Working Paper 1998/15
 

Timber plantations in Indonesia approaching the
predicaments of a modern utopia

Nils Bubandt
 
Visiting Fellow
Resource Management in the Asia-Pacific Project
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
11 December 1997

The plantation is, I believe, an excellent prism for looking at the politics of society.  Because the plantation is about the administration of a community, I feel it gives me an opportunity to look at the specific and often highly exotic workings of government bureaucracy in Indonesia as well as its way of implementing ‘development’, a key term in Indonesia politics, on the one hand, while continuing my interest in the local conditions of life in Halmahera, on the other.  In the plantation one gets a digestible serving of the national and the global cooked to the specifications of a local cuisine.
    The suggestion I would like to make here is, quite simply, that the plantation as a form of social organisation is uniquely modern.  I see the plantation as a model for administrative, bureaucratic modernity.  With apologies to Philip and a recent British movie, I think that in the plantation one can see modernity ‘go the full monty’.  It is a place where the dreams and hopes for a particular kind of society have been able to evolve.  The plantation expresses the utopian ideas inherent in modernity and may be seen as a concerted institutional attempt to implement these ideas.  The utopia, however, always recedes as the implementation proceeds because ‘something’ seems to transform the process of ordering into disorder at another level.  With examples from the plantation in Halmahera, I will describe the forever frustrated and unfinished process of ordering in modern institutions.  By looking at the plantation ‘from below’, from the perspective of those managed by the institution - in the case of the timber estate, transmigrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds - one can see that the attempts of social ordering continuously fail because the transmigrants navigate the rules and structures according to a multifaceted array of cultural strategies aimed at optimising their own livelihood on the estate according their varied perception of ‘the good life’.
    In order to highlight the plantation as a modern utopia, I will concentrate my talk on one kind of Indonesian timber estate in which the utopian ideas are most clearly expressed, namely the so-called HTI-Trans (integrated timber estates) (see diagram 1).  There are roughly 200 timber plantations in Indonesia today, by far most which are located in the Outer Islands.  When they are built to their full extension, they will cover well over 7 million hectares (70,000 square kilometres, almost twice the size of Denmark). The process of converting forest into plantations continues at a rate of about 400,000 hectares a year.  To date about 2 million hectares have already been established, not a mean feat considering that the plantation effort in the form of HTIs only began in earnest in 1990.  In  that same year (1990), the total area of plantations in the world was estimated at 135 million hectares, 90 % of which are timber plantations for industrial use (Kanowski 1997:1).  Like those in Indonesia, the timber estates of the rest of the world supply the wood industry, predominantly the paper and pulp industry as well as plywood factories and the sawn wood industry.  Indonesian plantations may account for only a small proportion of the global plantation area, but the pace of plantation build-up in Indonesia is one of the highest in the world (Kanowski 1997:2).
    In terms of acreage the integrated timber estates form a minor part of the overall plantation effort in Indonesia (about 10 per cent).  They are nevertheless a large-scale, government-initiated and government-sponsored programme of social forestry involving over 700,000 hectares of land and somewhere in the order of 50,000-100,000 resettled plantation workers and dependents spread into 74 plantations in 13 provinces throughout the country.  They are especially numerous in Kalimantan and Sumatra, but are also found in south Sulawesi and Maluku.  The integrated timber plantations are interesting because they combine two national efforts in Indonesia, both of which have colonial roots: the plantation establishment and the transmigration programme.
    The labour to plant and care for the plantation tress comes thus from transmigrants, half of whom originate from Java , while the other half is local (from surrounding villages and hamlets in the area of the estate).  The Department of Transmigration prepares the houses of the transmigrants from felled wood within the site (often cut on what is strictly speaking an illegal basis, since they do not bother to get an IPK.  The remaining felled wood is burnt!).  It also supplies the transmigrants with rice and a few other basic necessities for a one-year period.  In practice many HTI-Trans estates also have a high percentage of temporary labourers, often single males from villages around the estate.  With an area of  23,000 hectares, the estate in Halmahera for example has, aside from about 100 office workers and supervisors, 2,500 transmigrants and between 300-500 temporary workers.  The temporary workers form an overflow pool of labour, since they can be hired and fired to make up the shifting seasonal gaps between supply and demand for labour.  The temporary workers are thus in an insecure labour situation which furthermore marginalises them on the estate as both insiders and outsiders.  The transmigrants, meanwhile, are in the opposite position.  While the work is voluntary and they are not legally required to work on the estate, they are in effect structurally forced to do so, because they are given ownership of a quarter of a hectare of land which is not enough to provide for their needs.  In addition each family is given share-cropping rights to one hectare of plantation forest in return for caring for the trees on this area, but because they are not given ownership of this land few have wanted to work on these offered plots.  The transmigrants are thus both farmers and wage labourers.  As Sidney Mintz noted a long time ago (Mintz 1959:43), the double role of the plantation workers as peasants and wage labourers leaves them straddling two kinds of socio-cultural forms.  This straddling is actually done on purpose in all plantations.  But while the peasant background of the plantation worker is retained for economic reasons outside the estate in other plantation forms, in the Indonesian transmigration estate the peasant-worker exists within one integrated project.  As I shall show the transmigrants have various strategies for dealing with the constraints imposed on them by this situation.
    The both insecure and constrained labour situation of the transmigration estate has led some observers to label it ‘timber estate slavery’ (see Economic and Business Review of Indonesia, 7 May 1992:10, quoted in Brookfield 1995:105).  This term is not accurate given that the wage of the workers ‘on paper’ is relatively high (though by no means perceived as satisfactory by the plantation workers) and given that the basis of the work contract and the transmigrants’ stay on the estate is voluntary.  Most of all it is inaccurate because it casts the plantation in a feudal mould, rather than a capitalistic, benevolent and hypermodernist mould, a miscasting that misses many of the timber estate’s principal characteristics.  For while the conceptual ancestry of the timber estate programme may be found in the colonial plantations of forced labour as they developed on Java during the nineteenth, which, in its turn, had been inspired conceptually by the eighteenth century slave plantations of the New World, the ‘hyper-modern’ timber plantation of the 1990s has an organisational rationale and a set of imperatives of its own.
    The HTI-Trans are joint ventures between private companies and a national logging company of the State Forestry Department (known as Inhutani I-V).  The two partners divide costs and profits between them on a 60:40 basis.  The actual running of the estate is in the hands of the estate company, which is usually a daughter-company of the logging company in whose concession area the estate is set up.  The higher officials and employees in the estate management are almost all recruited from the logging company.  The national logging company, on the other hand, retains a supervisory and rather passive role.  The Department of Forestry makes forest land available to the estate plantation on a 45 year lease basis (35 years + 1 daur).  All land on the estate, except the quarter hectare donated to each transmigrant family, remains the property of the State and the estate permit can be revoked at any time during the first five year trial period, if the estate company fails to fulfil its obligations.  The company’s capacity to meet annual planting targets seems to be the most important criteria for judging whether the it fulfils its obligations.  Social criteria like worker satisfaction or ecological criteria, such as the establishment of fire or pest prevention measures, on the other hand, seem to be of negligent importance in deciding whether to extend plantation concessions.  In Maluku 14 companies were originally given the go-ahead to open timber estates.  Seven of these however had their plantation permits revoked during a clean-up campaign in 1995, all of them for not meeting their annual planting targets (RKT).
    There is much to be said about the ecological risks and the political economy of the plantation estates.   I will not go into these aspects here, however.  Instead I would like to take a step back and look at the timber plantation from a conceptual point of view as an institutional and ideological device, a device or a model for the organisation of society that is distinctive of modernity.  The way the transmigration plantation is being implemented in Indonesia makes it clear, however, that the plantation as model for modernity is adapted to implement a peculiarly Indonesian vision of modernity.  I will describe the plantation as an institution and its homologies with the unfinished project of modernity as a whole by going through a few concepts for thinking about the timber estate as a governmental device and a cultural model.  It should be evident from this that ‘imperial’ and administrative visions for the plantation are continuously undermined and I hope also to devote some time to describing the character of the mechanisms of ‘undermining’.
 

The plantation as a bureaucratic utopia

The integrated timber plantation in Indonesia envisages the production of timber by workers resettled on the estate.  As such it is a bureaucratic project that aims at the administration of both nature and society.  The timber plantation is the forester’s dream of the completely controlled and regularised forest which yields predictable profits combined with the bureaucrat’s or administrator’s dream of a completely controlled and regularised population which yield calculable and predictable amounts of labour.  The ideal unit of the plantation is the standard worker caring for the standard tree (Normalbaum) in the normal forest.  The timber plantation consists of even-aged, mono-cultural plots of fast-growing trees (Acacia, Paraserianthes, Eucalypts, pine or Gmelina).  The square plots have trees in rows at an optimal growing distance of each other and they are clear-cut on a rotational basis.  Conforming to a pattern known as the ‘classic normal forest’ (Osmaston 1968:93), there are as many uniform aged stands as there are years in the rotation: 10.  The transmigrants live in identical wooden houses with mud-floors and electricity, constructed in linear rows along linear streets.  The distance between the houses is 25 metres determined by the width of their quarter-hectare house plot.  A set number of households (about 25-30) make up a block, each marked by a letter in the alphabet, while 10-15 blocks make up one transmigration unit (UPT).  I hope this enough to convey a sense of the parallel between the linealisation of trees and people.  The lines of trees and the rows of houses, all arranged at an optimal, regular distance into ‘equi-productive’ blocks replicate each other: the social and natural landscape become mirrors of each other.
    The idea of systematising natural forests to optimise their yield and regularise production first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and is usually associated with German scientific forestry.  I came across a marvellous formulation of the extremely modernist notions entailed by scientific forestry in chapter five of a textbook on forestry from 1968.  The chapter is entitled ‘The normal forest’ and begins: It is this horror of confusion and simultaneous obsession with order and perfection that are the clearest traits of modernity, according to many writers on the modern condition.  Also note, how the forester is painfully, and somewhat sadly, aware that the full state of perfection is an ideal, yet he remains doggedly determined to pursue this unattainable ideal.  It is probably this process of pursuing order, rather than any actual or achieved order that best describes ‘the modern condition’.  As I shall explore later, this is the ‘predicament’ of the plantation as a modern utopia: a determined attempt to establish controlled order, which, even in its own understanding, is continuously frustrated.  The process of ordering that characterises modernity must therefore remain an on-going, forever unfinished struggle against what is perceived as the forces of disorder.  To the forester, the forces of disorder are ‘natural’.  They are bacteria, climate, pests, fires and other non-intentional agents.  To the administrator - the one in charge of ordering society -, however, the forces of disorder are ‘social’.  They inevitably appear to arise from the wilful resistance or inborn reluctance of those managed.  Contrary to the natural agents of chaos, the social forces of disorder tend to be regarded as intentionally or wilfully destructive of the strived-for order.  I shall return to this again below.
    The invention and technical application of an ideal of ‘normality’ in forestry by the end of the eighteenth century sounds, to me at least, uncannily familiar to Michel Foucault’s description of the rise of ‘normalizing or disciplinary power’ in the same century which has been described as a driving force of societal modernisation (see McNay 1994:100).  During the eighteenth century, a double form of normalising power, sometimes called bio-power, was, according to Foucault, established through the transformation of a series of new sciences and technologies of social surveillance.  On the one hand, eighteenth century prison reforms and a nineteenth century scientific preoccupation with sexuality within the domains of medicine, psychiatry, and education led to an acute focus on the aberrant or potentially abnormal individuality of the patient, the pupil and the inmate (Foucault 1978; 1979).  This focus took on social meaning within a discourse of normality which had as its implicit off-shoot the illusive figure of the ‘normal individual’.  On the other hand, eighteenth century demography shifted focus away from the family onto the discursive object of the population (Foucault 1980).  Health, living conditions and welfare became attributes of a generalised group, the population, that was defined as the mass of people that fell under the authority of the State by living within the perimeters of its territory.  The abstract concept of a population as an entity is a result of a variety of statistical techniques applied in medicine and welfare programmes that sought to tease out its characteristics: life expectancy, mortality rates, probable causes of death, average height, average weight, etc.  The object of these techniques cannot be adequately described as a vulgar wish to control by a unitary State.  Rather, and more confusingly, the population arose as a scientific, and later ‘popular’, object through a variety of attempts to achieve a panoptic (bird’s eye view) understanding of the ‘social’ and well-meaning efforts to implement benevolent social reforms in order to better the living conditions of the ‘masses’.  Despite the good ethics of most reforms behind the conceptual emergence of the ‘population’, the surveillance aspects of the reforms and new sciences also had a pragmatic utility.  The emerging capitalist mode of production found the statistical techniques and their implicit notion of the population obviously useful: The calculability of labour and resources is, as I tried to show, the main administrative appeal of the plantation.  What is interesting here, then, is that the ‘normal tree’ and the (normal) individual both became discursive ideals toward the end of the eighteenth century, just as the management of the ‘normal forest’ and the administration of the population became technically possible and morally desirable pretty much simultaneously in disciplines as separate as forestry on the one hand and demography/geography on the other.  Forestry may perhaps then be aligned with medicine, demography, psychiatry, and criminology as sciences that initiated bureaucratic, disciplinary modernity.  Is it a coincidence then that plantations were central tools of the colonial administration in many places of the world in the early days of nineteenth century, ‘modern’ colonialism?  Would it be inaccurate to say that the ‘modern’ plantations that replaced the slave-based plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were tools tightening colonial administration because the plantation, apart from being economically and politically important, acted as a cultural model for the bureaucratization of colonialism?  That the plantations were early attempts to implement an administrative utopia of colonial rule?  Just off-hand, I think the period of the Plantation System during Dutch colonial rule (1830-1870) acted as a huge, if failed, experiment in rationalised administration that perhaps helped fine-tune bureaucratic colonialism later on.  Richard Grove has shown in detail how the botanical garden and the island acted as central mental images in colonial administration which gave rise to a modern ‘environmental sensibility’.  It is thanks to colonial officers that we think of the world in terms of a fragile, global environment in need of care, regulation and protection.  This concern about the environment mirrored and continues to mirror social concerns (Grove 1995:482).  The establishment of botanical gardens and the first island protective laws in the eighteenth century were thus inspired by a Romantic search for a Utopian ideal and a deeply Christian notion of the Edenic garden (ibid.:483).  Creating an ordered environment through social restrictions was a way of recreating the divine order of Eden.  That such utopian attempts were placed on the colonial rim rather than in the European centre may appear surprising at first, but is on second thought quite logical for it was in the colony that a small and progressive bureaucratic elite had the power to carry out such experiments of social and natural improvement without political opposition.  The whole colony was in a way a site of utopian experimentation that would have been impossible in Europe.  It is clear that the plantation, run according to scientific calculus, is predominantly a colonial phenomenon (Padila 1959) and, I think, for these very reasons, too.  Like the botanical garden and the island, the plantation was a model of society as a whole - a site for administrative (and colonial) dreaming and acting - which could more easily be carried out in the colonies.  After all, the colonies were themselves as a whole exactly that: sites for administrative dreaming and acting.
    Whatever the historic and epistemic links between the productive rationalisation of forests and the social rationalisation of populations, it is certain that the confluence of the forestry ideal of control of nature and the bureaucratic ideal of control of an isolated population created a new social model of integrated governmentality.  The plantation as it has arisen in Indonesia since the early 1990s is thus an integrated institutional model directed only at the Outer Islands.  It might be described as an attempt to establish a social and ecological Utopia on the national rim.  To use Erving Goffman’s term, it is a ‘total institution’ in which the regularisation of trees and labour, of nature and society, is subsumed under the same administrative grid (see Goffman 1961).
 

The plantation as a total institution and a modern ‘heterotopia’.

Erving Goffman describes a ‘total institution’ as a bureaucratic organisation, peculiar to modern society, that cares for most of the needs of whole blocks of people at the same time as it restricts social intercourse between people within the total institution and society at large.  The function of the institution is always benevolent and seeks some sort of social reform or social care of those within the institution.  One can distinguish three main types of total institutions.  Like old people’s homes, mental hospitals, homes for the blind or orphaned, total institutions might seek to care for those who cannot care for themselves.  Second, total institutions may restrict dangerous individuals and attempt to reform them for their own good, such as prisons, re-education camps or labour camps.  Third, total institutions may be established to rationalise work and educate the ‘inmates’ to pursue this work more efficiently: army camps, boarding schools and merchant ships are examples of these.  It is within this last type that the plantation falls most squarely.
    First of all, it is important to understand that the timber estate programme in Indonesia was conceived and is implemented as a benevolent, progressive project both in terms of its environmental impact and in terms of its social aims.  Environmentally, plantations are aimed at alleviating the deforestation that is being caused by logging.  Plantations are supposed to supply the wood industry in an environmentally friendly manner as the government gradually phases out logging and introduces ITTO-backed eco-labelling of all timber.  Again, I will not dwell here on the ironies of the green rhetoric of the estate plantation programme but rather concentrate on the social reform aspects of the estate programme.  According to a provincial forestry official, the government carefully selected the logging companies with the best economic track records for the integrated plantation programme and placed on them ‘the small burden’, as he called it, of managing transmigrants rather than just employing temporary logging workers.  The timber plantation managements have clearly taken this social task on themselves and really see their role not just as an economic one of producing cheap wood but also as a social one of creating good educational, social, and economic conditions for all transmigrants.  The integrated timber plantation programme has thus definite social reform aspects.  The plantations are situated in forest areas and target in particular the inclusion of so-called ‘shifting cultivators’ who have long been the scape-goats of the government when it comes to explaining wild fires and deforestation.  The integration of shifting cultivators into the estate is intended to provide them with a stable livelihood and a better, economic standard of living.  By mixing Javanese transmigrants, supposedly skilled in intensive agricultural practices, with coastal villagers and shifting cultivators, the timber estate programme hopes to provide a better economic basis for the local population and contribute to regional, economic development but also to transfer, by a kind of cultural osmosis, the agricultural techniques and zealous entrepreneurship of the Javanese onto their less-developed national brethren in the Outer Islands.  The integrated plantation programme thus has clear nation-building intentions that resemble those of the transmigration programme.  The formal selection criteria for transmigrants thus have as their ideal a young, healthy family with good agricultural skills and no more than two children who, furthermore, have not been part of a transmigration programme before nor ever been members of the Indonesian communist party.  The intention is to install poor, but hard-working families whose size fit the ideal of the national family planning board and who conform to the criteria of ideal ‘normality’ in terms of health and political conviction.  Often accused of being Javanisation, the transmigration programme and its timber estate shoot-off is better described as the export to the Outer Islands of an ideal ‘normality’ as defined by the needs and fears of the government.  It is an attempt at governmental ‘normalisation’ but with certain cultural-developmental overtones.  It might be hoped that Javanese agricultural practices and economic entrepreneurship might filter through to the local population.  This cultural chauvinism, however, covers a more profound belief that the transmigration programme is about the diffusion of an effective, orderly and politically stable form of social organisation in tune with the needs of modern life.  In the national imagination this model of social organisation is a politically sanitised Javanese or Sundanese village, but real life Javanese and Sundanese rarely manage to live up to this ideal.
    The installation of a peculiarly Indonesian kind of modernity is, I believe, the social purpose of the timber plantation.  The modernity that it attempts to install is one in which family, estate and nation become mirrors of each other.  What is peculiar about the timber plantation as a ‘total institution’ is thus first its relation to the family.  Whereas most other total institutions seek to separate the ‘inmate’ from his or her family, the timber estate celebrates the family and encourages their formation.  Unlike the normal total institution which seeks the managed transformation of the individual, the timber plantation seeks to manage and transform families into smaller units of itself.  I attended the wedding of Andy, an engineer from Ujung Pandang, and his Gorontalo wife who worked in the estate office as well while I was on the plantation in Halmahera.  They had met on the estate and their wedding was both sponsored by and held on the estate.  The newly married couple sat on display on a stage in ever changing customes (fours change of clothes were made during the night: Bugis, Gorontalo, white wedding dress for the cutting of the cake, Muslim clothes for the reading from the Koran and neat casual for the late night dancing).  Facing them were rows of chairs reserved for the employees on the estate in descending order: the manager and higher officials in front, then office employees and field supervisors.  Standing in the dark outside the covered area were the transmigrants who had come to watch.  While the father of the groom had come all the way from Ujung Pandang, he remained silent through the evening.  Only two speeches were given.  One was by the former estate manager who had travelled to the estate to act as the father of the groom and assume the authority to marry him off.  In an emotional speech he talked about the first hard years of the estate, the career of Andy and concluded by encouraging all to regard each other as family not as officials and workers or as people of different ethnic groups (a unity which  the whole ceremony otherwise disproved).   The second speech was by the present manager who told how the local wild life had adapted to life under the fast-growing ‘sengon’ trees that covered most of the estate: both snakes and birds were regularly spotted in the trees.  This wedding showed, he concluded, that people, too, can learn to live and prosper under the ‘sengon’ trees.  As an institutional ceremony, the wedding presented a good picture of the ideal self-image of the estate.  The ‘family’ became a metaphor for the estate as a whole: a harmonious, homogenous unit of production adapted to its new natural environment.  While the rhetoric enforced this image, the ‘silent language’ of the ceremony (arrangement of chairs, speeches, and clothes) reminded everyone present of the social hierarchy and ethnic differences within the estate as well as its prevalent linear organisation of space (which incidentally is widespread in Indonesian society).
    The link between estate and nation had been emphasised in a ceremony only two weeks earlier.  On 30 August 1997 the estate held a grand celebration attended by all political, military and police officials of the district (kecamatan).  The ceremony was a combined celebration of the 52nd anniversary of the Indonesian Declaration of Independence, the 5 year celebration of the timber estate and the 11th year celebration of operations by the Barito Pacific Timber Group in the area.  In this ceremony, then, estate, logging company and nation become reflections of each other, a fact that was also underlined by the slogan: ‘HTI tidak boleh gagal’ that waved over the stage where karaoke competitions, speeches and small sketches of estate life (that had the lazy and slightly ‘daft’ worker as the humorous lynch-pin) were held.  This slogan: ‘The timber estate must not fail’ was adopted by the estate from a speech made by Vice-President Try Sutrisno when he opened a pulp factory in Kalimantan in 1996.  To everyone present the project of building plantations thereby became homologous with the project of building the nation and assumed much of its authority.  The family is important for the estate, just as the estate ‘really’ is a family.  At the same time the development of the estate assumed all the urgency and necessity usually ascribed to the development of the nation.
    Ironically, the plantation’s structure as a ‘total institution’ not just helps but also undermines its purpose of installing a particular Indonesian, modern identity.  The total institution rearranges both space and time for those inside it.  It spatially segregates the ‘inmates’ from the rest of society and brings them under the supervision of one bureaucracy that regiments the use of much of their time, says Erving Goffman.  Time management on the timber estates is carried out through elaborate man-hour schedules for the various tasks that establish the government standards for the wages paid for every type of job.  This standard is the cause of a great deal of dispute.  While the estate management complains that the quality of work is shoddy and hurried, the transmigrants are angry that the wage accord does not take into account the particular difficulties of the terrain: the thickness of the bush, the ravines, the amount of creepers and the distance to the fields.
    Another way that the estate regulates labour time is by setting ideal standards for household participation.  Management guidelines thus stipulate that 60 per cent of the labour of a household be spent on the estate.  Because male labour is taken to account for 60 per cent and female labour for 40, this stipulation in fact means that it is the man who is expected to carry out estate labour.  Another rule sets the maximum labour input over a month at 50 per cent.  The estate imagines this to mean that the worker only works on the estate every other day.  On alternate days, he and his wife are supposed to tend their vegetable garden on the house plot (or on their second field).  Some groups, especially the Javanese transmigrants conform to this scheme of sexual division of labour.  Some groups of local transmigrants, however, carry out the estate work in family teams that include both men and women.  This means that they work more intensively because they opt for distant fields and stay for weeks in the field until the task is finished.  Notice that the family may be a productive and conceptual unit of the estate, but the estate has definite ideas about what the family should do and be like.  The sexual division of labour within the family encouraged by the work calculus breaks up labour along gender lines: women work in the nursery where their nimble fingers are supposedly more productive; men are supposed to work in the fields where muscle is required.  Local groups that pursue a different cultural strategy of labour and work the plantation field as a family the way they would work their gardens are caught in a fourth time rule of the management.  The rule states that workers who do not take up a new task for two weeks after finishing an old one are stricken off the work roster and loose their accrued bonuses and workers’ benefits.  Coming back from a field which they worked very intensively, they are therefore forced to immediately take up a new task, lest they loose their bonuses.  Ironically then, it is (some groups of) local transmigrants that are most intimately involved in estate labour, while Javanese transmigrants remain only marginally attached to estate work.  Strangely, local transmigrants become more tied to the estate because they do not live up to the gender and labour stereotypes implict in the bureaucractic organisation of time on the estate, while conforming to these gender standards allows a degree of retraction from the estate.
    The rearrangement of space has similarly differentiated effects on the various cultural groups of transmigrants.  In the timber estate the spatial segregation is an effect of default rather than design.  The forest location and the poor infrastructure mean that transport to the outside is restricted.  One might think this would help create the localised community necessary for the transfer of agricultural skills and entrepeneurship from Javanese transmigrants to local transmigrants.  In fact, however, localisation was felt very differently by the various groups in the timber estate in Halmahera where I worked.  Javanese transmigrants complained of the difficult transport situation and of the restricted market for their products as a main cause of continuing economic hardship.  Local transmigrants, on the other hand, felt the plantation had immensely ‘opened up’ the area by improving transport.  They had close contact to their former villages and depended heavily on their gardens outside the estate.  Such off-estate gardens were not available to the Javanese transmigrants who were therefore more dependant on working for the estate and on their small garden plots within the estate than local transmigrants.  The Javanese transmigrants regard estate work as hard and underpaid and it carried little hope for a better economic future, since they always ended an assigned work task as poor as they entered it (pas-pasan).  As a result of these restrictions both on and off the estate, the Javanese transmigrants had left the estate in great numbers.  Over fifty per cent of the original transmigrants from Java had left when I was there and many more were on the verge of leaving.  Their departure can to a large extent be put down to the spatial restriction on their economic activity (coupled with dissatisfaction over a lack of sufficient ownership of farming land under the plantation structure).  The success of local transmigrants was, to a large extent, an effect of their ability to break the spatial barriers of the estate and maintain social relations and land tenure rights on the outside.  At the same time local transmigrants were more linked into estate work because of the way their sexual division of labour fused with estate regulations on time.  This combination of an abillity to transcend plantation borders and their adaption to its work schedules made this group of local trasnmigrants more successful than other groups.
    I have argued that central features of modernity (perhaps a peculiarly Indonesian version of nationalist modernity) is built into the plantation as a governmental technology.  It functions as a total institution that strives to fulfil the utopian dreams of a perfect and perfectly managed society (and a perfectly rationalised production unit).  At the same time, these utopian dreams are constantly left unfulfilled.  The modern, national identity that the plantation attempts to promote remains therefore a ‘virtual’ identity.  This is not surprising to anyone.  It is part of the self-image of modernity that it is a constantly unfinished project.  Seeing itself as continuously unfinished legitimates a constant application of new and better regulations, rules and techniques to seek a better fit better utopia and practice.  Now, this practised utopia is the total institution.  Or as Foucault (1986) would call it, a ‘heterotopia’, a place of alternate social ordering that seeks to realise the utopia.  The basic tension in modernity is then between the utopia (perfect places that exist only in the imagination) and heterotopias, where an alternative social ordering tries to, but inevitably fails in, creating the utopia (Hetherington 1997).  The plantation is one such heterotopic attempt at a different social ordering.  The irony is that the very structures of the new social ordering subverts the utopian dreams of the plantation.  The tight temporal management and spatial segregation of the transmigrants that should encourage the creation of a uniform transmigrant-worker-citizen-farmer is working to demoralise and drive away the Javanese transmigrants, the very people who were to be the cultural dynamo in establishing this new personhood.
    Simultaneously, the gap between the high ideals and the actual implementation of these ideals is responsible for a great deal of slippage.  One example is the difference between the ideal and the actual transmigrant.  In stead of the married, young, healthy, farm-wise head of family who has not participated in transmigration relocation before, the actual Javanese transmigrant often has experience of other transmigration sites (often negative experiences which caused him to leave but he may nevertheless still may have a household there); he may be a retired teacher wanting to wait for his pension to grow in the bank for a few years before he returns; or he may be a single entrepreneur hoping to establish a financial basis for his trading enterprise in Java but may in fact have little farming experience.  While it is obvious that transmigrants join for their own reasons and with their own future trajectories (many of them still turned toward Java), the estate management blames of a poor selection practice in the Department of Transmigration recruiting offices  as being responsible for not supplying the ideal transmigrants.  The management claims most Javanese transmigrants are actually ‘professional transmigrants’ who are lazy and without farming experience, and who are only interested in getting the free supplies of rice before they move on.  Notice how non-conformity and failure to achieve set ideals is interpreted as wilful resistance on the part of the ‘inmates’ by the estate management.  I think this is a general reaction.
    I see the study of the Indonesian timber estate  as the study of the relationship between organisational structures on the one hand and the social inertia that always seems to glue up the smooth working of such structures on the other.   As an organisational structure, the timber estate is an attempt to implement a social and ecological ideal.  However, the actual day-to-day workings and failures of the timber plantation make it obvious that something is continuously preventing this utopia from realising itself.  This ‘something’ I would like to label ‘social inertia’ for want of a better term.  ‘Social inertia’ describes the local strategies and individual motivations of plantation workers which - often without anyone intentionally wanting to - have the combined effect of running counter to the aim of regularisation and linealisation inherent in the estate plantation, and thus continuously undermining its utopian project.  The local strategies and individual motivations for participation result from the complex and heterogenous attempts by the socially and culturally divergent groups associated with the estate to optimise their livelihood in what they perceive to be an adverse and difficult situation.  Social inertia is different from social resistance although it effects may be the same.  Social inertia is people going about their business in ways that do not square with the calculuses of the management or the overall plans of the estate programme.  However, they do so for their own mundane reasons: to establish a good life as this is understood from their own cultural horizon and not with any explicitly subversive or political intention.  Social inertia describes the phenomenon that actions may not be intended as subversive but often appear so from the point of view of those in power because their effect is to thwart the intentions of the utopian project.  In the timber estate I studied resistance was rarely a motive for action by the transmigrants.  It was, however, a mirage that often appeared in the field of vision of the estate management and took the shape of laziness, desertion, wilful gossip or false rumours.  One example was a persistent story that a man from the Department of Agronomy had promised plantation workers that the law would be changed so that they would be allowed to own 1,25 hectares instead of merely 0,25 hectares.  The estate company knows of no such man ever arriving on the estate, but his promise is an often cited argument against estate disclaimers that workers have ownership rights on their sharecropping fields.  The estate insists backed by the law that workers merely have usufruct (hak punggut) on these fields (one hectare per family).
    While the effect may be to resist the plans and  schemes of the estate management, social inertia does not amount to resistance, at least not in the eyes of the participants, though it may well look like resistance from the perspective of the estate management.  The point is that ‘resistance’ is an imperial, ‘top-down’ concept.  It is, I argue, in the nature of power that resistance appears more often in the view from above than in the view from below. Resistance is, then, as much a conceptual tool of hegemony and suppression as it is a subaltern tool of emancipation.  The king, the imperial officer, the colonial administrator or the estate manager will tend to see any thwarting of their plans as the result of wilful acts by resentful, recalcitrant, or ignorant subjects.  This explanation of obstacles and failure serves two functions.  Firstly, the legitimacy of the system is maintained, for were it not for these wilful acts of subversion, the system can pretend to itself it would work according to plan.  Secondly, this explanation allows for the establishment of appropriate countermeasures and readjustments.  In fact, the position of the reformer or leader demands a slightly recalcitrant, resentful or ignorant mass of inferiors.  Without such recalcitrance no leadership or reform would be needed. It is this process of constant readjustment to fit a recalcitrant reality which is so characteristic of modernity.
  

Diagram 1

Overview of timber plantations

in the Outer Islands of Indonesia by September 1997

 
 
Type of HTI
Number of Plantations
Joint Venture
Total area alloted
Realisation till September 1997
HTI-pulp (high priority) 
13
9
2,580,123 ha
863,837 ha
HTI-pulp (non-priority)
10
0
1,405,186 ha
26,744 ha
HTI perkakas
48
0
1,200,990 hectares 
288,038 hectares
HTI-Trans
74
74
730,991 hectares 
 221,412 hectares
Other HTI
 
 
 
 
(pulp, perkakas, trans)
85
0
1,410,329 hectares 
606,732 hectares
 without IPP or SK 
(19)
 
  (351,212 hectares) 
 
 permit revoked
(20)
 
 (10,331 hectares) 
 
TOTAL
230
83
7,327,619 hectares
2,006,763 hectares
Source: September 1997 progress report of HTI. Department of Forestry, Jakarta

Annual progress in hectares:
Total area planned to be cleared and prepared for HTI plantation in the RKT for 1997/98:  409,538 hectares (for pulp use - 200,407 hectares, for wood industry - 65,402 hectares, for HTI-Trans - 87,948, other HTI - 55,781 hectares).

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