Guest Lecture at Wageningen University, Course on "Sociology of Development and Change", Tuesday 16 March 2019 10.15 to 12.30 https://www.wur.nl/en/activity/guest-lecture-customary-communities-in-motion-politics-of-indigeneity-in-contemporary-indonesia.-by-dr.-noer-fauzi-rachman-padjadjaran-university-bandung-indonesia-.htm
Indonesia is an important and interesting place to understand how the meaning of indigeneity, a new keyword today, are contentiously shaped. Using a methapore from Indonesian Javanese traditional puppetry vocabulary, this is kawah candradimuka, a sacred crater to shape a powerful knight, through which masyarakat adat, the Indonesian term for custom/tradition regulated communities, is articulated and shaped at multiple sites of struggle. I plan to elucidate indigeneity politics at national level in Indonesia, started in 1999 when Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN/Indigenous Peoples' Alliance of the Archipelago) was first established. AMAN provides a unified national movement platform for the localized and sporadic struggles of Adat communities against the systemic land dispossession. AMAN used the term masyarakat adat as the translation for the term of indigenous peoples as defined by the UN Declaration on The Right of Indigenous Peoples.
AMAN campaigns mainly for the visibility of masyarakat adat and their rights by posing their relational positionality with/within the Indonesian nation state. In 2012, AMAN submitted a constitutional review against some articles of the Law number 44/1999 on Forestry to the Constitutional Court. In this presentation I will analyze the significance and consequences of this counter-hegemonic legal maneuvering (Rachman and Marsalam 2017) which succeeded to produce an important ruling that state customary forest should not be part of state owned forest. The Ruling is a new landmark in Indonesian agrarian policy by establishing the constitutional norm that the status of masyarakat adat as a right bearing subject, and the owner of their customary territory (Rachman and Siscawati 2016). An important follow up after the Ruling is a national inquiry conducted by National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) to examine human right violations related to agrarian conflicts and the ownership status of customary territories within forest zone. I will end my presentation by explaining the key policy processes of the current government administration under Joko Widodo, the Indonesia President since 2015, including the latest: the issuance of some licences to recognize hutan adat (adat owned forest) in the end of 2016.
The Indonesian story stimulates me to talk about the politics of indigeneity through the lens of “institutional activist”, which is defined as individuals who affect change (in organizational norms to policy reform) from within organizations/institutions (Pettinicchio 2012). My presentation will demonstrate a unique view situated by my own trajectory: being scholar activist, expert, and now, a public official in the executive office of the Indonesian President, and also offer apreciation, critique, and additional arguments on the meaning of indigeneity, based on my intensive works (Peluso, Rachman, and Afiff 2008, Rachman 2011, Rachman and Siscawati 2016, Rachman and Marsalam 2017), and fascinating works of some critical scholars, including Persoon (1998), Moniaga (1993, 2007), Peluso and Vandergest (2001), Li (2000, 2001, 2010), Colchester et al (2003), Burn (2004), Dove (2006), Afiff and Lowe (2007), Acciaioli (2007) Tsing (2007, 2010), Davidson and Henley (2007), Bedner and Huis (2008), Sirait (2009), Bakker and Moniaga (2010), Franz von Benda-Beckman, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (2011), and Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin (2013).
References
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