Jacob Nerenberg

Grant Type

Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship

Institutional Affiliation

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Grant number

Gr. 10648

Approve Date

November 4, 2023

Project Title

Nerenberg, Jacob (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) "Nerenberg, Jacob (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) "Land Locked: Indigenous Labour and Citizenship on an Asia-Pacific Frontier""

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: The ethnographic monograph analyses a regime of citizenship which makes recognition of indigeneity conditional on a diminishment of indigenous labor. The ethnography is focused on the central highlands of West Papua (at the eastern limit of Indonesia), a territory contested between the West Papuan independence movement and the central Indonesian state. The book’s chapters illustrate the function of the regime of unrecognized indigenous labor by examining indigenous livelihoods, the modes of economic governance and development programming to which indigenous life is subjected, and a multifaceted scene of debate and ideological representation through which inequalities between indigenous Papuans and non-indigenous newcomers are framed and interpreted. In so doing, the book’s chapters highlight the systemic forms of hidden labor performed by indigenous Papuan residents as they endure the ongoing integration of their territory into Indonesia and into world capitalist markets. The book also interprets contestation of this non-recognition, as indigenous Papuan political actors unexpectedly place labor at the heart of regional political life in a “remote” theatre of natural resource extraction, where formal employment markets have played virtually no role in the construction of modern citizenship.