Fruits of the Orchard: Land, Space, and State in Kepulauan Riau

Abstract

What gives somebody a right over land? Drawing on recent re-theorizations of "space", this paper ethnographically dissects a dispute over the illegal settling of an abandoned orchard in the Indonesian province of Kepulauan Riau. It demonstrates how parallel "rights", "duties", and claims of "belonging" can emerge from the multiple webs of social relationships in which land is enmeshed. Local incarnations of the state are similarly embroiled in these parallel social and spatial networks, fracturing the authority of the state as arbiter. The case thus offers fresh perspectives on land rights, spatiality, and the state in both Indonesia and social theory.

Kepulauan Riau (popularly and hereafter referred to as Kepri) —is Indonesia's youngest province. In 2004, it formally seceded from the wider province of Riau, doing so largely on a Malay ethno-nationalist platform (see Colombijn 2003; Faucher 2005; Thung and Leolita Masnun 2002). However, Kepri's proximity to Singapore has recently attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia (Lyons and Ford 2007). Thus while the provincial government defiantly asserts that Kepri is the "heartland of Malay culture", observers visiting the islands have instead been struck by their extensive cultural pluralism, viewing it as a "tiny microcosm of Indonesia" (Guerin 2001) or a "distillation of 'Unity in Diversity'" (Mack 2004, p. 158).

Demographic movements have carried with them both new persons and new solidarities. But they have also generated new anxieties. Specifically, a belief reverberates around Kepri —subscribed to by Malay and migrant alike —that Malays are culturally disadvantaged relative to migrants, and continually losing out to them in situations where they are forced to "compete": the job market, formal education, local politics, and the context I focus on in this article —disputes over land.

I will begin by discussing the arguments Kepri people typically advance to explain why Malay populations are seemingly "marginalized" and divested of land to which they have long-standing, ancestral, and indigenous claims. I argue that their culturalist reasoning fails to fully capture what actually happens when migrants and locals contest land rights in a juridical setting. I propose that "land" may profitably be rethought in terms of "space", drawing on recent work that pictures space as an emergent property of webs of relationships.

This argument is advanced through reference to a dispute surrounding the illegal settling of a disused orchard in Kepri by migrants from North Sumatra. The case should have been straightforward, as the Malay family that owned the orchard had a formal and fully acknowledged ownership right, enshrined in a state-sanctioned title deed. However, it quickly transpired that there were other, informal, kinds of "rights" at play in the hearing, each originating in distinct epistemological and social apprehensions of the land under dispute. The case thus sheds a critical ethnographic perspective on models of land rights to explore the factors that can prevent their actualization. Central to these is the ambivalent positioning of the state. Building on the insights of anthropologists who have argued that "the state" is often made real for citizens through its capillary manifestations —such as local officials or bureaucratic documents (see for example, Gupta 1995; Navaro-Yashin 2007) —I demonstrate how these capillary manifestations are neither wholly determined nor co-ordinated by the state they embody. Rather, they can —and do —pursue their own divergent agendas, even within the practice of statecraft. The result is a potential for bewildering capriciousness on the part of a state. Whilst this can explain the overturning of the Malay landowners' expectations in the case at hand, it also flags important qualities of "the state" that might be exported profitably to other anthropological arenas.

In particular, it raises questions surrounding the significance of the state's unreliability for generating and maintaining cynicism and disaffection within the public sphere. A burgeoning body of literature has noted that —contrary to Marxian models of mystification and false consciousness —many contemporary publics are well aware of the illegitimate and predatory natures of their states, but adopt a cynical disposition, carrying on as if they were unaware of, or able to bracket off, these insights (Sloterdijk 1988; Zižek 1995). Ethnographically, this has been described as a pervasive "chic bitterness" in Turkey (Navaro-Yashin 2002, p. 164) whilst, for Indonesia, a similar sentiment appears to surround Siegel's suggestion that "falsity simply pervades the Indonesian world" (1998, p. 55). This claim arises in a discussion of the trope of aspal, or "asli tapi palsu" (literally "genuine but false") —a version of counterfeiting conducted by someone on "the inside". Documents known to be fake, or products known to be of substandard quality, issued with authenticating stamps by government or business "insiders", are paradigmatic of "aspal " —fake, but indistinguishable on the surface from the genuine article. The result, Siegel suggests, is that "one knows one cannot rely on signs; they are as likely to mislead as not" (1998, p. 55) —and this category of "signs" encompasses anything bearing the stamp of the state.

At first glance, the prevalence of the trope of aspal in Kepri's public discourse, coupled with widespread and everyday allusions to deep-seated corruption, collusion and nepotism would seem to support an image of the province's public as profoundly cynical and habituated to encountering falsity on a daily basis. However, it is my contention that a stress on the banality of deceit is problematic on two grounds. Firstly, as the case study at hand clearly illustrates, citizens do enter into engagements with the state in good faith, and do rely on signs. They are fully convinced that their claims, documents and rights are genuine and that the state will uphold these. If these expectations are overturned, the result is considerable distress, which is only subsequently coupled to a cynical discourse suggesting that they should have expected no better. Secondly, I would therefore argue that cynicism should not be treated as an overarching "cultural logic" —even if it is very pervasive. Rather, by tracing the particular trajectories underpinning any one cynical affect, we might develop deeper insights into statecraft, citizenship, and the political process. In this article I demonstrate, through the in-depth consideration of a single example, the potential value of such an approach.

Land, Space, and the Malay

Informants frequently told me that land presented a particular conceptual difficulty for Kepri Malays.¹ Growing up on islands, and traditionally working as fishermen, Malays were said to have developed a way of thinking that was oriented towards the marine, such that they would be flummoxed by land and unable to realize its potential (see for instance, Tarigan et al. 1996, p. 76). This, for the vast majority of my informants —both Malay and non-Malay alike —rendered Malays particularly vulnerable to exploitation, "trickery", and outmanoeuvring at the hands of recently arrived migrants who came from parts of Indonesia where, due to a farming heritage, the long-term potential of land was understood.

Malays' maritime "fishing culture" was also widely asserted to make them susceptible to the promise of instant reward and dispose them against formulating long-term plans for the future. I was thus told that the reason so few Malays owned premises in the centre of Kepri's towns was that they had been offered a seemingly generous sum for the land by non-Malay businessmen and instantly agreed to the sale. This interaction was said to exemplify the "fighting spirit", risk-taking attitude, and readiness to seize opportunities that my informants considered archetypal of non-Malay migrants.² By contrast, the Malays had failed to understand how profitable that land would have been if they had used it for a business themselves. Further alleged cultural proclivities towards "permissiveness" and against conflict meant that even if Malays realized their land was worth more than was being offered, they would not dare to bargain. As a consequence, I was told, Malays had been deprived of prime real estate, leaving them both economically marginalized and literally emplaced "on the margins" of central urban locations.

These arguments were very persuasive for my informants —not least because of the political and emotional resonance that they carried in the wake of Kepri's secession, which, in placing the "protection" of indigenous Malays at the forefront of the Kepri government's mission, rendered it easy and appealing to think of Malays as "internal others" and to cast struggles over resources in an ethno-nationalist framework. As convincing explanations of how and why Malays "lose" land in desirable urban locations, however, the arguments do not stand up to close scrutiny. Their stereotyped profiling of both Malays and migrants is usually empirically false in any given case —as with the ethnographic example I shall be discussing in this article. Moreover, they operate within a discourse in which concepts such as "Malayness" and "indigeneity" are uppermost in thinking about and relating to land. This approach both obscures the many alternative idioms through which a plot of land may be conceptualized and renders invisible the many other parties, institutions and entities with which land might be imbricated —previous owners, civil-administrations, and state officials to name but a few. As such, the understanding of "locality" that it presents —one which pervades the rhetoric and political analysis of regional autonomy and decentralization —is destabilized by the multiple senses of being "local" that emerge ethnographically and which, paradoxically, draw on senses of the civic and the national to instantiate themselves.

In this article, I seek to improve upon such "culturalist" explanations by employing an analytical approach focusing on the concept of "space". Recent work in anthropology and cultural geography has redrawn the nuances of this term, stressing it as an emergent property of social relationships. In the words of anthropologist Corsín Jiménez, "people relate to and engage with landscape in various ways because social relationships are inherently spatial" (2003, p. 148). In the Chilean city of Antofagasta, his informants talked of urban "spaces" not as settings —symbolic, environmental or otherwise —where social life takes place but rather as vehicles for the expression of social relationships and, he suggests, aspects of those relationships themselves (ibid., pp. 146, 150). The nature and tenor of a social relationship is thereby fundamental to the categorization of a "space". Rather than preserving space as an irreducible ontological category through which sociality stretches and in which social life unfolds, he instead sees space as transient and contextualized events, a dimension of "salient and distributed agency" —what he terms a "capacity" (ibid., p. 142).³

In this light, then, the widespread understanding in Kepri that the province is "Malay land" (tanah Melayu) can be seen as a capacity of social and political relationships between ethnic groups, as inspired by Indonesian discourses of "regional culture" (Guinness 1994) and more recently, the currents of ethno-nationalism. But Corsín Jiménez's approach also invites the question of what other relationships may criss-cross and infuse a particular patch of land, and what kind of "space" it could be as a result (Strathern forthcoming). As I now show through a discussion of how "space" was manifest in an abandoned orchard on the island of Karimun, this question is fundamental to understanding how rights to, and ownership of, land might be resolved in a context of contestation.

The Muara Lima Orchard

In 2001, Lukas Sinaga,⁴ a Batak from the Lake Toba area of North Sumatra, migrated to Tanjung Balai Karimun. Hunting for a plot of land (kolong) proved fruitless until he found a patch of overgrown shrubland in Kelurahan Muara Lima,⁵ a central location near the police station. It looked ideal. Lukas asked the local residents whose land it was and was directed to Sulaiman, a Malay living on the other side of town. Lukas took Sulaiman for coffee and explained he would like to clear the land and build on it. Sulaiman agreed, allowing Lukas to live on the land rent-free. Five years later, not only was Lukas living there, but over twenty other Batak households had joined him to form a new kampung (neighbourhood). Although many of the Bataks had come to Kepri with the dream of making their fortune, none had so far succeeded. Rather, the men earned a meagre living working as motorcycle taxi drivers (ojek), harbourside porters, and builders, whilst the women engaged in small-scale trading activities such as the making and selling of cakes.

In June 2006, Lukas and his neighbours were issued with a summons by the local district head, or Lurah, of Muara Lima. They had been inhabiting the land illegally. The owners, a family of Tanjung Pinang Malays, were giving them two options: buy the land, or be evicted. The plaintiff was an elderly Malay named Agus. In 1928, his father, who lived on Karimun, had bought a plot of land in the Muara Lima area and used it as a fruit orchard. Upon his death, he left the orchard to Agus. By this point, however, Agus had a job and family in Tanjung Pinang, and so entrusted care of the orchard to his older brother. When this brother died, stewardship of the orchard passed to Agus's nephew, Sulaiman. Knowing that the orchard was now overgrown and unused, Sulaiman saw little reason to object to Batak newcomers building on the land.

As the economy weakened, and fuel and sugar prices rose, Agus and his wife Zahra had begun to turn their attention towards the Karimun orchard once again. Originally on the outskirts of Tanjung Balai Karimun, urban growth meant it now enjoyed a prime location in the centre of town, and might fetch a good price if sold to developers. Mentioning this to a relative on Karimun led to the revelation that the land was now occupied. Zahra disguised herself as a prospective property buyer and went to investigate the land. She was shocked by what she found. Not only was the land 'full of Bataks' but they were talking about land not being for sale as if it was theirs. She beat a hasty retreat and discussed what could be done with her family. Agus was angry, protesting, "this land is my inheritance right (hak warisan), it may not be used by outsiders!" Yet selling the land to developers would be difficult if the land was inhabited. The best solution was to sell to the Bataks.

Zahra, Agus, and their son Halim therefore arranged a hearing in the Lurah's office, where they planned to demonstrate their entitlement to the land and demand money from any Bataks who wished to stay. Malay Karimun residents told them that the plot's central location made it likely to be in great demand from companies working in both commerce and tourism. They circulated tales of similarly located land that had recently fetched 200,000 Rp/m² (Rupiah per square metre), although Halim was prepared to offer a reduced price of only 100,000 Rp/m² in light of the exceptional circumstances under which the land had been settled.

Before committing to this policy, they presented it to the Lurah —a middle-aged Malay woman named Fitria. Zahra was confident of her support. "Fitria, the Lurah, she's a good person," she explained, "She is Agus's granddaughter (cucu) and one of us (orang kita, i.e., a Malay), so she will definitely help us." The precise kinship link was unclear. Fitria was not recognized by Agus as a granddaughter, merely as a relative (saudara). She may have been the child of someone Agus adopted, or a more distant member of his extended family. However, the appellation cucu helps foster intimacy, a strategic asset in the dispute. Fitria advised that offering a fixed price was the best approach to adopt, but recommended 55,000 Rp/m². After some discussion, the family decided to follow her advice. They then went to sleep, dreaming of the money they would make from their abandoned orchard.

At this point it is useful to consider exactly what rights Agus and his family felt they were drawing upon to advance their case. As Behuria (1994) describes, the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law formalized pre-existing systems of land tenure and established several basic rights. Primary titles, derived directly from the state, included the right of use (hak pakai), the right of management (hak pengelolaan) and perhaps most significantly, the right of ownership (hak milik). The last of these represents the "most complete" form of individual land right, and the registration of the land and production of a certificate of title is integral to its assertion (Behuria 1994, p. 2). Since Agus had retained the original Dutch title deed (gran) given to his father, and had recently acquired a letter from the Bupati of Karimun's office endorsing the title deed as valid in the present day, the Malays were confident that their claim to the land was invincible, and they would be able to force a sale at whatever price they chose.

Authors writing of other regions in Indonesia have been quick to draw a link between the increasing registration of land ownership with an increase in that land's commodification and alienability. MacRae reports that in Bali a desire to avoid conflicts over land ownership, coupled with government campaigns, has led people to "appl[y] in droves … to obtain indisputable legal title to their land, a procedure which ironically frees their land from customary restraints on alienation and opens the door to its inevitable commodification" (MacRae 2003, p. 159). An "unavoidable … increasing alienation of land [and] individuation of land rights" is also noted by Breman (1983, pp. 125–26) as he traces the "progressive capitalist transformation" in post-colonial Java.

Whether lamenting or celebrating the advance of capitalism, these accounts equate the right of ownership derived from the state and enshrined in the title deed with a freedom of dispositional control that permits "alienability". This was precisely the thinking of Agus and Zahra as they strove to render their orchard alienable. Yet the case study, as it unfolded, offers two correctives to the implicit theories of land rights set out by Behuria, Breman and MacRae. Firstly, while the proliferation of modern, bureaucratic technologies of land registration is envisaged to underwrite a "capitalist" attitude towards land that is contrasted with "customary restraints" —cast as conservative —the Kepri Malays' impetus to commodify land was itself part of the logic of "custom". Much more significantly, the case reveals that obstacles to dispositional control do not only take the form of "customary restraints" but can be formal, procedural, and themselves derived from the state. Indeed they can permeate what a "land right" is —in practice —actually held to be.

Behuria observes that individual land rights can be trumped by the state in circumstances where it wishes to regulate the use of land in accordance with regional or local development plans (1994, p. 2).⁶ However, the state, and the officials who personify it on a day-today basis, are also ensnared in webs of relationships that themselves cause plots of land to emerge as distinct "spaces" —in the sense discussed above. In such circumstances, and with state officials as the ultimate arbiters of land rights hearings, these spatial templates can mitigate and modify a purely legalistic logic of land rights. The empowering force of the land title certificate, on which the Malays hoped to draw, turned out to be less reliable than they, or its previous scholarly commentators, would have expected.

A Land Rights Hearing

"Are there any Muslims here?" asked Fitria. The hearing had begun. Behind a large, valance-covered table sat Fitria, Halim, Agus, several Kelurahan officials, and the Pak RT for the area under dispute. In Indonesia, all legally registered homes are ascribed to a neighbourhood association, or RT (rukun tetangga —literally "harmony amongst neighbours"), following the implementation of the 1979 Village Law. This law was part of an overarching system of reforms that sought, in Guinness' interpretation, to extend the reach of the civil-administrative bureaucracy as deeply as possible into Indonesian society. Community leaders, he suggests, became "salaried civil servants, thus ensuring their primary loyalties are to the central and regional government, rather than to their own 'electorate'" (Guinness 1994, p. 274). Within urban areas, each Kelurahan headed by the salaried civil servants Guinness describes is also broken down into smaller neighbourhood units —RT —groups of approximately forty households. Though it exists by regulation, the RT is not an official level of government and formally has the status of a "social organization". Its leader, who may carry influence but receives no wage and performs the role alongside his or her other responsibilities, must monitor any demographic changes in the RT, work to ensure social cohesion amongst its residents, and represent RT members in encounters with state bureaucracy (see Logsdon 1974). Hence the Pak RT's presence at the hearing.

Despite this representation, however, the RT members had also turned out in force. In the rows of chairs were twenty-three representatives of the settler families who had been summoned to the hearing. At the front of this group sat sixteen moustached Batak men clutching notebooks, and one Chinese woman. Behind them were six tearful young women with babies. Zahra, myself, and two of Agus's relatives sat to one side, watching events unfold. Sulaiman, fearing reprisals from the settlers, had fled to Malaysia and was therefore not in attendance.

Fitria:Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh (Arabic: peace be with you and may Allah bestow His mercy and blessings on you). Before we begin, I would like to say that as your Lurah I do not want my constituents (warga) to be disrupted by this problem. So I hope that in this meeting today we can find the best solution for everyone […] It turns out the land on which you are staying is actually owned by these people, who have come a long way from Tanjung Pinang to discuss the matter with us today. As you can see, the man in question is very old, so I hope we can finish this quickly and respectfully. So I will let them put forward their background, explain about their claim to the land, and then say what price they would like to ask for you to actually own the land that you live on, which is what I want for my constituents, and what you all want for yourselves.

While the content of this introduction underscores Fitria's role as a good Lurah, concerned with her constituents' welfare, the speech's delivery carried quite different implications. When we had met her in her office before the hearing, she had spoken in a very standard Kepri Indonesian with a standard pronunciation and vocabulary. During the speech, whilst retaining Indonesian vocabulary, she adopted a broad Malay accent, turning "a" vowel sounds into "e"s. Likewise, her insistence on Islamic opening procedure despite the largely Christian audience —increasingly a standard bureaucratic procedure across Indonesia —was concordant with self-presentation as a "good Malay". These points were specifically noted with approval by Zahra, who said she felt at ease in such an environment, and used them to demonstrate her confidence that the Lurah was on her side.

Halim was the next to speak, introducing himself as the representative of the Tanjung Pinang family. He circulated photocopies of the land deed from 1928, and a recent letter from the Kabupaten government, endorsing the deed's authenticity. According to an official in the Kecamatan Karimun office, contestations of this kind have increased in frequency under the new regional autonomy laws. In this official's eyes, ownership of land had become very unclear under the Suharto regime, when Dutch title deeds were often ignored in favour of the whims of the powerful. Now in the era of reformasi, Kabupaten Karimun had passed a law promising that if a title deed was produced, all arrangements necessary would be undertaken to return control of the land to its rightful owner. Here, as in the scholarly work discussed earlier, "rightful ownership" is associated with the title deed —a document of supposedly irrefutable proof.

The practical force of such documents has been observed by a number of anthropological analyses. Hull, for example, invokes the fabrication and falsification of documents surrounding land compensation claims in Islamabad to critique the idea that "bureaucratic semiotic technologies" are tools by which a government dominates the populace (2008, p. 514). He instead offers a Latourian account, in which documentary procedures constitute "a complex series of transactions among people and things that are basic to routine government" (ibid., p. 515). Any proposed gap between the "government" and "bureaucratic technologies" is in this view illusory —and this is why false documents can be used as such effective tools against the government. This perspective, however, hinges upon the notion of a bureaucracy that self-consciously strives to be all-pervasive and "hermetically sealed". While this may be the goal underpinning Pakistani statecraft (see Hull 2008, p. 505) —and is certainly a popular characterization of Indonesian statecraft (see for instance, Jackson 1978) —the Kepri case challenges this assumption. While proper bureaucratic procedure could be, and often was, insisted upon by state representatives, these same individuals also possessed the local sovereignty to dissolve the significance of the document and instantiate a rather differently focused process of decision-making. Bureaucratic documents thus re-emerge as one of multiple tools that a government might employ (and their ends may or may not be to dominate the populace) according to circumstance, whilst the local sovereignty of officials challenges Guinness' (1994) argument that the transformation of community leaders into civil servants necessarily orients them towards the centralized state. The Kepri hearing demonstrates this clearly, as a series of manoeuvres emerged in counterpoint to the bureaucratic authority of Agus's documents.

A sombre atmosphere descended as the photocopies passed from Batak to Batak. Explaining that he wanted to respect his father's inheritance but without overly disrupting the Batak settlers, Halim proposed the fixed price of 55,000 Rp/m². Zahra looked round to see the reaction. Most of the settlers looked glum, and some were weeping. Fitria broke the silence.

Fitria: So that is how the land is valued by its owner, he is asking for 55,000 Rp/m². But now, you, the community (masyarakat) have an opportunity to propose an alternative price, and we can all bargain as we would for all purchases. Please, go ahead.

This was an unpleasant surprise for Agus's family. They had already dropped their opening price on Fitria's advice, hoping to secure a smooth passage to a fixed-price sale. Now they heard her introducing a bargaining stage, and naturalising it as "what happens in all purchases". The settlers were swift to argue why the price should be lowered. Cynthia, the Chinese woman sitting at the front, claimed 55,000 Rp/m² would still be prohibitively expensive. Several Bataks, however, called into question the very basis of the Malays' claims.

Jonas: Actually, we built our own houses, and we looked after the land. We had to fell the trees that were there. When we arrived, the place was still jungle! But now it's suitable to be a place for houses. And we haven't asked for any money for that. So maybe our payment could enter into a discount to the price you just stated?

Oktavius: You must also say thank you to us because if we hadn't occupied the area the land would definitely have been used for a local government building, and if that were the case, you wouldn't have gotten any money at all.⁷

Jonas: If you truly want to respect your inheritance rights, a price that would be consistent with the affluence of the community is 20,000 Rp/m² over two years, with you paying for the paperwork.

Fitria commented that 20,000 Rp/m² sounded like a good price. Halim, however, refused and made 40,000 Rp/m² his final offer. There was a long silence, after which one Batak said that he "didn't want to speak for everyone, but did want to say that the economy nowadays was very tough (susah), especially if you had children to send to school". He had no idea where he would get "money like that". There were sombre nods, and one woman left the room crying. Fitria suggested an adjournment so that everyone could calm down.

At this point it is helpful to consider some of these developments in more analytical terms. Specifically, I want to ask what is actually being contested in the dispute. Agus's legal ownership, established through the circulation of photocopied deeds, is never in question —but its exclusivity is. What determines whether the land price should be 200,000 Rp/m² or 20,000 Rp/m² is the discourse through which the land, as space, comes to be perceived, conceptualized and constructed.

In the public context of the hearing, Zahra, Agus, and Halim situate their claims within a particular discourse of legal ownership that gives them control over the land's future development —a sense of land as tangible, concrete, and "theirs". But although Zahra, who was keenest to sell, predicated her husband's right to do so on the alienability of land ensconced in the title deed, she was not purely motivated by commodity capitalism. Rather, the sale of the land at a time of economic hardship would facilitate her in becoming the mother and grandmother she wanted to be, enabling her to better provide for her family. The land's tangibility and alienability as a resource allowed it to be productive for her in a way that it could never be as land, on an island which it was now too expensive to travel to regularly. The "commodification" of the land was thus not in tension with "customary" Malay practices and values but an alternative means of their actualization (cf. MacRae 2003).

Her husband had an additional relationship to the land, because it was his inheritance (warisan), and therefore carried "not only the sense of something passed down, but also that of someone leaving a part of themselves, through their blessings, to future generations" (Brenner 1998, p. 177). While Agus might be seen to have been rather remiss in honouring the kin connections associated with Muara Lima (the orchard had, after all, been disused for decades), these sentiments were stirred up once he learnt that the land had been settled without his permission.

Here the concept of "Malay land" is no mere abstraction, but a literal fact enshrined in ownership documents. Moreover, the land's Malayness does not simply derive from a geoethnic ontology which sees Malayness as indigenous to and inseparable from the concept of Kepri. It has been entrenched through Agus's historical imaginings, which pictured generations of his ancestors using the land in a Malay way. "Outsiders" risked sullying that —especially since the outsiders in question were Bataks, and thus predominantly Christian. Agus feared a Batak neighbourhood would conduct Islamically impure (haram) activities on a daily basis and thereby flout the Malay Muslim values with which the land had been imbued and which he felt he was expected to safeguard when his father left him the land. His biggest fear was that, if granted title, the Bataks would use the land to construct a church. It had taken all of Zahra's diplomacy to persuade him that they needed the money badly enough to sell. Striving for a high price could in this light be interpreted not as greed so much as an attempt to resolve this predicament and honour the bequest appropriately.

In all of these logics, the disused orchard is treated as land —discounting the neighbourhood on it since the landowners had not given building permission. By contrast, the Bataks offer a model through which a qualifying entitlement to the land —to be reflected in a reduced price —derives from the activities of "labour" conducted in the plot. So what has this labour done? On the one hand it can be read simply as a service —as Jonas said, they have cleared the plot of secondary jungle. But the labour involved is more than simply the use of axes and saws. Through the felling of trees and building of houses, a conceptual transformation has taken place by which a well-located plot of jungle —ripe for development or the siting of a government building, yet not sufficiently desirable to warrant a full-scale eviction —has been turned into a kampung and thereby preserved. Critical to this line of argument is the implicit observation that these kampung relationships were formally recognized and ratified by the state by ascribing the houses to an RT. Unregistered "wild" houses (rumah liar) may be demolished by the state with no compunction whatsoever (Lindquist 2008, p. 13). Yet as it was, the very act of occupation —by setting in motion the bundle of emplaced social relationships that is a kampung and their ratification in an RT —acted as a form of unsolicited insurance, protecting the land from (hypothetical) state predations. Land had become space.

The trope of "social impact" alluded to by Jonas and Cynthia also attempts to highlight how embedded the disused orchard is within a web of social and moral relationships. In this case, the land is posited as a small portion of national and provincial territory, and therefore subject to the values and regulations that define the nation-state and the province of Kepri. These acknowledge and support Agus's legal right to force a sale, but they also serve to temper the price that he demands by drawing on his moral obligations as a citizen not to generate hardship for others. The land, and its appropriate disposal, is a means by which Agus can achieve a morally appropriate relationship with the wider society of which he is also —through idioms of national and regional inclusivity, as well as appeals to wider humanity —a part.⁸ Land is thus a means of achieving appropriate and ethical relations with others —and not something that should be restricted to exclusive idioms of "ownership", whether that is the ownership of the possessive individual or a more ethno-culturally regional idiom of "Malay land". Indeed, Jonas attempts to use this morality of citizenship to temper the moral claims of kinship that Agus and Halim have invoked, arguing that an affordably low price of 20,000 Rp/m² (only a tenth of the estimated value) "truly respects the inheritance right". The value of the inheritance, in this formulation, inheres not only in the magnitude of its cash equivalent, but in the social impacts that the activation of "inheritance rights" might have. The conservative inter-generational trajectory of the inheritance is juxtaposed with the inter-generational trajectory of development (pembangunan) and social improvement. With the land price integral to the realization of both trajectories, the Malays are asked to strike a balance between the two. When they refuse, negotiations reach a standstill.

The Lurah's Dilemma

Corsín Jíménez's (2003) capacity-based approach to space becomes extremely helpful for understanding the situation faced by Fitria, and the issues she was grappling with as she called for an adjournment. Although moving into her office was presented as a chance for everyone to "calm down", it also represented an opportunity for her to re-establish control over the situation. Zahra, Agus, and Halim had all been very surprised by the turn of events, and sat down on the office chairs muttering amongst themselves —confused and unsure what would happen next. Fitria, sitting behind the desk and speaking in an authoritative tone, seized the opportunity to present her own opinion regarding what should be done.

Before turning to the hearing's denouement, it is useful to think more carefully about the precise predicament the dispute had created for Fitria. As her opening speech highlighted, she was caught in a tension between her obligation to two sets of social relationships: firstly to her constituents; secondly to her "family" and Malays more generally. These social relationships each instantiate particular incarnations of "space". In the Malay discourse, the space at stake is a territorial one, a plot of land, a legacy, a symbol of Malayness —all the things it is for Agus and Halim. With her constituents, matters are more complicated.

As noted above, when Lukas Sinaga and his friends cleared the land of trees and built their first houses, these buildings were allocated to an RT within Kelurahan Muara Lima. The relationship between several Batak migrants and the apparatus of state surveillance and registration institutionalized in the neighbourhood system created a new space, an RT, which brought with it not just affiliation to a bounded patch of territory (Agus's land) but a predefined position within a web of civil-administrative social relationships. As such, the RT not only ratified the web of relations thought to define the kampung, but also generated brand new social relationships, including clientelistic relations with the Lurah herself. It is this spatial understanding of the plot that is most meaningful to Fitria, and that effectively establishes a parallel discourse in which the Bataks "belong to" —and thus have "rights" in —the land. It is within this template that Fitria exists as a Lurah, and the plot therefore takes on primary significance as the location in which her constituents are emplaced.

The neighbourhood system is typically understood to be an effective agent of social integration, promoting bonds of friendship through shared neighbourhood activities that cross ethnic and religious boundaries (Novendra et al. 1996; Sullivan 1992). Yet the system, in its apparently neutral ascription of buildings to civil-administrative units, constructs a particular conceptual infrastructure of belonging to space that can have radically political effects, fostering interethnic tension and fracturing the authority of the state. The state as a legislative body clearly supported the ownership rights of the Malays, but its local personification —Fitria —was embroiled in a set of relationships engendered by the RT system that steered her loyalties in quite the opposite direction.

Fitria's concern for her constituents was neither inevitable nor wholly altruistic. Her constituents were directly responsible for her re-election and, given the state's new commitment to democracy in local elections, must be satisfied with her performance in the role. She therefore had to look after her constituents or face disgrace and electoral defeat; part of this involved safeguarding their status as residents of their own homes. As many informants observed when discussing the hearing with me, Fitria may have been particularly compromised by the fact that the settlers were Bataks. The Karimun journalism industry, perceived to have a very strong influence over public opinion of politicians, is dominated by Batak migrants, allowing the settlers a distinct "hold" over their Lurah. Should she arbitrate against them, the Bataks might draw on ethnic and regional ties with local journalists to ensure she garnered unflattering reporting. Zahra even speculated that, from the fervour with which they wielded their notebooks, some of the "settlers" present at the hearing might actually have been journalists undercover.

From this interpretation of events, Fitria's dilemma lay in choosing between violating her ethnic and kinship obligations to her Malay "grandfather" on the one hand, and on the other, not only violating her obligations to her constituents, but also actively sacrificing her political self-interest. Fitria's ultimate commitment was made very clear in the hearing once the plaintiff 's party (myself included) had withdrawn to her office. Although her self-presentation may at first have contained a degree of rhetorical Malayness, it became obvious that she favoured the constituents' demands to lower the price, and appropriately enough, by this stage in the hearing, her affected Malay accent had entirely slipped away.

Fitria: I don't want my constituents to have any problems. I know those people and they are good people but they are poor … I think a more suitable price would be 30,000 Rp/m2 [paid] over 6 months. If it's like that they will hopefully agree and in my opinion it is already expensive enough. What do you think?

Zahra: 30,000 isn't much!

The Malays were furious, but the Pak RT joined Fitria in insisting that more than 30,000 Rp/m² was an unreasonable price. Halim, angered by what was happening, made an attempt to reinvoke the authority of the inheritance:

Halim: Ultimately, it is not our right to set the price. It is not our land. We must ask the landowner if he agrees to a price like 30,000 Rp/m². Dad?

Agus: This is my family's inheritance right! This is not only for me, or to get money, this is for all of my family, and everyone who was in the legacy, all my siblings. I do not want to sell that land for a cheap price, especially to outsiders!

Halim: So we stick to our earlier price [55,000]. If they don't want to pay, no problem, they can move. If they do neither, we can go to the authorities and prosecute them. I will tell them that in a moment, and it's still their choice what to do.

Fitria:(extremely angry) You will not! You may say nothing of the sort! They are my constituents and I must look after them, and they are not going to be intimidated by talk of the law. If the price is high, they will not pay it, and you will not get your money. 30,000 Rp/m² over 6 months is already enough.

The finality of her tone predicted what was to come. The party returned to the atrium, with the exception of Agus, who had stayed behind because he was "overheating" (sakit panas) from the stress of selling at such a low price. Jonas, on behalf of the land users, gave a sullen vote of thanks, and the "settler" group trailed out despondently. The Malays sat immobile at their table, a sour look on their faces. Only Fitria looked as if she might be happy with the eventual resolution.

The bitter discussion during the journey home highlighted how much Fitria's formulation of the appropriate relationships between Lurah and constituents had modified the potential relationships Agus could have with the land that he legally owned. Not only had Fitria reneged on the 55,000 Rp/m² price she herself had suggested, it was she who had initiated a bargaining process. Halim observed that this had transformed the discussion of a much-valued inheritance into a "marketplace" transaction of common purchase. For him, property of this kind could not be bargained over —a position in stark contrast to Fitria's assertion that "as with all purchases" bargaining should take place. The initiation of the bargaining process had thereby reconstituted the land as an alienable space, a commodity, rather than as a legacy, the value of which would be retained even though exchanged into the less preferable form of cash, and Halim felt deeply resentful that he had been forced to bargain hard just to keep his already impoverished family from selling at a loss.

Moreover, the bargaining process had resulted in a contract which did not, in the Malays' eyes, do justice to the inheritance. Unconvinced that helping Batak members of a pluralistic society would be "honouring" the inheritance, the Malays focused instead on the consequences of surrendering their land to ethno-cultural "Others". For weeks after the hearing, Agus was obsessed with the thought that the Christian Bataks were desecrating the Islamic character of the land which it had accumulated over generations of use by, and transfer between, Malays. He was eventually bed-ridden by a fever, which his daughter attributed directly to the stress of the land transaction. The whole family remained stunned by how radically the outcome of the dispute had differed from their expectations.⁹ They had, after all, entered the Lurah's office never doubting that, with the title deed in hand, right was on their side.

In the early stages of the hearing, everybody had seemed happy to accept Agus's legal claim to the land, and the state authority his documents manifested. But as the negotiations broke down, especially when Halim invoked the threat of prosecution, the state authority of the civil-administrative system, embodied in Fitria, revealed another logic whereby it was not the Bataks that must buy the land so much as Agus that must sell it. Both as a principle of social welfare and as a practical consideration for Fitria's election prospects, the poverty of the constituents had become the limiting factor to which the seller's aspirations must adjust. Agus may have been able to commodify his land through an opportunistic use of his title deed, but the webs of social relationships and cultural logics that opposed him stopped his transition to fully-fledged land capitalist. Likewise, while the provision of state-approved objects (stamped and signed letters, photocopied title deeds) had "empowered" Agus with a clearly defined right over his land, the actualization of that right proved not to be the automatic consequence that theoretical models of rights and entitlements would presume.

Conclusion

In an Indonesia that has, since decentralization, been increasingly characterized by strident putra-daerahism —the allocation of status and privileges to individuals born within a particular region (Eindhoven 2007), the Muara Lima land hearing offers a refreshing counter-example, where migrants' claims to land were upheld. Yet I have also stressed that the local framework for explaining events of this kind —a framework which focuses on the socio-cultural characterizations of "locals" and "migrants" —is not helpful for explaining a set of processes that emerge from the values and relationships internalized within a variety of procedures —from inheritance to civil-administrative classification —and the degree to which these can garner support from immediate personifications and embodiments of the state. Not only did "migrants" come to possess —in practical terms, if not in legal theory —"land rights" that proved more plausible than the Malays' state-sanctioned ownership rights of hak milik, they had garnered these through their own distinct brand of locality —one based on incorporation into political geographies rather than the "ethnolocality" that, as Boellstorff (2002) has noted, structures the Indonesian nation as a tapestry of ethno-cultural groups, each "indigenous" to their own respective province.

This having been said, the hearing was quickly appropriated into the discourse of Malay inadequacy and marginalization alluded to earlier. Although Agus and Zahra had always been aware of the fact that the Bataks were from outside Kepri, this had never been a major frame of reference when contesting the rights to the land. In the Malays' argumentation, appeals had been made to the authority of both kinship and legal ownership, but never to anything approximating "Malayness" or "indigeneity". Once the hearing was over, however, they narrated it as a battle of "local" versus "migrant". The land now took on significance as a symbol of Malay dispossession, this status itself a capacity of the social relationships that had unfolded during the land rights hearing.

This article began with a discussion of the everyday logics offered to explain why Malays appear to lose land to migrants very easily. The assumptions and premises underpinning this kind of explanation —that Malays are unable to understand the value of the land, are easily "tricked" by the prospect of immediate cash, and are unable or unwilling to put up a fight —are all denounced by the specificities of the case study. Moreover, such an account would gloss over the complex values, obligations and claims to rights associated with the multiple spatial capacities exhibited by the land —factors which, as I have argued, were integral to its eventual disposition.

The multiplicity of webs of social —and thereby spatial —relationships in which Fitria was enmeshed, coupled with the local elections looming on the horizon, left her little room to manoeuvre as arbiter of the hearing. Her task was to reconcile templates and aspirations surrounding the land and to find a solution that would hopefully convince and please all parties. How she felt she could manage her social relationships was therefore at the hub of the dispute resolution process, determining how the land came to be discursively constructed and conceptualized in the hearing and thus ultimately its price. Unfortunately for Agus, her kinship and ethnic sentiments were outweighed by a sense of civic nationalism and an attachment to her job —a comfortably salaried position in a time of economic hardship —stacking the odds against the plaintiffs from the very beginning.

When contrasted with the optimism the Malays had in the rhetorical power of their title deed, and the force with which land tenure policies are typically argued and believed to help "local" or "indigenous" populations, such an outcome is highly ironic. Since both the text of the title deed and the contradicting voice of the Lurah were, and were appealed to as, "the state", this hearing illustrates how state authority —precisely because it inheres in capillary, everyday, manifestations —can contain inherent unreliability. This was not because of the state's inefficiency, corruption, or other problems about which Kepri residents often complain. Rather, due to its multiple instantiations, the state was simply involved in too many social relationships with the Muara Lima land. The spaces that emerged from these could not be reconciled, requiring a virtuoso —and arbitrary —arbitration on the part of the Lurah, which suspended the overarching authority of bureaucratic documents and sublimated it to skill at bargaining and an ethic of care for the land's illegal inhabitants. Such events therefore not only signal the relevance of analytic attention to "space" for accounts of land tenure, but underscore how this dimension of land can help explain the seemingly paradoxical circumvention of claims that appeal to both legal ownership and indigeneity, so counter-intuitive in the era of regional autonomy.

Yet the very fact that the case overturned conventional and widespread expectations of how the state should behave warrants a final consideration of the implications of the hearing for the Malays' broader political subjectivities. For all that they drew on stereotypes of inept Malays, cunning Bataks, or corrupt officials (Halim began to speculate that Fitria was being paid to intercede on the Bataks' behalf) to explain away their defeat, these explanatory strategies were all a function of the genuine and profound shock they had felt in Karimun. Their subsequent turn to cynical discourses of the kind that commonly circulate in public —that "they should have expected no better" —is in large part a measure of how something "better" was precisely what they did expect. The bitterness of their defeat gave these cynical tropes a new resonance and led to their being articulated with deliberation and weight. Moreover, it was these tropes that came to structure the Malays' future expectations such that, for example, they saw no value in appealing the case at a higher level of state authority —despite the clear possibility that their title deed might carry more weight in such a forum. "It is too tiring and expensive to prepare all the papers," commented Zahra, "and it seems that even with the papers there is no guarantee of success." Instead, they focused on trying to sell the unsettled portions of the orchard, over which their ownership rights had now been unambiguously asserted. By adopting such a position of cynical defeatism —itself engendered by the tone and outcome of the hearing —the Malays themselves ratified Fitria's decision as final.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that their cynical disposition pervaded their whole approach to the political. While they now carried little faith in the state's powers of arbitration, they still showed a great interest in other aspects of the political process —especially the activities of groups lobbying for "Malay rights", or arguing that "indigenous" Malays should be entitled to additional privileges over migrants to Kepri. Though an interest in such groups was not solely the outcome of their experiences at the Karimun hearing, their own experience of marginalization certainly increased such policies' appeal. The case thus offers a simple but important observation for the broader enterprise of political anthropology: that sentiments of cynical disaffection might be profitably explicated through tracing their origins in biographical experiences, thereby enabling an exploration of their depths, their limits, and their influence on future political behaviour. The Muara Lima orchard hearing, in this light, is not just an interesting event which happened a few years ago. It is a force which continues to burn.