Indigenous peoples as “non-movers”: Immobility,space,and survivance among the Pinatubo Aeta in the Philippines

Abstract

This article examines immobility among the Pinatubo Aeta in Pampanga, Philippines, not as cultural attachment to place or a lack of mobility resources, but as a practice formed within spatial orders produced by the state, capital, development, and legal recognition. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, and survivance, it analyzes how land rights, labor, education, and institutional negotiation reshape the meanings of land and staying. The article argues that Aeta immobility is neither simple exclusion nor passive subordination, but a historically structured spatial position from which everyday negotiations over land, indigeneity, and livelihood unfold. Foregrounding the “labor of staying” as an analytic concept, it reframes Indigenous immobility not as the absence of movement, but as a dense field of everyday political work carried out within—and against—the spatial order of state-led development.