Navigating Futurities in Transmigration Areas: Cultural Encounters, Ecology, and the Imagination of Living Spaces in the Contact Zone
Convener: Iman Fachruliansyah
The transmigration program in Indonesia, historically, was conceptualized by the state as a future-making project. This project brought promises of modernization, national integration, and economic prosperity. However, in everyday realities, the state’s design of the “future” frequently collides with lived socio-ecological realities. Transmigration areas have subsequently transformed into complex “contact zones”, a spaces where diverse groups with differing ontologies, value systems, and histories, encounter one another to compete for and negotiate living space.
Moving beyond classical narratives that frame transmigration merely through the conflict-assimilation dichotomy, or through the failure of state programs, this panel invites researchers to examine transmigration areas through the conceptual lens of Futurities. We view transmigration areas as dynamic arenas where multiple futures are continuously being imagined, anticipated, and reassembled by local communities. Amidst ecological uncertainties, the expansion of extractive capitalism, and shifting political-autonomy regimes, how do local inhabitants and transmigrants construct their own trajectories of the future?
This panel invites multidisciplinary researchers working on transmigration areas across various regions of Indonesia. We seek papers that explore practices of cultural hybridization, the emergence of new social institutions, everyday survival strategies, land negotiations, interethnic governance arrangements, and ecological adaptations. We are particularly interested in contributions that highlight how these communities actively secure and/or reinterpret their ecological and social futures, whether independent of or as form of resistance to the state’s developmental blueprints.
This panel, by situating transmigration as an ongoing contact zone of diverse and competing livelihood practices, aims to contribute to broader anthropological discussions on socio-ecological resilience and everyday futurities. Rather than focusing heavily on macro-level state politics, we seek to understand how communities with differing ecological backgrounds and livelihood traditions navigate rapid socio-spatial transformations driven by state policies, shifting autonomy regimes, and extractive industries. Furthermore, we aim to uncover how they negotiate shared living spaces, and how they reconfigure their social relations to secure a sustainable future together.