Presentation short abstract

Differentiations in the landscape are easy to overlook. This paper examines the storied landscapes of Indigenous recognition through the perspectives and dilemmas among local youth. It spotlights the idea of intersectional inheritance as a way to understand how crops and people reproduce landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

In communities undergoing agrarian transition in Southeast Asia, the very practice of crop production embodies continuity, possibility, loss, and transformation. Beyond the institutions of tenure, acts of cultivation shape land and resource use in dynamic ways, defining how tradition is sustained, forgotten, or replaced. Whether a crop is deeply embedded in a community’s identity and subsistence (like rice) or considered a relative newcomer through commodity booms (e.g. rubber), each initial experiment or repetition represents legacy, risk, and possibility. Relations of cultivation are often dismissed or easily overlooked, but form a tapestry connecting memory with desire in the landscape. I analytically propose a closer examination of these relations under the conceptual framing of landscape of potential/precarity, rooted in opportunity for some, invoking risk for others. Theorizing a relational binary in this way connect claims to the past with articulations of the future, situating uneven political ecologies of inheritance. Evidence emerged from multi-year ethnographic engagement in Kajang, Sulawesi, following local youth life stories in the aftermath of Indigenous recognition. I center constitutive experiences represented by two young men considered gendered examples of success among their peers. Their uneven, inchoate trajectories, provide novel insights on variegated agrarian change in Southeast Asia.