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Seeing property in land use: Local

territorializations in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

DAN

Nancy Lee Peluso

Abstract

Key words

This paper looks at ways of seeing property rights and making

claims to land, land-based resources, and territories over time in a
district of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. It starts from the premise
that changing political economic circumstances and cultural politics create historical conditions that make it easier for political actors to see and act on particular sorts of claims. At present, the
predominant way of seeing is one based on territoriality. Government and international land use planning are dominated by territorialization strategies. Territorialization, however, is not only an imposed process emanating from centers of power. Using case studies of counter-mapping NGOs and of the territory-producing practices of Salako in a West Kalimantan village, I explore the ways that
local territorializations have contributed to changing constructions
of ethnic identity, physical landscapes, and tree and land tenures.

Territorialization, landscape, land rights, counter-mapping, forests.

The old man told us they had occupied this site in Sanggau since approximately 1920. They had purchased the
rights to it from its previous occupants. The terms of the
transfer of occupancy and use rights had been negotiated
by two customary (adat) leaders one from each group.
The original settlers agreed to transfer rights to occupy the
site a territory including rights of access to the fallows of swiddens they had once farmed, and rights to two
relatively large tembawang, forest gardens filled with
fruit trees, including durian trees (Durio zibethinus)
planted by several generations of their ancestors. The
terms of the exchange were meant to acknowledge the labor and claims of the ancestors who had created these
valuable resources the cleared forest for fields and the
tembawang. The transfer also required certain ritual practices to appease these ancestors for making the transfer. In
determining the terms of the exchange, the adat leaders at
the time considered the extent of the fallowed fields, the
numbers of standing trees, and numbers of tembawang
within the territory being exchanged.
The transaction was notable for several reasons. First,
the move away of the first group, and of the second group

into the site, did not occur simultaneously. The first group
moved downriver from this living site in the late 19th century after two major headhunting raids. The new group
moved in much later nearly two decades after formal
pacification of headhunting by the Dutch. This was
when the negotiations and ritual transfer took place.
Once transferred, neither the terms nor the significance of the negotiation passed from the first villages collective memory. Around 1977, more than 50 years after
the ritual transfer, a resident of the new village decided
to make a swidden in a forest site where a cluster of durian
trees would have to be cut. News of the plan to cut the
durian trees traveled fast. The current adat leader from the
first village traveled upriver and demanded additional
customary compensation, not only for the direct descendants of the trees planter(s), but also for the whole village. The payment was meant to finance a feast and ceremony to appease the spirits of the ancestors who had
planted those particular trees. Moreover, the new residents did not object; they paid the fines associated with
cutting durian trees and provided the required ritual food
for the ceremony.

Nancy Lee Peluso

Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Division of Society and Environment, University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3314, USA.
Email: npeluso@nature.berkeley.edu

Geografisk Tidsskrift,
Danish Journal of Geography 105(1):1-15, 2005

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 1

How do we explain the recognition of such an intergenerational claim on the cutting of trees despite its absence in the tenets of colonial or contemporary land laws,
and given the major political changes that occurred since
the transfer generations earlier? Perhaps this cluster of
durian trees a small tembawang--was overlooked in
the original transfer of rights of occupancy? Perhaps the
rights to the standing stock were transferred but not the
rights to cut the meaningful trees? None of these decisions were ever written down or formally witnessed by
government agents, but they were carried to successive
generations through oral histories. In any case, the current villagers were willing to recognize the old occupants claims. Maybe they feared spiritual retribution if
the ancestors of the tree-planters were not ritually recognized. Maybe they just wanted to appease their neighbors.
Whatever the reason, the incident reveals that neither legal systems nor state notions of territoriality always and
forever determine what will actually happen. Even in
transactions adhering to customary guidelines, alternative territorialities or ways of seeing property in the landscape can confound the intended rationalities of formal
government and property practices.
In many parts of the world today, territorial solutions
to land use and other resource conflicts have become
tools of choice. Activists, scholars, planners, development practitioners, and other ordinary people deploy territorial strategies and tactics to make claims on resources,
ranging from gold mines to forests to agricultural land.
Territorialization the creation and maintenance of spatialized zones within which certain practices are permitted based on the explicit or implicit allocation of rights,
controls, and authority is important in global, national,
and local resource management strategies. Yet its ubiquitous presence in all manner of global and local fora, and
its multiple forms, expressions, and origins, demand
more in-depth understanding. Why? Because territorialities based on a variety of legitimating discourses are not
exclusive zones of influence and they are clashing all
over the place.
Scholarly analyses of territorialization have typically
focused on the analysis of the state and its agencies or on
global trends (Sack, 1986; Steinberg, 1987; Barber, 1989;
Menzies, 1994; Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995; Sivaramakrishnan, 1997, 1999; on the global, see Brenner,
1999; Sassen, 2000; Sundar, 2001; Sikor, 2001). Nationally focused studies have examined governmental
processes of internal territorialization (Vandergeest &
Peluso, 1995). These characterize state activities follow-

2 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

ing nation-state establishment as well as the international

boundary-setting activities of colonial and post-colonial,
post-socialist, or new national powers (e.g., Mann, 1986;
Thongchai, 1994; Paasi, 1996; Li, 1999; Sikor, 2001;).
The main contribution of the internal territorialization argument has been to show how territorial processes such as
civil administration, land use zoning, and the allocation of
jurisdiction to forestry and other land management departments helps constitute and consolidate state power.
State territorializations do not just happen; rather, state
actors must wrestle with contending demands and actions
of individuals, communities, and other sub-state groups
who want authority, jurisdiction, or control over land and
resources and not simply access for use. Contestation can
be intentional or not, but it is not only a response to state
discourses of territorial resource management the demands and assumptions in local claims may pre-date state
claims (Wadley, 2003). Thus while the power relations
that inhere in local territorialities may involve bio-power
(the disciplining of human practice through both coercion
and consent), they do not necessarily invoke the authority
of national governments (Gramsci, 1971; Foucault, 1984).
Like state or international NGO or other forms of territorialized practice, localized efforts to discipline practice try
to make certain forms of behavior vis--vis resources
seem normal. In some cases, local territorialities are simply overlooked or not noticed by state authorities, while
state ideas of how things should work are ignored by local
actors (Wadley, 2003). Nevertheless, when different
views of normalcy, legitimacy, or rights come into conflict
within the same space or territory, problems can ensue.
This paper examines a few of the multiple expressions
of territorialized property relations that have emerged or
developed in the western districts of West Kalimantan
throughout the 20th century. While I will not go into detail
on this here, the research suggests that increasing territorialization for conservation and development as well as
for civil administration or natural resource management
underlies and informs some aspects of the recent ethnic violence in this region.
Two distinct cases are made. The first example, of
Salako Dayaks who live today in the village of Bagak
Sahwa, shows several different scales of local territorialization practices and processes. Planted and protected
trees have played important roles in processes of claiming
land under individual or collective jurisdiction. On the
one hand, clusters of long-living trees, primarily durian
trees (Durio zibethinus), serve as markers in the broader
landscape, showing where sets of people have lived in the

past. Called tembawang in Indonesian and English,

timawokng in Salako, and variations on these names in
other Dayak languages, these clusters of trees are social
forests of the highest order: they mark former living sites
where either longhouses or swidden huts used to stand.
They are thus clear representations of the living space occupied by the current residents ancestors, and often stand
adjacent to the same ancestors burial places. Through the
inheritance of trees by successive generations of the treeplanters descendents, whole groups of people can claim
both ancestry and territorial association with places beyond the bounds of their current village settlements
every timawokng for which they have stories represents a
former living site and marks out a regional territoriality
that does not conform to village boundaries. Although
these landscapes of past settlement show the villagers
histories, Indonesian government policy drew the bounds
of administrative villages around their current living sites
in the late 1970s, intending, among other objectives, to cut
them off from that regional territorial history.
The second case talks about NGO practices that are explicitly territorializing customary rights through countermapping. This has been accomplished through a mobilization of the powerful discourse of customary rights in
legal and policy circles in Indonesia. NGOs have inspired
and assisted many local communities in making maps of
village resource territories, particularly in forest areas
where settlements had been declared illegal by the national forest mapping and administration projects of the
1970s and 1980s (Moniaga, 1993). The counter-maps
produced are expected to gain legitimacy by using the language of landed property rights (territorial claims) and using a textual form a map understood by powerful
actors in the Indonesian government and international
conservation organizations. Counter-mappers are thus directly engaged in the translation of ways of seeing property and modes of thinking about, using, and representing
resources and claims (Peluso, 1995).
In a recent paper looking at contentious boundarymaking practices, Wadley (2003) has shown just what a
mixed-up process internal territorialization can be, contending as it does with shifting degrees of state power, and
multiple claims to legitimacy, past and present, in setting
boundaries. In particular, he demonstrates the difficulties
of superimposing territorial, on-the-ground boundaries on
pre-colonial conceptions of power over people rather than
territory. My emphasis in this part of the paper is less on
the establishment of boundaries, but more on the actual
practices of Salako that established clear territorial claims

in this case, planting certain trees in certain places with

certain meanings. Wadley mentions this for the Iban he
discusses in his paper (2003: 101) but does not go into detail on the ways these practices produced territorial associations. Territorialization has to be seen as not only a
product of national policy or global trends but also as an
effect of practices emergent from changing local circumstances.

Defining territoriality and territorialization

In conceptualizing territoriality, Sacks (1986:19) simple
definition has been useful: the attempt by an individual
or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control
over a geographic area. Resource control by territorialization works by some person or institution of authority
determining how people may or may not use resources
found within spatial boundaries. However, the directness
and intentionality implicit in this definition are not always
present in the creation of territories. Sometimes territoriality comes about through less direct actions and shifts in
practice (Ludden, 2003; Moore, n.d.).
To understand the particular forms of territoriality that
are recognized and not recognized in these West Kalimantan communities, however, it is important to understand the nature of state territorialization. NGO activity to
establish customary rights of villagers and to formalize
property claims emerged in response to national policy
and practice during the so-called New Order regime of
Suharto (1966-1998). The Suharto regimes intense drive
to bring the most resource-rich areas of Indonesia under
the authority of the central state apparatus was unprecedented in its effectiveness (Li, 1999). Territorial controls
were a key part of the extension of central state power
(Peluso, 1992).
All modern states divide their territories into complex
and overlapping political and economic zones, re-arrange
people and resources within these units, and create regulations delineating how and by whom these areas can be
used (Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995). These zones are administered by agencies whose jurisdictions are territorial
as well as functional. The territories are represented on
maps, thus modern cartography plays a central role in the
implementation and legitimation of territorial rule (see,
e.g., Anderson, 1991; Thongchai, 1994). Property rights
in land are represented on maps and administered by the
state in virtually all nation-states today, although the types

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 3

and terms of property vary widely from fee simple alienation to the recognition of various sorts of common property. Registration of land rights in deeds, titles, or simple lists in cadastral registers empowers the state authorities further by establishing a state agency as the arbiter of rights and arbitrator of disputes. Indeed the term
alienated land refers to the excision of not only a piece
of the national landed estate but of some portion of authority formerly exercised or claimed by the state in regard to the land within its national territory. Sketch maps,
surveyors maps, cadastral surveys, and descriptions of
boundaries often accompany land titles or deeds. State
agencies use these tools to rationalize and record the geographic coordinates of a particular piece of land which is
privately owned. Importantly, however, such alienated
land still remains within state jurisdiction and both its
recording and its transfer become means by which states
control both the people and the land they claim to own
(Kain & Baigent, 1992).
Territorialization can thus refer to any attempt to exclude or include people by reference to a piece of land
marked in some way by recognizable geographic boundaries (Menzies, 1994). Boundaries must be recognizable
(if not by the state by another arbitrating authority) or
they cannot serve their inclusionary or exclusionary purposes (Rose, 1994).
Despite Sacks (1986:21-22) claim that territorial
classification and control of resources often replaces the
regulation of access to specific resources within a territorial zone, territorial controls often supersede rather
than replace other types of regulation (Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). It might be argued that only a fine line separates the combination of territorial and non-territorial
rights to and controls on resources and the domination of
one sort by another. As the cases described here show,
changes in everyday practices can be just as effective as
direct and open strategies for laying claim to resource territories. Words and actions, like maps, matter.

Case 1: Territorialized Salako property rights;

Villagized territorial histories
Salako Dayaks manage a range of forest types, all with
different sorts of origins, species compositions, and uses.
This is not to say, however, that they establish rigid land
use categories or zones. The borders between these land
use types are blurred and uses overlap (Peluso & Padoch,
1996).

4 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

As with Dayak groups all over Borneo, swidden cultivation has always imparted some kind of territorial rights
(Schneider, 1974; Appell, n.d.; Weinstock, 1983). Recognized because of the labor entailed in clearing mature forest, after the death of the clearers, territorial rights were
vested in either their direct descendants or in their resident
longhouses/settlements. Oral histories collected from
Salako villagers in and around Bagak Sahwa have shown
that territorial rights to cleared land were loosely held in
common by the clearers descent group, although through
inheritance practices, certain individuals might gain favored access to land. Whether or not a particular piece of
land would be inherited by a favored child or grandchild
would depend on many circumstantial factors. Sometimes certain plots of land would be cleared and planted
repeatedly by an individual, and over time that plot would
come to be recognized as an individuals (or a couples)
holding rather than common property, although other kin
might ask to borrow it to plant rice for a season. Such
practices varied within and across villages.
Salako, again like other Dayaks, also recognize nonterritorial claims for access to and control of forest products. Rights to these were/are held by the individuals who
find, protect, plant, encourage, or otherwise manage them
(Peluso & Padoch, 1996; Peluso, 1996). A resources biological characteristics can impart territorializing components. Once trees are planted or claimed, other users lose
access to the land in which they grow and to other possible alternative uses of that land. If the trees retain their
value and meaning through multiple generations, they can
preclude other uses for a long time. Owners of such trees
effectively gain territorial control, which can be relatively
extensive if one person plants multiple trees in close proximity.
When people lived in longhouses, with each family in
their own apartments (biik), they planted fruit trees or
protected self-sown trees right outside their apartments.
When a longhouse or an apartment moved, people generally took as much of the building materials as they could
move and used them again. In the gaps remaining, apartment members would plant more trees, especially durian.
Thus these tree-planting practices during residence and in
the wake of moving meant that friends, family, and neighbors planted trees in close proximity to each other. Each
tree or clump of trees (kompotn) descended to the
planters children and grandchildren. Through the generations, this meant that many different families owned trees
within the same small territories (Sather, 1990; Padoch,
1994; Peluso & Padoch, 1996). The Salako name for these

Figure 1: Southern part of Bagak Sahwa; named encircled areas indicate timawokng (Photo and map by Charles Peters)

forests, as mentioned above, was timawokng, which translates as former living site (see also, Padoch & Peters,
1993; Sather, 1990; Padoch, 1994).
The location of the timawokng of Bagak Sahwa are
shown in Figure 1. Transfer or sale of these trees was relatively rare, though it occurred in times of crisis (to pay
for healing, hospitalization, school fees, or other big expenses). Given the meanings attached to these ancestral
durian trees, such transfers were fraught with meaning
and involved important ritual. Territorial domination by a
single tree owner in these timawokng was also quite impossible (see Peluso, 1996). Timawokng as a territorital
entity thus came to be regarded as part of the villages
common holdings. The resource of concern within these
timawokng, however, was not the land but the trees. Individuals, households, or descent groups could hold, inherit,
or transfer rights or access to specific trees within the
timawokng, in the gardens around their houses or apartments, and in surrounding forest areas. These practices
produced co-existing, multi-scaled collective and individual territorialities, all in one site.

The broader story of Salako territorialities can be

traced from timawokng to timawokng, through physically
connected groves of consecutive trees or groves that are
only connected by stories. Durian trees live longer than
most other fruit trees and therefore serve as the longest
term multi-generational markers. So the evidence that the
ancestors of Bagak Sahwas residents once lived in places
named Batukng, Bintawo Baruk, Batakng Tangoh, Pasar,
Marago Sanorekng, or Sarinokng is the presence of trees;
not only durian, but also tampoak, mangosteen, langsat,
dukuh, cempedak, Kalimantan mango. How do we know
they were Salako? By the names of the trees, the genealogies of their managers, and the stories of the things that
happened in those places. The presence of durian and
other fruit trees, and in more recently made timawokngs,
rubber or even oil palm, provide evidence that this land
was once under rice and other field crops. Burial grounds
were sometimes coincident with timawokng or special
durian trees were planted in burial grounds. In either case,
the practice of mixing the residences of the dead with the
ancestor trees of the living ensured that those trees would

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 5

Figure 2: A forest garden in Bagak Sahwa, Timawokng Anjauh

(Photo by Nancy Peluso)

not be cut for a very long time, perhaps never.

Salako also planted durian trees in many of their swidden fallows especially if for some reason they didnt
plan to return to cultivate rice in that fallow during their
lifetime. Such fallows could also acquire the status of a
former living site, because people stayed overnight in
these swiddens. The presence of durian and other fruit
trees is thus the most obvious key to the tracing of Salako
settlement across this landscape. The first ones to move
would remember where their apartments had been in the
longhouse and therefore could find their trees. Later, children would remember where their ancestors lived from
having gone up into the hills at durian season and waited
for the fruits to fall.
More evidence of specifically Salako presence comes
from the special varieties of durian they planted. The
founders of Batukng and their friends planted a variety of
durian that produces a very thin fruit meat with a particular color and a fragrance that is distinctive and distinguishable. The planters decided that whoever lived at the
longhouse, no matter who their ancestors were, could
take fruits from those trees. The trees were like notes
for them (catatan) or like pantak (grave markers of important people): they showed where people had been and
which people had been there (Takdir, 1998:21). But
while ordinary people could generally not afford the costs
of the rituals for making pantak when they died, anyone
could be remembered by the durian trees they planted.

6 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

Durian trees thus served a purpose in both personal and

collective identities and histories, serving to mark the
lives and stories of both important and ordinary people.
They blurred the boundaries between spaces of the living
and spaces of the dead not only in burial grounds, but
everywhere. People whose ancestors were separated when
they moved to a new site can recognize their ancestry in
the timawokng at durian season, when some or all the descendents come to collect and eat the fruit and remember
their common histories. Figures 2 and 3 show durian gardens and an old durian tree in Bagak Sahwa.
In a timawokng in Pasar, for example, a friend of mine
showed me a grandparent tree that reputedly was planted
seven generations earlier, and to which he is connected
through his family history. What I first saw when we went
there was a timawokng connected to another village
Pasar with what I thought of as another history. The
story my friend told, however, taught me a new way of
seeing property and connections to that landscape the
timawokng was one site on a traveling trajectory of
Salako settlements since they had moved from their place

Figure 3: Durian tree planted by Nek Ketel (Photo by Nancy

Peluso)

of origin in Sarinokng, near the Selakau River. Pasar also

experienced its own trajectory of landscape forms: it was
once a longhouse site, it became a timawokng, and the ancestral trees in that timawokng were connected to people
who stayed in Pasar and those who had moved to new settlements which were later integrated into different administrative villages.
New settlement sites needed good places to farm,
places to bathe, and to be situated so that people felt safe.
When headhunting was still prevalent, they preferred
higher elevations; pacification in the late 19th century
eventually led to more Dayak settlements on lower ground.
Burial grounds and the trees planted there provided sites
for long term associations between people whose settlements were later designated parts of different administrative villages. Each time a house moved or split, a decision
about whether to establish a new burial ground or continue
using the old one had to be made depending on how
close or far the group moved, this would be more or less of
an option. Close relations between people in Pasar and
Bagak are explained in part by their sharing a historical
burial ground. This means they share a common settlement
history, even though today they are located in separate administrative villages (Takdir, 1998: 27).
The landscape alterations made to river sites that became bathing spaces also mark sites of former residence
in the forest or in old timawokng. Specific places had to
be marked as bathing places to prevent bathing into the
same flow of water used for drinking, and to preserve
some degree of modesty for the bathers. These places can
be identified today by the specific speckled plants and
flowers (puring) planted there, even if the path of the river
has changed since people lived there.
Embedding an intricate web of actions and meanings
in the landscape, residents simultaneously created a material base connecting Salako pasts and futures in their
cuttings, their diggings and their plantings. Manifest in the
landscape features themselves, these networks of social
relations are part nature, part human trees with
names, fruit forests that grow from the resting places of
the dead but feed the living, places where people have
bathed, farmed, met, sheltered themselves from headhunters and tax collectors. These landscape features were
not only sites where practices of everyday life were performed, but as human-nature creations, they colonized the
land, making each site a territory.
The village/settlement/longhouses authority over
many of these timawokng territories as well as descendents access to them was obscured by the rise of central

state forestry in Indonesia (see below). Forests were

specifically defined as state territory, and management of
legally recognized forests was given over to the Forest
Department. If a tembawang fell within the jurisdictional
boundaries of a state forest, the planters descendents
could easily lose access to and control of those trees. If
they were lucky, they were able to continue collection of
fruit from the trees, although many foresters and other officials perpetuated the colonial-era misconception that all
durian and many other fruits were naturally occurring
forest fruits (see, e.g., Lowe, 1848; Ozinga, 1940).
While the law provided for compensation for owned fruit
trees, this rarely covered the ritual costs involved in durian
tree cutting and was also subject to arbitrary recognition,
as Zerner (1990) has pointed out. The politics of the natural label meant that people could lose access to the fruits
of their own or their ancestors labor, and that the trees
could be cut down or reallocated by the government or its
agents.
National and global territorialization processes have
had direct and indirect sedentarizing effects here. Government recognition or acceptance of earlier modes of territorial organization has not been steady over the years
but most so-called local or customary categories can
not be called purely Salako either. On the government
side, for example, settlements used to be organized into
benua clusters of 4-5 longhouses or settlements with a
customary head appointed for life. This person was responsible for connections with outside authorities, mostly
coming in the forms of Malay tax collectors. Through the
entire period Sukarno served as president of Indonesia,
and in the early years of the Suharto regime, benua was
used as a territorial organizing form for administrative and
government data collection purposes. One kecamatan
(sub-district) contained several benua. But the 1979 law
on village authority changed all this, making villages the
only administrative category below the sub-district level,
and soon thereafter delimiting village boundaries that
only partially coincided with historical, customary associations.
Less directly, the space immediately outside the formal village boundaries of Bagak has filled up over time.
To the west of Bagak is a nearly 100-year-old Capuchin mission and school and to the south a small (3000hectare) reserve a watershed protection area created
in the period after 1932. In addition to the agricultural
lands and timawokng of adjacent administrative villages,
created by the government, there are several special transmigration sites where retired police and soldiers were al-

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 7

located land. To the north is a rubber plantation and transmigration project established with a World Bank loan on
the lands of another village.
In the context of these changes in their abilities to
move over the past three generations, villagers have not
only intensified their agricultural practices but have completely altered their living and working environment.
They have changed the hillsides gradually from a landscape dominated by swidden fields and fallows with
patches of managed forests, to a landscape dominated by
forests of economic trees, particularly fruit and rubber,
but also including self-sown timber species, fuelwood,
and medicinals.
The first major government intervention in the territory-producing practices of these Bagak Salako came in
the 1920s. At that time, the colonial authorities initiated
plans to turn the upper slopes of the mountain complex,
including about a third of Salako fields, fallows, and
forests, into a watershed protection area. This meant moving people out of their current living sites and away from
the multiple timawokng, burial grounds, active swidden
fallows, and fields that they had created over the years.
Local resistance was for the most part intense, although
some local leaders saw benefits in moving closer to roads
and other infrastructure (Takdir, 1998). In response to this
initial resistance, the Dutch moved the proposed reserve
boundary above some of the old longhouse sites, restoring a good deal of the peoples ancestral territory. But
once everyone was off the mountain in 1940, the territorial establishment of Bagak Sahwa as a permanent village
was set in motion. This meant, in the old ways, that it
would likely never become a timawokng in its own right
it was slated to remain an active settlement.
Even after moving, however, people continued to actively contest the boundaries and the very legitimacy of
the reserve through efforts to farm or harvest products
within it. Explicit contestation was most common during
times of political upheaval. During the Japanese occupation (1942 to 1945), the Indonesian revolution, and the
early years of Indonesian independence, when surveillance of state forests was practically non-existent, many
villagers made swiddens within the reserve and planted
rubber and fruit in the fallows. Villagers today still harvest the durian and other fruits planted within the reserve
border during this time, and visit the timawokng created
before the reserve came. Some have even planted new
fruit and rubber gardens inside.
Yet changing political circumstances in Indonesia today (and since 1998) have led to a re-embracing of the be-

8 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

nua territorial organization as a customary or Salako

or Dayak institution. Despite these claims, it remains
that benua was originally a government institution, a tax
collecting mechanism, and not some indigenous, Salakoproduced means of intervillage self-governance. It was a
means of organization imposed by Malays and later, the
Dutch administrators who recognized and bolstered
Malay power. While I wont go into a detailed history
here, the point is that these territorialities are mixtures of
state and local practices, as Wadley (2003) has pointed out
for the different circumstances that obtained in the Batang
Lupar area where he did his research.
These practices illustrate that people are negotiating
new forms of old territorial and non-territorial resource
claims. Whereas previously they had claimed the lands
encompassed by the reserve by clearing forest, making
swiddens, and planting the fallows, now their reclaiming
practices had to be limited to planting trees. Whereas at
first they might be seen as having lost control of the reserve land, their practices have created a territory over
which they have partial control or even graduated sovereignty (see Ong, 1999).
Contestation is visible in the language as well. Colonial and contemporary state authorities tried to create a
territorially bounded landscape, complete with formal
zoning category names, but the villagers continue to use
their own territorial names. For example, officials would
refer to being in the reserve or being out of the reserve, while local people refer to places by the names of
the ancestors who planted durian trees there, who made
swiddens there, or who had been a part of some memorable historical event in those places. In other words,
through everyday practice and speech, they have their
own zones that do not concede the primacy of the governments classifications (and intended limits on their activities). Using their own terms in some sense recalls both
their ancestral claims to the reserve territory and the practices of place-making and naming that hark back to earlier
times.
Other examples of local territorializations could be
given but constraints on the length of this paper prevent me
going into detail. Intensified tree planting and the ever-increasing commercialization of the economy have led to
changes in inheritance practices with a greater focus on
plots of land rather than on individual or clusters of trees.
For rubber, always and only a commercial crop, this type
of change has little effect on rubbers meaning. Durian, on
the other hand, still represents ancestral ties and claims, so
there is a broader impact when changes in patterns of

durian planting occur. While grandfather trees have not

been cut down in this village, many have been privatized.
There have also been shifts from collective to more individual property rights in land, especially in parcels formerly regarded as swidden fallows. The material effect of
planting whole fallows in trees that live 40 years (rubber)
or over 150 years (durian) is that other common holders
lose control of the land. When a plot used repeatedly for
swidden field cultivation every 10 or 20 years is planted in
trees, the property rights as well as the landscape form
change. Moreover, many people indicated that they are
planting more fruit trees in swidden fallows, wherein the
garden the land not the trees alone will be passed
on to their children. People are starting to think of durian
trees as components of territorialized property.
This is not to argue that these new practices will freeze
into immutable laws and rules, as rules are being re-interpreted all the time, as they probably always have been.
Grandparent trees, whether planted in the timawokng or in
other places (near swidden fallows or in current house
yards) still retain a great deal of meaning and value for
many villagers. Not every descent group has privatized or
territorialized rights to the trees they would have inevitably held in common in earlier times. Yet tensions are
emerging between new and old practices, between territorial and non-territorial forms of claiming and new ways of
seeing property.

Case 2: Directly contesting the territorial claims of

the state: NGO territorializations.
My second example of local territorialization involves Indonesian environmental NGOs who focused much of their
advocacy in West Kalimantan and elsewhere on village or
customary land rights in the early 1990s. Counter-mapping became a key component to their advocacy strategies. The maps of peoples claims, which largely did not
coincide with the governments ideas of who had rights to
which pieces of land, were viewed as alternatives to the
maps used by government, industry, and Big Conservation (Peluso, 1995). Because their efforts were conceived
directly in response to state policies, laws, and maps that
effectively erased local peoples claims from all area defined as state forest, I will briefly describe the specific
state policies and practices they were contesting before
discussing their alternative and counter -territorialities.
Territoriality in Indonesian forest management goes
back to the Domeinverklaring, passed in 1870 as part of

the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) Agrarian Act, in which

all land was declared the property or domain of the
state. Land which could be shown to be under cultivation
or other continuous use was declared customary (hak
ulayat) and subjected to native or customary law.
Customary lands were subject to legal procedures separate from those which guided property rights in land
leased by the government primarily to Europeans and
Chinese for colonial enterprise (Hooker, 1978). Unfree
or encumbered land, i.e., all land that was neither in the
category of customary land, nor alienated to private, (usually European) claimants, was subject to direct government jurisdiction. In other words, all land was state land,
but the laws to which any parcel was subjected depended
on the racial status of the claimant. Anyone or group defined as a native (inlander) could hold customary land
(tanah adat) individually or collectively. Europeans (a
category which included Japanese) and Chinese could
never own customary land but could lease land or concession rights from the government on all other unencumbered state land.
The forests of Java were carved out of this state land,
reserved, mapped, and had management plans drawn up
during the 19th and early 20th centuries (Peluso, 1992).
Customary or village lands were not mapped (Burns,
1999), but constituted a kind of residual category when
forests or agricultural lease areas and other major land
uses were surveyed, gazetted, and demarcated in the field
and on maps. Of course, not everyone inside or outside
government agreed with the definitions of particular tracts
of land as free or unfree. Conflict over land and
forests was the norm rather than the exception, even in
colonial Java where the forest department gained territorial ascendancy quite rapidly (Kartodirdjo, 1973; Peluso,
1992; Burns, 1999; see also, Peluso & Vandergeest,
2001).
Because of differences in the origins and nature of
colonial rule around the NEI, the legal bases of the
Domeinverklaring were contested when colonial foresters
first tried to constitute political forests outside Java, including in Western Borneo (GOI, 1986; Potter, 1988;
Peluso & Vandergeest, 2001). Political forests territorial entities defined as political-administrative units regardless of the kind of vegetative cover they actually supported only came to dominate the legal landscape in
West Kalimantan after 1967, as mentioned above, when
Foreign Investment act no. 1 and Forestry Act no. 5 were
passed. Some 59% of West Kalimantan was under political forest (Boomgaard, 1996). This legislation vested cen-

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 9

tral state authority in the Department (later the Ministry)

of Forestry and enabled the government to allocate timber
concessions and accept foreign investment in logging enterprises.
The formation of political forests based on territorial
principles was aided both conceptually at the national
level--and legally by the passing of the Basic Agrarian
Law (BAL) in 1960 (under Sukarno). Tha BAL reduced
the power of hak ulayat and some other categories of private property (e.g., tanah partikuliere). created under the
colonial state. A single land code was established. This
meant that claimants to customary lands could (and
should) acquire legal titles to the parts of commonly held
lands that they claimed as individuals; subsequently such
lands could be sold to other Indonesian citizens. In practice this rarely happened, particularly in outlying areas.
Having a single legal code for land administration
i.e., a code that was not differentiated by racialized identities as had been the case under colonial-era legal pluralism was seen as a unifying mechanism for the nascent
nation-state. At the same time, it diminished the jurisdiction and authority of some local groups over lands they
had claimed or assumed were theirs under Dutch rule. In
some places, this sort of central government authority
was welcomed, as local customary systems involved
slavery, servitude, or other feudal forms of social organization (see, e.g., Afiff, 2003). In other places, it was
viewed as a necessary part of the modernizing nationbuilding process following a long period of colonialism.
It was not until later, when the laws intents were reinterpreted and distorted under the Suharto regime, that some
people began to feel the move to a single legal system had
been folly.
The Forest Act of 1967, coming seven years after the
BAL, had the effect of creating a landed estate under the
Department/Ministry of Forestry that amounted to some
72% of the nation-states total land area. Mature forest,
in particular, had long been treated by Indonesian and
Dutch governments and scientists as if it were virgin,
and therefore automatically under the direct authority of
the state. Recognizing it as the product of local practices
whether protection of a standing reserve for forest
products, or production of a standing forest through planting and other forms of management in swidden fallows
would threaten its definition as untouched and therefore free unencumbered. Reflecting colonial scientific forestry and political views, the Forest Act
clouded the possibility for any of the countrys mature
forests to be officially viewed as products of local peo-

10 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

ples management decisions to keep some forests intact,

or even to plant, encourage, and manage others. Throughout the Suharto regime (1966-1998), state forestry gained
trem-endous power and government foresters felt no compulsion to research, understand or recognize local forest
practices or claims.
Even obviously secondary forests were not considered
locally managed, either, but as accidental products of
wild farming a term government reports often used interchangeably with swidden cultivation. These categories emphasized the non-territoriality of local practices and justified (for government actors and allies) mapping the forest with no recognition or settlement of local
peoples claims (as had happened, at least superficially,
under colonial forestry). Hundreds of villages that fell
within the broad jurisdictions of forests mapped from an
office in Jakarta or Bogor, were simply left off the maps
(Moniaga, 1993). Some land use maps showed what the
government considered to be permanent cultivation (irrigated rice land), but even such plots could be regarded as
criminal incursions on the state forest lands squatting
and peoples rights and claims were disregarded even
though a mere scratching of the historical surface could
show otherwise. In the cases where some nod might be
given to local peoples presence, compensation to local
people with resources and land within political forests was
never a recognition of territorial rights, but of rights to
trees (Zerner, 1990). These policies and laws created new
relations between property rights in trees and land, and
new larger scale territorialities among state, village, and
individual claims, forms of authority, and jurisdictions.
Today, these institutions, policies, and practices are
changing again in the wake of decentralization and reformasi. As Wadley (2003) has pointed out, state power since
1998 has been largely ineffective, particularly in its enforcement of its own claims. Government strategies and
techniques are being influenced by NGO and local institutions, practices, and constructs, while the practical politics of enforcement are changing. The following discussion, however, deals primarily with the counter-mapping
efforts that emerged and expanded during the second half
of the Suharto regime.
No longer the quasi-clandestine enterprise it was under
Suharto, since Reformasi, counter-maps have been made
in thousands of villages across Indonesia and are actively
used (with mixed results) to contest the appropriation of
their lands for resource extraction, conservation, and the
tourist industry (Kristianus et al., 1998).Using a method
developed by Jeff Fox of the East-West Center (Fox,

1990), local activists, sometimes with the help of international consultants and government officials, use sketch
maps and sometimes GPS devices to delineate land and
resource use territories, including standing forest resources that villagers claimed according to local traditions
or colonial-era allocations. Later, in many cases, the field
data are matched with data on official land use and topographic maps to create more high-tech maps. They use
these sophisticated computer maps in court or in disputes
adjudicated in other government fora.
Counter-mapping has had an interesting political effect in that NGOs used it not only to identify the lands
held by villagers and whole villages but has also tended to
label customary resources by landed categories. By doing so, they have (mostly inadvertently) invoked the colonial legal system that divided land between customary
land and unencumbered state land. What the NGOs have
missed in naming these customary lands on counter maps
was the fact that even customary land was still state
land, and still subject to colonial law, albeit through different means than those used to adjudicate commercial
lands leased to Europeans and Chinese. What differed was
not the presence or absence of state authority, but the manner in which such lands were administered and adjudicated, i.e., through a system of native courts, whose lowest level of authority was vested in the head of a longhouse. Effectively, this conferred greater territorial authority to local leaders and communities (at least those
recognized by the colonial government), but did not create the kind of autonomous local government structure
implied by the making of counter-maps and their use in
the current customary rights movement.
The process of making these maps and the maps themselves are meant to illustrate how indigenous ways of
organizing and allocating space support or conflict with
state forest management categories and processes. They
counterpose indigeneity (which is conflated with minority
ethnic status on a national level) with Indonesian state
ideas of spatial organization. Yet the terms of countermappers are forced by the politics of the mapping controversies and conflicts to use the language and tools of the
government, inevitably affecting the possible outcomes of
the exercise. The mappers talk to villagers about village
land tenure and inheritance, the nature of individual and
community decisions regarding resource use, and the
ways that villagers have dealt with outsiders seeking
access to local resources. They then put this information
onto sketch maps. This emphasis on villages without regard to their historical origins and precedents, contradicts

the intentions of the NGOs to empower alternative power

structures and local histories.
While one purported goal of these efforts was to appropriate the states techniques and manner of representation to bolster the legitimacy of local claims and authority,
one effect has been the re-invention of non-territorial
claims as territorial. By using the very language of mapping and the spatial territories of villages, the NGOs compel a territorial translation of concepts such as tree tenure
and resource use, while at the same time taking attention
away from different political organizations that derive
from other ways of thinking about and practicing spatial
organization that did not conform with government practice. While countermappers often eschew the governments overarching claims to forests, it uses some of the
categories of contemporary forest management e.g., by
identifying village protection forests in order to legitimate its claims to those same government authorities.
In other words, using villages a sedentary government territorial administration concept or protection
forests an ahistorical term constructed to indicate forest areas that will not be subject to extraction as terms
to explain local history in some ways confounds the
counter dimensions of counter-mapping.
In their defense, the maps became mechanisms for
strengthening so-called indigenous claims to forest territory by using more scientific methods and technologies to
document these claims. Counter-mappers attempted to
use science to speak truth to scientific power, in terms recognizable to scientists and the policy makers they advised.
They used hand-held GPS devices to make accurate
measurements, they used government maps but filled in
the abstract zones and conceptual environments created
by government mappers, and tried to place real people and
villages in the abstract empty spaces of these mapped
zones.
In the course of these exercises, some mappers either
purposefully or inadvertently racialized the landscape in
ways that were not exactly true to the landscapes history.
They counted the numbers of residents categorized according to the languages people spoke at home and correlated the Dayak residents of these areas with various forest territories. In districts which were ethnically mixed,
the map makers assigned a majority ethnicity. Issues such
as the historical movement of longhouses, families, and
individuals, and intermarriage between people of different
ethnicities were glossed over an ignored. Moreover, these
new notions of territoriality constituted a strange conglomeration of colonial and contemporary governance

Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1) 11

and organizational concepts. They were colonial because

they invoke some of the assumptions inherent in colonialera land law (e.g., customary land), even though the basis
of these laws colonial rule over all land within the
claimed territory is distorted in current understandings
and practices. They reflect contemporary state territorializations because they are based on the concepts of political organization extended to all of Indonesia during
the Suharto regime e.g., villages being the primary
local unit of analysis, and the unquestioned acceptance
of forests as both an uncritically viewed category of
both state politics and nature.
In practice, therefore, counter-mapping has accomplished some of the same things as formal government
mapping. Mappers assert permanent territorial claims to
both territorial and non-territorial resources. The maps paper over conflicting claims between individuals or whole
villages in many cases, although sometimes the maps can
be used to resolve conflicts. In some cases, the maps create histories for certain claims while ignoring others. And,
oddly enough, counter-mapping has done what colonial
officers were never able to accomplish: mapped village
territories. In some places in West Kalimantan, district
governments have asked NGOs to make village maps because they do not have the manpower. In the wake of reformation and decentralization, some counter-maps have
become maps of power when they were authorized and
used by regional and district authorities.
Would counter-mapping the original transfer have
made a difference in the original agreement or the outcome of the territorial transfer described in the opening
vignette of this paper? Had a map been made at the time
of transfer, perhaps the small cluster of durian trees would
not have been marked. The failure to write it down at the
time of transfer could later be used in a strict legal sense
to dispute the claims of the first village. But those legalities were not the factors being taken into consideration by
participants in this case. Nevertheless, the fact that such
arrangements were possible so long after the first village
moved raises questions about the finalities predicted by
opponents of formal-legal change such as codification
and customary practices.

Further implications and speculations

Territorialized spaces, as these cases show, are being produced locally as well as in tension with national and
global practices and trends. But the process of bounding

12 Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1)

villages is different today than it was in the past villages have territorial boundaries on the land, not in traveling stories about durian trees and burial grounds. As a part
of a modernizing Indonesia, their bounds are fixed by definition not by local historical associations. Sometimes the
more contemporary or convenient practice grates against
the remembered past. We need to imagine a different sort
of landscape than the one we see today, which also makes
us see todays landscape in a different way. Starting in the
place that is today Bagak and working backwards in time
provides a spatially limited glimpse of the past. We need
instead to examine the moving socio-spatial trajectories
that led to the constellation of social relations in Bagak today, seeking to understand the production of this territorialized landscape.
The globalization and in Indonesia the nationalization of social and political movements encouraging
indigenous peoples to formalize their resource claims
are reverberating locally as they converge with local
processes that constitute change. Some NGOs are actively using territorial politics and practices to de-center
state power. Maps, GPS, and so on, are powerful forms of
communication and claim, as well as technologies of state
power. Thus at the same time that NGOs are making
counter claims, they are to some extent acceding to certain
terms set by the state. In this process, they are aiding in the
incorporation of these localities onto state maps and
thereby eventually into state mechanisms for controlling
resource use. This is a trade-off that some are willing to
make; while others maintain their dreams of autonomous
village republics.
These forms of territorialization particularly when
they involve mapping the residues of idealized pasts and
ethnicizing or racializing the resource landscape in the
process represent sharp sides of a potentially doubleedged sword. While the territorial strategies and tactics
discussed here may seem to promise the return of resource
control to local claimants, they also run the risk of creating serious problems for the very people they are meant to
serve. They represent territorial claims in the terms of earlier forms of government (colonialism) that have long
ceased to exist and to which absolute return is impossible.
Even when mapped claims are allocated to whole groups
as in community mapping, they are nevertheless privatized group rights based on fictions of ethnic purity and on
mythical sedentarisms. They are creating the basis for
conflict that all forms of exclusivity and enclosure inevitably bring with them.
Ethnic conflict has raged twice through West Kaliman-

tan in the last few years, and mirrored conflicts from earlier periods (Peluso & Harwell, 2001; Davidson & Kammen, 2002). While exploring these is beyond the scope of
this paper, the territorialization and reconstruction of ethnicity whether through maps or the rebirth of colonial
and pre-colonial political organizations has to be seen
as contributing to conflict over resources. The stories told
above do not touch on the 200 year period of Chinese residence and intermarriage with local people in the rural areas of these western districts, nor of the Madurese and Javanese moving into the area after the Chinese were evicted
by the government and many Dayaks in the region. By focusing on a very small scale, the story produced thus seems
to be simply one of Dayaks and the respective Dutch colonial and contemporary Indonesian state.
Conversely, when looking at options for people whose
individual and group claims were never fully acknowledged by a national government, making counter-maps
seems to be a practical way to establish property rights or
at least to create documents for negotiation. It still remains
true, however, that once rights to resources are territorialized and mapped or documented in ways recognizable by
the state, the state gains a certain power over those resources and the people claiming them. The state becomes
a recognized arbiter and mediator of both access and
rights. Increased visibility to the state and its disciplining
mechanisms carries its own risks that mappers and their
constituencies must remember.
Both cases in Kalimantan illustrate that territorialization is a dynamic and contingent process, an expression of
relationships that emerge, operate, and converge across
and within localities, national spaces, and global networks. Territories, like places are produced at multiple
scales (Massey, 1994). If counter-maps constitute a new
spatial practice as a territorializing mechanism for making
claims, both the act of making the maps and the maps
themselves inevitably transform local discourses of property rights. In the process, concepts which come from different eras such as Customary Rights can be
translated into the present and re-presented in terms having greater contemporary meaning and power not only
on maps of land, but also in speech, and in the ways people relate to each other and the environment.

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