Mr Yuda Rasyadian1
1University of Oregon, United States
Biography:
Yuda is a PhD student and graduate teaching fellow in the Anthropology department at the University of Oregon. He works in a multicultural environment in Indonesia and West Papua with several grassroots communities and Indigenous peoples. His doctoral research investigates development regimes, Indigenous movements, non-profit politics, law, and multicultural world-making in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, seeking to understand how development projects are challenged and transmogrified by multiple forms of politics. Yuda is a Digital Editorial Fellow for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review journal (PoLAR) and is passionate about teaching, social justice activism, and various global solidarity efforts.
Abstract:
Marxist critique of capitalist development, with its theorization of resistance through class struggle and socialist projection, offers a compelling framework for envisioning an alternative world amid systemic inequalities, racism, and ecological crises. The theory, however, often overlooks the growing internal differentiation and new forms of commodification of labour and nature in contemporary social movements. This paper provides an alternative perspective to address such a predicament through an ethnographic account of the Indigenous women’s politics in West Papua. It follows their struggle for autonomy and sovereignty over their “living space,” challenging the power of development and palm oil plantation projects. Drawing on a preliminary study of the Indigenous women’s grassroots organization called Organisasi Perempuan Adat Namblong (ORPA) in West Papua, I explore how Indigenous women activists and villagers navigate and employ indefinite forms of “affection” in their resistance strategies while negotiating their gendered and racialized positions within intersecting and contested frameworks of nation-states, national and transnational activism, and settler colonialism. The ORPA generates specific forms of activism and political actions by establishing a “school of culture,” reclaiming lands, and reconstituting customary law (hukum adat), all of which embody a feminist vision of affection and care as a means of confronting the power of development and plantation projects. This politics, rooted in Indigenous Papuan epistemologies of land, life, and adat (customs and tradition), reimagines the way solidarity should be built, redefines the engagement with customary law, and envisions how more-than-human justice should be realized.