Abstract
Property (in its currently most powerful form) is made through the violence of dispossession. Property-making requires the transformation of landscape; prior residents, both human and nonhuman, are no longer welcome. This process is particularly clear in ‘frontiers’, that is, places where property is in formation through the displacement of Indigenous peoples and ecologies. This article takes up wetland drainage and mining for concrete aggregate as exemplars of this kind of property formation. In Sorong, a frontier city at the western edge of Indonesian Papua, transforming the landscape builds property for settler occupation. Indigenous land rights are channeled into alliances between settlers and Indigenous clan leaders to hasten the transformation of land for settler economies. ‘Intimate violence’ shapes relations not only with settlers but also among and within Indigenous clans. At the ‘edge of the Anthropocene’, we argue, landscape transformation reshapes both ecologies and human subjectivities, creating property as ecological ruin.
Most policy makers begin their attempts to address environmental degradation through securing property in its most familiar forms. Garrett Hardin’s influential (but repudiated) article, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, published in 1968, has been used ever since to legitimate approaches to ecological catastrophe that begin by securing property rights of the sort that global elites can best appreciate: land claims, guaranteed by law, in which owners are free to destroy previous communities and ecologies to make land into capitalist investments. 1 Dominant models of environmental amelioration, such as payment for environmental services (PES), focus on securing property for market-based negotiation. As Moradian et al. (2010) argue for PES, the complete hegemony of land-as-capitalist-commodity is rarely questioned, despite its inapplicability to most places. Only thus does property appear to be a solution.
The obvious contradiction of this approach is that the very landscape transformation required to make this kind of property dispossesses previous occupants, human and nonhuman. Where sustainable ecologies predate the making of land into an investment resource, they are destroyed in the transformation, often followed by ecological ruin. Indeed, the process of dispossession always involves violence – against both humans and nonhumans. This is most obvious in places where property is in formation; we call such places ‘frontiers’ to acknowledge the incomplete and often chaotic nature of governance for the capitalist commodification of land (Tsing, 2005). Such places are not archaic leftovers; frontiers continue to pop up all over the world. Neoliberal approaches mask the presence of property-in-formation to the planet’s detriment.
Attention to sites where property must be made before it can be claimed is essential to understand the role of landscape in capitalist political economy. Landscape transformation, we argue, is an ingredient of land grabs – but it sometimes precedes them. State governance and development ‘common sense’ (in the Gramscian sense of unreflexive hegemony) may lay the groundwork for capitalist accumulation, even before capitalists appear. This insight adds an essential specificity to more general arguments about capitalism and the environment, which focus on how regimes of production destroy ecologies to enable accumulation (e.g. Foster, 2000; Moore, 2015; Saito, 2023). Even before commodity-making destruction, places are being prepared – by their transformation into property. Much of the work of dispossession happens then; accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003) can be a multi-stage process in which ground is emptied and then reoccupied by capital. Our focus in this article is the emptying, which ushers in the possibilities of new social and economic relations.
This article focuses on two kinds of landscape transformation in the making of dispossession-oriented property in contemporary frontiers: the filling in of wetlands and the mining of aggregate for concrete infrastructure. The obliteration of wetlands was once an ordinary feature of economic development; now, however, it is widely acknowledged that the wholesale destruction of wetlands destroys coastal resilience (Finki and Makowski, 2017) and wrecks watershed ecologies (Scott, 2024). Yet the destruction of wetlands continues because it is a way of making dispossession-oriented property. Rather than ameliorating environmental problems, making property through the destruction of wetlands creates those problems. Similarly, mining for aggregate destroys hillsides; destruction is justified by the imagined necessity of concrete to economic development (Pivo, 2021). Concrete infrastructure is a key element in making dispossession-oriented property; indeed, the land-water separation necessary to fill wetlands is generally created through concrete. Here too, then, the drive to create a particular standard of property destroys living ecologies.
Transforming Land to Make Property
As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. (Locke, 1690)
There are many forms of relation between people and land, and some scholars work to open the definition of ‘property’ to those not ordinarily recognized by capitalists (e.g. Ostrom, 1990). In this article, however, we consider the dominant definition of land as property, that is, possession, as guaranteed by law, in which owners can use the land any way they want, without regard to previous occupation. Above, we call this ‘dispossession-oriented property’; from here on, we just use the term property.
As the quotation from John Locke attests, transformation by humans has long been considered a sine qua non for this kind of property. Land without transformation is not yet property: transformation gives owners the rights to dispossess, as draining swamps demonstrates. The draining of the English fens in the 17th century was a pioneering experiment in transferring land to elites through an extension of state governance (Ash, 2017). Draining swamps became a model for land reclamation, replicated in both metropole and periphery. In South Asia, for example, British legal frameworks transformed swamp elements such as silt, marshes, and bogs into concrete property, assigning names, categories, and ownership (Bhattacharyya, 2018). In Australia, swamps were drained not only for the expansion of colonial settlements but also to provide construction materials, introduce new animals for agricultural industries, and create grazing land for sheep and cattle (O’Gorman, 2021). Reducing hillsides through mining has also allowed the advancement of property. Water-rights law in the US West was created through miners’ claims (Worster, 1985). Even where mines themselves are not contested, downstream watersheds are revamped through mining. Whether downstream residents see themselves as destroyed or renewed depends entirely on their relation to property regimes put in place by landscape transformation through mining (e.g. destroyed: Kirsch, 2014; renewed: Ureta and Flores, 2022).
Consider Indonesia, the site of our research. Scholars have shown the use of ambiguities, gaps, and conflicts in Indonesian property law and policy, as poor people use multiple resources to establish rights (e.g. Gilbert, 2024; Keller, 2025; Lund, 2020), and as corporations grab already occupied land (e.g. McCarthy et al., 2012; Semedi and Bakker, 2014). Ambivalence about dispossession is, indeed, built into the law; thus, for example, the necessity of landscape transformation in making property is written into Indonesia’s Basic Agrarian Law, which stipulates that ‘building use rights are nullified in the case of abandonment’. Land cannot be possessed without changing it; those who rely on existing ecologies are ripe for removal.
Our study took us to the frontier town of Sorong on the west coast of Papua. The land here is swampy, with mangrove forests on the coasts giving way to fresh-water swamps inland. The Indigenous staple food was sago, a swamp palm. Indigenous people are now, however, a minority in Sorong; the town is controlled by Indonesian settlers. Sago has been bulldozed and replaced by filled-in land, which is drained by concrete ditches and blocked off from water sources by concrete roads and walls. Concrete and swamp conversion work together to enable settler occupation. This history inspires our argument: landscape transformation makes property through dispossession. First, violence drives away defenders, making empty spaces. Then, landscape transformation makes settler political economies appear inevitable; it changes people as well as law and landscapes.
One way to illuminate this is to focus on the transformation techniques through which landscapes become property in the settler political economy. By chance, Indonesian terms offer an echoing chamber of sound that brings focus to the connections among violence, the separation of water and land, and concrete infrastructure. Consider the four T’s in Figure 1. Together they participate in an obsession for progress; they ‘civilize’ Papua.
Techniques of landscape transformation in Indonesia.
Sorong was founded for oil exploration in the 1930s under Dutch colonial rule. In the 1960s, through US Cold War politics, Papua came under the jurisdiction of the nation-state of Indonesia. The Indonesian army came in to clear Papuans out of the way for Indonesian development. Many Papuans ran to hide in forests and swamps. Indeed, this initial violence was necessary to make way for the property-making regime of Indonesian settler occupation. In the word matrix above, we begin with tembak, shooting, to clear the ground. The government moved Indonesian settlers into Papuan lands through the national transmigration program. Soon enough, settler migration took off by itself, and by the turn of this century, settlers far outnumbered Papuans in Sorong. Settlers also controlled every sector of the economy.
Control was made possible by filling in the swamps, timbun. Sago trees were felled, making Indigenous subsistence impossible. Concrete roads and walls, tembok, separated land and water, creating a new ecology. Where hardened roads penetrated new areas, tembus, plantations and other settler pursuits became possible. Meanwhile, the need for concrete to build this infrastructure led to the mining of the hills behind the city to provide sand and gravel for concrete aggregate. We come back to tembak, which also refers to hydraulic mining, which shoots the hills to bring down sand. The term also refers to ‘shooting’ a queue through bribery. This is a necessary skill in a frontier economy where formal regulation cannot be trusted and every enterprise needs a scam.
In the 21st century, Indigenous land rights have added to contests over property. After the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, the Indonesian government was jolted by regional independence movements. ‘Special Autonomy’ was the government’s solution for Papua (across its now many administrative units). This program gave the regional government a role in administering resource exploitation – as long as it is carried out in the interests of national and international capital. It also channels funds for infrastructure building, which, in turn, has stimulated an ever greater wave of settler migrations to the region. Meanwhile, Papuan groups have formed Lembaga Masyarakat Adat (‘traditional councils’), which have sponsored customary land mapping projects to establish the boundaries of particular clans and ethnic groups. In Sorong in 2010, local clans of the Moi ethnic group, which claims first occupation, drew up land maps and agreements, which require all property holders to have a signed Indigenous release (surat pelapasan adat).
Land rights has become one of the few ways that Papuans can exert political agency. This is a major shift from the Dutch colonial period, in which a cross-ethnic educated Papuan elite had been trained as teachers, pastors, and administrators. This system had its own ‘civilizing’ terrors, still evident in its remains (e.g. Derksen, 2016; Rutherford, 2003). However, Indonesian occupation displaced this elite (sometimes through murder, sometimes through forcing them to become grunts in the Indonesian army). Instead, in a classic ‘divide and rule’ tactic, only clan members of groups that show evidence of precolonial residence have rights. Papuans who come to Sorong from other areas are outside this power structure; this is an important exclusion because Indonesian racism against Papuans knows no tribal boundaries.
Land rights recognition means, too, that the particular version of tradition codified in them matters; for Sorong Moi, for example, women are disinherited by a rule that specifies gender difference, without regard to historical experience. It also means that clans who claim land rights have everything to gain by displacing each other. Land rights struggles under settler occupation have sponsored what we call ‘intimate violence’, that is, the brutality of conflicts among those who live side by side. This brutality includes settler land grants authorized by the occupying army. But it also includes what seems gentler, yet also contains settler violence: for example, land rights are confused by second-generation settler claims of kinship to Papuans, through assertions that their fathers were accepted into Indigenous clans. These are also land grabs. Furthermore, within the cascading sense of loss of the expanding frontier, intimate violence spreads among Indigenous landholders; it is manifested in inter- and intra-clan fights among Indigenous claimants – as well as family betrayals and self-harm.
Landscape transformation makes land loss seem inevitable. Experienced collectively, this sense of inevitable loss is the context, we argue, for intimate violence. The land will no longer be habitable in its earlier way, not only for human residents but also for the multispecies life that formed both livelihoods and a common world. One Indigenous intellectual from the Sorong area put it this way, speaking about the mass destruction of sago groves, the source of the Indigenous staple food, that has accompanied Indonesian ‘development’. Our interlocutor discussed the cosmological connection to human life. To Moi people, he said, sago roots are life itself. People lived in the protection of sago groves. When they thought of making any disturbance, even a garden, they asked the land, by sitting bare assed on the dirt, waiting for a sign from the roots. Without sago, human life is unrooted. ‘Life is broken when the land is destroyed’, he explained.
Cosmological reflection is only a start. Property making in Sorong involves a close choreography of Indigenous and settler gestures to alienate people from earlier ecologies and render land as barren goods for transaction, that is, property. Old relations must be upturned – and this is done, we argue, by upturning the landscape. The rest of this article follows timbun and tembak as property-making techniques in Sorong.
Tembak : Displacing Former Residents
Landscape violence in Sorong began with the removal of sago palms. Tens of thousands of transmigrant settlers replaced sago groves with settler ecologies. McNamee (2023) argues that transmigration was timed explicitly to block Papuan independence struggles by displacing Indigenous people and landscapes; from 1978 to 2000, about 297,000 Indonesian transmigrants were placed in Papua. International support was key; in 1984, for example, the World Bank approved the Second Swamp Reclamation Project for transmigration to Papua (Fearnside, 1997). In and around Sorong, transmigration displaced Indigenous territories. Papuan clans were sometimes offered a token compensation fee, and were forced to accept it under threats of coercion. 2 The first step in creating property was displacement of both human and nonhuman residents.
Sago groves and productive swamps were replaced with wet rice fields and other settler ecologies. In fact, rice did poorly and was eventually abandoned. The overuse of pesticides spread toxic ecologies (Manning and Rumbiak, 1989). Some of the converted land eroded and is no longer productive for human livelihoods. However, this makes it available for further landscape transformation for settler occupation.
Transmigrants were sometimes settled on tidal landscapes, which they were unable to use for settler farming. Some transmigrants returned to their original homes, leaving land with an uncertain property status, adding to the chaos of property in formation. Those who stayed found crops that could survive wet conditions, such as bananas, taro, cassava, and corn. With the disappearance of sago, Papuans were forced to take up settler livelihoods. The wildlife on which they had depended had disappeared together with the swamps. Sacred places and ancestral burial sites were destroyed. Displaced Papuans found themselves forced to participate at an extreme disadvantage in settler economies and ecologies. It is in this context that the further transformation of the landscape could have such definitive results in making a new system of land as property.
Timbun: Eradicating Wetlands
After residents are displaced, the land must be rebuilt. This means channeling water out of swamps into drains and piling and compacting dirt above the swamp. Dirt is brought in and compacted; housing, roads, and farms rest on top. High concrete foundations raise buildings and roads above the water table. Water is channeled into drainage ditches. All this is timbun.
Big development projects coordinate landfill and houses; the bigger the land claim, the more uniformity the claimant can enforce. The settler landscape, however, is filled with all kinds of land claims, big and small, and timbun projects compete and interrupt each other. Everyone wants to make the highest ground; the water from the new high ground flows off on to the not-quite-so-high timbun projects all around. Furthermore, timbun must be repeated. The built environment sinks into the mud, even as storms bring in more water. Timbun is thus intrinsically both competitive and repetitive. It divides settlers as neighbors even as it displaces earlier residents.
A woman we’ll call Mama Maluku (because she is a settler from the Maluku Islands) was sitting on her front porch in 2022 as we passed by, and we stopped to talk. She described her land: Together with her late husband, she bought the land she now lives on for 9 million rupiah at a land auction around 2012. (The land had been seized when a previous claimant defaulted on loans.) She was able to obtain a National Land Board certificate of ownership (sertifikat hak milik), the most legally secure guarantee. Without timbun, however, it’s still not enough for possession. Through her timbun, Mama Maluku built a nice house plus an extra building she rented as rooms to sojourners and students. Problems arose, however, when her Javanese neighbor decided to improve her land. Mama Maluku broke into tears as she explained the situation to us: ‘Beside the house was a water channel. That’s why we didn't timbun to fill that place up. Then [the neighbor] came, and she measured the land next to me and timbun the water channel.’ Through timbun, the water channel became property.
Now the water flows into Mama Maluku’s lot. Her house is sinking into the mud. She has had to close the rental unit because it is completely flooded. Meanwhile, across the street from her house, the building of large-scale storage warehouses has blocked the stream that runs along the road: more timbun. Those buildings have exacerbated the flooding because the water, which no longer has channels, increasingly finds its way into everyone’s yards and houses. Mama Maluku, along with 20 other neighbors, filed a complaint with the Public Works Office, Development Planning Agency, and the Mayor of Sorong. But there was no follow-up. These departments, she said, sometimes clean drains along the main roads so that the water does not lead to traffic jams. They have less regard for neighborhoods or house lots. Mama Maluku sighed; she thought she had taken care of everything:
I have taken care of all the land certificates. It has been completed. But my neighbor blurred the land boundaries. She timbun the water channel to become land and to create property on that former riverbed.
Mama Maluku said that her neighbor bribed the National Land Bureau so that they would issue a certificate of ownership. Rumors that National Land Bureau officials could be bribed were rife during our research. This is a part of property-making too. But neither manipulation nor certificate means a thing if the land is not converted from swamp into settler space.
It is crucial to consider how important swamps have been for both the identities and the livelihoods of coastal Papuans. One Papuan activist argued (to the second author) that the destruction of swamps was the equivalent of the destruction of the Papuan people. Sago, as noted above, was the staple food; the sago palm cannot live without swamps. The activist detailed the many other swamp foods, from ferns to shellfish, that have been key to Papuan livelihoods. Furthermore, in the face of war and coercion, Papuans have used swamps as refuges, places where invading armies were unable to follow them. The destruction of swamps is thus always a dispossession: a wiping out of spaces of livelihood and wellbeing. Yet, as suggested above, the making of property through swamp eradication also draws in Indigenous clan leaders, who claim rights in the newly evacuated land.
Timbun, we have been arguing, is a necessary part of making wetlands into property, at least in Sorong. Law is also a necessary element. When claims overlap and contradict each other, claimants can sue each other. The first author of this article checked records of land cases, some pitting settlers against each other, some pitting settlers against Indigenous claimants, some pitting Indigenous clansmen against each other, and some with all these elements. In each case, timbun played a role. Claimants argued that they had timbun first, or that they had timbun more times, or that they had timbun most effectively. Opposing witnesses testified to the continuing presence of the swamp, working against land claims. One of the few swamp plants settlers are able to notice is the green vegetable kangkung (‘water spinach’). If someone can spot kangkung, it weakens the claimant’s case. Sometimes the claimants with the most official land certificates won, but only if they could also establish timbun.
The following case includes many of these elements; it concerns 7,800 square meters of land that has become valuable because of the commercialization of the neighborhood in which it lies (Mahkamah Agung Republik Indonesia [MARI], 2017). Two non-local men claim it, and each brought evidence to the court concerning their claims. The suit was brought by an Indigenous Papuan we’ll call Pak Maybrat, because he is from the Regency of Maybrat (and thus has no land rights in Sorong), against a Papuan Chinese, whom we will call Pak Tionghoa (‘Chinese’). Both men brought an array of certificates, alliances with local Indigenous clans, rental contracts with others, and histories of their activities in timbun. The case used all these, taken together, to clarify property.
In the court record, Pak Maybrat says that he moved to Sorong in the 1980s and gained permission to rent a plot of land claimed by the Wat clan cluster in 1989. (Clan names used here, like personal names, are pseudonyms.) Between 1989 and 2004, he says, he had permission and recognition (ijin dan pengakuan) under customary law from Wat to rent the land, but without a formal land release letter. Between 2004 and 2014, he says, the landholding Wat clan cluster were measuring (and thus establishing claims on) the land (mengukur tanah). In 2014, he received a signed, numbered, and filed Statement of Release of Customary Land Rights from the Wat clan.
Pak Maybrat testified that the land was swampy scrub forest in 1989. There were kangkung ponds and some banana trees. Indeed, Pak Maybrat claimed that he himself planted kangkung in the swamp before it had been timbun. (Kangkung can either grow wild or be planted; to claim planting offers a small refusal of the testimony of the swamp.) He says he cleaned, maintained, and filled the land through timbun over a period of more than 10 years, starting in 1991. His claim to continued timbun, along with his alliance with the Wat clan cluster, were his strongest assets in court. Each time the swamp started to come back, he says, he timbun again.
After the land was drained, piled, and compacted, in 2003, Pak Maybrat began renting out plots containing wooden buildings to tenants for restaurants. Pak Maybrat, with his wife and family, live next to the plots. While renting out his plots, he continued to gradually fill the contiguous swampy land. When the land became solid in 2004, he laid concrete for a motorcycle parking lot. He continued this expansion with further landfilling. In 2014, he worked with the head of the nearby and quite successful supermarket to lay concrete on the land to make it solid for a car parking lot. In 2016, he began renting the parking lot to the supermarket for 18 million rupiah per year. Finally, he expanded his business to build six plots of brick houses, by making additional timbun. He made his claims clearer through attesting to the dry-land crops he planted, including trees: ‘At the back of the houses it was still muddy and partly dry land, and I planted rambutan, mango, banana, papaya, jackfruit, cassava, taro, pandanus leaves, pineapple, red fruit, breadfruit, betel tree, matoa, soursop, and areca nut trees on the land.’ Cultivation, along with making land-hardened rental property for others, continued his remaking of the land.
This testimony of trees, filled land, and houses became relevant in 2017, when Pak Tionghoa challenged him. Pak Tionghoa had four use-rights certificates from the National Land Agency, and these lay directly in Pak Maybrat’s claim. Pak Tionghoa’s certificates were signed by the village head, the district head, and the director of Sorong’s National Land Agency office. The certificates were issued in 1983 and extended in 1995 and 2003. Pak Maybrat then brought the case to court, suing Pak Tionghoa for more than 54 billion rupiah (i.e. a lot of money), which includes the cost of timbun that he has been doing since 1991, the cost of transporting sand in trucks, building fences, the cost of building houses on swampy land, and the land rental fees he paid to the Wat clan cluster.
Pak Tionghoa’s case also needed timbun. He argued that he had begun timbun in 1983 – long before Pak Maybrat had even arrived in Sorong. In counter-attack, Pak Maybrat argued that Pak Tionghoa had not continued his timbun maintenance. As mentioned above, Indonesia’s Basic Agrarian Law states that ‘building use rights are nullified in the case of abandonment’. Pak Maybrat argued that Pak Tionghoa had abandoned the land – as witnessed by the return of the swamp. Pak Tionghoa argued that his continual renewal of his official certificates of land use was also maintaining the land. Furthermore, since 2001, Pak Tionghoa had leased his land to a Japanese used-car dealer. The used cars were put on land that was already timbun. Pak Tionghoa argued that he continued to extend his timbun land, filling a swamp full of kangkung ponds with sand. Between 2001 and 2013, he says, the car dealer built sheds to accommodate the cars, and he built a perimeter fence and a building for his used-car dealership. The car dealer paid rent to Pak Tionghoa – and also to the Wat landholding Indigenous clan.
Struggles among Indigenous landholding clans were creating an additional layer of epistemic murk. This plot was claimed by both the Wat clan cluster and the Lam clan. In 2010, a court settlement between the clans allowed the Lam clan to claim ownership. This clan settlement considerably weakened Pak Maybrat’s claim, since his possession rested largely on his arrangement with the Wat group. With Lam outside that settlement, Pak Tionghoa’s claims could advance. He argued that Pak Maybrat should sue the Wat leader, who had collected some 300 million rupiah of rent over the years from Pak Maybrat. This mistake should hardly devolve to him, Pak Tionghoa argued. Yet the settlement of clan claims hardly stood still, and the clan landowning situation remained uncertain. Not very far away, the Wat group won over Lam. Unsettled disputes between Wat and Lam groups continue across the city.
The question of the certificates was also muddy. Pak Maybrat questioned the verity of Pak Tionghoa’s National Land Board certificates. He testified that the National Land Agency (BPN) was never present on this plot: ‘During 1989, I never saw the BPN come and measure the land I had timbun. It’s strange that the BPN [without the necessary step of measuring and demarcation] could issue a certificate directly on my land.’
In the court record the first author read, Pak Tionghoa won through his certificates, lease agreements, and testimony of prior timbun. In many land rights disputes in Indonesia (Lund, 2020), winning in court does not automatically lead to possession; indeed, the case discussed below illustrates this. Concerning Pak Maybrat and Pak Tionghoa, we are unsure who actually occupies the land at this time. The law is one forum among many for fighting for possession. Still, it is the law that asserts property, naming its conditions. In this section, we have argued that timbun is a necessary prerequisite for property.
Swamps contest hard boundaries between land and water; timbun must be practiced iteratively. The low price of swamp land can be deceptive since the costs come later, perhaps after the housing has been sold to individual buyers. Making dry land is an endeavor that often frustrates owners, threatening their property. The swamp won’t go away easily. The repetitive practice of timbun highlights the swamp’s active role in resisting Anthropocene occupation.
Tembak Again: Pulverizing the Hills
Mining makes property, ironically, through the destruction of the living landscape. By rendering the land itself a commodity, and trucking it out, mining both establishes the value of the land and reclassifies it as an ownable asset. In the process, the whole assemblage of living things in that place is destroyed. Sand mining in Sorong also makes property in two other ways: First, flat land, created through razing sandy hills, becomes building sites, another form of land as property. Second, the destruction of the watershed by mining leads to the canalization of water, which, in turn, sponsors property at its edges, where the land is drained by these canals. Canalization has a close relation to timbun; drained land is set to become hardened as property.
The city of Sorong faces the sea and backs into sandy hills. Building the city, from its founding, involved the use of concrete, which needs a lot of sand. Since around 2000, the rush to build with concrete has boomed, and the need for sand has intensified. Given the city’s obsession with building, and with concrete, it is not surprising that the hills, once covered with forests, orchards, gardens, and sacred sites, have become places for sand mining.
Sand mining in Sorong is conducted with a range of tools from heavy mechanical excavators to hand-applied crowbars; within the range, hydraulic mining has a central place. The title of this section references ‘shooting’ the hills, tembak, with high-pressure hoses. But tembak also addresses even more destructive methods. Tembak also means to bribe in order to cut the long chain of bureaucracy. Large-scale sand miners bribe or tembak the local government to get permission to excavate the hills with heavy equipment. Even land explicitly protected for conservation, including ‘protected forests’, is vulnerable. ‘Officially sanctioned’ sand mines are associated particularly with big entrepreneurs and retired police officers, who have easy access to the bureaucracy. Property in these cases is secured with certificates and police protection.
In contrast, hydraulic mining is considered artisanal and is thus unregulated. While it requires capital, it does not need nearly as much as hiring an excavator would require. Thus it proliferates through the hills. High pressure water breaks down the sandy hillside, washing the dirt into sluices. The water flows into sand collection boxes, where the heavier sand within the dirt settles; the waste water, still heavy with sediment, flows out. From the boxes, the sand is shoveled into trucks.
The sediment-heavy waste water flows downhill; it is joined by the effects of rain on the loosened soil. Mining breaks up the structure of watersheds, leaving instead muddy waste streams; the broken watersheds spew sediment-heavy water into town; the town builds concrete channels for the water in a not-always-successful attempt to control the water’s descent toward the sea. Building projects crowd along the sides of these cement canals, which replace natural rivers. Builders take advantage of the drainage, which makes timbun possible, and, with their trust in concrete, they assume the stability of the canal. In fact, flood damage along the canals is common. The property made through canalization is unstable. Yet, ideologically, everyone depends on it; the close embrace of building and canals is symbolically important in the design of the settler landscape. This is one way that mining makes property, then: through downstream canalization.
How is property made in the artisan-mined hills? At first, the National Land Board treated the hills as empty and handed out certificates to settlers for sand mining. However, in the same turn-of-the-century period during which mining developed into a ‘sand rush’, Indigenous land rights were recognized, and Sorong’s Moi clans jumped into the fray to demand property in the hills. Sand mines were, indeed, the first and most intense sites of land conflicts in part because it seemed easier, to both settlers and Indigenous claimants, to make claims where property was so newly imagined, rather than in built-up districts of the city. Sand mines have been some of the most highly contested sites for property, not just between settlers and miners but also across Indigenous landholding clans. Indeed, our conclusion from fieldwork is that Indigenous clans need settler agents to organize and finance the mining, while agents need Indigenous clansmen to scare away other potential claimants. Today’s property in sand mining, we argue, is created through these cross-racial alliances, which destroy the landscape as a way to make law and value. Without the settlers, the land cannot be pulverized and sold. Without the Indigenous clansmen, mining risks serious claims fights. Such alliances are competitive; in sand mining, the most effective allies destroy the land most quickly and completely. Property, like a phoenix, rises from this destruction.
Consider what was happening in an excavator-dug sand mine during the second author’s fieldwork with Gilang Mahadika and Bustamin Wahid. The excavator was demolishing a whole hill in a very fast and efficient operation; when we were there, almost 100 trucks of mixed dirt were removed from the site every day. (Those trucks went to specialized sand washers to remove the clay and silt so the sand could be sold to developers.) The same clans involved in the land dispute described in the previous section were disputing here: the clans we are calling Wat and Lam. Both clans offered their own stories of timeless occupation, and each disputed the other’s claims. The Wat group had won a court case over this land; but Lam leaders were planning to bring the dispute to a different judge, in a courtroom where they felt sure their influence would be felt. Wat members said they had possession until a party of Lam clansmen, emboldened by drink, attacked them with spears and machetes. Unprepared, they backed off. Meanwhile, Lam leaders claim that Wat is only there because of a marriage in which Wat men followed a Lam woman to this place. The Moi public intellectual quoted at the beginning of this article says neither clan has land rights in Sorong; both, he argues, get their rights from a third clan. This suggests that men followed women to the women’s home turf in both cases, but exposing this history, under current Indigenous rights codifications, would negate property claims. The stakes are high, and both Wat and Lam are ready to fight for their rights.
This whole scenario would not have been possible without settler agents on each side. Wat has allied with an Ambonese pastor, who wants to build a church on the ground left after the hill is mined away, leaving flat land. It was the pastor who first brought an excavator. With his Indigenous Land Release from the Wat group, he has already made plans for the church. Church building is hard to fight because of the sacredness of the Church; in other locations, it has defeated other kinds of land claims, including National Land Board ownership certificates. It was this pastor’s initiative, indeed, that started the sand mining in this place. Together, Wat and the pastor could reduce the hill to church property.
But then Lam got involved, chasing both Wat and the pastor away from the site. Lam have their own agent, a Manadonese settler with skills in handling money and equipment. The relationship is internally conflicted. The agent claims he is adopted kin, through relationships with Lam built by his father. Lam representatives, however, say he is hired help. What he does is employ and manage the excavator and its driver, handle the accounting, and collect and distribute the money from selling dirt. The Lam group can’t do it without him. In exchange, he gets to think of himself as the boss, helping out his Indigenous adopted kin.
Neither group could exploit the hillside – as property – without an alliance. The alliance brings the destructive force of digging machines and the power of finance together with the possible legitimacy of Indigenous claims. Without that alliance, the hillside might stay intact, that is, not be property at all. Meanwhile, there are phases of possession here. During our fieldwork, Lam and the Manado settler had possession; they were raking in money from selling the land in all its physicality. But the Ambonese pastor, the agent working with Wat, still held hopes of building once the hill had been fully demolished. Because of the superior claims of church building, plus his Indigenous release certificate from Wat, he is planning to build as soon as the excavator is finished, even though it is operated by the Lam alliance. Lam still hope to stop him, but they had not advanced an equally convincing building plan when we left the field.
Alliances that omit Indigenous land claimants completely are also possible – and effective as long as they destroy the land. All around the excavation just described, Papuans from other regions (that is, without land claims) have gathered, clustering like bees to nectar. Watershed channels have been destroyed, and mud flows down from the excavation. The Papuans situate themselves in the mud in the most literal sense: they each stand in a pool of mud, adding water as necessary with hoses, to wash, dig, and pile sand to sell. Meanwhile, they work at great speed to put up brick and concrete houses in the broken watershed. Since the ruined land can no longer support earlier purposes, and thus has become terra nullius, they have a chance to establish property there just by building (and then paying taxes on the buildings to argue for state legitimacy). Their alliance is with the excavation itself as a property-making apparatus, and not with any landholding Indigenous clansmen or settler agents.
Excavators have been banned in many areas, leaving sand mining to technologies imagined as artisanal, such as hydraulic mining. Areas without excavators – like the periphery of the excavation described above – are not so much in the spotlight, and would-be property makers sometimes dispense with Indigenous permission as well as land certificates. Hills mined with hydraulic hoses are spaces of comparative free play. (Land claimants sometimes mentioned oral permission from clansmen.) Land claimants with rather shaky claims get busy with sand mining before anyone can question their possession. The structure, however, is still the alliance: here between the settler land claimant, whom local people call ‘Boss 1’, and his or her settler mining manager, whom people call ‘Boss 2’. It’s the mining manager who arranges everything, providing the materials and equipment for ‘shooting’ and shoveling, including pumps, sluices, spades, and hoses. Boss 2 brings on a crew to actually do the work. He handles the money and gets out the sand. Often, Boss 2s have ties to the construction industry, a direct market for their sand. Boss 1s cannot hold the claim without Boss 2s. The alliance makes the land disappear, and thus confirms its status as property. Without it, Boss 1s would be stuck with weak and useless claims, probably unusable.
The expertise to pulverize the hills is united with claims to control the place. Such alliances, we have been arguing, are necessary for turning land into property through mining. Mining makes hills disappear into the construction industry, but their ghosts appear again in law as possessions. Hillside life is destroyed; property takes its place. Indeed, land as property is almost by definition a legal form that disregards the assemblage of life in a place. Property is transactable because it does not matter what lives there; whatever flourishes or does not, land as property, conceptually, is a barren good, transactable because of the irrelevance of its residents, human and not human. Mining thus exemplifies the key work of property making: it destroys the livability of a place to create a transactable commodity. Where Indigenous clansmen claim land rights, they can be coopted into this work of destruction. But mining eradicates the life world; the sago, the root crops, the fruit trees, the fish, and the wild animals are gone. Through mining, the clan loses the ability to support itself through the living connections of the place. Even in claiming possession, then, clan leaders endorse the work of dispossession.
At the Edge of the Anthropocene
Sludge, however, is anathema to the modern project. (Ingold and Simonetti, 2021)
The ‘solid fluid’ (Ingold and Simonetti, 2021) of the swamp resists property; it must be pounded into submission. Landscape making in Sorong illuminates the making of both nature and culture, and both governance and violence, in their Anthropocene forms.
Had it been made official, the Anthropocene, to geologists, would have been an epoch of planetary history. 3 It would be a unit of time that has no ‘edges’ except those of the planet. All geological epochs are planetary in scope: they are tied to geological strata that by definition demarcate a uniform planetary space. Despite this geological definition, however, the term has had another use: to sponsor interdisciplinary and public discussion about human relations to the environment. Within this discussion, there are good reasons to imagine the Anthropocene through its spatial heterogeneity (Tsing et al., 2019, 2024). If the concept of the Anthropocene is going to tell us anything about the interactions between humans and nonhumans that change the planetary environment, we need to attend to the social and ecological patches through which Anthropocene effects develop and spread. Climate change, for example, is created in the relationship between fossil-fuel burning centers (such as industrial cities) and carbon sequestering peripheries (such as forests and oceans). Other Anthropocene effects are even more patch oriented. Wetland loss – the motor for a planetary ‘Great Drying’ – happens in patches. Mining – with its planet-spreading toxic wastes and mountain-range-sized overburden – happens in patches. These phenomena, as they help make the dangers of the Anthropocene, are best studied in place. Yet, as indicated in these examples, they are not isolated. To imagine a patch as an element in making the Anthropocene admits immediately to patch-to-planet connections. It is part of the responsibility of a patch-centered analysis to attend to much wider systems of interconnection, from development regimes that privilege concrete to capitalist investment practices that finance more-than-human dispossession.
We call the scene in Sorong an ‘edge’ of the Anthropocene because both dispossession and development there are recent, fast, and brutal. Settlers imagine their job as bringing the region into line with globally normalized practices of infrastructure building, property law, and wealth making. From the vantage point of Sorong, we can see both the ordinariness of these practices and also their exotic, cruel, and destructive nature. We can see how they add up not to some idealized era of wellbeing but rather to an apparatus for demolition of the living world.
Property making is the most normalized part of this apparatus. Prominent scholars, such as Hardin (1968), mentioned above, have argued that we humans make a mess only when we don’t have property regimes. In contrast, we argue that property-making proceeds together with the dismantling of the living world, requiring humans to treat landscapes as if they were by their nature barren. As property, everything on the landscape is of, by, and for human owners; nothing else matters. Previous residents, human and nonhuman, are dispossessed. Property making is thus a leading edge of building the Anthropocene, in all its planetary dangers.
‘At the edge of the Anthropocene’, the rapid and recent environmental degradation in Sorong is facilitated by alliances formed among tribes, clans, and ethnic groups across the boundary between Papuans and Indonesian settlers. Indigenous Papuans suffer as victims but also find inspiration to reclaim their ancestral lands for settler-type development. Local businessmen and retired police or army officials act as financiers. Through effective connections and bribery, they work with officials to accelerate land acquisition and resource exploitation. Timbun and tembak make this possible.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by the SEACoast project, funded by the Luce Foundation.
