Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how the Batak people in the Batang Toru landscape employ a state of being silent to actualise demands for sharing and draw powerful outsiders involved in a nexus of conservation and extractive projects into a relation of interdependence.

Presentation long abstract

This paper aims to analyse how the Batak people interact with conservation in the midst of an ongoing process of de/frontierisation of their environments and living spaces, exonymically called the Batang Toru landscape. The presence of powerful outsiders—a nexus of extractive and conservation projects that encompasses mineral and energy companies, state forestry agencies, and conservation organisations—has produced messy encounters characterised not only by unequal power relations but also by an inherent contradiction that follows such ignorant interventions. The conservation projects hinge on their ignorance of the chronic injustices faced by the Batak people, adopting state spatial regimes and so-called participatory activities to accomplish the ultimate goal of habitat protection while simultaneously defeating the Batak people. Concomitantly, the Batak people also turn around and productively employ a state of being silent to actualise demands for sharing and hence draw the powerful outsiders into a relation of interdependence. In this process, being silent is often required as an integral part of neutralising outsider power and maintaining possibilities of being in relation with other powerful outsiders. Rooted partly in Batak kinship structures, being silent means not only allowing others to be determinative entities, but also assigning them a newly acquired role as affluent givers by subscribing to newly established moralised relations. This dynamic process of interdependency is key to proposing a relational, rather than negational, understanding of de/frontierisation in a highly contentious landscape such as Batang Toru.