Making and Unmaking Territories with Plants in the Riverine Peat Landscape of Central Kalimantan

Central Kalimantan, located on the Indonesian side of Borneo, has often been described as a state frontier area where rapid changes take place in legal and administrative regimes and in the rules that govern access and ownership to land and nature. Today, frontier development includes state and non-state actors that bring natural resource projects aimed at producing long-term effects by engaging local people in the commodification of nature. Local people adopt and abandon these projects at a rapid pace due to changing conditions, policies, and natural hazards. I will explore commodification in terms of territorial projects and the spatial and temporal reordering of human-nature relations within the landscapes of Central Kalimantan. Linked to the territorial expansion of trees and plants, commodification challenges local environmental practices and forms of sociality. The paper argues that the commodification of nature and the territorial aspects of this bring new layers of complications and thus have unexpected effects on the lives of local populations. Keywords: frontier, commodification, plants, landscape, state-making, Kalimantan

Frontiers of Existence

This article introduces a new concept, ‘frontiers of existence’, to highlight and demand more attention be placed on the lives of human and other-than-human beings whose possibilities to exist are extinguished or radically and negatively transformed at resource and commodity frontiers and demand more attention be placed on this. What happens to existences at these places has not been a central focus in prior studies utilizing political economy, political ecology, or other approaches for studying frontiers. This article is makes a theoretical contribution, by arguing that the research on resource frontiers should more fully recognize more fully the redistributions of existences caused by major landscape changes. The analysis is based on field research since 2004 on the expansion of monocultures and deforestation in Brazil and the effect of this on existences. Four key questions for the existential analysis of frontiers are suggested, and their application is briefly demonstrated through ethnographic material collected in November and December 2019, in the Amazon and Cerrado regions of Mato Grosso State in Brazil. Keywords: resource frontiers, ethnocide, deforestation, political ontology, global land grabbing, frontiers of existence, forests

Introduction

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life.

Skolt Sami and industrialization

This article shows how the Finnish state, in connection to international actors, has advanced industrialization, territorialization, and commodification on the Skolt Sami home grounds, and how the Skolt Sami people’s nature-linked livelihood activities have changed or become threatened in connection with these processes. The theoretical starting points of the article sheds light on territorialization and the power practices of the state, and on commodification (i.e. the development of industrial economic features). The three cases of territorialization and commodification discussed in this article are the following: (1) the industrialization of the Petsamo area until1944, (2) the industrialization of reindeer herding from 1995 on, and (3) the Arctic Ocean railroad plan in 2016–2021. The article argues that international factors have significantly influenced the process of state-directed territorialization, which on several occasions has divided the Skolt Sami. Furthermore, the article claims that in the process of commodification, despite having changed, traditional nature-related livelihood activities are important for the continuity of the Skolt Sami way of life. Keywords: Skolt Sami, livelihoods, reindeer herding, natural resources, state, industrialization

Closing the Frontier, Opening Doors

In this article I examine a recent communal cocoa planting project in a Wide Bay Mengen community in East Pomio, Papua New Guinea in relation to histories of resource extraction. I discuss how the community members modeled the current planting of cocoa in accordance with earlier forms of agriculture, namely copra production and swidden horticulture. The cocoa planting project is linked to a longer history of labour and resource extraction in Pomio. I analyze the cycles of labour recruitment, logging, and oil palm expansion through the framework of the frontier, by which I mean a spatio-temporal process through which certain areas are portrayed as having abundant resources, which are made available for extraction. The cocoa planting project was a local response to these conditions and intended to be a source of income based on inalienated labour and local landholding and a spatial strategy of establishing points of access to other places, called 'doors' by the community members. My aim in this article is twofold. First, I argue that the frontier understood as a spatio-temporal process helps us to conceptualize cycles of resource extraction. Second, I show how people living in areas understood as frontiers form their own analyses and responses to the conditions under which their land, labour, and resources are made available to others. Keywords: cocoa, commodification, frontier, infrastructure, natural resources, oil palm, Papua New Guinea, place, territorialization

Instrumental Touch: A Foucauldian Analysis of Women’s Fitness

Group Pilates classes in commercial fitness gyms are among the most common forms of mindful fitness in Warsaw. The instructors teaching these classes often correct the participant’s posture by touching them. While academic publications often critique fitness as a disciplinary practice, much fewer studies analyse touch understood as one of disciplinary techniques. Similarly, little is known about the experiences of fitness culture participants who encounter instrumental touch during Pilates classes. This qualitative research project analyses how Michel Foucault’s concept of anatomo-political power intersects with instrumental touch applied during Pilates classes to study how touch is used to train fitness bodies and how instructors and other participants of Pilates sessions participate in power relations. The article considers the value of instrumental touch in the context of relations between instructors and their clients.

Possessed by a slave, not slavery

The present paper is divided into three large steps around the themes of spirit possession and the historical imagination of slavery in Cuba. These three steps reflect both ethnographic dimensions of these themes and broader theoretical approaches towards them. The last step, ‘apomimesis’, is the one proposed by the author, not by way of replacement but displace­ment. The first step, ‘formulaic’ historical imagination, covers the ground of a direct expression of slavery as historical trauma through spirit possession. The second step, ‘mimesis’, displaces the first by adding into it the possibility of reversal, of empowerment, the slave becoming an anti-slave. The third creates another simultaneous condition. Through the negative dialectics of apomimesis the non-slave emerges.

Ialenti, Vincent 2020. Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 208 p. ISBN: 9780262539265 (paperback).

Ialenti, Vincent 2020. Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 208 p. ISBN: 9780262539265 (paperback).