Lecture by Christian Lund, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, and welcome by Michael Eilenberg, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University

Abstract:

The old aphorism that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ suggests that property rights (‘the law’) are not merely about legal rights, but, more importantly, about social relations and the political and physical capacity to hold things of value: land, in particular. 

However, while possession may be nine-tenths of the law, the last tenth of legalizing land claims still matters a great deal. As Indonesia’s modern history is a string of regime changes in a context of deep agrarian conflict, legalization is crucial as it promises to take land claims safely through times of changing fortunes as rights. Yet, as the Indonesian land legislation remains a thicket of competing rights and overlapping jurisdictions with little clarity, people try to give their claims an air of legality regardless of whether a genuine correspondence between them and statutory law actually exists. This generalised legal posturing produces a paradox: People creatively refer to the law as if it was fixed, but by doing so they effectively make (up) the law, fragment by fragment, constructing what they believe to be already there. And, crucially, such manufacture and persuasion of legality can have the effect of law. 

Through urban and rural case studies, Christian Lund explores how legal posturing through state and law effigies produce the effect of legality in Indonesia’s agrarian conflicts. He examines the importance of law as a reference point under constant construction. Peasant movements, indigenous peoples’ organizations, and urban neighborhood groups struggle against companies and private gangs as well as different branches of government, to legalize their land claims. In this unequal mix of dispossession and resistance, the many stakeholders in Indonesia make up what effectively becomes property: They are all law-makers.