Theorizing ethnographically: No shares without acknowledgement

Abstract

As anthropologists have long recognized, a share is not a gift. Shares belong to owners. Only someone acknowledged to be the owner of a share of valued goods is entitled to demand the portion that properly belongs to them. This insight invites further ethnographic research and theorizing. What kind of person is acknowledged to be the proper owner of a share? What are the conditions under which demands based on ownership are recognized or disallowed? Where acknowledgement is lacking, how can it be achieved? To address these questions, I draw on my ethnographic research in Indonesia. Indigenous highlanders I encountered in Sulawesi in the 1990s grounded ownership in an individual's labour. Contra popular assumptions about the naturally communitarian nature of Indigenous people, social membership in a kin group or community furnished scant grounds for sharing valued goods such as labour or food. Research I conducted with Pujo Semedi in 2010–2015 in Kalimantan's oil palm zone indicated that villagers whose land had been occupied by plantation corporations were convinced they were rightful owners of a share of plantation wealth. Yet, racial tropes inherited from the colonial era together with the plantations’ social, juridical and spatial arrangements impeded acknowledgement. Plantation corporations and their government allies saw no grounds on which to compensate villagers for their losses, include them in benefits or involve them in plantation affairs. Drawing upon these ethnographic sources and comparative material, I further theorize why there can be no sharing without acknowledgement.

In the face of massive global and national inequalities, sharing resonates as a popular demand. But shares, as anthropologists have noted, are not gifts (Bodenhorn, 2005; Widlock, 2017; Woodburn, 1998). Shares ‘belong to owners’. They are allocated to claimants because they are entitled to them. Hence a ‘rightful share’ is the ‘proper share of things to be distributed to those who ought to have them’ (Ferguson, 2015: 55, 176–177). Building on these insights, my essay asks: What kind of person is acknowledged to be the rightful owner of a share of valued goods? What are the conditions under which ownership is acknowledged or disallowed?

The criterion of ownership usefully distinguishes the grounds on which valued goods may be distributed. Parsing the title of James Ferguson's book Give a Man a Fish, we can identify at least six different reasons why fish could change hands: (1) because the recipient needs a fish more than the giver (altruism, charity); (2) because refusing a fish might cause disruption (pacification); (3) because receiving a fish will make the recipient more productive (instrumentality); (4) because the giver and recipient owe each other fish (reciprocity); (5) because the recipient is owed a fish in return for their land, labour, goods and services or to compensate for a loss (exchange); (6) because membership in a social group bound by kinship, patronage, community, nationality or copresence confers the right to claim a share (entitlement). From this list, only the last three entries meet the anthropological definition of sharing, as the recipient is acknowledged to be the rightful owner of the fish in question, hence entitled to demand what is due.

What does it mean to be acknowledged? Johannes Fabian (1999: 53) addresses this question by dwelling on the concept of recognition, rendered in one word in English but three distinct words in German:

Erkennen… as in ‘I know these persons or objects when I see them’ (an act of cognition); Wiedererkennen, as in ‘I know these persons or objects because I remember them’ (an act of memory); and Anerkennen, as in ‘I give these persons or objects the recognition they ask for and deserve’ (an act of acknowledgement).

Fabian adds a fourth meaning, ‘recognizing a speaker’ in the context of a formal meeting which I fold into acknowledgement; a speaker who demands a hearing is admitted to the table.

Unlike classification or memory which are brought along as fixed schemas and preconceptions, acknowledgement requires knowledge, and knowledge for Fabian can only be generated through communicative exchanges between ‘coeval participants’ (Fabian, 1999: 53). His essay concerns colonial explorers in Central Africa whose sense of racial superiority made the very concept of communicative exchange absurd. He also explores ethnographic encounters in which recognizing ‘the other’ as coeval is the condition for producing new knowledge – a condition that power imbalances tend to preclude. Fabian (1999: 66) argues that acknowledgement cannot be ‘doled out like political independence or development aid’ nor set in place by legal fiat; it is the product of exchanges that change people and reset relations between them.

Building on Fabian's analysis, I argue that acknowledgement as a rightful owner is integral to sharing. Without such acknowledgement, there is only charity, instrumentality or pacification. Acknowledgement cannot be assumed as natural nor as Fabian stresses can it be ‘doled out’. Rather, acknowledgement is predicated on the open-ended work of establishing and sustaining the conditions for exchange among ‘coeval participants’ and removing discourses, practices and structural arrangements that stand in the way.

Presented in these terms, the search for acknowledgement seems rather abstract and possibly circular: it is difficult to see how a person whose capacity to be a ‘coeval participant’ is not acknowledged could then achieve ‘the recognition they ask for and deserve’. Ethnography can contribute to this body of theory by shedding light on the practices through which acknowledgement is achieved or disallowed. Here, I draw on research I have conducted in two areas of Indonesia where acknowledgement took quite different forms.

In Highland Sulawesi where I conducted research from 1990 to 2009 (Li, 2014), my interlocutors grounded their concepts of ownership in an individual's labour power, and most of the exchange they engaged in was strictly reciprocal, like for like. Contrapopular assumptions about the naturally communitarian nature of Indigenous people, social membership in a kin group or community did not furnish entitlement to a share of valued goods.

In Kalimantan's oil palm plantation zone where I conducted research with Pujo Semedi from 2010 to 2015 (Li and Semedi, 2021), local landholders whose land had been occupied by plantation corporations were convinced they had a right to a share of plantation wealth, but made no headway. Racialized stereotypes entrenched since colonial times together with juridical and spatial arrangements enabled the corporations and their government allies to overlook former landholders and barely acknowledge their presence, still less their claims. Under these conditions, human rights ‘doled out’ by international treaties or national legal codes failed to establish the acknowledgement villagers demanded and deserved. In a third section, I draw upon these two studies and comparative resources to further theorize sharing ethnographically.

Ownership and sharing in highland Sulawesi

In Widlock’s (2017) account of sharing among hunter-gatherers, people make demands for their share of hunted meat rudely, directly and persistently, leaving no doubt that they consider themselves to be rightful owners. In contrast, when I began my research in the highlands of Sulawesi in 1990, the only people acknowledged to be the rightful owners of items of value were the people who produced them with their own labour and sweat. No one else was entitled to demand a share.

Highlanders had a strongly developed sense of individual personhood. They acknowledged men, women and children to be the owners of their own labour power, fully entitled to sell their labour and its products, make a gift of them or engage in exchange with someone else. Parents did not lay claim to children's labour. From the age of 10 or so, they gave children access to a patch of earth on which to plant groundnuts, showed them how to tend the plants and hiked with them down to the market to help them sell the crop and pick out a new piece of clothing with the money they earned. They paid older children to take care of younger siblings, recognizing that the caregiver had the option of deploying their labour elsewhere. Husband and wife maintained separate fields or made an agreement to work together, becoming co-owners each entitled to half of the product. Some youngsters still sharing a hearth with their parents had their own rice fields and took bundles of harvested rice from their section of the household's storehouse when they wanted to contribute to a special meal for a guest – a gift they were free to make or withhold.

Land belonged to the pioneer who sweated for months wielding an axe to clear the huge trees. The pioneer could use the cleared land, sell it or lend it to others. It passed undivided to his descendants who used it in a loose rotation, but descendants did not claim ownership of this land because, as they explained, it was not their sweat that created it. In their view, the original pioneers, living or dead, were still the owners; current users were merely borrowing from them. There was a taboo against saying the names of ancestors and genealogical memories were short so unless they had witnessed the land clearing themselves, they were often unsure whose ancestors had cleared which patch of forest. Since no one claimed ownership over this land and land was abundant, there was no need to decide who was or was not included in an ownership group comprised of descendants, and no such groups formed. A would-be borrower (descendant or not) simply asked permission from the person who first cleared or who last used a plot, unless so many years had elapsed that no one knew who to ask.

In relation to primary forests and streams with their stocks of timber, forest products and prey highlanders recognized that people living close to these resources had stronger claims to access them than people from further away, but these claims did not amount to the right to exclude others. Etiquette suggested that newcomers should politely ask permission from those already in place, and particular elders had a ritual role in ensuring the safety of people who ventured into forest areas. Within the forest, highlanders deemed only something they worked for as truly their own: they claimed ownership of game they hunted, of a water source they had directed towards their home by installing a bamboo channel, and valuable resin trees they had nurtured by clearing around them.

Transfers of labour and food

Transfers of labour among highlanders were of four kinds, all of which conformed to the principle that labour conferred ownership. (1) Some labour transfers were strictly reciprocal, a day for a day, usually when a group of 2–20 neighbours committed to working on each farm plot in turn until the cycle was complete; (2) some labour was transferred in the context of a ‘work party’ in which a person invited neighbours and kin to work on their swidden plot in return for a festive meal on site, with a loose expectation of a future return; (3) labour was sometimes transferred as a unilateral gift, when someone showed up uninvited to help out and (4) there was some work for a wage in cash or kind.

Behind the clarity of the principle of ownership based in labour, there were tensions: no highlander could actually survive based on their labour alone and transfers signalled a necessary but fraught interdependence. The gift of labour expressed ownership in the purest form, as no one doubted that the owner of labour was entitled to use it as s/he wished. With reciprocal labour, highlanders looked for exchange partners of similar stamina and strength, usually their siblings, cousins and neighbours of the same generation. For the work party system, expectations of reciprocity were in tension with the idea of the gift. At a work party hosted by an older man, for example, I overheard some guests grumbling that the host held work parties too often or pushed the participants too hard (e.g. to work in the rain or take only a short break after lunch). They felt he was extracting too much of their labour, which he was too old to reciprocate in kind. Reflecting later on the low turnout for his work party, the host recognized that his physical strength had declined but noted that he put time and labour into brokering marriages for the young people he invited to the work party; hence, they should be willing to reciprocate with labour in a different form. When his guests failed to show up, claiming to be sick or noting the rain, they countered his logic and reasserted their position as the owners of their own labour. They could make a gift of it if they chose, but the host was not entitled to demand a share.

Wage labour was also beset with tension. People who received a wage sometimes hinted that the wage was not a full compensation for the labour they expended, since labour is embodied and fecund. As one woman observed, when she weeded the shallots in her neighbour's field she received a wage, but the neighbour received a clean field in which her crops could grow. No one relished the position of being at another's beck and call and employers were wary of issuing commands that their workers might resent. For both sides in the transaction, recognizing a person as the owner of their labour made the practice of detaching labour from its owner by means of a wage feel a bit violent, and buyers and sellers avoided this relationship if they could.

Transfers of food I recorded in the 1990s retained the principle of individual ownership. When someone had a good harvest of fresh corn, they gave up to half away to people who came to help tie up the bundles, to kin and neighbours the owner invited to come to receive it as a gift and to others who showed up hoping to buy corn for a low price. Owners of the corn noted that some bundles would probably return to them when neighbours had a good harvest, but they did not consider themselves entitled to a share of a neighbour's harvest: the owner was the person who grew the corn and it was up to that person to decide whether to store it, sell it or give it away.

Highlanders valued effort and disdained free riders – people who attempted to profit at another's expense. Within the household, a married couple and their unmarried children had the right to consume whatever cooked food was in the pot. ‘We work separately’ one of my interlocutors observed, ‘but we eat together’ (Li, 1998). Beyond the household boundary, there was no ‘moral economy’ (Scott, 1976) to guarantee subsistence. Highlanders had no system to distribute food to widows or failing farmers nor were there patrons who provided security to clients by meeting their needs when times were hard. Highlanders often said, ‘we’re all kin here’, gesturing to the houses of their neighbours, but the bilateral kinship structure and dispersed settlement pattern worked against clear social or spatial boundaries and did not confer entitlements. When someone extended help to another person, it was on a dyadic basis and explained in terms of specific, embodied relationships (e.g. my sister-in-law came to help me harvest last year when I was sick, and today I noticed her field is full of weeds so I’m going over to help).

After cacao

Ownership as the motor of sharing worked well when an exact equivalence could be established: notably, a day of work for a day of work. Reciprocal exchanges diminished when the economic pathways of highlanders diverged. In the 1990s, highlanders started planting cacao on their swidden fields, effectively claiming individual ownership of plots of land they had previously ‘borrowed’ from the ancestors. There were struggles over who had the right to plant perennials on which patch of land, but the matter was generally resolved by making a fresh labour investment: whoever expended labour in planting cacao became the acknowledged owner of the trees and the plot.

Women had to work to cement their position as owners after cacao. In the old days, men were acknowledged as the owners of the land they cleared, but the work of women who grew food to sustain their husbands while they wielded an axe in the forest went unrecognized. Alert to this problem, when the cacao era arrived, women were careful to take an active role in planting cacao trees on their own plots or planting cacao together with their husbands on an explicit, co-ownership basis. Their embodied presence in the fields and the work they did digging holes to transplant cacao seedlings demanded – and secured – the acknowledgement they deserved. Still, the additional burden they assumed in securing food to fill the family pot sapped their energy and reduced their capacity to invest in the creation of property on their own behalf.

After cacao, land promptly became a commodity, freely bought and sold. Some highlanders established successful cacao farms and began to accumulate land and capital while others were squeezed for land and capital, fell into debt and entered a downward spiral. After a decade, cacao came to dominate the landscape and food crops were squeezed out. Highlanders, especially women, welcomed the shift, noting that poor weather or pests used to devastate their crops of rice or corn, yielding them no return for the months of hard work they invested crouching down or on their knees, weeding huge swidden fields with small hand-held tools.

Class-based inequality anchored in land ownership became entrenched. Even the most successful cacao farmers had less than 10 ha in production, so they did not need to employ regular workers, leaving newly landless kin and neighbours without a means of livelihood. Prospering farmers made no apologies for buying mechanical weeders, which displaced the labour of neighbours who needed work. The machines, they said, saved them money; they also enabled them to avoid the awkwardness of hiring kin and neighbours for a wage, people who might privately feel the transaction was unfair or extractive, as in the example I gave above.

The ‘work party’ system fell into disuse as it was anchored in the requirements of swidden rice production. The purpose of transferring labour through the work party system was to establish multiple rice fields on adjacent plots and plant them all in a short period, so the rice ripened at the same time. An isolated rice plot or one that ripened ahead of others would be stripped clean by monkeys or birds. Once highlanders stopped growing rice, there was no need to coordinate their efforts. The exchange of bundles of fresh corn also disappeared. The few households that still grew corn preferred to store it for family use. The new staple was rice bought by the sack on credit from a cocoa trader and carefully rationed among household members; no one expected it to circulate in the same way as fresh corn nor did they make demands. Boundaries of households as units of labour and consumption became more defined and requests by impoverished kin and neighbours for assistance in the form of a kilo of rice, a small loan or a day of paid work were a source of tension. Many highlanders were charitable, but they felt they had to harbour their resources to keep their own farms afloat.

To summarize, in the 1990s, individuals were acknowledged to be the owners of their labour and its product, and transfers reflected this principle. Only an explicit agreement to exchange like for like (a day for a day) furnished a claimant with a right to claim a share of something owned by someone else. No one demanded shares based on social membership in a kin group or neighbourhood. After the arrival of cacao and the intensification of market relations, highlanders’ concepts of personhood and property did not change. The shift was that those who had no land could not realize the value of their labour by working on their own land nor by working for a wage since paid work was scarce The outcome was a profound sense of disorientation not because sharing collapsed, but because the sense of personhood tied to ownership of one's own labour power lost its meaning.

Struggles for acknowledgement in Indonesia's plantation zone

My second research site is situated in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zone where the government has allocated around 22 million ha, a third of Indonesia's total farmland, to national and transnational plantation corporations. Hundreds of thousands of customary landholders have lost access to their farm and forest land; yet, these losses are compensated very little, if at all. Ethnographic research I conducted in West Kalimantan with Pujo Semedi in 2010–2015 (Li and Semedi, 2021) indicated that former landholders who continued to live in tiny hamlets surrounded by corporate palms believed they were entitled to a ‘rightful share’ of plantation wealth, but they struggled to achieve acknowledgement of any kind. Natco, a branch of the state-owned plantation corporation that arrived in 1980, simply pushed villagers aside. Priva, a plantation corporation privately owned by an Indonesian national, arrived in 1990 with a scheme to include villagers but on highly adverse terms. In addition to these two corporations, three more corporations occupied adjacent land. Together, they took up almost all the farmland in the subdistrict, leaving former landholders confined to their hamlets, without land to farm or stable jobs.

Shares due

There were three main grounds on which villagers in the plantation zone we studied asserted a claim to a ‘rightful share’ of plantation wealth. The first was land, the second was unmet promises and the third was acknowledgement of their standing as coeval participants in the plantation economy who deserved to be consulted on decisions and included in the stream of benefits. I will explain each of these in turn before examining how villagers’ demands for acknowledgement could be so thoroughly denied.

Like the Sulawesi highlanders I described above, villagers were most confident in expressing claims to ownership that were based on their own labour. They claimed ownership of fallow swidden land cleared by themselves or their ancestors and to rubber and fruit trees which they divided among their male and female children in each generation. It was in relation to this, individually owned land that they made claims on Natco and Priva for proper compensation. They were much less sure about their right to make claims based on their loss of access to uncleared land or the forest and river resources they relied on as components of their livelihoods. They were not familiar with transnational legal provisions concerning the rights of Indigenous people (e.g. ILO 169) or national advocacy campaigns that argue for the right to claim ancestral territory collectively (Li, 2020). Even with this information, they would have struggled to make a claim because the plantation zone we studied had been a forest frontier into which several distinct Malay and Dayak groups speaking different languages had moved over the preceding century. Newcomers politely asked the groups already in place for permission to clear forest land, but there were no clear boundaries or customary institutions asserting territorial jurisdiction. When the plantation corporations came, villagers experienced a catastrophic loss in their access to forests, water sources and a land reserve for future generations, but they did not make claims in these terms.

The second grounds for claiming ownership of a rightful share of plantation wealth was unmet promises. When the plantation corporations entered their villages seeking some kind of consent, corporate public relations staff, accompanied by government officials and sometimes by armed police, promised that plantations would improve villagers’ wellbeing. In an outlandish version of this promise, plantation staff in another district declared they would turn villagers’ water ‘into coca-cola’ (De Vos et al., 2018). Corporate promises were vague and never written into contracts of the kind that would give villagers a clear, legal right to a share. Nevertheless, for our interlocutors, promises meant something. Unmet promises were not just disappointing, they infringed upon their personhood. Villagers felt they had been induced or tricked into make a sacrifice which brought them no reward. Sacrificing oneself for the common good has value in Indonesia – fighters who sacrificed their lives to achieve independence from the Dutch are one example. But a pointless sacrifice, called in Indonesian mati konyol, betrays the sacrificiant. Villagers whose sacrifice was betrayed felt they had been taken for fools (konyol).

Instead of receiving promised benefits, villagers said they had ‘become the audience’ (jadi penonton). This expression flagged their sense of material unfairness, as they watched full-time plantation workers and managers, as well as village leaders and government officials allied with the plantations, prosper at their expense. They witnessed the children of plantation managers heading off to university, while their own children lacked the funds to complete high school. Adding to the injury, plantation managers refused to hire them, preferring migrant workers who they deemed to be more reliable.

In relation to the third grounds on which villagers claimed a right to a share – acknowledgement of their status as coeval interlocutors and participants in the plantation economy – ‘becoming the audience’ flagged complete failure. An audience is expected to be passive and has no role in the drama unfolding on stage. The corporations in our study site did not even perform for the audience, and they simply overlooked it as if no one was there.

Expressing his frustration at being overlooked, one elder lamented that Natco had started replanting the aging palms without consulting the original landholders, indeed ‘without saying a word’. ‘The company shouldn’t do that’ he insisted. ‘This is our place. We are the original people here’. For him, acknowledgement was a matter of consultation as well as a fair distribution of plantation wealth. ‘We have to fight the company’, he insisted, ‘they have to give up some land. We understand they can’t give up all of it, but they have to give us some, so we too have a share’. He was desperate and spoke with emotion:

I’m stressed all the time ...I get panic attacks. Where will my children and grandchildren go? If you ask me that question I can’t answer it. None of us here can answer it. It was all set up wrong from the start. The company took all our land and gave us nothing. Now there is oil palm everywhere except the graveyard.

The share he envisaged as ‘rightful’ – due to villagers by right – was not a finite amount. Its horizon was future-oriented: it meant enough to enable villagers to prosper for as long as the company was present in their midst.

Demanding acknowledgment

For villagers’ demands for a rightful share of plantation wealth to be granted they needed, first, to be acknowledged as coevals, competent to engage in a communicative exchange. Yet, villagers struggled to establish acknowledgement of this kind. Instead, plantation managers and their state sponsors viewed villagers as unruly and backward people. They drew on knowledge they ‘brought along’ as racialized stereotypes and avoided encounters where new knowledge might be generated. They did not simply deny villagers’ claims, they failed to hear them.

A struggle that unfolded in our research site circa 1999 illustrates the challenges villagers faced when trying to communicate their claims. Encouraged by the fall of President General Suharto in 1998 and promises of reform, a large group of villagers whose land had been occupied by the state-owned plantation corporation Natco mobilized to set up a series of blockades. They insisted that the plantation director travel from the city to meet with them, refusing to deal with his intermediaries and underlings. For the protesters, proper acknowledgement meant that the director must talk with them face to face. The director arrived and there was a tense meeting at a barricaded plantation gate. Some weeks later the director, senior government officials and the village heads who were leading the protest signed a formal agreement which committed Natco to a sharing of sorts. It would develop some oil palm smallholdings for villagers on their remaining land, if they had any, and villagers would pay back the costs through monthly deductions from their harvest.

Limited though it was, the agreement took on iconic status. A decade later, villagers continued to refer to it and we found a copy of the document pasted to the wall of a village co-op. The protest leaders hoped that the director's presence and the signed agreement would cement a fundamental shift in their standing: henceforth, they would be acknowledged as competent parties with whom plantation managers would engage in an ongoing dialogue. They were sorely disappointed. Not only was the smallholding programme delayed and its delivery incomplete, plantation managers continued to take actions unilaterally, witness their failure to consult with villagers over their decision to replant the aging palms and extend the plantation license. In the managers’ view, blockades confirmed that villagers were unruly and ungrateful and quite unfit to be included as parties to negotiations or partners in a plantation enterprise. Rather they should be ignored or, if necessary, pacified.

In Indonesia's plantation zones, as in the mining zone described by Welker (2014: 106), corporations often make tiny gifts or concessions to end blockades or resolve small grievances, a practice popularly known as ‘handing out Panadol’. Panadol (paracetamol) is a medication used to cool temperatures and make a headache go away, but it does nothing to address underlying causes. The expression condenses the scorn with which managers treat villagers, and the low value they ascribe to villagers as people for whom the smallest gift should suffice. For villagers, saying they have been given Panadol (dipanadol) meant they had been treated as fools, and denied the acknowledgement they demanded and deserved.

Acknowledgement disallowed

The three grounds on which villagers in our research site asserted an entitlement to a rightful share of plantation wealth – loss of land, unmet promises and the right to be consulted and included – made no headway at all with plantation managers who did not acknowledge that villagers had any basis for their claims. The stunning absence of state or corporate accountability for occupying vast areas of land and causing harm to the residents is a social fact. It is the question of how a rightful share can be so thoroughly disallowed that merits close attention. Two strategies stand out: denial of ownership grounded in labour and the organization of space to preclude corporate responsibility for the harms imposed.

To deny land ownership as a ground for claims, corporations had to discount villagers’ labour investments or render them invisible. One village headman, trying to make sense of how Priva had overlooked villagers’ productive rubber trees, theorized that it was all a mistake: ‘The plantation surveyors flew over in a helicopter and they thought what was growing here was forest’ he said; ‘they did not see that it was our rubber groves and fallow rice fields’. Adding to the insult, they did not set foot in the village or consult him about their plans. Whether the surveyors lacked the capacity to read the Indigenous landscape or simply did not see the point in recording the presence of people, plants and practices to which they attributed no value, the outcome was to produce the terra nullius on which plantations could be built, together with a population that was so far from coeval it could not even be seen, still less heard.

As they proceeded to take hold of their government-granted concession land, both Priva and Natco had to deal with the villagers they encountered on the spot. At this point, they did recognize that villagers’ labour investments merited compensation, but they radically discounted the value. Natco paid villagers a small compensation for their bulldozed rubber and fruit trees but paid nothing for their fallow swiddens. One villager commented on the uncompensated labour: ‘They should have paid us for the axe head’ he said, ‘because it was our hard work that cleared the land. Natco saved a lot of money because we made our rice fields there’. Priva did not pay villagers for their productive trees and swidden fallows but offered to exchange them for smallholder plots at a discounted rate. Villagers who agreed (or were coerced) to ‘release’ 7.5 ha of land received an oil palm plot of 2 ha and a house lot, both encumbered by debt. The corporation took over the remaining 5 ha to use for its core plantation and to allocate to incoming transmigrants, free of charge. In neither case did the corporations call these transactions ‘purchases’ since they stopped short of acknowledging that the land had owners. If the villagers were indeed owners, they would be entitled to receive a fair price.

Indonesia's 1960 Land Law, which is based largely on the colonial Land Law of 1870, underpins these discounting practices. The law provides scant legal recognition to customary landholders and claims much of the national land mass as state domain (McCarthy and Robinson, 2016). The colonial land law hinged on the racial rationale memorably caricatured by Malaysian historian Alatas (1977) as ‘the myth of the lazy native’. According to this myth, which was ‘brought along’ and endlessly repeated throughout the colonial world, natives barely produced anything. As inefficient producers, they did not qualify as proper landowners and their status as nonowners rendered them as less than complete persons whose presence and claims did not need to be acknowledged (Bhandar, 2018).

Native laziness is still the grounds on which Indonesian government officials issue corporate concessions without the consent of villagers and without the obligation to buy or rent their land at the market rate. In our research site, officials and plantation managers asserted that the Indigenous Malay and Dayak farmers were very primitive and had accomplished nothing before plantation corporations arrived to bring modernity to Kalimantan's backward interior. To make this assertion, they had to overlook or discount the productivity of villagers’ rice fields and the tons of rubber, these ‘lazy natives’ had sent down river every month since around 1920, boosting Indonesia's export earnings. Plantation managers and workers asserted that it was their labour and skill that generated value by rendering unused land productive. According to this logic, villagers had no grounds on which to demand shares of plantation wealth. They were not even entitled to charity. Legal requirements for corporate social responsibility, which are minimal in Indonesia, are not enforced (Rosser and Edwin, 2010) and villagers in our study site tried in vain to persuade the corporations to help pay for community projects like repairing a bridge or school.

Excluded from benefits, villagers also lacked legal grounds on which to hold corporations or the government to account for the harms they caused. Indonesia's plantation and investment laws assign corporations a vague mandate to bring jobs and development to remote areas but do not impose a specific obligation to secure the well-being of the former landholders or provide redress for harms.

The spatial organization of land concessions cements corporate exoneration by physically carving up the landscape into zones for which corporations are responsible (the concession with its resident workforce), and spaces designated as ‘enclaves’. Enclaves are the original hamlets, shorn of farmland, where the former landholders continue to make their homes and eke out a precarious existence. They serve as spaces to which the costs of installing corporate plantations are quite literally externalized. Formally speaking, people living in enclaves are classified as ordinary villagers, and they fall under the authority of a village head. Corporations have no jurisdiction over them, and village welfare is a state responsibly but there is a catch. Village heads and officials at all levels of government are formally required to protect plantation corporations and assist them in their work. Hence, residents of the enclaves are shorn of the protection of their village heads and other government officials. Yet, they cannot represent themselves in dealings with plantation corporations since they have no juridical relationship with them nor a forum in which to raise grievances or make claims. Every element of their lives is shaped by corporate presence – their access to land and water, to work and livelihoods, and their forms of community and leadership – yet, the corporations have no legal obligations towards them and can ignore them at will.

The juridical–spatial arrangements that deny villagers access to a forum they could use to leverage a rightful share of plantation wealth also deepen the social divides that hinder acknowledgement. In our research site, plantation managers and workers living inside the concession were furnished with a full set of facilities to lead modern lives (houses, schools and health centres), while villagers in the enclaves lived in dilapidated houses, were forced to rely on filthy river water and could not afford to connect their homes to the electricity grid. These two social groups, all of them Indonesian citizens, lived in proximity. Some were visible to each other across a river; yet, their paths seldom crossed. For plantation workers and managers, the destitution of the enclave population was further confirmation that the local Malays and Dayaks were radically different from themselves; hence, they avoided social interaction and some workers we interviewed had never set foot in the villages nearby.

Since the state grants corporations with land concessions under the rationale that they bring development and jobs to remote regions, people who disrupt their work by protesting their arrival or launching public demonstrations and blockades can be criminally charged. Across Indonesia's plantation zone, protests are regularly met with violence and arrests, while plantation corporations are permitted to break land and labour laws and flout environmental regulations with impunity (Berenschot et al., 2022). Former landholders eking out a fragile existence in the enclaves are not acknowledged as the kind of people who deserve the protection of law (Berenschot and Dhiaulhaq, 2023) nor do they benefit from human rights instruments, which the Indonesian government readily signs but fails to implement (Butt, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2019; Lan et al., 2022; Marti, 2008). Even when they succeed in making their presence felt viscerally by taking direct action in formats such as arson or blockade, they are not acknowledged as injured parties or rightful owners whose demands must be addressed. Instead, their actions reinforce the entrenched assumptions about radical differences that plantation managers and many migrant workers bring along, and no new knowledge is generated.

Theorizing ethnographically

So far, I have drawn on my ethnographic research to theorize a link between sharing and acknowledgement: only someone acknowledged to be the owner of a share of valued goods is entitled to demand the portion that properly belongs to them. In this section, I want to test this theory by expanding it to other contexts. I first take up the question of ownership, then probe more deeply into the question of how acknowledgement can be so thoroughly denied.

My findings on the centrality of individual labour to ownership in the Sulawesi highlands resonate with other studies of highland Southeast Asia (see, among others Gibson, 1986). They interrupt an assumption popular among urban people (including urban Indonesians) that sharing based on social membership is somehow ‘natural’ among Indigenous people. For the Indigenous highlanders I encountered in Sulawesi, it was the sweat that a person expended axing trees or weeding fields in the hot sun that established property and personhood, and they valued both very highly. They took pride in making gifts which confirmed their status as fully developed persons capable of caring for themselves and others, but they were watchful. To work for another person without receiving a ‘rightful share’ in return was to be taken for a fool or worse, to be positioned as a dependent or slave, a diminished kind of person unfit to participate as an equal in social life.

In many contexts, the idea that an individual is the owner of their labour power and the property they create is far from obvious. Slaves are classified as property, not as persons, and they are not acknowledged as the owners of their labour or its product. Noting the protean character of racialism, Robinson ([1983] 2000) pointed out the many discourses and practices that social groups have deployed to forge racial and other distinctions that diminish the value attributed to types of persons and the work they do. The list includes distinctions based on age, gender, ability, legal status and social class envisaged as a fixed attribute of persons.

On the class axis, diminished personhood, its history and mutability, are well illustrated in Robert Castel's account of the changing status of workers in France. In the 18th century, Castel (1996) explains, people who did casual, manual work (those without trades or guilds) were characterized as ‘two legged tools, without freedom, without morality, possessing only hands that do not earn much and deadened souls’. Commentators of the period questioned whether ‘two legged tools’ were fully human (Castel, 1996: 617). It was not until the 19th century that casual manual workers were legally classified as workers. Transforming work from a relation of personalized dependence between two individuals (one who sold labour and one who bought it) into a fully social relation between two estates (workers and employers) was a massive social shift, consolidated in law. Workers became new types of persons with a recognized place in the national order and entitlement to pensions, holidays and other elements of a dignified life. The downside, as Castel notes, is that engagement in paid work became a criterion of social membership. Whatever the law says about equal citizenship, in France today as in many other countries, only people who contribute to the nation through paid work (and taxes) are acknowledged by fellow citizens as full members of the social body, entitled to a ‘rightful share’ of national wealth; unwaged people are de facto second class.

The capacity to demand a rightful share in exchange for work is deeply uneven. In much of the world, access to paid work is segregated and restricted. All too often, both the social membership of workers and the value of their work are denied. Under these conditions, payment accorded to workers is not based on acknowledgement of their right to a share of the wealth they generate but on pacification or instrumentality: no fish is necessary if a crust of bread will do. Most at risk are people Marx defined as the ‘relative surplus population’: people whose labour has no value in an economy organized on capitalist lines. Although unemployed people may serve as a labour reserve that functions to discipline workers and depress wages, not everyone is needed in this role. Like landless highlanders in Sulawesi and former landholders squeezed into enclaves in Kalimantan's plantation zone, a great many people find their labour irrelevant to capital at any scale (Li, 2009). No doubt they work very hard in their struggle to survive, but the work they do does not qualify them as rightful owners of a share of wealth nor does it establish social membership in the nation in the manner Castel described. Rather, the global resonance of the narrative that links social membership to having a ‘proper job’ stands in their way, even in contexts where such jobs have never been common (Ferguson and Li, 2018).

Academic and bureaucratic categories that value production over distribution deepen the challenge of acknowledgement. As Ferguson (2015) argued, while direct ownership of a wage seems natural or self-evident, it takes a great deal of work to position oneself as the rightful owner of a share of a wage earned by someone else; yet, this distributive labour is unseen and uncounted. People who cannot claim ownership of a wage through their direct deployment of labour must struggle against the narrative that only something you have worked for directly truly belongs to you. Up against this barrier, they may demote labour as the basis of their claims and ground them instead in membership in a conjugal partnership, a family, kin group, community or nation.

For the highlanders of Sulawesi, as I wrote in Land's End (2014), the concept of making a claim for a rightful share of national wealth based on membership in the nation was nowhere on the horizon. They were spatially isolated, several hours away from the centre of the nearest administrative villages, a journey that required fording rivers and hiking rugged hillside trails. They lacked roads, schools, health care and the other amenities that are routinely available in more accessible villages. Very few of them spoke the national language. They understood full well that their survival and prosperity depended on their own labour and initiative; hence, the steps they took to try to improve their situation by launching into cacao.

In Kalimantan's plantation zone, villagers also lacked secure livelihoods and government facilities, but their predicament could not be explained by their spatial isolation. Wealth was being generated all around them and spending on infrastructure was lavish, but they struggled to be acknowledged as rightful owners of a share. Plantation managers did not simply deny former landholders a share of plantation wealth; they denied their denial, operating as if no one was present or had suffered a loss. Their non-acknowledgement resonates with the ‘architecture of erasure’ and structure of denial Makdisi (2010: 555) exposes in Israeli-occupied Palestine, which I quote at length:

What is being expressed here is a kind of genuine blindness, an inability to understand or even to recognize the other. We can think of it as a kind of racism, though not of the kind that one encounters in, say, Foreign Minister Lieberman, who … wants to expel the remnant of the indigenous Palestinian population (‘they have no place here’, Lieberman said…: ‘they can take their bundles and get lost’). Lieberman's kind of racism is blunt, but it is also honest; it acknowledges the existence of the other and says frankly that is seeks to remove or destroy the other. The point is that the violence it directs against the other is premised on an acknowledgement of the other's existence and the threat the other's sense of home poses to the Zionist project to create an exclusively Jewish home in Palestine. This other kind of racism, by contrast … is more complicated. Its premise is not simply the denial of the other or the erasure of the other but rather … the denial of denial, the erasure of erasure. This is a form of foreclosure that produces the inability – the absolutely honest, sincere incapacity – to acknowledge that a denial and erasure have taken place because that denial and erasure have themselves been erased in turn and purged from consciousness.

The architecture of erasure described by Makdisi, and by Weizman (2007), is simultaneously juridical, spatial and profoundly racial. In occupied Palestine, remnant settlements are divided one from another, nominally governed by ‘their own’ authorities and forced to improvise livelihoods without access to resources; yet, the occupying force occludes or erases their presence and operates as if they were not there. Though far from equivalent, corporate occupation in Indonesia's plantation zone involves similar forms of erasure. Spatially, corporations rely on juridical–spatial arrangements to enable them to occupy massive areas of land without an obligation to attend to the needs of the occupied population, and they barely recognized their presence. Corporate managers we interviewed were not explicitly racist; rather, the erasure occurred at the level of cognition. They sincerely did not recognize – did not see or classify – former landholders as the kind of people who deserved to be compensated for losses, included in benefits or engaged as coeval participants in a communicative exchange.

What of Indonesian citizenship? For historical reasons, social membership in the nation confers little protection or benefit to citizens. As Anderson (1991) explained, horizontal brotherhood – the nation as an imagined community – was weakly developed at the time of independence. It was irreparably damaged in 1965 when, with military support, part of the population turned on the other part, labelled communist,and massacred half a million people with impunity (Robinson, 2018). The victors did not recognize the losing side as brothers or fellow citizens but as animals, fodder for the ogre of predatory power (Anderson, 1999). Decades later, Anderson's analysis still holds. Despite the promises of the constitution, demands for a rightful share of national wealth on the grounds of common citizenship make little headway. The constitution sets in place a nominally equal citizenship but embeds it in ‘family principles’ according to which individuals who are loyal to their families, communities, employers and government may be extended paternalistic forms of care, but they are not acknowledged to be the rightful owners of shares of national wealth nor do they participate as coevals in a communicative exchange (Bourchier, 2015). The ‘family state’ furnishes no grounds for dialogue or entitlement, only for deferent supplication.

Elsewhere, the deficits of citizenship are less extreme. Rejecting a form of Indian citizenship that hinges on charity or pacification, economist Patnaik (2010) argues for rights to a share of national wealth to be non-negotiable. Sharing, insists, should not be postponed to the time when the gross domestic product has grown and state coffers are full. ‘Should’ for Patnaik flags a site of struggle. He recognizes that shares will not simply be ‘doled out’; they must be fought for, and it is the fight itself that forges the grounds for acknowledgement. In a profoundly hierarchical society like India where divisions of caste and class are entrenched, the barriers to acknowledgement of coeval personhood are immense (Shah et al., 2018). Bureaucratic neglect adds to the problem, as the poor often fail to receive benefits to which they are entitled (Gupta, 2012). Nevertheless, in contrast to Indonesia, mass mobilization to demand that shares owed are in fact distributed is a routine feature of public life (Mitchell, 2023).

In South Africa where citizens have a robust sense of entitlement to welfare, housing and city services, social membership in the nation is grounded in the struggle against apartheid and shared experiences of suffering (Ferguson, 2015). Similarly in Zimbabwe after independence, claims to a share of the nation's wealth were grounded in the sacrifices made, ‘suffering for territory’ in Donald Moore's account (2005). In Indonesia suffering for the nation does not serve as an effective basis for acknowledgement – villagers in the plantation zone bemoaned the ‘pointless sacrifice’ imposed on them, which had brought them no reward. Since 1966 suffering imposed on citizens has had little or no political cost: votes are bought with cash, politicians and bureaucrats abandon voters with impunity and law offers little protection (Aspinall and van Klinken, 2011). Yet, there is nothing mechanical about this abandonment. As Cedric Robinson argued, it takes work to construct and sustain diminished forms of personhood, just as it takes work to create the conditions for acknowledgement.

Conclusion

Shares, James Ferguson observes, belong to owners and should be distributed to the people who ought to have them. This feature distinguishes sharing from transfers based on charity, instrumentality or the need to pacify dangerous classes. It raises a question that is both conceptual and ethnographic: what kind of work does it take for impediments to be removed so that people can be acknowledged as rightful owners of shares of valued goods? For conceptual resources, I turned to Johannes Fabian's theorization of acknowledgement, a form of recognition that cannot be simply ‘doled out’ or issued unilaterally, like the rights listed in global declarations. Rather, acknowledgement is achieved through practices and struggles that establish variously classified others as ‘coeval participants in a communicative exchange’. The risk with this line of reasoning is circularity: to be recognized as an owner one must first be recognized as a person qualified to be an owner, making it unclear how acknowledgment (or its absence) are constituted historically.

To further theorize the relationship between sharing and acknowledgement, I turned to my ethnographic research in highland Sulawesi where ownership anchored in work became unsettled and Kalimantan where the failure to acknowledge the claims or even the presence of people damaged by plantation presence was severe. I attended closely to discourses and practices, the juridical and spatial arrangements that established acknowledgement or stood in the way. There is nothing natural about acknowledgement. It is the product of particular kinds of work, and it requires the generation of new knowledge – knowledge that transforms people and forges new possibilities. Non-acknowledgement also takes work. Exploring the different grounds on which acknowledgement is accorded or withheld helps clarify how shares in valued goods are distributed, and why some people have no access to them.