Positions

The relations I explore in this chapter are those that positioned Lauje highlanders as poor and backward, and encouraged them to seek ways to improve their situation. These relations reach back in time to the eighteenth century, outward to colonial and national policies and distant markets, and inward to the very immediate and concrete: what crops would grow where, the pattern of rainfall, and encounters between highlanders and coastal folk when they met face-to-face. There was some coercion, but it was difficult to compel highlanders to do someone's bidding so long as they controlled their land and grew their own food. My title "positions" flags the way in which identities were formed relationally, as highlanders and coastal folk developed distinct habits and structures of feeling. Position also signals the spatial element of these relations, and the entanglement of topography with identities, practices, and powers.

Powers

In 1990, driving into the Lauje area from west to east along the road that hugs the coast on the north side of the Gulf of Tomini, it looked to me as though no one lived in the dry and barren hills that loomed to the left. For a casual observer who had no time or inclination to hike up into the hills, the barren appearance of the foothills was misleading. The slopes facing the coast were in a rain shadow for most of the year, and only good for one corn crop in the short season that brought rain from the east. No one lived on those slopes, although cattle roamed and poor people gathered fuel wood to sell. The twenty thousand people who lived in the highlands were far inland, well out of sight. Along the narrow coastal strip there were substantial brick houses lining the road at the center of each of the desas, and shabby bamboo huts by the road at the desa peripheries, in the muddy lanes behind the brick houses, and on the shore alongside small wooden fishing boats. Coconut palms were the main vegetation, tall, skinny, and well past their prime. Access to the Lauje area was mainly by sea until 1975 when a rough road was completed along the coast. In 1990 the trip by road from the provincial capital Palu took about ten hours, reduced to six hours in 1993 when the coastal road was paved, longer if a flood had washed out one of the bridges.

On my first visit, the headman of one of the nine Lauje desas informed me that highlanders "don't grow anything," adding "they only grow rice and corn." We were standing in the desa administration office, a one-room wooden structure devoid of furniture except for an information board and a sketch map nailed to the wall. The spaces on the information board where desa officials were supposed to insert data on population, production, and so on were mainly blank. The map, like the desa maps shown to me by other headmen in the Lauje area, covered the neatly aligned houses, mosques, marketplace, schools, and other facilities of the coastal strip in some detail, but was vague about the highlands, representing them in spatially compressed form with a few strokes of the pen. It took me some hours sitting with the headman to fill in the blank spaces and establish that there were people living in the highlands, and the people, the hills, and the rivers had names.

The headman's derisive dismissal of highlanders' food production, together with highlanders' invisibility on the desa map and data board, were not idiosyncratic. They were an indication of how a characterization of highlanders as wild, backward, and unproductive worked to secure particular relations of power. The headman neglected to mention that coastal people had depended on food produced by "backward" highlanders during the centuries before improved transport enabled sacks of rice to be imported. He overlooked the role that highland food production still played in 1990 as the main source of cheap food—corn and tubers—for coastal people who could not afford to buy the prestige food, rice. He did not describe how highlanders had been "feeding" the coastal merchants for two centuries by supplying the forest products (timber, rattan, resin) and cash crops (tobacco, shallots) from which the merchants made their profits. Nor did he mention that highlanders had already begun their own small experiments with planting new tree crops, cacao, and cloves. Highlanders did not need official prodding to identify a new opportunity.

It isn't unusual for people in positions of power over others (employers, chiefs) to treat the people who "feed" them with disdain. The headman's perspective was echoed by other headmen in the Lauje desas and by merchants, whose disdain was colored by frustration. Merchants' livelihoods depended upon these "wild" people but it wasn't easy to bind them into extractive relations. So long as highlanders had abundant land to grow their own food, merchants had no reliable means to compel them to sell their labor or their products. Nor could the small chiefdoms that formed on the coast in the period before Dutch colonial rule compel highlanders to pay tribute. When the Dutch colonial administration attempted to impose its control in the Lauje area around 1910, it too lacked the capacity to force highlanders to pay taxes or obey commands. A century later, some highlanders were still not incorporated in the desa administrative system, and desa maps and neighborhood lists were incomplete. Underpaid census takers I encountered in 2009, reluctant to hike far inland, planned to complete the census of 2010 as they had completed previous ones: by copying outdated lists of names supplied by neighborhood heads and filling in the blanks with guesswork.

The limited reach of state administration in the Lauje highlands is unusual for Indonesia, and rare also in other parts of Southeast Asia where, as James Scott has argued, most highlanders were enmeshed in state-based administrative systems by the middle of the twentieth century. The reason for limited administration was also different from the one Scott identified in other locales: Lauje highlanders did not resist rule, nor did they have a "genius" for managing their affairs without state interference. Desires for security and access to trade goods drew them into the orbit of coastal powers. Minimally they wanted salt, knife blades, cooking pots, cloth sarongs, shorts, shirts, and kerosene for the tiny wick lamps they made from discarded tin cans. These relations make little sense if we focus only on the coercive or "deductive" dimension of power emphasized by Scott in his discussion of how states or state-like entities subjugate people, impose fines and taxes, and extract goods and profits. It makes more sense if we examine how power works to produce subjects who desire particular ways of living. Desires come from somewhere, they have histories, but these are not histories of unilateral imposition. It was an array of powers—attraction, threat, coercion, the channeling of choice—that combined to position Lauje highlanders, and induced them to position themselves, in the spatially ordered hierarchy of an administrative regime and...