Imagined Indonesian Indigeneity and the Meratus People: A Postcolonial Interrogation

Abstract

There is a growing indigenous movement in Indonesia linked to global activism led by NGOs advocating on behalf of local traditional communities experiencing injustice and marginalisation. However, rather than taking indigeneity for granted, understood as a fixed category or inherent identity, this research critically interrogates the application of the concept in Indonesia. Often conceptions about non-indigeneity and indigeneity are viewed as dominant discourses that have been imposed on the voiceless local traditional communities. In contrast, this study seeks to give a voice to local people through a focus on representation. In doing so, the research has been conducted through a postcolonial perspective, and aims to contribute to knowledge about how indigeneity is produced, reproduced and resisted in postcolonial contexts and through engagements between communities, NGOs and the state. This research explores indigenous identity construction and examines the practices of representation through political, social and cultural dialectics within certain historical moments. The main question raised in this thesis is: How have NGOs influenced the representation of local traditional communities through the discourses of indigenous activism? The concept of representation goes beyond a simple notion of ‘being existentially represented’, prompting an interrogation to which the local voices of the people were made to be ‘self-representing’. In order to explore this question, an in-depth study was undertaken with local communities in the Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan province. The fieldwork involved an exploration of community members’ constructions of indigeneity and the production of indigenous identity through the masyarakat adat movement in Indonesia and NGO activism. This research incorporates postcolonial perspectives into interrogations of indigeneity, as well as engages in a close examination of representation. The Meratus study has therefore involved developing an innovative analytic strategy for understanding the complexity of indigeneity. This was achieved by drawing on postcolonial and poststructural theories, which found that the production of indigeneity is a fluid, imaginary identity that, when embraced in strategic ways, depends on local communities’ capacity to hybridise representational impositions from external forces.