‘We have been awake for years’: conflicting ecologies in an indigenous land management scheme in Indonesia

Abstract

As access to and control of land is increasingly contested, indigenous land management schemes promise to secure formal land rights. This article is concerned with one such scheme, Dayak, Wake Up (Dayak Misik) in Indonesia. The implementation of the scheme, orchestrated by a Dayak farmers’ organization, was rejected by the semi-nomadic Punan Murung as they did not share the same notions and conceptions of land and resources, which are intertwined with struggles over access and control. Framed with the concept of conflicting ecologies, thereby combining material political ecology with phenomenological and relational approaches, this article elaborates on different conceptions, relations, and terms of engagement with nature by the Punan Murung and representatives of the Dayak farmers’ organization, which are strongly interlinked with power relations. I show that the ecology of ethnically framed territorialization by the organization is hegemonic and subordinates the Punan Murung's alternative place-based ecology.