“The impulse is cartographic”: Counter-Mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality

Resource frontiers continue to expand globally across Indigenous lands as states and corporations enact forms of expropriation redolent of the formal colonial era for the sake of extraction. In the face of this expansion, the burden remains largely on frontline communities to defend their ecologies using the tools available to them. Across Indonesia’s resource frontiers, the “cartographic impulse” Edward Said once named to describe anticolonial struggles is apparent in the form of counter-mapping, which seeks to secure adat (customary) rights and defend Indigenous lands against extractivist expansion. This article revisits this practice and argues that the counter-map and its goals remain tenuous—mapping in its scalable form risks processing complex and multi-dimensional ways of relating to land into two-dimensional representations appropriate for a liberal property regime, while adat itself is a contingent and mutable legal goal. Ultimately, the article echoes emerging calls for the burden to be shifted away from frontline communities through the pursuit of just transitions to post-extractivism. Pemburuan sumber daya ke wilayah-wilayah baru yang masih kaya (resource frontiers) di tanah masyarakat adat semakin meluas secara global, seiring praktek-praktek perampasan berbau kolonial yang dilakukan oleh negara dan korporasi demi tujuan ekstraksi. Berhadapan dengan ekspansi ini, masyarakat di gugus depanlah yang menanggung beban terbesar untuk mempertahankan lingkungan hidup mereka, dengan menggunakan sarana yang tersedia bagi mereka. Di wilayah-wilayah baru ekstraksi sumber daya alam di Indonesia, apa yang pernah disebut Edward Said sebagai ‘cartographic impulse’ untuk menggambarkan perjuangan anti-kolonial terlihat jelas dalam bentuk counter-mapping, yang bertujuan untuk mempertahankan tanah-tanah adat dari ekspansi ekstravistik. Artikel ini hendak meninjau kembali praktek counter-mapping ini dan berargumen bahwa counter-map dan tujuan-tujuannya masih lemah– mapping dalam bentuk yang dapat diukur mengalami masalah dengan persoalan proses dan persoalan corak multidimensioanal dari hubungan dengan tanah dalam kaitan dengan representasi dua-dimensi yang hanya cocok dengan rezim kepemilikan liberal; sementara adat sendiri adalah tujuan legal yang sifatnya kontingen dan terbuka terhadap perubahan. Pada akhirnya artikel ini ikut menyuarakan seruan yang banyak muncul, bahwa beban harus dialihkan dari masyarakat frontline melalui usaha untuk transisi-transisi yang adil menuju post-extractivism.     

HISTORY,INSTITUTIONS, AND CITIES: A VIEW FROM THE AMERICAS*

ABSTRACT Every nation, formally or informally, defines and establishes the lines of political and fiscal authority among its national, regional, and local governments. Historically, centralized governments tend to restrict the power and autonomy of provincial and local governments. In this paper, we exploit the quasi‐experimental distribution of political institutions in the Americas caused by variation in European colonial experience to examine the impact of institutions on urban and local development, specifically on the degree of urban primacy, the size distribution of cities, the number and density of local government units, and the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. We argue that centralization of political power at the national level, as experienced in many countries in Latin America, contributes to urban primacy and a size distribution of cities favoring large cities. Additionally, even in more politically decentralized countries such as Canada and the U.S., variance in political centralization at the provincial (state) level over local governments led to significant divergences in urban primacy, the distribution of city sizes, as well as the form, number, and density of local governments. While we cannot rule out the importance of other factors, our findings suggest that political centralization affects spatial economic development.     

Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another.