Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers in the Sumatran uplands began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse.
Listen in: https://bit.ly/3YXUNOp
Scott talks with environmental anthropologist David Gilbert to delve into the history and politics of Indonesia’s landback movements. They discuss how grassroots agrarian workers organized to resist corporate and governmental land grabs under the authoritarian regime of Suharto and the New Order. They also get into the Cold War politics of the region, U.S. intervention in Indonesia and current political developments in Indonesia.
Bio//
David Gilbert is an environmental anthropologist with a special interest in social movements, ecological change, and post-development theory. David is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He held previous positions as at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. He is the author of “Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography.”
He is active in protest movements across four continents, from Sumatra and Amazonia to Catalonia and California.
Sign up to get updates on scrappy politics, scrappy history and our scrappy podcast.