The politics of the years following the Demonstration were a politics of racialized fear.[1]

Identity was like a sexy piece of the heaven. For over the past few decades, identity in anthropology study has been extensively produced and distributed to every corner of the academic discourses, also bring into being its function into development practitioners’ workplaces. As subject of research, identity now means to have pluriversal way of seeing, not just in the lens of winning-loosing kind of war. But, as Nancy Lee Peluso has finally pointed out, identity is somewhat mixed, intangible, negotiated, and sometimes be the arena of the war itself. Peluso took Chinese as an example whose the basic history they had was genealogical process of dehistoricization before and after the formulation of Republik Indonesia come into real.

The dehistoricization has interlinked with the idea of property rights, power relations, and the originality of the territories.[2] In this case, the property rights was the main driver related to the access of the resources which the Chinese often times propagandized with the word outsiders to make the authorization of the land tittle was impossible to obtain by the Chinese and their generations. Even tough that Peluso takes Chinese in West Kalimantan alone as example, the discrimination regarding land authorization for the Chinese has also been the spot of the problems in Java, in specific where the cultural epicentres were located. Despite the fact that the Chinese that was first migrated to Western Borneo fathered children with local woman, and this happens in every cultural epicentre in Indonesia, they their descendants were always associated with the terms ‘peranakan Cina’ or ‘peranakan Tionghoa’, rather than to be odd saying ‘peranakan Dayak’.[3]

In her research, Peluso demonstrated that the property rights to Chinese and its relation with the power was the product of colonialism regime. Under the United East Indian Company (VOC) rule, the law stated that the tanah adat territories could not be purchased or otherwise transferred to non-Natives. Therefore, Chinese could not own or buy the land as they were Aliens, foreigners, outsiders, to the state. In Soekarno regime, presidential decree forbidding foreign nationals to trade in rural areas and it effected Chinese in West Kalimantan, as many had not become Indonesian citizens.[4] Coming to Suharto’s era, the government privatized rights to rubber, in reality the land property rights in general, in the form of PPKR—Proyek Perkebunan Karet Rakyat (The People’s Smallholder Rubber Garden Project). PPKR was funded by the World Bank through the Indonesian People’s Bank (BRI), and the aim of the project was to assert authority over village land and the main targets were Dayaks and other pribumi citizens.[5]

To put some notes, Peluso’s findings on racialized territories as a projection of the Chinese dehistoricization was quietly new amongst the era.  Generally speaking, the most popular notions of the Chinese studies in politics has been tumbled upon the logic to support the government in the senses that Chinese controls all economic resources in Indonesia, either national, regional and local levels, so that the government is reasonable for taking back the power. Then, the anthropology studies that has possibility to give the voices for the unheard communities remains silent. This stillness projects that many anthropologists merely concern with the originality of Chinese-Dayak-Malay, than the dynamic of the mixed heritage as the state’s political intervention. However, what’s more interesting for me was the debt relation in rubber economy; that the rubber profit yet the capital goes in the hand of the Chinese and placing them as the greatest contributor of the money circulation at the local level. My thought goes to ask to what extend the Chinese’ contributions make influences over the dynamic of the identity on the ground?

[1] Nancy Lee Peluso, “Rubber Erasures, Rubber Producing Rights: Making Racialized Territories in West Kalimantan, Indonesia”, Development and Change 40(1): 47-80 (2009). © Institute of Social Studies 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford.

[2] Ibid. Page 49.

[3] Ibid. Page 55.

[4] Ibid. Page 58.

[5] Ibid. Page 64.