Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan: Challenging Power and Presenting Culture

Dayak individuals and groups engage in plural ecologies—characterized by different ways of integrating humans and non-humans and by different conceptions of "nature", "land", and "development". Two struggles for the maintenance of customary rights in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, exemplify this engagement. One is a rather forlorn dispute over land with a coal mining company, and the other a promising attempt to secure customary rights to a forested mountain area. Focus on individual and collective actors in these struggles allows consideration of how people appropriate and engage with different and partly contradictory ontological assumptions.