"The Impulse is Cartographic" Counter-mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality.

Tilley, Lisa

Abstract

Resource frontiers continue to expand globally across Indigenous lands as states and corporations enact forms of expropriation redolent of the formal colonial era for the sake of extraction. In the face of this expansion, the burden remains largely on frontline communities to defend their ecologies using the tools available to them. Across Indonesia’s resource frontiers, the “cartographic impulse” Edward Said once named to describe anticolonial struggles is apparent in the form of counter-mapping, which seeks to secure adat (customary) rights and defend Indigenous lands against extractivist expansion. This article revisits this practice and argues that the counter-map and its goals remain tenuous—mapping in its scalable form risks processing complex and multi-dimensional ways of relating to land into two-dimensional representations appropriate for a liberal property regime, while adat itself is a contingent and mutable legal goal. Ultimately, the article echoes emerging calls for the burden to be shifted away from frontline communities through the pursuit of just transitions to post-extractivism

Citation

Tilley, L. (2020). "The Impulse is Cartographic" Counter-mapping Indonesia’s Resource Frontiers in the Context of Coloniality. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 52(5), 1434-1454. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12634

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 20, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Apr 21, 2020
• Publication Date: Sep 20, 2020
• Deposit Date: Mar 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 8, 2022
• Print ISSN: 0066-4812
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-8330
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1434-1454
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12634
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12634