Claiming indigenous rights through participatory mapping and the making of citizenship

Abstract

This paper considers how participatory mapping, through the notion of indigeneity, is involved in the making of participants' political agency and the possible implications for local struggles over customary land and resources. Empirically, the paper draws on a field study of participatory mapping as a cartographic-legal strategy for the recognition of the customary rights to land and resources of the Dayak, an indigenous ethnic group in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. In this paper, we use citizenship as a basis for our analysis. On this basis, we discuss how the notion of indigeneity has assembled actors across different scales and how this has enabled indigeneity to develop as a site for claiming customary rights to land and resources through participatory mapping. One of our main arguments is the need to understand indigenous citizenship as a process that develops over time and through networks of actors that transcend the borders of the state and expand the formerly exclusive relationship between the state and its citizens in the making of citizenship. We challenge Isin's clear distinction between active and activist approaches to making claims of citizenship, suggesting instead that these approaches are mutually constitutive.

Geography and indigeneity III: Co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity’s economies

“…In Chile, Mapuche leaders view entrepreneurialism with considerable ambivalence and remain sceptical of the state’s ‘governance of hope’ that directs them into free market activities (Di Giminiani, 2018). Indigenous actors too continue to pursue the legal-cartographic strategy of trying to secure control over resources, despite the strategy’s often ambivalent outcomes (Rye and Kurniawan, 2017). In Peru, government promotion of digital technologies for productive innovation creates new rural-urban networks between rural artisans and IT professionals, even as wages are driven down by ‘national’ export policy (Chan, 2014).…”

On Doing Relational Research: Participatory Mapping as an Emergent Research Process

“…Alongside the development of critical GIS grew various participatory approaches (Elwood 2002;Elwood et al 2012;McIntryre 2008;Sieber 2006). While not always "critical", participatory GIS did sometimes overlap with critical GIS, by using consultation and feedback from community participants to challenge predominant/hegemonic mapping practices (Allen et al 2015;Bryan 2011;Chambers 2006;Dunn 2007;Elwood 2011;Harris 2016;Rye and Kurniawan 2017). 3 Despite the prevalence of critiques regarding the limitations of positivist methods, GIS has been used as a tool for social transformation "because it can produce new cartographies and spaces of possibility and build and expand geographies of hope and care that change social imaginaries in favor of non-hierarchical, class, gender and race relations" (Pavlovskaya 2018:40; see also Warren 2004).…”

B/ordering the environmental commons

“…Third , new technologies are increasingly being deployed to connect environmental agendas and activities across borders. Spatial information technologies are being utilised by indigenous communities in an effort to retain access to their communal homelands by mapping lifeways that were previously conveyed as mental images via the fluid oral traditions of intergenerational knowledge systems (Fox, 1998; Rye and Kurniawan, 2017; Berkes, 2018). These counter-cartographies are highly politicised because of their application in striving to establish the legitimacy of indigenous territorial claims that are at odds with postcolonial borders by demonstrating evidence of spiritual, economic and residential continuity in human-nature relations.…”