Making boundaries, disputing land: Frictions, palimpsests, and relational injustices in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

Drawing boundaries around land and forest involves diverse actors, technologies, and claims. Legal tools and territorial strategies function to control access, regulate movement, enable land investment, assert ownership, maintain customary relationships, and manage conflicts. In three ethnographic stories from Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, involving state forestry officials, plantation companies, and local communities, we conceptualise boundary making as an active and relational process mediating what type of land and resource use is sanctioned, whose knowledge and claims are recognised, and who benefits and bears the consequences of multiple and interacting forms of intervention. The concepts of friction and palimpsest provide a nuanced framework for examining land disputes and relational injustices in processes of frontier transformation. We argue that boundary making is an entry point for attending to forms of authority, exclusion, resistance and continuing negotiation of relationships, and relational injustices that are latent and less visible on the surface of interactions.