Indigenous Multi-species Community of Life and Indonesia’s Regime of War in Papua: collaborative action-research practice
Convener: Cypri Jehan Paju Dale
Co-convener: Sutami Amin
This panel builds on collaborative action research we have been conducting in Southern Papua. It brings together anthropologists, activists, and indigenous movement leaders to grapple with the question of state and corporate expansion into indigenous territories and the ways local communities navigate its consequences. Observing the current manifestations of militarization and capitalist structures in Papua, Sutami Amin investigates the emergence of Indonesia’s regime of war in the context of state formation and development. This regime of war targets not only indigenous people but also human and non-human multispecies communities. Kasimilus Awe, an Awyu leader and anthropologist, documents the multi-species cosmology of the Awyu and examines how the regime of war’s extractive development threatens this multi-species community of life. Vincent and Aloisia Kwipalo, Yei-nan and prominent indigenous movement leaders, reflect on their experience confronting the regime of war in encounters with the military and companies that recently arrived in their land. Cypri Dale, who studies the confluence of indignity and Christianity in Papuans’ responses to the Indonesian state, will elaborate on the Papuan conception of multi-species salvation, articulated, inter alia, in the Red Crosses movement. The panel contributes to the conference’s aim by bringing on board Papuan ontologies, ecological knowledge and political imagination, and an analysis of the Indonesian state and its development projects in the context of a global, multi-polarizing world. Methodologically, the panel advances a model of collaborative action research in which different actors work together to mobilize critical knowledge for self-empowerment and political change. It shows an engaged or activist anthropology at work and advocates for indigenous communities not as subjects of anthropological inquiry but as knowledge producers in their own trajectory.