Terminal Economy: Politics of Distribution in Highland ,

by

Jacob Nerenberg

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jacob Nerenberg 2018

Terminal Economy: Politics of Distribution in Highland Papua, Indonesia

Jacob Nerenberg

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

Anthropologists have long debated the relationship between local scales of politics and global capitalism. This dissertation examines regional politics in (West) Papua—a contested territory where Indonesia encompasses —in relation to the forces that incorporate the region into the world economy. It focuses on the Balim region of the Central Highlands, home to

Papua’s largest indigenous population. It examines struggles around the distribution of material goods, especially basic food staples sold by merchants or distributed as government aid and rations. State distribution programs in the region have expanded under Special Autonomy, a decentralization reform implemented to defuse the conflict between Jakarta and the West Papuan independence movement.

Combining ethnographic interpretation with economic history, the dissertation proceeds in three steps. First, it traces the transformation of the Balim food regime under the extractive forces of global capital—which has targeted Papua as a resource frontier, and compelled

Indonesian migrant livelihoods to depend on commerce in Papua. The history of extraction and commerce set the stage for Autonomy’s expansion of food distribution—an expansion that has

ii accelerated the indigenous shift away from self-sufficient food production. Next, the dissertation examines key sites in the incorporation process: peri-urban markets and minivan terminals that are nodes in regional distribution. These sites, where indigenous women sell produce and newcomer merchants sell imported goods, have been theaters of indigenous uprisings, inter- ethnic conflict, and commercial regulation initiatives. Finally the dissertation traces trajectories of indigenous youth who work in and around infrastructures, to show that the labor of mobile youth shapes how state distribution functions.

Together, these threads illustrate how indigenous participation in Balim regional politics has sought to enact some control over the process through which the regional economy is relegated to an end-point position. Overall, the dissertation advocates for a world-systems anthropology that shows how global and material forces recur across scales. These forces confront populations at contested peripheries of Global South countries with the double burden of responding to their incorporation, and experiencing state distribution partly as a form of displacement.

iii Acknowledgements

While I am responsible for the content of this dissertation, its production depended on the labor of a long list of people. First, I thank the many people from the Balim region and other parts of

Papua who I have known and worked with—in and the wider Balim area, in , and among the Balim diaspora in cities outside Papua. These individuals and their organizations provided friendship, guidance, patience, logistical support, and inspiration for my work. I continue to discover new ways in which my knowledge about the world has been expanded by my friends, interlocutors, and colleagues in Papua. I reluctantly maintain their anonymity.

My thesis supervisor, Tania Li, has been extremely supportive of my work, showing understanding and patience while continuously challenging me to think and write with more clarity and purpose. I am very fortunate to have had a supervisor who has always been available to discuss whatever difficulties I have experienced, who I have been able to count on for last- minute assistance of many kinds, and who has enacted care and hospitality I had never expected to find at graduate school.

Beside my supervisor, my advisory committee members have been very helpful. In particular, my many conversations with Joshua Barker allowed me to expand my sense of what it is possible to accomplish in anthropological research and writing. I am also grateful for being included in the opportunities for scholarly exchange that he initiated. I have benefited in many ways from working with Chris Krupa, who has contributed encouragement and sagacity to the ongoing task of bringing my writing closer to the elusive truth. Holly Wardlow periodically invited me to see my own questions and interests in a new light.

iv My external examiner, Danilyn Rutherford, has long inspired me with her writing. I am grateful for her deep reading and probing questions, which will help me continue to grow as a writer and researcher.

I have learned much from faculty members of the Department of Anthropology at

University of Toronto. I thank Shiho Satsuka for introducing me to the anthropological study of capitalism, and for pushing me toward new lines of analysis as part of her service on my examination committee. During my time at the Centre for Ethnography, Donna Young was very supportive and understanding. I am grateful for the critical engagement and encouragement I received during classes, workshops, and conversations in hallways, from Frank Cody, Maggie

Cummings, Naisargi Dave, Michael Lambek, Andrea Muehlebach, Alejandro Paz, Gavin Smith, and Todd Sanders. My master’s co-advisor, Andrew Gilbert, was among the first professors to help me adjust to the rhythm of intellectual production. My other co-advisor, the late Krystyna

Sieciechowicz, showed me a lasting example of rigour and dedication.

The people who manage and sustain the life of the Department have made my work possible with their competence and compassion. I thank Natalia Krencil for her repeated, timely efforts to keep me safe various types of administrative disaster. Annette Chan, Kristy Bard, and

Sophia Cottrell were helpful and patient on numerous occasions.

I have been very fortunate to find lasting camaraderie among my fellow students in the

Anthropology department (many of who have moved on to bigger and better things). I am lucky to have come to count Seçil Dağtas, Columba Gonzalez Duarte, Dylan Gordon, Alejandra

Gonzalez Jimenez, Daniella Jofre, Aaron Kappeler, Anna Kruglova, Timothy Makori, Vivian

Solana, and Aslı Zengin as colleagues and friends. All of these dear friends have made it possible for me to survive academic life. Just as important as the sharing of ideas and strategies have been

v their reminders of the importance of supporting one another and having fun. The writing group that Vivian, Timothy, and Columba set up was a base of strength and mutual support that made it possible for me to keep writing when it felt most difficult. I enjoyed spending time with fellow members of the Southeast Asia group in anthropology, including Stephen Campbell, Jean Chia

(whose parents were my generous hosts in Singapore), Emily Hertzman, Lukas Ley, and Jessika

Tremblay. The year I have spent with my office mates in AP 424 has been great fun, and I always look forward to running into Joanna Abdulhamid, Bronwyn Frey, Hadia Akhtar Khan,

Shozab Raza, Sardar Saadi, and Aakash Solanki. I have been happy to run into Jessica Cook,

Sharon Kelly, and Behzad Sarmadi in and around the department, and Atreyee Majumder offered me helpful advice at key moments.

Outside the department, and beyond University of Toronto, I have been lucky to find friendship without which my work would not have happened. Hülya Arık, Özlem Aslan, and

Jaby Mathew have been partners in impromptu hangouts and walks in the park, and have showed me great examples of friendship and life. I have also shared memorable times with Noaman Ali,

Salvador Altamirano, Zach Anderson, Ümit Aydoğmuş, Este Chep, Rastko Cvekic, Janne

Dingemans, Nehal El-Hadi, Fuad Ahmad Fanani, Caitlin Henry, Prasad Khanolkar, Johanna

Lewis, Katie Mazer, Wesley Oakes, Nathan Okonta, Alex Pereklita, Deepa Rajkumar, Meghana

Rao, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, James Nugent, Walter Ojok-Acii, Anto Sangaji, Erick

Sarmiento, Jessica Soedirgo, Akshaya Tankha, Begüm Uzun, Daviel Lazure Vieira, Patrick

Vitale, and Saafi Warsame.

Though I don’t visit nearly as often as I would like, I don’t forget my friends in Montréal.

Kristian Gareau and Victoria Nam have always been a phone call away, ready to talk things over.

vi I have benefited from interactions with members of the community of Papua researchers in North American anthropology. Leslie Butt, Eben Kirksey, Jenny Munro, and Rupert Stasch have made lasting contributions to my work and provided encouragement. Abidin Kusno and

Albert Schrauwers are two scholars of Indonesia who have been supportive. When I first went to

Papua, a number of people helped me learn about the Balim region. My entry into the Wamena scene was less lonely and clumsy than it could have been thanks to Michael Bluett, Esther Cann,

Masha Kardashevskaya, Katrin Hecke, Yulia Sugandi, and Katharina Werlen.

This dissertation was made possible by financial support from numerous agencies. I received doctoral scholarships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the

Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. My fieldwork was supported by the

Doctoral Research Award from the International Development Research Centre, the Lorna

Marshall Doctoral Fellowship from the Department of Anthropology at University of Toronto, as well as funding from Tania Li. My dissertation writing was sustained by the Chancellor Jackman

Graduate Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Fellowship in Ethnographic

Writing at the Centre for Ethnography at University of Toronto at Scarborough, and funding from Joshua Barker.

I thank my parents, Martha and Karl, for their unconditional support and understanding.

Their examples as thinkers, communicators, and creators have shaped my life and work. I also thank my sisters Laura and Madeleine who have encouraged me and taught me a great deal.

Finally, this work would not have been possible without Zyler Wang—whose presence in my life has changed everything. Zyler has been both the most insightful critic and most generous supporter of my research and writing. Her wisdom, compassion, and humour have deeply influenced my work and bring meaning and enjoyment to life.

vii Table of Contents

Introduction 1 Global analysis in nonprofit and academic advocacy ...... 7 Sites and methods ...... 13 Politics of foreign research in a sensitive region ...... 13 Data and methods ...... 18 Selection of sites and informants: constraints and power ...... 22 Guides among informants ...... 32 Collaborative labor of the ethnography ...... 37 Engaging Balim knowledge ...... 38 Chapter summaries ...... 40 Chapter 1 – Framing the Terminal Economy 45 A Papuan critique of political economy ...... 45 Scrutiny and relegation ...... 48 The terminal economy ...... 53 Theoretical intervention ...... 55 Livelihoods and distribution systems ...... 55 Anthropology of Infrastructure ...... 62 World-systems and imperialism ...... 65 Distinctions and moralities in global perspective ...... 71 Intervention in regional literature ...... 74 New Guinean encounters with global capitalism ...... 74 Politics of distribution in decentralizing Indonesia ...... 78 (West) Papuan politics in global perspective ...... 82 Chapter 2 – Incorporating the Balim Valley 86 Intensifying the regional distribution economy: motivations in context ...... 92 Balim Valley as strategic site of nation building ...... 93 Papua’s extractive paradigm ...... 96 Commercial networks and migrant livelihoods ...... 99 Balim in relation to Indonesia’s post-crisis re-peripheralization ...... 103 Trajectory of incorporation ...... 106 Production of isolation ...... 109 Livelihoods incorporation since the 1950s ...... 113 Sweet potato and rice ...... 117 Accelerated food regime incorporation under Autonomy and partition ...... 121 Livelihoods under overlapping phases of incorporation ...... 127 Infrastructural expressions of incorporation ...... 130 Conclusion: recursion across scales ...... 133 Chapter 3 – Contesting the Terminal: Difference, Disruption, and Regulation 135 Market confrontations ...... 139 Containment, regulation, and regional history of distribution ...... 146 Building an indigenous market ...... 150 Mediating distinctions in regional commercial history ...... 153

viii Distinctions through incorporation ...... 157 Regional map of distribution and difference ...... 158 Recursive moralities ...... 163 Moral inflections of the major intra-indigenous distinction ...... 164 Cascading lenses: obligation and enterprise ...... 170 Recursive distinctions at the edge of the world-system ...... 175 Channels of scrutiny ...... 178 Conclusion: regional politics on the recursive periphery ...... 180 Chapter 4 – Conscripts of Logistics: Trajectories of Mobile Balim Youth 184 ‘Terminal kids’ at thresholds of education, consumption, and labor ...... 188 Illegibility in terminal labor ...... 193 Historical role of education in terminal labor conscription ...... 195 Collective investments in education in relation to distribution networks ...... 200 Student associational life ...... 204 Obstacles and Autonomy ...... 207 Education and civil service aspiration under Autonomy ...... 211 Converging youth trajectories in Autonomy-era Jayapura ...... 213 Autonomy’s political pilgrimages ...... 214 Balim leaders in the capital ...... 215 Youth logistics around provincial politics ...... 218 Monitoring transit nodes ...... 221 Decentralization as conscription ...... 224 Conclusion: relegation and ascendance ...... 226 Conclusion 230 Incorporation and distinctions ...... 230 Production, distribution, and patchiness ...... 233 Extraction under concealment ...... 235 Closing: anthropology of produced possibilities ...... 236 Bibliography 239

ix List of Tables

Table 3.1. History of installation, regulation, and disruption of regional distribution, sorted by category of actor and power bloc. 155

x List of Figures

Figure 2.1. Various forms of commerce and mobility sharing the market-terminal space. 88

Figure 2.2. , gateway to the Balim region for people and manufactured goods. 91

Figure 2.3. Map of Papua within Indonesia, showing the location of Wamena. 93

Figure 2.4. Sketch of dendritic pattern of mass-produced commodity flows into the Balim region. 101

Figure 2.5. Merchants buying goods for resale from a wholesaler in Wamena.103

Figure 2.6 Heuristic sketch of main trajectories of movement of goods within, and in and out of the Balim region. 106

Fig. 2.7. Residents carry timber to make temporary repairs to the damaged ‘old’ bridge spanning Uwe river and connecting Wamena to Wouma district. 112

Figure 3.1. Dani protesters hold signs denouncing merchants’ sale of toxic foods, in front of Jayawijaya Legislature in Wamena, Sept. 24, 2007. 144

Figure 3.2. A honai, customary Balim men’s hut. 154

Figure 3.3. New ruko construction featuring regency-mandated honai roof front design. 154

Figure 3.4. Shops on main street of Wamena, retrofitted with variations on the mandated honai shape. 154

Figure 3.5. Satellite image of Wamena, showing the three principal peri-urban markets, the airport, and Wamena Mall. 160

Figure 3.6. Sketch map of roads and indigenous territories. 161

Figure 4.1. Young workers unload cargo at the airport in Wamena. 185

Figure 4.2. Boys working at an informal carwash near a market in Wamena. 193

Figure 4.3. Living room at a Balim regency student residence, with seating laid out in preparation for a student association meeting. 206

Figure 4.4. Organizational structure chart for a student residence in Jayapura (with identifying information blurred). 207

Figure 4.5. Afternoon traffic in a suburb of Jayapura. 221

xi

Introduction

This dissertation is about struggles around the distribution of material goods in the Balim Valley region of the Central Highlands of Papua province in Indonesia.1 It is a study of indigenous approaches to commerce and government distribution programs. Commerce and state aid programs have been two modes of distribution through which the Balim region has been increasingly integrated into the Indonesian state, and into global capitalism. As such, this dissertation examines how the indigenous Balim population grapples with the forces that have been incorporating their territory into the capitalist world-economy. The overarching argument that I will make is that indigenous participation in Balim regional politics, in various forms, is concerned with governing the regional economy’s relationship with the world-economy.

In order to interpret various forms of indigenous response to incorporation, this thesis develops the idea of the ‘terminal economy’ to conceptualize the structure of relations between the Balim Valley region and the world. The terminal economy is rooted in routine transactions at peri-urban transport terminals and markets, transactions that enact and express the region’s relegation to an end-point status. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this thesis present ethnographic material that shows how the heterogeneous space of the terminal acts as a microcosm of the incorporation processes, inciting agendas of distinction and regulation. As I explain in Chapter 1, the notion of terminal economy allows me to theorize how global-scale forces refract and recur across scales—and focuses attention on indigenous efforts to stabilize and, potentially, overcome the incorporation process.

1 Most English-language literature has referred to this region as the . There is a recent tendency to use Palim, which better represents the original indigenous pronunciation (Sugandi 2014). I settle on Balim as it is commonly used by indigenous authors (Alua and Marpaung 2007; Assolokobal 2007; Hisage 2006).

1 INTRODUCTION

The concrete phenomena I consider include a range of responses to the process of incorporation—from uprisings that disrupt commerce; to market regulation policies by indigenous representatives; and youth labor that enables the coordination of aid programs. These regional-level state distribution programs have been expanding under a set of government reforms known as Special Autonomy. Special Autonomy was legislated by Jakarta in 2001 and implemented more fully in the mid-2000s under a set of regulations at the Papuan provincial level. Special Autonomy is Papua’s version of a government decentralization agenda that has been implemented across Indonesia; it is the result of an effort by Jakarta, international agencies, and a number of Papuan representatives to defuse the conflict between the West Papuan independence movement and the Indonesian state. The movement challenges

Indonesian sovereignty in Papua, and contests inequalities between indigenous Papuans and newcomers from other parts of Indonesia, who control commerce and who have historically dominated the regional government. There exists rich scholarship on these inter-related issues: regional commerce, tensions between indigenous and newcomer populations, and decentralized governance in Indonesia. For the most part, this scholarship interprets regional politics in relation to forces and patterns that start at the scale of the Indonesian nation-state. When global-scale forces are included in the analysis, these tend to be limited to legacies of the Dutch colonial past.

In contrast, this thesis interprets regional politics in relation to contemporary global and material forces. By focusing on the case of the Balim region, where commerce and decentralized government distribution jointly incorporate the regional economy into national and global circuits, this dissertation revisits longstanding debates in anthropology—about how to interpret local and regional scales of politics in relation to global capitalism’s ongoing power of incorporation.

2 INTRODUCTION

My choice of the Balim region as a place to conduct this study was enabled by my prior experience working there for an international NGO that worked on conflict resolution and human rights. This NGO had first begun working in the Balim region in response to a conflict that emerged in the year 2000, when the independence movement was mobilizing indigenous masses in Papua’s towns. These mobilizations responded to the incorporation process by emphasizing distinctions between indigenous and newcomer—distinctions that had become meaningful through the expansion of newcomer-led commerce. And so, I was initially drawn to the Balim region by the material forces that became the focus of my study.

There are historical reasons why the Balim region is an appropriate site for the ethnographic study of regional responses to incorporation. Compared to most other regions of the

Global South, the highland interior of was only recently targeted by

Western imperialism, through appropriation of natural resources, conquest of consumer markets, and colonial governance in the name of civilizational uplift. These incursions, which began in the

1950s, set in motion an ongoing reorganization of economic life, which until then had been based on autarkic production and internal exchange of goods and labor. Until this time, the

Dutch colonial state’s claims to sovereignty in the region had little expression in terms of material installations or actual authority. The ‘late’ start to the Balim’s incorporation process means that its expressions are highly visible in contemporary struggles and controversies of regional politics. One such expression is the supersession of indigenous food production by the distribution of mass-produced goods. This supersession has incited resistance. A recurring theme of protest during the past 20 years has been for indigenous protesters to disrupt newcomer-led commerce—by shutting down markets, or blocking roads and runways. Part of my dissertation is

3 INTRODUCTION concerned with understanding such mobilizations as one form in a series of responses to incorporation.

Besides the ‘late’ history of imperialism, Papua’s position as a periphery of a large

Global South nation provides an especially fine grain to examine struggles over incorporation.

Indonesia has a four centuries-long history of being incorporated into the global economy— especially through resource extraction by foreign capital. While Indonesia has been mostly unable to achieve sustainable, large-scale industrial development, the booming primary resource sector in the country’s internal peripheries (such as and Papua) has generated a range of knock-on opportunities in areas such as petty commerce. The migration of merchants to the

Balim region is part of a process whereby commerce in Papua becomes increasingly important to

Indonesian livelihoods, and the Papuan economy becomes more firmly integrated into the

Indonesian mainstream. My thesis understands this ‘Indonesianization’ of the Balim economy as a key mode of its incorporation into global capitalism. Interactions between indigenous residents and newcomer merchants, and indigenous participation in regional government offices, are ways in which the trajectory of incorporation is experienced in practice.

The years since the enactment of Special Autonomy offer an ideal time to examine indigenous responses to incorporation. As I will argue in Chapter 2, Autonomy—while offering various forms of indigenous empowerment—has accelerated the regional economy’s incorporation. This has happened through expanded government distribution of rice rations to indigenous households—distribution that requires men to engage in urban lobbying rather than rural horticultural labor. Autonomy thereby shifts the regional food regime further away from autarkic food production, as state distribution intensifies the incorporation process previously enacted principally through the marketing system.

4 INTRODUCTION

Special Autonomy’s expanded politics of distribution act as a pivot in a longer, multi- faceted historical process. The motive force in this process has been North Atlantic capital’s identification of Papua as a profitable site for resource extraction. By allocating a percentage of resource extraction tax revenues to the provincial government, Special Autonomy acknowledges the extractive paradigm under which Papua has been integrated into Indonesia. Autonomy’s distribution arrangements may appear at first glance to be contrary to an extractive process. And yet, this thesis will show that distribution arrangements in this type of situation can accelerate incorporation processes that are fundamentally extractive. In the chapters that follow, I document attempts by indigenous actors to grapple with this dual aspect of Autonomy: the way it allows for a degree of indigenous authority to manage some aspects of the regional economy, even as it accelerates this economy’s incorporation into the world-economy. One implication is that indigenous residents of places such as the Balim Valley are largely denied the opportunity to experience government distribution as a form of protection or livelihoods stabilization. I understand this mode of incorporation by distribution as a predictable feature of politics in the contested internal peripheries of large Global South countries.

The intercession of Indonesian state building and newcomer mediates relations between the Balim regional economy and the global forces of capital. A range of indigenous mobilizations has disrupted resource extraction and commerce, challenging Indonesian rule and interrupting the incorporation process. This is where Autonomy has intervened—enrolling indigenous representatives into the work of managing the distribution of newly available funds and goods through a decentralizing state. These developments prompt the following questions:

What agendas have emerged in the wake of the disruptions that challenged Jakarta to increase

5 INTRODUCTION regional distribution programs, and indigenous politicians’ authority over them? How do these agendas respond to the global forces of incorporation?

In answering these questions I foreground a material understanding of incorporation— and trace discourses that have justified and strengthened its historical force. For instance, since the colonial era, missionaries and government officials have subjected indigenous economic practices to moral scrutiny. I present moments in regional politics where these scrutinizing discourses crystallize, or are reformulated—such as through inter-ethnic distinctions, attempts to regulate commerce. As such, the rubric of indigenous responses to incorporation includes not just attempts to shape material processes of distribution, but also attempts to deflect, belie, overcome, or otherwise endure the scrutiny that impinges upon indigenous economic life.

My analytic lens recognizes incorporation as a process that, as it connects the region to national and global flows, produces displacement, disconnection, and dispossession. As the previous autarkic food regime has been eclipsed, livelihoods disassembled, and families scattered, decentralized state distribution has spurred local- and regional-level rivalries and internecine conflicts. While there has been organized resistance to these processes, the historical record shows a tendency of accommodation and engagement. Numerous authors have noted welcoming stances toward missionaries, enthusiasm for non-local food products, and eagerness to occupy the decentralizing offices of the regional distributive state. Such themes resonate with anthropological studies of social and economic change across highland Melanesia, and are often framed within a rubric of enthusiasm for markets and capitalism (Golub 2014; Sharp 2013). The chapters that follow highlight material that shows a shifting series of indigenous approaches that range from disruption to regulation and coordination. The Autonomy era, while responding to protests and accelerating the incorporation process, has presented decentralized state building as

6 INTRODUCTION a key arena for indigenous response. My ethnographic material presents a transition from disruption to coordination and regulation, and toward building a distributive and regulatory state at the regional level. This material allows for an understanding of indigenous disruption as a tactical pivot toward inhabiting institutions to gain increased control over the incorporation process.

The following section recounts the process through which I identified attention to global material forces as a key priority in my ethnographic research. Then, to preface my presentation of my research methods, I discuss how I navigated a major obstacle to doing research in the

Balim context: the Indonesian government’s apprehension about the geopolitical potency of

Western advocacy. The following section outlines the key elements of data I deploy to support the thesis arguments, and corresponding data collection methods I used in the field. This is followed by an overview of key sites and informants, and a description of the collaborative aspect of my research. This presentation of methods closes by elaborating on how my research approach responded to the constraints of the challenging context by favoring conversation with indigenous knowledge. The final section of the introduction consists of summaries of the chapters, pointing out how each helps construct the overall thesis argument.

Global analysis in nonprofit and academic advocacy

To announce as I do that I interpret regional politics in relation to the global-scale forces of world capitalism, is to invite analytical and methodological scrutiny. In the first instance, one might question the choice of prioritizing global over national forces. There is a strong tradition among anthropologists of Indonesia to emphasize the organizing power of the Indonesian nation—whether in relation to cultural conventions of meaning, or, in a material sense, to the nation as the scale at which economic power is wielded. It is generally common in anthropology

7 INTRODUCTION to contextualize local field sites primarily with respect to the national scale. In Chapter 1, I discuss how my analysis contests this convention. Here I discuss the challenge of studying the region in relation to the global; and how the process through which I became involved in the

Balim region as field site led me to this conceptual and methodological priority.

In the case of Papua, there are some easily recognizable reasons why Western imperialism tends to be obscured from much discussion. For one, in a routine sociological sense, the most visible agents of disempowerment and violence against indigenous Papuans tend to be not Westerners but Indonesians, notably the large police and military deployments who are singled out in human rights reports. Consequently, many pro-independent organizations express their aspirations as ending Indonesian sovereignty in Papua. There is a wing of the movement that foregrounds an analysis of imperialism, but this analysis tends to be silenced in reports by mass media and Western advocacy organizations. Still, such associations surface at certain moments: for example, a slogan that appeared repeatedly on banners and signs of Papuan student protests during the past decade has been: “the Papua problem is an international problem”

(“Masalah Papua adalah masalah internasional”). This is a triple message. The slogan implies that Papua is a nation, and requests the involvement of the ‘international community’ in mediating between it and Indonesia; it also points to global—specifically, Western— responsibility for producing the conflict itself. Still, it is common for expert Papua observers to elide or minimize this responsibility—or to reduce it, as is common among Australian pundits, to a question of ‘complicity’ with Indonesia (Egret and Anderson 2017; Rollo 2013). Here, I recount how I encountered this mode of erasure and downplaying first as an NGO worker in

Papua, and then, in subtler ways, in academic advocacy regarding conflict in the Global South.

8 INTRODUCTION

I conceived of my research and planned my field work drawing on knowledge and personal networks that I had developed during a previous work experience in Papua, when I worked for an international NGO that conducted human rights accompaniment and ‘peace building’ projects in collaboration with community organizers. For 18 months from 2007 to

2009, I was a field volunteer on an international team based in Wamena. My work included many meetings with Wamena-based community organizations, human rights activists, churches and other religious institutions, youth groups, organizations dedicated to cultural revitalization and customary land tenure, as well as regional government officials and state security figures such as the regional heads of police and army, and intelligence officers. The NGO also had offices in the Papuan capital Jayapura and in Jakarta, with which we were in regular contact. The work allowed me to hear analyses of the political situation in the Balim region from a wide variety of perspectives. It also allowed me to get to know the place, visit hinterland districts, map out the regional economy and transportation network, hear indigenous accounts of regional history, and develop my linguistic capacity beyond the standard Indonesian I had learned in

Java—so that I could use the Balim version of Papuan Colloquial Indonesian, featuring word substitution from indigenous languages such as Grand Valley Dani (GVD) or Western Dani

(WD).2 I also built a personal network with members of the organizations I worked with, and with individuals I came to know otherwise, such as produce sellers and motorcycle taxi drivers.

Furthermore, I developed relationships with four households in three hinterland districts. Two of these drew on connections household members had with a former staffer at my NGO (an

Indonesian national with a history of activism around Papua). The other two were the households of an itinerant produce vendor that our office patronized; and a household whose members were

2 GVD and WD are the most widely spoken indigenous languages in the Balim region. The territorial distribution of these and other indigenous languages, and the role of intra-indigenous ethno-linguistic distinctions, are discussed in Chapter 3.

9 INTRODUCTION part of a cultural organization that partnered briefly with our NGO. I made weekend visits and overnight stays where I took tours of farms, water sources, schools, churches, and district offices—giving me a basic understanding of how livelihoods and authority were organized.

My experience working with this NGO involved extensive contact with members of organizations whose aim was to address the injustices experienced by the indigenous Papuan population. Some of these organizations were allied with pro-independence organizations; some such alliances were close, and in other cases there was critical distance. Many organizers were members of multiple organizations. Getting to know these individuals and organizations enabled my colleagues and me to map the West Papua movement in the region, and trace points of unity and internal debate. We learned about the history of uprisings and incidents of collective violence that had marked the Balim in recent decades—in particular, a series of incidents since an urban-based pro-independence mass movement had emerged in Papua’s towns in the wake of the fall of Suharto in 1998. I was in Wamena at the time of two major incidents in this series: a

2007 uprising triggered by reports that migrant-owned shops were selling poisoned foods; and the 2008 shooting death of an indigenous protester at an event marking the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. I noted how our NGO team discussed such incidents and their broader context in ways that tended to overlook economic and global dimensions of the conflict.

Meanwhile, in order to reassure regional police and military authorities, the NGO presented itself as being ‘non-political’ (‘tidak berpolitik’) and ‘not taking sides’ (‘tidak berpihak’). These stances assumed that an NGO funded by Western development agencies, and maintaining contact with diplomatic offices in Jakarta, could plausibly be seen as not ‘interfering’ in Papua.

The ‘non-political’ claim assumed that the Western government agencies backing our work had no role in the conflict.

10 INTRODUCTION

As a volunteer, I discussed with colleagues and local partners whether and how the

Indonesia/Papua tension was related to global power structures. Some indigenous pro- independence organizers downplayed the role of the West—at least when discussing the issue with Westerners, who were often seen as potential advocates for the movement. The more radical and materialist Papuan activists I came to know tended to understand indigenous dispossession in both a national and global context. Many pointed to the 1962 New York agreement at the UN, when the US effectively granted Indonesia sovereignty over Papua; or to the Freeport mining concession, granted by Suharto to the US mining giant before Indonesian rule had been formalized (Banivanua-Mar 2008; Leith 2003; Saltford 2003). It was fairly common to hear that

Indonesian state security forces were little more than ‘security guards of foreign capital’

(‘satpam modal asing’). I drew on these discussions to develop an analysis of how Western resource capital combined with the anti-Black racism of international institutions to interdict

West Papuan self-determination. I sensed that my analysis was incomplete. This was partly because there is no large-scale resource extraction in the Balim region per se. Also, I struggled to conceptualize the role of the Indonesian state as both a powerful encompassing force dominating

Papua, and an impoverished state on the international scene. I could not explain why so many indigenous Papuans sought to participate in the regional and local state apparatus, as it expanded under Autonomy.

My subsequent anthropological training provided categories to analyze the sites and relations I had observed, and to describe relations between Papua, Indonesia, and the West.

Notions of sovereignty and governmentality offered way to conceptualize forms of violence and collaboration. Still, I sought analytical tools to capture the relations between the multiple scales of power at work in the Balim region. While I found the discipline to encourage the tracing

11 INTRODUCTION legacies of colonial power, I had more difficulty locating analytical models for theorizing global- scale power in the present. The analytic of globalization tended to downplay the power of the

West, emphasizing instead multidirectional flows and scapes.

The year 2013 provided a key moment for me to reckon the stakes at play in analyzing global power, and the question of transnational advocacy. This reckoning related to advocacy by academics around conflict in Syria: several scholars signed a petition that called for the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (Campaign of Global Solidarity with the Syrian

Revolution 2013). The petition called on observers to bracket an analysis of imperialism and focus instead on harm done by the Syrian government. Many engaged social scientists consider it an ethical responsibility to advocate against governments accused of violence against protesters or rebels. Such advocacy often assumes that Global South governments are the primary agents of the harm and suffering of their own populations. In the case of Syria, critics of anti-government campaigns have challenged this assumption.3 What if this assumption overlooks power that operates at the global scale? I see this as an urgent question given that these global power relations amplify what Western academics say about conflicts in the Global South.

The assumption that Global South governments are the primary agents of their respective population’s suffering is entrenched in the international NGO world that I had represented during my prior presence in Papua.4 The Syria petition suggested that this assumption is salient in academia as well. Chapter 1 will more clearly question this assumption in relation to Indonesia

3 According to this line of analysis, international finance institutions pressured the Syrian government to open markets to foreign capital and curtail redistribution programs, leading to impoverishment and popular unrest. Meanwhile the US and its allies, seeking to remove or weaken the region’s only Arab nationalist government, armed sectarian and ethnic-based groups who attacked the government—thereby militarizing the conflict (Gowans 2017; Joya 2012). 4 It was once common for large international NGOs such as Oxfam to center inequality between wealthy and impoverished countries in their advocacy—such as campaigns around trade agreements (Aaronson and Zimmerman 2006).

12 INTRODUCTION and Papua, and review approaches that have contested it within and outside anthropology. The next section explains how my research methods were designed to bring into view processes and relations that cut across local, regional, national, and global scales.

Sites and methods

The types of data I sought and the methods I used were intended to test and elaborate my hypothesis that the contestations I had observed (during my NGO experience and during initial phases of fieldwork) were produced by, and responded to, global-level economic forces. My approach to the field was complicated by the fact that the Indonesian government is sensitive about allowing Western social scientists to conduct research in Papua. This sensitivity suggests the possibility that international research might in some ways harm the national interest of

Indonesia. Such concerns conditioned my entry into the field—highlighting a global form of power. Here I discuss how my choice of methods was informed by my interpretation and navigation of these concerns.

Politics of foreign research in a sensitive region

The Indonesian government’s scrutiny of foreign researchers in Papua is one among a number of ways it limits the global circulation of evidence of marginalization of indigenous Papuans, and state repression against the West Papuan independence movement. These measures operate in an international context where human rights advocacy has become a means for wealthy countries, especially the US and its allies, to exert power upon less wealthy countries (Badiou, Cox, and

Whalen 2001; Bricmont 2006; Mutua 2013; Petras 1999). It is surely widely known among

Global South governments that the US and its allies periodically pursue their geopolitical goals by supporting secessionist movements (Frindéthié 2016, 213–32; Parenti 2000; Petras 2009;

13 INTRODUCTION

Sautman 2014). An early instance of this pattern was the CIA assistance to rebels in and

North in the 1950s (when Indonesia was led by Sukarno, who took an anti-imperialist line in international affairs) (Kahin and Kahin 1997). Indonesian nationalists have perceived such operations of power in the work of Western advocates who pressured the UN to intervene and organize the 1999 referendum that led to the independence of Timor Leste (Widyatama

2015). Unlike the usual targets of the US’s promotion of secessionist movements, Indonesia has since the Suharto takeover been mostly amenable to US economic and military agendas (albeit without the close alliance notable of other regional countries such as Philippines or Thailand

(Lohman 2015)). Still, Indonesian military leaders recognize that the US military’s strong presence in the Pacific presents a potential threat (Maulana 2016).

In recent years, Indonesian politicians and military leaders have brandished the specter of

Western intervention to justify repressive measures and obstacles to international reporting in

Papua. One expression of such policies has been that police have detained and deported Western journalists working in Papua. During my time in Papua, newspapers warned of foreigners inciting and sponsoring the independence movement, and at least one major newspaper ran a front-page headline warning to “beware of foreign intervention” (“waspadai intervensi asing”).

Although this discourse mainly targeted journalists and human rights advocates, it resonated in evaluations of applications for foreign research permits by the Ministry for Research and

Technology (RISTEK) in Jakarta. Research proposals that are approved by RISTEK are passed on to national police headquarters for approval. RISTEK proceedings, available online, showed that, at the time I was preparing my fieldwork, applicants for social research in Papua were all denied on the grounds that Papua was a ‘conflict area’. The academics on the RISTEK board

14 INTRODUCTION likely anticipated police misgivings about Western academics working in Papua, where they might contact the independence movement and advocate on its behalf.

Besides this formal path to legitimate presence in Papua, there has been an informal way for foreigners to access Papua for a variety of purposes. This informal path had been brought to my attention by a number of informants, scholars at universities in Papua, and Western development workers. If I wanted to work in Papua beyond the short term, I should enter ‘via the church’ (‘masuk lewat gereja’)—I should get sponsored by a Christian organization and present myself as an associate of missionaries. Such an association would be a way to avoid (or placate) government anxieties about foreign intervention in Papua.5 I had found that it was common for

Western development workers to be working in Papua with visas obtained under the category of

‘spiritual coach’ (pembina rohani), regardless of whether they actually had any religious expertise. I had encountered many such lay missionaries, working in Papua in areas such as education, health, and entrepreneurship. I located a sponsor organization in Jayapura that did not expect any specific service in exchange for sponsorship. The sponsor emphasized to me the importance of refraining from public ‘political’ expression while in Papua. I was in favor of this restriction, as I was distancing myself from Western pro-West Papua advocacy circles (for reasons that I explain below).

I took advantage of the situation to access a site where a missionary organization is active in the Balim hinterland. I considered that this would allow me to observe lay missionary work in relation to regional politics and its global dimensions. I also expected that performing a partial embedding in this organization’s work would corroborate my lay missionary status in the eyes of

5 I interpret this exception as a form of recognition of the fact that Western missionaries have historically facilitated the establishment of Indonesian authority in interior regions, and actively opposed the Papuan independence movement—even providing intelligence about pro-independence guerrilla forces to the Indonesian military (Farhadian 2005, 40–41).

15 INTRODUCTION authorities. And so I periodically left my main sites in Wamena and a nearby rural district to spend time in a more remote hinterland district that hosted a missionary-led education program.

This shuttling between sites followed a familiar pattern of Westerners moving around the region for their work. The unstable and multi-sited approach that resulted from these constraints, as I toggled between vantage points, also aligned with my orientation toward synoptic, regional-scale analysis.

My past work for an international NGO that was associated with independence activists and human rights advocacy was both a problem, in that I might still be associated with the specter of Western intervention; and a boon in that I came to Papua with a pre-existing network, extensive knowledge of the security situation, and an ability to assess risks. I developed ways of adapting to this mix of constraints and enabling conditions. I took advantage of my network, but took some distance from those actors I deemed more ‘risky’, especially the more radical youth- driven organizations, such as Komite Nasional Papua Barat (West Papua National Committee,

KNPB). KNPB is known for deploying masses of highlander youth for large marches in

Jayapura, and for at times deploying an anti-imperialist line of analysis (some leaders have denounced, for instance, Jakarta’s service to ‘global neoliberalism’). I compensated for the social distance I took from such organizations by paying closer attention to the analysis they communicated.

I sought to incorporate into my research questions and methods an appreciation of the fact that a key feature of global power relations—the Western capacity to intervene in Global

South countries—was shaping the constraints I faced in the field. I had come to understand that the specter of Western intervention had taken on such force that international advocacy had become itself a justification for state repression against the independence movement (Pelcher

16 INTRODUCTION

2012). It is fair, of course, to object that the Indonesian state’s discourse warning about Western intervention is hypocritical to the extent that it legitimates the marginalization of indigenous

Papuans. Furthermore, some state security forces who persecute Papuan activists are funded by

Western powers as part of anti-terrorism programs (Supriatma 2013, 107). Regardless, for the specter of the West to have become a significant feature of the political landscape challenged me to take responsibility for how my agency was interpreted. Such responsibility required recognizing that the image of Western advocacy was available to be interpreted as a foreign intervention. Not only did this raise the risk of stigmatizing my informants and hosts as anti-

Indonesia collaborators; my presence could also be available to be brandished as a reason for further repression. I sought to distance myself from an image of an alliance of Western research and advocacy with indigenous Papuan society, in opposition to Indonesia. I became sensitive to how the image of this type of alliance is produced in advocacy (Cole 2012) (and perhaps, in anthropology (Butt 2002)). I considered how the reproduction of this image in field relationships might strengthen the specter of intervention. I learned to see such possibilities in routine interactions—such as when, around a time of intense pro-independence mobilizations, I visited a shop in Jayapura, and the cashier (a young man whose accent suggested origins in South

Sulawesi) asked, “soon all of us here will have to learn English, right?” (“sedikit lagi, kita disini harus belajar bahasa inggris, ya?”). The cashier’s remark evoked both a generic ‘global

English’ scenario, and a future where I would be joined in Papua by a larger white cohort, to usher in an independent West Papua oriented to the West rather than Indonesia.

I considered the misleading image of a West acting in alliance with indigenous Papua— its erasure of the global power relations that produce poverty, marginalization, and violence in the Global South. Papua had become a theater to reproduce this erasure, through representations

17 INTRODUCTION conveyed by progressive elements in the West’s global projections—namely transnational advocacy and social science. This erasure fosters an understanding of the Indonesian state’s anxiety toward foreign research as mere repression of knowledge. Instead, noting how such anxieties responded to global forces, I chose to trace how other national (Indonesian) impositions upon Papua might similarly be responding to global-scale forces. I looked for ways in which imperialism operates in the Balim region. Indigenous livelihoods provided a practical entry point for such attention, as I would be able to interpret changes in the regional livelihoods regime in relation to documented changes in Papua’s role in the Indonesian economy, and in turn to

Indonesia’s place in the world-economy. I also looked to regional discourses—in the way images of the West, and legacies of colonial thought, might shape the way material relations are experienced and contested. Overall, the climate of official suspicion and surveillance challenged me to attend to the global forces shaping regional politics.

Data and methods

The findings and arguments presented in this dissertation are based mainly on a total of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between November 2012 and December 2014.

The overall purpose of my data collection was to test my hypothesis that indigenous political tactics attempt to assert some degree of control over the process of incorporation of the regional

Balim economy into the world-economy. In what follows, I divide this overarching purpose into four sub-objectives, and list the data elements and corresponding methods.

18 INTRODUCTION

1. To assess the extent to which indigenous livelihoods are impacted by world-economic forces

This element was mainly one of economic history: tracing the emergence of the Balim regional economy as a relevant unit of analysis, and its changing relations with the world-economy. I divided this broad assessment into two groups of tasks. First, I sought historical data on changing relations between the Balim regional economy and the world-economy. I consulted secondary sources (by anthropologists, missionary ethnologists, and historians) on the economic context and aspects of colonial and early postcolonial rule in the region. I also consulted indigenous literature on historic economic change in relations between Balim and world-economy.

The second group of tasks was a more detailed examination of indigenous Balim livelihoods. In particular, I sought to gauge relative degrees of dependence on three broad spheres of activity: autarkic production, market exchange, and state distribution programs—and to register changes in this constellation especially during the past 15 years (under the implementation of Special Autonomy). Here, I again consulted indigenous activist literature, as well as government and international agency statistics on regional demography, change in regional production of sustenance food crops and change in distribution of non-local foods

(especially rice). I also used reports produced by NGOs and agencies on the government decentralization process as it affected regional economic development and livelihoods.

Much of this literature and statistical review was guided by observations and anecdotal evidence of economic changes in the region over the years since 2009, and through conversations with long-running informants in which I became aware of shifting livelihood patterns. I refined this picture by conducting interviews with members of a set of households

(selected through a process that I explain in the following section), and observations of food

19 INTRODUCTION consumption, horticultural production, and market produce sales. Finally, I conducted surveys of indigenous produce vendors at two of the principal peri-urban markets in order to determine vendors’ own understandings of the changing livelihoods pressures they experience.

2. To assess the extent to which regional-scale contestations and conflicts respond to world-economic forces

This task began by considering economic dimensions of the overarching conflict in the Balim region, over the integration of Papua into Indonesia. The first task was to interview participants in the major incidents of conflict between pro-independence groups and state security forces, and to consult human rights reports on these incidents—noting that most major incidents, since the

Papuan Spring that began in 1998, have taken place in or around the open-air markets that dot

Wamena’s periphery. I observed routine relations between market participants at these same markets. This was accomplished partly through direct observation of market spaces as a buyer of goods and user of transportation services.

Given that economic roles in the Balim region map quite clearly onto ethnic distinctions, the question of regional conflicts brought up the issue of ethnic dimensions of conflict. I investigated the extent to which ethnic tensions reflected economic roles and regional incorporation—by incorporating questions about ethnicity and relations between market participants into surveys of market vendors and discussions with informants. I also observed routine talk and campaign discourse in regional election campaigns and government programs that featured discourses of ethnic identity.

The final element in studying the relation between regional contestation and world- economic incorporation was to investigate the moral discourses that I found to pervade ethnic distinctions. I examined international and Indonesian-language media publications and NGO and

20 INTRODUCTION development agency reports about economic development in Papua—specifically the elements of these reports that discuss issues of culture in relation to development. I observed the work of local NGOs and international development practitioners—including lay missionaries—in

Wamena and in one hinterland district. I also collected elements of routine talk about questions of inequality and development, in various sites—with special attention to explanations for inequality that related to morality and ethnic difference. Finally, I consulted secondary historical sources, especially those written by missionaries who had worked on economic development projects in the region—to trace continuities in authoritative discourses on indigenous economic life.

3. To assess the extent to which indigenous participants in regional government seek to regulate the incorporation process

This assessment necessitated data on the policies of regency administrations in regard to markets and commercial distribution more broadly. First, I drew on extensive observation of markets and shops in the region, and informal conversations with long-time informants about how they have approached the commercial arena during their lives. I also surveyed media and government documents showing regency administration policies in areas such as market planning and regulation, and interviewed community organizers about their attitudes toward such policies. I conducted interviews with people who participate in regency government programs, or who aspire to do so, specifically in terms of coordinating the distribution of various resources (such as food aid) under Autonomy arrangements, or campaigning to found new partitioned regencies.

Finally, I held focus group discussions on the question of how regional and local level administrations should approach commerce.

21 INTRODUCTION

4. To assess the extent to which aspiration to control incorporation process affects relations between generations

This final element was concerned with data on relations between generations—in particular, on how parents plan for their children’s future. I observed household life and interviewed parents about their aspirations for their children. I also observed community events related to education—namely fundraising events that rural households hold sporadically to cover fees for high school and college students, especially those studying outside the highlands. In addition, I conducted participant observation of student residence life and student association events at

Balim student residences located outside the highlands—especially in the Papuan provincial capital Jayapura, as well as in the cities of and Jakarta. I also interviewed students in these locations, as well as returned students in the Balim region, about their life plans and trajectories. Finally, I observed the broader pattern of Balim youth migration, residence and livelihood in Jayapura (including students and dropouts) and interviewed migrant dropouts in

Jayapura about their livelihood strategies and aspirations.

Selection of sites and informants: constraints and power

Aiming for synoptic analysis of the Balim’s diverse population and heterogeneous territory required choices of where and with whom to spend my time. I aimed to satisfy three types of constraints and concerns: security, political influence, and my orientation toward synoptic regional analysis.

First, I aimed to navigate the context of periodic mass protests with occasional violence, state surveillance of pro-independence activists, and Jakarta’s sensitivity in relation to foreign social science researchers operating in Papua. There have been very few reported incidents of violence against foreign researchers in Papua but one such incident took place during the time of

22 INTRODUCTION my field research, when a German biologist on vacation survived being shot by unknown assailants at popular beach on the outskirts of Jayapura. Those responsible for the incident were never identified. Police, improbably, blamed the pro-independence group KNPB; some indigenous activists speculated that police had arranged the hit as retribution for Germany’s criticism of Indonesia’s human rights record in Papua at the UN. This incident reminded me that

I could not assume my safety, especially given the state security forces’ demonstrated capacity to attribute violence against foreigners to the independence movement (and so, presumably, deflect any accusations of responsibility from the home country of the victim). I was constantly concerned about attracting attention from intelligence agencies toward my informants and support network.

My prior NGO work had left me with good knowledge of the security forces and various intelligence agencies, and some of their methods of surveillance and intimidation. These range from ‘obvious’ tactics such as the odd-timed appearance of itinerant food sellers (typically speaking Javanese-accented Indonesian) at one’s residence; to more surreptitious infiltration by being befriended at a public place by someone who seems to have friends in common. I experienced many of these tactics during my time as an NGO volunteer—and learned to be perpetually on guard toward any new acquaintance. This posed a challenge to ethnographic research—which often values openness to spontaneous encounters. I developed tactics for evaluating the ‘safety’ of each individual I came to know. I relied heavily on my pre-existing network in this task. I followed a chain vetting process, starting mainly with my network from my time as an NGO volunteer (when our work partners and local staff had been vetted by the original NGO staff). This process demanded care and delicacy and carried risks. I constantly broadened my network and sought out alternative opinions.

23 INTRODUCTION

As explained above, periodic and partial embedding in a missionary-led education program allowed me to mitigate suspicion and evade scrutiny of my research. This aspect of my fieldwork also became an occasion for me to reflect on a mode of residual colonial power. The

Western missionary who managed the program in question had gained a wide reputation in the region. His power followed a pattern, where a number of white people have come to assemble entourages, command resources, and direct development interventions. This pattern began in the

1950s, when missionaries deployed resources and technologies. During the time of my research,

I was aware of at least a dozen or so such influential individuals or couples operating in the

Balim region, including:

§ a Dutch mission pilot based in Wamena, involved in a pilot training program in

collaboration with an evangelical church;

§ a German couple based in Wamena, who ran entrepreneurship trainings backed by

European development and mission organizations;

§ an American man based in a hinterland district where he ran education and HIV

prevention programs;

§ a number of Dutch and Americans who managed a teacher training college sponsored by

European Christian development organizations;

§ a European and South American couple who supervised a health care NGO affiliated

with an evangelical church, and consulted on environmental management with the

regency government, respectively;

§ an American staffer, based in Wamena, working for an international mission

organization, coordinating logistics for mission families translating the Bible among

remote, ‘uncontacted’ communities located beyond the fringe of the Balim valley proper.

24 INTRODUCTION

My prior experience as a 18-month volunteer in Papua, wielding that NGO’s resources— networking visibly with a range of public figures ranging from movement organizers and church leaders to police chiefs, and cultivating durable relationships with variously influential indigenous friends—had made me a marginal and intermittent member of this class of influential

Westerners (orang barat). This class had little formal authority but controlled significant resources, and often had some degree of legitimacy as informal religious authorities. Such informal Christian authority had a longer history among Protestant missionaries in Papua: the very first Protestant mission in Papua, authorized by the Dutch administration at the turn of the

20th century, was run by a pair of German carpenters with little religious training (Hummel

2012). This category of regional legitimation—what one friend dubbed the ‘fake missionary’

(misionaris palsu)—had first appeared as a tactic of colonial governance, and retained under postcolonial conditions some residual colonial aura. Under contemporary conditions, some members of this class act as fixers and facilitators for Western journalists and development experts seeking access to the region. This allows missionary interpretations of Papuan politics to influence the understandings of Western journalists and US development agencies—notably sharing a tendency to blame Papuan indigenous culture (sometimes alongside an image of endemic corruption of Indonesian politics) for indigenous hardship. I was concerned that my partial entry into the mission category might imply that I would contribute my critical sensibility to this residual colonial class’s legitimacy. At the same time, I noted that my entry into the ‘fake missionary’ category was consistent with my minor membership in the broader category of white regional authority figures.

These various associations allowed me to access a variety of sites, scenes and individuals within the region. I can divide the sites I accessed into three groups in relation to the

25 INTRODUCTION circumstances through which I came to know them: first through my human rights NGO work; second through my tactical association with mission networks; and third, a small group of individuals that I met through a senior anthropologist who had worked in the area. Over time, the relationships I developed interwove and overlapped, partly because the Balim is small enough

(its population, under half a million, on par with a middle-tier North American city). And so I present a single list of the sites and informants where I conducted my ethnographic work.

1. Wamena

The main site of my research was the town of Wamena, a growing and bustling commercial, transportation, and administrative center for the Balim region and broader Central Highlands.

Wamena hosts the offices and legislature of , the most populous in the

Central Highlands—out of which several newer regencies have been carved in waves of administrative partition. Wamena’s population is very diverse, with various regional indigenous ethno-linguistic groups, sometimes referred as tribes (suku), and residents from different parts of

Indonesia (especially Sulawesi, , , and Sumatra). The three open-air markets and transport terminals on the town’s periphery host encounters among all of these groups. These markets and terminals, one in particular, were the most important sites of my ethnographic research. I also frequented informal markets that took hold in the town center, and extensively observed the commercial economy throughout town.

Wamena has many neighborhoods where indigenous households from specific hinterland areas predominate—in particular, from the more distant hinterland areas in the outer reaches of

Jayawijaya regency, or from others such as Tolikara, Lanny Jaya, or Yahukimo. I sporadically frequented these neighborhoods when accompanying members of these hinterland ethno- linguistic groups. I spent one month living in one such neighborhood—located near one of the

26 INTRODUCTION main markets—with a key informant, a man in his forties whose main work was itinerant produce vending. This household, like many, was one site in a dynamic family scattering. The mother and one daughter were based mainly in the rural home (a one-hour drive away by minivan), and the father travelled back and forth between the two homes. His two other daughters (both of whom had been to college in Java) and teenage son lived permanently in town; another son worked in a coastal Papuan city. Such patterns of scattering and mobility are of course common to many sites of ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South.

The other important category of site in Wamena, where I conducted numerous interviews, meetings, and focus group discussions, were the offices of organizations working in areas such as human rights advocacy, women’s empowerment, customary indigenous revival, land mapping, economic development, and pro-independence organizing. Some of these organizations are affiliated with churches, including Catholic and mainline and evangelical Protestant churches.

Wamena was a site for research and a base for trips to hinterland sites. I was based in

Wamena for a total of roughly 12 months of my field research, and this included approximately

40 daytrips out of town. While the sites I have listed took up much of my in-depth attention, being based in Wamena allowed me to cultivate a synoptic view of its role in the regional economy. I observed a variety of routine interactions: moments such as parents visiting a bank to send money to their student children in Jayapura; young women selling sweet potatoes or areca palm by the road; families gathered at the dilapidated hospital waiting for a doctor; or groups of teens singing in the back of a truck, on their way to an election rally.

27 INTRODUCTION

2. Households in two hinterland districts

To avoid depending on any specific geographical or ethnic perspective among the indigenous population, I cultivated a group of informants originating or residing in many different parts of the Balim hinterland. I conducted at least short visits to households or homesteads in rural sites in seven districts—six in Jayawijaya regency and one in . Among these, I focused on two districts—one in Jayawijaya, and one in Tolikara—which I describe here (using pseudonyms for places and people).

2. a) Kaimo

I became acquainted with a homestead here through an introduction by an Indonesian anthropologist. One of the residents had, decades ago as a student at a Catholic seminary in

Jayapura, written an ethnographic text on Balim customary religion; this man has advised a number of Indonesian and international researchers over the years. In the late 1970s, he had been part of an early cohort of Balim youth to gain higher education outside the Balim region. Unlike many other members of this cohort, he had not gone on to take up a prominent position either in the regional or provincial state apparatus or in pro-independence organizations. He lived with his family in one among a handful of households grouped together in a homestead. I became close to one of these neighboring households, and stayed there intermittently, for a total of 2.5 months

(each stay ranging from a day to two weeks). The head of this household was a man in his 40s who was a low-ranking civil servant. His wife was a daughter of the powerful leader of a wider confederacy, which in pre-colonial times covered the entire territory that is now the district. This pedigree lent the family some renown, but the family was not particularly active in government politics. My presence seemed to be well accepted in the area, and I did my best to avoid any involvement in conflicts around control of Autonomy funding (which I describe in Chapter 2).

28 INTRODUCTION

Kaimo district is a short 15-minute minivan ride, or hour-long walk, from one of the markets on the immediate Wamena periphery. Compared to most districts in Jayawijaya regency or in the broader Balim region, the population of Kaimo has easy access to Wamena. It is very common for residents, especially youth, to be frequently on the move between home and town.

Conversely, since it is located so close to Wamena, there is in Wamena no neighborhood of

Kaimo people having relocated to Wamena. Additionally, since residents so easily travel to

Wamena for commerce, there is no market or newcomer merchant presence in Kaimo. In terms of religion, Kaimo is a mainly Catholic area. As I explain in Chapter 3, this means residents are likely to practice some elements of customary religion (adat) such as ritualized exchange at life- cycle events. This is reflected also in the prevalence of customary architecture of fenced compounds (GVD: silimo) containing round ritual men’s huts (GVD: honai or pilamo) and long kitchen huts (GVD: hunila)—the latter whose thatch roofs were widely being converted from thatch to aluminum roof by the end of my fieldwork. These aspects give the area the feel of an indigenous suburb of Wamena, whose population tends to uphold a kind of traditionalism, and engage in a high degree of small-scale urban-rural mobility.

2. b) Dombe

I spent a total of four months living in Dombe, a district center in the more remote reaches of the

Balim region. I accessed this area through a group of US telecommunications engineers who were implementing a pilot project there hosted by a missionary-led education program. Working in Dombe, at arm’s length from the missionaries there, was a way for me to validate my membership in the administrative category of ‘spiritual coach’. This proximity allowed me to observe missionary authority in the present. The missionary couple was sponsored from the region’s major evangelical church. The husband was well known and fairly notorious in the

29 INTRODUCTION

Balim region, having established an education program in one district, and then moving on to another in a separate, more distant hinterland district. I approached this man with trepidation, as I had heard about his work—and stories of disputes he had been involved in—from several of my acquaintances, including former NGO colleagues and other expats, and Balim acquaintances who had worked with him or heard about him. I eventually found that there were pockets of resistance to his authority in Dombe: it seemed some residents were suspicious of his motives and alienated by his brash manner. While he was hostile to the independence movement, he claimed that intelligence agencies suspected him of supporting the movement (because some activists had learned English and computer skills from the program he had previously run in a different district). He networked closely with US development funding agencies and church organizations. Needless to say, being associated with this missionary presence put me in a delicate position. I took care to respect the relationships of those residents who had come to rely on their programs in various ways.

Due to the poor quality of the roads farther from Wamena, travel between Wamena and

Dombe by pickup truck took approximately four hours when I first visited—and this had reduced by half by the end of my fieldwork, after road upgrades using Autonomy funds for infrastructure.

Residents of Dombe tend to be much less frequent commuters to Wamena than Kaimo.

Conversely, Dombe has a newcomer-owned shop economy, and a produce market that operates three days per week. The market hosts indigenous vendors selling their produce from the surrounding area. There is also a small cohort of produce resellers (both indigenous and newcomer) who commute between Dombe and Wamena. Store goods are more expensive, and most produce cheaper, in Dombe than in Wamena. Observing these dynamics helped me relativize the model of the terminal economy: beyond specific sites on the edge of Wamena, a set

30 INTRODUCTION of relations between more and less peripheral hubs of commerce and transport, in which typical features of these relations recur at each scale (so that, in some ways, in terms of commerce and transport, Dombe relates to Wamena as Wamena does to Jayapura).6

3. Jayapura

Jayapura is the metropolis of Papua—a sprawling and cosmopolitan urban center with a rapidly growing population. This population is composed of a majority of newcomers from other regions of Indonesia, as well as indigenous Papuan residents both from the local area as well as from other parts of Papua. Highlanders from the Balim region are a visible and growing presence in

Jayapura. The part of my research conducted in Jayapura was focused mainly on a neighborhood where a large number of Balim youth reside—especially but not only students. I followed my

Kaimo networks and met students and other youth from Kaimo who shared a flat in this neighborhood, in a suburb of Jayapura where a number of educational institutions and student residences are located. The flat was located near two such student residences, both owned by the

Jayawijaya regency administration. I conducted informal conversations and focus group discussions at the flat and these two residences. These discussions touched on topics such as relations between students and home regency politicians. I was interested in how Balim regional politics played out among students and other youth in Jayapura.

In addition to this targeted research with migrant Balim youth, I also spent time with other members of my Balim network in Jayapura. These included members of NGOs active in the Balim, youth associations affiliated with churches, and pro-independence organizations. In many cases these organizations’ membership overlapped with student associations. I followed

Balim networks to visit highlander-populated neighborhoods throughout the urban area. I

6 Chapter 1 elaborates these ideas.

31 INTRODUCTION observed sites such as Sentani airport, where I often saw young Balim men waiting all day to see who was arriving in or departing Jayapura. I visited markets and roadside sites where Balim women vendors sell produce, prepared foods, or areca nuts. Finally, I accompanied a members of the Kaimo household with whom I lived in the highlands, when they visited Jayapura to access medical services and complete paperwork for a civil service pension. Here I observed interactions between Balim residents and the provincial bureaucracy; and the increased visibility of Balim officials in this apparatus. Overall, I observed how Balim people approached the economic and administrative structures of Papua’s major city.

4. Yogyakarta and Jakarta

Besides Jayapura, many Balim students go to college in cities outside Papua. I conducted a small amount of research with students in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, and Yogyakarta, a major city in . To some degree, this aspect of the research emerged by accident. Parents that I knew in my Balim field sites suggested I get in touch with their children when I passed through those cities. On one occasion when I was leaving Indonesia temporarily, a group of relatives in

Kaimo sent me off with a package of sweet potatoes and money to buy areca palm nuts in

Jayapura for residents of a student flat in Jakarta. These students—including a son I knew from

Kaimo—helped me organize focus group discussions on the same topics as those in Jayapura.

Guides among informants

Running through my fieldwork were a set of running conversations I held with a set of especially insightful and knowledgeable key informants. Each helped me map out the relations and arrangements that interested me—and in a deeper sense, guided me to see the relevance of certain types of relations and sites, or helped me become aware of their existence in the first

32 INTRODUCTION place. This is not to say that these individuals determined my research priorities, or that each would necessarily agree with my arguments. Most of these individuals appear as informants in later chapters. Here, I group them according to the site where I had the most sustained interactions—though in all cases, I spent time with these people in more than one of the sites.

In Jayapura:

Wilson

Wilson was a long-time pro-independence organizer, who first became active in student organizations in Jayapura the early 2000s. During the time of my fieldwork, he was a key organizer with a major network that is pro-independence and traditionalist. He worked mostly behind the scenes to mobilize the member branches of this network, travelling frequently throughout Papua. His background allowed him to be equally at home in the highlands or the lowlands, in rural or urban areas: his mother was from a Balim hinterland district, his father a lowlander who had relocated to Wamena, and Wilson had grown up moving around between

Wamena, Jayapura, and his home district. He did not speak any indigenous languages, but worked for an organization that valorized customary culture. Wilson introduced me to organizers and informants in Jayapura and Wamena. He seemed to know people everywhere we went.

In his own words, Wilson’s politics were ‘situational’ (situasional)—which I interpreted to mean flexible, responsive to context-dependent constraints and possibilities, and alert to their potential change. I grew to appreciate the extent to which this type of stance permeated Balim politics in general. Even as he was organizing for Papuan independence, Wilson sporadically became involved in some aspect of electoral politics. During one of our many discussions,

Wilson lamented what he called the ‘stupidification’ (pembodohan) of the Papuan and specifically Balim class of indigenous politicians and officials under Special Autonomy. He

33 INTRODUCTION explained that many such representatives were surrendering idealistic aspirations for justice and empowerment, in exchange for control of channels of material resources—development funds, hiring authority, and so on—granted by Jakarta. Wilson emphasized this phenomenon as more of an intellectual and tactical failing than a moral one, as some other guides and informants did.

This emphasis may have reflected his distrust of the church and of his tolerance for moral compromise as part of political organizing.

Musa

Musa was a young writer and organizer with one of the smaller pro-independence organizations, one of the few that takes a materialist and socialist perspective. He relocated to Jayapura from

Wamena before my fieldwork began. Musa had grown up partly in Jayapura due to his father’s work there. His perspective on Special Autonomy was similar to Wilson’s, in that he found fault with indigenous politicians for exchanging political ideals for limited control of distribution arrangements. Musa visualized this form of power as web-like, ensnaring aspiring leaders in a set of debt obligations and turning them away from caring for the people. Musa was weary of entering into such obligations and distraction, and had turned down opportunities in academia and civil service. Musa’s attempts to come to terms with Papua’s subjugation caused him insomnia; toward the end of my fieldwork he was reading Marxist analyses of the Indonesian economy and drafting his own writing project, a critical appeal to renew Papuan nationalism.

In Wamena:

Frans

Frans was a father of four who I knew first as an itinerant fruit vendor who frequented the home and office where I lived and worked with my NGO colleagues in Wamena. During my

34 INTRODUCTION fieldwork, he often offered to accompany me on trips or errands, and I saw that he was a well- known figure in town, known to shopkeepers, drivers, police officers and higher-rung civil servants. Frans maintained a household with his daughter, and commuted to the village regularly to deal with village affairs, check on his family and his gardens, and bring fruit for sale in

Wamena. Frans had a sharp analysis of Papuan politics that he shared with me from the first time

I met him. Surely, his openness was emboldened by the fact that he saw Westerners like me

(NGO workers, academics and the like) to be potential advocates for the independence struggle.

When I had first met him, Frans shared his concern that the Indonesian state was using various methods to kill off the indigenous population. Near the end of my fieldwork, Frans analyzed

Autonomy’s localization of conflicts as a weapon deployed by Jakarta in response to Western countries’ attention to human rights violations. Frans explained that in a global era of human rights (HAM, hak asasi manusia), Jakarta knew it could not just kill Papuans, but had to find

“more clever, smoother ways” (“cara lebih pintar, lebih halus”)—such as inciting indigenous leaders to compete among themselves.

In Dombe:

Elias

I met Elias late in my fieldwork, in Dombe, where he briefly worked for the missionary-led program. Elias became my main guide to the Dombe situation. Among other issues, he helped me understand how it fit into the wider regional pattern of trade and transport. Many years before we met, he had worked as a conductor on one of the vehicles that shuttled between Wamena and

Dombe. Being a conductor meant keeping track of passenger fares, assisting the driver, loading and unloading cargo such as bundles of produce to be sold in Wamena, or sacks of rice obtained in town. Elias had also travelled around different parts of Papua looking for work, and had

35 INTRODUCTION worked as a porter at the airport in Jayapura. He was an organizer of a prayer group made up of members of the evangelical church that predominated in Dombe. Elias had a knack for using vivid comparisons and metaphors to highlight nuance and complexity. This helped me appreciate diverse and contradictory local responses to the moralizing attitudes of missionaries—informing my analysis of residual colonial moralities (see Chapter 3).

In Kaimo:

Lina

Lina was a mother of three who lived in a shared customary Dani compound along with another household, just off the main road that ran through Kaimo. Lina’s influential father had sent her to the Catholic mission in Wamena when she was a child. Lina had later married an indigenous lay preacher (GVD: wene wolo) and she had remained in contact with regional church leaders in

Wamena. Lina told me stories about the antics of the various Catholic missionaries and church leaders she had interacted with over the years. These stories implicitly helped me understand my work in the Balim in the historical context of this religious aspect of colonialism. Lina also allowed me ample time to learn to contribute sacks of rice to the household during visits. As I recount in Chapter 2, learning to bring rice to Lina’s house drew my attention more solidly to the role of Autonomy’s politics of distribution in a context of declining horticultural production.

Oskar

I first met Oskar when I visited a Catholic church building in Kaimo shortly before Easter, and found him leading a youth re-enactment of the crucifixion. Oskar was active in leading various kinds of artistic expression groups for youth. As a guitarist and singer, he was the latest leader of the district’s best-known musical band. As an NGO volunteer, I had spent days off in a honai

36 INTRODUCTION

(GVD: customary men’s hut) recording their acoustic songs. By the time of my later fieldwork stages, he had a laptop and was producing his own music and videos. He was also working on a development project funded by the church, in which a trainer came from Java to help Kaimo women profit from areca nut vending. Oskar sat on a district committee to allocate funds through

RESPEK—the World Bank-funded program that was part of Special Autonomy. He did not distance himself from district-level government affairs in the way that some of my other guides did. His contributions to my research were especially strong in terms of highlighting connections: especially between regional distribution politics, and the associational life of migrant highlander students—which he guided me around during a visit to Jayapura.

Collaborative labor of the ethnography

Each of the guides listed above, and many others to lesser degrees, contributed their labor to my ethnographic data collection and interpretation. This contribution went well beyond logistics.

Our long-running discussions shaped my research. Ethnographic research, at its best, can provide an opportunity for local informants or intellectuals to join in, reorient, and benefit from the process of knowledge production (Lambek 1997). The difficult context of the Papuan highlands, with security concerns, state surveillance, and scrutiny of Westerners (especially those operating independently of church organizations), created a situation where it made sense for me to involve local collaborators quite closely in my research. One advantage of doing so was to access certain kinds of data without requiring me to be overly visible at sites such as the main markets and terminals around Wamena. As I explain in subsequent chapters, these places have histories of tense contestation, and are known to be under state surveillance. Looking to gather more robust data on these places, I consulted Papuan anthropologists at universities in Jayapura, and some local NGOs in Wamena. The consultations led me to co-found, in 2014, the Wamena Economic

37 INTRODUCTION

Observation Project (WEOP) as a collective research project hosted by a local NGO, and with the participation of anthropology students from Universitas Cenderawasih (UnCen) in Jayapura.

The Wamena-based NGO in question was already working on programs to improve indigenous women’s livelihoods, and to train youth to use media technologies to document

Balim social and economic issues. I worked with a group of indigenous youth, and one anthropology graduate from UnCen, to devise surveys of vendors at two of the main markets around Wamena, and to plan visits to secondary hinterland markets. I cooperated with NGO staff and the anthropology student to carry out basic training in ethnographic field methods, and to involve WEOP members in data interpretation. By coordinating WEOP I was able to gather extensive market data without drawing excessive attention to myself. At the same time, the data gathered and the results of the group discussions became material for this NGO to inform their livelihoods programs planning.

Engaging Balim knowledge

The constraints of the field context were part of what motivated me to rely strongly on the information and analysis of my collaborators, notably the guides listed above, and other informants who served similar roles at certain moments. Focus group discussions were a major element of my data collection, likely far more so than in the average doctoral thesis. In practice, such discussions usually consisted of a combination of participants who were already closely familiar with my research—such as members of the Wamena Economic Observation Project— along with other, more recently recruited participants. As I or one of my close collaborators facilitated the discussions, it was possible to guide conversation toward issues that we had identified as priorities. Still, these discussions regularly seemed to veer away from issues that I had expected to focus on. For example, one discussion, with WEOP members and members of

38 INTRODUCTION two of the host households, started out as a set of reflections on the challenges faced by women market vendors. It soon transitioned into a somewhat tense discussion about the inadequacy of regional government support for women’s horticultural production work. This was one instance that illustrated the need to consider the politics of distribution in relation to questions of production (as I do in Chapters 1 and 2). In such ways I allowed my research priorities to shift in dialogue with priorities and controversies that became visible to me.

My reliance on the knowledge of the members of my network raised the risk of being steered toward specific agendas—especially in light of struggles over Autonomy programs, and the tendency of many pro-independence organizations to cultivate Western supporters. I diversified my network so as to mitigate such possibilities. While I remained in contact with members of pro-independence organizations, and invited their members to take part in focus groups and WEOP work, I also sought to work with people who were not part of the movement.

Knowing also that some of the regional conflicts took on dimensions of tension between various indigenous groups and their respective territories, I also sought diversity of background of informants in terms of geographical origin within the Balim area. For me to have ‘home bases’ in both Kaimo and Dombe sites communicated that I was not exclusively affiliated to any specific indigenous ethno-linguistic group. This approach resonated with pan-Balim and pan-Papuan sensibilities of Papuan nationalists. Most importantly, my stance made it easy to cultivate regional-scale analysis. Similarly, my decision to avoid staying for too long at a time in any specific locale, motivated mainly to reduce the risk of dangerous attention—also helped me shuttle between perspectives and scales, mirroring the mobility of many Balim residents. Such movement between scales of analysis can make visible inter-relations between seemingly disparate processes (Trouillot 1988, 289).

39 INTRODUCTION

The field context’s constraints provided an opportunity to attend to debates and differences among and within indigenous streams of political thought. Even as I vetted collaborators with care, I trusted their knowledge. I have shied away from distinctions between emic and etic perspectives. It is now fairly common in anthropology to announce a desire to amplify forms of knowledge that are conventionally muted in international arenas. Some readers may question the scientific precision of my approach. I increased the likelihood of achieving truthful conclusions by periodically revising my methods and definition of the field.

As part of the conversation with Balim knowledge, my thesis draws on works by Balim authors, including scholars as well as independence movement figures. I consider these literatures to be part of an array of knowledge produced about the region and its relation to global structures. Like any, indigenous Balim knowledge production is diverse, and its tactics of emphasis and downplaying respond to a set of constraints and priorities. Observing such tactics, I set out to relate them to my analysis of the relation of forces operating in the region. Indigenous knowledge producers are thus both theorists of, and participants in, the trajectories I interpret.

Chapter summaries

Chapter 1 provides a conceptual framing to orient the line of argument that runs through the subsequent chapters, and reviews the main elements of scholarly literature that inform the analysis. First, it motivates the conceptual framing by interpreting a common pro-independence partisan critique of Special Autonomy. This critique frames Autonomy’s proliferation of state distribution channels as a means to pull indigenous leaders into competition and allegiance to

Indonesia rather than Papuan independence. I interpret this critique as a description of the dilemmas faced by the indigenous population—compelled, via economic dependence, to turn away from pursuing political transformation. I also interpret the partisan critique, lamenting an

40 INTRODUCTION

‘economic’ tactic distracting from the ‘political’, as a challenge to conceptualize why and how certain populations become relegated to a burdensome type of materialism based on distribution.

I propose the notion of terminal economy as a way to conceptualize the relegation of contested peripheries of large Global South countries to a politics of distribution.

The literature review begins by discussing scholarship on marketing and distribution systems. I single out attempts to move away from interpreting markets as symbolic spaces, and toward analysis of markets as nodes in systems. I then discuss work in the anthropology of infrastructures, highlighting approaches and ideas that have guided my study of the Balim distribution economy in relation to higher scales of economic life. The literature review then moves to world-systems analysis and the materialist study of imperialism. I summarize key debates in world-system anthropology, and its call for attention to how global-scale power relations condition local or regional politics. The fourth and last are of conceptual literature is work in anthropology that analyzes moralities and distinctions in relation to global capitalism.

In addition to these conceptual literatures, I situate my thesis in relation to relevant regional scholarship on Indonesia and Papua. I review works that theorize Indonesia’s post-1998 state decentralization as an intensification and localization of Suharto-era patronage politics; and research in economics that shows how the 1997 Asian economic crisis, which precipitated decentralization, intensified the importance of Papua for the Indonesian economy. To close, I discuss ethnographies of Papuan politics in relation to global forces, and scholarship on indigenous marginalization in the Balim region.

The objective of Chapter 2 is to trace the process of incorporation of the Balim regional economy into the world-economy, and to provide a synoptic analysis of the types of infrastructures and socio-economic relations it has produced. This description and analysis are

41 INTRODUCTION mainly a task of economic history, combined with ethnographic observations of livelihood and conflict patterns. I distinguish two phases in the incorporation process: first, the installation of newcomer-dominated commerce, and then the proliferation of state food distribution channels under Special Autonomy. I first analyze the interests and objectives that orient Indonesian governance in the Balim region, with reference to the extractive economy and migrant livelihoods. I then return to a longer history of incorporation, starting with a brief colonial period, followed by the postcolonial installation of newcomer-led commerce and indigenous cash cropping. This phase established the peri-urban market-terminal space as node for transactions between the indigenous hinterland and the newcomer-dominated urban economy. Under the second, accelerated phase of incorporation under Autonomy, indigenous production of sweet potato ceded way to dependence on state distribution of rice. Finally, I argue that the commercial phase of incorporation defined the regional pattern of infrastructure, with its features of regional isolation and conjoined distribution and mobility. Overall, I argue that the Balim’s incorporation is a recursive process, where global extractive forces work through multiple scales to produce a situation of incorporation by distribution.

Chapter 3 analyzes regional contestations that respond to the two phases of incorporation of the Balim economy. It attends to how incorporation produces politicized and morally charged ethnic distinctions—distinctions that motivate indigenous tactics of disruption and regulation. In the first phase of incorporation, via the regional marketing system centered on unequal transactions at peri-urban nodes, contestation turns on tension between indigenous and newcomer. In this mode, indigenous protesters have disrupted the regional commercial system and critiqued migrant merchants on moral grounds; in turn, a residual colonial discourse blames indigenous culture for inequality in the marketing system. In the second mode, various scales of

42 INTRODUCTION intra-indigenous conflict proliferate. These conflicts surround control over state distribution programs, and feature moralizing criticism inherited from the first mode of incorporation.

Ultimately, the chapter shows how these two phases come together in a turn toward commercial regulation as a priority of Autonomy-era indigenous politicians. I argue that what appears as simply ‘ethnic’ conflict expresses moral critique that motivates commercial regulation in response to incorporation.

Chapter 4 examines how the regional incorporation process inflects inter-generational relations, by focusing on patterns of mobility and labor of indigenous youth. The chapter returns again to the two phases of incorporation into the world-economy, examining figures of mobile youth labor that correspond to the demands of each phase. It first returns to the economic history presented in Chapter 2, and considers it alongside life histories to describe how the piecemeal aspect of the region’s distribution infrastructures has effectively conscripted youth into informal work in and around those infrastructures. It then uses more recent life history data and ethnographic observation to describe the growing role of informal youth infrastructure workers in Autonomy-era politics of distribution—especially in the political intrigues and negotiations among Balim politicians at the provincial level in Jayapura. I argue that this conscription of displaced indigenous youth into types of informal labor, acting in a support role to facilitate the distributive functions of regional governance, channels aspirations to coordinate the distribution arrangements through which the Balim economy is incorporated into the world-economy.

The dissertation concludes by synthesizing the threads of the argument, and recapitulating my interpretation of indigenous Balim political tactics as a set of responses to the region’s incorporation into the world-economy. I discuss four inter-related ideas that run through the dissertation: how the incorporation process generates morally charged distinctions; the

43 INTRODUCTION importance of analyzing state distribution in relation to the global arrangement of production; the particular patterns of labor and aspiration that result from infrastructural inadequacy; and finally, the effective concealment of extractive global forces from sites such as the Balim Valley. The dissertation closes by returning to the challenge of devising ethnographic approaches that highlight how global material forces produce the ranges of possibilities within which regional politics happens.

44

Chapter 1 – Framing the Terminal Economy

A Papuan critique of political economy

“Papuan people didn’t ask for rice, or vegetables, or whatever. We asked for independence”. I was sitting on the floor with a group of Papuan youth research assistants who were studying livelihoods and markets in and around the highlands town of Wamena. The speaker, Melky, was a man in his twenties from the Yali area southeast of the Balim Valley that is centered on

Wamena. I had heard arguments similar to Melky’s from other Papuan friends and acquaintances—especially those who I know to be partisans of West Papuan independence from

Indonesia. They argued that Jakarta’s supposed solution to the challenge of Papuan nationalism failed to address the political content of Papuan grievances. Instead of addressing aspirations for self-determination, the argument went, Jakarta had allocated additional funds to the provincial government, announced new development programs, and sent Papuans material goods such as food aid. Questioning the sops being thrown to Papuan representatives, my partisan consultants insisted that the fundamentally required a political solution, not merely an economic one.

The partisan argument criticized a government reform called Special Autonomy, developed in response to West Papuan nationalist agitation following the fall of Suharto’s New

Order regime in Jakarta. The so-called Papuan Spring of 1998 to 2001 was marked by uprisings, protests, raisings of the Papuan nationalist Morning Star flag, and the landmark Papuan People’s

Congress (Chauvel 2005; King 2002). The movement was met with state repression and violence, including the assassination of Congress leader Theys Eluay in 2001. Still, it was widely recognized that Papuan mobilizations had succeeded in pushing Jakarta to grant concessions to

45 CHAPTER 1 the Papuan provincial government. These concessions were contained in Special Autonomy legislation, which was first formulated by Papuan delegates, modified by the Indonesian government, and then made law in 2001 (Sumule 2003). Special Autonomy made provisions for revenue sharing from resource extraction projects and funding resources for rural development programs, food aid, and infrastructure expansion in the Papuan interior; it also mandated increased indigenous Papuan representation at various levels of government (King 2004).

Autonomy programs were implemented along with input and support from international agencies such as the World Bank. A key part of Autonomy was contained in the Papuan version of an Indonesia-wide World Bank program called RESPEK, that established new structures of funding and decision-making down to the district level. A number of people in Melky’s age cohort had recently become members of RESPEK committees. Such work involved the control and disbursement of significant sums of cash, and decisions about whether to invest funds in programs such as electrification, road building, or improvement to horticulture. Promises of enhanced infrastructure, new development funds, and indigenous representation held broad appeal: many independence supporters had cautiously approved of Special Autonomy when it was launched in 2001. However, as programs such as RESPEK were implemented, the management of resources at the village and district levels had become a fraught arena of suspicion, competition, and conflict. In the years preceding our meeting, accusations of misuse of funds among RESPEK coordinators, and reports of conflicts among factions vying for control of development funds, had become increasingly common (Suryawan 2011). Many pro- independence partisans began to interpret Autonomy as a divide-and-rule scheme that shifted the dynamic of conflict in Papua from a vertical (i.e., Papua vs. Indonesia) to horizontal (intra- indigenous) dynamic (Haluk 2013; Suryawan 2011; Yoman 2010).

46 CHAPTER 1

I had first met Melky as an ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver who sometimes picked me up and shuttled me around town after dark, when minivans have stopped running in Wamena.1 Like many young highlanders, Melky had moved to Wamena from his native village when he finished elementary school. Coming from distant Yali territory, which lacks road connections to

Wamena, this meant a weeklong trek through forests and mountain passes. Melky came to

Wamena aspiring to gain an education—high school, and perhaps college or university—that is difficult to access in Papua’s rural interior. As for many young highlanders, his agenda of educational attainment proved difficult to achieve in amid systemic discrimination against indigenous people and the hardships of life as a youth migrant. In order to make ends meet,

Melky had found informal work at Wamena’s airport, markets, and minivan terminals—hauling cargo, driving becak (bicycle rickshaw), or packing boxes for migrant merchants from distant regions of Indonesia, such as Sumatra, Sulawesi or Java. Working as an ojek driver (using a relative’s motorcycle part-time) was something of a step up from these typical occupations of young indigenous men and teenagers in Wamena. Melky lived with fellow youth migrants from the Yali territory in a rudimentary wood-walled, tin-roofed bungalow on the outskirts of

Wamena. He spoke to me about indigenous Papuans’ challenges finding ways to scrape by, while outsiders profited from resource extraction, commerce, and construction. I interpreted

Melky’s analysis of the structures of power that marginalized indigenous Papuans as basically materialist, in the sense favored by most advocates of a political economy approach in the social sciences. So why did he and others differentiate a ‘political’ understanding of the Papuan conflict from an ‘economic’ approach?

1 All translated terms are from Indonesian, unless noted otherwise as GVD (Grand Valley Dani) or WD (Western Dani). I conducted fieldwork mainly in Standard Indonesian and Papuan Colloquial Indonesian, a category that straddles the distinction between Standard Indonesian and the Papuan creole dialect Logat Papua; as well as Grand Valley Dani, Western Dani, and Walak—three closely related Dani languages in which I have elementary speaking ability, which was supplemented by interpreters.

47 CHAPTER 1

My partial answer to this question is that indigenous activists have not so much contested an economic understanding of the Papua conflict, as they have critiqued official discourses that propose to placate them by providing economic development. Policy-makers and politicians in

Jakarta and international agencies have increasingly emphasized this ‘development’ approach to the conflict. This is exemplified by the 2013 launch of a new Unit for Acceleration and

Streamlining of Papuan and West Papuan Development (UP4PB), under the authority of the central government in Jakarta. At the time this program was announced, Indonesia’s then- president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) faced criticism from all directions over his handling of Papua. Human rights advocates questioned his ‘military approach’; Papuan politicians criticized the failure to implement key provisions of Special Autonomy; and nationalist Indonesian politicians alleged SBY was too tolerant of Papuan ‘separatism’. In this context, the offer of the ‘gift’ of accelerated development—presenting a discourse at once incontestable and depoliticizing (Ferguson 1990)—helped to neutralize diverse critiques.2

Melky’s critique can be understood as a refusal of this offer. This refusal to be placated suggested a need for investigation: how had the categories of political and economic come to be deployed in these ways?

Scrutiny and relegation

The offer of development (in the form of material goods) in exchange for a willingness to be pacified has a history in Papua, as elsewhere in the peripheries of global capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Indonesian government was still in the early stages of consolidating its authority in the Papuan highlands. Indonesian sovereignty in Papua had been established in the 1960s,

2 The discourse of development as a tactic for silencing dissent has a history in Indonesia, notably under the pro-US rule of General Suharto, the ‘father of development’ (Bapak Pembangunan), who took over from the Third-Worldist Sukarno in 1965.

48 CHAPTER 1 through a UN-mandated handover from the erstwhile colonial administration (Drooglever et al. 2009). Jakarta soon deployed teams of ethnographers, agricultural extension specialists, and engineers to set up economic development programs intended to incorporate the region and its indigenous population into the Indonesian state

(Sugandi 2014). The Indonesian military, which directly controlled government agencies in

Papua, harshly repressed a pro-independence uprising in 1977. In the wake of the 1977 war, highlands leaders grappled with the fact that indigenous institutions had been superseded by the power of the Indonesian state (Farhadian 2005, 39–40). Accepting the state’s offer of development expressed accommodation and reluctant acceptance (Farhadian 2005, 40). In 1977, as later in 2001 (when Special Autonomy was first adopted) and as again in 2013 (when UP4PB was launched), numerous Papuan representatives saw wisdom in coming to uneasy agreement with a superior power. Pro-independence partisans have often lamented this acceptance as an abandonment of a struggle for justice, in exchange for access to material rewards (Farhadian

2005; M. Haluk 2013; Heider 1996).

There is a history to suspicions over possible conflation of material and immaterial motivations. As elsewhere in the Pacific and eastern Indonesia, Christian missionaries had historically been deployed as the leading edge of imperial state building and extraction agendas

(Aragon 2001; John Barker 2005). Missions introduced goods such as clothing, steel axes, and mass-produced salt, all of which transformed regional economies.3 In the 1950s and 1960s, heyday of the missionary enterprise in the Papuan highlands, missionaries worried that local converts were embracing gospel in the hopes of receiving earthly rewards (Hayward 1997;

Sunda 1963). Contemporary missionaries I have met in Papua continue to suspect indigenous

3 Metal tools and cotton clothing were not present in the region before the arrival of missionaries; salt was laboriously extracted from a limited number of saltwater wells (Heider 1970).

49 CHAPTER 1

Christians of using Christianity as a means to gain material rewards. Anthropologists of

Melanesia have sometimes inadvertently validated such suspicions by portraying customary leadership as fundamentally a matter of distributing material goods to achieve ritual standards and maintain social standing (e.g., Lederman 1986; Malinowski [1922] 2002; A. Strathern 1969,

1971). I consider the history of missionary and ethnographic scrutiny as shaping the context of the West Papuan partisan critique of Autonomy for substituting material sops for political transformation.

I interpret the partisan critique of Autonomy in relation to streams of critique and auto- critique that associate indigenous leadership styles with patterns of Papuan culture. In discussions with Papuan NGO workers and activists, a common refrain has been that Papuan leaders tend to be too easily corrupted. One NGO worker explained to me that Papuan cultures tend to dictate life-long loyalty to creditors. In this light, Papuan leaders who become complicit with Indonesian power are acting according to indigenous cultural norms. Some West Papuan nationalists view Autonomy’s distribution programs as means to weaponize these cultural leadership norms (H. Haluk, n.d.). To argue that the Papuan conflict requires a political rather than an economic solution implies that the funds and goods distributed in Papua under

Autonomy do not warrant loyalty to Jakarta.

None of the activists I have in mind would claim that the economics of food (revolving around questions of land, labor, farming inputs, markets, prices, development assistance, and so on) are inconsequential to the struggle for Papuan justice. My own ethnographic attention to the

Balim region’s food distribution system has been informed by conversations with these same activists, and their analyses of indigenous disempowerment. Why did Melky mention rice and vegetables? Rice is produced in faraway places such as Java, shipped to Papua, flown to

50 CHAPTER 1

Wamena, unpacked by young men at the airport, loaded onto trucks, and unpacked by other young men at government offices or shops. During the past decade or two, the status of rice as food staple has been confirmed and sacks of rice have become a key element of contributions at major life-cycle events such as funerals and weddings. Rice is also distributed by various levels of regional government—regency, district, village—as part of programs such as raskin

(contraction of beras miskin—poor people’s rice), coordinated by Bulog (Indonesia’s state food distribution agency). Bulog’s programs operate through a national network of dolog, distribution posts, located in districts throughout the country. Wamena’s dolog, on the outskirts of town, is a site of such intensive transport of rice in from the airport and out to regional offices, that the road leading to it is in a state of constant disrepair. This damaged stretch of road, where vehicles slow down dramatically, gained a reputation as a site of crime, with groups of men holding up passing trucks. At every level, rice has become a central form of value—in a region where rice was neither cultivated nor traded as recently as 60 years ago (Heider 1970).4 Besides raskin, rice is distributed via civil service rations (jatah) that motivate competition for government employment.5 In the Balim context, rice distribution is thus a mechanism of dependence. This mechanism’s potency has increased under Special Autonomy programs (a process that I describe in Chapter 2).

Vegetables, in contrast to rice, are produced by indigenous horticulturalists. Most rural indigenous households in the region (and many households within Wamena proper) produce vegetables, and it is very common for rural-residing indigenous women to sell produce at one of

Wamena’s open-air markets on at least an occasional (once or twice a week) basis. From a

4 Locally grown sweet potatoes were until recently the main regional staple, and pigs were customarily the primary holder of household value. 5 The civil service is the only employment sector that a broad section of educated indigenous residents realistically aspires to.

51 CHAPTER 1 longer historical view, the production of vegetables for market sale is a recent development in the Balim valley. Vegetable cultivation as a development strategy dates to the missionaries who shared seeds with indigenous residents in the vicinity of missions; to colonial agents during the short period of Dutch state-sponsored development; and to Indonesian extension workers and merchants who have promoted new cultivars, inputs, and tools. The turn to vegetable cash cropping was an early step in a gradual transition away from self-sufficient food production. As

Balim horticulturalists became cash croppers, they also became buyers of imported mass- produced commodities. In contrasting a focus on ‘rice and vegetables’ to the ‘political’ question of independence, Melky alluded to this history through which the Balim has been incorporated into a wider capitalist world-economy.

Politicized highlander youth such as Melky tend to be caught in a difficult position.

While they may criticize their representatives for submitting to Autonomy’s promises and betraying the independence struggle, they also tend to be called upon by members of their communities of origin to intervene in conflicts around new state resources. At the time of the discussion above, Melky had recently spent three days negotiating with representatives from his home district, arguing for transparency and equity in the management of RESPEK funds by the district’s coordination team. Such conflicts have been widely reported by my consultants, and news reports have highlighted cases where such conflicts have become violent. To some Western development experts, these conflicts provide evidence that indigenous Papuans lack the capacity to conduct effective governance. Such civilizational narratives permeate the writings of experts who lament ‘state failure’ in the Papuan highlands (Anderson 2015). Such ‘critical’ reportage tends to overlook indigenous critiques of Autonomy. I consider the turbulent politics of

Autonomy as part of a trajectory that includes the eclipsing of indigenous modes of production,

52 CHAPTER 1 and a colonial denial of indigenous capacity for self-determination. I start from critiques and debates among indigenous actors in the Balim region and allow them to direct me to an area of inquiry: the regional distribution system, its changing relation to the wider national and global economy, and forms of critique and scrutiny that shape and respond to these changes. The partisan critique is a starting point for my investigation of what regional politics consists of in a contested periphery of a Global South country—and for my intervention in debates about political economy and scale in anthropology. The partisan critique has pushed me to view

Autonomy’s politics of distribution in the context of a longer, contested process of incorporation of the regional economy into the world-economy; and to consider indigenous engagements with these and other forms of distribution, in relation to that incorporation process.

The terminal economy

The partisan critique suggests that the incorporation of the regional economy gains momentum through Autonomy’s allowance of a degree of indigenous authority over the state’s distribution of life-sustaining material goods. Part of my task moving forward from this critique is to trace the relegation of the Balim regional economy to the position of end-point in distribution networks. I conceptualize the structure of this end-point situation as the terminal economy.

Relegation implies a process of constraining and containing. In emphasizing relegation, I note the prevalence in my ethnographic data of respondents describing a sense of being left behind, pushed aside, and taken for granted. I interpret this sense as an expression of a trajectory of change in arrangements of indigenous livelihood and regional governance. These changes express a succession of phases in the regional economy’s incorporation into the world-economy.

The concept of terminal economy expresses the relegating energy of the incorporation process: the way it converts the Balim economy into something peripheral to something much

53 CHAPTER 1 larger—to which it connects via this larger system’s outstretched extensions. I borrow the idea of the ‘terminal’ from the concrete places in the Balim region that I have identified as central sites for the reproduction of this economic structure: the minivan terminals (terminal) that adjoin the open-air markets that dot the edge of the Balim’s main town, Wamena. As I will describe in

Chapter 2, various types of transaction take place in and around terminals: in particular, the sale of produce by rural indigenous vendors to rural newcomer buyers; the sale of mass-produced food goods by newcomer shopkeepers to rural indigenous buyers; and the provision of transportation services to indigenous commuters who participant in that range of sales and purchases. As a key node in these circuits of distribution and mobility, the concrete place that is the terminal is thus a gathering place for the heterogeneous and unequal forces whose interaction constitutes a key part of the incorporation process.

As I will illustrate through concrete details in subsequent chapters, the relegation of the

Balim region to a terminal economy implies three interlinked features: incorporation, ambiguity, and recursion. The terminal economy structure is brought into being by the overarching trajectory of incorporation of the Balim economy into the world-economy. The relations that constitute the terminal economy propel this incorporation process forward (and are available for forms of disruption or attempts at regulation). As a process that changes the relations between scales of economic organization, incorporation is the central stake at play in regional politics.

This change in relations sees the Balim territory and population being brought into new types of connection with the world-economy. For relegation to proceed via this extension of connectivity signals the ambiguity of the terminal economy: its dual aspect of end-point and interface. I will illustrate this dual aspect through concrete descriptions of markets and terminals. These are places at the edge of town, where commercial distribution networks mostly come to an end; and

54 CHAPTER 1 they are mediating zones of interaction between rural and urban, indigenous and newcomer— transactions that enact incorporation. This ambiguity underpins the final feature: the recursion across scales and sites of the characteristic relations of the terminal. For a given peri-urban terminal to be ambiguous implies that relegation is at the same time a quality of connection. As the terminal pushes a place to the edge of a wider order, it also pulls that place into that larger order. The outward, invasive orientation of the terminal economy is expressed in the proliferation of progressively smaller terminals in the hinterland, and the relation of terminals to one another according to a nested hierarchy. Operating in this recursive manner, the terminal economy is irreducible to any single site. Rather, it structures regional space—and the region’s relation to the world beyond.

Theoretical intervention

The theoretical approach that I take in this dissertation engages mainly with four broad tendencies of scholarly literature: the study of livelihoods and distribution systems; the anthropology of infrastructure; the analysis of world-systems and imperialism; and the anthropology of moralities and distinctions in global context. The following sub-sections discuss how these bodies of work inform my analysis.

Livelihoods and distribution systems

First, I draw on traditions in Marxist anthropology that have been directly concerned with the livelihoods of peasants in the so-called developing world. Gavin Smith in his study of indigenous peasant resistance to landowners in Andean Peru, argued that in order to understand politics it is necessary to study livelihoods (G. Smith 1989). Smith argued that the form of peasant resistance flowed directly from the dynamics of their livelihoods struggles. Perhaps this insight was readily

55 CHAPTER 1 available to a study of land occupations by dispossessed farmers in the Andean context. The case of the Balim region’s indigenous people is markedly different: here, as in much of Melanesia

(and especially the New Guinean highlands), there is no centuries-long history of direct colonial dispossession, and no historic long-standing landlord class exploiting indigenous peasants. The

West Papuan resistance politics that typically get visibility in the international media consist of guerrilla action against military targets, waged by armed groups in forested areas far from markets or urban centers. Some such insurgent violence surrounds the massive resource extraction sector (and later on I elaborate on the importance of this sector for grasping the regional political situation in its global context). Instead of the sporadic guerrilla fight, I look to the recent history of indigenous uprisings and disruptions of regional marketing. In the past decade, indigenous groups have shut down peri-urban markets, planted spikes in the airport’s runway, and blocked the roads that extend out from Wamena into the hinterland (this practice has become a routine way for local residents to extract unofficial ‘tolls’ from drivers). My dissertation takes up Smith’s suggestion that we ask how livelihood pressures and transitions shape rural people’s politics (resistance or otherwise). In the Balim region I have noted that intense regional contestations have surrounded markets, food aid distribution, and infrastructure expansion projects. If distribution systems are inciting such turbulence and anxieties, then they merit attention as sites of political thought and action. Such attention should consider distribution in a wide sense, asking how systems of distribution (both market-based and state-based) generate contradictions and become sites of social change.

Many scholars have focused on systems of transaction linking peasant farmers with merchants in the postcolonial world. Numerous anthropologists have produced ethnographies of markets. They have highlighted meaning-making and cultural codes at work in sociabilities and

56 CHAPTER 1 transactions at markets—understood as symbolically rich places (e.g. Gell 1982; Ødegaard

2013). Carol Smith critiqued the anthropological tendency to study the symbolic and cultural aspects of markets as institutions, calling instead for analysis of marketing systems (C. A. Smith

1974). Sidney Mintz provided early examples of a systematic anthropological approach to produce marketing in Jamaica (Mintz 1956; Mintz and Hall 1960). Mintz read Alice Dewey’s study of a Javanese town’s commercial economy as another example of such an ethnographic lens (Dewey 1962; Mintz 1964). Lamenting a turn away from such system-focused studies in anthropology, Carol Smith advocating using analytic tools that economic geographers were using to grasp the spatial dynamics of marketing systems (C. A. Smith 1974). The objective was to analyze how marketing systems reproduced hierarchies, articulated modes of production, linked different economic scales, and generated tensions out of which was produced systemic change.

My analysis draws on Smith’s and Mintz’s proposals, aiming for a systematic and synoptic picture of regional distribution. Smith’s synthesis informs my analysis of how certain historical and spatial features lend the Balim marketing system its constellation of social forces. However,

I do not discard the approaches to markets as expressive and symbolic places, which Smith critiqued. Instead, I examine the symbolic or discursive meanings produced in concrete market places primarily as expressions of the role that these sites play in marketing systems.

The trajectory of economic change in the Balim region, especially since Autonomy’s major expansion of food aid distribution channels, pushes me to consider market systems as a particular subset of a wider category, distribution systems. Economic theorists have long debated the category of distribution in relation to the broader analysis of capitalism. Marx analyzed economists’ use of the categories of distribution, production, exchange, and consumption. In this usage, distribution and exchange inhabited together the middle ground between production and

57 CHAPTER 1 consumption: “distribution divides [products] up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs” (Marx [1939] 1973, 30).

Marx argued that these four categories constitute “members within a totality, distinctions within a unity”, and that among them, “production predominates . . . over the other moments” (Marx

[1939] 1973, 32). Marxist anthropologists have tended to gloss the distinction between distribution and exchange: for example, Mintz’s study of a “distribution system” in Jamaica included the range of commercial transactions through which agricultural products reached ultimate consumers (Mintz 1956). This usage correlates with a convention in the business world, where distribution is the process through which products are made to reach users or consumers— one of four elements of the “marketing mix” (along with production, pricing, and promotion)

(Borden 1964). Recent scholarship on government distribution programs has tended to contrast distribution with exchange—with the former referring specifically to state provision of goods, and the latter to market transactions (Collier and Way 2004; Ferguson 2015). Throughout this thesis, I use a broad category of distribution that includes both Mintz’s and Ferguson’s meanings.

Without erasing the analytical specificities of markets and commodification, I consider commerce and state distribution programs as distinct and inter-related forms of distribution. This approach resonates with Roitman’s call to pay attention to the tendency of distribution arrangements (in African countries specifically) to be marked by varying degrees of overlap between state and market channels (Roitman 1990).

An analytic of distribution allows me to consider market and state forms of distribution as part of a single arrangement undergoing change. Indigenous livelihoods in the Balim context tend to depend on varying combinations of self-sufficient horticultural production, income from selling produce, civil service wages and rations, and government food aid programs (whether

58 CHAPTER 1 allocated directly to a household or household member, or transferred along from a recipient along lines of kinship or some type of customary obligation). One implication of this overlap of forms and channels is that ideational associations from one form of distribution may be expressed in the sites of another (as illustrated in Chapter 3). Thus the broad category of distribution makes it possible to relate moral scrutiny of indigenous economic practices (part of the backdrop of the partisan critique of Autonomy) to the historical development of the regional economy.

While considering different forms of distribution together, I have been alert to evidence of indigenous aspirations to exit systemic inequalities in regional commerce, and attain sustained distribution—or redistribution—of goods via state programs. Conceptually, redistribution is a specific form of distribution in which allocations are made based on egalitarian considerations, such that wealth extracted from impoverished classes is, to some extent, channeled back toward those classes. Autonomy’s package of new development fund allocations and aid programs functions as a sort of limited and highly regimented set of mechanisms of redistribution, in the sense that Jakarta ‘returns’ a portion of tax revenues from Papua’s resource extraction sector to

Papua province in Jayapura (and from the province, a portion is distributed to lower scales of territorial administration) (King 2004; Mollet 2011). For me to conceptualize state distribution programs as constituting the latest phase of incorporation into global capitalism, is not to discount any aspirations for redistribution. Indeed, for redistribution to be a mode of incorporation becomes a dilemma and a burden for impoverished populations living at the contested peripheries of large Global South states.

A comparison of Special Autonomy programs in Papua with the types of distributive programs that Ferguson studies (and valorizes) is beyond the scope of this thesis. The Papuan

59 CHAPTER 1 context—with Jakarta deploying Autonomy as a means to defuse the Papuan independence movement—is in many ways different from those Ferguson studies. My thesis is in conversation with Ferguson’s study to the extent that these different cases are examples of states responding to popular critique of structural inequalities by establishing programs to distribute goods to marginalized populations. Furthermore, I take up Ferguson’s call to attend to various types of

‘distributive labor’ through which livelihoods are cobbled together among populations who lack access to stable employment (Ferguson 2015, 58, 94–102). Ferguson’s attention to the unequal distribution of global wealth is broadly consistent with a world-systems critique of global capitalism. However, my approach contrasts with Ferguson’s contention that a scholarly focus on politics of distribution ought to contest what he argues is an outdated Marxist framework centered on production (Ferguson 2015, 44–46). Ferguson’s foil is the adage “give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach him to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime”, which he associates with a “productionist common sense” that is supposedly suspicious of government distribution for “treat[ing] only the symptoms of poverty without getting at its underlying causes—causes that can only be addressed through providing things like training and education” (Ferguson 2015,

38). Instead, Ferguson points to populations in southern Africa who have access to training and education but not jobs, and argues that “lack of any distributive entitlement is the underlying cause” for widespread poverty (Ferguson 2015, 38).

Ferguson’s intervention has come in the wake of related arguments for a shift in focus from production, to analytics of movement that overlap with distribution, such as flow

(Appadurai 1990) or circulation (B. Lee and LiPuma 2002). In contrast to this theoretical tendency, the people I worked with in the Balim region consistently understood distribution in relation to production. For example, as I discuss in Chapter 2, discussions about the lobbying

60 CHAPTER 1 required to access state resources often led to laments about an associated decline of indigenous horticultural production. Such experiences of livelihood struggle belie theoretical attempts to detach production from distribution.6 Ferguson’s argument slips between a plea for an analytical focus on distribution as category separate and not subordinate to production; and a claim that distribution and not production is the key to economic justice. Ironically, this dual argument rests on his observation that production is organized in a highly uneven manner at the global level: in the example of fisheries, fish farm production is concentrated in certain Asian countries, while work in African fisheries is scarce (Ferguson 2015, 36–37). Certain tendencies of Marxist scholarship have theorized unevenness in the global organization of production (Amin 1977;

Rodney 1973; N. Smith 2010; Wallerstein 1974). The historical durability of such unevenness

(which implies a different account of the underlying cause of poverty in the Global South) motivates Ferguson’s identification of basic income grant programs as ideal forms of social protection for Global South populations. This element of his analysis suggests that state distribution in specific countries should be understood with reference to the unequal global organization of production.7 My analysis agrees with this implicit suggestion: in a later sub- section, I look to world-systems analysis and the study of imperialism for tools to analyze relations between the global organization of production and the national and sub-national organization of distribution. First, I discuss a separate body of scholarship that has grounded the study of distribution in attention to concrete distribution channels and questions of scale.

6 Marx critiqued a tendency of such attempts for favoring the “dialectical balancing of concepts” rather than the “grasping of real relations” (Marx [1939] 1973, 31). 7 Marx clarified that there are two types of distribution: distribution of products proper; and distribution of factors of production—itself an outcome of a history of production, and thus in fact a “moment of production” (Marx [1939] 1973, 37–38, 40).

61 CHAPTER 1

Anthropology of Infrastructure

I mentioned above that I understand the peri-urban market both as a node in a system, channeling movements of matter and people, and so a site for the reproduction and contestation of power relations; and as a type of place that gathers people around certain characteristic relations, and in so doing can be symbolically expressive. In emphasizing these interlinked understandings of the market-terminal space, I am borrowing an approach particularly well expressed in a recently burgeoning scholarly tendency: the anthropology of infrastructures. Of course, a synthesis of material and symbolic analysis long predates this academic trend. Many anthropologists focusing on infrastructures as material and expressive systems have been especially clear in considering overlaps and interpenetrations of what Brian Larkin calls the “politics and poetics” of infrastructure (Larkin 2013).

Broadly speaking, the category of infrastructure includes all varieties of arrangements of channels that enable movement or communication: from roads, ports, and airports to wireless networks, electrical grids and more. The diverse approaches in this tendency in anthropology share, for the most part, an interest in seizing on the materiality of these systems in order to trace the operation and limits of political categories such as citizenship (Anand 2011; Schnitzler

2013), state control (Joshua Barker 2002), or aspiration (Reeves 2014). This attention to materiality as analytical anchor is key to a range of characteristic moves across this literature.

One approach is to consider how once given infrastructures crystallize, they reshape the range of possibilities for communication and connection across and between territories and populations.

This in turn can give rise to new distributions of political authority—enacting a form of power that Chandra Mukerji calls “logistics” (Mukerji 2010). An allied approach has been to attend to the expressiveness of infrastructures. A frequently studied example is of government agencies

62 CHAPTER 1 unveiling new roads, and so communicating an intention to achieve a modernist vision of development. In such cases, a road design’s ways of enabling high speeds, large numbers of vehicles, and supersession of other land uses, together give form and substance to a government’s message (Harvey and Knox 2015; Khan 2006). An extension and converse of this move is to trace how this expressive aspect of infrastructures can end up affecting their materiality—and thus logistically (in Mukerji’s terms) influence the distribution of authority. In

Khan’s example of a highway project in Pakistan, the hyper-modernity expressed by the material form ended up communicating a mismatch between aspirations for progress versus realities of underdevelopment. Khan argues that this mismatch hindered the highway’s uptake, producing an abandoned place that undermined the ruling party’s claims (Khan 2006).

These lines of analysis inform my examination of the Balim region’s distribution infrastructures—the ensemble of channels through which commerce and state aid and rations result in the transfer of goods to the indigenous population. The peri-urban market/terminals around the edge of Wamena are central sites by virtue of their function as nodes in the regional commercial distribution infrastructure. The distribution infrastructure has historically been the founding mode of integration of the regional economy. This history has seen indigenous livelihoods and consumption patterns congregate around peri-urban spaces. The terminal is where commodity flows patch together so that rural inhabitants may market their produce in town, and newcomer merchants market their products in the hinterland. The minivan network through which rural inhabitants commute is part of this distribution infrastructure: indigenous inhabitants use it as a means to transport goods back and forth. State aid and rations, on the other hand, pass sporadically—and not always—through sites such as regency and district offices.

Since, in much of the Balim region, the administrative structure is largely composed of recently

63 CHAPTER 1 founded units that have yet to materialize in extensive buildings and so on, and since state distribution typically happens through occasional transfers rather than routine transactions, these arrangements are far less reliably or visibly anchored to specific places, as compared to commerce. Instead, state aid and rations operate largely through forms of lobbying, mobilization, and patronage that define allocations. The social and communicative labor that organizes this mode of distribution is often spatially separate from the sites of distribution. The infrastructure rubric shines light on this systemic difference in relation to the materiality and spatiality of how commerce and state programs are organized, respectively—while at the same time permitting to see these modes as elements of a wider system.

The indigenous Balim population has experienced peri-urban markets and terminals as sites where inequalities are reproduced, through the transactions and movements that converge there. Balim activists and intellectuals have periodically identified this reproduction as part of a process through which the regional economy comes to be dominated by a larger power structure.

Indigenous leaders and organizers have blamed this process for a decline of indigenous tradition, and a range of social harms and violence. As I show in Chapter 3, these understandings become rallying points for large-scale disruptions—which, in turn have motivated Jakarta to seek to pacify the situation by implementing Special Autonomy programs. This expansion of state distribution has gone on to agitate types of auto-critique and scrutiny—as demonstrated by

Melky’s partisan critique, and expert explanations for the ‘failure’ of Autonomy. Meanwhile, these transitions in infrastructural integration of the economy have required the conscription of different types of indigenous labor. This is evident in the work required to bring products to and from market—namely (as I examine in Chapter 4) the informal work that indigenous youth tend to do as ‘terminal kids’ who patch together the poorly integrated channels of the regional

64 CHAPTER 1 infrastructure by loading, packing, and carrying goods between vehicles, shops and so on. The logistical history of the region thus shapes labor organization and inter-generational relations— with consequences for how regional politics works.

All infrastructures share the broad function of organizing scale, and defining how different scales interact (Edwards 2003). Focusing attention on distribution infrastructures has been a way for me to observe changes in relations between the regional economy and higher scales of economic organization. The following section discusses how this element relates to the study of distribution systems and to antecedents in world-system analysis and the study of imperialism.

World-systems and imperialism

Numerous anthropologists have studied specific marketing systems in order to intervene in debates about relations between regional economies and global forces of world capitalism (Kahn

2009; Mintz and Hall 1960; Roseberry 1983; C. A. Smith 1984). Sidney Mintz’s work on sugar emphasized how agricultural livelihoods in Jamaica were entwined, through imperialist economic relations, with patterns of class and consumption in the wealthy core countries of the

North Atlantic (Mintz 1986). By crossing sites and scales, this mode of analysis anticipated

Marcus’ call for ‘multi-sited ethnography’ (Marcus 1995). It also took up Immanuel

Wallerstein’s call for scholars to situate their descriptions of regional situations in the context of the capitalist world-economy. Wallerstein advocated an understanding of capitalism as a system that historically expands across the world. He theorized this process of expansion as one where core Western countries came to dominate economies in the periphery, with the expansion of core capital serving to incorporate peripheral regions of the world into the world-system (Wallerstein

1974). For Wallerstein, this process, and the durable power relations it produces at the global

65 CHAPTER 1 level, severely constrain the range of political possibilities available in the periphery—producing states with weak capacity to promote their industries or protect their populations (Wallerstein

2004). Wallerstein has contested a tendency in social sciences to consider nation-states as basic units of analysis—advocating instead for the world-economy itself as the correct unit of analysis under global capitalism (Wallerstein 1974). This approach interprets strategies and tactics of

Global South governance—at all scales—in relation to the demands and constraints emanating from global economic power centers.

World-system analysis shares many elements with the approaches of dependency theorists who argued that core-country industrial supremacy has been achieved through relegation of peripheral countries to low-profit primary production, and consumption of high- profit core products (Prebisch 1962; Frank 1979). Dependency theory and world-system analysis were both anticipated by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism—which he defined as a concentration of capital in North Atlantic countries, carrying out a competitive ‘division of the world’ into arenas of extraction (Lenin [1917] 1939). Wallerstein drew on debates within and between the governing Marxist-Leninist parties of the Soviet Union and China (Wallerstein 1974). World- system analysis was elaborated in conversation with anti-colonial intellectuals of Africa and the

African diaspora such as revolutionary historian Walter Rodney—who drew on Lenin in arguing that core capital had actively ‘underdeveloped’ Africa, preventing African countries from industrializing (Amin 1977; Rodney 1970, 1973; Wallerstein 2000). I approach world-system analysis as a set of tools that have been developed through and in relation to efforts to understand and resist imperialist global power relations.

Anthropologists have claimed that Wallerstein’s core-periphery model is static, totalizing, homogenizing, and deterministic (Appadurai 1990; Dove 1996; Ortner 1984; Sahlins

66 CHAPTER 1

1994; Walker 1999, 8–9). Some critics allege that the core-periphery distinction discursively relegates certain countries and world regions to a marginal position with respect to the West— supposedly entrenching their structural marginalization (Brennan 2005; Sahlins 1994, 2–3).

Broadly speaking, these critiques tend to follow one of two tendencies. First is a longstanding objection to ‘economism’, which objects not just to world-system analysis but generally to political economy approaches in anthropology (Brohman 1995; Ortner 1984, 141–44; Snodgrass

2002). The second line of critique is a tendency to deny that power relations within Global South countries are strongly determined by global-scale power relations. I suspect that this second tendency unwittingly smuggles in the first. In other words, to downplay the structural vulnerability of a Global South state in its relations with core capital, is to deny that its patterns of ‘political culture’ are shaped by its material conditions—by systemic forces such as unequal terms of trade, foreign ownership of major sectors and infrastructures, dependence on imports, sensitivity to international credit evaluations, currency instability, and so on.

An important element that tends to escape much criticism of the core-periphery model is that Wallerstein’s designations of core and periphery apply specifically to the global organization of production, qualifying production arrangements according to their relative profitability. Core industries are monopolistic—in Lenin’s terms, organized in cartels (Lenin [1917] 1939)—and thus highly profitable; whereas peripheral production is neither (Wallerstein 2004). The core- periphery binary expresses the endurance of a history through which the economic power of the

West is achieved and reproduced through the incorporation of international markets into core production regimes—with direct colonial rule but one phase of an ongoing organization of power at the global scale. Under this arrangement, the periphery is a site of accumulation of value for the benefit of core capital, through natural resource extraction, labor exploitation, and marketing

67 CHAPTER 1 of core products (including not only agricultural or manufactured goods but also media production, communication platforms, and financial services and instruments).

One of the most visible features of the current age of global capitalism is the location of intense manufacturing activity in some regions of certain Global South countries. The progressive relocation of core industries to some parts of the periphery is a pattern that,

Wallerstein argues, is what is meant by ‘development’ in the Global South. This process is unlikely to elevate a country out of peripheral status because those industries that relocate are precisely those for which monopoly production is no longer profitable (due to a tendency for monopolies to eventually dissolve by intrusion from competitors copying profitable products)

(Wallerstein 2004). Economic hegemony is thus reproduced not merely by producing, but by producing products whose distribution is likely to displace other, prevailing production arrangements. Thus, one mode of incorporation of territories and populations into the world- economy is through the extension of networks of distribution of profitable products, replacing less profitable modes of producing the same or comparable products (Hopkins et al. 1987).

World-system analysis thus provides a global dimension that elaborates Marx’s analysis of the subordination of distribution to production. This mode of analysis suggests that distribution arrangements in peripheral regions can serve to incorporate populations into relations of subordination to regions of more profitable production.

A strong tendency in Marxist anthropology of livelihoods and marketing has been to understand marketing systems as “articulations” between distinct modes of production (Kahn

1974, 2009; Meillassoux 1981; Roseberry 1983). Such analysis assumes the existence of distinct capitalist and non-capitalist (or precapitalist) modes of production, and that the former dominate the latter while preserving them for their function of labor reproduction (Meillassoux 1981).

68 CHAPTER 1

Though this school of thought has contested the terms of world-systems analysis, the schema of articulation corresponds roughly to the process that world-system analysts describe as incorporation.8 In the Balim context, the decline of indigenous production and its supersession by Autonomy’s politics of distribution, is the latest phase in a trajectory of incorporation— preceded by a phase where indigenous production had partly shifted to cash cropping. I view the

Balim example of incorporation via (state) distribution as a process that is most likely to obtain in internal peripheries of peripheral countries, where secessionist conflict has motivated new state distribution arrangements. To the extent that the analytic of articulating modes of production fails to explain this process, this motivates my understanding of incorporation as a broad category of process—of which what some categorize as articulating modes of production is but one mode, another being the outright replacement of indigenous production.

In anthropology, analytics of world-system and imperialism have largely ceded way to a competing frame of analysis: globalization. The concept of globalization gained currency, starting in the late 1980s, as a way to describe a set of inter-related changes including the

“hypermobility of capital”, and increasing economic activities across borders (N. Smith 1997).

To some extent these changes were made possible by new transportation and telecommunications technologies. In addition, IMF structural adjustment programs had pressured many Global South countries to remove barriers to foreign investment and ownership. The term

‘globalization’ was used in different contexts as a means to variously summarize, celebrate, or criticize this set of processes (N. Smith 1997). Globalization theory in anthropology noted hypermobility and the decline of obstacles to cross-border finance in its studies (Foster 1999,

2002; Gregory 2014; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Trouillot 2003; Tsing 2004). This awareness has

8 World-system analysts have in turn contested the idea that areas under incorporation can include both capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production (Hopkins et al. 1987, 836).

69 CHAPTER 1 been in tension with a picture of globalization as a vaguely post-imperial time of “disorganized capitalism” (Lash and Urry 1987), when binaries such as core-periphery no longer apply

(Appadurai 1990). The analytical over-investment in categories of flow and circulation

(Appadurai 1990; B. Lee and LiPuma 2002) has helped to downplay the endurance of core- periphery relations, in which distribution economies come into place as elements in the global organization of production.

‘Globalization’ critiques of world-system analysis have at times seemed to be aimed instead at the variant of modernization theory that predicted global homogenization—a prediction that world-systems theorists have themselves opposed (Forte 1998, 55). It may be well be true, as Appadurai happened to claim, that for many indigenous residents of Papua

“Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization” (Appadurai 1990, 295).

Regardless, the forms of newcomer domination in Papua, and any indigenous aspiration to connect with Western power, do not constitute evidence of the waning of core-periphery power relations at the global level. I approach the layers of power in Papua as cause to more deeply examine how world-system forces traverse and shape relations between scales of economic organization. I take the fact that many indigenous Papuans experience “Indonesianization” as a threat as an illustration of the partial recursion of world-system relations across scales—global, national, regional, local. Studies of ‘frontier zones’ of Indonesia and other Global South countries, show evidence of the recursivity of some world-systemic core-periphery relations within the scale of the nation-state (Li 1999; Tsing 2004). This recursion is partial, not perfect—

Jakarta is not exactly a core to Wamena as periphery. In Chapter 2, I highlight the partial recursion of the global forces of food regimes (Friedmann 1993; McMichael 2009) to understand the Balim transition from autarkic sweet potato production to Indonesian rice distribution

70 CHAPTER 1 networks.

Appadurai’s critique of the “homogenization” thesis need not have been framed as a critique of the ‘old’ binaries such as core and periphery. To be sure, in the Balim region, the agitation of a range of ethnic distinctions (and not their dissolution) has been a central dynamic in the process of incorporation of the Balim economy. As I discuss in the next section, a recursive, relational, and inter-scalar analysis of distribution in relation to production helps to interpret such tensions.

Distinctions and moralities in global perspective

When considering the discursive context of the indigenous partisan critique of Autonomy, I look among other things to the moralized colonial scrutiny of indigenous economic life, and concerns that Jakarta is taking advantage of an indigenous culture of loyalty to creditors. These highlight the way livelihood issues in a context of inequality are, in numerous Global South contexts, expressed via moral discourses. A number of anthropologists have shown how such moralities may alternately express popular critique of inequality and exploitation, or be deployed to pressure populations to accept the withdrawal of state protections (Ferguson 2006, 69–88; Klima

2006; Ødegaard 2008; Sitko 2013; Taussig 2010). Alan Klima has argued that in the case of

Thailand, IMF criticisms of Asian finance—as supposedly laden with corruption and ‘red tape’—constitute a moral discourse that ‘trickles down’, stigmatizing informal popular practices of gambling and lending (Klima 2006). This process of trickling down illustrates a form of recursion of moralizing scrutiny of the economic practices of those populations being subjected to the pressures of core capital expansion.

Much of the talk I documented about Balim regional-level contestation expressed, questioned, or deflected various versions of the type of scrutiny that Klima describes. The

71 CHAPTER 1 partisan critique of Autonomy itself simultaneously absorbs and rejects the historical waves of suspicion and scrutiny that flow from the colonial idea of indigenous Papuans as culturally incapable of future-oriented management of funds (Hayward 1983). I noted numerous other expressions, appropriations, deflections, and deformations of his broad and multifaceted discourse. Such expressions have shown the economic issues that lie at the heart of most apparently ethnic tensions in the Balim region. In some cases, suspicions toward neighboring ethno-linguistic groups have been bundled with criticism of one’s own group. The partisan critique’s elaboration, with suspicion toward ‘Indonesians’ related to auto-critique of indigenous creditor-loyalty, illustrates this contradictory pattern. This move—absorbing historical scrutiny and expressing it as inter-ethnic suspicion—illustrates a theme that resonates with Klima’s analysis: how global forces of core capital may translate into types of moral critique and distinction. These critiques tend to play on colonial and more broadly imperial histories through which populations have been displaced and assigned distinct roles in regional economies. The resulting constellations of ethnicity were of concern to colonial scholars (Boeke 1953; Furnivall

1948). In world-systems anthropology, such constellations were analyzed as outcomes of incorporation: for instance, Jay O’Brien traced how ethnic distinctions in Sudan emerged and transformed as patterns of labor and land inhabitation were assigned to different populations at moments of change in the country’s relation to core capital expansion (J. O’Brien 1986). The process of incorporation that produces such constellations tends to be downplayed in sociological literature on migrant trading minorities (who supposedly function to address the “trader’s dilemma”—a clash between reciprocity and accumulation—and so allow host societies to maintain unity (Evers and Schrader 1994)).

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Inter-ethnic distinctions and tensions are an inescapable feature of the Balim political situation. The overarching tension between indigenous and newcomer has been a site of tension over the definition of Papua’s political status in relation to Indonesia and the world. Beneath this scale of distinction, various intra-indigenous distinctions have been agitated especially since the implementation of Autonomy’s expanded state distribution. Some scholars have viewed these intensified ‘horizontal’ tensions as illustrations of one or another of: incorrect policies; culturally defined tendencies of indigenous Papuans or Indonesian politics; or manipulation by Indonesian state actors (Anderson 2015; Bertrand 2014). While such interpretations may be based on actual patterns (especially as regards manipulation by state agents working to undermine the independence movement), my approach is to more aggressively contextualize these developments in global terms. The proliferation of intra-indigenous group tensions is an example of recursion and elaboration of the types of distinctions O’Brien traced—a process that imprints distinctions with the ongoing history incorporation.

To interpret localized moral critiques and tensions that result from incorporation, I look to anthropological scholarship that has shown how New Guinean populations navigate the aftermath of colonial moralities that typically had a binary structure. Andrew Lattas, interpreting the discursive and ritual practices of contemporary cargo movements in Papua New Guinea, has shown how they appropriate, transform, and redeploy a segmenting moral framework imposed by colonialism (Lattas 1992). For Lattas, this segmenting force operates simultaneously at all scales—from an opposition between white and black people; down to the level of the individual, divided against theirself. In Chapter 3, I draw on Klima, O’Brien, and Lattas to analyze how successive phases of incorporation translate into a segmenting pattern of appropriated and redeployed scrutiny and critique, that agitates distinctions at different scales.

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Intervention in regional literature

I understand Papuan politics as being enmeshed in a process of incorporation into the world- economy, via the integration of a highlands Melanesian regional economy into a Southeast Asian distribution system. Large bodies of scholarship that have examined each of the two regional and thematic sides of this encounter: on one hand, literature on New Guinean encounters with global capitalism; and on the other, politics of distribution under decentralization in Indonesia.

Additionally, I look to a tendency of anthropology that has approached political questions in

(West) Papua in relation to global forces. My analysis in various ways departs from, and at the same time synthesizes elements of each of these tendencies.

New Guinean encounters with global capitalism

Anthropologists working in New Guinea and nearby islands have made major contributions to the broad task of conceptualizing all manner of social phenomena in relation to the forces of the capitalist world-economy. The best-known example is the work of Peter Worsley, the Marxist anthropologist who surveyed a range of ethnographic literature on the region’s various “cargo cults” (or cargo movements). Colonial administrators had attached the ‘cargo’ label to these movements due to their evident enthusiasm for the distribution of commodities via new wide- ranging infrastructures. Various scholars have pointed out that this enthusiasm was incited by the way colonial distribution infrastructures seemed to conjure consumable products, without visible productive labor (Burridge 1970). Worsley expanded on this materialist aspect of the interpretation of cargo movements, and analyzed them as responses to incorporation into the world-economy (Worsley 1968). Worsley saw cargo movements as incipient or potential forms of resistance to incorporation—a sort of religious antecedent to anti-colonial nationalism. His interpretations have been contested from various directions, including a recent argument that the

74 CHAPTER 1 movements should be properly seen not as anti-capitalist but rather as pleas for “more advanced integration into global capitalism” (Neveling 2014).

I am interested in the way certain indigenous mobilizations can incite a kind of scholarly difficulty of interpretation as constituting resistance or accommodation to global capitalism.

Ethnographies of ‘modernity’ in Melanesia are laden with this openness to alternative interpretation. For example, Golub’s work on Ipili relations with transnational mining capital in highlands Papua New Guinea shows how sabotage against the mine function as bargaining tactics to increase the terms of compensation from the Canadian company, and so bring prestige to those who lead such disruptions (Golub 2014). It should not be surprising that observers with different political agendas have interpreted such disruptions more along the lines of resistance

(Coumans 2011). Of course, transnational mining in Papua New Guinea is a very different case from Balim distribution networks. The point is that in the scholarly record there is a transition from an early Marxist and world-systems moment that saw Melanesians waging incipient resistance to incorporation, to a tendency to see accommodation and even eagerness to participate in capitalism (see also Benediktsson 2002; Sharp 2013).

Running through the undecidability regarding resistance or accommodation to capitalism is a question that relates back to the context of the partisan critique of Autonomy in Papua: uncertainty regarding the sincerity of indigenous claims in relation to political justice and economic distribution. To question whether acts of disruption constitute real resistance or rather tactical positioning, expresses something akin to the long-running colonial mission suspicion that

Melanesians perform moral commitments as means to access material goods (Hays 1991). I have found missionaries in the Balim region to appropriate and deploy anthropologists’ theoretical models of Melanesian life. In my conversations with modern-day missionaries in the Balim

75 CHAPTER 1 region, I was told that various types of disruption committed by indigenous residents—from blocking roads to sabotaging a hydroelectric installation—were tactical moves aiming to lay claim to resources that could then be distributed along specific lines of clan affiliation so as to bring prestige. This kind of attitude draws on a well-established idea in Melanesianist anthropology: that Melanesian populations tend to value the distribution of material goods for the social relationships such distribution fosters (Sahlins 2005; M. Strathern 1988). Missionaries thus deploy the socio-centric interpretation of Melanesian distribution as a means to scrutinize indigenous political praxis for signs of insincerity. The scholarly interpretation of Melanesian responses to incorporation thereby helps shape the context within which Balim residents respond to incorporation.

The sociocentric analysis of Melanesian engagements with commodity capitalism runs through a range of allied analytical threads that see, instead of contested incorporation in the world-system, a “dialectical” process of “encompassment” by global commercial culture

(LiPuma 2001). For Marshall Sahlins, world-system analysis is “the super-structural expression of the very imperialism it despises”, because it supposedly claims that peripheral populations are

“passive objects of their own history”, whose cultures have been “adulterated” (Sahlins 1994,

412–13). Instead, encompassment is apparently a mutual process: world-systemic forces meet their match in the indigenous appropriation of global forms into existing categories and patterns of thought and practice (Sahlins 2005; LiPuma 2001; Robbins 2005). These anthropologists critique what they see as a prevailing scholarly belief that the expansion of core capital eradicates previously essential and absolute difference between Melanesian and Western ways of being (along the lines of Appadurai’s critique of the homogenization thesis). A key part of this analysis is an emphasis on indigenous desires for modernity, and an interpretation of

76 CHAPTER 1 participation in capitalism wherein commodification and development are valorized according to precolonial norms.

I contest these Melanesianists’ denunciation of world-systems analysis, and their accusation that it enacts the very incorporation it analyzes.9 I sidestep this debate between, on one hand, ‘salvage anthropology’ fantasies of absolute difference, and on the other, a post- structural downplaying of the material forces of imperialism. I disagree that world-systems analysis posits Melanesian ‘passivity’, and I think ethnographic analysis should involve sober appraisal of relations of forces. My interest is in how global capitalism constrains people located in peripheral situations to respond to their incorporation. Evaluating whether specific responses are ‘passive’ or ‘active’ requires empirical study—and may depend on one’s vision of political praxis (G. Smith 2014). Marxism and the study of imperialism have historically been elaborated through and alongside efforts to assert agency and resist or transform the process of incorporation. In this view, historical agency is both an empirical question and a political goal.

An anthropology that registers the power of the world-system should examine how and to what extent ‘local’ or regional political thought and action responds to the incorporation process—to analyze whether and what mode of agency is envisioned and enacted in relation to incorporation. Whether or not it misrepresents forms of accommodation as resistance, Worsley’s interpretation of cargo movements provides a relevant model by analyzing how Melanesian populations responded to (or anticipated) early moments in the incorporation of their regional economies into a global system of production and distribution. Contemporary Balim approaches to commerce and state distribution may alternately resist or accommodate specific aspects of incorporation— while attempting to assert some measure of control over the process.

9 Maximilian Forte notes that many elements of Sahlins’s work betray his stated opposition to world-systems analysis (Forte 1998, 73–74).

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Politics of distribution in decentralizing Indonesia

Special Autonomy (Otonomi Khusus) reforms implemented in Papua are a farther-reaching version of the Regional Autonomy (Otonomi Daerah) reforms that were implemented across

Indonesia in the years after the Asian Economic Crisis (krismon, contraction of krisis moneter

(monetary crisis)). This set of reforms dovetailed with the broader process of ‘democratization’ and reform (Reformasi) that followed the 1998 fall of Suharto (itself triggered by krismon and mass popular uprisings led by the “pro-democracy” (prodem) movement). The wide set of post- crisis transformations in Indonesian governance has been thoroughly studied in numerous disciplines, notably in anthropology, political science and geography. Scholars working from a

Marxist approach have tended to question or qualify the discourse of democratization, emphasizing instead continuity in an oligarchic character of the Indonesian state (Hadiz and

Robison 2013; Lane 2014; Winters 2013), or a more sustained penetration of foreign capital and increased exploitation of workers (Sangadji 2017). Other scholars have sought to valorize the reforms of decentralization, arguing that the advent of multiparty elections at regional and local levels has allowed popular claims for economic inclusion and minority rights to be heard and affect policies (Aspinall 2011, 2013a).

A central question in this literature has been to understand how local and regional politics work. A major stream of this scholarship has theorized a particularly visible element of the new regional politics: a proliferation of state distribution arrangements under decentralization. These studies have emphasized elements of informality, irregularity, or extra-constitutionality of such arrangements. Such arrangements include provision of public goods and services in exchange for support in electoral or other political processes; or allocation of funds for public investments

(such as infrastructures or other ‘public-use’ type of development projects) in response to

78 CHAPTER 1 sometimes violent mobilizations by various groups (Aspinall 2011, 2013a; Blunt, Turner, and

Lindroth 2012; McWilliam 2011; Schulte Nordholt and Van Klinken 2007). Many of the arrangements under study have been understood as forms of ‘patronage’ that depart from standards of impersonal bureaucratic provision of public goods and services (Aspinall 2013b;

Blunt, Turner, and Lindroth 2012; Choi 2011). Some interventions in this literature critique the tendency of international development agencies and lending institutions to stigmatize such arrangements as forms of ‘corruption’ which suggest ‘chaos’ or even ‘state failure’ (Baker 2015;

Klinken and Barker 2009, 4). These scholars point out that many of the new forms of distribution, patrimonial or not, build on a longer pattern of Suharto’s New Order state. These should therefore be understood as the way the Indonesian or Southeast Asian state functions— both as an outcome of history and in the interest of political ‘elites’ who instrumentalize arrangements of distribution and dependence to stabilize claims to power (Baker 2015; Baker and Milne 2015).

Baker has argued that “off-budget” financing of state agencies translates into the patronage quality of state spending (Baker 2015). This analysis builds on theorizations of

Suharto’s erstwhile legitimacy as a question of loyalty secured through practices of maintaining flows of resources and personnel through state offices (Robertson-Snape 1999; Sidel 1998). This mode of analysis captures a major aspect of enduring political cultures in Indonesia. Descriptions such as Sidel’s tended to represent a New Order regime awash in foreign investment, and yet downplayed the implication that such investments served the primarily extractive and exploitative relation between foreign capital and the Indonesian state. Such descriptions departed from an older thread of scholarship that emphasized the domination by foreign capital of numerous sectors of the economy—and a situation in which New Order planners took limited

79 CHAPTER 1 measures to empower a class of pribumi (native Indonesian) business, without interfering with foreign capital (Short 1979; Winters 1988). Though they downplayed the way such investments express foreign domination, Robertson-Snape, Sidel and others showed how Suharto manipulated foreign investments in the Indonesian economy into a system of rents that secured a broad network of loyal bureaucrats, military officers, and entrepreneurs.

World-systems analysis suggests that the relegation to a situation of rent seeking and patronage is a structural feature of peripheral states—especially those such as Indonesia, whose resistance to capitalist incorporation has been historically curtailed.10 Lacking globally profitable industries to tax, financially weak state agencies develop in a manner that political theorists correctly identify as departing from liberal norms (communicated as expectation by “neo- institutionalists” and agencies such as the World Bank (Choi 2011; Hadiz 2004)). As suggested by much scholarship, decentralization has extended the pattern of rent and patronage more widely and deeply—so that regional and local politicians are more directly involved than under

Suharto in channeling resources between capitalists, public budgets, and various formal and informal expenditures.

An issue downplayed in much of the literature on ‘democratization’ is that this proliferation of decentralized state distribution schemes has taken place alongside the dismantling of forms of redistribution and protective regulation of commerce—namely the slashing of subsidies on food and fuel; elimination of price control and crop-purchasing board functions of agencies such as Bulog (McCulloch and Timmer 2008; Yonekura 2005), and the deregulation of banking (Engel 2010). Many of these changes had long been demanded by the

IMF, and some degree of deregulation was already underway during the 1980s (Soesastro 1989).

10 In Indonesia, this curtailment was largely achieved through the US-supported, 1965 mass killings that eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party, setting the stage for the removal of Sukarno from power and his replacement by Suharto (Easter 2005; McNaughton 2015; Simpson 2008).

80 CHAPTER 1

The crisis provided an opportunity for the IMF to impose the full range of reforms it had long sought, as a set of conditions for debt financing. Despite a proliferation of decentralized channels of localized distribution, the overall total of state resources distributed through various forms of social spending has declined as a proportion of GDP (Silver 2003). In terms of rural development funds, the World Bank introduced, in the wake of the crisis, schemes to manage spending through block grants to local and regional administrations, with a degree of competition between and within administrative units (Li 2007, 230–66; Sari and Widyaningrum 2012).

Overall, the decentralization era has seen a proliferation of channels of state distribution that are more accessible to populations formerly excluded from direct access. In rural areas, access to these resources has involved new forms of horizontal competition. In Papua, these broad tendencies of decentralization have been implemented in their fullest form (Timmer 2007).

This has involved large-scale transfers of development funding authority to the province, and on to the regencies, districts, and village level. The block grant nature of these large transfers, and the fact that the indigenous population of Papua is overwhelmingly rural, translate into a broad and intense penetration of New Order-style relations of patronage and dependence—under

Special Autonomy’s rubric of indigenous empowerment (Mollet 2011, 236).

Before moving on to the final section, I mention work in economics that has shone light on how the global dynamics of the crisis impacted the production side of the Indonesian economy, and how this affected the situation of regions such as Papua. Economists have shown that the crisis reconfigured the Indonesian economy by changing the relative importance of two broad sectors of export-driven production: manufacturing on one hand, and resource extraction and agribusiness on the other. The drastic collapse of the Indonesian rupiah in 1997 led factory production, highly dependent on newly expensive imported parts, to decline precipitously

81 CHAPTER 1

(Fukuchi 2000a). The dismantling of subsidy programs compounded these effects by increasing the cost of manufacturing inputs such as fuel and electricity. In contrast to the massive job loss that resulted from factory closures, the collapse of the rupiah had the opposite effect on primary resource extraction and agribusiness sectors of the Indonesian economy. Sectors such as oil palm plantations and mineral extraction experienced a boost in the wake of the currency decline, as these exports became much more attractive on global markets. In terms of the structure of the

Indonesian economy, then, there was a shift of labor and investment away from manufacturing, toward primary sectors—representing a shift from highly value-added and labor-intensive sectors toward lower value-added and less labor-intensive production. Regionally, manufacturing has been highly concentrated in Indonesia’s ‘core’ regions such as , whereas primary economic sectors are more concentrated in the internal peripheries, such as Kalimantan and

Papua. Damaging productive livelihoods in densely populated regions, and generating extractive booms in less densely populated peripheries, the crisis increased Papua’s economic importance within Indonesia.

Drawing on the global analysis of production together with the discussion of Autonomy distribution above, I understand the post-crisis, Autonomy-era situation in Papua as one where the indigenous population faced an intensified influx of newcomers into regional economies such as the Balim Valley’s, at the same time as they were drawn into a high-stakes arena of distribution schemes that have often had a strong patronage element.

(West) Papuan politics in global perspective

I have mentioned that the West Papuan independence movement tends to express its claims with an international audience in mind. This global dimension of Papuan politics has been a focus of anthropological work. Danilyn Rutherford in particular has argued that by self-consciously

82 CHAPTER 1 speaking to global audiences, West Papuan nationalists show that the legitimacy of claims to sovereignty is always a matter of global interaction (Rutherford 2012). Meanwhile, Eben

Kirksey’s work on the independence movement shows that it attempts to mobilize interdependencies linking the Papuan economy to power blocs and institutions of Indonesia and the West (Kirksey 2012).11 Both authors note the global orientation of West Papuan nationalism and argue for the need to relate an analysis of Papuan politics to global dynamics (see also

Stasch 2016; Timmer 2013). In this regard, I follow a well-established pattern in scholarship on

Papua. However, the Balim region—home to the largest indigenous population in Papua—does not feature in this literature. The region of Biak, an island region off the north coast, has figured largely in both Rutherford’s and Kirksey’s work (understandably so given its long history of involvement in trans-regional trade, and the fact that many Biak leaders were prominent in the independence movement). Other examples that feature in this global-scale analysis include primitivist tourism in a lowland interior region (Stasch 2011), constitution drafting by independence movement leaders (Timmer 2013), state violence at sites of large-scale mining by the US company Freeport McMoRan (Ballard 2002a); and international human rights campaigns

(Kirksey 2012; Rutherford 2012). In other words, the global perspective of much work on

Papuan politics has emerged through an ethnographic focus on explicitly transnational encounters, and moments of activism and conflict that involve transnational actors.

By comparison, ethnographic work on the Balim region has tended not to foreground global forces. This literature has produced detailed examinations of relations between the indigenous Dani population and Indonesian state agencies in areas such as health, education, religious institutions, and rural development (Butt 1998, 2007; Farhadian 2005; Munro 2009,

11 My analysis contrasts with Kirksey’s contention that Papuan nationalism operates within multiple worlds at war, rather than a single capitalist world-economy under imperialist domination, and that this illustrates the potency of “heterogeneous alterworlds” (Kirksey 2012, 15, 236 n55).

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2013; Sugandi 2014). These studies have shown various ways in which Indonesian government policies marginalize the indigenous population. Butt and Munro have gone so far as to describe

Indonesian governance in the Balim region as a form of “colonialism” (Butt and Munro 2007).

These works are part of a revival of Western anthropology of Balim society, that had been an early but brief element in the wider world of highlands New Guinea studies (Heider 1970;

Pospisil et al. 1962; D. O’Brien 1964; Ploeg 1969). The formalization of Indonesian rule, and the violent conflict between state forces and the early independence movement in the 1970s, led to a withdrawal of Western anthropologists from Papua. The Balim region was especially difficult to access for foreigners due to its status as a heightened conflict zone compared to other parts of

Papua. Rutherford’s early work in Biak (on Biak relations with Indonesian nationalism) represented a return of Western anthropologists to Papua thanks to lightened state restrictions

(Rutherford 2003); Butt’s thesis extended that return to the Central Highlands (Butt 1998).

My thesis intervenes in this situation of contrast between the tendency of studies of globally oriented Papuan politics on one hand, and studies of indigenous Balim relations with state institutions on the other. This is a difference of emphasis in relation to which scales of social, economic, and political life are seen as analytical priorities—and which types of inter- scalar relations and processes are foregrounded. It is also a difference of ethnographic and methodological focus, and definition of what constitutes ‘politics’. The ‘global’ school of Papua studies has been most attentive to direct interactions that transcend the national (Indonesian) scale of power. The result has been a focus on politics in the sense of negotiating high-level positionings—most markedly so in the case of tracing attempts to mobilize Western power to change Papua’s status with respect to Indonesia. In contrast, contemporary Balim studies have been more concerned with routine social relations involving broad sectors of the indigenous

84 CHAPTER 1 populations—such as mothers’ experiences of clinics, or street youth sociability. My approach has been to draw on the global awareness of the former tendency, in combination with the latter tendency’s orientation toward synoptic regional analysis. As such I argue for a Balim studies that connects with the broader tendency of understanding Papuan politics in global terms. My focus on transitions in indigenous livelihoods is the key to analyzing regional Balim politics in relation to processes that cut across international, national, and regional scales.

85

Chapter 2 – Incorporating the Balim Valley

In Wamena, a small and seemingly remote town in Papua, at the outer eastern limit of Indonesia, commodity distribution permeates public life. On any given day, workers at the town’s airport unload multiple deliveries of cargo: from consumer goods of all kinds to vehicles, machinery, fuel, and building materials. Delivery by air to the Central Highlands’ regional hub is the first step in a set of distribution chains that fan out from the airport’s cargo terminal near the center of

Wamena. Consumer goods—sacks of rice, boxes of instant noodles, cooking oil, eggs, clothes, and commodities of all kinds—are transported to wholesale shops on Wamena’s main road, Irian

Street. Meanwhile, stacks of rice sacks branded with the Bulog logo of Indonesia’s Logistics

Agency are trucked to the Indonesian government’s regional food aid and rations distribution centers, the so-called dolog. Starting at the airport, state and market distribution networks fan out in successive steps of decreasing scale, from the regional hub to sites throughout the Balim River

Valley. Wholesale stores see constant daily action as smaller-scale merchants load cartons and bundles onto trucks and motorcycles. The sight of a pickup truck pulled up in front of a shophouse (ruko), male teenagers tossing boxes of instant noodles up to a balcony for storage, is common.1 The ruko itself is a ubiquitous architectural form on Wamena’s streets: a node in the infrastructure through which commercial distribution happens. Beyond the town’s core, more such shops line the open-air produce markets and adjoining transportation terminals. At these peri-urban sites, minivans and pickup trucks ferry indigenous commuters to and from their home rural areas in the broader Balim Valley region surrounding Wamena. Allowing indigenous passengers to carry produce, firewood, and timber to market for sale—and to carry shop-

1 Ruko is a contraction of rumah toko, shop house.

86 CHAPTER 2 purchased mass-produced commodities back to rural households—the minivan and truck network serves a double function of human mobility and goods distribution. The intensity of commercial activity—the daily bustle past rows of shops and groups of indigenous women vendors—constitutes the texture of urban space in Wamena. Commercial bustle, rows of shops, streetside vendors, and dusty peri-urban market-terminal spaces are well-known features of life throughout Indonesia’s towns; what is specific about their significance in a Papuan town like

Wamena is the ubiquity of these infrastructural forms: the saturation of public life in logics of distribution.

The open-air markets that surround Wamena, and other Papuan towns, feature a visibly racialized division of labour between indigenous Papuan and migrants from other Indonesian islands such as Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. In the vicinity of migrant-owned shops, Dani women sit on the ground waiting for buyers to inspect their produce. At minivan terminals that adjoin markets, Dani youth known as ‘terminal kids’ (anak terminal) work as conductors, hollering at potential passengers, calling them to be seated, and loading their cargo on the minivan roof. Once every inch of passenger space is full, minivans leave—with conductors clutching to the back of the vehicle. For indigenous market participants, the most used spaces are harsh and neglected. Key surfaces include the rocky ground that women cover with jute bags or flattened cardboard boxes to sit on, and umbrellas for rain or sun; the sagging, rusty minivan ledges that youth hang off; and tiny wooden shop-front tables where Dani consumers buy and chew the mildly narcotic areca palm nut (pinang) with betel flower (sirih) and lime powder

(kapur). Regency governments have in recent years installed covered concrete stalls for indigenous produce vendors. Providing excessive shade in the highlands’ cool climate, and lacking tactical visibility from shoppers and passers-by on the street, the new stalls are thinly

87 CHAPTER 2 used. Most vendors choose instead to sit in rocky, unsheltered open areas between shop fronts and the street. Others squeeze into the space under awnings of shops, attempting to optimize partial shelter and customer traffic. Around the edges of the market, indigenous men and women sell piles of firewood, clumps of tobacco, or perhaps a few live pigs. Off in the distance from one of the region’s three most important peri-urban markets, Pasar Misi (Missionary Market, named for its historical emergence adjacent to the region’s original Catholic mission), Dani men and women dig gravel from the Uwe river, and load it on trucks that ferry the gravel to a cement factory outside town limits. The transactions and trajectories that come together in the market- terminal space reflect its role as a node in the region’s infrastructures of distribution, extraction, and mobility.

Figure 2.1. Various forms of commerce and mobility sharing the market-terminal space

This chapter contextualizes peri-urban market-terminal spaces to show how they function both as interfaces for the regional distribution economy, and microcosms of a broader process through which the Balim region is peripheralized within larger scales of organization. I conceptualize the terminal economy as a set of relations taking place in typical nodes in mobilities and distribution circuits, and as a wider structuring of a regional space and power through which the Balim region relates to Indonesia and the world. A key set of immediate ways

88 CHAPTER 2 this economy is experienced is through a range of transactions and variously unequal relations.

Differences in livelihoods and mobilities map quite clearly onto relational categories of social difference—namely those of indigenous (orang asli) and newcomer (pendatang).2 Historically these differences have been spatialized, with terminal and market spaces hosting relations between rural indigenous producers and urban trading newcomers. While spatial and occupational boundaries have somewhat blurred over time, the contemporary commodity distribution system works through and reproduces these forms of social and spatial heterogeneity. This process depends on the terminal’s function as a mediating space.

In order to analyze the space of the terminal economy, I draw on a key insight from world-systems analysis: the way a core-periphery relation comes into being when a more profitable production system encompasses and dominates a space of less profitable production

(Hopkins et al. 1987; Wallerstein 2004). The periphery in this mode of analysis is more than simply a space at the edge of a polity, with lower densities of population, trade, and infrastructural connectivity. A periphery is a relational category that refers to production; in the capitalist world-economy peripheries are always being constituted as markets for more profitable products, and as providers of less profitable products. I understand the peripheralization of the

Balim regional economy as a process wherein a regional system of commodity distribution

2 Categories of indigenous and newcomer or non-indigenous population are in widespread use in Papua. In the Balim context, the category of indigenous refers mainly to speakers of any of the Dani family of languages, of which the most prominent are Grand Valley Dani, Western Dani, Yali and Nduga. Indigenous persons are sometimes referred to as orang Papua (Papuan person) or O.A.P., orang asli Papua (original Papuan person). The Biak terms komin and amber reference this same dichotomy, and are known throughout Papua. The idea of ‘black people’ (orang hitam) is also in occasional use. While a descendant of a migrant from another part of Indonesia generally continues to be known as a newcomer, this categorization is not absolute—there is a growing Papuan urban youth culture emerging namely in schools with mixed student populations; and in mixed households in urban settings. Those caveats aside, for the most part in the Balim region, distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous people are rigid enough to be treated as clear sociological categories. The division of commercial labour between indigenous and newcomer in a suburb of Papua’s capital Jayapura is documented by Akhmad (2004), who argues that these ethno-racial identities and economic roles co-produce one another. In Chapter 3, I elaborate on contestations around ethnic distinctions, and relate the indigenous- newcomer divide to other axes of distinction.

89 CHAPTER 2 comes into place—extending Indonesia’s national networks of market and state distribution

(themselves sourcing from Indonesia’s national production—especially agri-business—as well as more profitable foreign industries).3 The terminal’s heterogeneous relations enact a process of incorporation that has gradually eclipsed the Balim’s historically autarkic production system.

This process is made up of a set of routine practices and relations—and reorganizations of regional governance and livelihoods—that are the fine grain of incorporation into the world- economy.

The large volume of rice being flown into Wamena on any given day—to be sold in shops or distributed by regional government offices as rations or aid—exemplify the displacement of indigenous production by national distribution networks. The Balim population has, until recently, depended on self-sufficient sweet potato cultivation (Peters 2001). As will be explained later in the chapter, the large-scale distribution of rice cultivated outside Papua has increased as indigenous production has decreased. While the chapter initially deals with broader issues of the Balim region’s economic history in national and global context, this serves as a basis for analyzing recent transition in the regional food regime as a means of specifying the pace and timeline of incorporation.

To an outside observer or recent arrival, the intensity of commerce and construction in

Wamena can seem puzzling. After all, this is the highlands of New Guinea, a site separated from the coast and wider shipping infrastructures by formidable physical obstacles—a major mountain chain surrounding the Balim Valley, fringed by vast lowlands forests and swamps. This challenging topography continues to stand in the way of the long-planned completion of a road linking Wamena to the Papuan provincial capital Jayapura, on the north coast. With a population

3 Wallerstein, citing cases of petty traders who buy wholesale goods and repackage them in small amounts for resale, argues against conceptualizing distribution as a non-productive category of activity (Wallerstein 2004). I contrast distribution with production to highlight a transition in the livelihoods regime.

90 CHAPTER 2 of approximately 30,000, Wamena is the urban center of a wider Balim region whose population numbers approximately 400,000 people. This population represents nearly half of the total indigenous population of Papua; and roughly one-fifth of Papua’s total population (including indigenous and non-indigenous residents). The Balim Valley can thus simultaneously be seen as

Papua’s pre-eminent center of indigenous life; and as an isolated peripheral region weakly incorporated into dominant economic networks. This dual aspect is reflected in Wamena’s odd distinction as the world’s most populous landlocked town lacking any ground transport connections to a coast (Butt 1998, 9). In the absence of significant regional industrial production, dependence on costly air transport for transporting fuel, vehicles, machines, and consumer goods into the highlands results in steep price markups.4 Consumer prices and budgets for construction or development projects far surpass habitual Indonesian norms. The incorporation process thus faces major logistical obstacles, and yet these obstacles generate opportunities for profit.

Figure 2.2. Wamena airport, gateway to the Balim region for people and manufactured goods

This chapter first broaches the question of why, given the logistical and economic

4 The Balim region counts one cement factory and one tofu factory (using locally obtained gravel and soybeans respectively), as well a handful of small-scale installations processing locally grown coffee.

91 CHAPTER 2 obstacles standing in the way, Indonesian state and commercial actors have pursued the installation and expansion of a regional distribution economy in the Balim Valley. This analysis turns on the extractive economy that has shaped Papuan history, the importance of internal migration in Indonesia, and the role of the Balim region as a key arena in the conflict over

Indonesian sovereignty in Papua. The next step is to trace the longer history through which the

Balim region has been incorporated as a periphery. This involves showing how the Balim’s isolation has been produced historically; and tracing incorporation through changes in indigenous livelihoods and the regional food regime—from the short colonial period of missions and Dutch state agents, through a postcolonial period of commerce and development, and on to the present period of Special Autonomy and its expanded politics of distribution. The latter two phases correspond to two distinct but overlapping modes of incorporation: first, through commerce; and second, through state distribution programs. The chapter closes with a discussion of how the broader extractive paradigm of incorporation works in its first, commercial, phase, to shape the region’s infrastructures—and how these define patterns of indigenous labor, mobility, and relations with newcomers.

Intensifying the regional distribution economy: motivations in context

My overall argument in this chapter is that the political situation in the Balim region—its pattern of contestations and tensions—are produced by the process of incorporation of the region into the world-economy. It is true that the Indonesian government has its own imperatives for establishing a distribution economy in the region and so consolidating its status as a part of

Indonesia. In this section, I separate Jakarta’s interests into three inter-related elements. Each element involves a different relation between ‘economic’ interests (e.g., of extractive capital, or regional merchants) and ‘political’ imperatives (e.g., upholding Indonesian sovereignty). From

92 CHAPTER 2 the strategic perspective of the postcolonial Indonesian commercial and bureaucratic actors pursuing economic agendas in the Balim Valley, the expansion of regional commodity distribution pursues three interlinked objectives: first, to secure the Indonesian nation by preventing the separation of Papua; second, to stabilize the political situation so as to increase access of global capital to Papua’s natural resources; and third, to provide livelihoods opportunities to migrants from more densely populated regions of Indonesia. Taken together, these elements show a situation of incorporation via an extending distribution economy as the mode of integration of the region into the nation-state. This mode serves the interests of foreign and domestic resource capital, and addresses livelihoods pressures across Indonesia, in the face of global forces that peripheralize the national economy.

Figure 2.3. Map of Papua within Indonesia, showing the location of Wamena (Google Earth Pro 2017)

Balim Valley as strategic site of nation building

In order to clarify the first objective, it is helpful to consider the Balim Valley in the context of

Papua’s status as a zone that Jakarta has been anxious to integrate into, and maintain within, the

Indonesian nation-state. Indonesia’s central government has been, since independence in 1948, concerned with secessionist movements. In the 1950s, US intelligence bodies encouraged regional separatism in Sulawesi and Sumatra in order to pressure the anti-imperialist government

93 CHAPTER 2 of Sukarno (Kahin and Kahin 1997). Since then, national responses to secessionist campaigns have been militarized, and expressed as national defense. In recent decades, the main contentious regions of , Papua, and East Timor (now the independent country of Timor Leste), have been sites of heavy military deployments, pervasive state surveillance, and episodes of open conflict. Papua was annexed by Indonesia well after Indonesia won its independence from the

Netherlands, in the aftermath of WWII (Drooglever et al. 2009). Indonesia took control of Papua in 1963, after the Dutch withdrawal and a subsequent temporary UN administration (Saltford

2003). Early West Papuan nationalists (to whom the Netherlands New Guinea administration had promised eventual independence) were mainly located in coastal regions—where colonial governance had a much longer history than in the highlands (Chauvel 2005). By 1977, anti-

Indonesian unrest—expressed through the (Organisasi Papua Merdeka,

OPM) emerged among certain segments of the indigenous population in the Central Highlands.

In response to a series of guerrilla actions against state security forces by lightly armed OPM groups, the Indonesian armed forces (ABRI) quelled the 1977 uprising (Farhadian 2005).5

The aftermath of 1977 was a period of relative acquiescence of indigenous leaders to be governed by Indonesia. This uneasy agreement was marked by a broad program of

‘development’ in exchange for acceptance of Indonesian rule (Sugandi 2014, 147–50). This loose agreement fell apart in the aftermath of the fall of the Suharto government in Jakarta in

1998: a period which in Papua was a ‘Papuan Spring’ of open mobilizations around demands for

Papuan independence (Chauvel 2005; King 2002). Throughout this sequence of upheaval, repression, and accommodation, the importance of the Balim valley as a sensitive and strategic site of Indonesian nation and state building has grown.

5 The uprising was defeated through a combination of direct military action and arming of indigenous proxies (Farhadian 2005).

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The Balim region was a key site of pro-independence organizing at the time of the

Papuan Spring. In October 2000, the Morning Star flag of the West Papuan nationalist movement was raised at numerous sites in town, until they were taken down by state security forces, triggering unrest and violence in an episode known since as Bloody Wamena (Wamena

Berdarah) (Koalisi LSM untuk Perlindungan dan Penegakan HAM di Papua 2003). This included the first reported case of violence by indigenous highlanders against migrant civilians— mainly merchant families living at peri-urban markets caught in crossfire of clashes between state forces and indigenous pro-independence fighters (Meiselas 2003). This incident inscribed

Wamena in a cartography of ‘ethnic conflict’ in Indonesia: a problem of social disharmony and disintegration to be resolved by the state alongside international and non-governmental agencies

(Mote and Rutherford 2001). Meanwhile, Balim figures were gaining stature within the broader

West Papuan movement organizers in Jayapura, thanks to the attendance in May 2000 of a large

Balim contingent at the Kongres Rakyat Papua II (Second Papuan People’s Congress), a Papua- wide event that sought to rally Papuans around the cause of West Papuan independence.6

The 2000 uprisings, clashes, and repression in and around Wamena have since been narrated by independence movement actors as part of a history of Papuan challenges to

Indonesian rule, and indigenous suffering under state repression (M. Haluk 2013; Tebay 2005;

Yoman 2010). In their aftermath, a process of lobbying and negotiation was undertaken that led to Special Autonomy legislation—supported by sections of the Jakarta political class as a means to placate and defuse Papuan independence aspirations (Bertrand 2014). Autonomy’s

6 Balim participants at the 2000 Congress gained notoriety for making the journey from Wamena to Jayapura by foot, taking weeks to traverse mountains and swamps. The Congress’s title as ‘Second’ framed it as a follow-up to the First Papuan People’s Congress, also known as the New Guinea Council (Dutch: Nieuw- Guinea Raad), organized in 1961 by the Netherlands New Guinea administration, and where Dutch and West Papuan Morning Star flags flew side-by-side. The 2000 Congress interpreted the 1961 event as having granted West Papua’s independence—such that the goal now was recognition of an already-existing but ignored sovereignty (Elmslie 2002).

95 CHAPTER 2 implementation depended on a range of associated legislation at the national and provincial levels, which began to come into force in the mid-2000s (Mollet 2011). Autonomy has created numerous avenues for increased indigenous representation, and for extension and expansion of national (Indonesian) distribution channels into Papua’s interior regions. The Balim Valley’s history as a bastion of the Papuan independence movement—emerging but quickly quelled in the mid-1970s, and then resurging at the end of the 1990s—played a role in motivating the

Indonesian state’s response: intensification of the distribution economy in Papua’s Central

Highlands. The costs incurred to overcome the region’s weak infrastructural connections to the broader Indonesian economy have been the costs of integrating a strategic and restive frontier of the Indonesian nation.

Papua’s extractive paradigm

By intending to quell anti-Indonesian mobilization, the consolidation of the Balim region as an outpost of the Indonesian national economy has also aimed to secure Papua’s status as an extractive frontier for global capital. While there are no large-scale resource extraction operations in the Balim Valley itself, the Papuan highlands more broadly are one of the world’s major regions of untapped mineral wealth. In the western highlands, US-based Freeport

McMoRan operates the world’s most important gold mine, and third-largest copper mine; these make Freeport’s Indonesian subsidiary, PT Freeport Indonesia, the country’s single largest taxpayer—accounting for 2.4 percent of national GDP and 58 per cent of provincial GDP in

2005 (Ballard and Banks 2009, 150; Leith 2003). The Freeport mining complex is on the list of

Indonesia’s 270 “national vital assets” (Ballard and Banks 2009, 149). Foreign corporations’ access to mineral wealth, and Jakarta’s appropriation of tax revenues that flow from it, are widely spoken of in Papua as major motivating factors for Indonesia’s hold onto Papua, and

96 CHAPTER 2 support for this hold from the US-led ‘international community’ (Alua 2006).

In addition to the Freeport mine, the Papuan territory includes numerous reserves of timber, minerals, petroleum, and fisheries. Foreign resource companies from various Western and Asian countries, and domestic Indonesian companies, are active in many of Papua’s regions

(Sumule 2002). Meanwhile, agri-business projects have been established at increasing scale during the past decade, notably oil palm and other plantations at the MIFEE site in Merauke in

Papua’s southeast (Ginting and Pye 2013). Historically, the large-scale incursion of extractive capital into Papua can be contextualized within an Indonesian trajectory that transitions from rubber plantations in Java and Sumatra in the Dutch colonial heyday; then timber, mining, cacao, and oil palm in Kalimantan and Sulawesi in recent decades; and now Papua’s current multi- resource boom (Dove 1993; Li 1999; Peluso 1992; Stoler 1995). Indonesia’s environmental activists commonly narrate this trajectory as a matter of exhausting one peripheral territory’s resources and then moving on to the next. In Papua, such large-scale extractive industries have yet to reach the scale and saturation of livelihoods known to populations in Kalimantan, where vast landscapes have been deforested and reorganized as plantations and mines (Li 2016;

Siburian 2016). Some Papuan environmental activists point to Kalimantan as a possible example of Papua’s future within Indonesia. A rumor I heard repeatedly in and around Wamena was that

Freeport and other mining companies were planning such a large-scale mineral extraction future in the Balim region itself. Some have claimed that Freeport planned to build an extractive tunnel that would run from its installations in Mimika, to the mountains surrounding the Balim valley

(Nabire.net 2015). The Balim valley is located roughly 200 km east of the Freeport mine at

Tembagapura, and surrounded by a stretch of the same mountain range that is mined by Freeport.

Wamena’s relative infrastructural disconnection is likely the only obstacle to a major extractive

97 CHAPTER 2 boom in the mountains surrounding the Balim Valley.7

In the discourse of pro-independence groups, speculation about the possibility of an impending large-scale extractive incursion is framed in relation to a wider sense that indigenous

Papuans have no value to outside interests other than as inhabitants of valuable land, and purchasers of commodities (Aditjondro 2007; Alua 2006).8 In the more immediate terms of

Balim regional politics in relation to Papua as a whole, the Balim population’s status at Papua’s major indigenous population, and hosts of a potentially lucrative extractive frontier, mean that the consolidation of stable governance within the Indonesian system offers potential value for global capital (Strategic Asia 2012).

In sum, the Balim valley has been a relatively inaccessible population center in a Papua that global power blocs have treated first as a periphery of global sovereignty, and then as a frontier for extracting valuable resources. In these ways, another economic geography of terminals—extractive rather than commercial, and distinct from the peri-urban minivan terminal that is central to my thesis—indirectly but powerfully shapes the Balim’s experience in the world-economy. Anthropological work on the relationships between foreign resource corporations and the Indonesian security forces in Papua have described a tense relation of mutual benefit (Ballard and Banks 2009; Kirksey 2012, 104–9, 130–33, 216–18). This literature highlights the articulation between the interests of core capital and local situations of state violence. I wish to contribute to this analysis an explanation of the historical forces that define

7 The possibility of large-scale mining companies setting up operations in and around the Balim region is an element that raises the stakes of political intrigues over infrastructure expansion projects associated with state decentralization. 8 The idea of an impenetrable geography obstructing extractive economies that depend on connective infrastructure appears in some indigenous pro-independence discourses as the land’s natural resistance to the agendas of the Indonesian state and international capital (Kirksey and van Bilsen 2002; Kirksey 2012). This idea appears in stories told in the Balim about geologists, surveyors, and road builders struggling to work in the region, facing technical breakdowns and impassable landscapes.

98 CHAPTER 2

Papua as a frontier of resource extraction, and to trace how this broad extractive paradigm affects regions, such as the Balim, that lack large-scale extractive operations. In the Balim context, this requires examining issues that seem separate from resource extraction: national integration

(discussed above), and migrant commerce, which I turn to here.

Commercial networks and migrant livelihoods

Any first-time visitor to Wamena can quickly observe that non-indigenous merchants dominate the regional economy. It is exceedingly rare for a shop to be owned by an indigenous person: in

2015, in all of Wamena I counted a total of four.9 Non-indigenous migrants also tend to own shops in those outlying districts with dedicated market places (which typically operate a few days per week).10 In these ways, the Balim economy exhibits a basic dual division of labor— between urban-based migrant commerce on one hand, and rural-based indigenous informal labor and provision of primary products on the other—that shows similarities to regional economies in other peripheral regions of Indonesia (e.g., Li 2014; Spyer 2000).

The inadequacy of infrastructural connections linking Wamena to the coast, and outlying districts to Wamena, is a logistical obstacle—and generate opportunities for intermediaries to intervene in commercial circuits. On one hand, this is reflected in the role of police and military units in exploiting their supervision of transport infrastructures (especially the airport) to claim protection rents from merchants. More broadly, commercial distribution itself is patched together out of a series of small steps, each of which demands overcoming gaps in infrastructures. For

9 This includes Nit Hasik (GVD: “our products”), a downtown store owned by the regency government and launched in 2012 with Special Autonomy funds. 10 Newcomer merchants are absent in a number of rural districts, possibly as a result of local opposition to their presence; or because, in those districts directly adjacent to Wamena, commercial potential is low due to residents’ convenient access to Wamena for buying goods without hinterland price markups. In cases where an indigenous resident owns a rural shop, such shops are typically very thinly stocked and function more as a minor backup stock of a few basic goods.

99 CHAPTER 2 example, small-scale merchants can make a living loading racks of egg cartons and bottles of cooking oil onto motorcycles at wholesalers, and driving them to shops on the outskirts of town, where they divide the goods into small units (bags of cooking oil, for instance) affordable to most indigenous households. Control of, or access to some element in chains of vehicles and infrastructures—linking the Papuan highlands to commercial depots in ‘metropolitan’ Indonesia

(in major port cities such as Jakarta, Surabaya or Makassar)—can thereby be mobilized as commercial capital. Social networks stretching across the Indonesian archipelago can serve this purpose. For example, the son of a Javanese merchant I interviewed in an outlying district was attempting to convince a friend in Jayapura to send fresh ocean fish by air to Wamena on given days of the week. He planned to pay a small fee for one of the district’s pickup truck drivers

(who drove a vehicle owned by another of the area’s merchants) to pick up the package at the airport on his regular trips to Wamena, so that he could sell the fish at his family’s shop.

The national commercial structure of progressively increasing price markups and infrastructural inadequacy—a chain from Java’s main cities through eastern Indonesia, passing through the port in Jayapura, the air connection to Wamena, and the minivan and pickup truck network fanning out into the Balim region from Wamena—forms a system within which migrants are more likely than indigenous residents to have the social network, spatial mobility, and access to credit or capital required to accumulate some profit. As it extends into Papua, the shape of this chain is linear, punctuated by links that radiate out of nodes. Major nodes in the

Balim case are Wamena’s wholesalers and the rows of shops at peri-urban terminals. This distribution chain system resembles the ‘dendritic’ model of marketing system, as described by

Johnson, building on Mintz’s analysis of Haitian marketing (Johnson 1970 in Smith 1974:177).

Literature on marketing systems identifies dendritic systems mainly in contexts with a recent

100 CHAPTER 2 colonial history, or otherwise marked by conquest of the regional economy by an incoming power, whose merchants are supplied from higher-order centers outside the region. In these systems, distribution nodes are arranged in a nearly absolute hierarchy; lower-order sites are not connected to one another except via the single center that each connects to (C. A. Smith 1974,

177–79).

Figure 2.4. Sketch of dendritic pattern of mass-produced commodity flows into the Balim region—by air from Jayapura to Wamena, and by road from Wamena to hinterland district centers. Each district center is reached from Wamena by one or another of the roads radiating out of it. Centers accessible by different roads are, for the most part, not mutually connected except via Wamena. For example, while the distance from Piramid to Bolakme is relatively short, vehicular travel between the two must transit via Wamena. Major peri-urban market-terminal spaces are located where roads lead out to Hepuba/Kurima, Kurulu/Bolakme, and Ibele/Piramid respectively.

For newcomer merchants in the Balim, moving east to Papua fits in a well-documented and debated pattern of internal, and often circular migration within Indonesian (Hugo 1982;

Forbes 1981). This movement is captured by the verb merantau, meaning to move to a new location with a somewhat open-ended livelihood purpose, with the possibility of periodic return to place of origin (Lindquist 2009). In certain regions, such as Buton (),

101 CHAPTER 2 moving to Papua for commerce is one of two or three basic livelihoods choices that adult men are widely expected to pursue (Palmer 2004). The importance of such migrant commerce livelihoods for the Indonesian national economy should be understood within the context of its struggles to generate employment in the densely populated or economically stagnant areas of

Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi; and considering the long history of internal migration from

Indonesia’s densely populated regions to the less densely populated areas, especially in eastern

Indonesia. Under Dutch colonial rule, migration from Java to the so-called Outer Islands was conceived as a solution to landlessness and poverty in Java. This provided a template for the postcolonial program of transmigration (transmigrasi) that has allowed residents of Java and other densely populated regions to be assigned plots of land in more sparsely populated ‘frontier’ areas of , , or Papua. Since Suharto’s New Order government, transmigration has served as a means to incorporate peripheral populations into the developmental national mainstream by exposing supposedly backwards indigenous communities to more ‘modern’ farmers (Elmhirst 1999; Li 2007, 81–84). At the same time, the program aimed to defuse pressures of land and job scarcity in Indonesia’s ‘core areas’—issues seen as potential triggers of class-based socio-economic unrest there (Wijst 1985, 18, 23). Official state transmigration programs declined since the fall of Suharto (though more recently were revived).

I understand the ongoing unofficial migration to Papua as enacting, in a diffuse and informal way, a similar dual agenda of consolidating the nation at its fringe, and defusing livelihoods pressures in densely populated areas. Whereas formal state-sponsored transmigrants were expected to ‘civilize’ the national margins with their agricultural labor, ‘voluntary’ migrant merchants moving to Papua contribute their commercial activities to the national development agenda.

102 CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.5. Merchants buying goods for resale from a wholesaler in Wamena

Balim in relation to Indonesia’s post-crisis re-peripheralization

The linked factors of national consolidation, extractive economy, and migrant livelihoods clarify

Papua’s economic importance to Indonesia, and the strategic imperative that outside actors pursue in promoting the installation of a distribution economy in the Balim region. These factors gained a renewed salience in the wake of the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis, called krismon

(contraction of krisis moneter, monetary crisis) in Indonesia. Krismon is widely understood by scholars of Indonesia to have precipitated the collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime, ushering in the contemporary period of state decentralization and ‘democratization’ (Hadiz 2004; Hill and

Shiraishi 2007). The crisis was marked by rapid depreciation of the Indonesian currency—a response by international currency speculators to an episode of capital flight (itself made possible by Indonesia’s adherence to IMF demands for loose capital controls as a condition for

103 CHAPTER 2 loan financing) (Fukuchi 2000b; C. H. Lee 2003). Currency depreciation damaged Indonesian firms’ capacity to import parts and other manufacturing inputs (Fukuchi 2000a). In this way, krismon diminished Indonesia’s manufacturing sector—resulting in mass job loss in the industrial pockets of the densely populated parts of the country (namely the outskirts of Jakarta and nearby West Java, as well as parts of , Sumatra, and ). At the same time, currency depreciation made primary resources more competitive on international markets, providing a structural boost to the resource extraction and agri-business sectors (Casson 2000;

Fukuchi 2000a). These sectors have historically dominated economies in parts of Indonesia’s internal peripheries. The general pattern of the effects of krismon on the Indonesian economy was therefore to entrench a broad ‘extractive regime’ (Gellert 2010; see also Siburian 2016).

Such a regime is one in which highly profitable (industrial) production is relatively weak, and state budgets come to depend inordinately on rents from primary resource extraction and agri- business production.

The post-krismon expansion of extractive industries in Indonesia, produced by core- country currency speculation and IMF-demanded loose capital controls, intensified the economic importance of peripheral regions as sites of primary extraction (Fukuchi 2000a; Pohan and

Izharivan 2017). By weakening Indonesia’s capacity for relatively profitable production, krismon enacted peripheralization, understood in world-systemic terms. Thus the past 20 years have seen national growth horizons refocused toward extractive national peripheries—of which Papua has been the most ‘under-exploited’ and thus holds the highest potential availability of profit. A key moment in the re-peripheralization of the Indonesian economy at the global scale translated within the national scale to an intensification of Papua’s peripheral status.

As the aftermath of Indonesia’s crisis raised the strategic importance of Papua’s

104 CHAPTER 2 extractive sector, national development agendas have explicitly identified Papua as a terminal for extraction of raw materials (Strategic Asia 2012).11 This has yet to be accompanied by any significant development of post-extraction processing industries in Papua.12 Freeport, for example, transfers raw copper and gold ore from the mine to a coastal terminal via pipelines, and then ships the ore out of Papua; to be processed partly in Java, and the rest overseas (Ballard and

Banks 2009; PT Freeport Indonesia n.d.). This model of extraction excludes the range of secondary production activities that might provide broader employment opportunities. The ore itself is shipped privately on freighters that are not integrated into the wider network of

Indonesia-wide shipping. Freeport therefore contributes no return cargo from Papua back to

Makassar, Surabaya, or Jakarta—return cargo that would otherwise reduce shipping costs and help to moderate consumer prices in Papua.13 The extractive paradigm, based on taking primary resources out without investing in industry or infrastructure beyond what is necessary for extraction—sustains the peripheralization of the Papuan highlands.14

11 A central government report identified various regions of the Indonesian archipelago as ‘corridors’, each with its characteristic areas of economic ‘potential’. The Maluku-Papua Corridor was identified as having “abundant natural resources potential” while lacking infrastructural connectivity (Perekonomian 2011). 12 The regent of , home to Timika and Tembagapura, recently called on Freeport to relocate processing activities to Papua itself to create local employment (Fadli 2017). 13 Granted, a large amount of machinery, fuel, and goods are transported from outside Papua to the mine sites and engineers’ housing complexes in and around Tembagapura. The point here is that this enclave-oriented logistics is, for the most part, not integrated into the broader extension of Indonesia’s merchant networks to the Central Highlands via Jayapura. 14 I borrow this analysis of Freeport’s lack of contribution to outbound shipping costs from an Indonesian discussion forum analyzing a 2012 presidential election campaign proposal by the eventual winner, , for a ‘sea highway’ (tol laut)—a network of improved ports and shipping aiming to better integrate Papua into Indonesia so as to lower costs of goods and construction in Papua (Kaskus 2014). High consumer prices seem to be a common fate of extractive peripheries worldwide—such as in the Canadian Arctic, where diamond and uranium mining generate profits while indigenous residents lack access to affordable food or transportation (Göcke 2013).

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Figure 2.6. Heuristic sketch of main trajectories of movement of goods within, and in and out of the Balim region. Arrows indicate direction of movement, and vehicle icons indicate dominant mode of transport. For clarity, the Balim hinterland is represented here as a separate box even though on a map it spatially surrounds Wamena. In this sketch peri-urban market-terminals are located at the spot of the minivan icon. While no significant quantities of goods have been, for the time being, exported from the Balim region, this sketch would likely need to be updated after roads connecting the region to the coast are built, setting the stage for potential large-scale mining operations.

The next section contextualizes the post-krismon increase in economic focus on Papua in a longer trajectory of incorporation—and elaborates on how Special Autonomy reforms have accelerated the incorporation of Balim livelihoods.

Trajectory of incorporation

The lack of written archives has obstructed detailed study of the long precolonial history of

Balim civilization. Dani authors, Western missionaries, and foreign and Indonesian

106 CHAPTER 2 anthropologists have together produced a corpus of work that describes a precolonial context where the Balim Valley was divided into a patchwork of clearly bounded neighborhoods cultivating sweet potatoes, raising pigs, and cultivating fairly stable relations of political alliance that sporadically erupted in brief episodes of war pitting long-term enemy pairs and their allies

(Assolokobal 2007; Hayward 1983; Heider 1970; Hisage 2006; Sugandi 2014; Wetapo 1981).

Archeological work has provided some evidence to support claims by Dani authors and by foreign ethnographers that the pre-colonial system was egalitarian and ecologically sustainable.

Archeologists suggest intensive crop cultivation in the region dates back at least 10,000 years, with a major intensification of horticulture and animal husbandry roughly 2000 years ago— likely corresponding to the introduction of sweet potatoes and pigs into a region where taro and bananas are endemic (Haberle 1998).

Popular scientist Jared Diamond has called attention to the Balim region’s place in world history as one of the world’s independent origin centers of agriculture (Diamond 2005).

Diamond suggests that cooperative decision-making practices were key to the region’s characteristic agro-forestry techniques—techniques that sustained a dense population within the limited space of the valley floor (Diamond 2005).15 Balim authors and anthropologists alike have emphasized that indigenous practices of redistribution, alliance building, egalitarian decision- making, and military confrontation were jointly codified in a coherent and stable politico- religious system (Assolokobal 2007; Heider 1970; Hisage 2006). For my present purposes, the most salient aspect of pre-colonial Balim history is the fact that the region had never been encompassed as a subordinate periphery of an external system of production. Salt, seashells used

15 In subsequent writing, Diamond contradicted his valorization of customary Balim political values: echoing generations of missionaries and state officials, he argued that militarized pacification has benefited the Dani by eradicating traditional patterns of tribal warfare (Diamond 2012). Diamond makes no mention of the contemporary political or economic context, nor does he even identify the place as being part of Papua or Indonesia.

107 CHAPTER 2 as currency, certain stones used for ritual purposes, and axes are the only staple items for which there is evidence of pre-colonial transregional trade (Ploeg 2004). Until the first colonial explorers and missionaries entered the Balim region in the mid-20th century, the region was not a consumer of any mass-produced industrial products. None of this is to deny that the pre-colonial history of regional production was marked by various transformations—notably the introduction of sweet potatoes and pigs, which came to take on the status of basic staple and key store of household value, respectively (Assolokobal 2007; Haberle 1998; Heider 1970; Peters 2001;

Wetapo 1981). These production transitions surely accompanied major changes in the Balim politico-religious system. Production transitions were undoubtedly brought about through contact with outside forces—belying colonial notions of the highlands as ‘uncontacted’.16 This situation of small-scale, non-subordinate exchange with external production systems—occasionally punctuated by introduction of new production materials and practices—began to change in the mid-20th century, when the Dutch colonial state began to commit material resources to a civilizational development project targeting the Central Highlands.17

Starting in the 1950s, the Dutch state authorized Christian missionaries from Europe,

North America, and to run programmes to turn the indigenous population of the Balim region into modern citizens (Hayward 1983). In the Central Highlands, distance and landscape obstacles stood in the way of provisioning the missions with supplies. The coastal capital (then called Hollandia, now Jayapura) served as an aviation center to provision state and mission

16 Balim authors tend to describe the sweet potato as an age-old indigenous staple and basis of Balim life (Hisage 2006). Ethnobotanists and archeologists have argued that sweet potato propagated globally from South America by three paths that converged in the New Guinea highlands, including exchanges and movements of Polynesian seafarers and Iberian explorers (Ballard et al. 2005; Yen 1960). 17 Until this point, Dutch administration and development programs (often supervised by missionaries) were mostly confined to the coastal and island areas, especially the Bird’s Head, north coast, and Biak. Dutch territorial claims originally aimed mainly to retain western New Guinea as a buffer against British competition for the lucrative spice trade from Maluku (Rutherford 2012, 51). In the 20th century, global attention to supposedly ‘primitive’ and ‘lawless’ Papuans justified the Dutch performance of sovereignty through civilizing missions in the interior (Kirsch 2010; Rutherford 2009, 2012).

108 CHAPTER 2 agents seeking to pacify and govern the highlands. In the 1960s, after the UN-mediated transfer of Papua from Dutch to Indonesian control, U.S.-based mining company Freeport built the first road to a separate highlands area, far to the west and much closer to a coast than the Balim region. The ‘Freeport road’ connected shipping terminals at Amamapare (near Timika) on

Papua’s south coast to Freeport’s gold and copper mine in the western highlands. The Central

Highlands, thought to contain rich mineral deposits but separated by longer distances and harsher terrain from the coasts, have yet to be incorporated into large-scale extractive circuits—and the region has since remained without ground transportation links to other regions.

Production of isolation

As in any large Global South country, Indonesia’s mainstream development discourse devotes special attention to the ‘remote’ or ‘isolated’ area (daerah terpencil or pelosok). In Indonesia, with its history of coastal trading polities, the category of ‘isolated’ has been especially strongly applied to highlands or uplands areas. Such areas historically existed somewhat beyond the reach of pre-colonial coastal sovereigns, and have been seen under postcolonial governance as frontiers of development (Li 1999). Ideas about isolation and remoteness appear by convention in official communications about Papua, and especially the highlands areas, at all levels of government.

The quality of being isolated is treated as a problem to be overcome through various development strategies.18 Indigenous-run non-governmental organizations also tend to assume such notions. Evangelical church organizations use Biblical language to refer to highlands or interior regions as ‘the end of the earth’ (akhir bumi). Customary organizations, especially

Dewan Adat Papua, qualify this analytic by calling attention to the Balim’s pre-colonial history as an economically self-sufficient region within which residents gathered across various forms of

18 The solution to this problem is increasingly identified as infrastructure extension (Agustiyanti 2017).

109 CHAPTER 2 difference; and that shares a genealogical origin with other Papuan regions (Hisage 2006).

As the Dutch colonial state drew itself into the highlands in the 1950s, the challenge of connecting the Balim to wider infrastructures of communications and commodity provision inscribed itself into paradigms of regional governance. Deployed by the state as the leading edge of a belated civilizing mission, missionaries played a lead role in the process of connecting the

Balim to wider circuits. From their air base on the coast, missionary logistics operations maintained radio contact with missions and airdropped supplies and mail (Hayward 1983).

Approaching a Balim Valley where missions were establishing themselves in disparate locations, colonial state agents selected the relatively uninhabited central site of Wamena—strategically located at the confluence of the Balim and Uwe rivers—as the location for an administrative command center (Heider 1996). The growing proto-urban center anchored the logistical operations that enabled administration, provision, and the ‘pacification’ of Dani communities by missions and colonial police (Lieshout 2009). The founding of Wamena laid the basis for its subsequent emergence as the region’s commercial hub under Indonesian rule. The control of cargo logistics and provision have since remained a central arena of post-colonial power.

Wamena has grown from a frontier post of colonialism into a bustling and rapidly growing town.

Wamena’s airport, with its daily cargo deliveries of all the products required to sustain and expand a modern commercial economy, has become a site of intense power struggles among internal state factions over control of rents for commerce.19

As regards infrastructures of distribution and mobility, the Balim experience of colonialism differed from many other regions worldwide in some important respects: namely, its

‘late’ and short occurrence. By the time colonial state agents and missionaries began to pursue

19 Wamena and various district centers have seen open clashes between military and police units; many informants interpret these as turf battles for control of protection rents for cargo transport.

110 CHAPTER 2 civilizational programs of modernization in the region, well into the second half of the 20th century, the sovereign European power—the Netherlands—had long faded from its 18th-century position of hegemon of European capitalism.20 As such, there was none of the long history of colonial commercial and production economies familiar to studies of Indonesia—the rubber plantations, opium marketing agencies, and spice monopolies around which regional hierarchies of rule took hold in relation to Dutch sovereignty (Dove 1996; Li 2007; Rush 2007; Schrauwers

2011; Stoler 1995).21 Consequently, the development of modern infrastructures—airports, roads, power grids, and so on—started ‘from scratch’ in the highlands, often under the initiative of missionaries themselves, as they sought to assemble provisioning circuits. The resulting patchy, incomplete nature of regional infrastructure was compounded by the sudden withdrawal of the colonial state in 1961, its repatriation of a portion of its machinery and vehicles (followed by the transfer of much of the rest out of Papua by the incoming Indonesian administration), and the subsequent gradual elimination of the role of missionaries in governance and infrastructural planning (Garnaut and Manning 1974; Pouwer 1999). The inadequacy of infrastructure remains to this day a key feature of life in the Balim—a sense I gathered repeatedly from routine talk and my observations of overcrowded minivans, unreliable mobile phone network coverage, bridges

20 The Dutch power that ruled the archipelago that became Indonesia, for most of the period from the 17th century until the Indonesian revolution in 1948, formalized state sovereignty as the Netherlands ceded way to England (and France) in terms of hegemony within European capitalism (Vickers 2013; Wallerstein 1989). Indonesia was thus subordinated to the world’s first capitalist hegemon at a very early stage in the development of global capitalism; and this hegemon subsequently declined to a secondary position among core imperial countries. Belated and short-lived colonial rule by the Netherlands put early Papuan nationalists in the position of dealing with a colonial ruler that the new global hegemon, the US, came to view as less important than Indonesia (in light of US uncertainty in the early 1960s about whether Sukarno would tilt toward the West or the Communist bloc) (Webster 2009). 21 One consequence of the Balim’s belated entry into colonial history is that the Dutch, under pressure from Indonesia’s anti-Dutch campaigns and Third World anti-colonial movements, were compelled to demonstrate that their motivations were ‘ethical’—that the civilizational project aimed to prepare Papuans for self-rule (Rutherford 2012). Dutch officials promised eventual independence to Papuan leaders prior to the Indonesian takeover. The developmental veneer of the Dutch agenda belies the violence of pacification, with colonial police in the highlands sometimes shooting noncompliant indigenous residents to enforce their claim to a sovereignty superseding the existing system of alliances, hostilities, and boundaries (Lieshout 2009).

111 CHAPTER 2 in continual disrepair, and the high cost of air travel to Jayapura.

Fig. 2.7. Residents carry timber to make temporary repairs to the damaged ‘old’ bridge spanning the Uwe river and connecting Wamena to Wouma district. To the left is the ‘new’ bridge, which remained under construction for over a year. For several weeks in 2014, damage caused the old bridge to be unpassable for multi-passenger vehicles, forcing minivan terminals serving areas in the southern Balim Valley (Hepuba, Hitigima, Kurima) to relocate from Wouma market to the east side of the river.

The Balim valley is a region where integration—internally as a regional economy, and externally into broader provincial, national, and global orders and economies—is never convincingly materialized in actual infrastructural connectivity. The belated incorporation of the

Balim region into a wider capitalist world-economy produced the isolation that seems, in the discourses of mainstream development agendas or primitivist tourism, to be a natural and timeless feature of a landscape in a process of being ‘opened’ to the world. Here I am calling attention to a conjunction of two seemingly contradictory processes: incorporation and isolation.

Incorporation is a process whereby the Balim region transforms from a mostly self-sufficient economy into a subordinate margin that consumes the output of productive industries located elsewhere in a larger national and global economy. Isolation, meanwhile, is a process where the

Balim region transforms from being a space within which available transport capacities satisfy the limited scale and pace of distribution and mobility—to become a regional economy highly

112 CHAPTER 2 dependent on inbound and internal transport of ever-increasing volumes of goods produced outside the region. For places like the Balim valley, incorporation and isolation are two sides of a single process. Isolation is embodied in the inadequacy of the infrastructural channels through which incorporation happens. The regional distribution economy has been installed before its necessary infrastructures were constructed. These infrastructures have been lacking precisely because the highlands of New Guinea had never previously been subordinated to a wider economic order. The next section turns to this process of subordination.

Livelihoods incorporation since the 1950s

The 1950s establishment of a short-lived colonial sovereignty, enacted first through missionaries, did not immediately translate into a fully subordinate Balim economy. Self-sufficient, neighbourhood-scale food production remained the norm. The gradual institution of a cash economy, and the construction of some rudimentary provisioning networks under supervision by missionary and state agents (such as airstrips and motorcycle paths between villages), paved the way for the conscription of indigenous livelihoods into relations of labor and consumption oriented around new, non-local industrial products (Hayward 1983; Lieshout 2009). Typically, mission stations were established adjacent to indigenous neighborhoods. Proto-markets developed adjacent to missions as local residents provided produce, meat, firewood and building materials to missionaries in exchange for newly available items such as steel axes, packaged salt, or Western clothing.22 Missionaries began to formalize such market spaces by introducing notes

22 Salt was customarily extracted through a laborious process from a limited number of saltwater wells (by soaking and then burning plant fibers) present in a few sites in the mountains surrounding the Balim Valley. There is no evidence of metal production in New Guinea before the colonial era. Pre-colonial regional clothing, which continues to be practiced in some quarters, consisted of items such as vine-woven skirts (GVD: yokal) for women and penis-covering long gourds (GVD: holim) for men, as well as a range of other adornments, headgear, face coloring, and so on. Evangelization provided the immediate incitement for the

113 CHAPTER 2 which functioned as scrip (or currency) of various denomination. As missions expanded their activities, populations surrounding the missions took part in the trade of newly introduced items such as steel axes (Ploeg 1969). In these and other ways, the colonial civilizational project, initiated largely by missionaries, began the task of bringing into being a ‘modern’ distribution economy. Most of the labor of installing this regional economy was carried out by indigenous residents, who cleared paths and airstrips, transported goods and materials, and carried reports and samples of new goods and practices to other neighborhoods.

Mission-centerd commodity exchange was a major impetus for the involvement of indigenous livelihoods in the distribution of goods produced in the capitalist world-economy.

Mission and state development agents introduced new crops into horticultural practices, namely vegetables and new, non-indigenous cultivars of sweet potatoes. Today, the majority of horticultural production in the region is based on crops introduced in the 20th century.23 The short-lived colonial project also initiated another transition in food consumption that has gradually transformed the regional economy: the adoption of rice and the waning of sweet potato. Missions and state offices depended on rice airlifted from the coast along with other staple goods. As elsewhere in colonial Oceania, rice was one of the materials of modernization

(Bourke and Harwood 2009; Saweri 2001). In the case of Papua, the central place of rice in the new economy would take on heightened political meaning as a result of incorporation into

Indonesia—a country whose major population centers have historically had rice-based food regimes (and this is especially true of Java, from where dominant sections of the national bureaucracy and military have historically hailed).

embrace of western clothing items—first by the most successful mission students, who became evangelists and thus acquired new influence and authority (Hayward 1983; Lieshout 2009). 23 Exceptions include heritage sweet potato, banana, and taro crops; and some highly valued endemic varieties of pandanus.

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The postcolonial Indonesian state building agenda in the Balim region took its most salient form in the advent of rice as the new food staple. This was a slow process in light of the severe limits on formal wage labor (and thus purchasing power) for indigenous residents through the end of the 20th century. Rations for state civil servants (a broad category including teachers and health staff) have been a major avenue for accessing rice. In this way, rice has become a supplement to indigenous food production for households with a member working as a teacher or other (usually lower-rung) civil service occupation.

1977 marked a turning point toward further incorporation of the Balim economy within

Indonesia’s development mainstream. The military defeat of the pro-independence uprising, at the hands of the superior technology and mobility of the Indonesian forces, left many indigenous leaders with the sense that it would henceforth be necessary to accommodate Indonesian hegemony (Farhadian 2005). Thus began the period of development in exchange for pacification.

One element of this arrangement was to extend agricultural assistance for rice cultivation. Rice had not previously been cultivated in the region; neither was the Balim targeted as a major site of transmigration schemes where migrant farmers would be expected to inculcate new farming practices among indigenous residents. Agricultural extension officers established rice paddy projects at sites along the Balim river in the valley floor, where irrigation water was plentiful (in the absence of piped water infrastructures). The rice extension agenda never took hold in a widespread way in the Balim, and decades later, local rice production was making only a minor contribution to regional livelihoods. By 2012, local rice—grown mostly at Muai north of

Wamena—was only available at a handful of shops, selling at a higher price than Bulog rice.

Today two types of ‘imported’ rice are sold at most shops in Papua. The most widespread is

Bulog rice (beras Bulog), inexpensive Indonesian-grown rice distributed by the government

115 CHAPTER 2 logistics agency and erstwhile marketing board. Its counterpart is the expensive so-called ‘clean rice’ (beras bersih) imported from Vietnam or Thailand, and priced far beyond most indigenous household budgets.

The widespread adoption of rice by indigenous households is an issue of concern for advocates of indigenous cultural renewal and resistance to Indonesian hegemony. Members of the traditionalist wing of the independence movement—the customary organization Dewan Adat

Papua (Papuan Customary Council)—have identified the distribution of rice as a tactic to marginalize sweet potato, create dependence, and ‘Indonesianize’ Balim indigenous society

(Hisage 2006).24 The critique of rice is aimed both externally and internally: the auto-critical aspect laments the willingness of indigenous residents to move away from relying on sweet potato—the customary staple around which regional land use patterns were historically formed.

The lament about rice calls attention to sweet potato as the basis for the reproduction of life, in harmony with land and ancestors (Assolokobal 2007; Hisage 2006). It is noteworthy that such politicized laments of the waning of sweet potato in favor of rice proliferated in the years following implementation of Special Autonomy provisions, several years after its adoption as a national law in 2001. Autonomy has become a mechanism for accelerating transition of indigenous livelihoods away from local food production, toward reliance on state distribution.

Before such distribution programs expanded, during the period from the early 1960s to the late

2000s, the majority of indigenous livelihoods were based on household-organized horticulture

(Peters 2001, 50–51).25 Food production has been organized around sweet potatoes and other

24 Dewan Adat Papua (DAP) is the Papua-wide organization that advocates for indigenous customary institutions and Papuan independence; it is based also on a network of Dewan Adat Daerah (Region), Wilayah (Area), and Suku (Tribe) that organize at lower scales of territory and ethno-linguistic identity. Dewan Adat Lapago is the name of the Balim area Council. 25 William G. Martin argues that what some anthropologists have seen as non-capitalist spheres of domestic production are, in fact, organized in scalar units determined by the incorporation process (Martin 1987, 885–

116 CHAPTER 2 crops for consumption, as well as a variety of vegetable cash crops such as tomatoes, chilli peppers, green onions, and bananas. Produce sales generate cash for indigenous women to buy mass-produced goods at shops in Wamena, and accumulate cash for school fees and other expenses. Household members have also typically raised pigs, customarily used as reserve of value and exchange item. In the cash economy, pigs have been a convenient form of investment: a pig reared to a certain size and sold at market offers a way to obtain household cash for large expenses such as graduation fees or materials to upgrade rural housing. Overall, livelihoods arrangements for the majority of indigenous residents in the first half-century of Indonesian rule involved a growing economic subordination to newcomer commerce—but without large-scale detachment of the indigenous population from the means to produce their own staple foods. The extension and expansion of national commodity distribution networks in the Balim supplemented indigenous production, and only more recently began to significantly eclipse it.

Sweet potato and rice

In order to frame my argument about the acceleration of the Balim’s economic incorporation, I present a moment when I first became aware of the increased importance of rice in the indigenous food regime.26 In 2013, early in fieldwork (and several years after I first began travelling to the Balim region), I visited the household of Lina (who I name as one my key guides in the Introduction chapter), in a district a short drive from Wamena, in the Grand Valley

87). I have yet to determine whether, in the Balim case, the definition of the household as the unit of indigenous production is itself an outcome of an early stage of incorporation—presumably transforming a pre- colonial situation based on larger units of production. 26 Like the New Guinea highlands more broadly, the Balim region is widely known as a sweet potato region. When I was in Jayapura on my way to Wamena for my first visit in 2007, I had heard that “orang pegunungan makan ubi” (“highlanders eat tubers”). This identification of the region with its staple crop is associated with the idea that highlanders are attached to customary ways. This image of intense attachment provides essentialist explanations for development experts rationalizing regional inequalities, as well as for international pro-independence advocates who claim an essential difference between Papuans and Indonesians. Discourses about Balim culinary otherness signal the fact that the regional food regime is an arena of contested change.

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Dani-speaking area. Lina, the mother of the family, was one of my key interlocutors and had previously welcomed me into the family as a sort of honorary member. By the time of the visit in question I had known the family for several years. Given that my field research involved frequent circulation between sites, visits to this household often had an urgent quality, that of a too-brief and too-rare visit to dear friends or (in this case, adoptive, or fictive) relatives.

I had learned to bring store-bought food and other shop items during such visits to rural households: usually sweets and snacks, and household items such as cooking oil, detergent, candles, and the like. As I prepared for this visit, buying items at a shop near the appropriate minivan at the market-terminal, I ran into a friend who was familiar with the situation of the host family. Seeing me ponder what to buy, this friend suggested that the ideal thing would be a sack of rice. I bought a 25-kg sack of imported Vietnamese ‘clean’ rice; the minivan conductor loaded it onto the roof of the vehicle.

When I arrived with the rice (carried by one of the teenage boys of the household), Lina began to weep. She eventually explained that all this time, she had been too shy (malu) to ask me to bring rice, even though the household needed it. Lina told me that as she lacked brothers or other adult male direct relatives, she had nobody to bring her rice besides her husband, and his monthly civil service rice ration barely lasted half the month. When I asked about her crops, Lina told me that there were often no sweet potatoes to be harvested, and they were too expensive to buy at the market.27 Crops had recently been damaged by flooding of the Balim river, temporarily limiting income from produce sales. Meanwhile, Lina said, her husband and the other men always seemed to be away in town and unavailable to work in the gardens. Lina’s complaint about the men being unavailable for garden work fit a pattern under Autonomy (that I

27 In 2013, a pile of sweet potatoes suitable for a meal of approximately 4 people cost Rp. 50,000 (roughly $5 USD). One could instead purchase 4 kg of rice at the same price, and this would last for several meals.

118 CHAPTER 2 describe in further detail below). Decreased garden productivity meant that it was important to have rice on hand in the kitchen.28 I came to interpret Lina’s tears as a reaction to the fact that by finally bringing over some rice, I was enacting a kind of kin role—an adult male relative able to access food distribution circuits—that she lacked access to. For me to play this role also called attention to her lack, and to the vulnerable situation of depending on gifts or transfers of rice for household subsistence.

Reflecting on the episode later, I felt embarrassed about having taken so long to understand a basic (if emerging) feature of Balim life: the central role in indigenous rural livelihoods of the non-Papuan staple rice. During my visits before fieldwork, I had frequented

Balim youth activists who expressed pro-independence opinions and a critical analysis of the incorporation process. Several of my acquaintances in this milieu had described their contradictory predicament of enjoying rice-based meals—particularly those who had spent time outside Papua as students at universities in Jayapura, or outside Papua in Sulawesi, Java, or

Bali.29 I remember one organizer confiding to me, early in my first visit to Wamena, that although she valued hipere (GVD: sweet potato) politically, as a basis of indigenous life, she preferred to eat nasi (rice) on a daily basis.

During another visit, Lina told me a story about her own experience of learning to like rice. Her father was a renowned leader of a major war alliance, and as such, he had many wives—and dozens of children. He had represented a large segment of the regional population

28 At the time, this household counted four adults and four children of various ages (this composition changed over time as children or adults moved in with other relatives for various reasons). They lived in the customary GVD dwelling arrangement of the silimo, a courtyard with two hunila (longhouses each containing a hearth, women’s sleeping quarters, and adjoining pig pen) and a single honai (men’s hut). The two households occupying each hunila did not generally pool resources across hunila, beyond the shared expenses of maintaining the silimo as a whole. 29 Rice-based meals are widely available at restaurants in Wamena, but are fare more affordable in Jayapura. Chapter 4 analyzes the pattern of youth migration outside the region in relation to the politics of distribution.

119 CHAPTER 2 when Dutch Catholic missionaries established missions in the Grand Valley Dani area. These missionaries depended on rice rations delivered by air from Sentani on the north coast. As a small child in the 1970s, Lina took a liking to eating rice, which her father received from the mission. When the missionaries offered to admit one of his daughters for schooling at the mission in Wamena, Lina’s father chose Lina, knowing how much she liked eating rice. Lina recalled to me her experience of discovering rice and revelling in qualities that distinguished it from sweet potatoes—its fluffiness and uniformity contrasting with the uneven and unpredictable nature of sweet potatoes (which are more likely to have bad spots and be cooked unevenly).

Experiences of rice as a pleasing food express a contrast between the customary and the novel, and a comparison between an unprocessed root crop, scrubbed of dirt and peeled before eating, and a processed, standardized, and mechanically cleaned grain. Put this way, it is easy to understand how the introduction of rice might capture the imagination.30 This speaks to analysis of the types of desire that seem to drive transitions from coarse to fine foods—such as Singh’s description of a shift from millet to wheat in Central India (Singh 2015). Singh shows how this striving for a type of culinary refinement favours a more water-intensive crop, undermining the ecological foundations of life in a context of water scarcity. Unlike Singh, I analyze this type of change in relation to world-system forces of incorporation. I interpret experiences of taste and desire as part of the fine grain of a process of subordination to encompassing distribution networks and the more profitable production system they source from.

30 The enchantment of rice has come to carry a negative implication through associations with disempowering aspects of Indonesian rule in Papua, and pro-independence discourses about Papuan suffering and Indonesian violence. Related suspicions also appear beyond Papua: scandalous news reports appeared in 2016 about plastic rice being sold in numerous cities in Java. Meanwhile, the ascendance of rice over sweet potato in Papua progresses while, across Indonesia as a whole, a higher-scale displacement of rice by wheat is enacted through the increasing commercial dominance of instant noodles—a transition that benefits agri-business conglomerates notably in Australia (Fabiosa 2006; International Labour Organization 2013, 38).

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Accelerated food regime incorporation under Autonomy and partition

An accelerated shift away from indigenous food production has occurred in the wake of the implementation of Special Autonomy legislation. In order to make sense of this acceleration, it is necessary to clarify some basic features of Autonomy reform as they have influenced matters of consumption, production and distribution. Autonomy legislated increased indigenous representation at all levels of government. In particular, Autonomy legislation mandated that all heads of territorial administrative units (kepala daerah) be indigenous, from the provincial level through regency (kabupaten), district (distrik), village (desa), and hamlet (dusun) (Chauvel

2010).31 Meanwhile, a separate but related process of partition (pemekaran; lit. blossoming) has subdivided the existing territorial units into smaller territories. Pemekaran has taken place at all levels, from province to hamlet. Jakarta’s tactical deployment of partition in Papua began with the 2003 decision by the government of Megawati Soekarnoputri to divide Papua province in two, and thereby undermine the potential for Special Autonomy to become a basis for bolder political claims from Papuan leaders (Chauvel 2010). Many indigenous leaders subsequently themselves took up the mantle of pemekaran in a proliferation of campaigns to create further subdivisions, especially at the regency level, with the stated aim of bringing government services and infrastructures closer to populations residing far from their regency center (McWilliam 2011;

Suryawan 2011; Timmer 2007). In the Balim region, a key moment of partition took place in

2008, when six new regencies were carved out of Jayawijaya regency—which until then had covered the entire Balim valley, with its capital in Wamena. This started a process of installation of new administrative offices throughout the Balim region, headed by indigenous representatives.

31 In Papua, the term distrik is more commonly used than the equivalent camat that is in use in other Indonesian regions. Consequently I refer to regency and district, respectively, rather than district and sub- district as appears in scholarship on other regions.

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Partition campaigns at all scales have been intensely competitive, as representatives of different customary networks, present within single partitioned territories, vie for control of new development funds, other state resources, and decision-making regarding infrastructure siting.

New indigenous representatives, acting in the spirit of Autonomy to increase indigenous participation in government, have increased indigenous hiring in new civil service staffing. One major economic impact of these developments was that along with this marked increase in civil service employment among the residents of the Balim hinterland has come a corresponding increase in access to rice rations. Besides employee rations, Autonomy has increased access to state-subsidized rice supply through raskin (contraction of beras miskin, ‘poor rice’) programs

(Saidah 2014). Raskin long predates Autonomy; its scale has expanded dramatically through the increase in territorial administration offices through partition. Rations and raskin together entangle access to rice in the distributive dynamics of Autonomy arrangements and partition.

These rice provision programs have expanded and now pass through all the newly partitioned administrative offices of various scales. These distribution arrangements demand new levels of mobilization and lobbying at all scales. Household heads are compelled to strive to maintain positive relations with village and district heads so as to ensure access to rice allowances. In the event such allowances do not suffice, households may call on more amply provisioned kin—such as a relative who has attained a higher level in the civil service. Meanwhile, heads and other officials of villages, districts, and regencies—and their respective entourages—increasingly must travel to higher-level centers (of districts, regencies and the province, in Jayapura, respectively) to sustain relations with officials at relevant scales of authority. The various types of mobile lobbying required to secure household needs via these state allocations are one type of what

Ferguson refers to as ‘distributive labor’ (Ferguson 2015, 51).

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Much literature has focused on the turbulent nature of the process of decentralization in

Papua: factional conflict at local scales, rivalry over control of hiring and other distribution processes (Chauvel 2010; Suryawan 2011). The partisan critique if Autonomy highlights how many pro-independence voices see these conflicts as part of a strategy by the Indonesian state to shatter Papuan unity (H. Haluk, n.d.; M. Haluk 2013; Yoman 2010). Over the course of my work in the Balim region, from 2007 to 2014, it became increasingly common for acquaintances to report situations of intra-indigenous conflict over affairs of local and regional government.

During these years, new government offices were being established throughout the region: nodes of state distribution were proliferating. Partition and Autonomy were orienting indigenous livelihoods around practices of cultivating relations with the range of office holders who mediate access to rice aid and rations and allocations from block grants for rural development.

During my research, numerous informants—from rural-residing women and elders to student organizers in Jayapura—described a decline of regional food production under

Autonomy. Indigenous women have tended to be keen analysts of this process. Scenes of lobbying and faction building that mediate state distribution tend to be male-dominated spaces.32

Horticultural labor in Balim communities has, in contrast, tended to be women’s work—with men more likely to be called upon to provide labor on a sporadic basis for certain tasks such as clearing new planting areas, or building and maintaining fences to protect crops from pigs

(Peters 2001, 50–51; Sugandi 2014). In interviews, women residents complained that men have been increasingly absent from households, busy with ‘politics’, and thus unavailable to contribute their labor to horticulture. The meaning of ‘politics’ here refers especially to the

32 This gendering of formal politics and the politics of state distribution specifically can be understood as building on several male-dominated histories: in addition to an indigenous Balim historical pattern of men managing ceremonial distribution activities, male colonial and postcolonial state building agents have tended to approach indigenous life with an assumption that men were the principal power holders.

123 CHAPTER 2 above-mentioned practices of going to town to lobby, network, or travelling in the entourage of an official or politician.33 Some women were not only concerned about the lack of horticultural labor, but also about whether their husbands or other male kin would even succeed in securing rice allocations. On more than one occasion Lina expressed concern that her husband used the need to go to town for ‘politics’ as a pretext to socialize or play numbers games in the alleyways around the terminal. The demands of the new politics of distribution under Autonomy tended to dramatize the gendering of indigenous livelihoods: more strongly compelling men to take part in mobile and ill-defined ‘politics’, while constraining women to deal with shortage of horticultural labor and new kinds of uncertainty. Pro-independence campaigners commonly described the resulting situation as an era of increased dependence and vulnerability—with indigenous men reduced to a type of begging (minta-minta)—and a broad crisis of Balim horticulture (H. Haluk, n.d.; Yoman 2010).

The 2008 partition of Jayawijaya regency into a number of new regencies complicates the matter of a statistical demonstration of the decline of indigenous food production—given that this partition took place just as regional regulations had been implemented to intensify the politics of distribution that are central to my argument. Comparing statistics for 2004 and 2015

(before and after the partition) published in the provincial surveys Papua Dalam Angka (Papua in Figures), the population of Jayawijaya regency is roughly constant at 210 000 (due to the subtraction of the residents of the newly partitioned regencies) (Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi

33 In some cases, ‘politics’ may also refer to organizing with pro-independence organizations—this may have been the case for Lina’s husband, who had affinities with Dewan Adat. Chauvel has described how two forms of politics coexist in Papua: on one hand the Papuan nationalist movement, where politics is understood as a confrontation between Papua and Indonesia; and on the other, the Autonomy-era negotiations and contests over control of state resources, involving contestations between indigenous and newcomer populations, as well as among indigenous populations (Chauvel 2010). It may be that increasing demand for mobile lobbying for state distribution under Autonomy was mirrored by a parallel increase in mobile organizing on the part of pro- independence partisans, as different coalitions of Papuan nationalist organizations organized a series of high- profile events in Jayapura. Tracing connections between these developments in the distinct arenas of Papuan politics is beyond the scope of this thesis.

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Papua 2004, 2017). Over this same period, sweet potato production decreased roughly 28%, from 158 to 114 thousand tons (Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi Papua 2004, 2017). Sweet potato production in the Balim region was the topic of a 2013 study by the International Labour

Organization, which drew on government statistics to note that from 2010 to 2012, sweet potato production in Jayawijaya regency declined by 6.3%, from 146 to 137 thousand tons

(International Labour Organization 2013). This decline reflected tendencies in Papua’s other sweet potato-producing regions: across Papua, sweet potato production in Papua peaked in 2009 and subsequently decreased yearly (International Labour Organization 2013). Meanwhile, during the period 2007-2011, rice consumption in Papua increased by 3.3% per year—compared to an

Indonesian average of 0.74%. Studies from the preceding years, before Autonomy’s full array of distribution provisions were implemented (when various regional regulations were passed), suggest that the transition from sweet potato to rice was already under way—especially in the immediate periphery of Wamena, where horticultural land was being transferred to non- indigenous control for new uses (Lassa 2004). Major land use conversion at that time included market and terminal construction in Jibama, and new residential and commercial developments in a northwest peri-urban expansion of Wamena. In the wider Balim hinterland, such land conversion has not yet reached major proportions. In these areas, the expansion of state distribution programs has played a larger role than real estate development in detaching the population from the means of food production.34

The Balim’s incorporation process consists of an encroaching system of distribution working to displace and eclipse an indigenous-controlled system of production. This situation exhibits how a mode of distribution can gain hegemony at the expense of a prevailing mode of

34 Historically, alienation of land to enable the expansion of Wamena had played a role in initiating indigenous participation in the new regional distribution economy—as the state offered ‘development’ in exchange for relinquishing claims to alienated land (Sugandi 2014, 147–50).

125 CHAPTER 2 production. The historical period between colonial missions and agents establishing the first proto-markets, and Jakarta implementing Autonomy provisions of proliferating regional distribution nodes, can be seen in hindsight as a time when forces of incorporation gradually built up. A progressively expanding commercial economy and a basic structure of state distribution inserted themselves into the regional food regime and associated livelihoods, consumption, and mobility patterns—gradually subordinating indigenous production.

Autonomy’s expanded politics of distribution has accelerated this subordination.

The accelerated transition under Autonomy highlights how food production, distribution, and consumption are questions of power. Expanded mechanisms of rice distribution under

Autonomy enact a shift in food regimes (Friedmann 1993)—characterized by new forms of dependence. Friedmann highlighted US Cold War practices of buying loyalty and dependence from Global South client states (such as Mexico and India) by providing both newly engineered high-yield hybrid crop seeds and technologies, and cheap, subsidized US grain imports. The history of the US food regime’s global expansion secured loyalty to US interests among leaders in numerous countries—while producing in those same countries a mix of increased productivity, increased vulnerability to environmental change, decline of agricultural livelihoods, and resulting rural-to-urban displacement (Bernstein 2016; McMichael 2009). As suggested by the partisan critique of Autonomy, Jakarta’s tactical approaches to Papua now aim to secure

Papuan loyalty not so much through agricultural productivity improvements, but rather through the proliferation of state distribution channels and nodes. This proliferation valorizes a form of decentralized indigenous authority while eclipsing regional food production.

I found that it was not only pro-independence partisans who identified a disempowering aspect to the expansion of state food distribution. Time and again, I heard non-indigenous

126 CHAPTER 2 individuals drawing on their observations of the new distribution regime to argue that state food distribution was harmful to indigenous society. On one such occasion, I was sitting in the front of a pickup truck on my way from Wamena to the village of Dombe.⁠ Not far outside Wamena, we passed a rural homestead that doubled as a district administration office. A large crowd was assembled around a pickup truck in the yard, and several young men were unloading dozens of sacks of Bulog rice. This appeared to be an occasion for distribution of food aid. The driver next to me, originally from South Sulawesi, said something that shocked me at first: “That’s what is killing the local people. They become too lazy to work (malas kerja). May as well just put poison in the rice and finish the job!” Hours later, arrived at our destination, I pondered what he meant. The driver’s condemnation of state aid as a force that would make recipients ‘lazy’ aligned with a global tendency of conservative criticism of government social welfare programs

(Mead [1986] 2008; Thatcher and Keay 1987). I heard similar ideas from missionary development workers in Dombe and elsewhere in the Balim region, and have noted the traces of their criticism of indigenous poverty in the writings of Western Papua experts (Anderson 2014).

Still, I heard in the driver’s comment—and the somber mood among the passengers (all non- indigenous men) when he said it—a refutation of Jakarta’s claims about Autonomy’s potential empowering effects. In the Balim context, where state distribution served to defuse indigenous claims while accelerating incorporation, conservative critique took on an appearance of truth—as the indigenous population was effectively denied the opportunity to experience state distribution as a form of protection.

Livelihoods under overlapping phases of incorporation

Commercial and state distribution have constituted two phases in the incorporation process, even as they have overlapped in practice. The expansion of distribution under state decentralization

127 CHAPTER 2 has been not only a matter of rations and food aid, but also funds for local development projects; and a proliferation of ways of accessing cash. Bundles of cash have come into intensified circulation throughout Papua, as newly nominated coordinators of district development bodies, created under Autonomy, carry funds between Jayapura, Wamena, regency and district capitals and villages (Mollet 2011; Suryawan 2011). The process of shifting livelihoods dependence from horticulture toward this politics of distribution is multi-faceted. Large-scale indigenous participation in markets, and increasing consumption of rice in the time leading up to

Autonomy’s implementation, set the stage for the new politics of distribution to take hold—for state distribution to more deeply orient leadership and mobility. Autonomy’s reorganizations of indigenous livelihoods have served to entrench the relegation of the Balim region to an endpoint situation. The more recent phase in this trajectory depends less on newcomer commerce and more on the integration of indigenous livelihoods into a state-oriented distribution system. Still, this later phase builds on the inter-scalar peripheralization that I have traced and associated with the terminal economy both as a concrete space and set of relations.

The overlap of the two phases of incorporation is clear from recalling that state distribution programs include not just the rice aid and rations that I have focused on, but also block grants to district and village administrations. This cash is invested in development or infrastructure projects in some cases, or divided and distributed to households in others (Mollet

2011). The circulation of such grant cash, and the dependence of this circulation on various kinds of lobbying labor by household heads and members of entourages of officials and politicians, provides cash for consumption. Newcomer commerce both set the stage for this expansion of state distribution, and has been boosted by this disbursement system that prioritizes lobbying over indigenous food production.

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A variety of specific indigenous livelihoods arrangements result from these overlapping incorporation phases. The interviews I carried out among residents of my two main rural fieldwork sites, as well as group discussions held as part of the Wamena Economic Observation

Project, illustrated that it was very common for residents to depend mainly on a combination of household horticultural production for consumption and sale; rice rations through a household member with a civil service job; sporadic allocations of rice at times of distribution of aid primarily through the district administration; and purchase of small amounts of rice from market shops on an ongoing basis when state-distributed food runs out. The relative importance of these elements could vary with time. One interviewee—a man in his late twenties who lived in a household with his wife and child, as well as other relatives—explained that in this situation, many indigenous households were failing to build anything for the future: “We don’t invest in an economy for ourselves. We hardly farm anymore—if there is no rice in the kitchen, I’ll just send my wife to the market to buy 25,000 Rp (USD $2.50) worth of rice. We can’t go long without something from the district, or the garden”.

Many respondents described how this partial dependence on state distribution created a new kind of vulnerability to conflicts among local factions vying to control district- or village- level distribution of resources. Oskar, one of my close guides in the Kaimo, was for a time a coordinator for his district’s RESPEK committee. This position required that he facilitate open meetings to decide how to spend block grants, and manage the spending so decided. After some time, Oskar complained to me that his work had become impossible because of the conflict in the district. A relative of his wife had been elected as district head, and was clashing with Oskar over what the spending priorities should be. Oskar saw that this district head would decide to distribute the block grants as cash handouts to each household, and was worried that households

129 CHAPTER 2 seen as rivals—including Oskar’s own—would lose access. Oskar was stressed out, and decided to leave the highlands for a few months; he went to Jayapura to stay away from the scene of

Kaimo district politics—hoping to avoid provoking the district head into denying his family their share. These and other examples of household livelihoods management under Autonomy show a situation of heightened anxiety and risks of fragmentation. The availability of various source of state distribution made it so that households now had a large number of potential resources to turn to at any given time. However, this could require careful management of relationships, and difficult decisions about whether to escalate, assuage, or evade new kinds of conflict. As

Autonomy’s politics of distribution insinuated itself into relations among kin and neighbors, newly localized vulnerabilities and difficult decisions emerged.

This proliferation of conflict and vulnerability highlight a contradictory aspect of the incorporation process in this context. The location of distribution authority at the scale of the district, displacing indigenous production and generating dependence on national distribution networks, at the same time created scenes of local rivalry—scenes that seem to contrast with a theoretical image of an extractive world-system forces acting upon the region. Under Autonomy, then, the power relations at play in the incorporation process were partially obscured by an arena of horizontal tension.

Infrastructural expressions of incorporation

I have presented elements of context and observations that highlight the external forces that together bring the terminal economy into being as a regional structure and ongoing process.

Some scholars of Melanesian modernity have argued that analysts who emphasize external forces are prone to overlook indigenous engagements with, or attraction to, global forces of encompassment (LiPuma 2001; Sahlins 1994). While I value interpretations of how features of

130 CHAPTER 2 capitalist modernity articulate with pre-existing categories of indigenous thought, my intention is instead to trace how regional politics take shape in response to the extractive global forces of incorporation. The Balim case admittedly appears to relate oddly to this idea given that large- scale resource extraction has yet to begin—and that the expansion of state distribution programs have been the most recent mechanism for accelerating the regional economy’s incorporation into the world-system. In this light, a Sahlinsesque challenge to my analysis might question whether

Balim regional affairs are actually so strongly shaped by the extractive force of core capital. My response to such a challenge would be to advocate tracing multiple paths (some of them indirect) through which the extractive force of core capital works on the territory and population.

The expectation of an eventual large-scale extractive boom in the Balim region, under future conditions of improved infrastructural connection to the coast, is part of what drives efforts to integrate the population into the Indonesian state, via distribution programs. At the same time, the Indonesian economy’s post-crisis reperipheralization has intensified the historical pattern of internal migration, made commerce a more important source of livelihood for migrants, and directed investments to extractive frontiers such as Papua. The wealth circulating through Papua’s major resource extraction installations (such as the Freeport mine) radiate to various secondary economic sectors in regions beyond the immediate locations of extractive sites

(Ballard and Banks 2009, 149–50) and in so doing attract newcomers to the Balim region. These effects of extractive core capital are somewhat concealed, given the small scale of commercial profits accumulated by newcomer merchants (and partly invested back in their places of origin), and the broad sweep of the non-extractive distribution of food aid and rations under Autonomy.

By locating the Balim politics of distribution in relation to the extractive forces of peripheralization—be they indirect, concealed, and complex—and how they work across scales,

131 CHAPTER 2 it is possible to trace how they shape livelihood and mobility. This in turn brings into view how regional contestations respond to those global forces. The following chapter will examine regional contestations in more detail. To close this chapter, I elaborate on how the first phase of incorporation, via commerce, has proceeded through a regional organization of infrastructures that bears the imprint of the extractive logic of incorporation. Here I briefly discuss how this logic is reflected in the organization of infrastructures, and associated patterns of labor and mobility.

While large-scale resource extraction is not yet underway in the Balim, the economy of small-scale provision of primary resources (especially food produce, timber and gravel) is an important element in indigenous livelihoods—and sustains the construction and commerce that materialize the region’s integration into Indonesia. The infrastructures that move these materials are, in most cases, the same infrastructures that move the indigenous population. Minivans carrying commuters to and from market also carry produce and other materials to be sold there, and mass-produced products bought in town on return trips back to rural homesteads.

Infrastructures of distribution double as infrastructures of human mobility; the latter often seem to be appended, as an afterthought, to the former. The very inadequacy of infrastructures in the

Balim region—compared with, say, the modern highway linking the Freeport mine with Timika on the south coast—reflects the extractive priorities of the pattern of economic relations between

Papua and the world-economy.

The infrastructural coincidence of mobility and distribution is a characteristic feature of the Balim as a place at once populous and isolated, that lacks major extractive installations, and yet whose incorporation is driven by an extractive incorporation force directed at Papua as a whole. The fusing of mobility and distribution infrastructures enacts a byproduct of this

132 CHAPTER 2 situation: the effective conscription of large segments of the indigenous population into various types of informal work to patch these partial infrastructures together.35 The relegation of indigenous residents to such types of labor involves a subordinate positioning in relation to more powerful actors. Inequalities and differences in range and velocity constitute an arena of relative motion that expresses relegation—the sense of being ‘left behind’ (tinggal nonton, lit. ‘left to watch’) that appears in indigenous Balim literature (Assolokobal 2007).36 The extractive forces of incorporation serve to inscribe this relative motion in infrastructure—and as is clear in the next Chapter, regional contestations respond to this inscription.

Conclusion: recursion across scales

The threads presented so far present a synoptic view of the ensemble of relations through which the Balim regional economy has been turned into an isolated outer edge of expanding state and market distribution networks. This incorporation supersedes the historically non-subordinate regional production system. The Balim economy becomes incorporated as an extension of a national economy of distribution—itself subordinate to more profitable production arrangements that dominate the world-economy. These global power relations recur across scales, transmitting the hierarchies and inequalities in the global organization of production. The combined process of isolation and incorporation is broadly characteristic of New Guinean experiences of imperialism and post-colonial state building, especially for interior and highlands regions. This concomitance of isolation and incorporation produces the recursive pattern: to constitute a place as a node of distribution implies superseding its production system, and turning it into a launching pad for further distribution and supersession.

35 I elaborate on this process of conscription, and trace some its consequences, in Chapter 4. 36 This idea is important in Chapter 3 as it considers anxieties and resentments that surround the unequal regional division of distribution labor.

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Commerce and expanded state distribution have been two overlapping phases of the regional economy’s incorporation into the world-system. This process shows contradictory aspects, producing experiences of isolation, fragmentation, and uncertainty. Global-scale interests of core capital have articulated with Jakarta’s concern for sovereignty, to produce a situation where newcomer merchants and localized state distribution act as forces of incorporation. The possibility of an eventual extractive boom in the Balim region—which would more drastically reorganize the economy—sits in the background of this multifaceted process.

The next two chapters further examine the set of relations and political possibilities that flow from the infrastructural expressions of the incorporation process. The expansion of state distribution under Autonomy has been Jakarta’s response to indigenous challenges to Indonesian power in Papua. The next chapter traces the emergence of these contestations out of the infrastructures of commercial distribution—and interprets efforts to regulate the incorporation that works through them.

134

Chapter 3 – Contesting the Terminal: Difference, Disruption, and

Regulation

Late one Sunday afternoon in Wamena, I heard about a tense confrontation that had taken place earlier that day at one of the open-air markets that dot the town’s periphery. The regent (bupati) for the area had reportedly descended on the market along with a crew of security officers from the Satpol PP1 to disperse market and terminal participants—produce vendors, shopowners, drivers, conductors, shoppers, idlers, porters, and gamblers. This action enacted the Jayawijaya regency administration’s (kabupaten) new policy banning market activity on Sundays. A witness to the dispersal described how the officers shouted at vendors, kicking their mounds of vegetables aside. During the coming weeks, social and economic life at markets—and the adjoining minivan terminals that connect markets with villages of the Balim Valley surrounding

Wamena—would be suspended every Sunday to uphold the Christian day of rest.

My acquaintance who witnessed the argument was a Grand Valley Dani man who, at the time, was working with a development project aimed at empowering Dani women to succeed in petty trade. He lamented the regent’s hostile action against market vendors, and complained that the administration lacked sympathy for ordinary indigenous people (masyarakat) trying to make a living. He was recounting the incident as part of a discussion among a group of Papuan researchers gathered as part of the Wamena Economic Observation Project (WEOP), a project I coordinated in collaboration with local NGOs and Papuan academics in order to document the transactions, trajectories, and aspirations that constitute the regional distribution economy. We were especially interested in the livelihoods strategies of indigenous women (mama-mama)

1 Satuan Polisi Pamong Praja: a police-like unit under regency authority, deployed for crowd control.

135 CHAPTER 3 produce vendors. Many of these women commute from rural villages in crowded minivans, to earn some cash to buy staples such as rice, cooking oil or dish soap from shops in town, and to raise money for their children’s school fees. Our discussions were largely focused on women vendors’ struggles amid a decline of indigenous farming and different kinds of insecurity at the market. I expected my research partners to be critical of the regent’s aggressive action. Instead I found ambivalence and some support for the policy of enforcing the Sunday market closure.

One supporter among my associates—all nominal Christians of various denominations

(including both Protestants and Catholics)—explained that the Sunday ban could be a worthwhile means of respecting the weekly day of rest, as instructed by the Bible. Another remarked that the market closure would reduce the number of church congregants skipping

Sunday services. A third argued that enforcing the ban would help counter a rash of thefts on

Sundays during church services, when many rural homesteads were emptied of residents, leaving unguarded belongings and crops as easy targets. According to this argument, the market provided the crowds and transactional arena for thieves to resell stolen goods; and the transportation to make a clean getaway. In a broad sense, supporters argued that unless the market and terminal were regularly suspended, problems such as theft and other worrisome market-area activities such as gambling and illicit intoxication would continue. The weekly suspension of market activity would reduce such harmful activities, and make time in the rhythms of indigenous life for households and communities to gather and cultivate positive moral values.

The fact of support for the Sunday closure illustrated concerns about the types of sociability and transactions that take place at markets. No one denied that this policy, enacted by an indigenous Dani regent, would cause problems for people who were used to travelling or

136 CHAPTER 3 going to market on Sundays. At the same time, it was clear that the policy channeled a wider aspiration to create distance between the indigenous population and the market-terminal. This aspiration expressed anxieties about indigenous enmeshment in the commercial economy. As I will present in further detail below, the regent’s new Sunday closure policy intervened in a recent regional history marked by various types of unrest at markets. Much of this unrest had been fuelled by indigenous concerns about newcomer-dominated commerce, and a broad indigenous critique of how commerce disempowers the Balim’s indigenous population. In and around

Wamena, such critique and concerns have occasionally crystallized into collective actions to disrupt commercial distribution. These have included the incidents that led to Bloody Wamena in

2000, with flag raisings at markets and protestors planting spikes in the airport runway; then a

2007 uprising that shut down markets, spurred by reports that shops were selling poisoned foods; and the recent prevalence of road blockades by young men who set up informal toll points in the hinterland, demanding passage fees from vehicles. The regent’s 2014 policy of weekly market and terminal suspension formalized this wider regional pattern of periodic interruption of distribution networks.

The question of indigenous critiques and contestations of commercial power, and their moral register, is inseparable from the issue of social difference in the Balim valley and in Papua generally. The commercial economy, and market and terminal spaces, have been unequal interfaces between migrant-dominated town and indigenous-dominated hinterland. Peri-urban markets and terminals extend the distribution economy that enacts the process of incorporation through which indigenous production is eclipsed, and the regional economy subordinated to national and global networks. Relations between merchants and customers, produce vendors and buyers, and vehicle owners and passengers, express this wider indigenous disempowerment.

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Protests that have contested the inequalities reproduced through such relations, have also tended to emphasize distinctions between indigenous and migrant.

In contrast to a conventional opposition of ‘identity politics’ to ‘political economy’, a long tendency of critical and anti-imperialist thought has analyzed how the global expansion of capitalism has produced (and depended on) axes of difference conceptualized as race or ethnicity

(Du Bois 2007; Fanon 2004; J. O’Brien 1986). Colonial regimes in Southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific deployed migrant populations as part of agendas of accumulation and control— generating situations of ethnic and religious diversity overlapping with hierarchies of power and wealth (Furnivall 1948; Kelly 1992; Tarling 1992). In the Balim region, the social distinctions that have become grounds for contestation in the terminal economy have been produced by the region’s economic incorporation, expressed via an expanding distribution economy. In addition to setting the conditions for the indigenous-migrant chasm, commodity distribution has been an arena where intra-indigenous distinctions have taken on new salience. In some cases, inter-group conflicts are triggered by marketplace incidents; in others, distinctions have gained new weight as the process of regional economic incorporation proceeds. These tensions layer into the overarching opposition (migrant versus indigenous) in constituting the terminal as a site of fraught distinctions, at multiple scales. Efforts to regulate the terminal economy, such as the regent’s Sunday market and terminal closure, intervened in this multifarious scene—inviting an analysis that considers moments of disruption and regulation in relation to these scales of tension.

This chapter builds on Chapter 2’s analysis of the terminal economy by showing how this structure’s gathering of heterogeneous forces generates constellations of multi-scalar difference that incite indigenous-led agendas of disruption and regulation. It sets out to illustrate three

138 CHAPTER 3 linked processes: first, how the region’s incorporation into the world-economy produced a multi- scalar constellation of distinctions; second, how these distinctions have been infused with moral charge—rooted in both indigenous critiques of migrant commerce, and colonial scrutiny of indigenous expenditure; and third, how these moralities motivate recent indigenous-led efforts at disruption and regulation.

In what follows, I first trace a recent history of turbulence and uprisings at peri-urban markets and terminals. Organizers and participants have expressed concern that migrant merchants’ provision of non-local, mass-produced foods threatens the endurance of indigenous life. This illustrates how the space of the terminal economy becomes a site of anxieties expressed in relation to ethnic distinctions. The chapter then turns to forms of regulation that have grappled with the volatility of markets and their ethnically coded economic roles: first, relocation of the main market beyond town limits, second, rules that mandate the construction of indigenous icons on shops; and finally, construction of a separate market exclusively for indigenous vendors. I consider these efforts within the overall trajectory of regional economic incorporation, to emphasize the emergence of an indigenous-led regulatory agenda that addresses ethnic difference as it is articulated through distribution. The chapter then describes the way the process of incorporation has recursively produced various scales of ethnic distinction. Finally, it examines how these distinctions have been infused with moral charges that motivate the regulation agenda.

Market confrontations

Marketplaces in Wamena are broadly understood to be sites of tension and potential conflict. At a basic, ordinary level, a range of mundane tensions shape everyday life at markets. Among indigenous women produce vendors, a common worry is that intoxicated Dani youths might get

139 CHAPTER 3 into fights and incite larger-scale conflicts along lines of historically opposed customary affiliations; or pick a fight with a migrant shop owner and trigger punitive police or army action on the market as a whole. These types of incidents are common enough. Their likelihood is known to increase as the sun sets, when straggling produce vendors become anxious about unloading remaining merchandise—and whatever consumption of intoxicants is going on in back alleys or back rooms increases its effects. When I visited a market in the early evening, I often noted some vague tension. I also experienced the power of rumour to mobilize people in this context. One evening, shopping for dinner ingredients, I noticed heads turning in one direction, and heard murmurs about a fight reportedly triggered when a drunk Dani youth overturned an

Indonesian areca vendor’s table. After hearing someone in the distance say that—or ask if— soldiers (tentara) were on their way, I repeated what I heard, to which my companion reacted with alarm—“tentara!?” As the rumour of soldiers’ approach spread, I hurriedly stumbled through piles of cabbage and sweet potatoes—causing produce damage and loss of revenue that vendors fear.2

Security forces have not always been able to secure their hegemony in market-terminal spaces. In 2012, a police post adjacent to Wouma Market, one of the main peri-urban markets was burned down and three years later had yet to be rebuilt. News reports described the burning as a response to police violence against a suspect in the burning of another police post in a hinterland village—itself in response to a security forces crackdown on members of a pro- independence student organization. The market police post fire also came after police had themselves burned down the nearby headquarters of Dewan Adat LaPago, the regional branch of

Dewan Adat Papua, another pro-independence organization. These sporadic episodes of violence

2 I later recalled Geertz fleeing the crackdown on the Balinese cockfight. Geertz’s analytic of “deep play” left implicit questions about the political economy of the atmosphere of panic and rumour. (Geertz 1972)

140 CHAPTER 3 give added weight to the ambient expectation of turbulence at the market, and show how market tensions express the ongoing question of Indonesia’s contested sovereignty in Papua.

The temporary absence of patrolling security force at one of Wamena’s major markets is noteworthy given its history of unrest. In 2000, during the buildup to the Bloody Wamena

(Wamena Berdarah) events, the terminal space at Wouma Market was a key node in pro- independence mobilizations that swept through the region. At each of the main market-terminals around Wamena, partisans set up posts flying the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag of the West

Papua movement. Police action to remove the flag posts and arrest those guarding them triggered a large counter-attack by Dani men from the rural area beyond the market—leading to several deaths including police, shopowners and their families, and indigenous participants (Meiselas

2003). This first ever reported incident of collective indigenous violence against Indonesian civilians in the Balim region intensified the crisis in Wamena. Military reinforcements were flown to Wamena, and the army carried out punitive sweeps in the hinterland while police arrested independence movement leaders. Many Indonesian merchants, teachers, and health workers fled rural outposts to seek refuge in army and police compounds—or left Papua altogether.3 What appeared to some observers as the ‘primordialism’ of the 2000 incidents put

Wamena on the map of organizations concerned about ethnic violence in Indonesia and worldwide (Mote and Rutherford 2001).4 Reports of resentment by Dani against migrant

3 The police crackdown on the Morning Star flag defied the conciliation toward West Papuan nationalists advocated by then-president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid. Wouma market became an arena where state security agencies countered a supposed pro-independence ‘conspiracy’ among Papuan ‘elites’, and sabotaged Wahid’s attempt to increase civilian oversight over the military (Ballard 2002b; Mote and Rutherford 2001, 131–38). 4 Rutherford and Mote note that, contrary to sensationalized media reports conjuring a senselessly violent independence movement, indigenous violence against newcomer merchants was triggered by manipulative actions by state security agents (Mote and Rutherford 2001, 135–38). I think this violence also responded to the power relations that had crystallized through the installation of the regional distribution economy—a pattern of inequalities that had intensified with increased migration to Papua. My intervention aligns with O’Brien’s argument that incorporation into world capitalism tends to be the driving force for the politicization

141 CHAPTER 3 merchants used the discourse of ‘social jealousy’ (kecemburuan sosial)—a psychological spin on antagonisms flowing from economic inequalities that work through the ethnic distinction of indigenous to newcomer.5

My interviews with participants and witnesses of the 2000 incident underline how the market-terminal acted as a nexus for the politicized rumors that led to Wamena Berdarah. One participant recounted the killing of a Javanese motorcycle taxi driver known for sympathizing with the Papuan cause, and for treating indigenous people with kindness. This informant explained that those who killed the Javanese man were rural residents who rarely spent time at the market, and were acting on suspicions that intelligence agents had gone undercover to monitor pro-independence activities. While visual recognition of ethnic difference had enabled the killing of newcomers, this was linked to stories of surveillance circulated from the terminal, to the hinterland and back again. The terminal’s space of sociability led cross-ethnic cooperation to complicate patterns of ‘social jealousy’, and also allowed the suspension of such cooperation.

After the 2000 events, other episodes highlighted the tendency of market to facilitate the circulation of rumors and incite disruptive collective action. In 2007, reports of poisoned food

(makanan beracun) circulated among the indigenous population in and around Wamena. Soon, residents held impromptu meetings, and text messages circulated warning against consuming food purchased from shops. After a few days, indigenous protesters gathered at the major markets and demanded the closure of all shops. The uprising shut down virtually all commerce in

of ethnic difference in the Global South—and that intentional manipulation is effective to the extent that it can seize on such patterns (J. O’Brien 1986). 5 Indonesian discourses are ambiguous around diversity. The value of pluralism is enshrined in the concept of keanekaragaman suku bangsa (tribal-national diversity) and the slogan bhinneka tunggal eka (Old Javanese: unity in diversity). At the same time, since the early Suharto era, official discourse has warned that emphasizing tribal, religious, racial or ethnic differences (SARA) threatens national unity (Asgart 2003).

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Wamena for several days. Participants accused the Indonesian state of using shops to distribute poisoned food as a deliberate campaign to kill Papuans.

At the time of the uprising, I had recently arrived in Wamena to work for an NGO that worked in human rights and conflict resolution. I learned from local friends and community activists about reports that were circulating. In one story, a man bought a few kilograms of rice from a shop, and brought it home; later, after the family had eaten the rice, several members fell ill. Some reports were more dramatic: a young man was said to have purchased a single cigarette from a shop, and died immediately after smoking it. The ‘poisoned cigarette’ story was accompanied by an indication of direct merchant intention: the seller was said to have sprinkled a small amount of white powder on the cigarette just before passing it to the buyer, while he wasn’t looking. Many of the text messages that circulated speculated about other methods being used to poison indigenous consumers, such as injections into frozen chicken. Others warned of the addition of formaldehyde (formalin) to tofu.

The activists with whom I discussed these theories noted that the inadequacy of cold storage infrastructure—in and around Wamena, and along the distribution chains leading there from Jayapura and beyond—contributed to toxicity of foods sold in shops. Intermittent electrical supply and unrefrigerated transport meant that cargo such as frozen chickens or frozen sweets, shipped from Java, were likely to develop toxic germs. In such a context, merchants might use formaldehyde to mitigate spoliation and repel insects.6 Many participants and organizers also said that the products that end up being shipped to Papua are those of the lowest quality; I heard stories of codes on product containers indicating lesser-quality batches to be shipped to Papua.7

6 This explanation has been advanced regarding reports of toxic tofu sold at markets in Java and Sumatra, reported in 2005, 2006, and 2011 (Tamindael n.d.). 7 True or not, this rumor echoes well-known global commercial practices, such as large pharmaceutical companies’ earmarking of lower-quality batches for sale to Global South countries.

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Merchants were also accused of selling past-due products, taking advantage of low literacy and product knowledge among indigenous consumers.

The 2007 ‘food poisoning’ uprising tapped into long-simmering critiques and concerns. It is noteworthy that the reports that circulated by word of mouth and text message attributed intentional motive to merchants, or to shadowy state agencies sponsoring them from the background.8 This talk and action focused on markets as paradigmatic spaces, on mass-produced consumption products as dangerous objects, and on merchants as field agents of a larger agenda of collective violence. The rapid uptake of rumours about poisoning indicates an ambient readiness to endorse theories that state and merchant actors were plotting to kill Papuan people.

This readiness had developed over the decades during which the indigenous Balim population became subordinate actors in a regional distribution economy—a process in which merchants were the most visible agents.

Figure 3.1. Protesters hold signs denouncing merchants’ sale of toxic foods, in front of Jayawijaya Regency Legislature in Wamena, Sept. 24, 2007.

8 The speed at which circulating reports led to collective action highlights the potency of text messaging, a technology that had recently become widespread. The power of text messages drew on a history of rumor as an important mode for Papuans to share information about their disempowerment (Butt 2005; Kirsch 2002).

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The products that surfaced most often in the stories of poisonings were imported products whose consumption has been an object of concern and contestation. Cigarettes are widely consumed, though forbidden by evangelical churches. Soda is an expensive treat that generally appears in households as a contribution from a wealthy guest at a gathering such as a wedding.

Meanwhile, rice is the dominant staple of Indonesia. Indigenous traditionalists lament the growing hegemony of rice in the Balim Valley as a threat to the historic local staple sweet potato. In conversations with members of the regional Lapago section of the customary council

Dewan Adat Papua, I have often been told that Indonesia is killing the Dani “softly” (secara halus), by tempting consumers with harmful products high in sugar and chemical additives and low in vitamins, and replacing healthy Dani traditions with inappropriate staples of faraway Java.

Commercially distributed foods provided a lens through which to interpret the Balim economy’s incorporation, and to critique the role in this process of the newcomer merchants who dominate commerce. During my first months in Wamena, before the toxic food controversy, conversations with indigenous acquaintances had regularly turned to the question of threats to the indigenous

Balim people. One man, who I would come to understand was a committed pro-independence partisan, told me soon after we met that ‘they are trying to kill us all’—‘they’ being the various agents of Indonesia—especially soldiers and merchants—and ‘us’ being Balim and Papuan people more broadly. Such concern about indigenous endurance joined discourses of identity and difference with a critique of commercial food distribution.

Seven years before the food poisoning incidents, Bloody Wamena—with its climactic confrontation at Wouma Market—had gripped the region. Since then, Bloody Wamena had been recognized as a key event in the contemporary historiography of West Papuan nationalism—

145 CHAPTER 3 understood as a series of challenges to Indonesian sovereignty, and of repression by the

Indonesian state to quell Papuan discontent (M. Haluk 2013; Kirksey 2012; Rutherford 2012;

Yoman 2010). Bloody Wamena had led many non-indigenous merchants, teachers, and other government and private employees to leave the Balim region (Koalisi LSM untuk Perlindungan dan Penegakan HAM di Papua 2003; Upton 2009). This temporary exodus had disrupted the incorporation of the Balim economy more firmly into the Indonesian mainstream.9 Special

Autonomy, adopted in 2001, had responded to the Papuan Spring’s disruptions of the incorporation process—by enrolling indigenous leaders into an expanded system of state-led distribution upon which indigenous livelihoods would increasingly depend (see Chapter 2).10

This process, allowing a proliferation of regency and district government offices to supplement the distributive function of markets, was well under way by the time of the 2007 uprising against toxic foods. I suspect that this accelerated process of encompassment of the Balim economy within wider distribution networks had intensified the anxieties and critiques, expressed through accusations of intentional migrant schemes. These sentiments responded to the regional manifestations of world-systemic incorporation. They seized on market-terminal spaces—routine sites of interaction across difference—to contest the harms enacted through intensified incorporation.

Containment, regulation, and regional history of distribution

Governing authorities at the regency level have shown awareness of the potential of the market and terminal to facilitate unrest and disruptions. Such awareness can be seen in certain planning decisions by the Wamena-based Jayawijaya regency administration. In the years after the 2000

9 Population statistics show no permanent decrease in migrant population in Wamena; Upton concludes that most merchants soon returned to the region, and that there was a temporary dip in in-migration (Upton 2009). 10 By interpreting Autonomy as a government response I do not mean to diminish the role of the Papuan negotiators who helped produce it .

146 CHAPTER 3 incidents, the regency administration promoted a discourse of ‘Clean Wamena’ (Wamena

Bersih). This idea linked values of order and cleanliness in Wamena with the importance of reining in apparently problematic activities taking place at markets and terminals. Clean

Wamena began as a campaign to enlist ordinary residents in picking up garbage and monitoring marketplaces.11 In addition to problems of trash, food waste, vehicle emissions, and so on, the

‘clean’ in the campaign came to signal concerns about immoral, illegal, toxic, and dangerous activities known to take place at terminals, involving drinking, drugs, gambling, sex work, and theft. Eventually, the campaign ceded way to a regency decision to physically move Wamena’s central Town Market (Pasar Kota) out of town. The market was closed in 2003, and Jibama

Market (Pasar Jibama), also known as Pasar Baru (New Market), opened several miles north of town limits.

Some indigenous-led community organizations were supportive of the Clean Wamena campaign. I became aware of this support in 2008 in discussions with the staff of a small NGO that was loosely allied with both the student movement and the customary traditionalists of

Dewan Adat. These activists were supportive of the goal of an independent Papua, and many had been present at actions such as the 2000 flag raisings—actions whose violent aftermath had helped motivate regency authorities and security forces to seek to ‘clean up’ markets. As one organizer, a woman in her late twenties put it, “At the terminal, people are gambling, drinking, getting in a lot of trouble. Young kids, terminal kids, sniffing glue and things like that. This ruins their future (merusak masah depan mereka). People started talking about cleaning up Wamena, and so we had to support that”. The critique of migrant commercial hegemony dovetailed with a concern that indigenous youth were falling into patterns of behavior that put indigenous

11 The physical cleaning of urban space aspect drew on the Indonesian practice of kerja bakti (good works) which commonly takes place informally in neighborhoods. In Papua, kerja bakti is a common way for associations to raise funds or awareness of some issue.

147 CHAPTER 3 endurance in jeopardy. The Clean Wamena campaign articulated these concerns, and bridged them with security forces’ anxiety about the terminal’s capacity to generate unrest. Community organizers’ critique often highlighted the open secret of military and police sponsorship of the terminal’s various shadow business operations. These have been said to include numbers games, provision of sex work, backroom pornographic video projection, and distribution of illicit alcohol.12 On several occasions when I walked with a friend past a roadside carwash spot manned by youth next to a stream near Wouma market, I heard about drivers purchasing sex from young car-washers. In addition, the market-terminal space in general has consistently been rumored to host ‘free sex’ (seks bebas) among indigenous youth (Butt 2007). The most dramatic example of youth harm was the inhalation of Aibon brand glue vapor from plastic juice bottles by youth nicknamed anak aibon (glue kids). In its dismay at the participation of Balim youth in such harmful and covertly state-sponsored activities, an activist aspiration to supervise and control the terminal economy found common ground with a governmental discourse of

‘cleaning’. In this tentative alignment around the need to contain the harms of the terminal economy, the Clean Wamena campaign had anticipated the more recent support for the regent’s

Sunday market closure (with which I opened this chapter).13 Relocating Wamena’s main market beyond town limits extended this broad agreement on the value of containment.

Expulsion of the terminal economy to the town’s edges did not succeed in eliminating the youth consumption and labor practices that were seen as problematic. Pasar Jibama became the

12 Locally sold alcohol includes inexpensive home-brewed ‘pineapple water’, produced and sold by both migrant and indigenous women, and imported liquor smuggled by military aircraft from Timika (the mining town on the southwest coast that is a distribution hub for luxury goods consumed by expatriate Freeport staff). 13 Relocating the central market beyond town limits mirrored interventions in cities elsewhere in Indonesia and worldwide (Gibbings 2013). The creation of a new peri-urban space evoked, on a much smaller scale, the Suharto-era policy of “peri-urbanization” of Jakarta, which aimed to contain political threats associated with mass peasant migration to the city (Kusno 2012a). As peri-urban Wamena hosts (for the time being) little industrial production, the labour at stake was the informal distribution work of indigenous women and youth.

148 CHAPTER 3 region’s pre-eminent market—known for the best selection, quality and prices of produce—and where in addition to shops selling food staples and clothing, stall vendors sell indigenous handicrafts, second-hand mobile phones and laptops, imported seafood, and live pigs. Pasar

Jibama also became the regional center for street youth and the shadow economy lamented by community activists—the sprawling peri-urban locale providing freer rein for illicit transactions.

At the same time, moving the market beyond town limits proved to be only a temporary means of removing indigenous vending activities from the town core. The commuting distance to

Jibama market created new transportation challenges for indigenous produce vendors: while the new terminal serves commuters from most of the central, northern, and northwest Balim hinterland, residents from other areas seeking to trade at Jibama now had to pay for an additional minivan trip from the town center (or haul goods by foot).14 Meanwhile, the relocation of the market had created a wide urban zone lacking fresh produce sales. Noting that this commercial vacuum created an opportunity—or simply preferring not to incur extra transportation costs— indigenous women produce vendors increasingly set up their sales directly on the side of busy streets in central Wamena, often directly in front of shops. This practice became known as pasar kaget (informal market, lit. startled market).15

Based on my observations of interactions between indigenous vendors and migrant shopkeepers, and my reading of officials’ declarations on the matter, pasar kaget has been met with a mix of consternation at unregulated use of urban space, and tolerance of indigenous commercial initiative. Merchant tolerance of indigenous shopfront trade enacted a minor

14 A vendor encountering this transportation obstacle might wish to sell goods at either Wouma or Sinakma markets, closer to the town core. Given that these markets serve their respective hinterland catchment areas, access to vending space is not automatic, whereas Jibama is understood to serve the entire Balim region. 15 The pasar kaget practice resonates with a wider Indonesian pattern of informal shopfront trade (Kusno 2012b). Pasar kaget are found in many Indonesian towns, for instance gathering itinerant food stalls and other vendors on a weekly basis at central sites.

149 CHAPTER 3 reciprocation to the major pattern whereby newcomer business extracts value from indigenous land, labour and consumption.

Building an indigenous market

The spread of informal indigenous commerce soon signaled to regency planners and officials a need to regulate urban commercial space. On one hand, this was a question of restoring order to streets by restricting vending to planned sites—a regulatory orientation common to cities worldwide (Bromley 2000). At the same time, the proliferation of informal vending by indigenous women communicated a popular demand for a ‘suitable space’ (tempat yang layak) for selling produce within town limits. The Special Autonomy moment provided a basis from which to respond to this demand. In response to broader Papuan grievances about inequality and discrimination, Autonomy had mandated regional administrations to promote indigenous economic empowerment, and had provided for new regency-level development funding authority. Together these elements set the stage for a regency-level governmental response to pasar kaget. In early 2015, the regency administration unveiled a new ‘traditional’ market (pasar tradisional) within Wamena town limits, called Pasar Potikelek. This market was explicitly intended for use by indigenous (orang asli Papua, OAP) vendors only. The market was built at a cost of Rp. 34 billion (roughly 2.5 million USD), partly financed with Special Autonomy funds

(Adisubrata 2015). As reported by a community-based Papuan news service, Jayawijaya regent

Wempi Wetipo spoke at the unveiling ceremony:

“My desire is to provide a suitable place for Papuan women and men to sell, and so starting tomorrow, no more will anyone sell on the side of the streets or sidewalks; everyone will enter Potikelek Market. And next year we will also rebuild Sinakma Market, build it better so people can sell in a suitable place”, he said. The regent also thanked Papuan women who have consistently joined and competed in building the economy of Jayawijaya Regency with people from outside Papua. “[Indigenous] women also help

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the Jayawijaya economy. Therefore, the Agency for Industry, Trade and Cooperation will take note of the women who are buying and selling so the government can provide capital for women to build an even better economy moving forward”, said Wempi (Adisubrata 2015).16

The regent’s words illustrate how the new market construction was intended as both a question of valorizing the contribution of indigenous vending to the regional economy, and as a solution to a problem of unregulated use of urban space.17 In this way, the commercial regulation agenda, as taken on by the Autonomy-era class of regional indigenous representatives, merged discourses of Clean Wamena and indigenous empowerment.18

As noted in Chapter 2, the distinction between a sphere of indigenous-dominated primary production economy, and migrant-dominated commercial and service economy, must be understood relationally and historically—as an outcome of the ongoing incorporation of the

Balim economy. This outcome is dynamic, as evidenced by the increasing displacement of indigenous production by migrant commerce and expanded state distribution programs. This dynamic instability has driven concerns among some Papuan activists about defending indigenous primacy in primary production from migrant incursion. In some cases, activist and governmental agendas for marketplace empowerment and regulation have sought to stabilize the ethnic division of the economy—between indigenous provision of primary products and

16 “Keinginan saya memberi tempat yang layak bagi mama-mama dan bapak-bapak Papua untuk berjualan, maka dari itu mulai besok tidak ada lagi yang berjualan di pinggir-pinggir jalan, trotoar semua masuk di pasar potikelek. Dan tahun depan kita juga akan bangun Pasar Sinakma, dibangun lebih bagus lagi supaya berjualan di tempat yang layak,” tegasnya. Bupati pun mengucapkan terima kasih kepada mama-mama Papua yang konsisten untuk ikut bersaing membangun ekonomi di Kabupaten Jayawijaya dengan masyarakat dari luar Papua. “Mama-mama juga ikut membantu perekonomian di Jayawijaya. Oleh karena itu, dinas perindagkop akan mencatat mama-mama yang melakukan jual beli untuk pemerintah memberi modal untuk mama-mama membangun ekonomi yang lebih baik lagi ke depannya,” ujar Wempi. 17 After a few months of operation, reports emerged that the new Potikelek market was mostly empty. Vendors quoted in an NGO-run publication stated that the problem with the new market was that it was not located adjacent to a minivan terminal, making it impractical for would-be customers (Sekenyap 2015). 18 Wetipo’s comments echoed a pan-Papuan politicization of the figure of the indigenous woman vendor, or ‘mama Papua’. This figure since took center stage in an ongoing campaign by activists to pressure the government to build a central market for indigenous women in the capital Jayapura (Crocker 2014).

151 CHAPTER 3 newcomer distribution of imported commodities. Such proposals came to the fore in discussions between members of WEOP and youth organizers from Dewan Adat Papua. One organizer laid out the following proposal: “Migrants want to come here to trade, we can understand that. But they should only be selling products from outside—not farming and selling the produce. The regency should make it so only indigenous people can sell local produce”. This organizer, like many politically active Dani youth, had experience living in the coastal metropolis Jayapura.

There he had observed that a recent wave of migrants from outside Papua had bought land from coastal indigenous groups, had set up productive farms and were gaining an increasing share of regional produce markets. He described developments in Jayapura as a warning of what might happen if indigenous production was marginalized in the Balim region.

The development of malls and corporate supermarkets in Jayapura, sourcing produce from distant regions of Asia, Australia, and the Americas, illustrate a related trend that some organizers mentioned as having the potential to completely squeeze out indigenous production.

Another Dewan Adat organizer evoked an economic future that excludes indigenous vendors altogether: “In the supermarket they can sell any product, at any time of year. They can decide their own prices and control the market. How can indigenous women (mama-mama) compete with that?” The possibility that the supermarket could eventually eclipse the market is evoked by the 2014 opening of Wamena Mall (Mal Wamena), directly on the former site of the old Town

Market.

Indigenous activists’ interest in using regulation to protect the indigenous role in the primary sector formed part of the context within which Wetipo’s initiatives, such as the construction of an indigenous-only market, and the Sunday market closure—intervened. While

152 CHAPTER 3 community organizers have debated the effectiveness of specific policies, they have tended to advocate for increased commercial regulation by regency administrations.19

Mediating distinctions in regional commercial history

In this section I view regional commerce, regulatory policies, and indigenous uprisings together in a single trajectory. I focus on relations between two broad categories of actor: 1) in-migrating merchant and state actors (starting with colonial-era trading missionaries, and including contemporary policy-makers in Jakarta and internationally who negotiated Special Autonomy with Papuan representatives) who have worked to install and expand the modern distribution economy in the region; and 2) indigenous vendors and protesters who have shadowed ‘formal’ commerce with ‘informal’ vending, and periodically contested inequalities and harms by disrupting commerce as a whole. Special Autonomy legislation—responding to indigenous disruptions and demands—has allowed for the emergence of a third category of actor and practice: the growing class of indigenous regional government representatives who mediate between those two forces, attempting to satisfy the accumulation and control imperatives of the former, while valorizing the labour and grievances of the latter. Commercial regulation has become an important intervention for indigenous politicians. Working through social distinctions in commerce has been a way to bridge contradictory allegiances to military, police, and merchant power blocs on one hand, and indigenous partisans on the other.

Bupati Wetipo’s construction of the new Potikelek Market, and the subsequent Sunday closure, were key moments in the regency administration’s agenda of commercial regulation.

Before these, the Wetipo administration’s first regulatory policy, shortly after his 2008 election,

19 This is so even among many activists invested in the goal of an independent West Papua (such as those cited above)—who usually aspire to do away with the Indonesian administrative system of provinces, regencies, districts and so on. Kirksey’s analysis of the West Papuan movement frames this type of dynamic as the coexistence of visions of radical change, and support for piecemeal reforms (Kirksey 2012).

153 CHAPTER 3 had consisted of a seemingly cosmetic urban design policy. In 2009, Jayawijaya regency issued a new regulation requiring all ruko (shophouses) to feature a regionally specific architectural feature on the front of the roof: a figure of a honai (GVD), the round thatch-roofed men’s hut characteristic of customary indigenous households in the Balim hinterland.

Figure 3.2. A honai, customary Balim men’s hut

Figure 3.3. New ruko construction featuring regency-mandated honai roof front design

Figure 3.4. Shops on main street of Wamena, retrofitted with variations on the mandated honai shape

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The new ruko design regulation quickly made an imprint on public space of Wamena, as shop façades on main avenues and at markets were modified to adhere. In the wake of this policy, I heard a range of criticisms. These included merchants complaining about the cost of the new installations, and West Papua partisans dismissing the policy as performance devoid of substance. Still, the new regency administration had signaled its intention to regulate the terminal economy, by inscribing a recognizable figure of rural indigenous life onto the urban and peri- urban architecture of migrant commerce. In this way, the regent acted as a mediator, appending customary Balim specificity to the structure of Indonesian commerce. The agenda of commercial regulation thus announced itself by valorizing indigenous identity and highlighting the major axis of distinctions in the regional economy.20

Table 3.1. History of installation, regulation, and disruption of regional distribution, sorted by category of actor and power bloc

Colonial state & missions; Autonomy-era regional Indonesian state & merchants; indigenous representatives Popular & activist indigenous int. dev. agencies (post-2001) sectors

• Install distribution economy via missions, markets, and limited rations and aid (1950-) • Uprisings at market/terminal sites (2000, 2007) • Critique of migrant commercial power & economic discrimination against indigenous population • Demand support for indig. economic dev., protection of indigenous role in primary sector

20 Such performative valorizations of cultural identity by regency-level politicians have been a feature of the political landscape across Indonesia (Henley and Davidson 2008; Pisani 2014). Henley and Davidson list four factors driving these assertions, but the economics of migration between regions does not make the list. This is so even though a number of Indonesian regions feature large populations of migrants from other regencies or provinces (Pohan and Izharivan 2017).

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• Increased indigenous informal vending in town core (pasar kaget) (2005) • Relocate central market outside town limits (2005) • Grant limited indigenous regency-level regulatory authority, and expand state food distribution via Special Autonomy legislation (2001) and accompanying regional rules (2006) and partition of new regencies (2008)

• Require honai icon on all ruko (2008) • Build indigenous-only market (2014) • Sunday market & terminal closure (2014)

The synoptic history of regional distribution shows that the regulatory imperative was initiated prior to the ascendance of the new class of Autonomy-empowered indigenous representatives. The 2005 relocation of the central market drew on ideas of commercial regulation that resonated with indigenous activist sectors, before such an agenda was taken up and refined by regents that came to power in the wake of regulations that concretized

Autonomy’s provisions for increased regency-level authority. The Autonomy-era regulatory initiatives of Wetipo from 2008 onward continue to show some orientation toward containing the terminal economy—in a way that has been amenable to state security forces as well as some pro- independence elements. At the same time, these more recent regulatory policies have more clearly expressed an intention to protect indigenous livelihoods and morality. Assertion of ethnic distinction has been a key vehicle for this valorization.

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Distinctions through incorporation

The various forms of disruption and regulation listed above highlight how market-terminal spaces have taken on political charge by gathering people around transactions that reproduce inequality across axes of difference, and thus express a broader process of incorporation. This section focuses on the multi-scalar complexity of the regional constellation of distinctions, and of the various modes of anxiety it has elicited.

Since the colonial era, the dominant regional constellation of economic forces and ethnic difference has been a triad between indigenous Balim people (orang asli), newcomers from other

Indonesian regions (pendatang), and finally Westerners (orang barat)—mainly colonial officials, missionaries, and development workers. While it historically initiated the region’s incorporation process, the Western category has remained demographically marginal, and hides itself from any open role in the regional economy. Today, Western missionary development workers tend to be based in compounds in Wamena and in a few rural districts, working with

Papuan church organizations. Rather than frequent markets and shops, expatriates tend to purchase produce from itinerant vendors with whom they maintain ongoing relationships; and to buy store goods sporadically in bulk—often directly through wholesalers or mission pilots in

Jayapura. This concealed aspect of the white demographic has allowed scholars to exclude it, for the most part, from ethnographic consideration as participants in regional power relations. In the section below, I will include these actors as producers of a discourse that scrutinizes indigenous economic practices according to globally hegemonic moralities and world-capitalist supremacy.

For the moment, I bracket the white presence to focus on distinctions experienced through routine transactions and trajectories.

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The major interface in terms of routine economic interactions is between national merchant networks and the region’s rural indigenous majority. At the same time, marketing networks have intervened in a context of intra-indigenous distinctions, and these too have taken on new salience as a result of the regional economy’s ongoing incorporation. In the previous chapter I emphasized the analytic of terminal economy as a recursive pattern of relations between scales. The key idea here was that the relation of forces that peripheralizes the Balim economy recurs—is partially recaptured—along a chain of terminals. The notion of recursion highlighted how relations between successive steps in chains of distribution show analogous features at each step along these chains. Here I extend this analysis to argue that the matrix of social distinctions produced through the terminal economy also takes on a quality of recursion.

This quality is similar to the mode of ‘fractal recursivity’ that linguistic anthropologists use to describe categorical distinctions between language groups (Irvine and Gal 2000). In this mode, characteristics associated with intergroup distinctions, having been imposed by a governing power, (e.g. the colonial state’s comparison of regional languages in West Africa), are projected from higher-order onto lower-order oppositions (Irvine and Gal 2000). I expand on this idea to trace how world-economic incorporation politicizes distinctions at multiple scales, with distinctions at a given scale taking on some aspect of those at the next higher scale (though I do not claim that this recursion is fractal—i.e., exactly projecting features between scales of distinction). To demonstrate this pattern, it is first necessary to provide a picture of the regional map of ethno-linguistic difference in relation to patterns of commercial distribution.

Regional map of distribution and difference

The Balim Valley runs approximately 55 km long along a northwest to southeast axis. Wamena sits southeast of the geometric center of the valley floor, west of the Balim River. Its urban space

158 CHAPTER 3 is organized along a regular grid pattern that tilts north-by-northwest. The airport runway bounds the commercial town core; parallel to the runway lies Trikora St., a main road dotted with construction shops, banks, and hotels. Running southwest from Trikora St. is the main commercial street, Irian St., home to a series of clothing shops and wholesalers. Until 2005, a square sitting adjacent to the intersection of Irian and Trikora was the site of Wamena’s main market—since relocated to Jibama. Transit from Wamena to Jibama is provided by minivans that stop at Irian and Trikora. In addition to Jibama, there are main markets on the south and southwest edges of Wamena, respectively: Wouma (also known as Misi) and Sinakma. Each of the three main markets adjoins a terminal from where minivans ply routes linking Wamena to hinterland catchment areas, each with its characteristic ethno-linguistic composition. Wouma routes lead into the southeastern Grand Valley Dani (GVD) area, toward Kurima (at the edge of

Jayawijaya regency, forming an approximate border between GVD and Yali areas). Sinakma routes pass through the southwestern part of the GVD area, and on to in the western reaches of the Western Dani (WD) area. Finally, Jibama routes run through the central

GVD heartland, past the small Walak area, before splitting into roads heading into administrative centers in the northern WD zone.21

21 The significance of categories such as Grand Valley Dani and Western Dani is clarified in the following section.

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Figure 3.5. Satellite image of Wamena, showing the three principal peri-urban markets, the airport, and Wamena Mall (built on the site of the former Town Market before its relocation to Jibama). Most of the visible developments between Wamena proper and Jibama Market have been built since the market’s relocation there. (Google Maps 2017)

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Figure 3.6. Sketch map of roads and indigenous territories. Stars represent the three main terminals (Jibama, Wouma, and Sinakma), with roads radiating out of Wamena; circles represent main hinterland terminals; dotted lines represent approximate boundaries between indigenous groups.

Each of the market-terminal areas bears the imprint of the particular hinterland catchment area that it serves. Much of my research was focused on Wouma market, and so I can provide the most detailed description for this example; similar dynamics play out at the other markets as well. Indigenous produce vendors at Pasar Wouma hail mainly from areas located along the road running south from Wouma, directly across the Uwe River from the market: Hepuba, Hitigima,

161 CHAPTER 3 and finally Kurima (at the border between Jayawijaya and Yahukimo regencies). Pasar Wouma’s sub-regional constellation of belonging is layered with historical antagonism, as Kurima and

Wouma populations were customarily allied against the Assolokobal-Walesi alliance of which

Hepuba and Hitigima are key centers. Building on their historic affinity with Wouma residents, women who have relocated to town from Kurima are intermediaries at Wouma market, buying bulk produce from commuting rural vendors and reselling in smaller batches at moderate profit.

As at other markets, women produce vendors assembled at Wouma market divide into fairly well bounded sections based on area of origin. There is a dominant binary distinction between

Assolokobal and Wouma/Kurima sections; within these sections vendors tend to group by village, and to cooperate along lines of existing relationships for purposes such as watching produce if a vendor needs to leave for a short time.

The various roles and positions of market participants map onto multiple scales of distinctions. At the highest scale, indigenous vendors constitute a group in distinction from migrant merchants. The hierarchy in this difference is expressed spatially: indigenous vendors occupy unsheltered space on the ground (or sheltered but non-strategic space in Wouma’s recently built stall structure), while migrant merchants occupy wooden kiosks. This binary is also enacted through the economics of distribution and production outlined in Chapter 2: indigenous producers provide inexpensive primary products to feed a growing urban economy, through which migrant merchants expand and extend encompassing national networks of provision of mass-produced goods. The spatial institution of the market-terminal, mediating these transactions, has been a central scene for generating both the overarching binary of social difference, and also the lower-level constellation of distinctions that have emerged out of the

162 CHAPTER 3 patchwork of intra-indigenous linguistic and cultural variations.22 This is not to say that these differences did not exist before the colonial era. Rather, arenas of exchange and distribution— especially markets and terminals on the town’s edge—have been central theaters within which both the indigenous/migrant dichotomy, and a range of intra-indigenous distinctions, have been routinized and come to anchor forms of anxiety, scrutiny, and contestation. Paramount among the intra-indigenous contestations has been a binary distinction between Grand Valley Dani and

Western Dani, whose politicization I describe in the next section.

Recursive moralities

To open this chapter, I reported a discussion of the regent’s Sunday market suspension, in which commenters expressed anxiety about indigenous endurance, and suspicion of the market as a place that promotes immoral behavior. Indigenous critiques of migrant commerce highlight how the region’s incorporation into the world-economy has layered moral binaries into the matrix of identity categories. This moralization takes on two opposed valences: on one hand, a critique of commerce that expresses concern for the possibility of indigenous endurance under Indonesian domination; on the other, a pattern of scrutiny that problematizes indigenous economic practices.

In the preceding sections I interpreted the former register via talk and actions of indigenous actors who had disrupted commerce. The latter register, meanwhile, has been implicit in the regional commercial history. For example, Wetipo’s valorization of indigenous produce vending intervened in the context of the discourse alleging indigenous lack of capacity for business. Such scrutiny of indigenous economy runs through the history of interventions by colonial

22 I often heard Balim inhabitants remark that not until missions and colonial rule did indigenous residents interact peacefully across distinctions of tribe or alliance. Such commentary tends to gloss over the history of lineage connections across differences ethno-linguistic categories such as Grand Valley Dani, Western Dani, or Yali (Farhadian 2005, 12; Hisage 2006).

163 CHAPTER 3 missionaries and postcolonial development experts. What is of interest to me here is how this scrutiny has animated inter-indigenous distinctions at certain moments.

Moral inflections of the major intra-indigenous distinction

The discourse of a regional binary of WD versus GVD emerged among Euro-American ethnologists, both missionaries and secular academics, who conducted research in the Central

Highlands from the 1950s to the 1970s. These researchers met and compared observations alongside governing officials on occasions such as the Highlands Anthropological Conference

(organized in Wamena in 1962 by the UN Temporary Executive Authority) (Pospisil et al. 1962).

It became apparent that the languages spoken in the main Balim valley floor consisted of dialects varying incrementally. Boundaries of major linguistic difference (and diversity) were noted around the edge of this area. Inhabitants of areas to the west and north of the Balim valley spoke a distinct language with limited internal variation. The comparative ethnology gave rise to a categorical distinction between Western Dani as opposed to Grand Valley Dani cultures.23 This binary was a basis for comparing indigenous responses to missions and modern commodities.

Authors attributed to Western Dani an eagerness to embrace change, in contrast to supposedly

‘conservative’ Grand Valley Dani (Hayward 1983; Heider 1996; Ploeg 1966). As they inscribed the binary distinction in the discourse of regional government, colonial ethnology noted contrast between, on one hand, how willing WD were to work for missions and the colonial government, and on the other, the recurrent ‘hostility’ of GVD to missions and police (Ploeg 1966; see also

23 The binary holds sway despite the presence of groups that fit neither category: Yali, based in areas stretching east and south of the Balim valley; Walak, a smaller population whose language shares vocabulary with WD and GVD, and which is based at the northwestern edge of the Balim valley, between GVD, WD, and Yali areas; and others such as Nduga and Mek, whose territories straddle edges of WD and Yali areas, respectively. These categories are not absolute; transition zones between Yali and GDV areas, or between GVD and WD areas, are known for intermediate dialects and multilingual populations (Boissiere 2002). Furthermore, kin and affine networks have historically passed across these boundaries even before the colonial era.

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Farhadian 2005, 18, 36). Researchers debated the significance of this contrast, with Ploeg suggesting that higher population density and land pressures within the valley proper motivated greater attachment to indigenous political institutions—and so, more resistance by GVD to colonialism (Ploeg 1966).24 Whatever the explanation, the regional history of incorporation was marked by a binary discourse regarding how the two largest groups responded to possibilities of wage labor and consumption of imported commodities—with WD being associated with a more active participation in the new economy.

An occasion for these associations to crystallize came during the 2008 election campaign for regent of Jayawijaya (which brought Wempi Wetipo to power). Jayawijaya was at the time undergoing a process of partition, slated to carve 6 new regencies out of its boundary areas, with each regency catering to the area’s dominant ethno-linguistic group. Nduga would preside in

Nduga, Yali in Yalimo, and WD in Lanny Jaya25—leaving a shrunken Jayawijaya, in which cosmopolitan Wamena would be surrounded by a hinterland with a clear GVD majority. At the time, the incumbent regent of Jayawijaya was WD; the 2008 election raised the question of whether WD could legitimately govern a GVD-majority area. The Wetipo campaign mobilized a discourse of regional belonging that answered ‘no’ to the above question, rallying voters around the importance of electing someone from the valley (lembah) as opposed to the western area

(bagian barat).

During the campaign, I noted an increased legitimacy of the idea of irreconcilable conflict between GVD and WD populations. Some community organizers suggested to me that this discourse was being fomented by state intelligence agents as a means to incite ‘horizontal’

24 By 1977, well into the Indonesian era, the pro-independence OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka) guerrilla force took hold mainly in WD areas, and far less so in GVD areas. 25 The suffix –mo in Yalimo means ‘place’ in various regional languages; Lani (or Lanny) is another name for Western Dani.

165 CHAPTER 3 intra-indigenous conflict, and thereby thwart West Papuan pro-independence efforts at pan- highlander and pan-Papuan unity. My conversations in 2008 indicated that, for the WD/GVD distinction to be available for such manipulation, it had to be calling upon some routine anchor for critiques and anxieties to take hold. One afternoon, I visited a household I frequented in the southeast GVD hinterland. Gustav, the father, who occupied a lower-rung civil service job, told me with some hesitation that he was concerned about the possibility that people from the

‘western part’—meaning the candidate Budiman Kogoya—might take power in Wamena. The question of whether a candidate from the Western Dani area should govern Jayawijaya regency had been given a new intensity by the partition process, slated to base the new Lanny Jaya regency in the then-district center Thiom. Gustav asked rhetorically, “the WD people (orang bagian barat) will have their own regency in Thiom. Why should they rule (kuasai) Wamena?”

Gustav interpreted such a transgression of an ethno-regional division of regional authority as part of a broader process of ascendance of WD in GVD territory. Importantly, this apprehension was linked to a self-critique of GVD and a historical analysis of regional commerce. “Those western part people come into the valley to do business, trading and so on, while we valley people just sit around. The problem with us valley people is that we got lazy (kita jadi malas), with Wamena so close to our homes. We never had to travel far to reach the market and shops, to sell vegetables and buy rice and salt. As for ‘western part’ people, they live far from Wamena; they have had to endeavor (berusaha; connotes struggle and enterprise) to get to Wamena, to take part in the economy”.

This image of more entrepreneurial WD people in comparison to GVD came up here and there in conversations about the regional ethno-linguistic duality. I became aware of a current of

GVD anxiety about WD taking on a certain degree of economic superiority over GVD. One

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GVD informant described the WD population as demographically excessive—“there are so many of them, over there”—projecting anxieties about an ongoing Papua-wide demographic shift toward a non-indigenous majority (Upton 2009). Later, in 2014, I heard versions of these anxieties during WEOP market surveys. For example, at a secondary minivan terminal with an occasional informal market deep in the southeast of the valley, respondents reported that WD women had started to appear to buy produce for resale at restaurants in Wamena. This claim that

WD intermediaries were increasing their range of activities was accompanied by observations of increasing WD ownership of vehicles—notably the pickup trucks required to access the more distant WD areas (and which had incidentally become necessary to reach the southeast reaches of the valley, due to erosion damage to the road from Wamena). Still, there was no systematic WD ascendance to point to. Rather, the image of WD ascendance in terms of mobility, trade, and demography, expressed a speculative projection of the migrant-indigenous hierarchy onto intra- indigenous relations.

Issues of mobility and enterprise overlap with a religious dimension in modes of anxiety and auto-critique that have colored intra-indigenous relations. The religious aspect dates to a colonial process of partition, whereby the Dutch government assigned mission areas to different

Western Christian organizations. The areas assigned to Catholics were located in the heart of the valley, surrounding the eventual site of Wamena; those assigned to evangelical missions were mainly in more distant WD, Walak, and Yali areas. The colonial government’s designation of

Wamena as regional administrative center relegated evangelical areas to the Balim’s spatial margin. After the Indonesian takeover, this relegation was expressed as relations of remote

167 CHAPTER 3 districts to regency center; and through infrastructural dependence on the roads radiating out from Wamena.26

In 2008, a number of GVD market survey respondents noted that evangelical teachings make it easier for WD populations to be entrepreneurial. This sense is rooted in tension between regional Catholic and evangelical ideologies in relation to customary exchange and expenditure.

Catholic missions historically valorized customary (pre-colonial) religious institutions, lending

Balim Catholicism a syncretic character. It remains more common in GVD areas than in WD areas for residents to practice customary ritual expenditure and exchange—such as slaughter and distribution of pig meat portions according to customary guidelines at a wedding or funeral—and for participants to openly interpret such practices as having the capacity to placate ancestors and ward off negative outcomes in health, livelihoods, and horticulture. In contrast, evangelical teachings promote fear and hostility toward ancestral power, and interdict customary ritual exchange and expenditure.

Contemporary development initiatives associated with evangelical churches have broadened the missionary critique of ancestral expenditure. I have heard contemporary missionary development workers allege that customary redistribution for ancestor placation is

‘animist’ and thus irrational. As a corollary, it is argued that large-scale redistribution of resources for ceremonial purposes over-values momentary collective consumption, at the expense of future-oriented accumulation and investment. For such practices to be permitted by churches prevalent among GVD populations, and forbidden by churches prevalent among WD, means that relations between GVD and WD are tinged with scrutiny toward the GVD population for holding onto religious practices that supposedly obstruct development. This is not to argue

26 Ironically, the infrastructural marginalization of WD is cited in the GVD auto-critique as having spurred WD commercial initiative and potential political ascendance.

168 CHAPTER 3 that WD are free of the burden of this residual colonial scrutiny. Even if evangelical WD distinguish themselves from Catholic GVD who carry on with customary practices, the former are still harangued by church leaders for not having truly interiorized prohibitions against customary ancestral redistribution. Present-day missionaries commonly express concern that

Dani evangelicals still believe in ancestral power, but have simply decided to perform allegiance to the apparently more powerful Western Christian god. This critique expresses anxiety that Dani

Christianity is an effective ‘cargo cult’—a set of rituals aiming to access Western material wealth, rather than a faith oriented toward other-worldly aspirations (Hayward 1983). WD populations are thus subjected to this scrutiny even as there exists among WD communities a discourse that directs this scrutiny toward GVD. This moral recursion illustrates a version of what Andrew Lattas has argued for the case of New Britain: how the binary segmenting force of residual colonial moralities acts both to divide populations and to divide the self against itself

(Lattas 1992).

There is an internal inconsistency in the moralizing mission discourse. On one hand, the indigenous Balim population is accused of over-valuing present consumption at the expense of future-oriented accumulation; and on the other, of participating in Christianity itself as a form of future-oriented material investment. Inconsistent as they may be when taken together, such colonial discourses live on and inflect inter-group relations. Their attachment to the ongoing process of incorporation—experienced in ordinary transactions and comparisons of wealth and mobility—explains the staying power of these residual moralities. By providing binary frames through which to interpret inequalities, these ideas contribute to translating the global and material forces of incorporation into a moralizing language of difference.

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Cascading lenses: obligation and enterprise

The question of whether customary practices interfere with economic development became energized within the discourse of indigenous empowerment under Special Autonomy. The implementation of regional regulations as directed by Autonomy led the provincial government, and numerous regency administrations, to announce increased sourcing and contracting from indigenous-owned business, for purposes such as road and building construction. Such initiatives were welcomed by groups that advocate for indigenous enterprise, such as Kamar Adat Papua

(Customary Chamber of Papua). In the years following their implementation, reports emerged about slow progress, with indigenous-fronted companies gaining contracts under quotas for indigenous provision, only to sub-contract to migrant-owned companies. Press reports described such developments as evidence of a lack of entrepreneurial culture among Papuans. In my conversations with aspiring indigenous entrepreneurs in Wamena, echoes of this opinion appeared auto-critically—combined with descriptions of structural obstacles to indigenous enterprise, such as discrimination in education and finance.

Whether framed as structural or cultural critique, there is a widespread expectation that programs to stimulate indigenous enterprise will fail. The discourse of ‘inability to compete’

(tidak mampu bersaing) was frequently cited in discussions as a reason to explain why profitable secondary and tertiary sector businesses—mobile phone shops, food stalls, and so on—tend to be dominated by non-indigenous residents. In response, a variety of economic empowerment projects have sought to teach Dani men and women basic accounting practices. In one NGO programme, designed by a development practitioner previously based in West Java, the key was to convince Dani women selling areca palm nuts to conceptualize their enterprise as a distinct entity, and to separate personal from business cash flow. The challenge was to reduce the

170 CHAPTER 3 possibility of profits being channeled into non-business needs before they could be treated as capital. This logic of commercial accounting was incompatible with immersion in a network of obligations. When WEOP interviewed the single indigenous shopkeeper at Jibama Market (there are none at Wouma Market), he described the challenge as such: “It’s difficult to say ‘no’ when someone comes to me needing help.”

Development workers associate this demand for redistribution with a specific social figure: the ‘distant uncles’ (om-om), older male relatives who approach a host at collective life- cycle events such as funerals or weddings, and request cash payments to placate ancestral spirits or otherwise ensure smooth unfolding of events. Development staff and evangelical congregants routinely invoke om-om as drains on entrepreneurial initiative. I heard a clear example of this discourse from a white expatriate missionary who has conducted education projects in hinterland districts for over a decade. Driving his full pickup truck from Wamena, the missionary explained his understanding to me, the only non-indigenous passenger sitting among a group of his staff, who mostly understood English. “Papuan culture places great value in sharing; it’s like a kind of primitive communism. But this means that when the om-om show up, you can’t say no. So how can you save money, how can you change your situation? You can’t. That’s why we’re trying to change the values here.” This missionary’s brazen criticism dramatized a pattern I had witnessed in numerous interactions between figures associated with the evangelical churches (including newcomers and indigenous figures).

The discourse of cultural deficiency obscures—and legitimates—the process of the regional economy’s incorporation, enacted through the displacement of long-standing relations of production and distribution, and the subordination of indigenous livelihoods to an encompassing national and global distribution formation. Furthermore, the claim of culturally

171 CHAPTER 3 determined entrepreneurial incapacity compounds the obstacles to indigenous enterprise. My interviews with (aspiring and successful) indigenous entrepreneurs highlight how banks actively discriminate against indigenous business loan applicants. One Dani acquaintance in his late twenties, having studied business and hoping to start a construction contracting company, explained the situation in these terms: “We indigenous people are ready to start enterprises (siap berusaha). But when we go to the bank for credit, they always make excuses. In Jakarta they are saying they want us to succeed, but how can we start business without credit?” Staff at banks, like other private companies in Wamena, continue to be overwhelmingly composed of non- indigenous workers. While I did not directly interview any bank staff, two of my most trusted indigenous informants had non-indigenous friends in high school who were now bank employees—and who, I was told, admitted to these friends that it was true that indigenous applicants were systematically denied credit. These indirect informants suggested that such systematic denials of credit are based on an idea of cultural reluctance to plan ahead, and thus an inability to conceive of money as capital—as a resource to be invested and accumulated rather than consumed and redistributed. Redistributive ‘cultural’ institutions such as the figure of the distant uncle stood as foils to practices of entrepreneurship—constructing an image of the regional economy from which power relations and global forces have been erased.

Group discussions I held with members of the Wamena Economic Observation Project

(WEOP) helped clarify the material and systemic realities within which figures such as the om- om could be problematized. More than one discussant raised linked issues of mobility, infrastructure, and space to undermine or moderate the ‘culturalism’ in the om-om analytic. This line of analysis pointed to how the kind of tactical occupation of high-traffic public space required for commercial success would also tend to make one available to relatives whose

172 CHAPTER 3 requests for assistance could stand in the way of accumulating capital. The response of the sole indigenous shopkeeper at Jibama market highlights the ‘trader’s dilemma’, which scholars of commerce in Southeast Asia have described as one where the accumulation imperative of commerce clashes with social values of redistribution and reciprocity (Hans-Dieter Evers 1991;

Hans-Deiter Evers and Schrader 1994). This dilemma is inherently less salient for migrants conducting business at a great distance away from extended families (Bonacich 1973, 585). In this way, a material and spatial contextualization of the distant-uncle analytic resonates with global associations between migration and commerce (Marsden 2015; Mung, Body-Gendrot, and

Hodeir 1992). It also highlights the entanglement of the two opposing modes of moral critique I identified above—the indigenous critique of migrant commerce versus the residual colonial moralization of indigenous expenditure. As one member of Dewan Adat Lapago put it in a group conversation at their Wamena compound: “Newcomers (pendatang) can succeed here because they are far from their place of origin (tempat asal). They can be free (mereka bisa bebas). But we indigenous people always have obligations and demands (keperluan dan tuntutan) that we have to be responsible for”.

The residual colonial discourse that problematizes indigenous expenditure lives on as an explanatory framework and disempowering scrutiny that exacerbates the moral and material dilemmas many indigenous Balim people experience in their efforts to coexist or compete with newcomer enterprise. The scrutinizing discourse becomes part of the structure that further empowers migrant merchants who are already favored as mainstream national subjects, and indeed in many cases somewhat ‘free’ from potentially disruptive and unpredictable home obligations. At the same time, the visible fact of migrant commercial success provides a moralizing foil to intensify the discourse of indigenous incapacity. This cascade of mutually

173 CHAPTER 3 reinforcing moral lenses expresses the recursion of the incorporation process within the

Indonesian nation-state, as the displacement of the merchant population into Papua generates a fine grain of charged ethnic distinctions.

The discourse on obstacles to indigenous competition with migrant commerce provides conceptual tools that have animated intra-indigenous relations—namely, by providing a blueprint for an idea of incipient WD regional economic advantage over GVD populations. Interpretations of both these binary scales of difference refer to customary redistributive obligations, and their problematization in residual colonial scrutiny, as a barrier to development. GVD anxieties about

WD ascendance via entrepreneurial mobility project the model of the higher-order, systemic fact of migrant commercial dominance over the regional economy. This transference further exhibits how the trajectory of incorporation recursively agitates social distinctions. The benefit of understanding this process in world-systems terms can be further illustrated by considering the way the regional overarching dyadic opposition—indigenous versus migrant—inherited features of prior, higher-order oppositions: in Java, between the indigenous (pribumi) society and the white European colonizer class; and in Papua, between indigenous Papuans and Euro-American mission and colonial state authorities. Dutch colonial deployment of migrant and migrant- descendant Chinese merchants drew on the idea that pribumi society was not equipped to manage trade, and that Chinese merchants could act as an intermediate buffer to absorb pribumi resentments toward colonial power (Rush 2007; Taylor 1983; Upton 2009, 59; Bonacich 1973).

The postcolonial deployment of migrant merchants in Papua, as part of agendas of pacification and national integration, draws on these histories while enacting the process of incorporation.

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Recursive distinctions at the edge of the world-system

My emphasis on a recursive aspect of ethnicity—where distinctions between WD and GVD take on elements of those between indigenous and newcomer—suggests a minor Balim version of the dynamic amber versus komin (Biak: foreign vs. indigenous) dyad that Rutherford (Rutherford

2003) highlighted for Biak, the island off Papua’s north coast. The long Biak history of inter- regional trade and tribute with Moluccan sultanates, Chinese traders, and early European imperialists allowed the amber category to index a non-essentialist notion of ethnicity, so that foreign education could allow a Biak person to transition (at least to a degree) from komin to amber (Rutherford 2003; Widjojo 2008).27 The fact that ethnographies of West Papua have highlighted recursive dynamics of social difference should not be taken strictly as an indication of how ethnicity works in this part of the world. There is a long ethnographic record of related phenomena in other world regions—most famously in Evans-Pritchard’s fractal schema of segmented dyadic oppositions in Nuer scales of belonging (Evans-Pritchard 1940). Evans-

Pritchard’s ethnography showed that categories of identity and difference are inherently relational and situational. Which category becomes salient at a given moment depends on the demands of a given situation, and the scale of collectivity implied by specific interactions.

Missing from this approach was a global and material analysis of the trajectories through which this or that scale might become salient. An outline of such an idea was proposed by British colonial official J.S. Furnivall, who described contexts such as Java and Burma where different groups met only in the market (Furnivall 1948). Furnivall argued that the ‘plural society’, where migrant populations were assigned to certain secondary sectors of the economy, was a colonial creation designed to facilitate capital accumulation.

27 I do not claim such dynamism for the Balim context, with its comparatively more recent entanglement in global capitalism.

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Furnivall’s analysis, rooted in colonial assumptions, overlooked forms of pluralism that predated European rule in the Asia Pacific (Pham 2005). For Furnivall, the colonial division of labor meant that interactions between indigenous and migrant populations, mediated by markets, were empty of the solidarity required for a self-governing polity. From Furnivall’s perspective, this seeming lack justified the role of the colonial state. This impulse to supervise pluralisms rendered turbulent by colonial capitalism lives on in contemporary ‘conflict resolution’ programs that have categorized the Balim valley as a space in need of outside intervention (Mote and

Rutherford 2001). Furnivall’s comparative history did highlight how imperial accumulation strategies generated patterns of migration of workers and merchants, creating new forms of colonial and capitalist pluralism—where migrant and indigenous populations engaged in unequal transactions. This analysis helps clarify how ‘ethnic’ conflicts have emerged in a variety of contexts across Southeast Asia and beyond. At the same time, Furnivall’s analysis was missing the recursive and situational element of Evans-Pritchard. This dynamism of scale is especially relevant when considering a territory being incorporated into the capitalist world-economy via a large state that is itself peripheral to the world-system. The nested aspect of this process sets the stage for relations between identities to shift at certain moments.

Jay O’Brien has drawn on these various conceptual threads to argue that ethnicity in

Sudan has historically responded to shifting demands for labor and changing pressures on livelihoods, themselves expressions of different moments in trajectories of incorporation into world capitalism (J. O’Brien 1986). O’Brien traces how West African migrants came to occupy certain labor roles—work that the colonial state considered local Arab populations to be unfit for. While colonial labor recruitment consolidated heterogeneous migrant-descendant populations into a single identity, distinct from Arabs, later postcolonial transitions in

176 CHAPTER 3 livelihoods, under new global demands, saw this identity fracture and fragment. This history helps to explain the emergence of different ethno-nationalist assertions in Sudan—and provides another example of politicized distinctions being produced by an ongoing and shifting trajectory of world-capitalist incorporation.

The Balim case resonates with O’Brien’s understanding of ethnic constellations as products of capitalist incorporation. The extension of global and national distribution networks into the Balim region has produced the binary of indigenous and newcomer, with its complex of material inequality and moral scrutiny. The role of incorporation is further illustrated by considering that relations between indigenous and newcomer became increasingly tense shortly after the 1997-98 economic crisis (krismon) that precipitated both the fall of Suharto and the

Papuan Spring. Migration to the Balim region from Indonesia’s more densely populated regions, notably parts of Java, Sumatra, and South Sulawesi, increased markedly during the last years of the 1990s and the early 2000s (Upton 2009). As explained in Chapter 2, these years corresponded to a time of economic stagnation in the wake of krismon, when the Indonesian rupiah’s collapse caused hyperinflation. Resulting layoffs in manufacturing caused high unemployment in the most densely populated areas of Indonesia (Fukuchi 2000a), while primary extractive and agri-business sectors, mostly located at national peripheries such as Papua, became more competitive (Fukuchi 2000a, 515). The crisis also allowed the IMF and World

Bank to dismantle government controls on prices and foreign capital—increasing foreign domination of the national economy—and at the same time implement a new decentralized governance system (Sangadji 2017). The national economy’s intensified dependence on extractive frontier regions such as Papua and Kalimantan—and the revenue-sharing agreements under decentralization, that returned a greater share of extractive rents to these regions—

177 CHAPTER 3 increased the attraction of Papua as a target region for migrants from other provinces (Pohan and

Izharivan 2017, 150). The re-peripheralization of the Indonesian economy as a whole, expressed partly as a displacement of population toward Indonesia’s internal periphery, intensified conflicts with ethnic dimensions in the Balim region.28 Indigenous uprisings against migrant commerce in

2000 and 2007 illustrate this process.

Subsequent crystallization of intra-indigenous tensions from 2008 onward were triggered by government decentralization, as partition of Jayawijaya regency raised the question of which group should hold power in Wamena. While the national government’s manipulative, anti-

‘separatist’ tactics encouraged such rivalries, they had become salient through the projection of moral critiques addressing economic inequality between indigenous and newcomer. These critiques respond to the process of regional incorporation. The dynamic and tense arena of recursive moralities in the Balim has thus expressed this region’s experience of extreme peripheralization within the world-system.

Channels of scrutiny

The patterns of scrutiny that have flowed through global and national scales resonate with anthropologists’ efforts to trace how Global South populations respond to the moral frameworks through which they are disciplined by international finance. Klima has argued that in Thailand, power blocs scrutinize popular classes’ economic practices by channeling the moralizing discourse of the IMF—which has accused Asian economies of irrational management and illicit redistribution (i.e., ‘crony capitalism’ and corruption) (Klima 2006). In the Papuan case,

28 A notion of capitalist incorporation is generally absent from explanations of the Papuan Spring— conventionally traced to a “euphoria” for Papuan nationalism triggered by the fall of Suharto (International Crisis Group 2008, 14; Chauvel 2011). While there is certainly some basis to this claim, it minimizes the role of the economic crisis in driving increased migration to Papua—obscuring the global and material dimensions of the Papua conflict.

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Autonomy’s provisions for development funds under indigenous control provided an occasion for international observers (especially those allied with US financial institutions) to simultaneously problematize Indonesian governance for corruption and crony capitalism, and cast doubt on indigenous Papuans’ capacity to manage money (e.g., Anderson 2015; Giap,

Nurina, and Mulya 2015, 551). Within the national context, meanwhile, politicians and media have countered the claims of Papuan activists by attributing failures of governance and development in Papua to incompetent management of the Autonomy windfall. As this global discourse cascades toward the Balim sphere, it reaffirms the colonial scrutiny toward customary ritual expenditures for standing in the way of savings and investment (e.g., Hayward 1983).

Missionary ideologies—expressed by colonial agents who first imported mass-produced commodities and established produce markets in the region—thus laid the basis for a mode of moralization that opposes the indigenous critique of the regional-scale practices that further world-economic incorporation. While these moralizing modes are mostly organized around the overarching regional dominance of migrant commerce, they have agitated intra-indigenous distinctions. Their counterpart, the indigenous critique of newcomer commerce, has been a rallying point for disruptions and subsequently the regulatory agenda of regents such as Wetipo.

As weak as its actual effect on commerce may be, this agenda has gained legitimacy amid a tense relation of forces—channeling moral critique from an arena of inter-ethnic distinctions toward a program of regulation.

This pivot, from recursive moralities to an indigenous-led regulation agenda, takes its shape from the specificities of the regional trajectory of incorporation. A different example is provided by Lattas’s interpretation of cargo rituals in New Britain as active responses to the moral segmentation initiated by colonial authority, and given force by its command of global

179 CHAPTER 3 commodity chains (Lattas 1992). Lattas’ analysis suggests that the cascade of moral scrutiny and critique provides a structure for a wide variety of efforts by New Guinean populations to respond to global forces. The fine grain of ethnically coded economic inequalities in the Balim region has allowed commercial regulation to emerge as a key mode of response. This response highlights the materiality and inter-scalar dimensions of the process of incorporation.

The intersection of ethnic distinctions, economic incorporation, and dominant moralities allow me to emphasize three linked points. First, the turbulent agitation of distinctions in peripheries of Global South countries should be conceptualized as generated through processes of incorporation within global capitalism that recur at internal scales—and in relation to which patterns of colonial moral scrutiny may find second and third lives. Second, this recursive aspect implies that regional constellations of difference may shift and transform in relation to the specifics of how distribution economies emerge and consolidate. Third, the agitation of social distinctions through this mode of incorporation proceeds through (and generates) moral discourses of scrutiny, critique, and auto-critique—which, in certain contexts, demand agendas of commercial regulation that imply a coherent arena of regional governance. To close this chapter, I summarize and discuss the implications of this trajectory—from distinctions through incorporation, to regional governance focused on commercial regulation—to elaborate on recursive peripheralization.

Conclusion: regional politics on the recursive periphery

The material and interpretations I have presented in this chapter so far have emphasized the way the market-terminal space generates morally fraught axes of distinction that incite forms of disruption and regulation. The disruptions that have been incited have themselves demanded— from the perspective of Jakarta bureaucrats and international agencies and advisors—the

180 CHAPTER 3 governance reform of Special Autonomy that has enabled indigenous representatives to function as regional mediating force that presents itself as capable of regulating the distribution economy.

Meanwhile, fraught distinctions generated through the terminal economy have acted as a pivot toward indigenous-led commercial regulation.

Wetipo’s regulatory agenda—beginning with the honai-shaped emblem addition to ruko, and culminating in the Sunday market and terminal ban—drew on the recursive pattern of proliferating distinctions. It did so in ways that drew attention to the way these distinctions function not as timeless resentments but rather as responses to a process of incorporation.

Installing an indigenous imprint over the architecture of migrant commerce gave symbolic expression to the critique of migrant commercial hegemony, as a vector of incorporation. The

Sunday ban, meanwhile, addressed these same anxieties about migrant dominance, as well as concerns about marketplace patterns of youth intoxication and intra-indigenous conflicts.

Commercial regulation stood at the intersection of divergent imperatives of governance and endurance: regulation of urban space, indigenous empowerment, youth discipline, and collective morality. The Sunday ban did not dwell in this or that regional axis of distinctions; it gathered actors of diverse perspectives around the task of regulating the regional economy.

These regulatory policies have not been immune from criticism. Some pro-independence voices suspect figures such as Wetipo of collaborating with commercial and military power blocs while using symbolic performances to distract the indigenous population from the independence agenda. It is clear that mandating a local architectural imprint, and suspending Sunday transactions, have not significantly altered regional power relations. All the same, the imperative of regulation has been a rallying point that has consolidated a sphere of regional politics. This consolidation expresses, and responds to, the pattern of recursive peripheralization.

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Anthropologists have often criticized world-systems analysis for supposedly positing that incorporation into global capitalism implies a predetermined trajectory of homogenization, and reduces people to their material interests (Dove 1996; Ortner 1984). The incorporation of the

Balim economy within the world-system has been a fragmentary and uneven process, through which territory has been partitioned, differences affirmed, and the moral implications of accumulation thrown into debate. I think the standard critique misrepresents the aims and claims of world-systems analysis. Wallerstein himself observed that the continued expansion of global capitalism has led to proliferating assertions of identity and difference (Wallerstein 1991, 25). He and allied authors called for social scientists to produce ethnographically detailed accounts of incorporation processes (Hopkins et al. 1987). Still, critics have brandished the image of homogenizing and totalizing capitalist expansion as a foil, to argue that world-economic forces are in fact moderated and transformed by local institutions—and that world capitalism and local institutions each act upon the other with roughly equal force (C. A. Smith 1984). Along these lines, Carol Smith argues that situations of ethnic division are among a set of local institutions that produce a “weak and distorted form of capitalism” (C. A. Smith 1984).

In the Balim region, inter-ethnic distinctions have crystallized and become bases for mobilizations that have momentarily disrupted the incorporation process (most dramatically as a result of the 2000 uprising, with a temporary exodus of merchants). However, Smith’s thesis of mutually impacting local and global forces obscures the fact that the significance of these distinctions is itself a product of world-systemic incorporation. There was no confrontation between newcomers and indigenous people in the Balim region until the deployment of migrant commerce; and there was no sense among GVD that WD might gain regional hegemony until the incorporation process had significantly shifted indigenous livelihoods away from indigenous

182 CHAPTER 3 production. In the wake of the moralizing register of colonial rationalizations of inequality, incorporation into the world-system has generated and agitated distinctions among the groups that reside in the Balim region. These distinctions—and their expression as morally inflected critique and auto-critique—have acted as a pivot from the global forces of incorporation to the regional agenda of regulation. This limited regulation program lacks the power to shape the global forces of incorporation.

My emphasis on a coalescence of regional politics around commercial regulation in the

Balim region sits in tension with a tendency in much economic anthropology to view regulation as essentially an imperative inherited from colonialism or transmitted from global power centers, and resisted by ordinary people (e.g., Dove 1996). Drawing on popular anxieties, regency-level indigenous representatives have been the most visible actors to consolidate regulatory regional governance. They have mediated divergent aspirations and imperatives of Indonesian versus

Papuan nationalism, migrant commerce versus indigenous livelihood, and so on. This indigenous governing class has tapped into a diverse set of insecurities and anxieties in order to traverse a narrow space of maneuver. The legitimacy of their various regulatory initiatives illustrates a feature of the recursive periphery: the political potency of particularisms at various scales, each carrying moral charge that can incite aspirations to regulate the incorporation process.

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Chapter 4 – Conscripts of Logistics: Trajectories of Mobile Youth

As explained in previous chapters, one outcome of the Balim region’s trajectory of incorporation has been the incompleteness or inadequacy of the infrastructural connections through which the regional economy has been incorporated as an end-point in distribution chains. The inadequacy of infrastructures is dramatized by the fact that manufactured commodities of all types and sizes—from cigarettes to rice sacks to pickup trucks and barrels of fuel—have only reached the

Balim region by scarce air transport. This infrastructural inadequacy is a systemic feature of both the inbound and outbound connections linking Wamena to Papua’s and Indonesia’s main transit nodes, and also of the network of connections that integrate the Balim hinterland into a somewhat coherent regional economy centered around its hub, Wamena. Infrastructural inadequacy demands that residents depend on patchy, intermittent, and unreliable transport and communications services.

The ways such inadequacies shape politics in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries is a familiar theme in ethnographic writing on infrastructures (Chu 2014; Graham 2010; Larkin

2008; Mains 2012). Part of my broader analysis is to trace implications of the fact that this inadequacy—or disconnection—is the form through which world-systemic incorporation happens. In Chapter 3, this was a question of noting a process of fragmentation where an uneven geography of logistical integration, layered with colonial categories of difference, generated a constellation of tensions. At the same time, this process set the stage for aspirations to stabilize and regulate the distribution economy. I touched on the struggles and creativity of indigenous produce vendors who orient their livelihoods around the need for tactical insertion into gaps in distribution paths. The figure of the informal indigenous vendor, laboring to patch over

184 CHAPTER 4 distribution circuits herself, appeared as both a foil and inspiration for a coherent regional regulatory agenda.

In this chapter, I will deepen the analysis of how the patchiness of distribution infrastructures demand mobile indigenous labor—and how these forms of labor shape and consolidate regional governance. This chapter focuses on a laboring figure that agitates inter- generational relations: the mobile and displaced indigenous youth who work, in various functions, in and around regional infrastructures. Naturally, this is a broad category: some of the roles it encompasses are well defined, such as kenek (minivan conductor or fare collector) or anak cumo (contraction of anak cuci mobil – carwash kid). More broadly, discussion of youth labor in infrastructures points to the figure of anak terminal (terminal kid)—a category that includes more specific roles and jobs (and identifies youth by the space they occupy, and so indirectly by the work they do). As discussed in the previous chapter, young people working informally around the market and terminal space are objects of concern and anxiety among adults who worry that the terminal economy is a space of predation and harm to the possibility of indigenous endurance, at the hands of a migrant commerce nexus.

Figure 4.1. Young workers unload cargo at the airport in Wamena

185 CHAPTER 4

As argued in the previous chapter, popular concerns about terminal kids have helped to legitimate policies of spatial governance and regulation that have attempted, somewhat counter- productively, to segregate and contain indigenous commercial livelihoods. As will become clear below, indigenous concerns about terminal kids are part of a broader set of aspirations, calculations, and anxieties surrounding the place of youth in relation to the possibility of indigenous endurance in the Balim region. There is nothing surprising about the fact that youth as a category is infused with concerns about the collective future: ethnographers have observed such tendencies worldwide (Bucholtz 2002; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Durham 2004;

O’Collins 1986; Wexler 2006). Such notions are evident in the relation between the figure of the terminal kid, and that of the university student on a path toward government employment. Many

Balim parents aspire and endeavor to send one or more of their children to pursue university studies in Jayapura or outside Papua, in the hope that they will then be able to return and enter the regional civil service. This chapter shows that this aspirational trajectory is inseparable from the question of managing and coordinating Special Autonomy’s new distribution programs.

Indeed, the organizational structure of Special Autonomy’s new allocations creates slots earmarked for educated youth to take on roles of management decision-making (Mollet 2011).

And so, two paradigmatic figures of youth trajectory—terminal kid, and university- educated youth on a government career path—are emblematic of different moments of the regional politics of distribution. These moments correspond loosely to the two phases of incorporation of the regional economy into the world-system. In the first instance, it is by taking up an informal laboring position at the interstices of the commercial distribution infrastructure; in the second, it is a question of being drafted into the expanding government apparatus so as to coordinate state distribution. One of the central concerns of this chapter is to discuss how these

186 CHAPTER 4 trajectories intersect. The two most important forms of intersection, for these purposes, are the way many students have historically ended up inadvertently doing terminal-type labor when they move to a town to pursue their schooling; and secondly, the way youth who have been slotted into informal infrastructural labor end up being involved in the urban lobbying politics that

Balim representatives are required to operate in. By tracing and contextualizing these intersections, I will shine light on how these trajectories, together, respond to incorporation.

The chapter first traces the conscription of logistical youth labor as an implication of the broader process of regional relegation and incorporation that has been presented in preceding chapters. This is based on a social history of youth mobility and migration from the Balim hinterland to town for school, and an antecedent pattern of recruitment into logistical labor within formations of first, teacher’s food rations, and then commerce. Secondly, I illustrate the broad indigenous investment in an agenda of youth education, and its relation to the arena of regional politics of distribution under Autonomy. Third, the chapter examine the way figures of youth logistical labor, exemplified by the terminal kid, have in recent years become involved in enabling the new Autonomy-era class of indigenous representatives to conduct its role of managing the distribution of state resources. Through these three moments, I weave in and out of the life trajectory of a handful of informants whose life histories demonstrate the broader patterns at work. These patterns include: how shifting and overlapping identities of student and logistical worker emerge in market and terminal spaces; the historical conscription of informal logistical labor via educational aspirations; the expectation that education is a path toward managing state distribution channels; and the growing role of informal youth infrastructure workers in

Autonomy-era distribution.

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The category of youth as I use it in this chapter is broad and multivalent. On one hand, I refer to adolescents as a sociological age bracket, in relation to types of work that tend to be done by people of a certain age. At the same time, youth (pemuda) is a political category that has an important history in the development of associations, nationalism, and political parties in

Indonesia (D. Lee 2011; Mrázek 2002; Suryadinata 1978). This history influences the meaning of the category in Papua; associations and organizations representing a variety of interests and positions are known as ‘youth organizations’ (organisasi pemuda), including in cases where membership and leadership is composed mostly of adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. This flexibility and wide range of the youth category presents a challenge for analysis, and also an opportunity to trace connections between various expressions and experiences of youth. In this chapter I shuttle between and occasionally blur lines between youth as a category of adolescent individuals, and youth as a category of political actor (who tends to be somewhat older). I justify this blurring with reference to the fact that in the Balim context the latter category tends to be understood as a potential life stage immediately following the former (and building on its implications of experiences of education and/or mobility).

‘Terminal kids’ at thresholds of education, consumption, and labor

First I present elements of a life story that exemplifies a pattern of aspiring students getting effectively drafted into informal infrastructure labor. Elias was a man in his late twenties who, though he never made it to university, often talked to me about the political value of education.

He grew up in Dombe, a district center in the Western Dani (WD) area to which he had lately returned by the time I first met him. Elias’s time away from the highlands had taken him to

Jayapura, where he had worked informally hauling cargo at Sentani airport; and further afield to the Sarmi and Waropen regions, where he had tried his hand at artisanal gold mining and game

188 CHAPTER 4 hunting. During one of our meetings, he told me the story of his own struggles to go to school.

His narrative linked the aspiration to gain an education with opportunities for consumption and work in and around peri-urban minivan terminals.

Around ’94, ’95, my family was comfortable enough, when I was 10, 11. There were no cars then—the first road came through in ’95. I was in 6th grade. My mom became pembantu (domestic help), at homes of pendatang (newcomers). Mom worked at the homes for women whose husbands worked at the offices. She washed dishes, clothes; they gave rice, soap, oil, our home needs. Sometimes she got a monthly salary. With that money mom could buy frying oil, salt, MSG, soap. She made a garden down by the river, planted soya beans and corn. We took the products to sell to the tofu makers in Wamena. I graduated from middle school in ’98, and my mom endeavored (berusaha) so I could go to school in Wamena. I signed up at Catholic high school in ’98. I was signed up for school, but I didn’t do the entrance test. Actually, I did the test, but I didn’t go to school. While waiting around for the enrolment requirements to be announced, someone told me, ‘let’s drive cycle rickshaw (becak)’. I was already hanging out with friends [in Wamena]. I had approached people, young guys. The money that my mom gave me, Rp 180,000 (US $80) for school—I rode with the Kijang (Toyota van). I used up all the money to go out with rickshaw driver friends—I threw the money away, bought cigarettes and food; and I gambled with marbles. I used up the money—so I didn’t go to school. By then, I was considering that school wasn’t important [but rather], what could I eat? That was when my friend told me, ‘let’s drive rickshaw’. I was thinking, ‘I can’t go home’—I was scared my mom would beat me. We sat around, we thought, ‘maybe we can steal’. Before I knew about rickshaw, I was hanging out at the old terminal, in front of the airport. We called to passengers [to offer services as porter]. But I was thinking, this isn’t much fun—I had run out of money. So I joined the kids who cover motorcycles with cardboard (parking attendants)—for food money. One day, my friend brought me to the river, near Wouma market. He had told me about the rickshaw, but I didn’t believe him— how could we do it? I practiced with his rickshaw under the bridge. It belonged to this businessman from Makassar. He had more than 30 rickshaws; it was the Kaonak fleet.1 I was thinking, I didn’t have a place to eat—if I went home to Dombe, my mom would get angry. I was scared to go see relatives in Wamena, because I figured my mom had put the word out: ‘if he’s there, catch him’. So we made a schedule: my friend took the rickshaw from early morning until midday, and I took it from midday until night. At first, I was scared stiff (kaku), and people could tell, they were scared of riding with me. I was taken aback (kaget) seeing cars coming. Eventually, I could do it. [Lists rates for typical trips between key spots and markets in Wamena.] We deposited Rp 15,000 ($6) every day with the owner. We struggled just to get money for deposits, and there was no money left for

1 Kaonak is a Western Dani greeting between men. In Wamena, each rickshaw company brands its fleet, sometimes incorporating indigenous terms.

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food. [We struggled until we were] half dead (setengah mati). Sometimes I didn’t eat, I was tired, irritated. [Mr. Andi] made a lot of money: 30 times 15,000 everyday. I was already far from my parents. I was scared, I had already violated… this wasn’t in accordance to what my parents wanted. And then, October 6th [2000] happened and Wamena became chaotic.2

Elias’s narrative evokes a discrete shift from rural student pursuing future achievement, to urban street kid and transportation worker, hustling to stay alive. This is a familiar narrative pattern: over the years, I heard from many other informants, especially men, with similar stories of moving or commuting to an urban context to go to school—and ending up drinking, gambling, hustling, dropping out, working odd jobs at terminals, fighting, and ‘getting in trouble’.

For students from Grand Valley Dani-speaking (GVD) villages, mostly located closer to

Wamena than Elias’s Western Dani (WD) area, the transition to urban life tended not to be as stark as Elias’s—for who, at the time he moved to Wamena, going to the city required an expensive five-hour trip in a jeep on barely passable roads.3 For youth living nearer Wamena, it has been common to take a short minivan ride, or walk to and from high school in town every day, such that the market and terminal constitute more of a habitual gateway that punctuates routine commuting rhythms. For Elias and others from more distant WD-speaking regencies, the terminal acted more as a singular threshold, mediating between rural and urban spaces.4 Today,

Dombe has its own high school, but in Elias’s day it did not: going to high school required relocation and immersion in the urban context. What is apparent from the set of narratives I compiled, however, is that whether students had commuted daily or relocated to Wamena, the

2 These are the events of Bloody Wamena, noted previously, when state security forces attacked posts where pro-independence groups had raised the banned Morning Star flag—provoking a counter-attack by Dani men and youth at Wouma market. The crisis led migrants to seek refuge in police and army compounds, or to leave Papua outright, and ground commercial and administrative life to a halt (Mote and Rutherford 2001; Meiselas 2003). 3 This compares to the hour-long walk, or half-hour drive, typical of districts closer to Wamena. 4 The singularity of the terminal is especially dramatic for the growing population of young Yali rickshaw drivers who come from , located several days’ walk southeast of Wamena.

190 CHAPTER 4 terminal was the space where they recounted ‘falling’ into types of expenditure and work that obstructed their education plans.

Entering a pattern of convivial urban consumption that saw his school money quickly spent, Elias had little choice but to shift his immediate priority from educating himself for the future, to earning money in the present. The informal and insecure work that he did was the work that was available to him. At the time Elias told me his story, I had already observed and discussed the pattern of informal work by male Papuan youth who congregate at markets, terminals, the airport, and strategic spots on main streets—looking for work as parking attendants, minivan conductors (fare collectors, kenek), car washers (anak cumo), porters, or motorcycle parking attendants. At terminals and on main commercial streets it is common to see indigenous boys, adolescents and young men seemingly idling, waiting for work, scanning the crowds, or observing the movements of others. This work typically is organized through a relationship of allegiance between the youth worker and the owner, operator, or manager of a minivan, pickup truck, parking area, airport loading area, shop, restaurant, rickshaw fleet, carwash site, or riverside gravel mine. These relationships can be unstable and former terminal kids have recounted stories of having to use physical confrontation to defend their ‘spots’.

The varied types of informal labor available to indigenous youth are physically demanding. Minivan or pickup truck conductors typically are responsible for loading and unloading bundles of produce or firewood that indigenous rural residents ferry into town in the morning, to sell either directly to buyers or to intermediaries. Airport cargo workers haul boxes of food staples, building materials, finished products, machinery and vehicles—all of which are flown into Wamena in the absence of a road from the coast. Parking attendants endure intense midday sun, cold afternoon rain, and vehicle exhaust. Many shops and restaurants informally

191 CHAPTER 4 employ indigenous youth to haul boxes, clean, or run errands.5 While some youth obtain room and board with the family running the business, others live in compounds in and around

Wamena—often in neighborhoods known to house residents originating in one or another of the region’s districts (and thus sharing a mother tongue).

Many youth live in overcrowded compounds with inadequate water and sanitation installations. In recent years this has especially been the case for youth from more distant areas, such as Yali youth—who, coming from a more distant area lacking road connections to Wamena, have often moved to Wamena without older relatives and thus live in more dramatic separation from co-linguists of other age groups. Some youth occupy abandoned buildings in and around town, or live collectively in buildings that surround the major peri-urban markets of Wamena.

Several informants explained that such collective market-area arrangements often feature a merchant providing room, food, and in some cases intoxicants such as homebrewed alcohol, in exchange for availability to be deployed for a wide variety of types of work—sometimes including sex work (see also Butt 2007).6

5 Scholarly literature has generally not considered Papuan street youth or terminal kids as workers—with the notable exception of Balim scholar Theo Kossay, whose study of (mostly Yali) rickshaw drivers shows how, as in Elias’ story, intentions to save money for school fees are undermined by spending on pleasurable consumption items shared among groups of co-linguist friends (Kossay 2014). 6 An organizer who runs a local NGO that offers housing and schooling for street youth told me that many such youth have contracted HIV, contributing to a wider HIV/AIDS crisis in the region (Butt 2012). The issue of Wamena’s street youth has been addressed by a variety of NGO interventions and in some scholarly writing, mostly with a focus on the damaging effects of youth sexuality and sex work, STD transmission, and substance abuse. Butt (2007) argues against viewing such youth sexuality as agency, arguing that it responds to systemic disempowerment.

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Figure 4.2. Boys working at an informal carwash near a market in Wamena

Since my first visit to Wamena in 2007, in conversations with elders, religious leaders, community organizers, NGO staff, and researchers, the figures of the street kid (anak jalanan), terminal kid (anak terminal), and glue-sniffing kid (anak aibon) have come up again and again: as a sign of the dislocation of Balim and more broadly Papuan society, and of a sense of hopelessness and disarray caused by urbanization and Indonesian modernity in the Papuan highlands. Of course, such inter-generational anxieties resonate beyond Papua; the street kid is a key figure of urban modernity in Indonesia and elsewhere (Joshua Barker et al. 2009; Brown

2009). In the Balim region, this figure takes on political salience, as anxieties about errant youth have played a role in motivating efforts by community organizations and government agencies to contain and govern market and terminal spaces—notably the Clean Wamena program and the relocation of Wamena’s central market (recounted in Chapter 3).

Illegibility in terminal labor

Conversations with older generations showed that anxieties about street youth were intensified by a sense of illegibility that surrounds the terminal kid. When I first expressed interest in

193 CHAPTER 4 learning more about terminal kids’ labor and livelihoods, one of my key informants, a man in his thirties who had once himself engaged in terminal kid-type labor and lifestyle, explained to me the issue: “They won’t even speak to me, and I know them from the village! When they see us, the older generations, even though we were once like them, they won’t talk to us about anything.

They’ll just say, ‘yeah, yeah’, and move along”.

I myself noted that it was difficult to track down youth that I knew from time spent in rural Kaimo district, when I was at the market-terminal space. Although he was not exactly a full-fledged terminal kid, the teenage son of Lina provides a case in point. I had spent afternoons hanging out in and around the rural homestead with him, before he had started to frequent the market on the edge of Wamena. Later, I knew him to have befriended the son of a shopkeeper, and to do occasional odd jobs at this shop. One day when passing by the shop, I asked for him by name and was met with a confused expression. It turned out he was known there only by a nickname, taken from an Indian film, and that was obviously not his given name. On another occasion, I noted a phone number of a minivan conductor who I had requested to provide me with an estimated departure time for a return trip from a village visit. The conductor reluctantly provided his mobile number, but declined to provide his name. I learned not to ask again, and gradually made some sense of the self-effacing stance conductors and rickshaw drivers tended to adopt when interacting with passengers such as me, with my unclear allegiances.

When dealing with researchers and co-linguists of other generations, terminal kids seemed to value anonymity—going by a shifting set of names and nicknames. The task of scanning for opportunities for work and resources at nodes of transportation and commerce seemed to require limiting the extent to which one might be identifiable. A stance of illegibility responds partly to a history of state violence at markets—where Papuan nationalist uprisings

194 CHAPTER 4 have taken place, and where surveillance by state agents posing as itinerant merchants or ojek

(motorcycle taxi) drivers is widely assumed. Illegibility could also be a defensive tactic for terminal youth to bifurcate their rural and urban relationships—maintaining separation between parallel sets of obligations and debts. In practice, such considerations likely overlapped, especially given the participation of police and military in the illicit economy around the terminal. In sum, the tactical insertion of self into nodes in distribution infrastructure required not only strenuous physical labor and forms of calculation and mapping; it also involved negotiations with a ‘shadow’ arena of illicit transactions and dangerous actors, in which an ill- defined identity might be advantageous for the more exploited and precarious class of participants in this economy. Such calculations complicated the infrastructural labor of Balim youth, and further shaped the practices and dispositions cultivated in the terminal economy.

Historical role of education in terminal labor conscription

From a perspective focused on the regional economy as a whole, youth terminal labor, done mostly by young men, enables the distribution of goods and people in the region. This labor, along with the horticultural production and vending carried out especially by women, underpins the commercial phase of incorporation of the Balim regional economy. The figure of mobile, displaced youth laboring in and around distribution infrastructures recalls similar figures in other historical contexts of incorporation. A notable feature of the Balim case is how educational aspirations drive mobilities and displacements that set the stage for labor in infrastructure.

Trajectories such as Elias’s illustrate that the pursuit of education passed through the peri-urban space of the terminal economy—enabling conscription into infrastructure-patching work. There is a longer history to the role of educational aspirations in this process of labor recruitment. Life stories from the colonial and early postcolonial history of early regional schooling offer a

195 CHAPTER 4 window onto antecedents to more recent patterns of recruitment. This historical enrolment shows how regional incorporation unfolded via infrastructures that were generally inadequate—a process that demanded youth labor that was making itself available in order to pursue new schooling opportunities.

As described in chapter 2, in the mid-1950s, colonial Dutch authorities first authorized

Christian missionaries to establish missions in the Balim region. The Balim valley, surrounded by a major mountain range and separated from the coast by extensive forests and swamps, presented a logistical challenge for missions. Unlike mission sites on Papua’s north coast, or elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago, Papua’s central highlands region had little or no historical trade in staple goods with other regions (Ploeg 2004). At the time of colonial missionary arrivals, there existed neither a regional merchant class to provision staple goods and materials, nor any modern transport infrastructure to facilitate provisioning from urban centers to rural sites. A central preoccupation of missionaries was building and maintaining airstrips for cargo delivery from Jayapura, and attracting proto-markets to obtain produce and building materials in exchange for imported commodities airlifted from the coast (Hayward 1983; Ploeg

1969). Missionaries supervised the installation of various infrastructures to establish the channels necessary for provision and communication. Local residents provided the labor for such installations, presumably expecting to gain access to some of the missionaries’ impressive wealth

(Hayward 1983; Lieshout 2009). Mission provisioning was evidently enabled by new infrastructural technologies of transport and communications. These distribution technologies were, however, deployed sporadically and in piecemeal fashion in a Balim context lacking the

196 CHAPTER 4 long history of trans-regional infrastructure known to many other world-regions.7 Ironically, technologies impressive for their labor-saving effect—particularly motor vehicles—were implemented in a way that demanded indigenous labor.

Mission ‘civilizing’ activities in various ways generated prestige and attraction around the possibility of increased mobility and access to imported commodities. The education missions provided was, from the mission perspective, a means of training the first generation of indigenous preachers. For Balim residents, attaining this role was a way of attaining a new form of authority and mobility, as someone who would don modern clothing, possess books and writing implements, and spread the Christian message from village to village (Hayward 1997).

As the mission project grew, missionary aviation proved insufficient to support its provisioning needs; soon missionaries lobbied the colonial administration to invest in transport infrastructures to integrate the emergent highlands hub Wamena with its surrounding rural area

(Lieshout 2009). This integration was cut short by the end of the colonial administration over

Papua. Most missionaries soon ceded control of education programs to Indonesian church organizations and to the growing Indonesian state apparatus. Meanwhile, logistical integration of the highlands proceeded incrementally, and historical mission centers such as Dombe were left without a passable road to Wamena until the 1990s. The agenda of regional infrastructure integration faced hurdles of high costs for transport of materials. This was compounded by the disruptive transition from the outgoing Dutch colonial administration, that repatriated its fleet of equipment and vehicles; and by the budgeting challenges as the new province, then called Irian

7 Java offers a dramatic contrast: the centuries-long colonial period was marked by graduate development of shipping, road, and telecommunications infrastructure integrating and connecting the island’s regions within commodity distribution flows that linked it to wider European and Asian economies.

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Jaya, transitioned between unstable currencies (Garnaut and Manning 1974).8 In the Balim region, infrastructure integration did not keep pace with the expansion of schooling and its formal incorporation within the national Indonesian education system. More often than not, the task of transporting supplies such as teachers’ rations from Wamena to hinterland posts fell to students themselves.

Missionary and state, colonial and post-colonial education programs bound education and modern commodity distribution up in projects of civilizational uplift, which sought to guide the

Balim indigenous population into modern ways of living. This agenda depended on the recruitment of aspiring students as informal logistical laborers. This history appears in the life stories of numerous older informants that I collected—such as Frans, a man in his 40s from an outlying district beyond the GVD area.

J. When was the first time you went to Wamena? F. I was in my early teens. I went to primary school, there were teachers from Jayapura, Biak, and Java. Back then, we had to walk—there was no road. We walked from up there down [to Wamena] along the river, ehhh!—the water could go up like this, you had to swim. We carried rice, usually we got it from town [Wamena]. It was all mud, walking by foot all the way. We left around 6 in the morning, we walked, walked, walked, walked, walked, walked—we got to Wamena and it was 6 in the evening. You see, now, since then, they have made it a little closer, but back then it was just a little path. And Valley (GVD, Catholic) people here (...) If someone walked alone, [they would] kill [them]. Kill. You could go as a group, but if you were alone, they would steal things—people brought stuff, and whatever they brought could be taken. And they would kidnap people too, lots of people died. If you went as a group (rombongan), that was OK. J. So you’d usually go in a group—was that for school? F. Yes, for school—the teachers had rice rations in Wamena. J. Teachers had their students fetch their rice? F. Yes. Usually, everyone got it in town. Wherever they were posted—they would all get it in the town. Boys, girls, would walk together, all of them came down to get their teachers’ rice rations. They all got it in town. J. So the first time you went to Wamena was to get your teacher’s rice? F. Yes. We did like that, until grade 3, then the war (gejolak) started, in 1977.

8 All of this took place amid a period of instability for the Indonesian economy, as Western financial institutions pressured the Sukarno government over its moderate attempts to regulate foreign capital—leading to the takeover by Suharto (Short 1979).

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For Frans, life as a student before roads reached out from Wamena required periodic dangerous treks to Wamena; being a student implied working, sporadically, as a porter. I gathered similar stories from several older informants, supporting Frans’s claim that this was a generalized system for schools in the rural ‘outposts’ (pos-pos) (now district or regency capitals) beyond Wamena. In these early moments in the installation of the Balim distribution economy, children’s entry into formal education, understood as a way to gain benefits associated with the new power structure, is paired with a new mobility and the strenuous and dangerous work of hauling staple goods.

If in Elias’ story becoming a terminal kid was a consequence of spending tuition money on new sociable consumption opportunities, for Frans’s earlier conscription, hauling goods was simply an automatic implication of being in subordinate relation to a teacher. At these different moments, the regional distribution economy required youth labor to insert itself into nodes in a patchy infrastructure network. This relation, generated through the Papuan highlands’ belated trajectory of incorporation, illustrates a version of what Chandra Mukerji terms ‘logistics’: a type of power that is embedded in the infrastructural ordering of built landscapes, orienting practices and shaping of politics (Mukerji 2009, 2010). Balim youth labor is a converse of Mukerji’s case—where Louis XIV oversaw the construction of the inter-sea Loire canal that set conditions for the depersonalization of the French state (Mukerji 2009). Rather than a new large-scale infrastructure, in the Balim region from the 1950s onward colonial and postcolonial authorities installed a system of distribution but did not integrate its piecemeal channels into a coherent network. It was informal youth labor that enabled the regional infrastructure network to cohere as a semblance of a system. The inadequacy of the infrastructures through which the Balim

199 CHAPTER 4 region’s economy was encompassed, combined with the promise of modern schooling, effectively conscripted youth labor as porters, and later as terminal kids.

The conscription of youth logistical labor has historically been embedded in different types of violence: from the dangers inherent in travel through others’ territory; to the fights and police raids that are a sporadic routine at markets and terminals; and the large-scale events of

1977 and 2000 which put into play (and then reasserted) Indonesian sovereignty (Farhadian

2005; Mote and Rutherford 2001). The entwinement of education, commodity circuits, and violence characterizes the Balim region’s trajectory of incorporation, with its practical challenges of provision. This entwinement clarifies how regional contestations tend to revolve around distribution infrastructures (as illustrated for example in the regulation agendas of Chapter 3).

The experiences of mobile youth labor demanded by inadequate infrastructures are the local shape to a global question: the question of what politics is generated by gaps between aspirations of success embedded in discourses of education, on one hand, and realities of informal, insecure, or temporary work (or apparent idleness) that are foils to aspirations of youth achievement

(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Jeffrey 2010; Makori 2013; Simone 2005). The historical pace and timing of world-economic incorporation generated a particular regional shape of logistical power—drafting youth into roles that have in turn shaped regional politics in ways that I explain in the next sections.

Collective investments in education in relation to distribution networks

Education is a major site of collective investment and aspiration among the indigenous Balim population. Over the years, regardless of the perspective of the interlocutor, I had countless conversations about disempowerment of Papuans that turned to the idea that only through education could Papuans overcome their marginalization. It is very common for Balim families

200 CHAPTER 4 to aspire to send at least one child to university outside the highlands (especially in Jayapura), or outside Papua—common destinations including Manado (), Yogyakarta (Central

Java), as well as other cities in Java, , and Sulawesi. Jenny Munro, in her research on Dani university students in Manado (Northern Sulawesi), has shown that students aim to achieve

‘quality’ (kualitas)—an aspiration that responds to shame caused by official “discourses of diminishment” that stigmatize regional minorities as backwards (terbelakang) (Munro 2013;

Robbins 2005). In the Papuan context, indigenous populations and specifically Central

Highlanders are often framed as primitive (primitif) and stupid (bodoh). I repeatedly heard such ideas mentioned in an offhand manner, including by Balim people themselves expressing a kind of auto-critique.9 This idea is particularly salient in the Central Highlands, with its short history of modern education; it helps motivate collective indigenous investments with the aim of increasing educational achievements for highlander youth. The idea of backwardness is also expressed in the notion that the Balim region lacks ‘human resources’ (sumber daya manusia).

The expansion of the civil service that has accompanied government decentralization has intensified the idea that Papuans must become educated in order to navigate the challenges of the modern world (dunia moderen).

In the life stories I have collected, and in Papuan historical narratives more broadly, an element that reappears is a sense of being ‘tricked’ (ditipu) by Indonesian commercial and political actors—in market transactions and in affairs of state (Assolokobal 2007; H. Haluk, n.d.). The narrative of trickery draws on the material inequalities produced within the commercial economy, where the apparent proficiency of newcomers for commercial success produces auto-critique in relation to entrepreneurial incapacity (as described in Chapter 3). The

9 Such auto-critique is related to that described in Chapter 3 in relation to ideas about indigenous incapacity for commercial enterprise. I sometimes heard even partisans of Papuan independence express ideas such as “masyarakat di kampung masih bodoh” (“the people in the village are still stupid”).

201 CHAPTER 4 regional price structure of high-priced imported mass-produced commodities, and low-priced primary and horticultural products, expressed in differentiated commercial roles, systematically intensifies a sense of being duped in commercial transactions.10 I have heard this idea expressed as ‘orang Indonesia terlalu pintar’ (‘Indonesians are too clever’), in reference to the historical domination of commerce by migrants. In a related vein, a Wamena-based human rights advocate once complained to me that Balim people merely sell primary products (such as produce or areca nut) but rarely attempt value-added business such as selling fried chicken at a warung (streetside restaurant hut). While this advocate could explain how this structural inequity was produced through historical disempowerment and discrimination, he suggested that a kind of knowledge differential was to blame for continued migrant economic domination. The sense of being tricked or outmaneuvered and thereby disempowered has been a motivating factor among indigenous figures in focusing on education as a means of ameliorating the future prospects of the indigenous population (Assolokobal 2007).

While commerce incites such forms of motivational auto-critique, the regional civil service is the main site of employment and wage toward which educational aspirations are oriented among the indigenous population.11 As Munro has reported, students’ pursuit of quality through education is oriented toward the goal of returning to Papua to work toward development in the Central Highlands. Most often, this aspiration takes the form of aiming to work in regency- level government in Wamena or in one of the other highland regency capitals that have been founded through waves of partition in the past two decades.

10 While high prices of imported commodities include markups for air and road transport, low prices of local produce reflect an unacknowledged efficiency of the combined system of indigenous horticultural production and informal infrastructural labor that ensures the provision of produce at markets. 11 The private sector (swasta) is not widely seen as a realistic site of employment for indigenous Balim people. This relates partly to patterns of discrimination related in Chapter 2.

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Educational aspirations are frequently expressed through types of collective action, such as gatherings at rural homesteads, where study expenses are gathered through gifts from neighbors and relatives. Such events repurpose customary forms of ceremonial distribution practices, which in pre-colonial times especially served an important role in sustaining alliances

(Heider 1970; Ploeg 1966; Sugandi 2014). Customary forms of performative sharing have been adapted to the challenge of accessing education, taking the shape of an event sometimes referred to as les sumbangan (class donation) (Sugandi 2014).12

I first witnessed such ceremonial fundraising when Frans invited me to his home village to attend a feast organized to raise cash for the graduation fees of a relative’s daughter, who was studying at university outside Papua. As I would grow used to seeing at any rural Dani wedding, funeral, or other such event, the host family’s compound was converted into a sort of open-air reception hall. A tarp protected a seating area from rain, a small number of chairs for special guests were set up to one side, and sweet potatoes and greens were cooked in the regional bakar batu (‘rock grill’) method, in a pit with fire-heated rocks. Two elements differentiated the set-up from another event of comparable scale. For one, the food provided included no meat—a standard omission in such cases to maximize commission of resources toward education (as

Frans told me, and I later confirmed at other such events). Secondly, a small desk with two chairs was set up under the tarp, where two male members of the host family took notes and made announcements. Their work was to record the monetary contributions made by each guest upon arrival, after the customary exchange of greetings, expressions of gratitude and recognition— waa, waa, waa. Eventually, a ‘big’ guest arrived by pickup truck with his entourage—a high- ranking civil servant (and aspiring politician) who hailed from the area and was related to the

12 The word les is from the Dutch for ‘lesson’, and is in use especially in eastern Indonesia. The term les sumbangan is structured according to Dani rather than Indonesian grammar.

203 CHAPTER 4 hosts. This guest took the opportunity to make a short speech related to his ambitions as candidate in upcoming regency elections. Toward the end of the afternoon, one of the duo minding the desk announced the total contributions collected—over eight million rupiah ($800

USD). This amount was based on a wide range of contributions, from small amounts such as 25 or 50 thousand, to the two million given by the special guest.

The practice of doing without meat at such a gathering resonated with other stories of frugal denial on the part of students’ families, that I collected from a variety of informants. One college graduate, having returned to the highlands from Jayapura, told me about his family’s struggle to raise funds for his tuition, selling produce at market and finding money wherever they could, while spending little: ‘they ate rice without salt’. Evoking the self-denying consumption of completely bland food signaled sacrifice for the future of the child, the family, and ostensibly the wider community.

Student associational life

I became more firmly convinced of the significance of education as a means of insertion into the distributive bureaucracy through my discussions with members of Balim student associations, and observations of associational life in Jayapura, Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Student associations are organized according to location of study and regency of origin, so that in Jayapura,

Yogyakarta, Jakarta and other ‘study towns’ (kota studi), there are associations for students from

Jayawijaya, Lanny Jaya, Yahukimo, Nduga and so on. My interviews with association members showed that the primary objective of associations was to foster leadership among students. This objective was most apparent at the initiation activities organized to start the school year.

At an initiation I attended, the incoming cohort was subjected to tests and discipline involving public performance and group interaction. Male students were required to shave their

204 CHAPTER 4 heads, all were required to dress in matching white and navy, and made to sit in rows while older students conducted various lectures and activities. One lecture was on the question of leadership, explaining the difference between ‘democratic’ and ‘authoritarian’ leadership styles, and linking the material to the question of regional governance under Autonomy. Students were then called upon to verbally answer questions about the material. One facilitator forbade incoming students from laughing; those who transgressed were then punished by being required to spontaneously sing a customary Balim chant. The singing was perfectly coordinated; the four participants each took on one of the distinct characteristic vocal parts that structure typical contrapuntal Balim chants.13 This type of chant, known as etai (GVD) is known for its capacity to incite collective enthusiasm.

The transition from tension and embarrassment to collaboration and enthusiasm that I witnessed at the initiation was, I was told later, an intentional achievement of the facilitators and organizers. The idea was, as one association executive explained to me, to “get them to overcome their shyness, learn to speak in public, learn to interact with groups and with the opposite gender, and to become good leaders”. By demanding that participants withhold laughter, interact across gender difference, reflect on leadership qualities, and valorize customary forms of expression, initiation activities sought to inculcate in new recruits the importance of overcoming a disjunction between an Indonesian-dominated urban world of bureaucracy and the kampung (village) world of Balim life. Students were invited to embrace the goal of equipping themselves with the skills and dispositions needed to operate in the formal political arena and bureaucracy—without, for that matter, losing sight of the needs of Balim’s rural-dwelling

‘customary communities’ (masyarakat adat).

13 At a basic level these include a high staccato rhythm, a low drone, and a rhythmic lead verbal chant.

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Figure 4.3. Living room at a Balim regency student residence, with seating laid out in preparation for a student association meeting

The orientation of student associations toward the formal politics of the regional state can be seen in the wider formality that permeates student associational life. At meetings, even routine meetings, it was common for members to begin speaking with the formula ‘thank you for the time that has been given to me’ (‘terima kasih atas waktu yang diberikan kepada saya’).

Meanwhile, any event organized by the association would feature written invitations sent to potential attendees; a specially printed banner (spanduk) announcing the event; and often, a formal seminar component in which a guest would make a speech (typically on a topic such as leadership, highlands development, or Christian moral values).

Student associations worked to foster the capacity and responsibility for managing organizational resources, with little concern for academic life per se. Associations sought to spread the benefits of this approach as widely as possible, typically rotating executive positions yearly, and forbidding students from holding a position more than once. This gave as many students as possible the opportunity to take responsibility for tasks such as organizing activities,

206 CHAPTER 4 managing budgets, interacting with the regency administration, and coordinating joint activities with other student associations.

Figure 4.4. Organizational structure chart for a student residence in Jayapura (with identifying information blurred)

Obstacles and Autonomy

Collective investments and sacrifices for the aspirational cause of education ran up against widespread understandings that in practice, students faced many obstacles to success in education, especially at postsecondary levels. Munro recounts how for students in Manado, the aspiration to graduate and return to Wamena to land civil service employment was defeated by a range of difficulties which left many students unable to complete their studies and attain the required civil service qualifications (Munro 2009). I also gathered widespread reports of such difficulties, especially from youth themselves. On one hand, there were problems of discrimination against Papuan students in institutions. In addition, the trajectory of migration to a large urban context such as Jayapura, Manado or Yogyakarta often involved new hardships and dangers, which parents did not always understand in detail, but whose impacts they became aware of. One such danger was the possibility of hostility in another land. In recent years, the

Papuan student community, having become demographically significant and visible in certain

207 CHAPTER 4 neighborhoods, has faced episodes of racism and police surveillance especially in Manado and

Yogyakarta.14 Meanwhile, separation from the highlands context, and the household arrangements of food production and distribution, mean that many migrant students experience shortages of cash for food, transport, and other needs.

I learned about the struggles of migrant Balim students both from stories of older adults who recounted their own experiences, and through discussion groups with Balim students in

Jayapura, Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Across these gaps in generations, the challenge of studying while lacking basic necessities came up again and again. Many Balim-area students reside in official regency-funded student residences while away for their studies—an expression of recognition at the regency level of the political importance of higher education, and of the material needs students experience when migrating. While in some cases the extent of the government support for students is impressive, residences are also often scenes of hardship. In

Yogyakarta, I met a student who had run out of money for transport, and owned no motorcycle, and so was unable to attend class, while waiting for family in Wamena to gather and send funds.

In Jayapura, I heard about students running out of money and taking odd jobs such as selling newspapers at busy intersections, monitoring parked motorcycles, or working as porters at markets (similar to the type of work terminal kids do in Wamena). I also learned about the famed student residence meal: naskos, a contraction of nasi kosong (empty rice)—an indication of the struggle to eat more than a bare meal of unaccompanied staple. Many students at both sites reported struggling with various illnesses (attributed variously to unfamiliar climate,

14 In both cases, local nationalist militias, gathered to oppose Papuan students’ pro-independence demonstrations, and protected by police, attacked Papuan student residences. Students at one dormitory told me that when they pass by the scene of traffic accident, they nervously hope a Papuan student was not involved and identified as a culprit, which might lead to retaliations against Papuan students.

208 CHAPTER 4 malnutrition, lack of hygiene due to insufficient resources), and described how some students ended up drinking away savings instead of studying.

Parents back home showed awareness of and concern about the problems and dangers that stalk student life away from home. On various occasions, I heard disappointed anecdotes about this or that child who had left home with cash raised for studies, but spent it in a flurry of consumption once at their destination. Stories circulated about students spending tuition money on alcohol and other forms of pleasurable consumption, and having sexual relations. Savvier parents sent money piecemeal so that students could not spend it all. The figure of the migrant student has been associated with sickness and death. The student’s return to the highlands in a coffin has become a cultural theme, appearing for instance in a song by the popular Dani music group, Grup Kaonak (who sing in WD, GVD, Yali and Indonesian). When I asked their singer about their success, he attributed it to their ability to tell stories that ring true with the region’s listerners, and linked student deaths to consumption temptations.

80% or so of students returning home in coffins are highlanders. When we think about the resources (hasil) that the parents send—I don’t know, it depends how they manage their economy when they go to school—there’s a problem. But if they have it, for example the resources from selling sweet potatoes, vegetables, and so on, after that they can send the money. If they say ‘oh, this is the result of our parents’ labor, so we have to manage it well, and use it to pay tuition’… But there are some youth who—their parents send money—and even though it is a result of extraordinary labor, still they use it to party, to go to bars, to drink. And so finally, their lungs are burnt, they die, and are returned home. This is a great loss that happens.

Frans (who had introduced me to the tuition fundraiser activity) was aware of varied dangers that could befall students entrusted with tuition money and sent off to faraway cities to study. One day I asked him whose idea it was for his children to leave Papua for their studies. At the time, two of his daughters had graduated in public administration in Java and returned home; one of them worked as a civil servant in Wamena, which afforded a regular wage and modest

209 CHAPTER 4 rice ration that were crucial resources for the extended family. I had mistakenly assumed that

Frans’s motivation was based on an understanding that the education offered at universities in

Java or Sulawesi is of higher quality than those in Jayapura. Instead, Frans (who belongs to the

Walak ethno-linguistic group) explained it had to do with the danger of being around co- linguists. “For them to go to Java was my idea. I didn’t want them to be around other Walak people, speaking the same language, drinking, doing all kinds of things (macem-macem). In

Jayapura it’s too easy. In Java they could stay out of trouble.”

Frans understood that youth transition to the urban context could be an opportunity to link up—and share whatever resources were in hand—with acquaintances speaking the same native language.15 Sending his kids to faraway Java, where Papuan students are a tiny minority, was a way to mitigate the risks that their tuition money would be spent on friends and alcohol— and thus increase their chances of graduating and returning to Papua to find work in the civil service. It occurred to me that such social drinking could just as likely occur among co-linguist students at student dorms in Javanese cities.16 Furthermore, especially after partition of new, smaller regencies, regency support for student residences tended to promote co-linguist gathering in study towns. I think Frans understood the risks of dangerous youth behavior to be linked especially to the kinds of co-linguist consumption associated with the transactional space of the peri-urban terminal—and assumed that while Dani terminal kids are a fixture at markets in

Wamena and even Jayapura, this would not be so in the study towns of Java. In fact, some

Papuan youth do work as parking attendants even in cities such as Bandung and Jakarta— whether on a small-scale and independent basis, or as part of eastern Indonesian syndicates. In this sense the conscription of Papuan youth into informal infrastructural labor extends beyond

15 This is analogous to wantoks dynamics in Papua New Guinea (Monsell-Davis 1993). 16 Balim students in Java mentioned that some take advantage of how cheap beer is in Java, as compared to inflated Papuan prices

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Papuan territory and is part of Indonesian urban modernity. This extension is not likely known to parents such as Frans, who have not travelled outside Papua.

Frans’s concerns—that urban consumption in the Papuan context could lead youth to neglect their studies—recalls the auto-critique with which I contextualized the partisan critique of Autonomy in Chapter 1: the idea of an indigenous tendency to overvalue momentary shared consumption lies in the background of his anxieties. Meanwhile, Frans’s worries illustrated a discursive opposition between figures of student and terminal kid. The figure of the terminal kid stood as a foil to the aspired-to trajectory of a successful student transitioning to civil service employment. A ‘successful’ youth trajectory aiming to access and coordinate state distribution programs seemed always at risk of deviating into a ‘failed’ situation of precarious work in and around market distribution channels.

Education and civil service aspiration under Autonomy

When considering the widespread aspiration to ensure a child’s education so that they might access civil service employment, it is important to recognize that this aspiration has had a hegemonic status due to the fact that private sector employment and value-added enterprise have mostly been unavailable to the indigenous Balim population. The transformations in livelihood and authority initiated by Special Autonomy reforms have intensified this hegemonic aspiration.

Autonomy’s mandated increase in indigenous government representation, and the proliferation of new administrative centers at all scales from village to regency, has increased the availability of civil service employment for indigenous aspirants. At the same time, the increased importance of state distribution programs for Balim livelihoods has meant that placing a family member at some level of the regional government bureaucracy has become that much more valuable. In this

211 CHAPTER 4 way the accelerated incorporation of the Balim economy via Autonomy distribution has been accompanied by an increasing salience of education.

One new arena of aspired-to placement for youth in Autonomy’s distribution politics has been in committees mandated to coordinate the disbursement of funds under the RESPEK program. Each district (kecamatan) has been mandated to form a RESPEK committee responsible for receiving cash from regency offices and convening musyawarah (consultations, meetings) to decide on allocation of funds among possible development projects or disbursal schemes. Youth having acquired education and urban experience outside the highlands have played a major role in populating these committees.17 As such, the value of educational success has come to encompass both access to wage and rice rations, and the possibility of having a say in the wider coordination of state distribution programs. The latter possibility promises value that spans in scale from the household or family network to broader collectives such as clan or district—further justifying collective investments in education.

ThE increasing salience of education has been matched by an increasing supply of university education in Papua. Complementing state institutions such as Universitas

Cenderawasih, a number of private colleges have appeared in Jayapura—most specializing in degrees such as state administration and law, which are directly applicable to civil service employment. The increase in availability of education and indigenous civil service employment in the Autonomy era have, in a sense, responded to anxieties of those who have seen how gaining a higher education, itself against stacked odds, might still not suffice to enter the civil service and access its benefits. Alongside this movement toward making the aspired-to trajectory

17 Some pro-independence activists I have spoken to describe RESPEK committees as a means to absorb the labor and attention of unemployed graduates who might otherwise agitate for independence—making it a tactic of containment toward Papuan nationalism.

212 CHAPTER 4 more realistic than before, there has been—as I demonstrate in the following section—a growing proximity between ‘successful’ and ‘failed’ youth trajectories.

Converging youth trajectories in Autonomy-era Jayapura

Until now I have emphasized how figures of youth logistical labor have stood as anxiety- inducing foils to the hegemonic aspiration for successful educational achievement and placement in the highlands regional civil service bureaucracy. This aspiration is expressed in collective actions by parents and students alike—from fundraising to associational activities. At the same time, the historical and material realities of the Balim economy’s incorporation via inadequate infrastructures (as outcomes of the trajectory of belated colonial and decolonization processes, and extension of Indonesian commercial networks) has produced a situation where youth aspirations toward education have systematically been deflected into forms of informal logistical labor. The labor into which indigenous youth have been slotted has patched together piecemeal distribution channels. The bifurcation of youth figures—between ‘successful’ (university student and civil servant) and ‘unsuccessful’ (dropout, terminal kid, other infrastructural worker) trajectories has, throughout this history of incorporation, been somewhat fictive. There has never been a consistent way for Balim students to steer clear of infrastructural labor, and terminal youth have systematically ended up in their situation of informal labor through attempts at attaining an education. How does this split-but-not-really-split reality play out in the Autonomy period, and its accelerated incorporation? The present section presents evidence of Balim youth activities in Jayapura, the Papuan capital, to show how Autonomy’s politics of distribution re- entangle the split trajectories, so that ‘dropouts’ with infrastructural savvy become players in a new urban politics of distribution.

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Autonomy’s political pilgrimages

I focus here on youth scenes in Jayapura because the Papuan provincial capital has become, since the implementation of Autonomy, an even more important theater for a range of activities of lobbying, negotiation, and mobilization. This development is an ironic aspect of decentralization: a sort of recentralization of the political networks of the interior onto state offices in the provincial capital, as well as, to a degree, the Indonesian capital Jakarta. This is due to the fact that programs of funds allocation and campaigns for regency partitions all depend on authorizations and approvals obtained from ministries of the provincial and in some cases national government. For example, a campaign to create a new regency on the fringe of the

Balim region has to compile a justificatory dossier and send delegates to Jayapura and Jakarta to plead their case with government ministers and officials, in the hopes that the proposed regency partition will be added to the legislative agenda and eventually approved. Similarly, distribution of new funding packages to regency-level administrations through RESPEK and other decentralized funding programs has tended to require physical trips to Jayapura—most such funds being transferred in actual envelopes of cash.18 Most Autonomy and decentralization programs have been carried out in ways that require lower-level representatives to be highly mobile and make repeated pilgrimages to higher-level administrative centers. As the seat of the provincial government through which new Autonomy resources and authorizations pass from

Jakarta, Jayapura has been the main center of such dealings.

18 Cash transfers are presumably made necessary by the lack of banking installations in hinterland regions. Some informants suggested that the cash system is practiced because it facilitates payoffs and kickbacks.

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Balim leaders in the capital

The intensification of indigenous representatives’ need to appear in Jayapura has been problematic for many members of this new political class. Highlander politicians, officials, and aspiring politicians campaigning for partition have entered an urban and bureaucratic world with which many had little previous experience. Additionally, in entering arenas historically dominated by non-Papuans and coastal Papuans, Balim representatives have faced prevailing assumptions that highlanders lack the knowledge and savvy to operate in formal political contexts. Consequently, there has been a phenomenon of anxiety and embarrassment on the part of many highlander representatives when entering bureaucratic negotiations.19

The figure of the Balim ‘country bumpkin’ (kampungan) has been a fixture of Balim people’s own commentary about the experience of moving into the cosmopolitan context of

Jayapura—a sprawling city of over 300,000 that has both a pan-Indonesian and pan-Papuan demographic dynamic. The bumpkin figure is one of the recurrent themes in jokes (mob)—a form of social commentary that circulates widely across Papua. Many such jokes begin with a

Balim man travelling to Jayapura for the first time. In one, he sees a minivan announcing its destination of Waena (a suburb of Jayapura) and gets on, hoping to be (impossibly) driven back to the highlands. In another, he hears the announcement of ‘sahur’ at the early morning Muslim call to prayer, and responds by bringing vegetables (sayur) to the mosque, hoping to sell them.

Finally in another he orders chicken and rice takeout from a fried food stall, and asks the waiter to pack them separately to so that the chicken doesn’t eat the rice. Each of these jokes highlights the way the Balim presence in Jayapura has been an occasion for potentially embarrassing misunderstandings, especially in commerce and transport. The jokes dramatize the trajectory of a

19 This was reported during focus group discussions with members of student associations. Indeed, associations’ intention to foster leadership aims partly to prepare future leaders for such bureaucratic encounters.

215 CHAPTER 4 rural indigenous person, lacking urban street savvy and possessing only basic ability in

Indonesian language, making mistakes that dramatize his kampungan ways. These narratives express the ‘backwardness’ (keterbelakangan) that has been the dominant lens through which colonial thought framed the Balim’s incorporation into the world-system. The script of unfamiliarity, misunderstanding, and embarrassment highlights the way Jayapura has been for many newly mobile Balim people a challenging site of initiation to modernity (Farhadian 2005).

This has been the experience of generations of highlanders ‘going down’ to the coast for studies—dating back to the 1970s when a small number of Balim parents of a certain means

(those few having attained higher ranks of civil service or church employment) began sending their children to Jayapura for high school.

The difficulties of navigating the capital city’s systems have put highlander representatives at some disadvantage in a provincial bureaucracy that has historically been dominated by non-Papuan Indonesians as well as some coastal (notably Biak) Papuans. Since the

2013 election of Papua’s first highlander governor, Lukas Enembe, this dynamic has been partly transformed, as Enembe placed highlanders in some key official positions. However it has remained important for Balim representatives newly entering the scene of Jayapura-based provincial politics to surround themselves with trusted entourages to help them orient themselves in the city. Such roles have been filled by Balim youth with street savvy gained through experiences doing types of logistical work associated with the terminal.

The presence of non-student (or former student) Balim youth in Jayapura has been, as explained, a corollary of the migration of Balim students out of the highlands. There is much overlap in the neighborhoods where Balim youth live in the city—namely the suburbs of

Abepura and Sentani—between youth studying and youth doing work such as driving ojek

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(motorcycle taxi). The entry of Dani youth into work such as driving ojek has been contested: I heard of street battles between existing groups of coastal and non-Papuan drivers on one hand, and Balim youth seeking to gain status at the formal ojek stands located at strategic points throughout the city (namely, where main commercial thoroughfares plied by minivan routes branch off to roads that feed residential neighborhoods). Recently, Balim ojek drivers gained a boost in this struggle thanks to the ascendance of Dani politicians and officials in the provincial government—providing highlanders with an aura of strength from the perception of being protected by those in power.

The need for highlands representatives to be sporadically present in Jayapura has led many to establish residences and purchase vehicles in Jayapura. This expanding highlander infrastructure of residence and mobility in the coastal capital has required, in turn, an informal corps of individuals to occupy, oversee, and operate properties and vehicles—key roles of the

Balim politician’s or official’s entourage. The existence of this new class of highlander entourage was evident in the talk of non-highlander acquaintances in Jayapura, many of whom commented to me on the fact that orang Wamena (Wamena people) had since 2014 become numerous on the streets of Jayapura. I also noted, when in Wamena, that many young men would take extended trips to Jayapura, but that it was difficult to get precise explanations of the purpose of such trips: instead I got used to hearing that this or that individual was ‘going down (to

Jayapura) with’, or as part of the entourage (rombongan) of this or that regency administration division head (kepala), candidate at regency elections, or other such figure. These trips were especially likely to take place at key moments in relations between the regency-level and the

217 CHAPTER 4 provincial-level government apparatus such as elections, Autonomy block grant disbursements to regencies, or legislative meetings to ratify regency partition proposals.20

Youth logistics around provincial politics

I became aware of the important role of Balim youth dropouts in the system of political pilgrimages to Jayapura around the time of the provincial legislative elections of 2014.

Responding to the increased concretization of Autonomy’s provisions for indigenous leadership, a large number of educated Balim men and women had been recruited as candidates by

Indonesia-wide political parties. After campaigning had ended and the election held, candidates converged on Jayapura along with their entourages. Assisting these candidates and entourages was a young man, Albert, from the Kaimo district which was one of my main highlands field sites. He resided in a flat in the Abepura suburb of Jayapura, as part of a group including students and non-students, all from Kaimo as well. I had taken to visiting them in the evenings, once everyone had arrived home. Albert was working as a car driver for a candidate for provincial legislature. Another young man living in the flat, Jefry, meanwhile, sometimes worked at the nearby ojek stand; recently he was busy running errands and driving people around for another politician. In conversations, Albert and Jefry both told me that their respective patrons valued their knowledge of the city, and their skilled handling of their vehicles.

Jefry was unusual among highlander ojek drivers in that he owned a motorcycle of very high quality. He had decided years ago that his goal was to accumulate enough money to buy an excellent motorcycle, and to master its operation and maintenance. Jefry had travelled around the highlands, working as an ojek for a time in one of the more distant districts in the Western Dani-

20 The system of repeated transfers of piecemeal Autonomy funds transfers from Jakarta to Jayapura, rather than total yearly or longer-term budgets as many Papuan politicians have called for, is one factor contributing to the frequency of required trips by highlands officials to Jayapura. This system additionally inhibits long- term budget planning.

218 CHAPTER 4 speaking region, where he borrowed the vehicle of a relative who had found civil service employment in the newly partitioned regency there. Jefry had then spent some time with a different relative who was also employed in the civil service, taking care of raising this man’s pigs—which the relative compensated by granting him the sum Jefry needed to buy the motorcycle he had chosen.

Unlike some of my other experiences getting lifts, I always felt safe getting rides from

Jefry. He anticipated every turn and the many imperfections in the roads with subtle and well- timed turns and decelerations. Jefry himself explained all the mental work that he did in carefully memorizing each topographical detail of the roads he travelled. He also recounted his gradual process of learning to calibrate his physical control of the vehicle to these calculations. He partly credited his experience driving on the rougher, unpaved roads of the new highlands regency where he had driven ojek years before. Driving a motorcycle was about more than making money, Jefry explained to me. He did not drive ojek full-time: driving for fares was more of a sideline that he turned to when not otherwise occupied running errands and driving acquaintances around for this or that necessity. This was often at the request of one of a handful of provincial-level Balim politicians and officials—who would be in Jayapura for a brief period and need someone to escort some documents, a package, or an associate or relative across the sprawling city. The monetary aspect of these services was, as far as I could tell, contingent and situational. Jefry often gave lifts to relatives or friends without payment. Driving the motorcycle was his livelihood and his main way of helping relatives and friends.21

21 Jefry’s mastery of road and vehicle contrasts with stereotypes about highlander drivers as prone to driving unsafely and while intoxicated. Jefry’s pride in his virtuosity responded to this stereotype, and to related racial discourses about dangerous highlanders. Such discourses were salient at the time I interviewed Jefry: flyers had recently appeared in Jayapura, appealing for coastal Papuans to ally with migrants from other parts of Indonesia and expel highlanders from the city. Activists explained such campaigns as psychological operations

219 CHAPTER 4

I soon came to appreciate how Jefry and Albert were part of an informal and disparate corps of vehicle operators who could be called upon and mobilized at important moments in the provincial capital’s political scene. One evening in the days after the provincial election, Albert and Jefry did not return home until after 11 pm. When they arrived, there was a long conversation with the roommates and assembled friends—students living in regency student residences, and others living in flats nearby, all from the same Kaimo district. The conversation proceeded mainly as a set of reports by Jefry and Albert about what they had heard and witnessed that day and evening, in terms of which politicians were meeting with which others, where they had gone, how long meetings had lasted, what alliances or alignments were taking shape, who was likely to win or lose once vote counting was complete, and so on. It was apparent that the assembled friends looked to Jefry and Albert as sources of information about the indigenous political class and its operation in the electoral system. Many of those assembled were active members of student associations and various political organizations, including both pro-independence groups and official Indonesian state-sponsored youth groups groups.22 The reports by Jefry and Albert about the meetings and processes in the aftermath of the election was followed by discussion during which the more outspoken of these other guests debated prospects for development in the Balim region, and the question of how youth groups should relate to the indigenous politicians who were participating in the Indonesian state.

Albert and Jefry showed how youth who had left behind an educational trajectory and ended up doing mobile infrastructural labor could end up playing roles in the politics of

by state intelligence agents against pro-independence organizing, much of which has been led by highlander youth—some of whom were lobbying politicians to limit the scale of migration to Papua. 22 It is not uncommon for a given district-based youth network to gather across such divisions of allegiance. In practice I have noted that, to a degree, political disagreements about whether to organize for independence or collaborate with Indonesian institutions are often understood as debates about tactics for achieving Papuan empowerment (leaving aside the activities of indigenous pro-Indonesian militias such as Barisan Merah Putih (Red and White Brigade) that inform on Papuan activists and support state violence against them).

220 CHAPTER 4 ascendant highlander representation. By making it possible for the new crop of leaders to navigate the large and cosmopolitan provincial capital, they enabled the new highlander indigenous political class to work at the provincial level, and take on pan-Papuan leadership and authority. Albert and Jefry’s proximity to scenes of high-level negotiation and lobbying allowed them to share political information with highlander youth associations and networks. This assisted the informed critique, allegiance, or tactical positioning of politically active youth of diverse perspectives, with respect to government bodies and leaders.

Figure 4.5. Afternoon traffic in a suburb of Jayapura

Monitoring transit nodes

I have traced a pattern of overlap and shift between roles of logistical support, information gathering, and critique and allegiance toward leaders. This pattern draws on practices of migrant highlander youth in Jayapura and cities further afield who have found work at transportation nodes—a position from where they can monitor movements of individuals and in some cases claim resources from, or exert influence upon leaders in transit.

221 CHAPTER 4

Elias (whose story of working in Wamena I presented earlier) explained that when he worked in cargo at Jayapura’s Sentani airport, he was sometimes able to notice when this or that important figure happened to be passing through. He would share this information in evening conversations with other people from Dombe who resided in the same Sentani neighborhood near the airport. On my own arrivals in Papua I always felt an unnerving sensation of entering a dense matrix of observation upon landing at Sentani, collecting my luggage, and walking out into the open to see dozens of people monitoring the situation. This kind of observation overlaps with types of informal work helping people and things move in and out of airports and other nodes. I confirmed this overlap in conversations with a number of individuals over the years during which I travelled between Wamena and Jayapura. One Dani man in his mid-twenties, Lambert, worked informally at the airport, finding passengers for a newcomer who drove his own car; in later years Lambert sometimes hired himself out to drive rental cars. Lambert was interested in my ethnographic work. When we met, he demonstrated his knowledge by naming certain well- known individuals who he had seen land at or depart from Sentani, and connecting such movements with analysis of power struggles and conflicts in relation to Balim politics. In terms of his own livelihoods, Lambert mentioned that he was interested in starting up some kind of business—possibly shipping shop goods to Wamena. Spending time at the airport, knowing who came and went, and mapping the relations through which cargo and human transport were managed: this ongoing activity seemed to feed the incubation of his plans.

The practice of monitoring the airport to gather information and strategize about accessing resources was also a part of student associational life. At certain moments, associations were in tense disagreement with regency-level Balim representatives. Disagreements had to do with some regents resenting students for leading anti-corruption protests, and punitively

222 CHAPTER 4 withholding promised transfers of rice rations and funds for tuition fees or residence utilities. At one point Balim students in Jakarta were having a difficult time accessing promised funds from their home regency administration. They understood this difficulty as a consequence of an association leaders’ public criticism of the regent, and of the perception that he was a supporter of the political party that was in opposition at the regency. In order to address the situation and find the funds necessary to pay overdue residence expenses, the Jakarta students decided to approach a Balim politician from this opposition party—a member of the national legislature— and request his assistance.23 Once they had found out that he would be travelling to Jakarta, groups of students took turns waiting out at the airport to find him. As one student put it, finally one day he appeared and the students ‘caught him’ (tangkap dia), and were able to obtain assurances that he would connect them to resources and champion their cause.

Through a wide range of practices, migrant youth have been able to position themselves as a complex type of political organizing force. This force exerts itself through student associations as well as activist organizations of various kinds, which often overlap in terms of membership and may shift over time. While critiques of the new Autonomy-era political class sometimes exposed student groups to punitive measures, their involvement in this arena of politics has also meant that migrant Balim youth based in cities outside the highlands and beyond

Papua have been able to exert some influence. This influence and action has sometimes consisted of disciplining indigenous leadership by shaming it for shortcomings in terms of practices of redistribution; or assisting leaders in achieving their agendas or securing their own positions; or intervening in rivalries among leaders to secure their own needs as students. This capacity on the part of mobile youth channels their knowledge of urban infrastructures and their experience in

23 Even though this party did not control the regent’s office, it had significant power at the provincial and national legislatures—making it a viable source of assistance.

223 CHAPTER 4 flexible logistical work—cultivated through a history of observing movements of people and things at tactical nodes, cobbling livelihoods together and collecting information.

Decentralization as conscription

The convergence between indigenous political representatives and mobile, street-savvy laboring youth has a deeper history stretching into the first moments of state decentralization in the highlands. This is evident in Elias’ experiences after the moment where I left his story, after his return to Dombe after Bloody Wamena events in 2000. Some time after his return, Elias applied aptitudes he had learned on the edge of town—economic calculation, aggressiveness, and cultivation of social networks through pleasurable consumption—to the rural setting. After some time working as a conductor and packer for one of the pickup trucks that ferried passengers over rough roads between Wamena and Dombe, Elias became an illicit entrepreneur.

I became a milo (minuman lokal – local homebrewed alcohol) agent. I was the first here [in Dombe], before others knew about it. I was idle, just walking around, and I met someone from Biak. He told me the recipes, and we worked together; people came to buy it, and we served them. We sold one liter for 10,000. I also became a thief. I stole people’s pigs, chickens. Then people became scared. Because I was like a head of a gang, like that—I had the milo recipe, so I had a big network, and lots of people became friends with me. I considered that recipe was important for me, so I didn’t want others to know it. I had to be head, the chief, the important person—if people wanted to drink, they had to come find me to make the drink. I was like that until 2001—by then I had become addicted; I drank my own stock. I had networks all over [the surrounding villages]. I made a special team for the night. I instructed them to steal fish, chicken, whatever. I had lots of spies (intel); I stayed in, and they brought reports—there are this many chickens here, this many pigs here, so at night we went and picked them up. Eventually we were raided by the government, the police, the church. So we split up, we spread out. But I was still addicted to thieving and stealing. Then in 2002 or so I realized what I had been doing was wrong. So I went back to school, I wanted to continue on to high school. I passed the test; I got in. In 2003, I did first class, and in 2004 second class (in Wamena). But that sickness came on again—I got even more chaotic again. Because there was ballo (a type of liquor from South Sulawesi), made with red rice. I used the school money that my mother sent; I used part of it to buy alcohol. I became addicted. I became a drunk again. I was caught by police twice—because I was drunk, creating chaos (bikin kacau). My name was crossed out at school. So I went back to Dombe

224 CHAPTER 4

again. They had just opened the high school there. I had to start back in first class— in 2004, 2005, because there was no second class yet. Then [a friend] brought this pill. I took it, and then I couldn’t let go of it. I became an agent (vendor) for that thing. I would walk around like this (wobbling), and I sold it also. The money that came in—I bought cigarettes, and other stuff. One day when there were tests at school, I took that pill, and the teacher told me to line up in front. I walked all crooked and they looked at my eyes. My eyes were barely open, so they kicked me out, sent me home. I had this terrible fate (nasib sial). So I started up some little actions. I became a leader again—the police caught me again, and some of the others were caught too. They beat me. They put us in jail; they said for 7 years. They wanted to send us to court in Wamena. But at the time, in 2005, the new regency was being formed, and a few candidates were going forward to become the new bupati (regent) for that regency. The lawyers said this and that, [told the police that we] wanted to support [one of the candidates]—that candidate was interested, so he gave 20 million [rupiah] to the police, and they didn’t send us to Wamena. We were released. We asked police for permission to speak on the stage; we were thinking we could troll for attention (pancing perhatian); we spoke and sang, I spoke in the local language. We knew [the candidate] was from that kind of [terminal kid] background too, so we touched his emotions.

While Elias achieved a kind of success and supremacy, the goal of achieving an education seemed to constantly fall outside his grasp. He showed a type of creativity in bringing elements of the terminal economy—addictive intoxicants, secrecy, surveillance and robbery— into the village. After state forces cracked down on his crime syndicate, he found in an emerging political leader—who was seizing on the opportunities presented by decentralization—a chance to get out of legal trouble. Elias’ experiences in town had taught him to accumulate cash and power by collecting and defending a sort of monopoly of knowledge. This minor form of power eventually allowed him to catch the attention of an ascendant influential figure.24

Elias’ association with this rising politician would not last long. My interpretation of these varied and violent experiences sits at a distance from Elias’ self-critique as someone who once did ‘bad things’. His trajectory—following a fairly common pattern—laid some

24 To some degree this kind of trajectory reflects histories of preman politics well-known elsewhere in Indonesia—where politicians cultivate groups of enforcers who manage enterprises and work behind the scenes to “secure” (amankan) situations and exert influence. See e.g., Barker 2009.

225 CHAPTER 4 foundations for a more recent tendency. Experience in terminal-type work allowed youth to develop the ability to ensure logistical operations, and learn tactics of observation, secrecy, disclosure, aggression, and networking. These tactics have become bases for mobile youth to take on roles around the edges of the new power alliances of Autonomy-era highlander ascension. These roles have vacillated and varied from making demands and critiquing

‘corruption’, to providing logistical and ‘street’ support for various figures seeking power in provincial and regional governance structures. The possibility of taking on such roles was generated through trajectories around the edges of educational aspirations. These aspirations, seeming to offer a gateway to managing Autonomy’s politics of distribution, have

‘disappointingly’ deflected through the terminal economy—leading to a degree of convergence in those scenes of state distribution that had motivated educational aspirations in the first place.

Conclusion: relegation and ascendance

This chapter has gathered material from different sites and historical moments, bringing together youth trajectories that are in some ways divergent. I first showed how the Balim region’s history of being belatedly connected into a wider economic system, but without the requisite infrastructures, effectively conscripted indigenous youth into mobile labor needed to patch together piecemeal channels of distribution. This labor has required youth to insert themselves into infrastructure nodes, and to orient their mental and bodily faculties toward the movement of people and goods. The promise of education—recently seen as an antidote to indigenous marginalization—has fostered this conscription. Education has been, in a material sense, a gateway into the peri-urban spaces of the terminal economy.

Collective investment in the promise of education has been oriented toward state distribution: civil service rations and Autonomy-era aid and grants. These distribution

226 CHAPTER 4 arrangements have increasingly been the principal livelihoods alternative to indigenous production. The expansion of state distribution ushered in a new class of indigenous government representatives. While announced as a set of decentralization reforms, Autonomy has in some ways re-centralized highlands politics around the provincial capital Jayapura. This stealth recentralization has renewed the political importance of the types of infrastructural labor that have been a cornerstone of livelihoods for mobile Balim youth. Practices of vehicular mastery, calculation, secrecy and disclosure, monitoring of public spaces, physical and social mapping of infrastructures, and shared consumption resources among co-linguist networks: these capacities and dispositions have been honed through experiences epitomized by both figures of the terminal kid and the migrant student. These dispositions have enabled the new Balim leaders’ role in

Autonomy’s politics of distribution, and pan-Papuan politics in general.

The partial convergence of ‘successful’ and ‘disappointing’ youth trajectories around the distribution politics of Autonomy illustrates the broader dynamic of relegation that has been an organizing analytic for this dissertation. Collective investments in higher education among Balim people have expressed aspirations that youth enter the bureaucracy and ensure the coordination of state distribution, increasingly vital to indigenous livelihoods. Meanwhile, dropouts, having honed aptitudes working at the interstices of commercial distribution, have positioned themselves as supporting actors in the negotiations and contests that are the grounds of state distribution networks. This convergence around a politics of distribution illustrates complexity in the historical trajectory of relegation, as a corollary of incorporation and peripheralization of the

Balim economy.

This process of relegation has been, in various ways, deflating. This is seen for example in the partisan youth critique of indigenous leaders competing to control new distribution

227 CHAPTER 4 channels and in so doing seemingly accepting to be placated by material sops rather than pursue political transformation. This sense of deflation also appears in laments about students not succeeding, and ‘falling’ into problematic terminal-types of behaviors. At the same time, as other material from this chapter shows, relegation implies new forms of cooperation across different roles. Meanwhile, in the ascendance of Central Highlander figures in Papua-wide politics, and in the assertive Balim presence in Jayapura, we can see something that suggests a counter- movement to peripheralization: an entry of Balim networks into power centers. Logistical labor by displaced Balim youth has enabled the historical process of incorporation, and recent moves by Balim figures and networks to occupy the state’s distribution levers. Mobile Balim youth, by assimilating the terminal economy’s demands and dispositions, have helped to reorient the trajectory of relegation.

The short colonial project in the Balim region, ceding way to integration into postcolonial commercial networks, left the indigenous population in a situation where education and commerce were the main drivers of recruitment of youth into logistical labor. Indigenous youth have carried a large part of the burden of connecting piecemeal channels that make up the region’s inadequate infrastructures. Elias, Jefry, and many others accumulated capacities for operating vehicles, calculating risks, monitoring movements, and coordinating distribution— capacities that have become available for a range of complicities and resistances. Indigenous integration into the state through Special Autonomy depends on these capacities.

In the Balim context, the concomitance of disconnection and incorporation at once conscripted youth logistical displacement and labor, generated inter-generational anxieties, and set the stage for mobile youth to assert new roles vis-à-vis the state. These new roles were made possible by Autonomy—which itself contained elements of a tactical response of containment

228 CHAPTER 4 toward a terminal economy that had become a scene of disruptions. In these ways, attempts to defuse disruptions to the incorporation process have ended up paving the way for the Balim’s political ascension in Jayapura. Mobile youth labor, shaped by its experiences patching together inadequate infrastructures, has underpinned this ascendance.

229

Conclusion

This dissertation has offered an understanding of regional politics in the Balim region, and among the urban Balim diaspora, as a set of tactics grappling with the region’s historical relegation to an end-point position in commodity distribution channels. My main pieces of ethnographic evidence consisted of commercial regulation policies, participation in commerce and state distribution programs, and youth trajectories in relation to expanding state distribution channels. These scenes of livelihoods struggles and attempts to reorient regional governance have been shaped by the relegation of the Balim region to an ultra-peripheral situation in relation to the world-economy, and to a multifaceted politics of distribution. Many Papuan pro- independence partisans criticize this politics of distribution for the way it marginalizes and divides indigenous Papuans, and see it as a tactic to defuse attempts to build collective resistance around Papuan nationalism. This critical partisan perspective highlights the way the politics of distribution in this context expresses a history of relegation.

Incorporation and distinctions

Wamena is today a fast-growing town where public space and regional politics are saturated in relations of distribution. This saturation is expressed in the fact that commerce is the only basis of routine bustle; in the way indigenous disruptions have tended to target markets and transport routes; and in the way regional infrastructures conjoin functions of human mobility and commodity distribution. As Special Autonomy reforms have allowed indigenous leaders to claim authority in regional governance, many have attempted to subsume peri-urban market-terminal spaces to some form of moral authority. These moral assertions have expressed critique of newcomer domination in commerce, and anxieties about indigenous youth being exposed to

230 CONCLUSION harmful consumption and labor in the interstices of the commercial distribution network.

Regulation policies illustrate how the historical process of relegation works through inter- generational and inter-ethnic concerns and anxieties—themselves drawing on historical residues of colonial-era moral scrutiny. These residual colonial forms took on renewed salience and came to animate axes of distinction that were produced by the incorporation process itself—the displacement of populations, and assignment of distinct economic roles within the regional commercial economy that transformed the realm of indigenous production.

The Balim ascendance within Special Autonomy’s politics of distribution engages with a process that accelerates the region’s incorporation into the world-economy. This participation seeks to assert a degree of control over the incorporation process, in terms of regulating its commercial aspect and managing its state distribution programs. These approaches respond to the historical experience of relegation and incorporation. The types of labor and mobility that had been conscripted into enabling economic incorporation in spite of infrastructural disconnection—notably women vendors and teenage boys selling and hauling at marketing nodes—also enabled Balim ascendance. The scenes of this labor conscription have reproduced inequality and distinctions and made visible the disempowering aspect of incorporation. These peri-urban sites have hosted indigenous disruptions that have responded to this disempowerment; and in turn, Autonomy has expanded state distribution as a means to contain these disruptions.

In developing the concept of terminal economy, I sought to capture the effects of the historical process of relegation, its recursive dimension, indigenous responses to it, and the way these responses are shaped by the patterns of livelihood and mobility it has demanded. I located the start of the emergence of the terminal economy in the late-colonial, mid-20th century incorporation of a previously non-subordinate region, that was located beyond the reach of the

231 CONCLUSION existing infrastructures through which North-Atlantic capital had divided the world. The inadequacy of infrastructures was a result of the historical path of the Balim region’s incorporation into the world-economy—the way this incorporation produced a characteristic regional isolation. Surrounded by mountains and swampy terrain at the physical edge of the

Dutch empire, the Balim region had been a non-colonized buffer against intra-imperialist aggression—and as such not directly subordinate to the imperial economic order. The declining

Dutch power belatedly invested in ‘modernizing’ the Balim economy, only for this process to be quickly interrupted by the US decision to placate Indonesia’s anti-imperialist mobilizations. The

Balim’s characteristic infrastructural disconnection and patchiness were products of Papua’s entanglement in historical transitions in world imperialism.

I emphasized recursion as a means of relativizing the terminal economy analytic—and world-systems analysis more broadly—by highlighting the relational and incremental dynamic of a dendritic type of marketing space. This regional space takes on a linear hierarchy of differences between more and less central nodes. This recursion embeds itself in value-laden modes of identity, informing agendas of collective endurance. Recursion in the Balim context is made dramatically visible as a result of the extremes that mark Balim history in comparative perspective: the belated and compressed colonial modernization period; the intense physical disconnection from the major circuits of global capitalism; the resulting imbalance in the regional price structure (between expensive imports and inexpensive local products); and a disjunction between the rigidity of Indonesia’s militarized hold on Papua, on one hand, and the tenuous infrastructural connections to the wider Indonesian territory, on the other.1

1 I emphasize ‘extremes’ at the risk of echoing the primitivist travelogue’s marveling at New Guinean people and places as cultural emblems of all that is most distant and foreign to the modern West. The extremes I list are particular expressions of a global history of capitalist incorporation; while I refute a primitivist perspective

232 CONCLUSION

Production, distribution, and patchiness

I have found it useful to follow theorists of world-systems and imperialism in considering capitalism as a system that expands and thus seeks out territory to incorporate. The mode of world-economy expansion I have traced has been the eclipsing of less profitable production regimes by more profitable ones. Displacement of production implies encompassment of regional economies into higher-scale distribution networks through which profitable production is marketed (or otherwise distributed). I have contested a scholarly tendency to theoretically separate distribution from production. Instead, I understand world-systems analysis as offering a means to inscribe a scalar dimension in Marx’s explanation of distribution as subordinate to production. The global-sale organization of production sets the relations of forces through which specific state distribution programs come to be politically expedient. Such programs are not separate from the expansion of core capital; in cases such as the Balim, they may accelerate the incorporation process.

The region’s incorporation into the capitalist world-economy has depended on mobile indigenous labor. Indigenous labor in and around infrastructures has been effectively conscripted into functions of patching over the inadequate, piecemeal infrastructures through which the region’s incorporation has happened. Displaced indigenous labor has been crucial for bridging the disconnected channels through which the Balim region has been incorporated. Mobile practices of patching, characteristic of the terminal economy, have in turn supported a process of ascendance of Balim figures in broader pan-Papuan politics—lending the relegation trajectory a contradictory dimension.

one might suspect this list of reproducing a marvel at a human reality seemingly unlike any other. This may be a general conundrum for ‘engaged’ anthropology of New Guinea.

233 CONCLUSION

Even though, as per Lenin as well as Wallerstein, the world has already long ago been divided among power blocs of global capital (Lenin [1917] 1939; Wallerstein 1974), this process—of conquering markets, partitioning territories, and constituting spaces saturated in distribution—continues recursively, in internal hinterlands that may yet be transformed into frontiers of extraction and marketing. While the historical specifics vary widely, scenes of inter- scalar incorporation are always in some way sites of patching over distribution channels, of reorganizing patterns of mobility and labor—and of political efforts to respond by regulating and controlling such processes. The terminal economy concept points to recursive patchiness as a guiding analytic for interpreting such scenes of regional politics in relation to forces of incorporation. Part of the analytical value of the Balim regional economy as a case study is the fine grain—an outcome of the history rehearsed above—it provides for rendering recursive patchiness visible as a systematic structure of the periphery of the global periphery.

Of course, in many contexts worldwide the process of infrastructural ‘patching’ may look more like annihilation followed by reconstruction at higher scales—such as in cases of infrastructure mega-projects typified by highway or overpass constructions that clear out urban neighborhoods to make way for higher speeds and volumes of traffic (Anand 2006). In these cases one might say that planners and investors view pre-existing informal infrastructures as the

‘hole’ to be patched and displaced by monolithic construction.2 Conscription into patching labor is one moment in longer iterative and recursive processes of incorporation; conscripted patching labor may subsequently be discarded and itself patched over. The Balim context’s indigenous agendas of commercial regulation, and the widespread willingness to commit (at least temporarily) to the Indonesian state’s politics of distribution, suggest an anticipation of the

2 Such episodes are contentious in Jakarta; recently some politicians have offered to champion displaced communities as part of conflicts over control of urban development (Simone 2014; Widoyoko 2017).

234 CONCLUSION vulnerability of patching types of labor in and around infrastructures, and awareness of the need to secure more durable bases of livelihood.

Extraction under concealment

As I discussed in the introduction, confronting the concealment of global forces has been a motivation for my approach to Balim politics. I have sought to make sense of the absence of

Balim sites from the anthropological tendency to interpret (West) Papuan politics in relation to global forces. I did not seek to address this absence by focusing my ethnography on transnational encounters such as tourism, advocacy, or international development initiatives. Instead, I sought explanations for the scenes of contestation and scrutiny I observed and heard about. I followed regional shifts in livelihoods and conflicts to higher-scale interests and tactics that sought to contain disruptive indigenous politics, and maintain dominance of existing power relations at the global level.

One of the challenges to deploying world-systems analysis in the Balim context has been that the Balim region per se has not been the site of any large-scale extraction of value on the part of core capital. In Chapter 2, I analyzed the history of the Balim region with reference to the history of Papua’s relation to Indonesia, and Indonesia’s economic situation in relation to global capitalism. While tracing elements in this wide-ranging and complex set of histories and relations, I drew on the idea that a key element in the imperialist force of core capital is to constitute peripheral countries and regions as spaces of extraction. I argued that the post-Asian

Crisis intensification of Indonesian economic activity in Papua was connected to the way core finance worked through the crisis and its aftermath to entrench the Indonesian economy’s peripheralization—damaging industrial livelihoods while orienting investments toward primary, extractive and agri-business sectors located at the country’s internal peripheries. The extractive

235 CONCLUSION force of core capital thus shapes Papua’s situation along multiple, mutually interacting paths.

Beyond the space of the direct mineral stakes of companies such as Freeport, core finance has constrained the Indonesian state to intensify its integration of Papua as an extractive frontier. For this integration to take the form of extensions of state distribution in a Balim region lacking (for the time being) large-scale extractive installations conceals the extractive forces driving the process. This force has shaped the region’s patterns of infrastructure, livelihood, and contestation, prior to any major resource extraction materializing there—and there is reason to believe this will happen soon enough, as the long-delayed construction of the road linking

Jayapura to Wamena progresses (Humas 2017).

Closing: anthropology of produced possibilities

Anthropology today is a scattered enterprise, riven with conflicts of self-definition. Still it is common for anthropologists to celebrate a unifying commitment: the attention to the details of ordinary lived experience. This close attention implies a priority of scale, favoring one or another version of the local—and translating into a tendency to defend local agency against models of power that overdetermine such agency. Even works of political economy commonly argue that to foreground contemporary imperialism, or to use world-system analysis, leads to missing the way people ‘make their history’ on their own terms (whether these terms are understood as cultural codes or another model of meanings and motivations that spring from the local context) (C. A.

Smith 1984). In its most sophisticated iteration, this line of argument joins the critique of ‘old’ anthropology’s assumption of bounded cultural fields, and asserts that local-level institutions serve to “mediate between the local community and the world system” (C. A. Smith 1984). The emergence of ‘globalization’ as a subfield asserted that it was incorrect to view any space of ethnography as somehow cut off from global flows of “capital, people, commodities, images,

236 CONCLUSION and ideologies” (Inda and Rosaldo 2002). But the study of globalization broke with world- systems analysis, and systematic understandings of imperialism, in favor of considering how situations are produced through the encounter of local structures (or cultures) and global forces.

Such schemas have tended to reduce and circumscribe the global, relegating it to a status of one among other elements of context, subject to local mediation—and to analytical bracketing.

Confronting this bracketing as been my main challenge.

This thesis has raised questions familiar to traditions of political economy that are mostly represented in agrarian studies and anthropology of development. I have centered processes of rural livelihoods change and documented indigenous struggles around mainstream development discourses. However, I have departed from what has become the convention in such scholarship by returning to traditions of analyzing capitalism as a world-system, and postcolonial history as primarily a history of ongoing imperialism—in the sense advocated by Lenin and Rodney, of a continuing division of the world under the action of core capital. I have taken twists and turns around and away from the ideas of these canonical thinkers—allowing myself to converse with diverse approaches to anthropology. Paying attention to infrastructures assisted me in considering incorporation into world capitalism as a material process. The materiality of infrastructures (and of the labor done to overcome their historically produced inadequacy) provided me with a means to ground my analysis of scale-crossing forces, by tracing the concrete channels through which scale has been defined.

This dissertation has been a contribution to an anthropology of the global production of possibilities for regional politics in a contested internal periphery of a large Global South country. At the outset, I took up the partisan lament of indigenous Balim representatives’ apparent willingness to be placated by material sops. This lament by indigenous Papuan

237 CONCLUSION nationalists questioned indigenous leaders who have collaborated with Special Autonomy; it drew on both a moral critique of inequalities and an analysis of a history of incorporation. I sought to trace how it came to be that, in such a context, state distribution had become the focus of regional politics, and become a burden for those advocating radical political change. This investigation took my analysis in directions distinct from the immediate concern of the partisan lament (to contest Jakarta’s claims that Autonomy is bringing peace and inclusive development to Papua). I worked toward an understanding of what ‘politics’ is in the Balim Valley. I found that politics—from the partisan critique, to Wamena’s Sunday market ban, to the ethno-regional electoral tensions, to the construction of an indigenous-only market, and on to Balim officials’ youth entourages in Jayapura—revolved around tactical and moral responses to world-systemic relegation. This was not a scene of mutually impacting local structures and global forces, but of multifarious efforts to respond to a process of incorporation into the world-economy.

238

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