Resettlement and the politicization of ethnicity in Indonesia

Abstract

According to informants, of the sixty families on board who were settled in the transmigration site where I conducted field research only two were Javanese; the remaining fifty-eight were Sumatrans who had gone through the same process as Bu Sri and Pak Yatno in order to transmigrate. [...]how is the participation of particular ethnic groups in the 'imagined community' (Anderson 1983) of the nation affected by disparities in their access to resources administered by the state? Because land designated for food crops is typically used for crop diversification, households which do not receive this allocation of land face a significant loss in portential income from the sale of cash crops. According to company officials (private communication), it is up to their discretion whether to turn a particular case over to the local police or treat it as an internal matter.