Claiming the forest: Punan local histories and recent developments in Bulungan, East Kalimantan (original) (raw)
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Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
The Lumad struggle in the Philippines, embodied in its various indigenous peoples (IPs), is still situated and differentiated from modern understandings of their plight. Agamben notes that the notion of 'people' is always political and is inherent in its underlying poverty, disinheritance, and exclusion. As such, the struggle is a struggle that concerns a progression of freedom from these conditions. Going over such conditions means that one shifts the focus from the socio-political and eventually reveals the ontological facet of such knowledge to reveal the epistemic formation of the truth of their experience. It is then the concern of this paper to expose the concept of freedom as a vital indigenous knowledge from the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar. Using philosophical sagacity as a valid indigenous method, we interview Conching Cabadungga, one of the elders of the tribe, to help us understand how the Mamanwa conceive freedom in the various ways it may be specifically and geographically positioned apart from other indigenous studies. The paper contextualizes the diasporic element and the futuristic component of such freedom within the trajectory of liberation. The Mamanwa subverts the conception of freedom as a form of return to old ways and radically informs of a new way of seeing them as a 'people.' It supports recent studies on their literature that recommend the development of their livelihood rather than a formulaic solution of sending them back to where they were. The settlement in Basey changes their identification as a 'forest people' into a more radical identity.
Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan: Challenging Power and Presenting Culture
SOJOURN Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2018
Dayak individuals and groups engage in “plural ecologies” which are characterized by different ways of integrating humans and non-humans as well as by different conceptualizations of “nature”, “land”, and “development”. This is exemplified by two struggles for the maintenance of customary rights in East Kalimantan: a rather forlorn dispute over land with a coal mining company and a promising attempt to secure customary rights to a forested mountain area. Focusing on individual and collective actors allows to address how people appropriate and engage with different and partly contradictory ontological assumptions.
1 MR The Ideology of Dayak Ngaju Community of Central Kalimantan Implied in the Legends By
2015
Kalimantan (hereafter called KT) which has the function as lingua franca for the community. This language is used as the symbol of unity among the Dayakese in KT and it is also used as the medium in preserving the culture as most of traditional literatures are written in DN language, such as the holly text for the Christians (Bible) and the Hindus (Panaturan). In its function to preserve culture, DN language is used to record folklore, including legends. Legends in KT are quite popular as many of them are included in ritual speech which can also be found in Panaturan, the Holly Bible for the Hinduism in KT. For that reason, the legends are mostly related to cosmogony, which consists of life values and ideologies. However, this article is proposed by framework: how systemic-functional linguistics approach which relates semiotic theory can be used to dig up the ideology implied within legends as a product of text? As the object of this article is language so that the approach and theo...
Indigenous and Anthropological Theories of Ethnic Conflict in Kalimantan
Zinbun: Annals of the Institute for Research in Humanities Vol. 45, 2015
This paper analyses indigenous and anthropological attempts to understand several outbreaksof ethnic violence that occurred around the time of the 1998 Indonesian Reform in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Violence between immigrant Madurese and indigenous Dayaks hadoccurred regularly in the western and central provinces of Kalimantan since the intensification of thetransmigration policy in the 1970s but it increased dramatically with the collapse of Suharto’s NewOrder. Between 1997 and 2001 there were three major outbreaks of communal violence that attracteda great deal of sensationalist media reporting in part because they involved archaic forms of violencesuch as headhunting and cannibalism. This paper is concerned primarily with the different theoriesthat have been put forward to explain the violence, rather than with the ‘facts’ of the conflict aboutThis paper analyses indigenous and anthropological attempts to understand several outbreaksof ethnic violence that occurred around the time of the 1998 Indonesian Reform in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Violence between immigrant Madurese and indigenous Dayaks hadoccurred regularly in the western and central provinces of Kalimantan since the intensification of thetransmigration policy in the 1970s but it increased dramatically with the collapse of Suharto’s NewOrder. Between 1997 and 2001 there were three major outbreaks of communal violence that attracteda great deal of sensationalist media reporting in part because they involved archaic forms of violencesuch as headhunting and cannibalism. This paper is concerned primarily with the different theoriesthat have been put forward to explain the violence, rather than with the ‘facts’ of the conflict aboutwhich a number of reports have already been written. Social scientists who have worked in the areagenerally reduce the ethnic conflict to economic competition over resources between two marginalisedgroups. This interpretation of the conflict has been ‘fed back’ into the society by the media and isvehemently rejected by the Dayaks themselves, who have not only developed an alternative theoryof the conflict but also a critique of anthropological interpretations. They interpret the conflict as a‘clash of cultures’ between Madurese and Dayak traditions (adat) and dismiss the reduction of culturaldifferences to economic factors as yet another form of cultural imperialism in a long history of misrepresentationof Dayak society in which outsiders have imposed their categories of understandingon Dayak culture. They argue that the conflict can only be resolved if it is understood through thecategories of Dayak culture itself and managed within the framework of conflict resolution methodsavailable in Dayak culture.which a number of reports have already been written. Social scientists who have worked in the areagenerally reduce the ethnic conflict to economic competition over resources between two marginalisedgroups. This interpretation of the conflict has been ‘fed back’ into the society by the media and isvehemently rejected by the Dayaks themselves, who have not only developed an alternative theoryof the conflict but also a critique of anthropological interpretations. They interpret the conflict as a‘clash of cultures’ between Madurese and Dayak traditions (adat) and dismiss the reduction of culturaldifferences to economic factors as yet another form of cultural imperialism in a long history of misrepresentationof Dayak society in which outsiders have imposed their categories of understandingon Dayak culture. They argue that the conflict can only be resolved if it is understood through the categories of Dayak culture itself and managed within the framework of conflict resolution methods available in Dayak culture.
2011
Nation as a cultural-psychological phenomenon is best understood in terms of how a sense of nationhood operates in order to construct social identities or a social imagination about the modern nation-state (Anderson 1983). The forging of nationalism as a national identity cannot be seen in isolation of the rise of modernization and industrialization . Although the nation appears to be a modern phenomenon, Smith (1991) stresses that every nation preserves its own past historical artefacts, narratives, and symbols for present-day needs. This model needs to be elaborated further as it is insufficient to understand how a sense of nationhood operates among borderlanders of a state. This paper relates the story of Kalimantan's Iban borderlanders who are officially registered as Indonesian subjects but live on the dividing line between two countries. This makes them appear to be ambiguous subjects who are torn between the two different historical timelines of British and Dutch colonial history (as well as postcolonial Malaysian-Indonesian history). They are marginalized in every aspect and are the forgotten subjects in the history of the broader picture of Indonesia's so-called nationalism project. The explanation is twofold. The first explains how identity is constructed as multi-layered historical narratives involving local and national cultures, and second, how transnational borderlanders give meaning to nation as narrative. The primary data for this article were collected in 2002 through a series of interviews in the village of Benua Sadap, an Iban settlement on the Batang Kanyau River, close to the West Kalimantan (Indonesia) and Sarawak (Malaysia) borderline.
Socio-Cultural Values of Traditional Communities: A Case Study of the Dayak in Kalimantan
Asian Culture and History, 2016
This article is intended to reveal the socio-cultural values of traditional remote area communities of the Dayak in Central Kalimantan based on two legends and the existence of these communities. By applying semantics of sign systems, the expressions in texts showed connotative meanings referring to river communities, and the denotative meaning of living in forests for forest communities. While, expressions of migration could be related to cultural of manamuai 'wander' tradition and way of life as shifting cultivation farmers. Recently, the existence of these communities has contradicted government rules due to the laws in opening forests illegally. However, based on the characteristics, these communities can live in harmony with the government and forests investors through the empowerment programs for remote communities and CSR of forests' companies (logging or palm oil).