In-Formation

Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago

Celia Lowe

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400849703
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nationwide who suffered from degraded environments and faced accusations that they were destroying nature. Celia Lowe argues that biodiversity, in 1990s Indonesia, implied a particular convergence of nature, nation, science, and identity that made Indonesians' mapping of the concept distinct within transnational practices of nature conservation at the time.
Lowe recounts the efforts of Indonesian biologists to document the species of the Togean Islands, to "develop" Togean people, and to turn this archipelago off the coast of Sulawesi into a national park. Indonesian scientists aspired to a conservation biology that was both internationally recognizable and politically effective in the Indonesian context. Simultaneously, Lowe describes the experiences of Togean Sama people who had their own understandings of nature and nation. To place Sama and scientist into the same conceptual frame, Lowe studies Sama ideas in the context of transnational thought rather than local knowledge.
In tracking the practice of conservation biology in a postcolonial setting, Wild Profusion explores what in nature can count as important and for whom.

PART ONE

Diversity as Milieu

Akuna Pongkat Dan pergilah masyarakat Bajau ke laut, jauh. … Kehadiran ikan paus merupakan tertanda datangnya musim ikan.	I Pongkat And go ahead Bajau people to the sea, far away. … The presence of whales is a sign that the season of fish has come.
Kuda Laut Eksotisitas Indonesia di mata dunia sebagian terpenting adalah pada lautnya.	Sea Horse The exoticness of Indonesia in the eyes of the world for the most part is related to the sea.
Paka Lele dan Sawi Kehidupan mereka masih di warnai oleh corak tradisional. Mereka telah mengikatkan diri pada ikatan sosial yang menonjol pada tindakan kolektif dalam satu komunitas.	Paka Lele and Sawi Their lifestyle is still colored by a traditional patterns. They are already connected by social ties conspicuous for collective action in the community.
Ilmu Bajau Sebuah kampung Bajau terhambur di atas barisan karang. Di tengah birunya kepulauan Kaledupa. Kampung ini adalah tempat terakhir untuk menikuti kehidupan dan ‘misteri’ orang Bajau.	Bajau Knowledge A Bajau village scattered atop a row of coral. In the middle of the blue, the Kaledupa Islands. This is the last place for finding the lifestyle and ‘mystery’ of the Bajau people.
Koin Etnik Hasil laut sejak dulu jadi komoditas orang Bajau. Hasil laut itu kemudian mereka tukarkan dengan ‘nilai’ yang telah disepakati oleh kedua pihak.	Ethnic Coin Sea products since early times have been a commodity for Bajau people. They trade these products with a ‘value’ that is already agreed upon by the other party.
Rajah Bajau Ungkapkan bahasa rupa dari reka hias Bajau. Sebuah simbol rupa runggu tradisional.	Bajau King Speaking their language is one form of Bajau creativity. A symbol of their tradition. —Sopandi, Jelajah Etnik

IN RETROSPECT, Indonesians were rethinking diversity in relation to both nature and nation during the waning Suharto years. On the one hand, national norms for nature and its uses were being called into question. Were Indonesia’s trees and minerals to be a resource for logging and mining and other forms of elite national development, or was Indonesian nature a resource for “the people” (rakyat) to create a healthy subsistence? Parameters of social inclusion and exclusion in the nation were likewise under revision. Would acceptable cultural difference continue to be narrowly defined by the modernist state, or might new forms of identity be folded into the nation’s understanding of itself? This national conversation on diversity is the milieu within which scientists’ species inventories and their study of indigenous knowledge in the Togean Islands can be understood.

The working through of the problems of ethnic and natural diversity can be seen in two different gallery exhibitions for which Sama people (who are called “Bajau” in these works) provided the raw material. Sama were fit simultaneously into the twin configurations of ethnic teleology and nationalist history in the 1990s. First, they were considered an “alien ethnic group” (suku terasing) at a moment when hemispheric divides were constructed between Indonesian margins and centers at the intersection of ethnicity and a particular New Order framing of acceptable cultural difference. Second, Sama were considered a “marine ethnicity” (suku laut) at a time when Indonesia was beginning to reconsider its maritime heritage. These contingencies explain the “discovery” and “display” of Sama people as a resource for a national conversation on nature and identity.

The first of the exhibitions, Bajau, was scientific, ethnographic, and educational in nature, and was an outcome of a scholarly conference on Bajau/Sama communities held at the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) in Jakarta in November 1993. The three-day conference, “addressed the re-introduction of Indonesia’s cultural and ecological diversity as national assets” (Sejati 1994:34). The scientists in attendance all were scholars of Sama peoples’ “ecological adaptation, nautical skills, resource management, maritime wisdom, and particular sea lore.” The exhibition itself was constructed around a replica of a Sama village set in a water reservoir and filled with floating canoes brought from Sulawesi. Around this centerpiece were placed displays explaining the distribution of Sama communities around Southeast Asia; Sama origin stories and tales of life on the sea; terminologies and lexicons in Sama language; a description of the Sama environment; a story called “A Day in the Life of the Bajau”; a description of sea cucumber collecting; and an explanation of Sama medical practice and belief.

I was not in Indonesia in 1993 for Bajau and know it only through conversations with its curators and through its catalogue. In June of 1997 I was fortunate to witness a second exhibition however, in which Sama ethnic identity was invoked as a national resource. This exhibition, Jelajah Etnik [Ethnic Explorations]: A Journey Through Wallacea, held in the lobby of the Jakarta World Trade Center, presented a series of paintings by the artist Sopandi on the theme of Sama life in the Wallacea region. Sopandi’s paintings were a bricolage of hornbills, wild orchids, buffalo, dragons, tuna, boats, sea shells, and spirits, set in fields of abstract shapes. Each painting was overlain with intricate pen and ink line drawings and filled in with watercolors. Bursts of mega mendung cloud patterns, inspired by Javanese batik, formed the backdrop for the wild activity in the foreground. The finished canvases were framed with carved hardwoods described by the artist as “ordinary firewood.”

The Jelajah Etnik exhibition catalogue presented the artist in baggy khaki hiking pants, T-shirt, and canvas hat carrying a large backpack and bedroll. Looking like a nineteenth-century explorer, his image is superimposed upon a reproduction of Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1868 map of the Netherlands East Indies. Treking across the map below Sopandi are eight nearly naked Papuan people carrying machetes and wicker backpacks, seemingly on their way home from tending a garden. The catalogue is filled with descriptions of the paintings and of the artist’s adventures traveling in Southeast Sulawesi.

Whether as science or art, the exhibitionary imagination is always political.¹ The “native village” display, like that in Bajau, is a trope of ethnic exhibition deriving from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century universal expositions and world fairs. By presenting “native villages” and “native peoples” as tableax vivant spectacles, ethnic exhibitions educated EuroAmericans in racial and cultural superiority (Barkan and Bush 1995:25). Designed with the best evolutionary science of the time, one famous example, the Philippine exposition at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, aimed to re-enforce U.S. imperialism after the Spanish-American War. This display brought to life the notion that the Philippine people were civilizationally inferior and incapable of governing themselves without help from the more “advanced” United States.

Bajau, likewise, was a spectacle of elite Indonesian progress and superiority, and the evolutionary preoccupation familiar from the universal exposition is reflected in this description from the exhibition: “Today, the seafaring culture of the Bajau remains an example of these early maritime communities. Indeed their present day practices are direct links to Indonesia’s maritime past” (Sejati 1994:3). Similarly, the museum’s “archaeologists,” those in charge of Indonesian prehistory, oversaw the exhibition’s installation. Indonesian and international scholars alike pursued “ecological adaptation” as the modality for describing Sama peoples’ lives, a conceptual approach that fit well with the internal colonialism of the Suharto state.² In Bajau, Sama people are a living anachronism.

Like the paintings of Picasso, Sopandi’s style belongs to the twentieth-century tradition known as “primitivism,” and represents a romantic encounter with the exotic, unfamiliar, and anachronistic. The figures who walk across the pages of the Jelajah Etnik catalogue are racially Papuan, not Malay like Sama people, reflecting an Indonesian racial formation that associates darker Papuan features with primitiveness. Similarly, the Javanese batik Sopandi employs in the background of his paintings are iconic representations of ethnic difference in Indonesia. Sopandi presents his expedition to Wallacea as cultural time travel and his imagination is haunted by ninetenth-century colonial exploration.

Here is the question though. Must we read both of these exhibitions merely in the context of turn-of-the-twentieth-century European evolutionary thinking, or can we also understand these Indonesian scientists and artists as attempting to remedy problems other than those solved by earlier native village displays and primitivist art? What if we were to read Bajau and Jelajah Etnik against the grain, as thought that searches for new solutions to the problem of Indonesian modernity, albeit steeped in familiar modes of representation? In such a symptomatic reading, the place of ethnic and natural diversity within the nation appears, not merely as determined ideology, but as a problem to solve. While the two exhibitions each propose Sama inclusion into the nation on elite terms, more radical possibilities for the meaning of inclusion work to subvert the obvious exclusionary readings.

For example, programmatic activities during Bajau describe the fully modern political and environmental problems experienced by Sama people as citizens of the national polity. In a section of the exhibition catalogue titled “Issues Affecting the Bajau Today” the curators wrote:

In collaboration with local Bajau researchers, LIPI and Sejati research presents the ecological and social-cultural issues affecting the Bajau today. Contributors such as the Asia Wetlands Bureau, UNESCO, and other institutions also provide books and articles on marine resources. In this room, the visitor can learn about how changes in marine ecology influence the whole of Bajau society. The visitor could study how marine (traditional) resource management would be applied to wider development projects. Equally, the collected research would show the commercial potential of marine resources, and this includes marine tourism, for Indonesia’s national development. Most importantly, the main hosts of the exhibition, two Bajau representatives from North Sulawesi, would always be present to answer questions from the public and to recount their immediate experience. (Sejati 1994:38)

Public programming for Bajau included a discussion with Abdurrahman Wahid (leader of the Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama, who would later become Indonesia’s fourth president) on the importance of cultural diversity in Indonesia; a visit by fishermen from Jakarta Bay to discuss issues they shared in common with Sama representatives; and special events for business leaders and school children. Despite its anachronistic representational form, Bajau contains a sub- or parallel text that challenges the thinking of Indonesian elites, “creating something new within the most traditional political forms” (Rose 1999:280).

Similarly, while Sopandi’s style belongs to the early twentieth-century tradition in painting and sculpture called “primitivism,” the context for his work is not early twentieth-century Europe. In his paintings and catalogue descriptions, Sopandi presents a picture of Sama life that is very different from the Indonesian state’s own evolutionary representations of Indonesian life outside of Java, Sumatra, and Bali. For example, he describes his painting Bajau King with the caption, “Speaking their language is one form of Bajau creativity. A symbol of their tradition.” Clearly encompassed by a German Romantic theory of language, the caption nevertheless might also be interpreted as contesting state language policy that promotes the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, over regional ethnic languages. The value Sopandi places on Sama language confronts the state’s rationalist desire for Indonesians to speak formal “good and correct” Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia baik dan benar). In calling Sama language a form of “creativity,” Sopandi cracks open the universalist logics of governmental reason.

In order to understand how Indonesian scientists produced Togean Island nature and culture, we need to understand something about the milieu of diversity they were working within at the time. In this context, I propose we will learn more about Indonesians’ scientists and their work by taking them seriously as honest brokers struggling with what diversity can and will mean in the context of late-twentieth-century Indonesia. Although we cannot fail to recognize the power elite Indonesians have to represent, and while we can read both rational evolutionism and imaginative Romanticism into these exhibitions, Bajau and Jelajah Etnik were attempting to solve other problems than were turn-of-the-twentieth-century European expositions or exhibitions. Barkan and Bush, in their exploration of primitivism as a particular form of modernism, claim: “As primitivism reappeared in text after text, each new ideological mix proved unpredictable” (1995:13).

In part 1, IFABS scientists can be seen grappling with questions of how to represent Togean biodiversity and Sama identity. Questions about Togean species emerged from within transnational conversations on conservation biology and national discussions on science and nation. Questions about Sama peoples’ “indigenous knowledge” arose from within the milieu of Bajau and Jelajah Etnik where the meaning of diversity within the nation was at stake. These active practices of thinking produced such objects as “nature” or “culture” that should be understood outcomes, not starting points, for Indonesians’ science in the Togean Islands. From within this milieu we can hear scientists ask: What will count as the value of natural diversity for the Indonesian people?; What will constitute acceptable norms of cultural difference within the nation?; and, How can these values and norms be represented?

Chapter One

MAKING THE MONKEY

The [Togean] animal kingdom is, as cannot be expected otherwise, poor in representatives. It is said that the only mammals living here are bats, rats, and the babi rusa [deer pig]. Of birds, we find many of the species living along the main coast [of Celebes]. On our walk through the main village I saw Trichoglossus ornatus, Tanygnathus megalorhynchus, and Nectarinia lepida. There are few snakes and few crocodiles, and turtles are only found near Poeloe Sendiri. The sea between and around the islands is also poor in fish, a phenomena certainly worth mentioning. On the other hand, the sea surrounding the islands is rich in holothurians [sea cucumber], the most important article of trade and export in these islands. Finally, we noticed on our walk the most beautiful land snail, a Nadina, which we had not yet seen on the main coast. —C.B.H. von Rosenburg, Travels in the Region of Gorontalo

TOGEAN ISLAND biodiversity was not at all self-evident in the beginning of the 1990s. Nor was the archipelago’s appropriateness as a new national park. In order for the Togean landscape to move from “poor in representatives” (as it was in 1865) to “rich in biodiversity” (which, by the mid-1990s, it had become), the “facts” of Togean biodiversity awaited their empirical demonstration and social emergence (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Such a representation of Togean nature was encompassed by the work of species inventory in the emergent field of conservation biology. Key to the appearance of biodiverse nature in the Togean Island was the Togean macaque, Macaca togeanus, a primate living in the upland forest of Malenge Island. Nonhuman primates have always held a fascination for biologists due to their role in the history of human evolution. The reason of the moment proposed that if biologists were able to stabilize the species status of M. togeanus—if they could prove it to be unique and endemic—a protected-area initiative would be justified.

My familiarity with the Togean monkey and the question of its species status developed through my friendship with Jatna Supriatna. Dr. Supriatna, a conservation biologist from the University of Indonesia (UI), is the world’s leading expert on the evolutionary biology and systematics of Sulawesi macaques. In the mid-1990s, M. togeanus became a focal point for both Supriatna’s research, and for the establishment of a more encompassing conservation program in the Togean Islands. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Between the Human and the Wild Profusion
• Part One: Diversity as Milieu
• Part Two: Togean Cosmopolitics
• Part Three: Integrating Conservation and Development
• Appendix: Scientific, Military, and Commercial Explorations in the Togean Islands and Vicinity: 1680–1999
• Notes
• References
• Index