managing her boats and then her religious affairs and networks. When I asked, she expressed criticism of any arrangement in which one person works (the boat owner) and the other prays (the dukun). Her business flourished, she said, because she did both, sustain­ ing her business with her prayers and vice versa. Besides prayers, Bu Haji showed her gratitude by using the profits from her boats for pilgrimages to Mecca. A standard haj package cost about €2,500 in 2014, a little less than the operating costs for a 12-day trip of a small Danish Seiner. Umroh, the shorter yearly return visit for hajis, costs almost €2,000. While umroh is open for all who can afford it, the spaces for Indonesian pilgrims going to Mecca each year are limited. The contingents were already filled for years in 2014. Nobody seemed to quite know how, but Bu Haji had already gone on the haj twice – in 2008 and 2013 – and she had

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secured places for herself and different family members in 2020, 2023, and 2027. Bu Haji also served as an agent for people from Kali Sambong who lacked contacts, experiences, and knowledge of Arabic to make their own travel arrangements to visit Mecca. For every ten people she brought to the travel bureau whom she cooperated with, Bu Haji received one free slot for herself or family members. She stated emphatically that she was not interested in making money from helping others go on pilgrimage; she nevertheless fretted over the loss of customers to a competing agent when her ex-husband, out of spite, spread rumours about her. He was getting in the way of her thanking God, through her combined maritime and religious businesses. Bu Haji coordinated her visits to Mecca with those of many pilgrim friends whom she had met there and kept in touch with via Facebook. She was con­ stantly adjusting her umroh plans to match theirs. Especially close to her was a young Madurese man whom she had adopted as a son, and whom she chatted with via Facebook every night after the (optional) night prayers that both of them performed. Over the years, Bu Haji’s network had grown to include people from Sudan to Eastern Indonesia, and maintaining it required several hours a day spent on Facebook. Although Bu Haji was highly respected for her generosity and will­ ingness to help anyone in need, she felt that many in the village were willing to believe her ex-husband’s accusations that she went to Mecca for pleasure, to meet up with her Arabic ex-husband and possibly other men. Behind these accusations, and behind her extended religious quasi-kin networks and her specific relationship with God lay her difficult family history, which she remained silent about across many conversations. Not once did she mention her firstborn child, Bu Titik’s husband (see below). He, too, never mentioned her, and when I asked about their relationship, he responded with a sneer. He was struggling to make ends meet with Bu Titik, and without any support from his affluent mother. Others told me that he was her child from her abusive first marriage, which she had escaped by taking on migrant labour in Saudi Arabia. This indicates how this boat owner’s business history and its cosmopolitan Islamic ecology were underpinned by a specific family history that prompted her to look for connections elsewhere.

Bu Titik Bu Titik is the daughter of a fisher and owner of a small boat and a fish trader, neither of whom completed primary school. Bu Titik, however, insisted on continuing her education. She saved her pocket money and helped her mother at the fish auction place to demonstrate her commitment, and eventually, her parents let her study accounting at a vocational school. When she inherited her father’s boat, she put her knowledge and skills to use. There were no God, no father’s good deed in the past, and no dukun in her accounts of her business history. Instead, she argued that her fight for

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education, and then the education that she obtained had equipped her with the stubbornness, tenacity, clairvoyance, and skills she needed for running a mar­ itime business. Other boat owners praised her achievements in developing her business from one small old boat to two between 2010 and 2014, on her own and while helping her sister set up a fish trading business. Still, she was not popular among her peers. Her accounting knowledge, skills, and determination to confront any obstacles head on made it easy for her to spot and quantify the declining returns that many other small boat owners were at pains to deny at the time of my fieldwork. While they emphasized the unpredictability of incomes and the impossibility of making long-term predictions, Bu Titik was tracking both short-term fluctuations and long-term declining rates of growth and drew her own, devastating conclusions: the cost of petrol in particular had gone up as government subsidies had been gradually reduced, and the difference had not been matched by growing incomes. Bu Titik suggested that larger boats that could travel beyond the already highly exploited areas were doing much better. Thus, owners with a mix of larger and smaller boats, like Bu Haji, could do well. For owners with several medium-sized boats like Pak Guru, too, high overall returns made short-term fluctuations manageable and allowed owners to expand their fleets and incomes further. But for owners like Bu Titik, with one small and one second-hand, repair-intensive medium-sized boat, the future looked bleak. In 2014 she had therefore embarked on a strategy, first of diversification, and, eventually, of exit from the fishery. While exiting and shifting to an office job in a nearby urban centre was the stated dream of many boat owners, most postponed it to the next generation. They aimed to provide their children with the means and the education to leave fishery, by intensifying fishing efforts and their own incomes within it (Schneider 2018). Bu Titik, by contrast, had already invested parts of her incomes from boats, topped up by bank loans, in a business opportunity provided by a friend in Jakarta. She owned a truck that transported goods in Jakarta’s port. Her friend was overseeing the dayto-day operations. However, Bu Titik was not satisfied with the income and with her own lack of involvement, owing to the distance. In 2014 she was preparing to withdraw from this venture and concentrating on a new one. After plenty of research on the internet, she and her husband had decided to invest in recycling. They had rented a small workspace for sorting bottles for re-sale to a nearby recycling plant. Bu Titik had hired people who col­ lected the bottles, and she did the accounting. Her husband was responsible for the sorting and sale. Bu Titik observed how the world of figures, tables, and notebooks in which she felt knowledgeable, secure, and in control was both disturbed and enriched by what she learned about plastic. Plastic, she reported, came in an astonishing variety of qualities and therefore prices. She reflected that fish was diverse, too, but easy, as she had absorbed the knowl­ edge about fish prices and qualities since her childhood and could leave the

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rest to trusted traders. Setting up a bottle business, she had to teach herself the materiality of bottles, as far as it mattered for prices, from scratch. Bu Titik’s ecology, much like Pak Guru’s and Bu Haji’s, constituted a world overlapping with but nevertheless distinctive from those of other boat owners. Both her education and her pride in it were exceptional. Her uncompromising honesty about her assessment of her situation, which was not so different, in the end, from that of many other boat owners, did not help to make her popular among them, despite her respect for her achieve­ ments. At the same time, as she observed cheerfully, none of them shared her current professional interest in plastic, and she had no intention of sharing her insights. Fearing that her self-taught business might fail, she had informed only her family and closest acquaintances. When she needed advice on plastic, she found it online. While exceptional among her colleagues, some female high school students at Kali Sambong, who were continuing their schooling while their brothers had abandoned school to go to sea and earn money, spoke of future aspira­ tions similar to Bu Titik’s. By 2019, the majority of those girls had married crewmembers or financially struggling young boat owners and had all but disappeared under the burdens of raising small children on a fluctuating income. Some engaged in income-generating activities of their own within the narrow limits of what was socially acceptable for young married women at Kali Sambong. A few of them had moved away, either for marriage or for wage labour. It remains to be seen how the fishery might change, if and when these women involve themselves more directly in investment decisions.

Conclusion Pak Guru’s, Bu Haji’s, and Bu Titik’s ecologies, if reviewed side by side, demonstrate the plurality of ecologies among boat owners at Kali Sambong. Their specialized role in the fishery can account for certain similarities, espe­ cially for the lack of concern with fish, their habits and habitat, and their concerns with entities and relations that can help one “find money”. With respect to the particular entities and relations that constitute them, however, they differ. The three examples above indicate that particularities of life and family histories, the density of spiritual powers accessible to those with the necessary contacts and the uneven usage of educational possibilities can be detected behind these differences. There is no shortcut to understanding a boat owner’s ecology, and no single factor that can account for the differences. My suggestion has been that such plural ecologies emerge in settings where entrepreneurs are self-taught, where they pragmatically grasp oppor­ tunities that they perceive, and where there is little control or coordination that would provide a common framework for them to conceptualize their activities in a similar way. Under such conditions, boat owners are not only free but are also forced to draw on whatever is at hand for sustaining and

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developing their businesses, and for making sense of success and failure. While they do not conduct their businesses and do not develop their ecolo­ gies in complete isolation from one another, fear of gossip and an atmo­ sphere of competition can explain why knowledge about the businesses and ecologies of others beyond a close circle of family and trusted friends is limited. To conclude, I briefly return to boat owners’ resistance against government efforts to regulate the Danish Seining fishery by banning this gear type in national waters. It appears plausible to view this resistance as a response to the constraints on their entrepreneurship, which they perceived of as an abrupt reversal of earlier government interventions. They had become entre­ preneurs, as they liked to emphasize, at the request of the New Order gov­ ernment that they provide protein for the nation, and specifically for the growing urban population on Java that needed access to relatively cheap animal protein. Danish Seining had done an admirable job at fulfilling this need, though at considerable environmental costs. Moreover, many boat owners were heavily indebted. They emphasized that they had not had direct support from the government in their entrepreneurial ventures; their busi­ nesses were their own achievements. They were proud of them, and they would not let them go. Finally, with its capital bound up in boats and with debts to service, the government’s attempt to ban Danish Seining seemed unreasonable. However, for a deeper understanding of what boat owners stood to lose as a result of a ban on Danish Seining, a consideration of their entrepreneurial ecologies is helpful. As should be apparent now, these contain specific rela­ tions with specific entities that they have worked for years to build, sustain, deepen, and expand through their maritime businesses. These relations are valued and unfold their effects far beyond their professional lives. Connec­ tions with spirits or God, and deep convictions of what is rational and right transgress the divide between business and everyday life, and between work and family relationships. When the former suffers, the latter are affected not only at the financial, but also at the ecological level, the level of relationships among human and non-human entities. These ecologies differ, and so far, no united front of ecologically grounded resistance to the regulation of the fish­ ery has emerged. Still, the plural entrepreneurial ecologies are no less real than ecologies that appear more unified, more singular, from the perspective of an external hegemonic one that puts them at risk.

Notes 1 Northern Java’s Danish Seine fishery, based in five different ports of which Kali Sambong is one, has grown exponentially since the late 1990s, along with expand­ ing urban market and innovations in the local processing sector. This growth has been partly undocumented, difficult to measure exactly (see e.g. Prisantoso 2011), and has placed heavy burdens on fish stocks and the seafloor. The Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries attempted to ban Danish Seining in national waters

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in 2015, on environmental grounds. This plan was eventually aborted after three years of protests by fishers, delays and negotiations (see e.g. Semedi and Schneider 2021). In my research at Kali Sambong before, during and after this period of uncertainty, I have aimed to gain a detailed, ethnographically grounded under­ standing of Kali Sambong’s Danish Seining fishery from the perspectives of var­ ious participants. Fishing capacity has been discussed widely and for many years as a key factor in sustainable fisheries management. See e.g. Garcia and Newton (1995), Pauly et al. (2002), Beddington, Agnew, and Clark (2007), Cochrane and Garcia (2009). For Southeast Asian small-scale fisheries, see e.g. Pomeroy (2012). As documented for the Java Sea small-scale pelagic fisheries by Cardinale, Nugroho, and Hernroth (2009). With 20 of Kali Sambong’s boat owners, about a third of those active during the time of my fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured interviews, most in several sit­ tings, about their life and business histories. In addition, I spoke to them and to most other boat owners informally, either at home or at their workplaces, and observed them regularly as they supervised the unloading of their boats at the auc­ tion place. Stretching 13 months of fieldwork across six years has allowed me to build relationships, refine and verify my understanding of their businesses across time. After the deduction of operating costs, the income is divided 50:50 between owners and crew. This is a rule of thumb only. Actual calculations are more complex. A fish trader once made this parallel explicit by pointing out that “a bank is just like Dewi Lancar (the goddess of the Java Sea), we can ask for money, but the risk is great.” For a concise summary of the concept of aliran as it was popularized in anthro­ pology by Clifford Geertz and its limitations (see Hefner 1990, 221–222). A third, more complex one would require an analysis of occult economies exceeding the scope of this paper. The division of labour that ascribes the handling of spiritual powers to men and the managing of finances to women is well-known from the ethnographic literature on Java (Keeler 1985, Stoler 1977). Some women at Kali Sambong argue that men who claim that only women are good at handling money are merely seeking an excuse for leaving the task of household budgeting to their wife.

References Alexander, Jennifer. 1987. Trade, Traders, and Trading in Rural Java. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jennifer and Paul Alexander. 1991. “Protecting Peasants from Capitalism: The Subordination of Javanese Traders by the Colonial State.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33(2): 370–394. Aspinall, Edward and Greg Fealy. 2010. “Introduction: Soeharto’s New Order and its Legacy.” In Soeharto’s New Order and its Legacy: Essays in Honour of Harold Crouch, edited by Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, pp. 1–14. Canberra: ANU Press. Beatty, Andrew 1999. Varieties of Javanese Religion, An Anthropological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beddington, John R., David J. Agnew, and Colin W. Clark. 2007. “Current Problems in the Management of Marine Fisheries.” Science, 316(5832): 1713–1716. doi:10.1126/science.1137362.

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Cardinale, Massimiliano, Duto Nugroho, and Lars Hernroth. 2009. “Reconstructing historical trends of small pelagic fish in the Java Sea using standardized commercial trip based catch per unit of effort.” Fisheries Research, 99(3): 151–158. doi:10.1016/ j.fishres.2009.05.015. Chambert-Loir, Henri and Anathony Reid, eds. 2002. The Potent Dead: Ancestors, Saints, and Heroes in Contemporary Indonesia. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’I Press. Cochrane, Kevern L. and Serge Garcia, eds. 2009. A Fishery Manager’s Guidebook. Chichester, West Sussex and Ames, IA: Wiley Blackwell. de la Cadena, Marisol and Mario Blaser, eds. 2018. A World of Many Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feith, Heribert. 1980. “Repressive-Develomentalist Regimes in Asia.” Prisma, 19: 39– 55. Furnivall, John S. 2010. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gago, Véronica. 2017. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Garcia, Serge M. and Christopher Newton. 1995. Current Situation, Trends and Pro­ spects in World Capture Fisheries. Rome: FAO Fisheries Department. Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Economic Towns. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hefner, Robert W. 1990. The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretative History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hill, Hal. 2000. The Indonesian Economy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, Joel S. 1980. Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, Joel S. 1999. “Culturalising the Indonesian Uplands.” In Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power and Production, edited by Tania Murray Li, pp. 79–103. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Keeler, Ward. 1985. “Villagers and the Exemplary Center in Java.” Indonesia, 39(1): 111–140. Krisnandhi, Sulaiman. 1969. “The economic development of Indonesia’s sea fishing industry.” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 5(1): 49–72. doi:10.1080/ 00074916912331331342. Laksana, Albertus Bagus. 2014. Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explora­ tions through Java. Burlington, NJ: Ashgate. Li, Tania Murray. 2014. Land’s End, Capitalist Relations on an Indegenous Frontier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McVey, Ruth. 1992. “The Materialization of the Southeast Asian Entrepreneur.” In Southeast Asian Capitalists, edited by Ruth McVey, pp. 7–33. Southeast Asia Pro­ gram. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pauly, Daniel, Sylvie G. Christensen, Tony J. Pitcher, U. Rashid Sumaila, Carl J. Walters, Reg Watson, and Dirk Zeller. 2002. “Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries.” Nature, 418: 689–695. doi:10.1038/nature01017. Pemberton, John. 1994. On the Subject of “Java”. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pomeroy, Robert S. 2012. “Managing Overcapacity in Small Scall Fisheries in South­ east Asia.” Marine Policy, 36(2): 520–527. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2011.10.002.

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Prisantoso, Budi Iskandar. 2011. “Assessment and Management of the Dermersal Fisheries of the Java Sea, Indonesia.” (Unpublished Thesis; Master of Maritime Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong.) Robison, Richard and Vedi R. Hadiz. 2004. Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets. London: Routledge. Rostow, Walt W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rutherford, Danilyn. 2003. Raiding the Land of the Foreigners. Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press. Schneider, Katharina. 2018. “Precariousness and Prosperity among Javanese Fish Traders.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(3): 640–655. doi:10.1086/701027. Semedi, Pujo. 2003. Close to the Stone, far from the Throne, The Story of a Javanese Fishing Community, 1820s-1990s. Yogyakartra: Benangmerah. Semedi, Pujo and Katharina Schneider. 2021. “Fishers’ Responses to the Danish Seiner Ban and the History of Fisheries Governance on the Java North Coast.” Maritime Studies, 20(1): 43–62. doi:10.1007/s40152-020-00202-1. Sprenger, Guido and Kristina Großmann. 2018. “Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 33(2): ix–xxii. Stoler, Ann. 1977. “Class Structure and Female Autonomy in Rural Java.” Signs, 3(1): 74–89. doi:10.1086/493440. Wertheim, Wim F. 1995. “The Contribution of Weberian Sociology to Studies of Southeast Asia.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26(1): 17–29. doi:10.1017/ S0022463400010456. White, Ben. 2014. “Betting on the Middle? Middletown, Mojokuto and ‘Middle Indonesia’.” In In search of Middle Indonesia: Middle classes in provincial towns, edited by Gerry van Klinken and Ward Berenschot, pp. 35–48. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Woodward, Mark R. 1985. “Healing and Morality: A Javanese Example.” Social Science & Medicine, 21(9): 1007–1021. Woodward, Mark R. 2011. Java, Indonesia and Islam. Dordrecht: Springer.

9

The Reinvention of Moral Ecologies in Indonesia Thomas Reuter1

Introduction Ecologies are dynamic patterns of relation between human and non-human nature, which can have a destructive, or a sustaining, or even a regenerative impact on the natural environment. First and foremost, ecologies are a means of survival, and the elevated contemporary interest in ecologies is, in no small part. due to the simple fact that humanity’s survival is now acutely threatened by environmental collapse on a planetary scale, owing to the adoption of modernist ecologies that are unsustainable. Ecologies around the world were all once rather localized, diverse and tra­ ditional, and generally produced relatively more sustainable societies than what we see today. Complex and long-established interactions between vari­ able local environmental conditions and diverse cultural traditions ensured that there were countless different ecologies or ways of relating to nature. These relations were not always sustainable in the premodern period, but they clearly were not anywhere near as destructive of nature as are today’s mod­ ernist ecologies. It seems we need to journey back to the future, but the future can only be different if we understand history. Nearly all domains of life were transformed in the last century by the rise and global dispersion of a modernist, industrial, and consumerist way of life, originating in Western countries and underpinned by an instrumentalized version of scientific rationalism. Local ecologies around the world became less nuanced and more homogeneous under this influence, and ever more aggres­ sively extractivist. Traditional food systems lost their sustainability with a shift to a universalist, modern, industrial approach to agriculture in most countries. In Indonesia too, the loss of sustainable local food systems trig­ gered by this shift has undermined the integrity and biodiversity of the eco­ systems in which these food systems were embedded, as well as compromising human health and food security (Reuter 2019). Cultural landscapes once subject to the ritual maintenance of a living ancestral order were desacralized, land was separated from ritual and moral obligations, and its produce commodified.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-9

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In Indonesia and elsewhere, this destruction was justified by reasoning that the satisfaction of short-term human needs takes priority. This argument is not easily dismissed, and it persists today. Food insecurity is set to escalate in the 21st century, prompting dire warnings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (2015) and other international agencies. Indonesia is ranked 36th among countries worldwide that are most at risk of food inse­ curity, according to the UNU’s Global Risk Report 2016,2 and thus serves as a pertinent example of this dilemma. Mainstream food security policies pro­ posed by the global agricultural research complex, agro-corporations, and international development agencies and adopted by Indonesia and many other governments from the 1960s onward, thus keep promoting capital investments into ‘agroindustry’, the dissemination of new technologies (ran­ ging from mechanization and chemical inputs to biotechnology), the opening of national markets to food imports, and increased production of high-profit food crops for export in the name of the economic doctrine of competitive advantage. National policies based on this modernist ecology have favoured agro-cor­ porations with large land holdings, and ignored the needs of small farmers and their communities. The corporations tend to make profit-oriented rather than food security-oriented production decisions, however, and hence their products are mainly processed foods which are causing an epidemic of non­ communicable diseases (Shrimpton and Rokx 2013). Meanwhile small farm­ ers and fishers, without much support, continue to produce most of the world’s staple foods, as well as a vast diversity of healthy fresh foods, and do so in a more environmentally friendly way. In Indonesia’s case, for example, rice, legumes, vegetables, and fruit are produced mostly by smallholders who struggle to make a living from farming, not least because government market interventions depress rice prices to protect poor consumers (Kompas 2017). The first part of this paper presents a brief history of how the modernist approach to agriculture has impacted Indonesia, and describes the hege­ monic, homogenized scientific rationalist ecology it has sought to establish, in the name of food security but to the detriment of local moral ecologies and the health of people and environments. Ecologies became less local and less plural as a result. We now know that modernist ecologies are deeply flawed and produce a flawed approach to food production. The dramatic loss in agro-biodiversity we have already suffered worldwide in the wake of the Green Revolution (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations 2004), for exam­ ple, has reduced the resilience of food systems to escalating environmental shocks, such as we now can expect to occur with near certainty this century (Reuter 2017b). And yet, biodiversity loss is just one indicator of compro­ mised ecological health. Others include decreasing soil fertility, erosion, water scarcity, and pollinator decline. Finally, there is a steady loss of arable land to housing, infrastructure, and industrial development in modernizing coun­ tries like Indonesia. This loss has been compensated for by converting

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remaining pockets of forest and wetlands to farmland. The sacrifice of wilderness for the expansion especially of industrial agriculture, such as palm oil ‘biofuel’ plantations in Borneo and elsewhere, is emblematic of this juggernaut of destruction (Reuter 2011). The instrumental rationality of this approach is not truly rational, whether in a scientific or long-term economic sense, although there is certainly a narrow version of science and economics that has served to conceal the underlying motive of greed under the cloak of need. On the sociocultural side, the rise of modernist ecologies has been equally destructive. It has produced inequality of food access, owing to ever increasing income inequality and the simultaneous marketization of once very inclusive, traditional, moral ecology-based food systems (MacRae 2005). The still dominant neoliberal approach to farming has led to a gradual disappearance of locally sovereign food systems and asso­ ciated social safety nets, causing increased ‘market dependence’. Expanding corporate ownership along the entire food supply chain is leading to a condition of ‘market capture’ (Reuter 2015). A pattern of cartel formation and relentless profiteering has thus become characteristic of the global food market (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2006), of which Indonesia is a part. Calls for alternative economic models are becoming louder (e.g. Piketty 2013, Reuter 2017a), however, as pre­ vailing modernist extractivist policies threaten to cause cascading system failures, both socially and ecologically. In the past, food insecurity often has been ameliorated socially within moral economies based on culture-specific moral frameworks of norms and values and on practices of mutual aid (Scott 1976, 1985, Thompson 1993). The moral economies of local food systems have provided resilience to dis­ advantaged people around the world, who may otherwise have been food insecure or more severely so. These local moral economies were also moral ecologies, being not only more socially inclusive but also including the wider eco-system in its moral universe, often by way of religious ecologies and associated ritual observances. The tapestry of local ecologies was also plur­ alistic and diverse. Traditional ecologies are now largely destroyed or in severe disarray, as are the natural environments in which they operated. They have been replaced by a more homogenous modernist ecology that has seen nature as a mere object for study and economic exploitation. Ecologies also can be restored, however, to become more respectful again toward the environment. And, indeed, a large movement of smallholder farmers in Indonesia, together with affiliated non-governmental organizations and a minority of progressive agriculture experts, is looking to do just that. They are developing sustainable alter­ natives grounded in local knowledge of traditional farming, and establishing locally food-sovereign systems of production, distribution, and consumption. This farmers’ movement is simultaneously inspired by and linked to an international post-modern environmentalist movement that promotes

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sustainable agriculture. It is also wide open to the use of modern or innova­ tive technologies for regenerative agriculture. Overall, I shall argue, this farmers movement is not a simple return to past ecologies, but rather a post-modern reinvention of traditional moral ecologies that still lie within people's living memory in many parts of the country, augmented general ideas and practical solutions emerging from a contemporary international movement to make ecologies sustainable. Indonesia’s farmers movement is not a nostalgic regression but a serious struggle to turn the tide of ecological destruction. Simultaneously looking backward and moving forward, Indonesian farmers are adopting a broadly ‘regenerative’ stance. They are not alone. Indeed, even international agencies that have long advanced the cause of industrial agriculture are now becoming supportive of regenerative approaches to food security, drawing on global data sets and scenario simulations to support their case for a fresh start (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations 2004). They are thus beginning to challenge the hegemonic modernist views of agri-science and agri-business from the perspective of a new, ecological stream within postmodern science. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, to which 193 governments pledged their support in 2015, are perhaps the most obvious reflection of this global discursive shift. The second part of this paper looks at the accomplishments of Indone­ sia’s sustainable farming movement, focusing on the ‘Union of Indonesian Farmers’ (Serikat Petani Indonesia). It will show how plural ecologies with post-modern, eclectic features are re-emerging in Indonesia in response to serious environmental and social challenges, and weight up whether this movement may turn the tide of environmental destruction.

Modernity as ecocide: a brief history of food system change in Indonesia The recent rise of Indonesia’s sustainable farmers movement, to be discussed in the following section, needs to be understood as a response to a specific historical process. I thus begin with an account of this history of changing ecologies and associated agricultural practices in Indonesia, with a focus on the island of Java. The transformation of Indonesian agriculture and farming communities is also an apt illustration of the short-term benefits and dis­ astrous longer-term consequences of agro-industrial approaches to food security in general. Local food systems in Indonesia have had their production, trade, and consumption patterns thoroughly transformed in the wake of state and industry-sponsored interventions and ‘modernizations’, beginning in the colonial era and accelerating since the late 1960s, as is true of most countries in the developing world. This historical process can be roughly divided into four stages, as follows.

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Colonialism and the early transformation of Indonesian agriculture Indonesian indigenous agriculture is difficult to reconstruct in an ideal-typical sense and it certainly has never been static (Fox 1992). In nearly all cases, however, agricultural cycles of production were steeped in ritual performances directed at the spirits of founding ancestors or deities associated with fertility, such as the rice goddess, Dewi Sri. Land access was almost always associated with ceremonial and social obligations. Landscapes were home to a diversity of invisible beings with whom humans coexisted and who needed to be con­ sidered. Nature was thus seen as permeated with agency and its own distinct interests. Agriculture and its ritual were locally adapted to locally very diverse cli­ matic conditions and seasonal cycles, for example, to the east and to the west of the Wallace line. Cultural differences, although they were not radical among the related peoples of this archipelago, also played a role in generating a plurality of traditional ecologies. Indian culture and later Islam and Chris­ tianity gained influence on ecological thinking in some parts of the archipe­ lago but not others, creating a relatively thin patchwork overlay of introduced ideas about nature. Indonesian ecologies were indeed never entirely isolated. Local ecologies showed varying degrees of commodification of agricultural produce, ranging from almost entirely subsistence-based ecologies in some parts of the archipelago, to the large surplus-producing irrigated rice econo­ mies of the Javanese hinterland, to ecologies in the Moluccas that, for cen­ turies, engaged in spice production for sale to Indian, Chinese, Arab and, eventually, European traders. Despite the variability and openness of indigenous ecologies, they remained largely self-directed until the colonial period, when agriculture was in part subsumed under a foreign economic system. This was a major incision. As Nevins and Peluso (2008, 16–17) point out: changes and privatization of access or control over nature and resources deploy various legitimation techniques, including the terms of science, moral authority, and violence to justify and further their projects. This results in the development of unique forms of accumulation that articu­ late with the specific characteristics of particular resources and with the production of new forms of knowledge about these processes and their associations with different or new owners and users. On the island of Java, where Dutch colonial intervention in the agroecology was particularly pervasive, processes of foreign acquisition transformed local ecologies profoundly. The introduction of the so-called ‘culture system’ (Dutch Cultuurstelsel) in 1830, forced farmers to help produce export cash crops such as sugar and coffee by providing their labour to large plantations in lieu of land tax payments (Geertz 1966, 53–59). The scheme was partly an adaptation of the indigenous aristocracy’s method of demanding corvée

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labour from peasants to help cultivate the large land holdings the latter required in order to provision their armies with rice. The crops cultivated for the colonial rulers, however, were not for subsistence. Rather, a twotrack rural economy began to take shape, juxtaposing a colonial economy of export enterprises geared towards cash crops and profit, with a parallel indigenous agriculture system left with the thankless task of cheaply pro­ ducing the rice and other staples needed to sustain a labour force for the former. In short, indigenous agriculture remained very significant but was rendered invisible and economically subservient. Geertz describes a dual system of: large-scale, well capitalized, rationally organized estate agriculture which by 1900 accounted for 90 percent by value of Indonesia’s exports […], and was essentially not part […] of the Indonesian economy at all, but of the Dutch. (Geertz 1966, 61) This dual economy reflected also a dual ecology. The new plantation agri­ culture was imposed suddenly and was not integrated into the kind of ritual order that continued to regulate production and distribution of traditional crops such as rice, but also of ‘localized’ crops such as maize (Reuter 2002, 372). The ecologies and general attitudes toward nature associated with cash crops such as sugar, and with its mode of production, were essentially mod­ ernist and European. This modernist, rationalist worldview was embodied in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy, which employed many Dutch-educated Indonesians who later became the local carriers and domesticators of a new, ‘modern worldview with Indonesian characteristics’, and the creators of associated ecologies focused on the ‘development’ (pembangunan) needs of the modern Indonesian nation state (Arnscheidt 2009, 117–124). Modernism was thus appropriated and somewhat domesticated in Indonesia, especially after independence. The ingenuity of the local peasant population in navigating these tectonic changes is genuinely remarkable. They managed to sustain themselves on more or less the same amount of land, despite a fourfold population increase in the period 1830–1900. That per-capita productivity remained static under these adverse conditions, thanks to greater intensification and efficiency, was a major achievement that is not adequately reflected in Geertz’ use of the term ‘agricultural involution.’ Indigenous agriculture, although pushed to the limit and augmented with new crops like maize and cassava, was not fundamentally transformed but continued to be dominated by smallholder farmers and a substantial underclass of poor, landless sharecroppers, all with largely traditional attitudes toward nature and maintaining a ritual approach to food production and distribution.

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The plantation economy was also not static. It became gradually less state driven and mutated into an increasingly corporatized and highly capitalized agro-industry by 1900. Geertz notes that by 1938, toward the end of colonial rule, some 2,400 estates occupied 2.5 million ha of land in Indonesia, half of it on Java. This corporate colonialism somewhat foreshadowed the postindependence modus operandum. Indonesian independence: farmers leading social reforms A series of turbulent events, from the Great Depression to the occupation of The Netherlands by Germany in 1940, the Japanese occupation of the archi­ pelago in 1942 and the subsequent independence struggle, opened up the opportunity for the formation of a new Indonesian Republic under the lea­ dership of its founding president, Sukarno. The young republic was faced with the difficult task of reshaping the dual agrarian system inherited from the Dutch. The dual system went briefly into reverse gear. By 1958 one-half of the plantation land had been claimed by small farmers and returned to sub­ sistence agriculture. Rice fields (sawah) formerly leased to sugar plantation businesses were returned to rice production in some areas, feeding a popula­ tion destined to quadruple yet again in the remainder of the 20th century. The necessary intensification of agriculture reduced the scope for nature preserva­ tion and ritual sensitivities at a practical level. In Java, however, the ritual aspects of agricultural production were also marginalized under the powerful influence of a new brand of modernist Islam, a movement that first arose among western educated, ‘modern’ Indonesians and was intolerant of ‘preIslamic’ or syncretistic rituals and beliefs (Ricklefs 2012). Land reform and social justice programs introduced by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its rural wing, the Indonesian Peasants Front (BTI) were leading to an unprecedented politicization of the peasantry at this time, reflecting another and competing modernist ideology: farmers were attracted by these programs, and by the party’s vision of social justice. Others […] by the severity of rural poverty and inequalities in land ownership and control. […] In 1955, BTI declared its membership had reached 3 million and the PKI was placed fourth in the 1955 general election, with much of its vote garnered in the countryside. When a new share-tenancy law and the basic agrarian law were promulgated in 1960, […] these laws provided the PKI and BTI with a legal basis to escalate their demands for the destruction of feudalism. The BTI […] campaigned for tenant farmers to receive a fairer share of the crops they produced […]. By 1962 BTI had around 5 million members. (Bachriadi 2012, 1)

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A fourth driver of modernism in the sphere of agricultural ecologies, apart from bureaucratization, Islam and Marxism, was modern science and tech­ nology. Some agricultural mechanization and synthetic fertilizer use began under Sukarno, although his general hostility toward foreign aid, loans and ‘development assistance,’ which he saw as the instruments of a neo-imperialist come-back, kept the influence of agri-science and agribusiness to a modest scale. Land reform also wound back some of the corporatization of the agri­ cultural sector. Farmers of the New Order: passive recipients of ‘Train & Visit Program’ and ‘Green Revolution’ packages This situation changed dramatically with the military coup of 1965 and a subsequent genocidal purge of communist farmer activists and other pro­ gressive elements. General Suharto’s regime now accepted all the foreign aid on offer, launching a new phase in Javanese agricultural policy. A massive and authoritatively enforced ‘Green (Counter-) Revolution’ began. The approach was revolutionary in that it imposed a radically new, socially, and ecologically aggressive agricultural model on local food production that did away with all the moral concerns of traditional ecologies and gradually marginalized small farmers. Indonesia’s independent farmers movement was outlawed, its leaders killed or imprisoned and all others forcibly depoliticized. State-controlled ‘village unit cooperatives’ took the place of independent cooperatives. Farmers assigned to these local units were situated at the bottom or ‘receiving’ end of a hierarchical state bureaucracy led by the ministry of agriculture. The same farmers who had managed to feed populous Java for centuries were suddenly recast as ignorant, their knowledge and culturally modulated relationship to the environment irrelevant. To use the words of one informant, they were politically and professionally ‘brain washed’ (cuci otak). Stripped of their dignity and poise, Indonesia’s rural population became alienated from their own land (Winarto 2013). Agricultural rituals were dismissed by authorities and largely disappeared in Java and elsewhere, although some elements persist until today. The new wave of agricultural industrialization was driven by massive use of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, replacement of indigenous rice with high-yield hybrid varieties such as IR5 and IR8, and mechanization (Fox 1993b). Yields rose spectacularly at first, but the Green Revolution also led to severe ecological impacts, including soil degradation, declining soil fertility, nutrient deficiency, erosion and water pollution, and associated public health issues (Fox 1991, Buresh, Witt, and Pasuquin 2007). Worse, the large early yield increases were plateauing by the 1990s (Fox 1993a). Rice yields rose much more quickly in the 25-year period 1965–90 (from 1.77 to 4.30 t/ha) than in the period 1991–2014 (from 4.35 to 5.13 t/ha), namely by 243 vs. 18 percent respectively (Ricepedia 2018).

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The Indonesian state frequently forced farmers to take up combined seed­ fertilizer-credit packages under the auspices of the Bimbingan Massal (BIMAS) or ‘mass guidance’ program for agricultural modernization (Booth 1988, 148). This was accompanied by a domineering, top-down farmer re­ education program referred to as the ‘Train and Visit’ model. At times, the state’s development agenda was advanced also through intimidation and the destruction of fields with local rice varieties by the military (Thorburn 2015). Farmers thus were made dependent on the agro-industrial sector for a supply of chemical and seed inputs, and on the state for subsidies of up to 50 percent to make these inputs affordable. The one element of continuity was that the New Order state, like the colo­ nial state before it, expected farmers to display social solidarity by subsidizing industrial and agribusiness labour (Subejo 2013). While yields and overall production increased, farmers’ incomes were kept low by the interventions of the ‘National Logistics Agency’, BULOG. The agency frequently flooded the rice market with imports or from its own stockpile to keep consumer prices low at farmers’ expense. This practice continues until today, as a recent article illustrates:

Figure 9.1 Remnants of Traditional Food Culture in Java: Gunungan, Yogyakarta Royal Palace, 2017 Photograph by the author.

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Thomas Reuter While the government is importing rice to help bring down the price, harvest season has begun and farmers have been hit hard […] the price of unhusked rice […] had dropped to Rp 4,200 (31 US cents) per kilogram from Rp 5,500 per kg a few days ago. It means each farmer earns Rp 1,300 [23.6%] less for each kilogram of rice sold. The government announced that it would import 500,000 tons of rice to ease prices, which had exceeded the price ceiling, particularly in urban areas. (Jakarta Post 2018, 1)

From Farmer Field Schools to a New Independent Farmers Movement Toward the end of his reign, General Suharto took a number of populist deci­ sions to shore up waning public support. This period saw a shift to some new approaches in agriculture. When a massive brown plant-hopper (BPH) infesta­ tion threatened to devastate the rice harvest in Java in 1986, triggered by the loss of predator species that previously had held this pest in check, owing to pesticide overuse, Suharto issued a degree (INPRES 3/1986) to ban many of the most harmful pesticides and restrict the use of others. The new Integrated Pest Man­ agement (IPM) model required active farmer participation and engagement, however, and thus was implemented through so-called Farmer Field Schools (FFS). While there is some debate about their universal effectiveness (Resosu­ darmo and Yamazaki 2011), the BPH outbreak was soon brought under control, only to re-emerge when a new government failed to continue these FFS-based IPM programs (for a detailed history, see Fox 2018, Winarto 2004). In any case, the use of a more participatory FFS approach had unexpected side effects on general farmer morale. As Craig Thorburn reports: IPM farmer groups [trained in FFS programs] began participating in local Independence Day parades and other festivals, waving banners fes­ tooned with integrated pest management slogans, and carrying giant

Figure 9.2 Indonesia Rice Import Fluctuations. Adapted from Index Mundi 20173

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anatomically correct models of predacious lycosid and linyphiid spiders. From the outset, IPM in Indonesia took on the hallmarks of a movement. (Thorburn 2015, 11) Farmer field schools thus may have paved the way for the subsequent resur­ gence of farmers’ movements during the Reformasi period, after the fall of the New Order regime in 1998. New and once again independent farmers move­ ments multiplied in the new democratic environment, comprising local initia­ tives as well as mass organizations with a social justice agenda and considerable political clout (Bachriadi 2012). This contemporary situation must be understood as the latest chapter of the long history of changing ecologies outlined above. The recent and current part of this history is char­ acterized by the gradual decline of a hegemonic modernist ecology and the resurgence of plural ecologies at the local level, based on a blend of revitali­ zation and innovation, tradition and postmodern eco-science.

Reinventing Plural Ecologies from below: an Indonesian farmer’s movement for sustainability There is growing international recognition that smallholder farming is vital to food security and sustainability. A recent report notes that farmers on small and relatively biodiverse farms feed two-thirds of the world with healthy food on less than a quarter of arable land, while corporate farming tends to spe­ cialize on mass-producing sugar- and fat-rich foods, bioethanol, and biodiesel (Herrero 2017). Similar observations have been made about the socio-ecolo­ gical advantages of small fisheries compared with large commercial opera­ tions (Chuenpagdee and Pauly 2008). An important report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technol­ ogy for Development (2008), meanwhile, has recognized the potential of small scale, organic farming to feed the entire world, and expressed concerns about plans by the agrobusiness camp to launch a second, genetically modified organism-based Green Revolution. In Indonesia today, organic farming – certified or not – is booming, based on a lot of grassroots and some government support. Rapid growth in organic farming, from 40,970 to 238,872 ha between 2007 and 2010, was first based on a farmers’ movement. The Indonesian government, followed by some provincial and local governments has since entered the fray (Sertori 2011). Its Go Organik 2010 campaign boldly envisages Indonesia to become the world’s biggest organic food producer (Kementrian Pertanian 2010). A number of support schemes were set up to inform farmers of modern organic farming technologies and new marketing strategies. Unfortunately, however, organic farms officially declined in 2011 as many farmers decided not to renew formal certification, owing to the crippling costs, leaving 59.8% of organic farms uncertified (Mayrowani 2012). A national certification scheme

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had been set up by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2002, and later augmented by a number of well-recognized private schemes, such as Pamor (supported by Aliansi Organik Indonesia), which try to use self-monitoring principles to reduce the cost of policing farmers. The national standard (SNI No. 01-6729­ 2002) is too rigid for many farmers to comply with, however, and many reported to me that compliance costs were exacerbated by the rent-seeking behaviour of officials. In general, top-down initiatives led by the state or com­ mercial actors have struggled to inspire lasting farmer engagement in the postReformasi era, while grassroots initiatives tend to be robust (MacRae 2011). This applies in particular to farmer-led initiatives grounded in a simultaneous revival or recreation of ‘resilience communities’ of the kind Bankoff (2003) has described in the Philippines. Localized farmer cooperatives Many thousands of independent farmers’ cooperatives formed in Java in the Reformasi era since 1998, and many more on other islands. I have elsewhere described four of these cooperatives, Rukun Makaryo, located in the village of Pereng, Mojogedang district, Karanganyar regency, Central Java; the Joglo Tani sustainable farming school north of Yogyakarta; the Bumi Langit per­ maculture project run by a Muslim community to the east of Yogyakarta, and the Lumbung Tani Lestari cooperative with an associated Credit Union, TYAS Menunggal in Bantul, south of Yogyakarta (Reuter and MacRae 2019). Shared elements include a strong emphasis on intensive and free farmer education, social solidarity (Jav. rukun), consumer friendly prices, direct marketing, and somewhat less common, local credit provision, financial management advice, or mobile phone-based, direct-marketing tools for farmers and communities. Building one-stop supply chains, reviving culture and community, and strengthening local food system resilience are the key aims shared by independent local farmer groups. The strategies they have developed for networking and cooperation are now gradually being trans­ ferred to include artisan workers and other groups in the local economy, and rules of ‘symbiotic cooperation’ are being established to secure livelihoods for all participants. In sum, these are local social movements that are reinventing livelihoods and moral ecologies from the ground up, combining traditional and modern elements. The Union of Indonesian Farmers The new farmers movement is not only operating at a local level but has established also new, re-politicized national ‘mass organizations’ (ormas). In essence these are federations formed by the countless small, local, indepen­ dent farmers cooperatives that proliferated in the Reformasi period, and reflect their ethos of fierce independence. One farmer activist explained this

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with a metaphor, saying that mass movements are the political ‘warships’, while farmers’ cooperatives are the economic and social ‘supply ships’. The most significant among the former is Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI), the ‘Union of Indonesian Farmers’.4 Originally known as FSPI (Federasi Serikat Petani Indonesia), this organization was founded at a national gath­ ering of farmers on 8 July 1998 in the village of Lobu Ropa, Asahan regency, North Sumatra, only eight weeks after the resignation of General Suharto from the presidency (21 May 1998). This event marked the rebirth of inde­ pendent farmer mass organizations (ormas) after 32 years of political oppression, making use of political freedoms once again available under a new democratic system. Other such mass organizations include the ‘Fraternity of Friends of Farmers and Fishers’ (Persaudaraan Mitra Tani Nelayan),5 the development conflict-focused ‘Agrarian People’s Communication Forum’ (Forum Komunikasi Masyarakat Agraris, founded 22 December 2011 in Kulon Progo), the new umbrella organization ‘Farmers Movement of the Indonesian Archipelago’ (Gerakan Petani Nusantara, founded 21 January 2016) and several others, all of which are closely interlinked. This case study focuses on SPI,6 which, with more than a million members, has considerable political clout, enabling it, for example, to stage public demonstrations or engage in direct bargaining with political parties during election campaigns offering informal block-voting deals. With branches in Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, West Papua, Nusa Tenggara Timur, and Nusa Tenggara Barat, SPI is promoting an agenda of sustainability, food sovereignty, and agrarian renewal based on a blend of neo-traditional and modern organic farming methods and the strengthening of local communities and economies. Human rights, land reform, fair trade, and other agrarian justice issues, as well as protection of the environment, are the central preoccupations. Consistent with their human rights commitment, the organization does not believe in encouraging the production of organic food with the aim of achieving a premium price domestically or on interna­ tional markets, as this would compromise the human right to healthy food of consumers with low incomes. Farmers are instead meant to benefit from going organic by reducing their input costs and increasing long-term yields, for example, by reducing vulnerability to pests through the use of local varieties. Intensive farmer education and training field schools convey information on the preparation and use of solid and liquid organic fertilizer; organic pes­ ticides; sustainable land management; prevention, identification, and eradica­ tion of pests; crop observation; harvesting and storage; as well as organizational skills and human resources management within cooperatives. This education is continuous and can take several years, with regular visits by trainers and community facilitators. There is some educational collaboration with like-minded Indonesian academics, who are a minority in still agro­ technology-dominated agriculture faculties, but SPI prefers to use its own experts. Most notable are the “young farmers schools” (sekolah tani mudah,

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or Sekti Muda), which seek to address the problem of aging among Indone­ sia’s farmers (Laksmana, Andriyuni, and Langgara 2020). Education is also to a large extent lateral, as farmers exchange knowledge with their peers, some of whom are specialized in one area. One group of members have become experts in sovereign, organic fish farming, for example, and are propagating their model far and wide. Meanwhile, another SPI member in Sleman, Mr Udik, a specialist in the use of a wide array of microorganisms and herbal tonics for agriculture and is now sharing his knowledge through the entire SPI network. Note that experiential knowledge in agro-microbiology is quite advanced in Indonesia. Some SPI activists demonstrated this, when they were able to travel abroad and participate in peer exchanges with farmers at the international level, facilitated by global partner organizations such as the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty or La Via Campesina.7 Seed sovereignty is another priority. SPI member Mr Surono Danu from Lampung, South Sumatra, has collected seeds of 124 local rice varieties, and the SPI network as a whole has collected some 250 varieties of local rice, as well as many traditional varieties of other food plants, which are shared among members through an ingenious seed multiplication scheme. This is no

Figure 9.3 A shelf in Mr Udik’s farmer laboratory Photograph by the author.

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easy matter, because trade in ‘uncertified’ and ‘non-standardized’ seed is criminalized in Indonesia. In 2012 six farmers in Kediri were arrested for selling their own maize seed, based also on false intellectual property rightinfringement accusations by a commercial seed company. SPI took the matter to a judicial review and the court granted farmers permission henceforth to produce, select and distribute seed on a local scale. SPI farmers are able to produce their own high-quality maize seed, for example, at 1/14th of the price of commercial seed. Local heritage rice varieties, meanwhile, have shown resistance to pests and yields that compare favourably to hybrids under organic cultivation. SPI members view the government and its policies as firmly aligned with the interests of the agroindustry, although some improvement has been noted under the current president. One activist commented that the government appears ‘for the first time to be on the side of farmers,’ at least partially, providing free organic certification to some members, supporting seed sover­ eignty (although still favouring hybrids) and fertilizer sovereignty. SPI there­ fore has opened up to cooperation with government agencies where possible. But conflicts also persist. For example, a government field officer (petugas

Figure 9.4 An SPI-run organic catfish farm threatened by its own success Photograph by the author.

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penyuluh lapangan) recently threatened a SPI-run organic catfish farm with closure, in the name of consumer protection, because they had the audacity of producing their own fish feed granules from abundant organic materials, rather than using the much more expensive and chemical-laden but “certified” industrial version. This fish farm model is achieving returns on capital of 20 percent per month. Apart from organic feed, it also uses local microorgan­ isms to purify the water and prevent diseases. The innovation capacity of SPI’s mutual help and education system is for­ midable. One initiative worth emulating elsewhere is an ingenious crop-failure insurance scheme, allowing farmers to use recyclable by-products such as manure or rice straw rather than money to pay premiums. Pilot insurance projects in Kalimantan and Java are progressing well. With extreme weather incidents becoming more frequent, crop insurance can help farmers stay in business. The coherence of Java’s sustainable and just food movement is so great now that the knowledge transfer of any such innovation is very rapid.

Conclusion The case of the Union of Indonesia Farmers described above shows how farmers in Indonesia are developing their own creative solutions, locally and in national mass organizations. They are enacting different, post-modernist ecologies, sometimes against or beyond state hegemony, sometimes in colla­ boration with it. Indonesian farmers, in conscious community with other activists around the world, are contemplating the prospect of an emerging post-state crisis condition and are thinking it is time they looked after them­ selves by rebuilding plural, localized and morally responsible ecologies from the ground up. Food is a key trope for a growing concern for survival, with the help of a renewed sharing economy. And food is also a primary focus of people’s practical response to the breakdown of the ecologies they depend upon. Food system change is thus a key to understanding emerging new ecologies in Southeast Asia and beyond. My observations suggest that sustainable agricultural methods and moral economy principles of production and distribution are inseparable parts of the ecological thinking of the new farmers movement. The creation of local food systems designed to deliver food security to consumers, livelihood security to farmers and the restoration of sustainable ecologies is all part of an integrated agenda. To focus solely on the value of healthy ecologies and elite organic diets, they argue, is not enough (see also Winnett 2011, iii). The new ecologies are thus moral in a dual sense: socially and environmentally. Promotion of such ecologically and socially responsible ecologies and corre­ sponding food systems around the world will help to address the global food gap by strengthening the small farmers who feed us. Traditional, local knowledge-based farming and tech-savvy (modern) variants of organic farm­ ing can be combined for this purpose.

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While it is unlikely that Javanese farmers will ever return to some of their earlier ritual observances, they now do look back at them more kindly than was the case in the heyday of modernist thinking. One organic farmer pointed out to me that “we are just beginning to realize the wisdom of our grand­ parents. The offerings of fermented rice they deposited in the fields, for example, they contained MOL [local microorganisms] that we are only now rediscovering for the treatment of plant diseases.” Heritage varieties of food plants are rediscovered and celebrated anew as farmers learn about the power of localized evolutionary adaptation and the coevolution of humans and domestic plants. Traditional Javanese values such as rukun (social coopera­ tion) are reframed as sensible economics. Farmers are inspired by this kind of thinking to form a direct alliance with consumers and thus take ‘the market’ out of food systems. This is already happening, with a variety of initiatives sponsored by InProSuLA, SPI or local farmer movements reaching out to their communities, to create what they refer to as ‘symbiotic cooperation’ networks. These networks of moral community – a community that also includes non-human nature – deserves recognition as a best practice model for a transition to sustainable food systems elsewhere. Javanese ecologies and associated perceptions of nature, once seen as the sacred abode of invisible spirit beings, then cast down to become the mere object of extractive greed, it seems, are now settling in somewhere in the middle. Nature and human society are now portrayed as on a par, interdependent, sub­ ject to a similar logic, and equally deserving of care and respect in the minds of the many farmers in this movement who I was able to interview. There is a renewed plurality of approaches; for example, some farmers are more inspired by a new, ‘green’ Javanese Islam. But overall, there is a common trend toward more sustainable and nature-friendly ecologies, pushing back against a still powerful modernist model of extractivist agriculture.

Notes 1 After obtaining his PhD from ANU in 1997, Thomas Reuter taught at Heidelberg University and held a sequence of prestigious fellowships and a full professorship at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute, where he is currently a professorial fellow. He was President of the Australian Anthropological Association (2002–05), chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (2008–12), Senior VicePresident of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2009–18), an executive member of the International Social Science Council (2013– 18) and a board member of Future Earth (Asia; 2015–20). He is on the board of the World Academy of Arts and Science, and a fellow of the European Academy of Science and Academia Europaea. Research in Indonesia has focused on indigenous people, new social movements, religion, power elites, globalization, climate change policy, and food security. This article draws on a current Australian Research Council-funded research project on Indonesian food systems. 2 https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:5763/WorldRiskReport2016_small_meta.pdf (p.62).

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3 See www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=id&commodity=milled-rice&grap h=imports. 4 www.spi.or.id. 5 www.facebook.com/PersaudaraanMitraTaniNelayanIndonesia. 6 Data are based on extensive interviews with leading SPI members and several field visits to locations where SPI is running education and development programs in 2017. 7 See: www.foodsovereignty.org and https://viacampesina.org/en.

References Arnscheidt, Julia. 2009. Debating Nature Conservation: Policy, Law and Practice in Indonesia: A discourse analysis of history and present. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Bachriadi, Dianto. 2012. “Fighting for Land.” Inside Indonesia (online issue 107); www.insideindonesia.org/fighting-for-land. Bankoff, Greg. 2003. “Cultures of Coping: Adaptation to Hazard and Living with Disaster in the Philippines.” Philippine Sociological Review, 51(4): 1–16. Booth, Anne. 1988. Agricultural development in Indonesia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin Australia. Buresh, R. J., C. Witt, and J. M. C. Pasuquin. 2007. “Fertilizer best management practices in Southeast Asia, paper presented at the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) International Workshop on Fertilizer Best Management Prac­ tices, 7–9 March 2007.” Brussels, Belgium. Chuenpagdee, Ratana and Daniel Pauly. 2008. “Small is beautiful? A database approach for global assessment of small-scale fisheries: preliminary results and hypotheses.” In Reconciling Fisheries with Conservation: Proceedings of the Fourth World Fisheries Congress, edited by J. L. Nielsen, J. J. Dodson, K. Friedland et al., pp. 575–584. Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society, Symposium 49. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. 2004. “What is Agrobio­ diversity?” A fact sheet in the Training Manual “Building on Gender, Agrobiodi­ versity and Local Knowledge”. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. 2015. “The State of Food Insecurity in the World.” Fox, James J. 1991. “Managing the ecology of rice production in Indonesia.” In Indonesia: Resources, Ecology, and Environment, edited by Joan Hardjono, pp. 61– 84. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Fox, James J. 1992. The Heritage of Traditional Agriculture Among the Western Aus­ tronesians. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies: Australian National University. Fox, James J. 1993a. “Ecological policies for sustaining high production in rice: Observations on rice intensification in Indonesia.” In Southeast Asia’s Environ­ mental Future, edited by Harold Brookfield and Yvonne Byron, pp. 221–224. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Fox, James J. 1993b. “The Rice Baskets of East Java: The Ecology and Social Context of Sawah Production.” In Balanced Development: East Java in the New Order, edited by Howard Dick, James J. Fox and J. A. C. Mackie, pp. 120–157. Singapore: Oxford University Press.

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Fox, James J. 2018. “The threat to rice production in Java in by planthopper pest outbreaks.” LEGATO Ecosystems Services, Rice Planthopper Project; https://rice hopper.wordpress.com/category/bph-outbreaks. Geertz, Clifford. 1966. Agricultural Involution, The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Herrero, Mario et al. 2017. “Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis.” The Lancet Planetary Health, 1(1): 33–42. www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30007–30004/fulltext. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. 2008. “Industrial Agriculture and Small-scale Farming.”. In IIASTD report on Agriculture at a Crossroads: Findings and recommendations for future farming. www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/industrial-agriculture-and-sma ll-scale-farming.html. Jakarta Post. 2018. “Unhusked rice price drops, farmers hit hard.” 30 January 2018; www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/01/30/unhusked-rice-price-drops-farmers-hit-ha rd.html. Kementrian Pertanian. 2010. Rencana Strategis Kementrian Pertanian Tahun 2010– 2014. Jakarta: Kementrian Pertanian (Ministry of Agriculture). Kompas. 2017. “Kebijakan Pangan Mendesak.” 9 January 2017; https://kompas.id/ba ca/opini/2018/01/09/kebijakan-pangan-mendesak. Laksmana, Dimas Dewi, Wardha Andriyuni, and Fuad Langgara. 2020. “Natural Farming in Yogyakarta.” Inside Indonesia, 2 April 2020 (online). MacRae, Graeme. 2005. “Growing Rice After the Bomb: Where is Balinese Agri­ culture Going?” Critical Asian Studies, 37(2): 209–232. MacRae, Graeme. 2011. “Rice Farming in Bali: Organic production and marketing challenges.” Critical Asian Studies, 43(1): 69–92. Mayrowani, Henny. 2012. “The Development of Organic Agriculture in Indonesia.” Forum Penelitian Agro Ekonomi, 30(2): 91–108. Nevins, Joseph and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2008. “Introduction: Commoditization in Southeast Asia.” In Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age, edited by Joseph Nevins and Nancy Lee Peluso, pp. 1– 24. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Le Capital au XXIe Siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. (First published in English by Harvard University Press in 2014). Resosudarmo, Budy P. and Satoshi Yamazaki. 2011. “Training and Visit (T&V) Extension vs. Farmer Field School: The Indonesian Experience.” Working Paper No. 2011/01, Department of Economics, Crawford School of Government, Aus­ tralian National University. https://acde.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/p ublication/acde_crawford_anu_edu_au/2016-12/wp_econ_2011_01_resosudarmo_ yamazaki.pdf. Reuter, Thomas A. 2002. Custodians of the Sacred Mountains. Honolulu, HI: Hawaii University Press. Reuter, Thomas A. 2011. “Devastation and Hope in Borneo: Anthropologists’ FirstHand Account.” The Conversation (23 May 2011). http://theconversation.edu.au/a rticles/devastation-and-hope-in-borneo-anthropologists-first-hand-account-2118. Reuter, Thomas A. 2015. “The Struggle for Food Sovereignty: A Global Perspective.” In Averting a Global Environmental Collapse: the role of anthropology and local knowledge edited by Thomas A. Reuter, pp. 127–147. London: Cambridge Scholars.

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Reuter, Thomas A. 2017a. “Principles of Sustainable Economy: An anthropologist’s perspective.” CADMUS – Journal of the World Academy of Art and Science, 3(2): 131–149. Reuter, Thomas A. 2017b. “Seeds of Life, Seeds of Hunger: Corporate Agendas, Seed Sovereignty and Agricultural Development (Indonesia, East Timor).” Anthropology of Food, December 2017: 1–18. https://aof.revues.org/8135. Reuter, Thomas A. 2019. “Understanding Food System Resilience in Bali, Indonesia: A Moral Economy Approach.” Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, 41: 4– 14. doi:10.1111/cuag.12135. Reuter, Thomas A. and Graeme MacRae. 2019. “Regaining Lost Ground: A Social Movement for Sustainable Food Systems in Java, Indonesia.” Anthropology of Food: 1–25. doi: https://journals.openedition.org/aof/10292;(published online 18 July 2019; open access). Ricepedia. 2018. “Indonesia, Basic Statistics.” A CGIAR project report. http://ricep edia.org/indonesia (accessed 21 February 2018). Ricklefs, Merle C. 2012. Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, C. 1930 to Present. Singapore: NUS Press. Scott, James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sertori, Trisha 2011. “The (Real) Green Revolution.” The Jakarta Post (19 September 2011). www.thejakarta.com/news/2011/09/15/the-real-green-revolution.html-0. Shrimpton, R. and C. Rokx. 2013. The Double Burden of Malnutrition in Indonesia. Jakarta: World Bank. Subejo. 2013. Pembangunan Petanian dan Pedesaan. Jakarta: University of Indonesia Press. Thompson, Edward P. 1993. Customs in Common, Studies in traditional popular cul­ ture. New York: New Press. Thorburn, Craig. 2015. “The Rise and Demise of Integrated Pest Management in Rice in Indonesia.” Insects, 6(2): 381–408. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. 2006. “Tracking the Trend Towards Market Concentration.” United Nations Conference on Trade and Devel­ opment report; www.grain.org/article/entries/2197-unctad-study-tracking-th e-trend-towards-market-concentration-the-case-of-the-agricultural-input-industry. Winarto, Yunita T. 2004. Seeds of Knowledge: The Beginning of Integrated Pest Man­ agement in Java. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies. Winarto, Yunita T. 2013. “‘Memanusiakan Manusia’ dalam Lingkungan yang Tang­ guh: Mengapa ‘Jauh Panggang dari Api’?” Antropologi Indonesia, 34(1): 75–90. Winnett, Yasmin V. 2011. Go Organik! Berangkat Dari Wacana Revolusi Hijau Menuju Pertanian Berkelanjutan. Malang: Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik, Universitas Muhammadiyah.

10 “Talking” Trees Urban Ecologies in Late Socialist Hanoi Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Introduction For ages, trees in Southeast Asia have had a particular meaning for people living in their surroundings. Majestic trees have always impressed both rural and urban residents. Large trees are considered dwelling places of spirits and therefore they are conceived as sites of veneration in many countries (Boom­ gaard 1995, 53, Boonpromkul 2019). Recently, the clearing of forests in South­ east Asia has provoked a number of protests, as local people have become increasingly aware of the value of their natural environment and thus want to prevent the overexploitation of nature. “Ecology monks” and the Buddhist ecology movement in Thailand, for example, actively supported environmental and conservation activities (Darlington 2011 [1998], 143). In respect to metro­ polises, the ethnographic exploration of the relationship between people and trees is still in its beginnings. Nonetheless, there is a growing literature on the connection between human and non-human relationships in Southeast Asian cities with a focus on urban renewal and the transformation of the city (Herzfeld 2016). Against this backdrop, various actors with different aims encounter each other, such as urban residents, investors, local authorities, spirits, and ghosts (Barthe-Deloizy et al. 2018, Johnson 2014, 2015, Tadié 2018). As studies focusing on urban political ecology (Cornea et al. 2017, Saguin 2019, Swynge­ douw 2015) and on ecologies of urbanism in Asian cities (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2017) have suggested, cities are places where environmental pollution requires quick action. Recent research based on a conversation between geography and ethology calls for “animating the urban” (Barua and Sinha 2019) by focusing on animals and their place making activities. With regards to plants, urban greening (Cooke et al. 2020) and trees in particular (Phillips and Atchison 2020) are major topics in urban planning and the future of cities in the 21st century. Aiming at bringing into dialogue urban political ecology and ideas about the potency of urban trees, this chapter contributes to anthropological knowledge about human/non-human relationships in Viet­ nam’s capital. In Hanoi, the chopping down of six hundred old and healthy trees was part of an urban renewal project and hence, the incidence should be DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-10

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embedded in processes of urban planning and development more general. Urban renewal takes place all over the country, and therefore, the demoli­ tion of housing and the construction of new high-rise buildings inevitably leads to conflicts between authorities and residents. This has been studied, for example, with regard to land expropriation policies in Ho Chi Minh City (Harms 2016, 2019). With a view to a secondary city, Schwenkel (2020) carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Vinh in north-central Vietnam. Devastated by US bombing, Vinh was designed as a model socialist city with the help of East German urban planners in the late 1970s, but nowa­ days Vietnam’s first planned city is marked by decay and repurposing (Schwenkel 2020). In Hanoi, urban renewal is characterized by the destruc­ tion of socialist housing and the construction of new high-rise buildings, but also relates to the demolition of traditional marketplaces. I have explored elsewhere, that trees, in conjunction with shrines, may play a pivotal role in saving marketplaces from being demolished (Hüwelmeier 2018b). As plants are attributed special powers that can be activated in certain cases, this contribution explores, besides civil society activism, peoples’ ideas about the strengths of trees which formed part of the environmental movement in Hanoi. Characterized by public demonstrations, online petitions and other activities, the Tree Hug Movement was actively supported mainly by young people. Moreover, human-tree relationships and various practices in forging emotional bonds between protesters and trees contributed to the creation of affective ties between humans and non-humans in the city. Allegedly this “loving”, hugging and non-violent protests may have resulted in the with­ drawal of the authorities’ plans to chop down further thousands of healthy trees. Since the environment is interpreted and valued in different ways by var­ ious actors, I here refer to “plural ecologies”, a term that has been coined by a network of anthropologists investigating the manifold variations of “the environment” and its embeddedness in different political, social, gendered, religious, material, and rural/urban settings in Southeast Asia. I draw on an understanding of ecology as a “more or less coherent set of relationships between humans and non-humans” (Sprenger and Großmann 2018, ix). In the urban context discussed here, the state, represented by the People’s Com­ mittee of the City of Hanoi, security authorities, workers cutting the trees, and urban dwellers, protesters, and activists appear as human actors, while trees, spirits, ancestors, the urban landscape, storm and heavy rain figure as non-human actors. In the course of my analysis of the Tree Hug Movement it will become obvious that various hierarchies and power conflicts had an impact on civil society activities. Hence, urban political ecology (Cornea et al. 2017, Rademacher 2015) is an important research perspective, while the con­ cept of “plural ecologies” sharpens the view on human/non-human relation­ ships in cities and is thus significant in understanding people’s protest and the Tree Hug Movement in the capital of the late socialist country.

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Against the backdrop of recent scholarship on political ecology in urban areas (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan 2017), on the revitalization of the anthropological concept of animism (Århem and Sprenger 2016) and on the entanglement of political economy and socio-environmental relationships (De la Cadena 2015, Szerszynski 2017), I investigate the impact of human agency on eco-systems in the metropole of Hanoi as well as people’s ideas about the potency of trees. To this day, the focus of social research in the area of poli­ tical ecology is mainly directed on rural regions and indigenous groups, and here in particular on exploitative practices of multinational companies. But there are manifold connections between city and rural areas in particular as a result of urban-rural migration, as has been illustrated, for example, by eth­ nographic research with female waste collectors moving between urban Hanoi and villages of origin (Nguyen 2016). Both in cities as in rural areas, research on environmental changes and environmental crises should be embedded in historical, political and economic interrelationships. Power relations and the purposes of different actors, in conjunction with the pivotal role of social media as well as people’s perceptions on the person-like status of trees form the focus of this contribution. People’s ideas about the forces of nature and the potency of rivers (Johnson 2019) and other places (Guillou 2017) are known from a number of regions of Southeast Asia (Ladwig 2015, Shepherd 2019, Work 2019). In the animistic cosmos, animals and plants, beings, and things appear as intentional subjects and persons endowed with will and power to act (Århem 2016, 3). In contrast to Western naturalism, which assumes a fundamental opposition between objective nature and subjective culture, the anthropological concept of ani­ mism postulates an intersubjective and personalized universe within which the Cartesian separation between person and thing seems to dissolve. Notions of relationships between humans and spirits, for example, do not stop at the gates of cities as has been shown by recent anthropological work on the power of ghosts, deities, and spiritual beings of all sorts to act in Southeast Asian urban spaces (Turner and Salemink 2015, van der Veer 2015). To date, however, only little ethnographic knowledge exists about city dweller’s attrib­ uted power to trees in the urban environment. But, as geographers have ana­ lyzed recently, trees have an effect on urban spaces that should be taken more serious (Phillips and Atchison 2020). This chapter continues by situating the Tree Hug Movement in Hanoi in the broader perspective of the governments’ slogan of a “green, clean and beautiful” city (DiGregorio et al. 2003). The next section introduces the emergence of civil society activism after the cutting of six hundred old trees in the center of Hanoi and illustrates the power of social media. The following part points to affective relationships created between urban residents and trees by exploring protestors’ ideas about considering trees as if they were ances­ tors. I draw on activists’ reference to the importance of trees in Hanoi’s his­ tory and underline the significance of objects in giving trees a voice. I conclude by arguing for a concept of urban ecologies that include the

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attributed potency of trees and other non-human entities. This approach requires the reference to history, ancestry, gender, sacred places, and materiality.

Green, clean and beautiful Already in the early 2000s, social scientists warned of environmental problems in the northern part of Vietnam, both in rural regions (deforestation) and in urban areas, especially Hanoi (DiGregorio et al. 2003). According to the slogan “Green, Clean and Beautiful”, the Communist Party was designing the modernization of Vietnam’s cities and was thus contributing to the “civi­ lization” of its inhabitants (Harms 2009, 2012). While in postwar Vietnam “ecological concerns were a part of the socialist city making” (Schwenkel 2017, 47), it seems as if historically anchored ideas about “Eco-Socialism” (ibid.) did not play a pivotal role in the past decade. In Vietnam’s metropolis, parks were downsized (Söderstrom and Geertman 2013), socialist housing and their green areas demolished (Hüwelmeier 2022a), and old trees chopped down. In the wake of these urban renewal projects, tensions between local autho­ rities and residents have repeatedly occurred in Hanoi in recent years. The demolition of houses and the subsequent construction of new roads have led to traffic noise and air pollution, as millions of motorbikes (Truitt 2008), and an increasing number of SUVs cause massive environmental problems. Fur­ thermore, part of urban renewal included the destruction of several tradi­ tional marketplaces in the inner-city area. In the eyes of the authorities, these places did not meet the required hygienic and aesthetic standards. As a result, thousands of traders and their families lost their economic livelihoods, while investors earned a great deal of money by constructing high-rise buildings on the former site of the markets (Endres and Leshkowich 2018, Hüwelmeier 2018a). In all these cases, city residents’ protests came up, but tensions were downplayed and received only little attention from the media.

“Killing” six hundred Trees: civil society activism in urban Hanoi The felling of six hundred old trees was part of the “renewal projects” to beautify the capital of Vietnam. This environmental scandal and the resulting civil society movement occurred in March 2015. At that time, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in urban Hanoi, but was not directly involved in the Tree Hug Movement. However, I could observe one of the protest marches against the logging, and I talked about the chopping down of the trees with interlocutors and friends, since these issues were part of everyday conversa­ tions in the city. Moreover, I followed comments and images on state televi­ sion, in the press, and on the internet and took photographs from felled trees and newly planted trees, from which a number had been uprooted shortly after, as I will explain below.

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Everyone I spoke with was shocked by the tree felling. Providing shade and oxygen for decades, the trees planted during the French colonial period were felled, sawed up, and transported to other places. In the course of the protests against the logging, activists and city dwellers alike reported on the “souls” of old trees, which, owing to their human-like characteristics, should have never been chopped down. As mentioned earlier, in Vietnam as well as in other regions of Southeast Asia (Boomgaard 1995), some trees are said to have potency, enabling them to be effective in certain situations. Humans attribute guarding properties to particular trees, for example by protecting a certain area from negative changes caused by urban renewal. According to the nar­ ratives of my interlocutors, trees are animated, being the dwelling place of deities, spirits, or wandering ghosts, such as souls of aborted fetuses (Hüwel­ meier 2022b). When people harm these trees, the latter retaliate, as has been reported by urban residents: Some people became sick, couples were divorced, and children or other family members died. In the case discussed here, initially about 6,700 old trees were to be felled in 190 streets of the city (Geertman and Boudreau 2018, 212). According to those responsible for the felling, they posed a danger to pedestrians, motorbikers and car drivers. Moreover, in the eyes of the authorities, the diversity of old tree species did not fit into the cityscape, and for this reason, too, they intended to plant new trees, all of the same species. My interlocutors com­ mented with a wink, that ideas of uniformity were part of the communist ideology and that perhaps for this reason the political leaders wanted to shape nature accordingly. Homogeneous-looking trees obviously matched with the political-aesthetic ideas of state planning staffs. Consequently, the People’s Committee of the City of Hanoi did not speak of a logging project, but of a “landscaping project” (Vu 2017, 1188). According to the proposal of the Department of Construction, the aim was to replace old and dying trees with other types of trees or plants that were considered more suitable in terms of the city’s appearance. “As many as 6708 green trees, making up more than a quarter of the total city greenery, would be cut down and/or replaced for the reasons such as these trees were either dying, decayed, or bent, or posing risks to road users during rainy seasons, or different kinds of trees were planted on the same street creating a poor aesthetic outlook (implying that the government wanted trees planted in lieu to be uniformed), or trees were detrimental to planned infrastructure projects [……]” (Vu 2017, 1188) Public protests emerged, after the trees were felled. Rumor circulated in parts of the population that state officials would make a very good deal by selling the timber of the old trees, especially as the whereabouts of the felled tree trunks were never clarified. More or less explicitly, the moral misconduct

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of political leaders, as well as allegations of corruption, came to mind among a number of city residents. The role of social media Since there is no independent press in Communist-ruled Vietnam, and news­ papers, television and radio are under state control, political and environ­ mental activists resorted to social media (Thiem 2018). Facebook is used by millions of people in Vietnam, and for those who are interested in politics, especially for the younger generation, it is the only way to exchange ideas, and to organize protests. After a former senior government official wrote a petition to the city government against the felling of trees and after this peti­ tion was posted on the net, people met up on the internet. Forms of protest began with the establishment of a first Facebook page, which was made up of various activists and supporters. The online community included lawyers, journalists, artists, scientists, human rights activists, and students, among others. This resulted in a closed Facebook group of about one hundred experts and activists, which, however, was connected to the first Facebook fan page and was able to circulate information as well as to mobilize public pro­ tests. After a petition with 22,000 signatures collected within 24 hours was presented to the city government, the chairman of the Hanoi City People’s Committee stopped the logging operation for the time being (Vu 2017, 1194ff). But the protests continued. „The movement creatively organized six ‘Peaceful Walks’, a cycling tour ‘Cycling for Trees’, and a ‘Tree Hug Picnic’ […]. Those in the movement who were architects started coordinating the mapping and monitoring of the tree cutting. They shared their findings online, and as such provided the public with their comments on HPC’s (Hanoi People’s Committee, G. H.) process of selecting and cutting the trees. Famous singers participated in a wave of cover songs, with the message ‘Xin đừng đốn cây’ (please don’t cut the trees). Artists and poets produced work promoting the trees as living creatures, and poets wrote about them as historical symbols for the citizens of Hanoi.” (Geertman and Boudreau 2018, 213) Since a “Tree Hug Picnic” was initiated via the fan page of Facebook, several hundred people peacefully gathered in the centre of Hanoi for a public demonstration. “Around 500 people came from diverse segments of society joined the picnic, many of whom wore advocacy T-shirts (sponsored by a local NGO), carried Tree Hugs Hanoi banners, holding hands outside the park and displaying their love for Hanoi, love for environment and love for trees. They sang, played music, hugged trees and marched along the

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lake, calling to stop the fell of trees and protect environment. The picnic was covered with the atmosphere of friendliness, peace, and love, which was the leading message that the Group 6700 People strived to spread to publics. The event happened with no excessive behaviour from security.” (Vu 2017, 1197) During the protests against the tree felling, activists of the “Architecture Cinema Club” founded another Facebook group with the aim of making a documentary film about the events of deforestation and protest. In the same month, a third Facebook group named “For a green Hanoi” was founded, which not only focused on the logging of the trees, but also demanded more rights of participation, transparency of political decisions and was supported by environmentalists and political activists (Geertman and Boudreau 2018, 211). In Vietnam, civil society involvement is undesirable and for this reason, it is hardly surprising that public protests came to an end after a short while, not least owing to intimidation attempts by state authorities. In response to activists’ “irregular demands” for claiming a say in matters that directly affect their lives, local authorities have banned demonstrations on the streets of Hanoi. At the same time, however, they met with activists and finally agreed to end the logging program (Gillespie et al. 2019, 27). Particularly in questions of environmental justice, protests are successful if they can be supported by scientific expertise. If this knowledge is combined with the involvement of the civil society, the government in late socialist Vietnam cannot respond exclusively with repression. With a view to environ­ mental justice, these forms of resistance were labelled “strong sustainability” protests (Gillespie et al. 2019). By contrast, in cases of protests against local environmental disasters, where there was no ecological knowledge of longterm environmental damage among the population and where the protests ended with compensation payments, scholars use the term “weak sustainability” (ibid.). During the Tree Hug Movement, scientists organized seminars and explained the condition of the trees from a professional point of view, thereby informing reporters and the audience about important areas of environmental protection. In addition, architects conveyed knowledge about the handling of urban trees and their meaning in the context of city life.

Affective relationships between humans and urban trees During the public protests against the tree felling, an affective bond between city dwellers and trees was created as part of the peaceful “city walks”. For example, some trees were described as friends of the people, “…throughout time the old trees become their companions” (Vu 2017, 1191). Indeed, old trees are important providers of shade in Hanoi in the hot season. For some residents, a tree becomes an economic source of income, for instance by establishing a mobile soup kitchen underneath it, a place to sell tea, a mobile

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flower shop or a hairdresser’s place. Other trees become places of memory. If somebody dies in a traffic accident in the immediate vicinity of a tree, neigh­ bors would establish an altar in this place. As I have explored elsewhere, some urban dwellers presented offerings at a shrine that was attached to a trunk of a specific tree in the city centre. The tree was chopped down a decade ago. It reminded devotees of the Japanese occupation of Hanoi in World War II, and the great famine in which thousands of Hanoians died and were buried in mass graves next to this particular plant (Hüwelmeier 2018b, 297). Certain trees in Hanoi, according to the ideas of urban residents, do have a spiritually protective function, and hence function as places of mourning. A particular Banyan tree in urban Hanoi, which was not part of the tree felling project, is located next to a maternity clinic, where also abortions are performed. The tree is considered as animated since fetus spirits gather in its treetop and have found a new home here (Hüwelmeier 2022b). In this context, the intertwining of gender, spirit worship, and human–tree relations is becoming evident. Since aborted fetuses are believed as having suffered a “bad death”, they are not buried according to traditional ritual and will not be venerated at the familial ancestral altar. The Banyan tree and the altars surrounding its huge trunk is thus the only place in the city to save these souls from being forgotten. In this case, power relations and hierarchies in Vietnam’s patriarchal system refer to “feminist political ecologies” (Elmhirst 2011).1 Moreover, the attested potency of this particular Banyan tree also hints to the relationship of infra­ structure and the urban sacred. With its protruding branches it not only damages the roof of a neighbouring house, but with its expansive aerial roots it wraps around a socialist propaganda wall and embraces underground tele­ phone cables and water pipes. Construction workers refused to cut the underground roots and had to find a way of laying new cables some meters away (Hüwelmeier 2022b, 19). In fact, the narratives about its attributed agentive powers are so overwhelming that all attempts to “tame” this Banyan tree have so far failed. No one would dare to chop it down or even cut its roots or branches. Although none of the six hundred trees had been as much venerated as the particular Banyan tree mentioned before, affective ties between trees and people were repeatedly emphasized in the Tree Hug Movement. Most of my Hanoian interlocutors believe in spiritual entities of all sorts, although the authorities still speak about “superstition” when certain popular religious practices are performed in the public. With the emergence of the Tree Hug Movement, some predominantly young people referred to old trees as being ancestors, as I will elaborate below. While hundreds of young protesters peacefully formed a chain of people in the centre of Hanoi as a result of the logging, they carried stickers and leaflets with the inscription “Tree Hug Hanoi”. The signs depicted trees with a heart symbol, formed by two human hands, which was obviously intended to suggest the message of a close and emotional relationship between people and trees. As one protester summar­ ized it to a reporter: “He said Hanoians and tourists love the trees for many

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reasons. They are good for the environment, and there is sentimental value, too, as many of the trees are as old as his grandparents. Healthy trees are also being chopped down, he adds, and this is a great pity.”2 Trees as metaphors of ancestors Comparing the age of trees and the age of grandparents is of particular interest here, as this is another indication of affective relationships between humans and their environment. Grandfathers in Vietnam, and male ancestors in general, play a pivotal role in the social fabric and popular religious beliefs of Vietnamese. Ancestor worship is considered one of the most important religious practices for obtaining protection and intercession from the world of the deceased (Hüwelmeier 2016, Jellema 2007). Offerings, incense sticks, and prayers are part of everyday religious practices in private homes as well as at altars and shrines in public spaces, and trees also represent places where deities and spirits are worshipped. The sentimental meaning of trees in the case discussed here refers to the strong emotions with the grandparent gen­ eration, which is characterized not only by hierarchy, respect, and esteem, but also by the power attributed to the ancestors. In Vietnam’s patriarchal society, children have the duty to look after their parents at a certain age. After death, the living will establish an ancestral altar and continue to care for the well­ being of the deceased. As the world of the dead is imagined by the living as a parallel world, family members will continue to cook for the ancestors, pre­ sent food offerings (Hüwelmeier 2021), and burn incense and “spirit money”. By performing death commemoration days and presenting offerings at the ancestral altar at home on the first and 15th day of the lunar calendar, the dead are believed to enjoy a pleasant life in the other world by consuming objects made from paper (Hüwelmeier 2016). These practices are to be understood as an exchange relationship between the living and the dead, as the deceased are imagined to exercise a protective function for the living. Wealth, health, and family happiness are essentially attributed to the existence and satisfaction of the ancestors. By considering old trees as metaphors of grandparents, it is no coincidence that protesters of the Tree Hug Movement held a commemoration ceremony for felled trees in the streets of Hanoi on the evening of 22 March 2015: „In the morning, many people join the Tree Hug event held by some civil society organizations at Thien Quang lake. People take photograph and pose with trees, singing, holding banners, wearing advocacy T-shirt, and calling to stop cutting trees and protect the environment. In the evening, a group of people hold a commemoration ceremony between tree stumps in Nguyen Chi Thanh street. The commemoration is aimed to pray for the “souls” of the trees that have been chopped down so that they will rest in peace.”3

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Sensing trees as being metaphors of ancestors also evokes recollections, as stated by a journalist: “According to a reporter, for residents of the capital city, ‘trees are memories, poems and cinemas […]. They are the people’s childhood […]. Mr. Tuan’s letter shows the concerns of millions of people who are interested in the incident, including those living far from Hanoi, even overseas. People might not care as much about wasting VND 3,000 bil­ lion to build the Museum of Hanoi, but they do care in the case of the trees as trees connect to their past and childhood. That is the most important factor.’” (Le et al. 2015, 17) This resonates with what interlocutors and friends in Hanoi told me, namely that trees create relationships between people and their past. When I was walking with my friend while taking photographs of the chopped down trees, she remembered exactly what kind of particular tree this was and who was sitting there selling tea over many years. In this respect, trees may be con­ sidered objects mediating continuity between different periods of Vietnam’s history. These cover the imperial era, the French colonial period, which ended in 1954, and also the short period of peace between the expulsion of the French and the beginning of the American–Vietnamese War. My friend remembered those years as her most beautiful period of life which she described as “green, quiet and peaceful Hanoi”. However, recollections of the past also include the bombing of Hanoi, from which most of the old trees were miraculously spared. A poet reminded the audience that during the war in Hanoi, when there was fighting and a hail of bombs, the trees did not stop breathing. But in the present, when there are no wars, the trees are cut down without cause.4 The person-like status of trees Affective relationship between protesters and trees contributed to the produc­ tion of social space in the city, which was articulated by wrapping and knotting yellow ribbons around trees and by attached signs to the trees with the inscription: “I’m fine, don’t kill me”. These practices refer to relationships between trees, place-making (through history and memory) and personhood in the Tree Hug Movement in Hanoi. State-controlled newspapers reported under the heading “Talking Trees” about this performance of the tree protectors. In other headlines the cut down trees were called “devastated Hanoians”. “…young people tied yellow knots around the trees on the streets of Trang Thi, Hang Bai, Hue, Phan Chu Trinh, Giang Vo, Cat Linh. Hoang Thuy Linh – the project inventor - said: ‘we launch this campaign to protect trees, and to convey to the people the message of environmental

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and greenery protection’. Using Facebook, many young people took part in this activity for the love of tree shades in Hanoi. They altogether ‘made a small contribution to the protection of trees, the landscape and environment’. Apart from tying knots, many others actively put up signs which say ‘I’m fit, so don’t kill me’ or ‘for a green Hanoi’. These activ­ ities were not only reported, shared and discussed on social networks, but also on state-owned newspapers. Headlines such as ‘Talking trees’ or ‘Devastated Hanoians’ strengthened the people’s emotions over the lives of trees which have long been around.” (Le et al. 2015, 18) Knotting and tying of trees may thus be interpreted as practices of med­ iation between humans and trees. Thus, trees may be considered as repre­ senting cohesion, perpetuation and strengthening of bonds between urban residents, the environment and society. Likewise, ribbons are tied around Banyan trees at sacred sites in Laos and Thailand, as I noticed during my visits, but these practices are not performed in pagodas and temples in Hanoi. However, since the Tree Hug Movement was declared peaceful, it may have been influenced by Buddhist ideas and practices such as placing ribbons around trees, which young urban residents may have seen elsewhere, via the internet or by travelling. Indeed, photos were published not only displaying people placing ribbons around trees, but also young people binding green ribbons around their wrists (Le et al. 2015). In some places of Southeast Asia, such as in Laos, wrist-binding is part of complex rituals to integrate the soul with the body to ensure the well-being of people (Ngao­ syvathn 1990, Sprenger 2017). Known as friendship ribbons in many parts of the Western world, these objects are conceived as a sign of affection between young people. Apart from young protestors, artists and other cultural workers also played a pivotal role in the Tree Hug Movement, using material objects to perform anger and disappointment. Together with architects, designers, and singers they supported the protests. Artists designed a number of posters, avatars and comics on the theme of the logging and the protection of the trees. The avatar “Tree Hugs” depicted arms wrapped around a tree in the shape of a heart, while the green colour may be considered a symbol for the environment.5 Graphic figures were often chosen by Facebook users. But there were also pictures of a child sitting next to a tree stump, crying. The original image shows a child sitting next to a dog that was killed so that its meat could be eaten (Le et al. 2015, 22).6 Protesters and journalists alike attributed personal status to trees in Hanoi: Trees have perceptions, trees can speak, they have a soul, trees are killed, devastated, and memorial ceremonies are held for them. Similar attributions of personhood were investigated with regard to rice as a food­ stuff in Laos: rice is not only seen as a grain, but, for example in relation to spirits, as a “partner in a life-giving relationship” (Sprenger 2018, 265). The

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revitalization of the concept of animism, the animation of plants and ani­ mals and thus the assigned relationships between humans and particular trees/animals/plants play an important role in recent scholarship aiming at discussing an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of humanenvironment relations (Århem 2016, 3). Anthropology in/of cities would benefit from approaches that take urban residents’ ideas about an animated nature more serious.

Response by the State Even though the public protests were peaceful, massive intimidation attempts were made by the authorities. For example, activists received warnings from the police after the “Tree Hug Picnic”, students who tied yellow ribbons around the trees were asked to come to the police station for questioning and the media were ordered to stop reporting on the movement (Vu 2017, 1197). Although the state’s tolerance lasted for several weeks, founders of Facebook groups and some activists were arrested and students were visited by local government officials. This also contributed to the destabilization of the movement. Finally, after some protesters held up posters with messages directed against politicians during the “Green Walks”, the protest marches were disbanded entirely in April 2015 (Le et al. 2015, 25). Yet, and certainly not least because of the protests performed by the Tree Hug Movement, the planned felling of thousands other old trees were ulti­ mately not carried out. Some scholars are convinced, that the success of the protest was due to the quiet and reserved appearance of the movement, the demonstratively shown affection for old trees, and in general the way of a non-confrontational protest (Geertman and Boudreau 2018, 228). After a government inspectorate (Thiem 2018, 108) investigated the case and sub­ mitted a report to the government, some officials were rebuked for their irre­ sponsible actions (ibid., 105). However, further environmental scandals followed throughout the next years. In Hanoi, there happened a mass fish mortality in 2016 as well as in 2018 in the famous West Lake. In 2016 a more than hundred-year-old turtle, called cụ rùa or great-grandfather, venerated as sacred animal, died in the Hoan Kiem Lake in the center of the city. Since the animal’s death took place shortly before the Communist Party Congress in March 2016, Hanoians considered this incident a bad omen with regard to the political future of the country (Ortmann 2017, 9). The death of the old turtle, prob­ ably caused by air pollution and dirty water, was followed by a mass fish mortality off the coast of Vietnam in April 2016, affecting a stretch of coast of over 200 km, caused by the discharge of toxic wastewater from a Taiwa­ nese-owned steel plant. Peaceful environmental protests against the polluter Formosa were quelled by the police in spring 2016 (Robert 2019, 152), while thousands of fishing families lost their livelihoods. A movie taken by the environmental organization “Green Trees”, now established in Vietnam,

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about this mass fish mortality was shown in Berlin in January 2020. Hence, this environmental disaster and its cinematic documentation contributed to the creation and maintenance of transnational ties and points to the global connectedness of activists. The movie is the first one ever produced in Viet­ nam on the subject of civil society involvement and bears the significant title “Đừng Sợ! Do not be afraid!" 7

Conclusion Urban ecologies unfold an unexpected variety of modalities of coexistence and relationships between humans and trees, plants, animals, spirits and ghosts, ancestors, and the weather. Studies focusing on urban political ecology and on ecologies of urbanism in Asian metropolises have suggested that cities are places where environmental pollution requires quick action. Urban greening and trees in particular are major topics in urban planning and the future of cities in the 21st century. To date, however, there is only little knowledge about city dwellers’ ideas on animated trees, spirited infra­ structure, and urban ghosts and spirits. Since most of the research on envir­ onmental change and human/non-human relationships in the social sciences and the humanities focuses on remote areas, the urban still seems to be a neglected field in anthropological studies on multiple and divergent ecologies in Southeast Asian cities. As has been analyzed in this chapter, the coexistence of humans and nonhumans in the urban environment is not without tension and conflict. Resulting from the chopping down hundreds of old trees in Hanoi, the Tree Hug Movement has developed as an urban environmental movement in Vietnam’s one-party state. Since different actors were at work, power relations and hierarchies played a pivotal role in the Tree Hug Movement. Besides the local authorities who were politically responsible, there were those entrepre­ neurs who would make a good business. Urban residents were convinced that the timber would be sold at top prices. Protesters for their part did not form a homogenous group either. Alongside a core group of activists, there were thousands of online supporters followed by artists, architects, scientists, and other cultural workers who made their knowledge and creativity available to finally prevent further tree chopping. In the course of the protest movement, particular urban trees were attrib­ uted human characteristics and were considered “friends” of the city’s inha­ bitants, some called them “ancestors”. They are said to have guardian qualities, including shade-giving properties and the ability to deliver oxygen. Trees serve as places of remembrance, both of a romanticized childhood and of bombing raids. Assigned person-like qualities of trees were not completely eradicated by chopping them down, since a number of people believe that their “souls” may continue to exist. As a result, some Hanoians are firmly convinced that sooner or later the “killed” trees may take revenge: on

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politicians, on workers, on security forces, and on all those who take personal advantage of the tree felling campaign. It is not yet known whether the people responsible for the logging opera­ tion were hit by the agentive powers assigned to the trees. However, in the summer that followed the felling, a devastating storm swept over Hanoi and caused great damage. Newly planted trees, which had been hastily put in place of the felled ones on the orders of the authorities, were uprooted by the violent storm. It became obvious that a number of those new trees, whose origin and species were completely unknown in Hanoi until then, had been planted with a plastic film around the root ball. Some residents felt that in Hanoi trees cannot even be planted in the right way, without plastic sheeting. As the newly planted trees also had very thin trunks, malicious tongues referred to these plants as “chopstick trees”.

Notes 1 With the increase in air pollution in the last few years, as I could observe in Hanoi’s busy streets, women perform protective measures concerning the female body, by wearing special clothing covering the whole body, including gloves and masks when riding a motorbike. This clothes not only protects the underlying office clothes from becoming dusty and dirty, but also protects the skin from becoming dark. “Dark” skin, according to female interlocutors, is considered “not nice” and is associated with the hard work in the rice fields. I cannot go into detail here, but these practices refer to yet another layer of urban ecologies, namely to what has been entitled “embodied urban political ecology” (Doshi 2017). 2 www.voanews.com/east-asia/hundreds-hanoians-protest-tree-chopping-plan (acces­ sed 12 January 2021). 3 http://vietnamrightnow.com/2015/04/timeline-of-the-tree-felling-project-in-hanoi (accessed 23 January 2020). 4 “Poet Tran Dang Khoa recalled: ‘In the war, Hanoi successfully kept its green lungs despite heavy bombardment and fighting. I was just a small child at the time, yet I was proud of the capital city in my verses: “Những na˘ m giặc bắn phá – Ba Đình vẫn xanh cây – Tra˘ ng vàng Chùa Một Cột – Phủ Tây Hồ hoa bay…” (Despite the fighting – trees continue to grow in Ba Dinh – the moon shines over the one-pillar pagoda – flowers bloom in Tay Ho Palace). Nowadays, while there are no enemies nor fighting, the greenery of Hanoi gets beaten even harder than during the bombardments from the B52 bombers.’” (Le et al. 2015, 20). 5 “Painters designed posters and avatars: a large number of posters, avatars and comics on the topic of tree felling, tree protection and Hanoians’ love for tree was developed. Among these, the avatar “Tree Hugs”, which shows arms around a heart-shaped tree and coloured in green as a symbol of the environment, was most commonly used by Facebook users. Other mock-ups, such as the picture of a child crying beside a stump (from the original picture of a child crying beside a dog killed for meat), or a caricature of a greedy official cutting trees into money, spread quickly on the internet.” (Le et al. 2015, 22). 6 As is probably known, dog meat was long considered a delicacy in Vietnam. How­ ever, in recent years a decline in dog meat production and also a collapse of dog meat restaurants in Hanoi can be observed. Simultaneously, lap dog owners are increasingly appearing in the parks and on the streets of Hanoi, which did not exist ten years ago. Whether the visibility of dogs as pets is due to an expression of new

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affective relationships between humans and animals (e.g. dogs being driven around in a basket on a motorbike) cannot be further discussed here. 7 https://taz.de/Info/!169992 (accessed 6 February 2020).

References Århem, Kaj. 2016. “Southeast Asian animism in context.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, pp. 3–30. London and New York: Routledge. Århem, Kaj and Guido Sprenger, eds. 2016. Animism in Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge. Barthe-Deloizy, Francine, Marie Bonte, Zara Fournier, and Jérôme Tadié. 2018. “Géographies des fantômes.” Géographies et cultures, 106: 1–10. Barua, Maan and Anindya Sinha. 2019. “Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation.” Social & Cultural Geography, 20(8): 1160–1180. Boomgaard, Peter 1995. “Sacred Trees and Haunted Forests in Indonesia. Particularly Java, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Cri­ tical Approach, edited by Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland, pp. 47–63. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press. Boonpromkul, Phacharawan. 2019. “Sao Hai’: the city pillar, the crying tree trunk, the goddess shrine, and contradictions in the sacralization of nature.” South East Asia Research, 27(4): 321–343. Cooke, Benjamin, Ani Landau-Ward, and Lauren Rickards. 2020. “Urban greening, property and more-than-human commoning.” Australian Geographer, 51(2): 169– 188. Cornea, Natasha L., René Véron, and Anna Zimmer. 2017. “Everyday governance and urban environments: Towards a more interdisciplinary urban political ecology.” Geography Compass, 11(4): 1–12. Darlington, Susan M. 2011 [1998]. “The Ordination of a Tree: The Buddhist Ecology Movement in Thailand.” In Everyday Life in Southeast Asia, edited by Kathleen M. Adam and Kathleen A. Gillogly, pp. 143–153. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. DiGregorio, Michael, A. Terry Rambo, and Masayuki Yanagisawa. 2003. “Clean, Green, and Beautiful: Environment and Development under the Renovation Econ­ omy.” In Postwar Vietnam. Dynamics of a transforming Society, edited by Luong Hy Van, pp. 171–199. Oxford: ISEAS. Doshi, Sapana. 2017. “Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions.” Area, 49 (1): 125–128. Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011. “Introducing New Feminist Political Ecologies.” Geoforum, 42(2): 129–132. Endres, Kirsten W. and Ann Marie Leshkowich, eds. 2018. Traders in Motion. Iden­ tities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ versity Press. Geertman, Stephanie and Julie-Anne Boudreau. 2018. “‘Life as Art’: Emerging Youth Networks in Hanoi and the Tree Hug Movement.” City & Society, 30(2): 210–236.

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Gillespie, John, Thang Nguyen, Canh Le, and Hung Nguyen. 2019. “From ‘Weak’ to ‘Strong’ Sustainability. Protesting for Environmental Justice in Vietnam.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 14(3): 1–42. Guillou, Anne Yvonne. 2017. “Potent Places and Animism in Southeast Asia.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 18(5): 389–399. Harms, Erik. 2009. “Vietnam’s Civilizing Process and the Retreat from the Street: A Turtle’s Eye View from Ho Chi Minh City.” City & Society, 21(2): 182–206. Harms, Erik. 2012. “Beauty as control in the new Saigon: Eviction, new urban zones, and atomized dissent in a Southeast Asian city.” American Ethnologist, 39(4): 735– 750. Harms, Erik. 2016. Luxury and Rubble, Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Harms, Erik. 2019. “Marxist urbanism meets the specter of communism: anthro­ pological engagements with master-planned projects and mass dispossession in Ho Chi Minh City.” In The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City, edited by Setha Low, pp. 297–309. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Herzfeld, Michael. 2016. Siege of the Spirits, Community and Polity in Bangkok. Chi­ cago, IL and London: The Chicago University Press. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2016. “Cell phones for the spirits. Ancestor worship and ritual economy in Vietnam and its diasporas.” Material Religion, 13(3): 294–321. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2018a. “Ghost Markets and Moving Bazaars in Hanoi’s Urban Space.” In Traders in Motion. Identites and Contestations in the Vietnamese Mar­ ketplace, edited by Kirsten W. Endres and Ann Marie Leshkowich, pp. 126–148. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2018b. “Market shrines and urban renewal in Hanoi.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 33(2): 291–318. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2021. “Feeding the Spirits - Cooking, Offering and Reclaiming Lộc in Late Socialist Vietnam.” South East Asia Research, 29(1): 108–125. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2022a. “Colonial ghosts, the French cemetery and urban renewal in Hanoi.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 23(3): 232–249. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud. 2022b. “The sacred Cowshed Tree in urban Hanoi - a home for unredeemed souls.” Material Religion, 18(3): 311–332. Jellema, Kate. 2007. “Everywhere incense burning: Remembering ancestory in Doi Moi Vietnam.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38(3): 467–493. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2014. Ghosts of the new city, Spirits, Urbanity, and the ruins of progress in Chiang Mai. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2015. “A Spirit Map of Bangkok: Spirit Shrines and the City in Thailand.” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 28(3): 293–308. Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2019. “The river grew tired of us. Spectral flows along the Mekong River.” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 9(2): 390–404. Ladwig, Patrice. 2015. “Worshipping Relics and Animating Statues. Transformations of Buddhist statecraft in contemporary Laos.” Modern Asian Studies, 49(6): 1875– 1902. Le, Quang Binh, Thi Ha Đoan, Thi Thu Nam Nguyen, and Thanh Tu Mai. 2015. Report on Movements to protect #6700 Trees in Hanoi. Hanoi: Hong Du Publisher. Ngaosyvathn, Mayoury. 1990. “Individual Soul, National Identity: The ‘Bai-Sou Khuan’ of the Lao.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 5(2): 283–307.

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Nguyen, Minh. 2016. “Trading in Broken Things: Gendered Performances and Spatial Practices in Northern Vietnamese Rural Urban Waste Economy.” American Eth­ nologist, 43(1): 116–129. Ortmann, Stephan. 2017. Environmental Governance in Vietnam, Institutional Reforms and Failures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, Catherine and Jennifer Atchison. 2020. “Seeing the trees for the (urban) forest: more-than-human geographies and urban greening.” Australian Geographer, 51(2): 155–168. Rademacher, Anne. 2015. “Urban Political Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 137–152. Rademacher, Anne and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, eds. 2017. Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Robert, Christophe. 2019. “In One’s breath - Nothing stands still: A Multimedia Exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 14(2): 145–154. Saguin, Kristian. 2019. “Political ecologies of urbanizing natures in Southeast Asia.” In Routledge Handbook of Urbanization in Southeast Asia, edited by Rita Pada­ wangi, pp. 355–365. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Schwenkel, Christina. 2017. “Eco-Socialism and Green City Making in Postwar Viet­ nam.” In Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, edited by Anne Rademacher and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, pp. 45–66. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Schwenkel, Christina. 2020. Building Socialism, The Afterlife of East German Archi­ tecture in Urban Vietnam. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Shepherd, Christopher J. 2019. Haunted House and Ghostly Encounters. Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975. Singapore: NIAS Press. Söderstrom, Ola and Stephanie Geertman. 2013. “Loose threads: The translocal making of public space policy in Hanoi.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 34: 244–260. Sprenger, Guido. 2017. “Local comparisons. Buddhism and its others in upland Laos.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 142 (2):245–264. Sprenger, Guido. 2018. “Buddhism and Coffee: The Transformation of Locality and Non-Human Personhood in Southern Laos.” Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 33(2): 265–290. Sprenger, Guido and Kristina Großmann. 2018. “Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 33(2): ix–xxii. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. “Urbanization and environmental futures: politicizing urban political ecologies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, pp. 609–619. London and New York: Routledge. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2017. “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch.” Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3): 253–275. Tadié, Jérôme. 2018. “Voir les défunts à Jakarta. Fantômes, espace et temps.” Géo­ graphies et cultures, 106: 1–16. Thiem, Bui Hai. 2018. “The new meaning of political participation in cyberspace. Social media and collective action in Vietnam’s authoriatarianism.” In Political participation in Asia: defining and deploying political space, edited by Eva Hansson and Meredith L. Weiss, pp. 95–111. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Truitt, Allison. 2008. “On the Back of the Motorbike: Middle-class mobility in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.” American Ethnologist, 35(1): 1–19.

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Turner, Bryan S. and Oscar Salemink, eds. 2015. Routledge Handbook of Religion in Asia. London and New York: Routledge. van der Veer, Peter, ed. 2015. Handbook of Religion and the Asian City. Oakland, CA: University California Press. Vu, Ngoc Anh. 2017. “Grassroots Environmental Activism in an Authoritarian Con­ text: The Trees Movement in Vietnam.” Voluntas, 28: 1180–1208. Work, Courtney. 2019. “Chtonic Sovereigns? ‘Neak Ta’ in a Cambodian Village.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 20(1): 74–95.

11 A Positive Other? Comprehending the Hope in Animism’s Overcoming the Capitalist Socio-ecological Crisis Michael Kleinod

Introduction The anthropology of ontologies constructs animism as an “other” to moder­ nity’s Nature/Society dualism, conceiving nonhumans in terms of sociality, intentionality, and agency. Through such opposition, animism presents the possibility of conceiving differently of the world and humanity’s position in it, promising an exit route out of disastrous societal nature relations based on the “naturalist” dualism. This chapter enquires into the hopes for animist ontology to represent a “positive other” in relation to capitalism’s crisisridden ecology. It explores the “hope-content” (Bloch 1996) of animist ontologies, thereby working towards a conceptual integration of ontology and political ecology that is a main feature of this volume. I argue that, since the idea of animism as “positive other” to the capitalist malaise is crucially rela­ tional, any answer to the question of whether “animism can save the world” (Sprenger 2021) first of all points to the one asking. This chapter thus com­ bines insights from fieldwork in Laos with methodological self-reflection according to Bourdieu’s praxeology (Bourdieu 1988, 1990, 2003) in order to work towards what Ernst Bloch (1996) had called docta spes, “educated” or “comprehended hope” – a central pivot of theoretically elaborate and practi­ cally achievable “concrete utopias” as opposed to mere wishful thinking (ibid.). Let me start this quest with a personal experience from my last fieldwork in Laos. During a conversation with a chao cham (ritual master) about bangbot – a special kind of forest spirit, to which I return in the second half of this chapter – a middle-aged man, named Tiang, suddenly entered the scene directly approaching me and, with wit in his eyes, declared: “I know where to find bangbot – under the parasol!” Evidently amused by his own play on words (referring to the literal meaning of bangbot as “hidden in the shade,” i.e. being invisible), he went on in English: “Those are just stories! Bangbot are invisible, there is no proof that they exist. Why are you inter­ ested in these stories?” My bafflement prevented a straight answer. For: yes, indeed, why was I…? I could have answered with the purpose of my research, to explore the ecological content of bangbot as “spirits with morality” DOI: 10.4324/9781003368182-11

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residing in undisturbed forests. But this would just have avoided the problem as his question ran deeper, touching on the foundations of scholarly engagement with animism. Tiang’s asking for my interest in “spirit stories” shall thus guide the explorations in this chapter. Let me define right away the central, and certainly most contentious, term in this text, hope: I use this term here following Bloch’s (1996) notion of docta spes as “intention towards possibility that has still not become,” representing “not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole.” According to this distinction between “the subjective and objective hopecontents of the world” (ibid., 7), the hope in animism would involve sub­ jective intentions as well as objective potentials for a profound overcoming of the extractive and alienating capitalist metabolism – and, importantly, the degree to which subjective intentions really grasp the objectivity to be over­ come. Thus, the hope-content is highest in those aspects of animist discourse and practice that address most explicitly and most strikingly the peculiarities of that which is to be overcome – capitalism – in its historical specificity (endless accumulation and extraction) as well as profound ubiquity (expand­ ing across the globe and deep into bodies and their environments). One cen­ tral element in comprehending the “utopian function” of animism – not sufficient but necessary, if also necessarily incomplete – is reflecting the degree to which the subject of such comprehension, i.e. the author of this text, is himself mediated by that which is hoped to be overcome, capital, as well as by animism. Therefore, in order to delve into this question of why I was interested in spirit stories, self-reflection is one important strategy here. Like “Bourdieu’s work on personal narrative lies at the intersection of … statistical survey methods … and … participant observation methods of anthropology” (Reed-Danahay 2005, 131–132), this self-reflection connects auto-ethno­ graphic reflection (section “Animism, tacit and ritualized”) with positioning within the social space (section “Scholastic animism”); which is then, in turn, related to ethnographic considerations of whether “bangbot can save the world”. A key point in all of this is that the hope-content of animism depends crucially on socio-structural position and historical-cultural con­ text. More specifically, the following two sections suggest a differentiation between tacit and ritualized animism, and scholastic animism. My overall argument is that the content of hope, in terms of an overcoming of the capitalist crisis, is found in the latter rather than the former – and right because of the intellectualist, purified, moralized, rationalized understanding of “animism” present in scholastic rather than tacit animisms, also because of exactly the sociostructural positionings of researchers and theoreticians vis-à-vis their “local” interlocutors. The example of sociostructurally different inter­ pretations of the bangbot imaginary in the penultimate section delineates this differentiation in the ethnographic material. The final section discusses this

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examination in light of the terminology established in the Introduction to this volume.

Animism, tacit and ritualized: critical autoethnography A first possible answer to Tiang’s question is that spirit stories are fascinating in their exoticism, i.e. their “alterity” to “modernist” Westerners, such as the researcher. But of course, it is more complicated. For, if spirit stuff fascinates because it seems somewhat exotic, yes, it is also strangely familiar somehow. A very basic observation is this: What typically defines an object, to some­ what “stand against” subjective intention and providing resistance to it (as in the German Gegenstand), is easily – and in fact regularly in everyday life, if you pay attention – experienced and communicated as a counter-intention of sorts: as if the object actively “objects” the subject. In my own everydaylife experience such endowment of objects with intention takes place most obviously when things are handled clumsily or inadequately (e.g. when being unfocused, impatient or in a hurry), so that the object’s specific, inadequately handled makeup is taken as some kind of intention on its part to thwart the subject’s project (“Come on, you’re just an object!”). Likewise, some pre-reflexive, tacit, animistic impulse is arguably present in a whole range of modern practices that hugely surpass contexts commonly defined as “animistic.” A most recent example is the COVID-19 virus: although an unintentional, “dumb” RNA sequence in scientific terms, “Corona” was and is often endowed with intention discursively, as if it was actually out to kill humans, cleverly mutating, a revenge of nature. The COVID-19 example suggests that such “animation” may be the result of distress on part of human actors at the mercy of an uncontrolled force.1 Such tacit everyday animation of objects troubles too easy distinctions between “us” and “them;” as Bourdieu claims: The anthropologist […], who does not have an adequate knowledge of his own primary experience of the world, puts the primitive at a distance because he does not recognize the primitive, pre-logical thought within himself. Locked in a scholastic, and thus intellectualist, vision of his own practice, he cannot recognize the universal logic of practice in modes of thought and action (such as magical ones) that he describes as pre-logical or primitive. (Bourdieu 2003, 286) Thus, acknowledging our own animist leanings is a first necessary step in theoretically conceiving that of others. However, it seems that scholars of animisms in the Global South often abstract from and disregard the animist elements in their own everyday practical entanglements with nonhumans, thus sidelining the fact that somehow “we have always been animists” (Harvey 2014, 11) and will remain so all the more with the unfolding

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ecological crisis. One peculiarly “modern” form that is central to capitalist everyday life is the personalization of human products on the grounds of the “commodity fetish” (Marx 1867 [1976], Leithäuser 1979, Latour 2005): the perception of commodities as having exchange value in themselves easily translates into imbuing them with a life of their own and an affective bonding with them.2 Bourdieu’s statement just cited stands in the context of his favorable read­ ing of Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer’s Golden Bough – an approval that needs to be questioned if animism’s hope-content is to be comprehended. As Wittgenstein proposes: When I am angry about something, I sometimes hit the ground or a tree with my cane. But surely, I do not believe that the ground is at fault or that the hitting would help matters. “I vent my anger.” And all rites are of this kind. One can call such practices instinctual behavior. – And a historical explanation, for instance that I or my ancestors earlier believed that hitting the ground would help is mere shadow-boxing, for these [sic] are superfluous assumptions that explain nothing. What is important is the semblance of the practice to an act of punishment, but more than this semblance cannot be stated. Once such a phenomenon is brought into relation with an instinct that I possess myself, it thus constitutes the desired explanation; that is, one that resolves this particular difficulty. And further investigation of the history of my instinct now proceeds along different tracks. (Wittgenstein 1931 [2018], 148–149, emphasis original) A refutation of this passage would obviously explode the confines of this chapter. But my concern is less with Wittgenstein’s peculiar epistemology, but rather with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, “that product of the regularities of the social world for which and through which there is a social world” (Bour­ dieu 1990, 140; emphasis original), and according to which “instincts” are not as ineluctably “basic” as Wittgenstein suggests here. To leave it there would amount to an ahistorical ontologization of instincts that appears to contradict Bourdieu’s own assertion that the habitus, as the source also of instincts, is a historical product. I thus contend that the commonplace animation of things among “moderns” needs to be seen in its historical depth (even if this is necessarily tricky and incomplete). “Shadow-boxing” though this may be, it means grappling with, and seeking to objectify, the “shadow” of the observer as a crucial procedure in methodological self-reflection.3 In this sense, everyday “modern” animism may be seen as historical result of a reconfiguration of the sacred (rather than its full secularization), i.e. “the establishment, rise and fall of a vertical, transcendent axis in thought and cosmology” (Szerszynski 2005, 7) in the course of Western history and capi­ talist development – from the immanent “primal sacred” via the idea of a transcendent, monotheistic God to modern-day environmentalism and

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techno-shamanism – relocating “the sacred” in nature and technology, to which an intrinsic value and intention is attributed. COVID-19 or climate change may easily appear as revenge especially when also “moderns” are increasingly put at the mercy of the uncontrolled socio-ecological forces of global capital’s crisis underwritten by a notion of Nature as nonhuman, at once disposable and sublime (Cronon 1996, Groh and Groh 1991). As Begemann (1986) has argued, in pre-capitalist Western Europe “nature fear” was constitutive of a “subject-centric” worldview that saw nature as an encompassing web of relations with intentionality towards humans (e.g. reading an earthquake or a thunderstorm as a sign of one’s destiny). This habitus has declined with the growing mastery of nature and the Enligh­ tened project of “the extirpation of animism” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947 [2002], 2). This project has been incomplete, however. What was done away with (at least in the Western context that I grew up in) are distinct social conventions that had made such “ontologies” more concrete, explicit, institutionalized; i.e. the lore that prescribed natural-supernatural forces as distinct intentional proponents (such as, dwarfs, mermaids, fearsome mountain spirits or celestial Wild Hunts) – or, what I call here “ritualized animism.” In contrast, the “tacit animism” as described above remains active in everyday life. Two reflexive snippets from fieldwork shall illustrate this difference between tacit animism and a more refined ritualized animism, highlighting my own fear of the “natural-supernatural” and the related sense of being at the mercy of unaccountable forces, as experienced by a barely modernized “modern.” On an early misty morning of my very first fieldwork our tour de force through the White Thai villages of rugged Pu Luong Nature Reserve in Northern Vietnam put us on a long and steep path uphill in order to get to the next village. Already exhausted from the past days, and tired after a bad sleep in the unaccustomed environment of an assemblage of wooden stilthouses (and without any coffee intake!), we had to climb for hours, heavily packed, over razor-sharp Karst rocks slippery from the constant drizzle, slowly and cautiously one step after the other. Neither was it an option to return, nor did we know how much further we would have to follow this arduous path. This exhaustive and unnerving experience was also more than just that: while in it, the growing despair and feeling of helplessness got imbued with a strange anger directed at the perceived ill intention and des­ potism of some nebulously personal, supernatural force – as if the environ­ ment itself was intentionally against us. There was no question of “belief” involved, only practical engagement with uncontrolled, unaccustomed situa­ tions in a wholly unfamiliar, ruggedly rural place. If in this vignette the personality behind all of this remained unspecific, the following episode features a clearer lore, or theory, if you will, exemplifying ritualized animism (for details see Kleinod 2016). Towards the end of a vil­ lage walk with elders of a Katang community the heaviest thunderstorm I had thus far experienced not just convinced me of the depth of villagers’

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manifold concerns with all kinds of spirits; it also demonstrated vividly at first hand, again, how nature fear turns into “more-than-nature fear” (Begemann 1986, 76). Arguably, a mighty tropical thunderstorm in a village peripheral even for Lao standards, lacking any lightning conductors or brick walls, is of an experiential quality very different from one in a town or city in temperate latitudes.4 However, the frightful course of events was in an all too strange alignment with villagers’ explanations: several close lightning strikes – first under the stilt-hut where we sought shelter, then in a tree close by, and again at the hut during a focus group interview – proved that Phanya In (Lord Indra) was out to kill me for having “played with food” (by taking photos of a lizard tied up for dinner). The fact that the storm receded at exactly the moment when I ritually submitted to Indra’s power further supported local theory. Thus, on top of “just the weather,” my own “nature fear” was compounded by knowing Indra’s rage. Its various objec­ tive signs not only aggravated my experience of being “at the mercy of a capricious nature” (Scott 1976, 26), it simultaneously gave the resulting animistic impulse a more definite form, relating to a major thewada (celes­ tial being) watching over humans, their well-being, and their wrongdoings. It made leaving the hut a daring endeavor for at least the rest of the day. This short reflection of fieldwork experiences is not to suggest that my own feelings explain those of my hosts, at least not simply by some ahistorical immediacy of practical involvement of researcher and researched in the same practical context (like Wittgenstein appears to suggest). Rather, the argument here is exactly that my own animist leanings can and need to be seen against their historical trajectory of an incomplete “modernization” and seculariza­ tion, as related above. It must be seen against the fact that the lands between the Rhön Mountains and the Thuringian Forest, where I grew up, were themselves populated until not too long ago by nature spirits and roamed by celestial heroes in their dreadful-nurturing Wild Hunt, not unlike Phanya In.5 This region was a heartland of Protestantism and a center of witch hunts that ravaged Thuringia until far into the 18th century.6 Still, habituated in a petty-bourgeois family of the German Democratic Republic (Mau 2019), between a largely areligious environment and the Pro­ testantism that my family followed in opposition to the socialist regime, I saw myself done with religious “belief” at the age of 15 at the latest, settling somewhere between atheism and agnosticism. But once in Laos, asking Mae Simueang (spiritual protectress of Vientiane) for safe passage or placating a chao thi (local tutelary spirit) were not the last things to care about. Coming back to Tiang, an answer to his question is found, rather than in simple exo­ ticism, in this twisted relation of “incomplete moderns,” such as myself, to the (super)natural. These fieldwork experiences not only made this relation more obvious to me but also cautioned against the idealization of “animism” as wholesale solution to the capitalist misery.

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If animism is to present a hopeful alternative to universal appropriation and exploitation for the profit of the few, it will be necessary to comprehend not only its historical preconditions but also the ways in which, at present, it is mediated by what the investment of hope intends to transcend, capital. Therefore, in order to locate such hope in animism, the following section introduces a further kind of animism in addition to the tacit and ritualized animisms suggested here: scholastic animism.

Scholastic animism: socio-structural positionings For Bourdieu (2003, 281), reflexive sociology situates the researcher in the social space and its various social fields in order “to grasp and master the prereflexive social and academic experiences of the social world that [the social analyst] tends to project unconsciously onto ordinary social agents.”7 I seek to do this, again only sketchily, to account for the mediation of the scholarly interest in – and the hope invested into – spirit stories by capital structures. In “participant objectivation”: What needs to be objectivized, then, is not the anthropologist performing the anthropological analysis of a foreign world but the social world that has made both the anthropologist and the conscious or unconscious anthropology that she (or he) engages in her anthropological practice. (Bourdieu 2003, 283) Here is a central point concerning the hope invested into animism: it owes much (if not most) to an institutionalized detached relation of theory and theoreticians to practically lived reality, coming from a privileged position in the social space: the paid work within the relatively autonomous academic field of distilling a synoptic “ontology” from practical entanglements to which, in turn, such scholastic preoccupations are alien (see Bourdieu 1990). In this vein, “animism,” the object of scholarly hope, is first of all an artefact of this field and its peculiar delineations and inequities. Seeking to “make sense” of it is thus a concern mainly, if not entirely, for the detached observer as member of that field. A first main delineation in terms of capital is thus that between the academic field and those social practices that become its object of investigation, general­ ization and abstraction. In Bourdieusian terms, the academic field national and international, in particular in times of “academic capitalism,” is: a field with relative positions of dominance, subordination, and equality based on differential holdings of forms of capital. Each academic department or individual faculty member within a discipline occupies a position in relation to others, nationally and internationally […]. (Mendoza, Kuntz, and Berger 2012, 560)

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The scholarly discourse on animism and alternative ontologies thus arises in a conflictive social context with its many fault lines between faculties or dis­ ciplines, between teaching and research, dominating and subordinate posi­ tions (professors, staff, students), etc.; and it must be seen from the perspective of the accumulation of various sorts of capital, competition for funds, authority, recognition, etc. Faculties, disciplines, departments, and individuals are in competition namely for reputation as “a form of symbolic capital that is related and sometimes converted to other forms of capital such as cultural (e.g., differential holdings of valued knowledge) and economic capital (e.g., research funding, salaries)” (Mendoza, Kuntz, and Berger 2012: 561).8 Between and within academic subfields exist relations of power in terms of capital inequity, such as, between autonomous (intrinsic to acade­ mia) and heteronomous (influenced by other fields) principles of hierarchy and domination, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, or between institutional and intellectual capital, including respective authorities of consecration and gate-keepers (Lenger and Rhein 2018, 94–115, Bourdieu 1988). Thus, besides “theory vs practice,” another major distinction constituting the hopeful construction of animism as positive other is that of “natural vs. social sciences” as main delineation of the academic field that is reproduced on each level of the differentiation of academic labor (i.e. between “hard” and “soft” sub-/disciplines). It is therefore important to note that the academic discourse on animism is part of a social structure that is divided exactly along those lines questioned by that discourse, i.e. Nature vs. Society. Arising in a certain section of cultural anthropology, i.e. on the “soft” side of this gap within the subfield of social sciences, the topic of animism is consequently constructed in a rather idealistic fashion (“ontology”) and, furthermore, is indigenous to a rather peripheral area of the academic field as a whole (Note here the structural homology with the social positions of the “animists” stu­ died by that field!). Its ambition for societal relevance and recognition may be seen in the way in which animism and alternative ontologies are related to pressing social problems such as environmental degradation, whereas the often rather esoteric9 treatment of the subject matter signals its ephemeral, perhaps “heterodox” position (even if the discourse produces its own ortho­ doxies and power structures) among the “softest” sections of the social sci­ ences. According to Mendoza et al. (2012, 578), “variation in access to different forms and amounts of capital leads to differing sets of perspectives and associated choices that can be thought of as reflections of differing habi­ tus for a faculty member.” That is, the field-specific discourse on animism as positive other can be read as a political-economic strategy of positioning within this peculiar social structure geared towards intellectual capital as an “ability to influence public opinion” (Mendoza, Kuntz, and Berger 2012, 561; Bourdieu 1988). In terms of such objectivation of the objectifying subject, the preoccupa­ tion of the author of this chapter with animism is grounded in a social position characterized by a non-academic, petit-bourgeois family

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background that might account for the particular choice of rather peripheral themes cross-cutting various disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Occupying a rather “dominated” position within this rela­ tional space of academic subfields (as part of the academic precariat of postdoc researchers in the German academic field; Bahr et al. 2022, LangeVester and Teiwes-Kügler 2013, Schneickert 2019), the choice for a niche topic such as animism, and its treatment in a niche way (by applying prax­ eology to what is mostly treated in “ontological” terms), might be seen as a strategy of creating a “claim” to gain recognition in those subfields so as to reproduce or further improve one’s social position (as compared to family background). It is furthermore essential to note that social positions of scholars dealing with “non-modern ontologies” are secured and reproduced not just within academia but, more generally, within a global social space where scholars from urban, capitalist centers are pit vis-à-vis people from rural, peripheral places. Academic capital is thus gained via the appropriation of local knowl­ edges for scholarly distinction in fieldwork among villagers, hunter-gatherers, transhumant pastoralists. This discourse is therefore structured by a most central fault line of global capitalism: the political–economic–cultural relation of capitalization and appropriation most visible in the distinction between town and countryside (Moore 2015).10 My own social and cultural position­ ing happens within what might be called a relational global social space (Weiß 2005) encompassing German, as well as Lao social structures and cul­ tures and their unequal, in fact still rather “imperial” relations (Brand and Wissen 2021). Such a sociological reflection of one’s own position is an indispensable aspect of explaining scholarly interest in “stories” such as those about bangbot (see following section), as the manifold structural delineations and rela­ tions just sketched are constitutive of the researcher as well as her, or his, subject matter. It is a necessary, if insufficient, moment in explaining the spe­ cific form and function of a peculiar discursive practice (accumulation of various sorts of academic capital), while its concrete contents and truth value (critique of capital accumulation) are explained by historical accounts as provided in the preceding section and, more pronouncedly, by the nonidentity of scholars with capitalist society (see “Discussion and Conclusion”). This is thus the place to add another differentiation, that of scholastic animism – referring to the scholarly “new animism” discourse that has ritualized animisms as its subject matter (while tending to forget practical, tacit animism), employed as criticism against capitalism and as positioning strategy in the “di-vision” of academic labor. It is itself, in a sense, metho­ dically animistic in its reliance on Latourian social philosophy (Latour 1993), seeking to circumvent the subject/object dualism. That scholastic animism might represent the locality where hope of the sort under consideration here is most likely to be found will be argued in the Discussion. The following section uncovers in the ethnographic material of bangbot the distinction

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between tacit, ritualistic, and scholastic (or: “urban”) animism that I sug­ gested thus far in the mode of self-reflection.

Can bangbot save the world? In my quest for the hope in animism it is necessary to reflect and explicate the ways in which animism addresses, contests or reproduces those socio­ ecological structures in the transcendence of which hope alone resides. The bangbot – at whom Tiang’s asking was directed – are a good case in point since this peculiar spirit imaginary explicitly addresses the morality of eco­ logical relations, providing a critical yardstick. However, again, the socio­ historical structuring of this complex of meaning determines, as I suggest in this section, whether or not bangbot are interpreted as some kind of positive other. The bangbot (Kleinod and Chanthavong forthcoming, for further details) are generally considered by Lao people as “spirits with morality” (phi thi mi sintham); they are represented as human-like though invisible beings living a devout, even monastic, Buddhist life in the remote and inaccessible jungle. This link of Buddhist morality and deep jungle allows for – but does not necessarily involve – value judgements of recent socio-economic development in Laos, namely its official “turning land into capital” (han thi din pen theun) policy, which regularly comes with deforestation and immoral social inequity. Some bangbot narratives rather explicitly address this situation, but it appears that there is a spectrum of bangbot interpretations with varying degrees of “morality” and thus of critical potential. Previous research found the most pronounced criticism regarding Lao modernization – as uttered through the bangbot idiom – in accounts of urban educated milieus, while it was lesser to non-existent in recent rural accounts.11 This variation in bangbot narratives with the rural-urban spectrum is expressed most pointedly in the differential use of cosmological classifiers to define bangbot: in rural accounts bangbot tended to be classified as phi (“spirit”) whereas in urban accounts they tended to be cast in terms of the­ wada (“angel”) (with the category of khon, ordinary person, at the middle of the continuum as overlapping category).12 This recalls classical scholarly debates about the distinction and relation between phi and thewada, which also tends to be expressive of the distinction and relation between Buddhism and animism (Holt 2009, Van Esterik 1982) and, arguably, between town and country.13 Without being able to go too deep into these issues here, it is notable, first of all, that central to the general distinction between these cate­ gories (regardless the overlaps) is the amount of karmic merit and moral purity, which, in turn, centrally defines bangbot’s current capacity to critically comment on recent Lao development: Phi tend to be seen as lacking mor­ ality and merit, thus located in subhuman realms; while thewada are “hea­ venly phi” in superhuman realms of Buddhist cosmology (see Van Esterik 1982; Formoso 1996). Phi accounts of bangbot framed them very much in

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terms of Van Esterik (1982), “as immoral and untrustworthy, emotional, unreasonable […].” (ibid., 6) In other words, they figured as everyday trick­ sters that need to be dealt with, and that can be forced by magical acts. Just like the guardian spirits described as phi in Van Esterik’s account, they may be placated by offerings of meat, and are seen as raw-fooders including the consumption of meat. The further we move along the continuum towards the thewada pole, accounts of bangbot stress their Buddhist morality, their benevolence against honest and pious humans, the impossibility of forcing their will, their vegetarian diet (even if they raise chickens). In short, narratives clas­ sifying bangbot as phi, as found in rural villages close to comparably undisturbed protected forests, their trustworthiness and benevolence was rather in doubt and narratives tended to be void of socio-ecological criticism; while in narratives classifying them as thewada, as found among urban upper middle classes in the cities of Vientiane and Savannakhet, they turned into explicit role models for a positive, traditionally Lao alternative to perceived corruption and dishonesty, social misery, and ecological destruction. However, while the most pronounced criticism via the bangbot imaginary is uttered today in the urban thewada mode, historically it was exactly the phiinterpretation which made bangbot central to the beginnings of the violent social criticism that was the Holy Man’s Rebellion (1901–36): to combatants, it was a “Phi Bangbot” who lend potency and legitimacy to the first leader of the revolt, Ong Keo (Pholsena 2006, 130). What has changed in the meantime, among other things certainly, is the ecological context: this revolt was not directed at deforestation or species extinction but at French colonialism; and the political legitimacy conferred by bangbot was couched in a magico-ani­ mist-Buddhist “tradition of sorcery and invulnerability” (Pholsena 2006, 131) endowing rural-based elites with authority and the capacity to lead.14 In con­ trast, in today’s tension between environmental plunder and conservation in Laos (Kleinod 2017) their legitimating power lies in the connection of Bud­ dhist merit to the Lao forests (Ladwig 2013). In this example, frontier capi­ talist dynamics are expressed through animist-Buddhist cosmology according to varying historical and socio-structural actor-positions. While in the phi register bangbot used to lend symbolic capital to rural elites in anti-colonial revolt, today they confer symbolic capital to an urban elite that partly consists in newly emerging “socio-ecological” milieus created by former urban intel­ lectual capital and more recent involvement of international conservationbased activities (see Kleinod and Chanthavong, forthcoming). This ethnographic example demonstrates how the hope-content of animist imaginaries depends on socio-structural and historical position. It suggests that, at least today, the position-specific meaning of bangbot is hopeful (with regard to addressing and overcoming capitalist nature relations) to the extent that the (Buddhist) morality of bangbot becomes an explicit yardstick against which the morality of Lao development is measured. This is the case in urban accounts interpreting bangbot as celestial thewada – which can be seen here as analogous to scholastic animism in its urban origin as well as its

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more or less explicit critique of capitalism – while in rural accounts bangbot’s interpretation as phi did not bring their morality to the forefront, treating them rather in terms of everydayness and untrustworthiness. However, the hopecontent of bangbot as thewada only consists in the kind of criticism and the alternatives enabled by that Buddhist outlook, which is rather escapist and backward-looking in nature, longing for a return to some pure and idealized precapitalist Lao past. If it provides an outlet for critique in a political setting that silences any kind of opposition to the Party line, it also adheres to the national discourse about Lao-ness and the “fine Lao customs,” so that its potential for overcoming the status quo is rather limited. Similarly, the non­ violent nature of thewada alone hardly provides for a powerful and combative attitude as in the interpretation of bangbot as phi in the context of the Holy Man’s Revolt. This suggests that most hope would lie in bringing together the­ wada and phi interpretations to make for a more revolutionary outlook – implying, in turn, an overcoming of the distinction between town and coun­ tryside, as I will argue now.

Discussion and Conclusion So, why was I interested in spirit stories? The full answer is (ideally) given by this text, its short version is: exactly because of their supposed “hope-content.” This problem lies at the intersection of two main lines of inquiry as established in the Introduction to this volume: first, the relation between ontology and ecology – and the problem of integrating ontological and poli­ tical-ecological approaches; second, the relation between hegemony and pluralization. From a praxeological perspective, the relation of ontology and ecology is conceived from the vantage point of social practice. Modernism and animism are as such close to what Weber called ideal-types and, there­ fore, have as much reality as ideal-types do, that is, none (Weber 1978, 20). In praxis, the supposedly distinct multiplicity of mutually exclusive ontologies (Baumann 2020) is factually of a piece. Returning back to Tiang, the question of why I was interested in stories about bangbot came from a male Khmu in his mid-forties with an – unsur­ prisingly – “modern” background: having learned English in the village with the US Peace Corps, he was involved in tourism on the Thai island of Kho Phi Phi and employed as local guide for a major Lao ecotourism company. While to me his question triggered a process of self-reflection (as laid out above), he told me his reason for asking this question: it was not because he did not believe in spirits in general, but he was unsure whether bangbot in particular exist since they are per definition “invisible” – so how could anyone really know? He then related how he had once conducted an “experiment” (his word) to prove the existence of phi gong goy:15 One eve­ ning, he explains, he builds his bed across a stream in the forest and waits for gong goy to come. Deep at night, he lights a fire, grills some meat, and very soon these creatures would be all over the place screaming “gong goy gong

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goy”! This experiment confirmed to him the actual existence of gong goy. About bangbot, however, he is not sure, but he will “go and check.”16 Yet, despite his doubt he still does think that they exist – and he would go on talk­ ing about bangbot as if they existed, such as, when his sister was made invisible by them in his childhood (Kleinod and Chanthavong, forthcoming). I cannot begin here to make full sense of Tiang’s deliberate and daring “experiment” to prove the empirical existence of spirits, but it highlights the confusing and messy practical reality out which ideal-typical “ontologies” are distilled (i.e. purified) from all “the urgency, the appeals, the threats, the steps to be taken, which make up the real, really lived-in, world” that such synoptic generalizations abstract from (Bourdieu 1990, 82). To Tiang’s “animist-mod­ ernist,” (quasi?)scientific practice, obviously, analytically separated ontologies constitute a coherent whole. In this vein, the relation and salience of those ontologies in a given practice depends, furthermore, not least on the respec­ tive interests and power relations of particular actors (or groups) in specific practical contexts. In other words, ontologies are part of a socially structured logic of practice that is always, following Bourdieu (1990), logically consistent only to the degree that this is practical. Partly beyond Bourdieu (Kleinod and Schneickert 2020), practice is always also ecological: it is in practices that the “social metabolism” (Marx 1867 [1976], 198) takes place, since practice is per definition a matter of engaging with other humans, nonhumans, as well as with oneself. Therefore, ontologies are ecological to the degree that they are objectified in bodies and environ­ ments as pivots of actions. Thus, neither “modernism” nor “animism” – abstractly defined by academics through the location of “personhood” and “sociality” – are as such already ecologies, but only insofar as they inform praxis (Becker 2012). Pragmatically guided by some pre-reflexive beliefs (Bourdieu’s doxa), practices organize bodies and environments in a socialsymbolic order naturalized by embodiment and habitat-making (Bourdieu 1990, 2001, Kleinod and Schneickert 2020). Thus, “animism” is an ecology as a practical operator involving “doubt as much as belief, guesswork and experimentation, as much as tradition and convention” (Sprenger 2016, 32). In this sense, it involves politics and ecology from the outset. An important implication of this materialist praxeological stance is that practice is perhaps the most central locale of ecology, the active metabolic relation between society and “that nonidentical moment […] called […] by the crude, too narrow name of ‘nature’” (Adorno 1966 [1973], 178). In other words, dominative capitalist relations, i.e. the appropriation and exhaustion of humans and honhumans, as effected through hegemonic political-economic structures produce manifold, concretely experienced nonidentities with such domination. While it is in these nonidentities that hope may be found, socially produced and structured unease can be more or less hopeful with regard to its respective potential to fully grasp and transcend capital’s eco­ logical crisis. That the capitalist Nature/Society ontology is hegemonic in every corner and depth of this world should be rather obvious in these times

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of global warming and pandemic. However, it is not problematic just because it is hegemonic, but because of the peculiarly exploitative and exhaustive ecological relations that are ruling instead of otherwise possible ones. As ecoMarxist scholar Jason W. Moore pointedly said, the Nature/Society dualism “drips with blood and dirt” (Moore 2015, 4). This ontology is a violent abstraction, a real force in its “world-shaking material divorce of the direct producers from the means of production” (Moore 2015, 76). There is hope only to the degree that this is reflected in theory to become transcended in practice. There is thus some reason to assume that the greatest hope-content lies in those animisms labelled here “scholastic” and “urban;” first, because it is in the academic field (and analogously urban educated milieus) that a critical reflection most adequate to the wide-ranging and profound socio-ecological problem at hand is best possible, exactly for its relative autonomy, detached­ ness, aloofness; second, simply because the hope-content depends on whether hope was invested to begin with. This seems to be the case most explicitly in scholarly “synoptic” reflection on “animism”, as well as in urban accounts of bangbot. However, as long as the scholastic discourse about animism does not free itself from its institutional disciplining, i.e. to the degree to which it adheres itself to capital accumulation – such as by reproducing rather spe­ cialist and esoteric knowledge in a l’art pour l’art fashion inaccessible to actual political action – the hope-content also of scholastic animism will remain limited. Likewise, the nonviolent, urban, Buddhist outlook of bangbot as thewada appears as one of still limited hope-content regarding the problem at hand. One key element in liberating scholastic animism’s hope-content from institutional disciplining is methodological self-reflection, objectifying the subject of objectivation as product of historical trajectories and social struc­ ture; and thus in acknowledging a certain, ambivalent relation of this subject to its “object” of study. A hopeful transcendence of capitalism by animist ontologies will be conceivable only to the extent that this ambivalence is fig­ ured out. As I suggested here, the similarity between researchers and the “nonmoderns” they investigate lies in a tacit animism that is shared by both and often goes unacknowledged by the former. What differentiates both is the scholasticism involved in the researcher’s social position, and the structuredstructuring relation to animism as her field of inquiry, i.e. the distillation, generalization, purification of a “meaning structure” out of messy realities unconcerned with such concerns. Most hope lies in scholastic animism because it is most explicitly employed against capitalism in its particularity and generality, rather than in local tacit and ritualized animisms subject to the mercy of uncontrolled socio-ecological forces. To conclude, the hope-content of animism in terms of practice as “con­ sciously illuminated, knowingly elucidated content” (Bloch 1996, 146) cru­ cially depends on reflecting the ways in which the talk about “animism,” as well as the one talking, are active parts of those capital structures that such

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talk intends to overcome. If such hope-content is highest in scholastic ani­ mism for above reasons – redundant or inconclusive, as it stands – true hope in animism (i.e. as Blochian “positive utopian function” that matches sub­ jective intention and objective possibility) has to proceed to factually over­ coming such existing institutional-epistemic structures as “[t]he division of social and extra-social Being […] that takes its bearings from the arrangement of the sciences” (Adorno 1973, 141). In other words, scholastic animism needs to transcend the academic confines by turning from contemplative to partisan knowledge: Because merely contemplative knowledge necessarily refers to what is closed and thus to what is past, it is helpless against what is present and blind to the future. […] The knowledge necessary for decision accordingly has a different mode: one which is not merely contemplative, but rather one which goes with process, which is actively and partisanly in league with the good which is working its way through, i.e. [with] what is humanly worthy in process. (Bloch 1996, 198) Importantly, such a mode of engaged knowledge production will have to look for the New instead of taking some localized “non-modern” or supposedly “indigenous tradition” as already existing alternative to the problem at hand: an encompassing and ubiquitous social metabolism of a profoundly exploita­ tive, exhaustive, and alienating quality that turns symbolically on the ontolo­ gical di-vision of Nature vs. Society. A partisan “militant optimism” (Bloch) seeking to overcome this grand “violent abstraction” (Moore 2015, 76), clearly has to break with institutionalized academe, in order to speak and act for and with the plurality of the nonidentical moments in this real-existing socio-ecological impossibility.

Notes 1 This force is often naturalized as “natural catastrophe,” enabling political decisionmakers and major economic actors to deflect responsibility according to the “nat­ uralist” ontology. 2 Such as when worrying whether one’s expensive bike may be “bored” standing in the basement “alone” – a concern confessed to me by a close friend. 3 In fact, Wittgenstein’s argument goes along with his methodological stance already in the Tractatus that, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – a philosophical stance criticized as “utterly antiphilosophical” since philosophy is exactly “to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identi­ fies it at the same time” (Adorno 1993, 101–102). 4 Begemann (1986, 90–91) highlights the significance of the invention of the light­ ning conductor for fundamentally delimiting fear of nature as it took away the natural-supernatural dangers of thunderstorms interpreted as “witch weather” or expressions of God’s wrath.

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5 In the region around my hometown, a natural deity of pre-Christian origin named “Mother Holle” was popular in folklore. In some respects close to Indra, Holle is largely a benevolent celestial protectress of human and agricultural fertility, of females and the domestic sphere, and closely connected to creatures, which have striking similarities with bangbot (see below section “Can bangbot save the world?”): gnomes – benevolent (if playful) little helpers with many curious facul­ ties. Holle’s roots in ancient Germanic mythology and her ambivalent nature can be read from a lore, which puts her as leader of the mythical “Wild Hunt” of supernatural beings (going back to Odin), bringing fertility to the fields over which it goes while also terrifying the human populace as harbinger of evil times. 6 In Mother Holle as in the idea of witches, pre-Christian mythology merged with Christian beliefs. The witch hunts were also a direct attempt to eradicate “pagan” practices, and they were instrumental in the development of capitalism (Federici 2004). 7 A prime example, in my view, of such immediate projection is found in Nikolas Århem's (2014) dissertation on Katu spirit forests. Århem’s detailed ethnographic study highlights ex negativo this need to seriously reflect on the conditions and relations of research subject and object, in order to avoid the romanticist trap of idealizing “animists” as environmentally noble savages, and confusing animism as part of frontier subsistence with late capitalist culture-industrial productions: Århem reads the movie Avatar as expression of modernist Deep Ecology and is “surpris[ed] to find so many striking similarities between this Deep Ecology fan­ tasy culture (the Na’vi) and the cultures of the groups […] visited in the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam” (69). Thereby, Katu of the Vietnam/Laos bor­ derlands tend to be appear as incorporations of culture-industrial stereotypes. 8 Not least, “funding agents—federal and industrial—are key drivers of research agendas and the ways in which faculty members pursue their work” (Mendoza, Kuntz, and Berger 2012, 579). 9 This esotericism also betrays the fact that not all ontologists claim societal rele­ vance but rather seek to preserve the right to pursue their science as l’art pour l’art. 10 This is the foundation of treating urban animist narratives in parallel with scho­ lastic animism in the subsequent section. 11 This is decidedly not to claim that there is generally less critical awareness among rural milieus who, in fact, bear the brunt of the Lao resource economy. Rather, our data suggests that narratives employing the specific bangbot narrative for criticism of Lao modernization is, and only recently so (with the advent of the international eco-capitalist sustainability agenda) located in urban rather than rural milieus. 12 That means that some referred to phi bangbot, some to khon bangbot, some to thewada bangbot. Many interlocutors used khon (person) as bangbot are generally regarded as human-like, but with differential further qualification as rather phi-like or thewada-like. 13 That is to say: while Buddhism and animism generally mix in a Lao setting, the purification of Buddhism (i.e. from animistic elements) was always the concern of a devaraja (“God-king”) residing at the “urban” power center of a mandala polity (Swearer 2010). The distinction phi vs. thewada thus tends to designate various socio-structural actor-positions along the urban/rural divide (Rehbein 2017). 14 This seems true even if Ong Keo derived legitimacy from Buddhist ideas and practices because Buddhism was (and is) seen in Laos through an animist lens (Holt 2009), so that a neat separation between Buddhist and animist power is hardly possible on the level of practice and politics. 15 Which is perhaps the best-known malevolent forest spirit, hopping “along on one foot wherever it goes,” and as real as the blood he sucks “from the toe of a way­ farer” who then “will become weak and die” (Rajadhon 1954, 72–73).

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16 According to Tiang‘s phi-interpretation, the intricate magical procedure of grilling the skin of a white buffalo killed by lightning could force bangbot into visibility.

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Index

Note: Locators in italic refer to figures and those followed by “n” refer to end notes. academic capital 193, 195 accountability 138 activism/activists 7, 18, 65, 68, 78, 83–84, 88–95, 98–99, 107, 113–115, 127–128, 161–165, 170–172, 174–175, 180–181 Adaro Met Coal 104 adat land in Indonesia 98–110; alternative agreements to 106–108; dilemma of privately owned and certified land 106–107; lack of legal acknowledgment 107–108; relational ecology, problem of representation 108 adat laws 100, 102 adverse incorporation 68 agama 48, 55, 56–57, 60, 61–62, 85, 87, 90 Agrarian People’s Communication Forum 161 agribusiness 156, 157 agricultural involution 154 agriculture 48, 70, 73, 90, 103, 106, 149–156, 158, 161, 162, 165 agri-science 152, 156 agro-biodiversity 150 agro-corporations 150 agro-industrial green revolution 20 agroindustry 150, 163 agro-microbiology 162 Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) 84 Alor 17, 47–53, 56–61 ambiguity 34–36, 41 American–Vietnamese War 178 analogism 67 ancestor spirits 86 ancestry 114, 118–120 animism 17, 18, 19, 20, 28, 36, 38, 42, 67, 187–203; anthropological concept

of 171; case studies 89–94; critical autoethnography 189–193; defined 9; doubtful 29–32; hierarchical 9; hopecontent 187, 188, 190, 197, 198, 200; indigeneity and 85–87; in Indo­ nesia 83–95; ritualized 189–193; scholastic animism 193–195; tacit 189–193 animist ecology 17, 18, 29, 65, 67, 68, 78, 79 antagonistic ecologies 132 anthropology of ontologies 4–5, 7 anthropomorphic spirits 101 Appadurai, Arjun 37 Århem, Kaj 9, 86 Aru Islands: ancestry, migration, and land 118–120; conflictual culture politics 120–127; future of indigenous ecologies in 127–128; overview of 116–118 Asian financial crisis 138 attached ecology 99–102 autochthonous religion 70 autochthony 10–11 bangbot 196–199 baroque ecologies 135–136 baroque economies 133 Benedict, Ruth 38, 40 Bimbingan Massal (BIMAS) 156 biodiesel 159 biodiversity 1, 49, 73, 149 bioethanol 159 biofuel 151 Bird-David, Nurit 77, 100, 105 Blaikie, Piers 3 Blaser, Mario 67 Bloch, Ernst 187, 188 Borneo 4, 15, 17, 65–80, 151

Index Bourdieu, Pierre 13–14, 187–190, 199 brown plant-hopper (BPH) 158 Bubandt, Nils 35 Buddhism 9, 10, 11, 31, 36, 85, 202n13 Buginese traders 117 Cadena, Marisol de la capitalism 18, 20, 43, 77, 187, 188 capitalist extractivism 78 capitalist socio-ecological crisis 187–203; bangbot 196–199; critical autoethnography 189–193; scholastic animism 193–195 Catholicism 85, 86 chopstick trees 182 Christianity 9, 11, 67, 153 chthonic powers 9 civilization 87, 132, 172 civil society activism in urban Hanoi 172–175 class-based approaches 83 climate change 1, 7, 191 coal extraction 104 coal mining 70, 104 co-existence of different ecologies 104–105 colonial-era stereotyping 137 Committee for the Formation of Aru Islands Regency 125 commodity fetish 190 communication 21, 29, 32–42, 37, 39, 42, 58 composite economy 99 concrete utopias 187 conflict-ridden realities 114, 115 conflicts 1, 15, 19–22, 28, 42, 67, 69, 74, 78, 85, 98, 100, 118, 120, 133; Dewan Adat Aru (DAA) 125–127; internal 117, 121; LMA, mass violence and autonomy 124–125; between new adat organiza­ tions 124–127; between Urlima and Ursia 123–124; within and between vil­ lages 121–123 conflicting ways of invisible human-like beings 47–63; adat 47–49, 53–59, 61, 62; agama 47, 48, 55–58, 60–62; ancestors 51–52; hegemonialization 58–59; narrative’s meaning for village life 52–53; pemerinta 47, 48, 55, 56, 60– 62; road construction work organized as ritual 53–54; village life in transition 50–51; village-setting 48–50 conflictual culture politics 120–127; Dewan Adat Aru (DAA) 125–127; LMA, mass violence and autonomy 124–125; between

207

new adat organizations 124–127; between Urlima and Ursia 123–124; within and between villages 121–123 contradictions 28, 30, 31, 32, 40 contradictory behaviour 66 controlled equivocation 5 Coral Triangle Initiative 49 cosmic economy of sharing 100 cosmologies 5, 7, 8, 13, 20, 190 cosmo-political diplomacy 33 Council of Indonesian Ulama 88 COVID-19 189, 191 critical autoethnography 189–193 cultural asset 112 cultural differences 28, 33, 153 cultural diversity 116 cultural landscapes 149 cultural politics 12, 83–85, 89, 93, 113, 116, 127, 195 culture contact 28 culture system 153 customary land 68, 91, 92, 121 customary law 93, 100, 113, 126 Darwin, Charles 117 Dayak Benuaq 65–80 Dayak Misik program 104, 105 “Dayak Wake Up” scheme 99, 102; rejection, in Uut Murung 104 de Castro, Viveiros 5, 8 decentralization laws 125 decentralization process 116 decision-making 5 defining land process 106 deities 86 De la Cadena, Marisol 6, 115 democratization process 69, 116 dependency theories 3 Descola, Philippe 4, 29, 67, 101 devastated Hanoians 178 development assistance 156 Dewan Adat Aru (DAA) 125–127 dichotomous ecologies 67–69 discrimination 87, 99 diverging ecologies 112, 114 diversification 19, 21, 112, 113, 115, 121, 143 diversity 20, 28, 36 doubt 9, 29–36, 39, 197, 198–199 Dove, Michael 4, 99 dual ecology 154 Duri 91, 93, 95 Dutch trade monopoly 117 dynamic spiritual landscape of Java 140

208

Index

East Kalimantan 65–66, 70, 77, 78–79, 105

Eastern Indonesia 11, 17, 35, 47, 51, 52,

61, 112, 142

ecological autonomy 4

ecological disturbances 112–128; ancestry,

migration, and land 118–120; Aru Islands 116–118; challenging indigeneity from within 113–116; conflictual culture politics 120–127; future of indigenous ecologies in Aru 127–128 ecologies 13–16; defined 2; feature of 14

ecology monks 169

economic development, adat for 125–127

economic strategy 70

eco-socialism 172

elite occupation 137

elite organic diets 164

empowerment 89

endosociality 10

entrepreneurial ecologies, in Javanese

fishery 132–146

environmental conflicts 4, 67

environmental health 4

environmental justice 175

environmental rights organizations 79

environmental spiritualism 65–79, 89–91,

98, 135–136, 140, 141

epistemological uncertainty 34

epistemology 38, 105, 190

Escobar, Arturo 8

ethical negotiation 114

ethnic differences 33

ethnicity 11, 32, 69, 85, 91, 102

ethno-cultural difference 33

ethnography 28, 29, 67

ethology 169

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 35

exosociality 10

exploitation 1, 68

extended subsistence 99

failed ritual 47, 48

Farmer Field Schools (FFS) 158–159

farmers leading social reforms 155–156

Federasi Serikat Petani Indonesia (FSPI) 160

feminist political ecologies 176

fisheries 117, 132–146, 159

flattening epistemologies 114

Food and Agriculture Organisation of

the UN 150

food security 149, 150

food-sovereign systems 151

food system change in Indonesia

152–159

forest: as home of spirits 74–76; as landscape in flux 71–72; as place to make a living 72–74; as source of timber 76–78 forest gardens 72, 106

fractures 66

French colonial period 178

frictions 4, 14, 28

future-oriented action 21

future-oriented indeterminacy 28–43 Gago, Véronica 133, 136, 138

Geertz, Clifford 50, 137, 146n7, 154, 155

genetically modified organism-based

Green Revolution 159

geography 3, 169

German Democratic Republic 192

global climate 65

global food market 151

government 6–12, 18–19, 30–31, 48,

53, 56–57, 60–61, 67, 76, 84–85, 88,

92–93, 99, 102, 107–108, 112–121,

123, 124–128, 132–133, 138, 143,

145, 150–152, 157–159, 163, 171,

173–175, 180

Gramsci, Antonio 15

Great Depression 155

Green Revolution 150, 156–158 green areas 172

green revolution 19

Hanoi 20, 170–182 hegemonialization 2, 8, 13–17, 19–21,

58–59, 61, 62, 112

hegemonic ecologies 7

Heisenberg, Werner 43n2 heterogeneity 67, 69

hierarchical animism 9

Hindu civilization 87

Hinduism 11, 70, 85–87

historicization 4

Hobsbawm, Eric 76

Holbraad, Martin 2, 79

home of spirits and loggers 65–80; beyond dichotomous ecologies 67–69; forest as home of spirits 74–76; forest as landscape in flux 71–72; forest as place to make a living 72–74; forest as source of timber 76–78; setting the scene 69–71 homogeneity 67, 68

homogenized scientific rationalist ecology 150

homogenous ecologies 113

homogenous modernist ecology 151

Index hope-content 187, 188, 190, 197, 198, 200 human and non-human relations 8–10, 19, 51, 98, 110, 123, 134, 149, 169, 170, 181 human–environment relations 3, 4, 8 human resources 21 human rights 113, 114, 118, 161 human-spirit interactions 85 human-tree relationships 170, 175–180 incomplete moderns 192 indeterminacy 10, 28–43 indigeneity in Indonesia 83–95; animism and 85–87; case studies 89–94; concept of 84–85 indigenous activism 18 indigenous aristocracy’s method 153 indigenous communities, defined 93 indigenous ecologies 7, 67, 68, 112–115, 121, 123, 124, 127, 153; in Aru, future of 127–128; variability of 153 indigenous faiths 86 indigenous frontier 103 indigenous knowledge 41, 94, 109, 115 indigenous ontologies 67, 109 indigenous peoples 4, 8, 18, 65, 67, 68, 83–85, 87–89, 93, 94, 99, 106, 109, 112, 114–118, 125, 128 indigenous politics 7 indigenous production 94 indigenous rights 67, 68, 76, 79, 112, 113, 118 indigenous rights organizations 79 indigenous tradition 201 individualist dichotomy 32 individual ownership rights 73 Indonesia: animism in 83–95; colonialism and early transformation of agriculture 153– 155; farmers leading social reforms 155– 156; farmer’s movement for sustainability 159–164; food system change in 152–159; indigenous movements in 83–95; local food systems in 152; negotiating indigene­ ity and access to land in 112–128; nego­ tiating plural ecologies of adat land in 98– 110; reinvention of moral ecologies in 149– 165; rice import fluctuations 158 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) 155 Indonesian independence 155–156 Indonesian Peasants Front (BTI) 155 industrial agriculture 151 industrialized agriculture 19, 20, 48, 70, 73 informed consent 120

209

Ingold, Tim 4, 98, 102, 103 Integrated Pest Management (IPM) model 158 intensive participatory observation 67 interaction techniques 41 interdisciplinary approach 3 internal conflicts 117, 121 internal diversification 113, 115 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development 159 International Coral Conservation Agree­ ment 49 international development agencies 150 international law 58 international trade 117 invention of tradition 76 investment strategies 133 invisible human-like beings, conflicting way to 47–63; adat 47–49, 53–59, 61, 62; agama 47, 48, 55–58, 60–62; ancestors 51–52; hegemonialization 58–59; narrative’s meaning for village life 52–53; pemerinta 47, 48, 55, 56, 60–62; road construction work orga­ nized as ritual 53–54; village life in transition 50–51; village-setting 48–50 irregular demands 175 Islam 9, 10, 11, 47, 57, 61, 70, 85, 87, 90, 92, 93, 155 Islamic spirituality 138 Java 49, 70, 132, 133, 135–141, 145, 152, 153, 155–158, 160, 161, 164 Javanese fishery, entrepreneurial ecologies in 132–146 Kali Sambong’s fishery, plural ecologies in 134–135 Karen 4, 33 kepercayaan 86–88, 90 Khmu 198 labor theory of property 73 Lahu 31, 33 Lamed, see Rmeet land claims 89, 95, 102, 119, 122 land management 98 land rights 83, 102 landscaping project 173 language of argument 115 Laos 11, 29–30, 179, 187, 192, 196–197 late socialism 169–182 Latour, Bruno 22

210

Index

legal acknowledgment, lack of 107–108 legal pluralism 84 legitimation techniques 153 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 36 Li, Tania Murray 4, 65, 68, 73, 76, 107, 136 Lisu 31, 37 LMA (Lembaga Masyarakat Adat Jargaria Aru) 124–125 local culture and customary law 127 localized farmer cooperatives 160 Luhmann, Niklas 34, 39 Maluku 112–113, 116, 117–119, 123, 124, 126–127 marine ecology 48 maritime entrepreneurs 138 market capture 151 market dependence 151 marketplaces 170, 172 Marxist approaches 3 Marxist-materialist models 3 mass guidance program 156 mediating animals 101 memory and morality 72 meta-ecology 22 metaphors 56, 57; tree as, ancestors 177–178 mobilization 102, 114, 118, 121, 125 modernization theory 137 modes of identification 29 money spirit 31 moral ecologies 20; colonialism and early transformation of agriculture 153–155; Farmer Field Schools (FFS) 158, 158– 159; farmers leading social reforms 155–156; farmer’s movement for sus­ tainability 159–164; food system change in Indonesia 152–159; Green Revolution 156–158; localized farmer cooperatives 160; reinvention in Indo­ nesia 149–165; Train & Visit Program, passive recipients of 156–158; union of Indonesian farmers 160–164, 162,163 Mus, Paul 9 nationalism 11 national law 58 National Logistics Agency 157 national policies 150 natural catastrophe 201n1 naturalism 10, 19, 28, 32, 36, 38, 42, 43, 67, 171 naturalist dualism 187 naturalist ecology 78, 79 naturalistic ecology 65, 67, 68, 78, 79

naturalist ontology 78 natural resources 83 natural-supernatural forces 191 natural vs. social sciences 194 nature conservation 61 negotiating plural ecologies of adat land in Indonesia 98–110; co-existence of different ecologies 104–105; flexible boundaries in sharing economy 100; rejection of “Dayak, Wake Up” in Uut Murung 104; relational and attached ecology 99–102; relational and attached mode 101–102; resourcebased, detached ecology 102–105; spirits, mediating animals and forest as extension of social realm 101 negotiation processes 3, 5, 7, 33, 85, 89, 112–114, 118, 123 new animism 195 New Order 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 137, 145, 157, 159 non-communicable diseases 150 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 6, 15, 19, 89, 94, 151 non-indigenous people 113 non-modern ontologies 195 Non-Timber Forest Products 11 non-trivial anthropological theory 41 numinals 9, 29, 32, 34–39 nutrient deficiency 156 objectification 1, 22 occult powers 9, 140 oil palm 70, 90 ontological commitments 13, 20 ontological creativity 79, 80 ontological indeterminacy 29 ontological permeability 101 ontology 4, 19, 66, 79, 187, 193, 198, 200; coproduction of indigenous and modern worlds 6–8; and politics 5–8 ontology of possibility 28–43, 75; ambiguity 34–36, 41; concept of 36; dimensions of variability 32–34; doubt 34–36, 41; doubtful animism 29–32; and plural ecologies 39–41; uncertainty 34–36, 41 operating costs 134 organic farming 159 owner spirits 86, 91 parks 172 participant objectivation 193

Index participant observation methods of anthropology 188 peasant studies 3 Peluso, Nancy Lee 153 pembangunan 68, 85, 94 penunggu 90, 91 pemerinta 47–48, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61–62 person-like status of trees 178–180 person-techniques 38 place-based ecology 105 place-bound spirits 91 plural ecologies 54–55, 170; co-existence of different ecologies 104–105; flexible boundaries in sharing economy 100; in Kali Sambong’s fishery 134–135; negotiating of adat land in Indonesia 98–110; rejection of “Dayak, Wake Up” in Uut Murung 104; relational and attached ecology 99–102; rela­ tional and attached mode 101–102; resource-based, detached ecology 102–105; spirits, mediating animals and forest as extension of social realm 101; structure and dynamics of 16–20 plural economy 137 pluralization 2, 4, 13–17, 19–21, 55, 75, 79 political authorities 57 political conflicts 7 political ecology 2–7, 13, 67, 171, 198; defined 3; early phase of 3 political-economic strategy 194 political economy 67, 95, 171 political ontology 2, 67 politics and ontology 5–8 positive utopian function 201 postmodern approaches 4 post-New Order neoliberalism 137 poststructuralist approaches 4 primary forest 73 privately owned and certified land, dilemma of 106–107 proper indigenous community 76 property rights 73; conflicts 120 Protestantism 57, 85, 90, 192 qualitative approaches 67 quantitative approaches 67 quantum physics 43n2 radical cultural relativism 4 rationality 89, 90, 135, 151 reforestation 69

211

relational ecology 99–102, 104, 106–108; adat land, alternative agreements to 106–108; dilemma of privately owned and certified land 106–107; lack of legal acknowledgment 107–108; problem of representation 108 relational epistemology/ontology 105 relational model 102 religion 8–9, 12, 20, 30, 48–49, 54, 56–57, 61, 69–70, 85–90, 93, 94 religious affiliation 88 religious authorities 57 remnants of traditional food culture in Java 157 representative body (BPD) 106, 108 resilience 6, 150, 151, 160 resistance 20, 68, 113–115, 117, 118, 120, 132, 145, 163, 175, 189 resource-based, detached ecology 102–106 resource-based approach 98 resource exploitation 114–115, 128 resource extraction 42, 98, 102, 104 rice fields 71–73, 155 ritual errors 50 ritual failures 50 ritualized animism 189–193 Rmeet 11, 29, 32–33, 37, 41 road construction 53–54, 59, 61 Rudnyckyj, Daromir 133, 138 savage life 87 SaveAru movement 118, 127 scholastic animism 188, 193–195 science-based ontology 66 secular fundamentalist 30 self-determination 11, 68, 69 self-monitoring principles 159 self-responsibility 138 Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI) 160–164, 163 shark-finning 57–58, 117 sharing economy, flexible boundaries in 100 small-scale agriculture 99, 106 small-scale logging licences 76 social action 36 socialist housing 170, 172 socialization 36, 127 social justice 155 social life 1 social media 171, 174–175 social metabolism 199 social relationships 39 sociocultural systems 114

212

Index

socio-environmental relationships 171

socio-structural positionings 193–195

soil fertility 150, 156

souls 32

Southeast Asia: autochthony 10–11;

hierarchy and power 12–13; human and non-human beings relationship 8–10; theorizing inspired by 8–13; translocality 10–11 South Sulawesi 18, 84, 89, 91–93

special characteristics 93

spirit money 177

spirit religion 30

spirits with morality 196

spiritual authorities 57

spiritual economy 138, 139

spirituality 89–91

state law 13, 93, 100, 103

state territorialization processes 99, 104,

109

statistical survey methods 188

stigma 85, 88

strategic essentialism 68, 114

strategic simplifications 76

strong sustainability protests 175

subject-centric 191

subsistence-based ecologies 153

sudden death 49, 50, 52–55, 59, 60

Sukarno era 84

superstition 176

supply chains 151, 160

sustainability 21, 67, 94; farmer’s

movement for 159–164; weak 175

sustainable agricultural methods 164

Sustainable Development Goals 151

swidden agriculture 70, 72–73, 90–91, 116

symbiotic cooperation 160, 165

tacit animism 189–193 Talking Trees 169–183; affective relation­ ships between humans and urban trees 175–180; civil society activism 172–175; green, clean and beautiful 172; personlike status of trees 178–180; response by state 180–181; social media, role of 174–175; trees as metaphors of ancestors 177–178 techno-shamanism 191

telecommunication 112, 118

Thailand 4, 31, 33, 36–37, 169, 179

theory vs. practice 194

thing-techniques 38

top-down processes 139

totemism 67

tradition 32, 36, 40, 42; defined 40

Train & Visit Program, passive recipients

of 156–158

transcontextual interfaces 5

transition 50, 165

translocal relationships 8, 14, 69

Tree Hug Movement 170–172, 175–181

trees, as metaphors of ancestors 177–178

trendsetter 91

Tsing, Anna 4

uncertainty 32, 34–36, 41, 76

Unity in Diversity 116

urban ecologies in late socialist Hanoi

169–183; affective relationships between humans and urban trees 175–180; civil society activism 172–175; green, clean and beautiful 172; person-like status of trees 178–180; response by state 180–181; social media, role of 174–175; trees as metaphors of ancestors 177–178 Urlima 119, 121, 123–128

Ursia 119, 121, 123–128

utopian function 188

Valeri, Valerio 9

variability, dimensions of 32–34

Vietnam 14, 169–181, 191

village life in transition 50–51

village-setting 48–50

village unit cooperatives 156

violent abstraction 201

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 38, 41, 42

vulnerability 161

Wallace, Alfred Russel 117

weak sustainability 175

Weber, Max 198

Western modernity 2, 16

Western philosophy 36

West Kalimantan 18, 84, 88–89, 94–95

Widodo, Joko 112

witchcraft 35

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 190, 201n3

world religions 41, 42

world system theories 3