Terminal Economy: Politics of Distribution in Highland Papua, Indonesia

Anthropologists have long debated the relationship between local scales of politics and global capitalism. This dissertation examines regional politics in (West) Papua—a contested territory where Indonesia encompasses New Guinea—in relation to the forces that incorporate the region into the world economy. It focuses on the Balim region of the Central Highlands, home to Papua’s largest indigenous population. It examines struggles around the distribution of material goods, especially basic food staples sold by merchants or distributed as government aid and rations. State distribution programs in the region have expanded under Special Autonomy, a decentralization reform implemented to defuse the conflict between Jakarta and the West Papuan independence movement. Combining ethnographic interpretation with economic history, the dissertation proceeds in three steps. First, it traces the transformation of the Balim food regime under the extractive forces of global capital—which has targeted Papua as a resource frontier, and compelled Indonesian migrant livelihoods to depend on commerce in Papua. The history of extraction and commerce set the stage for Autonomy’s expansion of food distribution—an expansion that has accelerated the indigenous shift away from self-sufficient food production. Next, the dissertation examines key sites in the incorporation process: peri-urban markets and minivan terminals that are nodes in regional distribution. These sites, where indigenous women sell produce and newcomer merchants sell imported goods, have been theaters of indigenous uprisings, inter-ethnic conflict, and commercial regulation initiatives. Finally the dissertation traces trajectories of indigenous youth who work in and around infrastructures, to show that the labor of mobile youth shapes how state distribution functions. Together, these threads illustrate how indigenous participation in Balim regional politics has sought to enact some control over the process through which the regional economy is relegated to an end-point position. Overall, the dissertation advocates for a world-systems anthropology that shows how global and material forces recur across scales. These forces confront populations at contested peripheries of Global South countries with the double burden of responding to their incorporation, and experiencing state distribution partly as a form of displacement.Ph.D