Tania Murray Li - Compromising Power-Development, Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

Compromising Power: Development,
Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

Tania Murray Li
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Dalhousie University
Key questions then become NOT who rules but how is rule accomplished.
—Philip Corrigan, State Formation
COMPROMISE v.t. to settle by mutual concession; to place in a position of difficulty

or danger; to expose to risk of disgrace.
—The New Elizabethan Reference Dictionary
Relations of rule are cultural relations, formed and reformed in the context of
specific discourses, practices, rituals, and struggles. They offer a rich and im-
portant field for ethnographic analysis.1 In this article I examine the set of rela-
tions framed through the discourse and practice of "development," critically en-
gaging the work of Arturo Escobar (1992, 1995), James Ferguson (1994), and
others inspired in various ways by Foucault.2 My argument is that a Foucauldian
understanding of governmentality (the attempt to constitute governable sub-
jects) is an accurate guide to development as a project of rule, but that the actual
accomplishment of rule owes as much to the understandings and practices
worked out in the contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy as it
does to the imposition of development schemes and related forms of disciplin-
ary power.3
My study is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of Indonesia's offi-
cial program for the resettlement of isolated people. Resettlement programs are
familiar enough as objects of anthropological study and critique, and there are
many important accounts of the damage done to indigenous folk by inept bu-
reaucrats and bullying regimes. My focus is rather different, for I seek less to ex-
pose the all-too-predictable havoc wreaked by state power in the periphery than
to highlight the significance of that periphery, and the activities that go on there,
in the constitution of the self-proclaimed center. Just as others have shown that
colonialism was critical to the self-fashioning of the West (Cooper and Stoler
1997), "development" is here explored as a modern state's attempt at self-fash-
ioning and rule, considered always as fragile and contingent accomplishments.4
Cultural Anthropology 14(3):295-322. Copyright © 1999. American Anthropological Association.
295
296 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
As it turns out, there is a rather large gap between what program proponents
and critics had primed me to expect at Indonesia's resettlement sites and what I
encountered there. In brief, I found a program to civilize "primitives" perform-
ing its operations on rather ordinary folk, changing them very little, but main-
tained despite its failures and even construed, in some quite specific ways, to be
a success. The gap between findings and expectations and the attempt to puzzle
out the reasons for it offer the opportunity for reflections on "how rule is accom-
plished" and on the compromises integral to rule.
To clarify my theoretical concerns and to contextualize my ethnographic
material, the following section outlines some of the features of development re-
gimes in general and Indonesia's New Order in particular.
Development Regimes
The rationale for "development" as an activity of nation-states draws on the
more general logic of governmentality. Governmentality is Foucault's short-
hand for the emergence of a distinctive, modern form of power which seeks to
govern or regulate the conditions under which people live their lives; the ration-
ality that renders the activity of government thinkable to its practitioners and
those on whom it is practiced; and the concentration of government in the (ex-
panded) apparatus we have come to call "the state" (Foucault 1982, 1991; Gor-
don 1991). This form of power was operative in late colonial regimes that were
concerned with "disabling old forms of life by systematically breaking down
their conditions, and with constructing in their place new conditions so as to en-
able—indeed so as to oblige—new forms of life to come into being" (Scott
1995:193, emphasis in original). In the postcolonial era, concern with welfare
and improvement falls under the rubric of "development" and provides many
governing regimes with a significant part of their claim to legitimacy.
The identification of continuities in modes of rule across the colonial di-
vide (Anderson 1991; Ludden 1992; Scott 1995) highlights the national and
governmental dimensions of development sometimes neglected in critiques that
focus on the alien character of the goals, programs, and procedures generated in
Western nations and international agencies and imposed on others (e.g., Sachs
1992). In India, as Chatterjee observes, the processes of the modern (govern-
mental) state have taken hold, and "one does not, unfortunately, have the option
of sending this state back to its origins" (1993:227). South Africa under Man-
dela provides a further case in point: the African National Congress, which long
eschewed the language of development tainted as it was with segregation and
apartheid, soon found itself adopting the " 'pragmatic' language of 'reconstruc-
tion and development' "(Crush 1995:xii).
In its national dimensions, "development" can be considered one of the
more significant "everyday forms of state formation" (Joseph and Nugent
1994), which offers, like education, public administration, and land law, an
arena in which "the state" can continuously restate its raison d'etre and become
instantiated in routine processes and events. Development planning has become
a normal state activity and an important mode through which the state apparatus
DEVELOPMENT AND RULE IN INDONKSIA 297
presents itself as serving a "national interest" apparently above politics (Chat-

terjee 1993). "Development" thus condenses claims by and about "the state" and
provides a discursive framework for conceptualizing and managing the relation-
ship between "the state" and citizens. It asserts a separation between state
(which does the developing) and populace (which is the object and recipient of
development). "Development" authorizes state agencies to engage directly and
openly in projects aimed at transformation and "improvement" and provides the
immediate context and occasion for many encounters between bureaucrats and
those they would constitute as clients. Its science supplies definitions and mea-
sures of deficiency, techniques for bringing about change, and the criteria for
judging success.
To discern the effects of these framings, statements, practices, and claims
requires some close investigation. Despite the promising rubric of "encounter,"
Escobar's (1992, 1995) explorations of the techniques of classification and
planning offer little insight into how plans are executed and whether they are
imposed coercively or received "on the ground" in the forms or with the effects
intended. Ferguson argues that development discourse has the effect of "depoli-
ticizing everything it touches" (1994:xv) by masking the expansion of state bu-
reaucratic power and by insistently "reposing political questions of land, re-
sources, jobs or wages as technical 'problems' responsive to the technical
'development' intervention" (1994:270). But who does the discourse affect in
this way? Ferguson demonstrates that political issues are not raised in the docu-
ments produced by international development agencies working in Lesotho but
fails to show the depoliticizing effects of "development" discourse on Le-
sothans. His study of an internationally funded rural development program re-
veals that the Lesothan officials involved with the program were quite clear
about the role it could play in strengthening both party and state in a rebel re-
gion. Moreover, the villagers in the "target group" seemed all too aware that
livestock and other apparently technical initiatives had the potential to regulate
their lives in ways they found unacceptable, and they feigned compliance, ig-
nored them, or sabotaged them accordingly.
Rather than depoliticizing the countryside, as Ferguson argues, "develop-
ment" programs may become a politically charged arena in which relations of
rule are reworked and reassessed. Akhil Gupta (1995) suggests as much in his
discussion of Indian contexts in which the claims and promises made by "the
state" about development become points of popular leverage, even though peo-
ple routinely encounter projects that endebt, entrap, and alienate. To grasp such
dynamics, it is necessary to explore the ways in which meanings and outcomes
are negotiated, albeit within an uneven field of power. Categories that mani-
festly do not fit, plans that fail, and compliance withheld or withdrawn expose
the fragile nature not only of the government agencies promoting this or that de-
velopment program but of the very idea of "the state" as knower, arbiter, and
provider for "the people." Ferguson (1994) argues that the development appara-
tus is protected from the implications of failure through a circular logic in which
failure merely serves to confirm the need for better plans and programs, more
institutional capacity, and a more powerful state apparatus. He attributes this

outcome to the totalizing power of development discourse and the capacity of
the "machine" to seal itself off from potentially contradictory information.
While not denying these discursive effects, I argue that the transformation of
failure into more development involves more than a mechanical process internal
to the machine. It involves some complex cultural work at the interface between
development projects and those they target.
The framing of a "development" intervention is a delicate cultural opera-
tion. First, it is necessary to identify a target group with a deficiency to be recti-
fied. Knowledge of another's deficiencies depends on, as it constructs, a bound-
ary between the knower and the object of knowledge. As Stacey Pigg (1992) has
observed in Nepal, the condition of being a backward villager, rather than sim-
ply a poor or relatively powerless one, is visible only from afar—to know one,
you cannot be one. But maintaining the necessary boundaries is tense and diffi-
cult work (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Bureaucratic schemes for ordering and
classifying populations may be secure on paper, but they are fragile in practice.
Second, there needs to be an agency tasked with planning and executing the ap-
propriate development fix. The longevity of such an agency is not guaranteed:
there are many national contexts in which persistent failure to accomplish the
goals set IJ a problem, both for the credibility of the regime overall and for the
department most directly involved, especially when limited national resources
(rather than donor funds) are deployed. To defend itself from competing depart-
ments, maintain its own definition of a development problem, and proceed with
its particular type of development fix, a government department must therefore
find ways to generate some kind of success. Finally, I would suggest that the
compliance, if not consent, of the "target group" is needed to distinguish "devel-
opment" from outright coercion. In the direst days of apartheid in South Africa,
the idea that the homelands and associated "betterment schemes" were designed
for the "development" of the black population was hardly persuasive to anyone,
and to the target group least of all (Ferguson 1994:261-262). To frame encoun-
ters in development terms, some level of compliance must be achieved: it too is
an accomplishment, not a given.
Seen from this perspective, neither plans unilaterally imposed nor dis-
courses hermetically sealed would be especially effective in framing develop-
ment encounters. It is less important that plans and discourses prevail than that
they engage, providing room for maneuver and opportunities for compromise,
with all the nuances of that term. As an agreement between two parties, a com-
promise assumes that agency is distributed, if unevenly: both sides have a "power
to." It also assumes a level of conscious knowledge and understanding of what
is being gained and given up. It thus carries with it the sense of betraying or com-
promising oneself. This is, as Sayer argues, the normal but uncomfortable posi-
tion of those subject to rule, who find themselves "participating in a ritual," "liv-
ing a lie," or engaging in other forms of "bad faith," "knowing complicity," and
"moral accommodation" (1994:374): He emphasizes that rule does not require
agreement but only compliance, a "willingness to conform, to participate in the
DEVELOPMENT AND RULE IN INDONESIA 299
established order as if its representations were reality" (1994:374). I would add

that this requirement applies also to state functionaries, similarly obliged to
make compromises and live lies, and I would emphasize that relations of rule
can also be compromised, or put at risk, in such encounters. "Development" is
an especially risky arena in which the pretensions and claims of "the state" may
be easily unmasked. Recall though, it is not only the emperor who is embar-
rassed when it is pointed out that he has no clothes. Compromises enable, but
they simultaneously introduce the possibility of exposure and disgrace. They
rely on an intimate understanding of one's own people and a competence in
"how things are done." They form the uneasy subtext to the political jokes and
the cynical reflections on the pomposity of a speech, the tedium of a spectacle,
or stupidity of a plan—reflections that, while they criticize another, also impli-
cate the self.
Within this general framework, rule and its compromises are enabled and
constrained by the sedimented histories, contemporary social forces, and inter-
national resource flows configuring a particular national arena. In Indonesia, the
centrality of "development" to the New Order regime has a unique and bloody
history. The systematic attempt to reorder and regulate the relations between
population and resources commenced in the colonial period beginning in Java
early in the 19th century (Breman 1980) and was extended to the other islands
while deepening its remit under the aegis of the "ethical policy" early this cen-
tury (Anderson 1983; Schrauwers 1998). The disruptions of the Japanese occu-
pation, the independence struggle, regional separatism, and the mass political
mobilization of the Sukarno era cast the bureaucratic system, like the economy,
into serious disarray, and systematic programs of a governmental kind were
stalled (Anderson 1983). Suharto took power in 1965 in the context of mass kill-
ings directed at alleged communists. The New Order's claims to legitimacy have
always invoked the necessity to prevent a return to chaos, an end pursued
through both overtly repressive and more subtle governmental means.5 One di-
mension of rule examined by John Pemberton (1994) and others (Dove 1999;
Kahn 1999; Schrauwers 1999) is the insistent reframing of political issues in
terms of cultural diversity. Another is the claim that development should be pursued
as the antithesis of, and the antidote to, an excess of politics (Feith 1981; Langen-
berg 1990:126). The masses are to stay off the streets and in their orderly vil-
lages, focusing their energies on progress and "development." "Primitives" occupy
an ambiguous place in the state discourse on culture (they have yet to be cultur-
ized in bureaucratically recognized and displayable forms), but they do play a
significant if spectral role in the state discourse on development, in which they
have quietly become icons of the archaic disorder that represents the limit and test
of state order and development. From the perspective of the elite, "primitives," un-
like communists, are not regarded as seriously dangerous but rather as wildly un-
tutored—somewhat like ordinary village farmers, but much more so. Disorderly
yet vulnerable, primitives are relatively scarce, and their taming becomes an ex-
emplary lesson in marginality through which the more advanced rural poor can be
expected to position themselves nearer the center. [Tsing 1993:28]
The term for "development" New Order-style is pembangunan, with a par-

ticular meaning established by downplaying its nationalist-era connotations of
awakening (membangun) in favor of construction (also membangun), and fur-
ther reducing the connotations of the latter from the potentially dynamic project
of nation building to the more solidly directive operation of building the na-
tion's infrastructure and physical plant (Heryanto 1988). The alternative term
that translates as "develop" (berkembang) refers to natural growth and unfold-
ing and is therefore much less suited to New Order purposes (Heryanto 1988).
Physical construction and the delivery of physical inputs (seeds, credit, cleared
land) to favored clients of the regime have been financed by international do-
nors, by licensing arrangements with transnational corporations, and by oil
revenues especially in the "oil decade," 1973-83. These external sources of
funding have enabled the regime to reestablish and vastly increase the bureau-
cratic apparatus and spread state largesse without placing a tax burden on the
populace and with minimal domestic accountability (Anderson 1983; Tanter
1990). But, despite the confidence suggested by the claims and proclamations
(e.g., declaring Suharto to be the Father of Development), the legitimation sup-
plied by "development" in the New Order has always been fragile (Heryanto
1988, 1990). Between the frustrations of people unable to access state resources
and the anger of those whose land, forest, and other means of livelihood are ap-
propriated for state or private schemes, there is much that belies the promise,
and exceeds the containment, of New Order-style "development."
Indonesia's Program for the Resettlement of Isolated People

Since 1950, Indonesia's Department of Social Affairs (known popularly
and hereafter as Depsos) has continued the Dutch program of resettling people
from isolated regions (mountains, hinterlands, islands, coasts) to locations more
accessible to the apparatus of development and rule. The official term for these
people is masyarakat terasing. In their English publications (Department of So-
cial Affairs 1994-95), Depsos translates this term as "isolated communities,"
but the term terasing has a richer set of meanings equally integral to the program
logic: (1) secluded, separated, isolated and (2) exotic, very strange. Associated
terms are difference, deviation, and alienation (Echols and Shadily 1989). By
1994, Depsos had resettled 160,000 people and estimated in that year that there
remained over one million people in need of Depsos attention. In recent years,
the program has been modified to include an in situ option under which people
remain in their current areas but are rearranged into more compact and orderly
settlements complete with housing and government services such as schools and
health clinics. The program's preamble asserts that the government has an obli-
gation to ensure that all its citizens have the opportunity to participate in, and
contribute to, development and it should therefore make a special effort to reach
out to those who, through accidents of history or geography, have been excluded
from this process. Questions of justice are said to be involved, as well as national
pride: Depsos documents note that the existence of masyarakat terasing can
"lessen the successful] image of national development" (Department of Social

Affairs 1994-95:4).
Critics have argued that the program destroys indigenous cultures and
(sometimes forcibly) removes people from their ancestral lands and livelihoods
to herd them into "camps" characterized by poverty, ill health, malnutrition, cul-
tural dislocation, dependency, and despair. They note cases in which the land
from which people have been removed is promptly reallocated for other uses,
such as logging, mining, plantations, or transmigration (Colchester 1986a,
1986b). Officials dismiss foreign critics as romantics who would allow their fas-
cination with "primitives" to stand in the way of progress for Indonesia's iso-
lated people. They insist that the program's mode of operation is not coercion
but, rather, gentle persuasion and education, in keeping with local aspirations.
They lament that donors have shown no interest in direct funding or support for
the program, obliging them to rely on the general pool of funds administered by
the central planning agency Bappenas.
I am not in a position to evaluate the rights and wrongs of the resettlement
program. To do this would require a comprehensive study, with a special focus
on Irian, where the cultural differences, struggles over resource access, and po-
tential for instances of coercion to go unreported are at their most extreme. In-
stead I have a more general observation: in order for the program to have either
the damaging effects critics identify or the positive effects the program pro-
poses, it would have to actually achieve its goals—removing people from one
place to another or reforming their everyday lives according to a prescribed
model. Yet it is widely agreed by program critics, and sometimes acknowledged
by its officials, that the program is prone to failure. In the most obvious in-
stances, people abandon the resettlement sites and refuse to return when at-
tempts are made to persuade them and the houses are left to rot or are taken over
by other villagers if the land and location are sufficiently attractive. Recognition
of these problems and the desire to reduce waste and embarrassment have led to
a reformulation of the approach and the attempt to offer a more flexible array of
options in tune with the aspirations and desires of the target group, but even the
modified program has met with limited success. Consistent failure in a program
that has continued to operate for almost fifty years requires that the questions be
reposed along the lines explored so provocatively by Ferguson (1994): What
does the program actually do? What are its effects? What is the relationship be-
tween failure and rule? I address these questions through an analysis of the pro-
gram logic and my observations at two resettlement sites, one in Kalimantan and
the other in Sulawesi.6
The Program Logic
The program logic defines a project to normalize bodies, subjectivities, and

communities and discipline them to the nth degree. It is a complete attempt
at social engineering, governmentality in gross form. The deficiencies of the
target group are identified as being nomadic or living in isolated areas, in scat-
tered or impermanent settlements; using limited and environmentally destructive
production techniques, such as shifting cultivation; inadequate housing, nutri-

tion, clothing, and hygiene; being culturally backward, closed, undynamic, and
irrational; lacking a government-recognized religion; being isolated from inter-
action with other people; lacking knowledge of national affairs, the national ide-
ology, and the concepts and obligations of citizenship; and being without access
to government services. The program is designed to rectify these deficiencies
through the provision of some physical inputs: a small wooden housing unit per
family on a half-hectare house lot; two hectares of farmland, prepared in stages;
basic food supply for one year; tool kits, household utensils, seeds, fertilizer,
and clothing; housing for field staff; a social activities building; settlement
roads and bridges; a clean water system; a religious building (church or
mosque); communal radio and television powered by a solar energy system; and
a demonstration farm plot and other productive equipment and inputs. The non-
physical inputs are guidance, advice, and supervision from the resident field
staff, religious personnel, and district and provincial officials. On the basis of
this set of inputs, a sort of "modernity package," the target group is expected to
move from isolation and backwardness to the status of "ordinary villagers" cul-
turally normalized and enmeshed in the regular system of village administration
and national development within a period of five years.
Numerous program documents spell out and confirm the above logic, and
there are detailed guidelines for officials at all levels explaining how planning,
implementation, and evaluation are to be carried out. There are also long lists
stating the number and location of isolated groups already resettled and those
still "undeveloped." In themselves, these documents can be seen as assertions
about the necessity of the state: they describe a national problem, the existence
of backward tribes, which is large in scale and very complex; they explain that
there is a government agency actively working to solve the problem, according
to a definite strategy and method; and they assert that progress is being made as
reflected in the numbers successfully resettled, even though they recognize that
much more still needs to be done. These are messages circulated most readily
within the state apparatus itself, where their function is self-confirming. They
are reiterated whenever a national or provincial seminar is held on the subject of
isolated people or a resettlement site is opened with the requisite ceremonies and
speeches. Through media coverage of these events, they presumably make their
way into the consciousness of the newspaper-reading and television-watching
public. A sample of headlines captures the tone: "E. Kalimantan Isolated Tribes-
men Need Serious Handling" (Indonesia Times 1996); "Sulitnya Medan In-
teraksi Masyarakat Terasing Terbatas" (Because of the Difficult Terrain, the In-
teraction of Isolated People Is Limited) (Berita Utama 1996); "Masyarakat
Terasing di Kaltim Belum Terjangkau Pantarlih" (Isolated People in East Ka-
limantan Have Not Yet Been Reached by the Election Registration Team)
(Suara Pembaruan 1996); "33,435 Warga Suku Terasing Belum Dibina"
(33,435 Isolated People Have Not Yet Been Reformed) {Berita Utama 1997).
Such media events, like the program documents, seldom do more than re-
state the program logic, reel out numbers, and reiterate the difficulties involved
in the task of "civilizing" truly "backward people." Rarely do they discuss spe-
cific people or places or the substantive effects of the program at a particular lo-
cation. When specifics do come out the context is usually negative: a news re-
port that a resettlement site has been abandoned. These occasions greatly
embarrass program officials, who feel they are exposed as incompetent or cor-
rupt. In their own defense, they argue that critics, including officials of other
government departments, have no understanding of the difficulties involved in
working with "primitives." Some officials explained to me that the journalists
who write or threaten to write such stories, or the nongovernmental organiza-
tions (NGOs) that claim to be advocates for the people, are simply being mis-
chievous, trying to show the government in a bad light or angling for bribes from
program officials. These were intimate exposures about their own national cul-
ture that were also intended, I assume, to impress on me how difficult it is for a
well-intended program to make headway. Exposures of program failure do not
normally threaten the program logic. As Ferguson has primed us to expect, pro-
ponents and critics alike generally interpret the failures as evidence that more re-
sources and honest effort are needed to overcome the problems of backward-
ness. Nevertheless, there are signs of stress and strain here, ample confirmation
that rule is hard work. Regional officials who fear the criticism of superiors,
counterparts in other ministries, the media, and the public find themselves de-
fending a flawed program. Fear of failure and critique are not just personal mat-
ters, however. They contribute to some rather significant compromises in how
the program is delivered and what it becomes on the ground, beginning with the
identification of appropriate "targets."
Identifying the Target Group

The literature on colonial rule in India and Africa (e.g., Cohn 1996; Dirks
1992; Ludden 1992) indicates that the effort to discipline colonial subjects re-
quired the production of a very detailed system of knowledge. The British in
particular were vigorous about surveying, mapping, listing, classifying, and an-
thropologizing. Regardless of their elaboration, the schemes that assumed (as
they produced) proliferating subdivisions of tribe and caste were never adequate
for the "real" social complexity of the subject populations. Nonetheless, it ap-
pears that an effort to know what and who was "out there" was considered cru-
cial to the project of rule: facts were taken seriously; competent colonial officers
were expected to speak local languages and to understand native mentalities.
The Indonesian program for isolated people shows evidence of a signifi-
cantly different approach to knowledge. There has never been an accurate cen-
sus of the relevant population. According to Colchester (1986b:91) the figure of
about 200,000 used in the early 1970s was later revised upward to about 1.5 mil-
lion. The official number, which states that there are 1,033,107 isolated people
still unreformed, is arrived at simply by subtracting the number that has been
"taken in hand" (ditangani) by the official resettlement scheme from the number
acknowledged earlier. The inadequacies of the available data on this and other
topics could be viewed as a sign of weakness in Indonesia's planning system.
Undoubtedly, it greatly frustrates foreign experts. Under the dev-speak rubric of

"institutional strengthening," foreign advisors assigned to various government
agencies have produced long and detailed lists of social indicators in an effort to
pin down the targets and tasks of development more precisely and have also fi-
nanced or undertaken major mapping efforts. But there is another possible inter-
pretation of the state of Indonesia's official data system: as a component of a
culture of rule that is, like the British system described by Corrigan and Sayer
(1985), sui generis.
The "knowledge" available on the subject of Indonesia's isolated people
establishes all the conditions needed to maintain the program (a problem, a tar-
get group, a plan, some evidence of progress). But in place of India's multitudes
of closely specified subgroups, the Indonesian program operates on the basis of
a rather generic primitive, defined in vague terms by broad and potentially con-
tradictory criteria.7 Understood in terms of governmentality, this vagueness is
no accident. Colchester (1986b:91) notes that in the period after independence,
many different ethnic and tribal groups were named and recognized by the
agency then responsible for them. It was under the New Order's "development"
regime and the commencement of five-year plans in 1968-69 that tribal people
came to be classified according to their overriding shared cultural trait—their
primitiveness—and a larger-scale, standardized program to transform them was
designed accordingly. I would like to point out another consequence of vague-
ness: the space it opens for compromise. Shifting cultivation, one of the criteria
used to define "primitives," is currently practiced by tens of millions of Indone-
sians across the archipelago, for it is the most practical means of farming the
hilly interior. Which of these people will actually be identified as targets for the
program, become the recipients of the standard package of inputs, and permit
Depsos to show that its numbers are changing in a positive direction is deter-
mined by a process that gives some room for maneuver on both sides.8 Further,
I would suggest that this room for maneuver does not indicate the absence or
weakness of rule but signals, rather, one of the ways in which it is accomplished.
The pressures and opportunities surrounding the on-the-ground practice of
target group selection are many. There are reports of powerful interests pressing
for the removal of people from valuable land and resources (Colchester 1986a,
1986b), but vigorous action in this regard is usually left to other departments
with a stronger mandate to "develop" the nation's natural resources: forestry,
transmigration, mining, estate crops. The mandate of Depsos is seen to be pri-
marily social, taking care of the weak and deprived.9 Because coordination be-
tween departments is not high either in Jakarta or in the provinces and regencies,
where each government department has an office and staff, Depsos works ac-
cording to its own rhythms rather than being brought in, as one might expect, to
take care of the people displaced by other "developments." Indeed, it is some-
times a competitor with other programs scrambling for land to convert to one or
another "development" purpose. Some of the terrain inhabited by the popula-
tions designated masyarakat terasing is simply too poor or inaccessible to be of
much interest to other parties. There is little pressure on Depsos to reconstitute
marginal populations as a labor force, in view of the huge numbers of impover-

ished and compliant Javanese willing to work anywhere in the archipelago un-
der the transmigration program or other more spontaneous arrangements. It is
therefore possible to take the Depsos program at its word and recognize that
often, if not always, it is primarily a program about "development" and the con-
stitution of governable subjects, rather than the seizure of resources or the cap-
ture of labor. If this is the project, it becomes especially significant that some
sections of the rural population are much more easily "developed" and governed
than others. The element of feasibility, or likely success, looms large for pro-
gram officials, for the reasons discussed earlier: they do not want to fail. This is
the beginning of my answer to the first and most prominent puzzle I encountered
in the program: the absence of "primitives" among the recruits at Depsos reset-
tlement sites.
Officials charged with delivering the program and making it a "success"
have an interest in identifying potential program recipients who are sufficiently
isolated, culturally distinct, or "primitive" to meet the program criteria, but they
avoid the most extreme or difficult cases. True nomads, really isolated people of
the kind that might conceivably be unfamiliar with living in houses, wearing
clothes, or cooking in a pot or who might run away in fear of strangers, are
highly unlikely to stay put in a resettlement site. The program has no examples
of success with such people. They are, however, precisely the kinds of people
imagined in the program logic and those for whom the "modernity package,"
with its pots and plates, sarongs and seeds, is designed. So long as primitives ex-
ist—in the specter of the urban imagination and in the pages of program docu-
ments—they enable "the state" to make the statements about the necessity for
development and rule contained in the program logic. In practice, any group of
rather ordinary shifting cultivators will do, especially if they have some colorful
artifacts that signal their "difference." As a Depsos official confirmed, "We
have not so far tackled the truly nomadic people because that is very difficult
and we have limited resources; most of the people we work with are only semi-
nomadic or living in temporary settlements." The key, from the point of view of
the Depsos staff, is that the people selected should be keen and willing to partici-
pate, interested in receiving what the program has to offer, and ready to play
their part in making the program a success. This means avoiding people who
might approximate the "primitives" for whom the program was designed and se-
lecting others to fill the primitive slot, an enabling but somewhat risky compro-
mise. 10
Senior regional administrators have a different set of concerns. They need
to ensure that the projects of the various technical agencies (and the construction
contracts and other associated bounties) are spread across the districts, as evi-
dence that the government is taking care of the people and bringing develop-
ment, and they need to bring in the vote for the ruling party. To the chagrin of
officials in Depsos and other agencies, such "political" concerns regularly inter-
fere with their capacity to carry out their "technical" programs in the most suitable
locations and in the manner intended. Once the site is selected, more jockeying
occurs over who will be selected as "candidates" for the resettlement program
(candidate is the term used, calon warga binaan). It might seem odd that people
would volunteer to be labeled primitives, but one must recall that the inputs be-
ing offered through the program are valued goods: free houses, a year of free
food, two hectares of land, and some other, less consequential items. These
goods can be used, sold, or abandoned when the deal is no longer attractive
(often after the rice ration ends). Selecting candidates involves, therefore, the al-
location of state largesse to groups and individuals who need to be rewarded for
past loyalty and service (former government officials sometimes appear among
the recruits), as well as those the regional authorities hope to transform into
grateful subjects and loyal voters for the ruling party. This is the second part of
my answer to why the candidates are not "primitives": truly isolated people are
of limited political significance and also lack the clout to insert themselves into
the channels of state patronage that are established and maintained through "de-
velopment" (Hart 1989). The implications of selection practices for rule there-
fore seem clear enough. To explore further the compromises, I turn to some ex-
amples.
Half of the recruits for the site in Sulawesi were mountain people, living
scattered in tiny bamboo houses, shifting cultivators, Christianized in the past
decade, few of whom spoke Indonesian, and none of whom had been to school.
They therefore fit the program criteria rather well. The other half were Muslim
coastal villagers, who made no claim to be masyarakat terasing. I was told by of-
ficials that the coastal people had been included in the project at the request of
the mountain people, who favored a joint settlement rather than one for them-
selves alone. If this was true, they later changed their opinion, for the social and
religious tensions between the two groups turned out to be overwhelming. The
mountain people did not adjust well to conditions in the hot, dry, coastal site and
found the economic provisions made for them unviable. Within a couple of
years almost all of them had returned to the hills. Their houses were then taken
over by more coastal villagers with the agreement of Depsos officials that they
too were needy people and the government's money should not be wasted. This
was a compromise, enabling but uncomfortable. The local Depsos officials rec-
ognized that their goal of reaching the mountain people had been a total failure,
although the official record in Jakarta still shows "success" in the form of one
hundred more households "handled" by the department. Coastal villagers felt
awkward about profiting from the mistakes and misfortunes of others, officials
and mountain folk alike, and were anxious that an attempt might be made by one
party or the other to take back the houses. Those who had returned to the hills
duly acknowledged their gratitude to the government for trying to help them and
made few critiques of the program, focusing, instead, on their own inability, as
mountain folk, to adapt to coastal conditions—a self-essentializing move in-
tended, perhaps, to dissuade Depsos from trying again.
In the Kalimantan site, the issues surrounding identification were quite
complex. The official project-planning document provides an account of the
project's target group." It names four distinct ethnolinguistic groups of
masyarakat terasing present in the vicinity of the proposed project but then ig-
nores such distinctions in the descriptive text, mixing up the characteristics of
the groups to present an image of people who were scattered in groups of five to
ten households, living in a longhouse, without access to schools, adherents of a
rather exotic set of traditional cultural practices, and in urgent need of Depsos
guidance and development. In reality, only one group, the Punan, were really
scattered, and only a few members of another group lived in a longhouse; the
great majority of those who became "candidates" were living in a concentrated
and rather well equipped village settlement, complete with both primary and
secondary schools, located just across the river. The confusions and inaccura-
cies of the data served to produce the generic "primitives" with the requisite de-
ficiencies that rationalize and legitimate the program in general and this project
in particular. As Ferguson (1994) has, once again, primed us to expect, the num-
bers and images are fanciful, but the nature of the fantasy is no surprise.
In the final selection of 75 candidates for the project, the Punan, locally ac-
knowledged to be the true masyarakat terasing—forest dwelling, allegedly
timid, often hungry, ignorant enough to be easily tricked and exploited—were
mostly excluded. From the 68 Punan names that were appended to the project-
planning document, only four moved into the site, and they soon left. There is
some doubt that the others were ever informed that their names had appeared on
the official list. Ten additional households from the neighboring village were in-
cluded at the last moment, displacing other candidates, because they had con-
tested the construction of the project houses on land to which they had custom-
ary rights (this issue is further discussed below). These people continued to
reside in their much more substantial village homes, visiting their Depsos
houses on occasion to keep up the appearance of habitation under threat that
their membership in the project would be withdrawn. Some used the project
houses as convenient farm huts.
To appreciate why such compromises in candidate selection did not detract
from the officially recognized "success" of the project, it is necessary to under-
stand how success is envisaged and constructed. I visited the site in the company
of some senior Depsos officials, and their reactions upon our arrival will serve
to illustrate. As we turned off the main road, the officials remarked favorably on
the carved and brightly painted sign at the gate of the settlement which declared
that it was a guidance center for masyarakat terasing. The houses were arranged
neatly along the unpaved project road. Some had fences and gardens, again a
subject for positive comment, although the number of houses we passed (50 per-
cent by my count) that showed no evidence of habitation went unremarked (but
not, perhaps, unobserved). When we reached the house of the Depsos field staff,
the first question the senior official put to him was, "Are the people here?"
[Warga ada?]; he then ordered that they be gathered (suruh kumpul), to which
the response was, "Ready!" [Siap!]. In these moments, many important criteria
for success were established: the houses had been built as budgeted; the recipi-
ents had recognized their subject position, confirmed their exotic origins, and
shown evidence of a (presumed to be new) capacity to work on voluntary
collective projects (the painted sign); they were beginning to make their envi-
ronment orderly (the fences); they were in place (had not run away); and when
needed to greet official visitors and show evidence of deference and gratitude,
they were there on command.12
During our stay, I discussed with the officials my doubts over whether the
people recruited into the project from the nearby village could really be consid-
ered masyarakat terasing. I pointed out that I had discovered that many of them
had secondary school education and undoubtedly had long been familiar with
money, clothes, cooking pots, and the government. For reasons I have begun to
illuminate, the officials were unused to thinking about the characteristics of
their "target group" in this kind of detail, but they replied, on reflection, that the
villagers in question were, after all, natives of Kalimantan and therefore differ-
ent in terms of culture (terasing dari segi kebudayaan). Furthermore, they
lacked decent houses. That is, they met enough of the criteria to be considered
rightful recipients of the program, even if they were not especially poor or physi-
cally or socially isolated. Moreover, their most obvious deficiency, housing, is
one that the program is guaranteed to be able to remedy.
The regional official who had planned the program was similarly undis-
turbed by my observations, arguing that the more advanced villagers (though
still classifiable as masyarakat terasing) had been included in order to set an ex-
ample for the more backward people who were the true targets of the program.
But, as I have already noted, the Punan one might have expected to find as the
"true targets" were actually excluded. A local field staff member explained to
me that the Punan were "really too different, not the kind of people who can ad-
just to living in the heat outside the forest, not interested in eating rice, and not
accustomed to farming." For these reasons, he had been unsurprised and even
sympathetic when the four Punan families that resided briefly at the site had de-
cided to leave. He had tried to persuade them to return, tracking them down in
their forest homes, but faced criticism from other settlers who argued that, ac-
cording to the rules, the Punan should be expelled for prolonged absence and for
failing to participate in the weekly communal work groups. He also observed
that his superiors would judge him on the criteria of whether or not the houses
were inhabited (are the people here?) and would be much less concerned, or per-
haps not concerned at all, about who exactly filled the slots. Here, then, is a fur-
ther working out of the selection compromise. Not only were the quintessential
"primitives," those in whose name and on whose behalf the program is designed,
excluded from it or allowed to go their own way, but their absence was ex-
plained in terms of their "primitive" nature, different culture, and inability to
adapt—precisely the characteristics the program is supposed to work on and
transform.
The headman of the neighboring village, part of whose population had
moved into the resettlement site (only a ten-minute walk from the village cen-
ter), had yet another perspective on the selection question. He reported that the
village had been the recipient of a (free) government housing project in 1983
and had applied in 1990 for an extension of the project to accommodate newly
married couples and others who did not have good houses, including the few re-
maining in an old longhouse. They were all rather surprised when they were in-
formed that the housing would be supplied under the auspices of the program for
masyarakat terasing. "We thought it was rather strange [aneh]," he said, "and a
bit embarrassing, but, then, it is only a name, so it does not matter too much. We
understand that this is the name of their program, so we just have to put up with it."
Program Implementation
The Depsos resettlement program is designed to be implemented in stages.
By the end of year one, the settlers should begin to be familiar with the purpose
and proper use of their new houses and public facilities; begin to understand the
importance of remaining settled in one location so that children can go to school;
understand transportation systems; and understand the importance and useful-
ness of the guidance and instruction they are receiving. By years two to three,
they should have learned permanent agriculture, including tree crop production;
be able to subsist on the products of their land; and have acquired new and posi-
tive values in relation to religion, health, and education. By year four, household
production is to be increased and diversified; appropriate technology employed;
the quality and variety of consumption improved; cooperative ventures started;
communication with neighboring groups enhanced; capacity for rational think-
ing and collective decision making through discussion and consensus increased;
and consciousness of the need for national peace and order implanted, together
with increased understanding of, and love for, the nation and observance of na-
tional laws and regulations.
One difficulty that might be expected in the implementation of the program
is its superfluous nature: many of the recruits already have at the outset the at-
tributes expected as the end products of the transformation process. This is the
compromise that averts failure and virtually guarantees that the program will be
declared a success when the time comes for evaluation, a consideration already
present in the identification/selection process I have described. But only a dog-
matic outsider, lacking or refusing cultural intimacy, unattuned to the ways
things are said and done, would insist on pointing this out. The official monitor-
ing and evaluation process focuses on whether the inputs were delivered: houses
built, goodies handed out, guidance lectures presented. Evaluation documents
do not refer to a specific set of baseline data but simply repeat the standard nar-
rative about isolated folk who needed to be, and have successfully been, devel-
oped. In any case the planning documents, if they could be located, would not
disrupt the story line. The paper trail is thin on details, and many local govern-
ment offices, including Depsos, are remarkably paper free.13
The program recipients in both sites, when I asked them, were not willing
to pass judgment on the program as a whole. Indeed, they could not, for they had
not been made privy to its conceptual logic and were not informed about all the
deficiencies they were supposed to have had nor the radical ways in which the
program inputs were supposed to transform them. Recognition by program offi-
cials that this information would be offensive might account for the lack of
detail, as could the consideration that the so-called primitives are not themselves
the most important audience for statements about state capacities to bring about
transformation and development.14 The evaluations the recipients were able and
willing to make referred to specific components of the project of importance to
them, namely, whether they were in fact given the inputs promised to them and
how useful, or useless, these inputs turned out to be. In these cases and others
that I have seen or which have been reported (e.g., Suparlan 1995) there was a
gap, sometimes a chasm, between promise and delivery which potentially com-
promised the individuals who delivered the program and the program as a
whole, exposing its self-proclaimed competence and generosity to a grounded
critique of its empty words, silly advice, poor quality, and short measure. Com-
plaints I heard were that the hoes broke on first use, the full food ration was not
provided, the young and inexperienced field staff needed constant guidance
from those they were supposed to guide, and the tasks residents were required to
perform for the collective good and their own self-improvement (fence building,
sign painting, path clearing, attending lectures, and greeting guests) were time-
consuming distractions that kept them from making a living. In the Sumatran re-
settlement site studied by Parsudi Suparlan (1995) the settlers understood their
compliance with the program's labor and attendance requirements to be just re-
turn for the gifts they had received, but their sense of obligation diminished as
the ration period ended. Field staff informed me that withholding rice rations
was their standard recourse when persuasion failed, the right to exercise direct
discipline being the counterpart to paternalistic generosity.15 Such forms of dis-
cipline are thin, however, and after the ration period ended the field staff both in
Suparlan's study and in the two sites I describe here found themselves without a
reliable audience for instruction or command.
In a different Kalimantan site, settlers described for me in detail the defi-
ciencies in the package they received when compared to that given to Javanese
transmigrants in a neighboring settlement. They attributed the difference to the
association of Depsos with charity rather than "development" and to the logic of
the program title: "Everything about this program is poor quality because they
think we are worthless; that's what it means to be called masyarakat terasing.
The government loves the Javanese, but they despise us." These comments indi-
cate that the label the settlers accepted in order to obtain access to the goods they
wanted nevertheless hurt and compromised them. They also reveal the risks
posed by the compromise, which selects as project recipients people who are
more than capable of launching articulate and well-informed critiques.16 Under
these conditions, the usual response to criticism—"They need more guidance;
they do not yet fully understand"—is unpersuasive, even perhaps to a listener
fully implicated in the cultural intimacies of compromise and rule.
Model Livelihoods and Project Land

The livelihood model promoted by the program is the two-hectare family
farm. This is the model assumed to be "normal" for Indonesia's rural population
and is associated in government rhetoric not only with pragmatics of food and
DEVELOPMENT A N D RULE IN INDONESIA 311
market production but with the moral goodness of routinized work in orderly
fields and villages. In practice the two hectares of land allocated to the settlers is
seldom capable of providing an adequate living, let alone an improvement over
the diverse array of activities, such as swidden farming, tree crop production,
forest product collection, and wage labor in the timber sector, that sustain the
target populations. Because the project resources do not provide a viable alter-
native, the settlers have no option but to continue with these practices, including
cycles of seasonal or longer-term mobility, dooming from the outset the project
of "settling them down." Field staff, who must live at the site, soon recognize its
ecological limits. They therefore accommodate existing patterns of resource use
to avoid impoverishing the settlers and hope that they will find ways to stay in
place, at least until the five-year project cycle is completed and the evaluation
signed off. As a result, a program that sets out to accomplish a total transforma-
tion in lives and livelihoods makes few changes to people's material conditions,
except for the provision of houses. The settlers continue to survive and prosper
as a result of their own sweat and initiative, unimpressed by empty claims about
agricultural improvement: "An extensionist visited once and gave us each a
handful of seeds and half a bag of fertilizer—what use is that?" However, wise
to the limits of their environment and inclined to be skeptical, they are not espe-
cially surprised by this aspect of program failure. They weigh program deficien-
cies against the gains, which include some genuinely useful gifts.
In terms of livelihoods, the hill people who moved into the resettlement site
on the Sulawesi coast found themselves in an impossible situation. The coastal
strip is very narrow, and the only cultivable land belongs to others, so they were
allocated a barren area in the dry foothills. This was an area used by coastal vil-
lagers to graze cattle and goats. The coastal people are not primarily farmers but
survive on wage labor in the coconut sector or further afield, petty trade, low-
tech fishing, and some seasonal farming of food and cash crops in the hills. The
main difference between them and the hill people is that the latter are more com-
mitted farmers—contrary to the program logic, which assumes that the "primi-
tive" hill folk need to be taught this skill. The hill people maintained their hill
farms while living in the coastal resettlement site, hiking up and down daily, and
it was to their reasonably successful hillside farming ventures that they returned
when their rice rations ended and the "demonstration plot," together with the
few heads of corn they had agreed to plant on their program-designated plots,
were eaten by goats or shriveled up in the heat. When quizzed about this situ-
ation, the regional Depsos official responsible for the program stated that he had
been aware that the designated land was not great, but he felt so sorry for the hill
people who were unable to send their children to school that he had decided to
go ahead with the project anyway. The layers of compromise in this statement
were not further revealed, although some of them can be surmised.
In the Kalimantan site, the contentious issue was not land suitability but
land allocation. The project-design document has appended to it five neat dia-
grams showing the boundaries of the 462.5 hectares of contiguous land desig-
nated for the project and details of its slope, elevation, potential for flooding,
and current land use. The current vegetation is shown as scrub. The document
notes that it is state land in use by local residents for shifting cultivation
(ladangs) and held under customary tenure. It does not mention how or whether
rights to this land would be reallocated or redefined in order to allocate the
standard two-hectare plot to each new project resident. When the project was
proposed, there was a meeting of the village committee (the LKMD) in the main
village site, and an agreement was signed to the effect that the land to the right
and left of the road would be given up for the purpose of building the settlement
without claims for compensation. The document mentions nothing about farm-
land. The context in which this document was produced may have included, be-
sides the usual compromises, some coercion or perhaps confusion. The implica-
tions of the project design for the distribution of farmland may not have been
fully understood by the village committee, for what they had in mind, as I noted
earlier, was simply a housing project. The villagers upon whose land the settle-
ment houses were built were, in the end, compensated through the decision to in-
clude them in the project and give them the standard package of goods (house,
rice ration, and so on)—a compromise much resented by others who felt they
better deserved, but did not receive, such charity. There was no movement, how-
ever, on the allocation of the farmland, and some residents of the settlement
claimed that they had even been forbidden by the customary landowners from
making use of the quarter-hectare garden plots surrounding their project-built
houses. In particular, they were prevented from planting fruit trees, a customary
sign of ownership.
There were various perspectives on this situation among the Depsos staff
associated with the project. One view was that the resettlement site was a gov-
ernment project, approved by the governor, under which the residents had the
right to the two-hectare plot of land promised in the project design. The land is
owned by the government, and any customary rights that pertain are overruled
when the government decides to reallocate the land in the national interest and
for the purpose of development.17 Therefore, the residents should go ahead and
use the land, ignoring what the customary owners say. This is a strong statement
about the nature and rights of "the state," but the detailed picture reveals com-
promises and contradictions: Why, if it was already government land, was the
village committee asked to sign a statement releasing the land to the government
for the purposes of the project? There is a gap here between official talk and the
actions of officials trying to get a project under way. These are not only local
compromises. A Depsos official in Jakarta confirmed that one of the reasons for
the slow progress of the resettlement program has been the difficulty in identify-
ing empty land—this in a nation in which 76 percent of the terrain is legally de-
fined as "forest" and stated to belong to the government (Peluso 1992). The
document signed by the villagers could be seen as a way of making them ac-
knowledge the legitimacy of the state's claim, but the fact that such confirma-
tion was deemed necessary hints at a recognition of the rights of the customary
users to "state land" or, at the very least, a desire on the part of Depsos to avoid
trouble.
Another official suggested that the land allocation problem should be set-
tled through a compromise that does not cause too much loss of livelihood or in-
come (tidak terlalu merugikan) to either the customary landholders or the settle-
ment residents, perhaps by reducing the area of land designated for the project to
about one hundred hectares. He also observed, correctly, that the allocation of
land anticipated in the project blueprint was not especially important for many
of the residents of this particular site because they were from the area anyway
and had their own customary land both within and outside the (nominal)
boundaries so neatly outlined on the planning map. In proposing a compromise
to settle a problem between squabbling villagers, he confirmed the necessity of
the state's guiding hand. The scenario is more remarkable if one recalls the
source of the conflict: in this case a government program that was designed, ap-
parently, in ignorance of the local understandings about rights and claims that
would both cause the initial fuss and be invoked by both villagers and officials
in its resolution.
Development: Giving Generously or Taking Away?

There is clearly a complex economy of rights and claims at work in the al-
location of land for this program, much less singular or definitive than indicated
by legal codes, officials statements, or NGO critics pressing for the recognition
of customary land rights (see Li in press; Peluso 1995). There are many in-
stances in which one or another branch of the state apparatus, backed by military
support, has acted in a draconian fashion to force people off land they consider
their own (Colchester 1986a, 1986b; Dove 1999; White 1999). But the fact that
there are, according to NGO sources (Lynch and Talbott 1995), up to 65 million
people currently living "illegally" on land classified as "state" forest indicates
that, most of the time, "the state" either cannot, or elects not to, implement its
own laws. This situation could be seen, again, as a weakness of the state system,
a failure of "the state" to assert effective control over the relation between popu-
lation and resources. It could also be seen as an approach to rule that balances
state claims to ownership (which legitimate the naked power sometimes as-
serted) with claims about state generosity in permitting people to make use of
state land for the purposes of gaining a livelihood (so long as they do not occupy
space immediately required for "development"). I heard officials speaking in
these terms on more than one occasion, although I doubt it is an "official" posi-
tion. As individuals, it is understandable that officials would prefer an interpre-
tation that stresses their humane concern for struggling villagers over one that
highlights their own incompetence.
A different land conflict involving the same set of villagers, this time
united, erupted in violence, showing the limits of state generosity as a mode of
rule. The village lies within a massive area allocated to the parastatal forestry
conglomerate Inhutani. Villagers were enraged when industrial tree seedlings
were planted in the middle of their tidal paddy lands. There was a heated dispute,
and police and other authorities intervened. Two sides were taken: officials arguing
the preeminence of national law, and residents emphasizing their customary and
moral rights both to the land and to "survive and feed their families" as citizens
of Indonesia, which, they argued, are stronger than Inhutani' s "rights on paper."
The coercive enforcement of rules produced not order but chaos, to which the
exercise of brute power was an unsatisfactory but apparently inevitable re-
sponse. Officials were charged with responsibility for "settling down" the peo-
ple, a task they explained in the paternalistic language well honed on masyarakat
terasing but applied more generally to unruly villagers: the need to "impart un-
derstanding" (memberipengertian) to people whose mental capacities and grasp
of the concept of development were still sadly deficient (Dove 1999). This lan-
guage allows little room for compromise among those who are its targets, for it
is all too obvious that the development state was, in this instance, not giving but
taking away.
On an everyday basis, however, generous giving serves as an important
component of New Order "development" in general and the Depsos program in
particular.18 Needy people are being given assistance by a generous state that un-
derstands the aspirations of its citizens. All of the Depsos inputs are framed as
gifts, and they are ritualized accordingly: there are ceremonies to hand over the
keys to the houses, to open public buildings, and so on. The idiom is reinforced
every time senior officials visit a site. The format of the visits I observed in-
cluded a meeting with the assembled residents during which the officials asked,
"What else do you need here, to make your lives better?" The reply was a list of
goods or government services: "We are still lacking in electricity," "We could
use a new pressure lamp," "Our school building has no furniture yet." To ensure
that the impact of a generous state is immediately felt, Jakarta officials have a
special budget for bahan pendekatan (literally, "goods to make you closer" or
perhaps better rendered as "contact goods," evoking efforts to coax very timid
and primitive folk). In practice, these are gifts that senior officials purchase spe-
cially so that they have something to hand over when they visit resettlement
sites, to "make the people feel happy"—and grateful. When I discussed with an
official the annoyance that settlers were expressing about the insulting label
"masyarakat terasing," he replied, "It is true, we hear that all the time, they do
not want the label. But if we ask them whether they want all the things we give
them, they say yes!" The logic of gifts is especially important in relations of rule
if it precludes an alternative framing in terms of rights and entitlements. Such
containment is precarious, however, as the conflict with Inhutani clearly shows.
Reflections on Development, Culture, and Rule

The resettlement program examined in this article is a clear and probably
extreme example of an attempt to reform subjectivities and reorder space for the
betterment of the population and for ease of rule. The argument I have made is
that the Foucauldian concept of governmentality provides a better guide to the
project of rule than it does to an understanding of how rule is accomplished. To
appreciate the latter, one needs to understand the cultural framings embedded in
the ethnographic details: how objects of planning are defined, selected, and ar-
rayed; the forms of interaction between officials and those they would constitute
as clients; the approach taken to deviations from the plan; whether "the rules"
are vigorously enforced or generously, paternalistically ignored to better en-
mesh, indeed to compromise, the objects of planning. These should be consid-
ered, moreover, not as exceptions or oversights but as part of how rule is accom-
plished. By this I do not mean to suggest that compromise is planned or
preconfigured in the plan, engineered by an omniscient and very subtle state for
the purpose of rule. Its consequences for rule are, instead, the unintended out-
come of culturally informed action, the result of people's intimate knowledge of
their own state system, which includes the knowledge of "how to go on" in a va-
riety of contexts, including when up against a problematic plan or rule. I would
emphasize also that it is shared cultural knowledge, reproduced and revised un-
der changing conditions, not simply the ad hoc invention of strategic actors
striving to make their own lives and tasks easier.
The implication of my analysis is that attempts to reconfigure the condi-
tions under which people live their lives, if too vigorously pursued, would be
rather vulnerable to failure. No plan could anticipate every contingency or fully
transform the social world because "disciplinary effects confront not docile
bodies but situated cultural practices and sedimented histories of people and
place" (Moore in press). Unilaterally imposed, a development plan might sim-
ply miss its mark or invite hostile reactions, in either case revealing its political
dimension and foregrounding power rather than embedding it seamlessly in the
everyday. Similarly, a development apparatus hermetically sealed within a dis-
cursive regime that fails to connect with its presumed subjects would soon break
down. Instead, longevity and a modicum of "success" in development programs
and other projects of rule are secured through their failures and the gaps and fis-
sures that yield not only room for maneuver but the possibility of the culturally
intimate—but often uncomfortable—forms of engagement I have explored
through the term compromise.
Attention to the "how" of rule has become prominent in historical studies
grounded in political economy (e.g., Abrams 1988; Cohn and Dirks 1988; Cor-
rigan and Sayer 1985; Joseph and Nugent 1994) that argue that the state system,
through its rituals and routine operations, produces (and disguises) the relations
of power on which the reified idea of "the state" is based. The Foucauldian con-
cept of governmentality takes one, via a somewhat different route, to a similar
place: to an understanding of the ways rule is embedded in mundane practices
and procedures so that "the state" appears increasingly abstract, apparently re-
moved from daily life just at the point when relations of rule are at their most in-
tense (Mitchell 1991). Reviewing these arguments from the perspective of my
ethnographic study, I find their general thrust persuasive, but they sometimes
overestimate the capacity of "the state" to fashion or present itself in its chosen
terms and to implement the projects that are designed to embed relations of rule.
While the abstract idea of "the state" is often present in everyday discourse and
practice, there is a gap between the state idea and the reality of more or less con-
tradictory programs, initiatives, and statements that people encounter directly
(Gupta 1995). The ethnographer, like her or his subjects, is left wondering
whether these fragmentary, local, personalized, and frequently unsatisfactory

encounters can really be "it"—reinforcing the perception that the powerful state
exists but is somewhere else, probably in an office in the capital city. These ex-
periences offer a clueto the processes through which the idea of "the state" takes
hold and is instantiated in local settings, even as they threaten to expose its conceit.
By emphasizing compromise, rather than the more familiar binaries ac-
commodation and resistance, I have sought to build on Sayer's insight that it is
"very rarely a question of 'the state' here and resistance there" (1994:376, em-
phasis in original), although such conjunctures can arise. Resettlement sites de-
signed as units of orderly administration for compliant citizens may become the
locus of a different kind of community as people forge collective identities mo-
bilized through historical struggles, as agents capable of making claims on—or
opposing the claims of—others, "the state" included. This is a capacity for ac-
tion or agency constituted not outside but within the framework of state institu-
tions and relations of rule.191 gave one example in which the separation of state
and society produced through the exercise of planning enabled a community to
find new and stronger ways to define "itself and contest state plans that threat-
ened to appropriate crucial resources.
As Sayer reminds us, "rule IJ accomplished, domination is secured much of
the time" (1994:373, emphasis in original). How does this happen? My contri-
bution to this well-established line of inquiry has been to argue that the reified
"up there" state, or state project, would be even more vulnerable to exposure
without the everyday compromises that characterize the relationship between
state functionaries and citizens. Critique is muted by an intimate, sometimes
cynical knowledge of the limits of state capacity to deliver on promises and the
recognition that government officials must also live lies and adapt if they are to
get things done. It is this intimate knowledge, rather than ignorance or false con-
sciousness, that facilitates rule and draws people into compromising positions
and relationships. My discussion veers therefore toward a Gramscian notion of
politics as the locus "where forces and relations, in the economy, in society, in
culture, have to be actively worked on to produce particular forms of power,
forms of domination" (Hall 1991:124, cited in Moore in press, emphasis added).
It implies an understanding of hegemony not as consent, nor as the project of a
singular and coherent state, but as a terrain of struggle and, more prosaically, as
the routine and intimate compromises through which relations of domination
and subordination are lived.1®
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank Victor Li, Donald Moore, Tim Babcock, Pauline Bar-
ber, Lindsay DuBois, and Donna Young for critical readings of an early draft of this ar-
ticle. Thanks also go to Dan Segal and four reviewers for Cultural Anthropology for
incisive commentary that contributed significantly to the final version.
1. See Corrigan and Sayer 1985, Dove 1999, Herzfeld 1997a.
2. See, for example, the contributions in Crush 1995 and Sachs 1992.
3. Michael Herzfeld (1997b) uses the term cultural intimacy to explore the paradox
that loyalty to one's nation, like love for one's family, stems from an intimate knowledge
of its flaws and imperfections. I take this insight in a slightly different direction by leav-
ing the question of love and loyalty open and considering the compromises implied by
such shared knowledge.
4. Much of the discussion in Cooper and Stoler's introduction to the Tensions of
Empire (1997) is relevant to my project here, especially their emphasis on the fragility
and contingency of rule and the continuous effort required to produce and maintain the
necessary social boundaries.
5. Hefner (1990:250) poignantly describes the continuing agony of both the fami-
lies of victims and the villagers active or complicit in this violence, clarifying the terrible
backdrop against which "order" might be a popular desire, as well as an imposition.
6. For reasons of confidentiality and diplomacy, I am deliberately vague about the
location of the two sites and the ethnolinguistic groups involved. I am also unable to give
details about the conditions under which I visited them. I can confirm that my analysis
draws on more than ten years of research and writing on topics related to Indonesia's
more isolated people and their relations to the Indonesian state system, although my vis-
its to the two sites discussed here were of a "rapid appraisal" variety. I have visited five
resettlement sites in addition to these two and found broadly similar conditions.
7. Compare this with Trouillot's (1991) argument about the "savage slot" and its
role in the constitution of anthropology as a discipline.
8. For a fascinating discussion of "room for maneuver" in relations between devel-
opers and tribes in Indonesia, see Tsing 1999.
9. In addition to "primitives," Depsos is responsible for orphans, prostitutes, un-
ruly children, and other wayward folk.
10. People not interested in becoming "candidates" for the program have their own
strategies of avoidance. According to Tsing (1993:93, 96), some residents of the Mera-
tus mountains line up their own houses so that it "looks good when the government
comes to visit" and serve good food to important visitors so that they will be satisfied and
go away. As in the cases I describe here, people who stayed on in resettlement sites were
those who already lived in the area, while those who were from far away eventually
"went home" (Tsing 1993:176).
11. To preserve confidentiality I do not give references for these documents.
12. Peluso (1992) describes the compromises made to meet the criteria of success
in a social forestry project in Java—in that case, the requirement that seedlings be in the
ground on the eve of a forest manager's visit.
13. Much of the exemplary work on state formation and rule has been historical in
focus and relies on the archival record, for example, Corrigan and Sayer 1985, Joseph
and Nugent 1994, and Nugent 1994, as well as the work on "colonialism's culture"
(Thomas 1994), the "tensions of empire" (Cooper and Stoler 1997), and colonial rule
(Chatterjee 1993; Cohn 1996; Dirks 1992). As these scholars recognize, reliance on ar-
chival sources carries the risk of exaggerating the coherence of state plans, projects, and
procedures and falling prey to the specter of a unified "state" with a singular rationality
and purpose. The everyday practice of compromise leaves few traces. In the case I have
presented here, the archival record offers considerable insight on the project to civilize
"primitives" but a fantastical version of the histories, livelihoods, and aspirations of the
people touched by it. These are precisely the kinds of details the project documents and
the project itself, with its concern to perform standardized operations on generic "primi-
tives," are designed to obscure. Indeed, officials were surprised by my dogged attempts
to unearth these documents in project offices, for they themselves set little store by them
as a source of information: the documents' functions are to record a project process
unfolding as it should, keep superiors happy, and maintain the flow of funds. As one of-
ficial told me, "There is no point in reading those things, one is just like another; when
we write them we just copy a previous one and change a few bits of information here and
there." Information on local details is conveyed, when needed, in verbal form. This ap-
proach to knowledge is, as I have argued, quite compatible with rule, but it would be
quite incompatible with a research process in which the archive was the sole or major
source of information.
14. In conversations among themselves or with me, some officials made disparag-
ing comments about "primitives," which indicates that they had absorbed the program
rhetoric or else elected to mouth it in bad faith. In direct encounters with the (not very
"primitive") people in my study sites, officials were generally diplomatic and polite.
15. This form of punishment of course compromises the project goal of settling
mobile folk in one place, for without their rice ration they are obliged to seek work else-
where.
16. Tsing (1993) has shown that people in an out-of-the-way place may have quite
subversive critiques of the government, but some of the styles in which their critiques are
articulated seem to require an interpretive effort beyond the reach of a casual visitor,
making their audience select.
17. There are legal provisions for compensating customary landowners whose land
is appropriated for "development," but these are not invoked by Depsos because the pro-
gram is assumed to bring benefits to the community outweighing any individual loss.
18. The centrality of gifts to the rhetoric and practice of development has also been
observed in Sri Lankan contexts. See Brow 1990 and Woost 1994. For a discussion of
the limits of gifts as an instrument of rule in Thailand, see Vandergeest 1991.
19. On the problem of pure spaces of resistance, see Mitchell 1990 and Moore
1998. For a study of the constitution of community in the context of resource struggles
and development interventions, see Li 1996.
20. For a discussion of hegemony as a state project and as a terrain of struggle, see
Roseberry 1994; for dissident remarks on this subject, see Sayer 1994; and on hegemony
as the way domination is lived, see Williams 1977.
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Compromising Power: Development,

Culture, and Rule in Indonesia

COMPROMISE v.t. to settle by mutual concession; to place in a position of difficulty

Cultural Anthropology 14(3):295-322. Copyright © 1999. American Anthropological Association.

presents itself as serving a "national interest" apparently above politics (Chat-

institutional capacity, and a more powerful state apparatus. He attributes this

established order as if its representations were reality" (1994:374). I would add

The term for "development" New Order-style is pembangunan, with a par-

Indonesia's Program for the Resettlement of Isolated People

"lessen the successful] image of national development" (Department of Social

The Program Logic

The program logic defines a project to normalize bodies, subjectivities, and

production techniques, such as shifting cultivation; inadequate housing, nutri-

Identifying the Target Group

Undoubtedly, it greatly frustrates foreign experts. Under the dev-speak rubric of

marginal populations as a labor force, in view of the huge numbers of impover-

Model Livelihoods and Project Land

Development: Giving Generously or Taking Away?

Reflections on Development, Culture, and Rule

whether these fragmentary, local, personalized, and frequently unsatisfactory

Li, Tania Murray

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