Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Gold conflict and contested conduct: Large- and small-scale mining

subjectivities in Indonesia
Matthew Libassi
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Resource extraction shapes the people who live and work in its midst. In Pongkor, Indonesia, these trans­
Extractive industries formations revolve around long-running tensions between large- and small-scale gold miners. The region is home
Subject formation to a state-owned industrial mine as well as thousands of unlicensed, small-scale miners. These actors have
Governmentality
competed over the same gold deposits, and who has the authority to mine them, for more than three decades. In
Small-scale mining
Resource conflict
this article, I examine how this resource conflict informs multiple, co-constitutive extractive subjectivities in
Indonesia Pongkor. I expand upon existing analyses of resource governance, extractive development, and environmental
conflict by examining the multi-directional, interrelated processes of subject formation entailed in asserting
claims to resources. Drawing on ethnographic research, I frame the situation in Pongkor as a territorial conflict
with three competing subject formation processes at its core. First, the mining company has attempted to end
small-scale mining by reconstituting local people as more amenable development subjects. It emphasizes
particular nationalistic, economic, and moral values through both disciplinary and community development
programs. Second, small-scale miners have responded by cultivating political subjectivities grounded in a col­
lective “community miner” identity. Community miners go beyond simply participating in gold-based liveli­
hoods; they learn to argue for rights to local resources. Third, the mining company has pursued internal reforms
aimed at remaking itself and its employees. Using small-scale miners as a foil, company leaders work to repo­
sition their operations as a model of clean and green development. In tracing these processes, I complicate
narratives of industrial extractive dominance and community resistance by demonstrating that subjects inside
and outside of mining operations are co-constituted. I call for further research on the shaping of varied subject
positions—including corporate mining employees, small-scale miners, and local residents—involved in extrac­
tive conflicts.

1. Introduction mining region in West Java, Indonesia. Pongkor is a contested resource

Political ecology research has shown that natural resource gover­
nance involves more than simply enforcing resource policies—it also
entails management of human conduct (e.g., Agrawal, 2005; Li, 2007;
Peluso & Vandergeest, 2001). In this article, I extend this work by
demonstrating how endeavors to shape thought and behavior are
employed in, and constitutive of, resource conflicts. Rival resource
claimants may enact competing, but interrelated, governmental projects
that result in multiple, partial, and co-constitutive resource
subjectivities.
I learned this lesson firsthand during research in Pongkor, a gold
territory where both large- and small-scale gold miners make claims to
local gold reserves. Antam, an Indonesian state-owned mining corpo­
ration, holds exclusive legal rights to mine on a 6,047-hectare mining
concession in the region.1 Thousands of residents of nearby villages,
however, make a living extracting and processing gold from the same
space without permits. Despite their lack of legal standing, these resi­
dents argue that local people should be able to benefit directly from local
ores.
I went to Pongkor to conduct ethnographic research on small-scale
mining livelihoods. However, I quickly found myself entangled in the
region’s broader conflict over gold. Shortly after I arrived, one of my

E-mail address: matthew.libassi@rutgers.edu.

1
Antam is the abbreviated name commonly used for a majority state-owned corporation formally known as PT Aneka Tambang Tbk. The company operates
multiple industrial mineral extraction and processing facilities throughout Indonesia. In this article, I use the name Antam to refer specifically to its gold mining
operations in Pongkor, a practice that is common in the region.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.005
Received 31 October 2021; Received in revised form 6 October 2022; Accepted 13 October 2022
0016-7185/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Matthew Libassi, Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.005

M. Libassi
hosts, an informal mining entrepreneur named Om Ferry,2 offered to
take me to view a small-scale mining area. Walking on village paths, we
climbed up to a road atop a ridge from which we could see traces of
small-scale mining in the forested valley below. At some unmarked point
along the way, we crossed the line between village and industrial mining
concession.
After about an hour, Om Ferry and I noticed a cloud of dust further
down the road. Three corporate mine security vehicles were rushing
towards us. Soon, we found ourselves being interrogated at Antam’s
local headquarters. Company officials reprimanded us for trespassing,
endangering the safety of ourselves and others, and impinging on the
security of a “Vital National Object.”3 Most emphatically, they insisted
our behavior was not how things are done in Pongkor. We had not fol­
lowed Antam’s strict protocol for visiting the concession. We had not
received the company’s permission, not entered through their official
gates, nor were we accompanied by an authorized company guide. In
response, Om Ferry argued with them. He insisted that ordinary Indo­
nesian people, not just mining corporations, had a right to enter the
concession and even to benefit directly from the nation’s mineral re­
sources. Eventually, the Antam officials deemed us more foolish than
dangerous and we were released. However, one thing was made
clear—Antam were the gatekeepers to Pongkor’s mining area and if I
wanted to conduct research on the concession I would need to comply
with their rules.4
This unintentional encounter provided powerful insight into Antam’s
view of the Pongkor region: as a territory over which it exercises au­
thority. This territorial control means more than simply excluding others
from accessing gold. It also involves attempts to shape the conduct of
local populations, both on and off the concession. My experience was a
glimpse into Antam’s governmental effort to transform “wild” informal
miners into “proper” development subjects. However, through Om
Ferry, the experience also showed me how small-scale miners put forth
their own interpretations, promote their own value systems, and lodge
their own territorial claims. He represents an emergent, more explicitly
political class of “community miners” (penambang rakyat) who do not
merely pursue mining livelihoods, but also argue for rights to local gold.
As I would learn later, Antam has been compelled to respond in turn. The
presence of small-scale miners has influenced how the company envi­
sions itself and trains its employees. Corporate leaders use small-scale
miners as a foil in attempts to position Antam as a clean and green
model of development.
In this article, I analyze the conflict over gold in Pongkor through the
lenses of territory, governmentality, and subjectivity. Like other mining
companies, Antam endeavors to consolidate its control over mineral
resources by cultivating new dispositions within local residents—as
Frederiksen and Himley (2020) put it, by producing amenable “extrac­
tive subjects.” I use the case of Pongkor to complicate and expand this
notion of extractive subjectivity. While it is easy to imagine mining
corporations as supremely powerful, I argue that top-down, corporate-
to-community forms of governmentality are not the only important
forms of subject formation in extractive sites. Alternative forms of
extractive subjectivity emerge from within communities, sometimes
2
All names used in this article are pseudonyms. I use the Indonesian and
Sundanese honorifics Om (uncle), Pak (Mr.), Mang (younger uncle, Sundanese),
and Bu (Mrs.) to provide an indication of the social position of the people
described.
3
Vital National Object (Obyek Vital Nasional) is an official legal designation
given to locations or operations deemed essential to the well-being of the
Indonesian nation and afforded protection by Indonesian state security forces.
4
After this encounter early in my fieldwork, I was much more careful about
visiting the mining concession. Shortly afterwards, I met with the local police
unit and various village heads to introduce myself, present my research permits,
and receive their guidance on working in the area. Eventually, I approached
Antam senior staff with my research proposal and received permission to collect
interviews with employees and visit several areas within the concession.
2
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
opposing rather than facilitating corporate resource control. Extractive
operations turn governmental processes inward, too, attempting to
shape the conduct of corporate mining employees. These multiple sub­
ject formation processes are interrelated. They compete to win hearts
and minds and, in the process, respond to and inform each other. This
results in overlapping influences and a set of multiply authored, co-
constitutive extractive subjectivities. In the case of Pongkor, small-
scale miners have, paradoxically, influenced identities within Antam
as much as the company has shaped conduct in the villages. Both
Pongkor’s small-scale and industrial mining participants are thus pro­
duced as extractive subjects. These findings challenge commonplace
notions about how power operates in extractive contexts and highlight
emergent forms of small-scale miner cultural politics.
I draw on twelve months of ethnographic research conducted in
Pongkor between 2016 and 2018. During this time, I lived with small-
scale miners, their families, and other community members in two
local sub-villages (kampung). This experience allowed me to witness and
participate in many of the day-to-day activities, conversations, and
challenges related to small-scale mining life. Additionally, I conducted
semi-structured interviews with members of the Pongkor community,
including small-scale miners of various types, community leaders, and
non-mining residents, focusing on three villages (desa) where unlicensed
gold production is a key source of livelihoods. I located interviewees
through purposive sampling to ensure a diverse set of Pongkor com­
munity members were included. Most interviews took place in homes,
small shops, or other residential spaces in the villages, though others
occurred in gold processing facilities or at tunneling sites.
While living in Pongkor’s villages, I also regularly visited and con­
ducted interviews at Antam’s industrial mine. After initially surprising
company officials by wandering onto the concession, I later requested
and received permission from the company to inquire about its experi­
ences with unlicensed mining. I completed interviews with various
Antam and former Antam employees, including senior staff, corporate
social responsibility (CSR) officials, security officers, and mining tech­
nicians. Additionally, company employees provided me with documents
about the mine’s history, operations, and community engagement pro­
grams and facilitated visits to several locations within the concession’s
boundaries. All interviews and broader research activities were con­
ducted in the Indonesian language.
In the sections that follow, I review relevant literature on resource
territories and subjectivities (Section 2) and provide context about the
gold mining conflict in Pongkor (Section 3). Then, in Sections 4 through
6, I describe three interrelated processes of extractive subject formation
in Pongkor. First, Antam has attempted to dissuade people from
participating in small-scale mining through forms of discipline enacted
both on the concession and in local villages. Second, small-scale miners
have countered this by cultivating political subjectivities grounded in a
“community miner” identity. Third, Antam has responded to community
miners and tried to consolidate its authority through an internal
governmental project aimed at molding its employees into clean and
green examples of legitimate mining. Pongkor thus illustrates how
extractive conflicts are not simply fought over material resources, but
also through the dispositions of the people who use them. I argue this
dynamic has produced an interrelated, co-constitutive set of extractive
subjects including corporate mining employees, small-scale miners, and
non-mining local residents. Competing attempts to control resources
entail competing endeavors to shape subjects, with results that are likely
to be hybrid and incomplete.
2. Resource territories and resource subjects
Popularly and academically, one of the central concerns surrounding
the extractive industries is how mines affect nearby resident commu­
nities. Mainstream development and business knowledge suggest that
industrial mining companies can support local residents and avoid
conflict by providing jobs, hosting CSR initiatives, and engaging
M. Libassi
“stakeholders.” These practices are framed as components of maintain­
ing a “social license to operate” (see Hilson, 2012; Owen & Kemp, 2013).
In contrast, empirical analyses have shown mixed results, including
limited development benefits, social unrest, and human rights violations
(e.g., Ballard & Banks, 2003; Bebbington & Bury, 2013; Gamu, Le Billon,
& Spiegel, 2015). Scholars have also highlighted tensions between in­
dustrial mining operations and small-scale miners (e.g., Geenen, 2014;
Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007; Patel, Rogan, Cuba, & Bebbington, 2016).
These struggles have spurred debates over land tenure, the distribution
of mineral-derived benefits, and whether or not large- and small-scale
mining can peacefully co-exist (Hilson, Sauerwein, & Owen, 2020;
Kemp & Owen, 2019; Verbrugge, 2017). Anthropological research,
meanwhile, has dug into these conflicts and contradictions by closely
examining the interactions, processes, and people that mediate mine-
community relations (e.g., Golub, 2014; Jacka, 2018; Kirsch, 2014;
Welker, 2014).
Among the findings of this last, more ethnographic literature is that
extractive companies do more than engage stakeholders. They also work
to shape them. Frederiksen and Himley (2020), reviewing a wide set of
scholarship on mine-community relations, give this phenomenon a
name: the production of “extractive subjects.” They identify this as a key
mechanism by which contemporary extractive industries consolidate
control of resources through “quieter registers of power” (drawing on
Allen, 2011), including persuasion, seduction, and manipulation, rather
than primarily though violence and accumulation by dispossession (p.
2). Here, I bring the concept of extractive subjectivity into conversation
with broader scholarship on resource territories and subjects to prepare
for my analysis of the role subjectivities play not only in securing
compliance, but also in competing for resources.
Geographers, anthropologists, and political ecologists use the
concept of territory to understand how multiple forms of power are
deployed to govern resources over space. In contrast to conventional
understandings of the term (see Agnew, 1994), this literature un­
derstands territories as dynamic, pursued by diverse actors for myriad
purposes—including both industrial and small-scale mining—and al­
ways contested and incomplete (e.g., Corson, 2011; Peluso, 2018; Ras­
mussen & Lund, 2018). I build on a major contribution of this
scholarship: the finding that violent force is only the most obvious
means controlling space. Drawing on Foucault, Gramsci, and other
critical social theorists, scholars have shown how forms of discourse,
knowledge, and self-regulation are also key to consolidating territorial
power (e.g., Marston & Himley, 2021; Moore, 2005; Yeh, 2013). To give
one prominent example, Peluso and Vandergeest (2001, 1995) have
demonstrated that scientific forestry was central to state control of
“political forests” in Southeast Asia. The forestry expertise they examine
is not simply about trees, but also who should interact with them and
how. For Peluso and Vandergeest (2001), scientific knowledge is enac­
ted in political forests in forms of Foucauldian governmentality, “by the
disciplining of the population to think about and act towards ‘the forest’
in specific ways” (p. 764). Similarly, in the realm of mining, Braun
(2000) argues that the incorporation of geological discourses into Ca­
nadian law produced settler subjects eager to develop underground re­
sources. Processes of territorialization, thus, entail an ordering of the
relations between people and resources, including governmental efforts
to shape human conduct.
Whereas Peluso and Vandergeest’s (2001) and Braun’s (2000) ana­
lyses center on the production of territorial authority, other scholars
have focused more on the making of environmental subjects. For
example, Agrawal (2005) uses the term “environmentality,” adapted
from Foucault’s governmentality, to describe how subjects internalize
state-legitimated environmental values through participation in
resource governance initiatives. But, important as Foucauldian insights
are for highlighting how power operates through subjects, scholarship
has also warned against the tendency to interpret governmental power
as singular, top-down, or absolute (e.g., Cepek, 2011; Fletcher, 2017;
Singh, 2013). Welker’s (2012, 2014) research on an American mining
3
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
corporation in Indonesia is particularly effective in demonstrating this
with regard to extractive operations. Welker describes how the mining
company attempts to shape local residents into self-reliant subjects
through community development programs. However, these govern­
mental projects often fail and produce unintended outcomes, as when
participants used agricultural workshops to frame themselves as clients
dependent on aid from the mine (Welker, 2012).
One response to these complexities has been to employ Gramscian
understandings of hegemony to complement and complicate Foucaul­
dian governmentality (Ekers & Loftus, 2008; Gidwani, 2008; Li, 2007;
Moore, 2005). Gramsci’s insights allow for an understanding of power
that combines coercion and consent and insists on the specificity of time,
place, and person. Interests are determined not simply by economic
relations, but by the interplay of particular historical, cultural, and po­
litical factors, leading to subjectivities that can seem fractured, contra­
dictory, and unstable (Hall, 1986; Jakobsen, 2022; Mann, 2009). This
framework suggests that broad structural factors set the conditions of
possibility through which subjectivities emerge, but simultaneously
emphasizes that cultural politics, identities, and other situated factors
nevertheless generate dynamic and sometimes surprising subject posi­
tionings. Thus, researchers must tease out the specific historical con­
junctures, social relations, and symbolic meanings that contribute to
particular subjectivities (Moore, 1993).
Feminist political ecologists provide other avenues through which to
understand the complexity of environmental subjects (e.g., Elmhirst,
2011; Mollett & Faria, 2013; E. Robinson, 2021). For Nightingale
(2011), “subjectivity is ultimately a contradictory achievement with
subjects exercising and internalizing multiple dimensions of power
within the same acts” (p. 155). This interpretation emphasizes the
instability of subjectivities and the intersectionality of socio-natural
relations that contribute to them, often leading to unexpected out­
comes. For example, in resource extraction, Valdivia (2008) demon­
strates that petroleum production in Ecuador has resulted in not only the
opposing political movements of neoliberal deregulation and Indigenous
resistance, but also the mobilization of “petro-citizen” subjects who
demand responsible management of petroleum by and for the benefit of
the nation. Reflecting a feminist lens back on the power of the state,
Nightingale (2018) argues for a recursive understanding of authority
and subjects wherein domination and resistance occur within the same
relation. Struggles over resources are opportunities to renegotiate the
boundaries between state, society, and nature, thus constituting both
subjects and the “socioenvironmental state” (p. 689). I engage these
feminist and Gramscian lenses to interpret Pongkor’s resource conflict as
constituted by interrelated, overlapping processes of subject formation
aimed at defining these boundaries.
By examining multiple types of miners in Pongkor, I extend a body of
research that, taken together, illustrates the diversity of subjects found
and formed in extractive contexts. Anthropologists famously explored
how the lifeworlds of mine laborers and their families were reworked in
mid-20th century mining frontiers (Nash, 1979; K. Robinson, 1986;
Taussig, 1980). Other scholarship describes the cultural practices, dis­
courses, and politics of industrial mine and petroleum workers who
identify themselves with the extractive industries (e.g., Kojola, 2019;
Scott, 2010; Valdivia, 2008). Finally, a growing literature has examined
the transformation of subjectivities accompanying the worldwide
expansion of small-scale mining in recent decades. Researchers have
explored the flexibility and mobility of small-scale miners (Jønsson &
Bryceson, 2009; Zhu & Klein, this issue; Zhu & Peluso, 2021), in­
tersections of gender and mining (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015; Werthmann, 2009),
and the multiple subject positions of brokers who facilitate legally
ambiguous extraction (Hausermann & Ferring, 2018), among other
themes. This scholarship has also described emergent political sub­
jectivities (though not always framed that way) as small-scale miners
around the world contend with the legal precarity of their livelihoods.
For example, researchers highlight that many small-scale miners iden­
tify with mining as a professional career and demonstrate an interest in
M. Libassi
and capacity for self-governance (Bryceson, Fisher, Jønsson, & Mwai­
popo, 2014; Bryceson & Geenen, 2016; Klein, 2022; Tschakert, 2009).
These diverse examples hint at the myriad types of extractive subject
formation meriting analysis beyond those which facilitate industrial
mining.
These critical takes on subjectivity underline that resource subjects
are always a project in the making. They are likely to be multiply
authored, often fragmented, and only sometimes internally coherent. I
bring these interpretations to the case of Pongkor to analyze the role that
subject formation plays in resource conflicts. The case provides a rare
opportunity to empirically examine the relationships between the
various positionings—corporate miners, small-scale miners, and non-
mining community members—described separately elsewhere in the
literature on extraction. To accomplish these goals, I frame the situation
in Pongkor as a territorial conflict with three competing and interacting
subject formation processes at its core.
3. Mining control and contestation in Pongkor
Pongkor is one among thousands of small-scale gold mining locations
spanning 30 of Indonesia’s 34 provinces. Together, these sites are home
to an estimated one million people who depend on incomes from gold
(Ismawati, Zaki, & Septiono, 2018). Although Indonesia has a permit­
ting system specifically for small-scale mining, very few sites have ac­
quired permits. It is difficult for existing mining communities to conform
to the technical requirements in these policies, and therefore prospects
for formalization often appear slim. Moreover, most locations with sig­
nificant gold deposits—including many where small-scale miners
currently operate, such as Pongkor—have already been zoned for in­
dustrial mining (see also Meutia, Lumowa, & Sakakibara, 2022). Thus,
almost all small-scale gold mining in Indonesia is considered illegal
mining.5 National government rhetoric and popular media typically
frame associated activities negatively, emphasizing lawlessness and
greed rather than livelihood provision. For example, small-scale mining
is often glossed as “wild mining” (pertambangan liar) or “mining without
permits” (pertambangan tanpa izin, or the acronym PETI) and labelled as
theft of the nation’s resources or an environmental crime (e.g., Gewati,
2016; MEMR, 2021).
Despite policies to the contrary, small-scale and industrial mining
have often spatially overlapped in Indonesia (e.g., Camba, 2021; Lang­
ston et al., 2015; Williams, 1988). Sometimes this juxtaposition has
resulted in conflict (Aspinall, 2001), as observed in mining locations
throughout the world (e.g., Geenen, 2014; Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007;
Kemp & Owen, 2019). Such tensions have been a motivating factor in
policymaking. For example, in the year 2000, Indonesian President
Abdurrahman Wahid issued a formal presidential decree instructing
government agencies to “stop all forms of unlicensed mining” in part due
to “loss of investors’ confidence” in the formal mining sector (Presi­
dential Instruction No. 3, 2000). Despite this and more recent policy
initiatives, small-scale mining has continued to grow throughout the
5
In Indonesia, legal small-scale mining requires two types of permits. First,
the area in which mining occurs must be designated as a People’s Mining Re­
gion (Wilayah Pertambangan Rakyat), a classification that cannot overlap with
industrial mining zones. Second, individuals or collectives participating in
mining must obtain a People’s Mining Permit (Izin Pertambangan Rakyat) for a
specified region. Additionally, all small-scale miners must comply with broader,
national environmental regulations. This includes a prohibition on the wide­
spread practice of using mercury, a toxic heavy metal, in gold processing.
Although small-scale miners in many parts of Indonesia have advocated for
legalization, few will be able to easily transition their practices to meet these
bureaucratic, tax, and environmental requirements. Instead, many argue for
allowing incremental incorporation of the standards. In some of the most le­
gally ambiguous cases, regional governments have allocated permits to small-
scale miners without receiving the required approval from the national
government.
4
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
past two decades, leading to enduring frictions with industrial opera­
tions (Meutia et al., 2022). Pongkor is a high-profile case of this broader,
nationwide antagonism between the formal and informal mining
spheres.
The story of gold in Pongkor begins with Antam. Prior to its arrival in
Pongkor, Antam already had a significant place in Indonesian history.
Created in 1968 through the merger of multiple state-owned mining
companies, Antam became a symbol of Indonesian sovereignty and na­
tional pride during the 1970s and 1980s. Its Cikotok gold mine, a
nationalized former Dutch colonial asset in Banten province, even
appeared as a standard topic taught in elementary schools. Advocates
framed the mine as proof of Indonesia’s progress into modernity and its
ability to develop peripheral regions of the country through state-driven
resource extraction (Hidayah, 2017)—narratives that remain important
to Antam’s corporate identity today. As reserves dwindled at Cikotok,
the company shifted its focus to Pongkor, beginning systematic explo­
ration in 1988 and initiating gold production in 1994 (Basuki, Suma­
nagara, & Sinambela, 1994). Today, Antam owns multiple mining
operations throughout Indonesia, but the Pongkor mine remains its key
investment in gold and also the largest gold mine on the island of Java.
In dozens of personal history interviews, Pongkor residents told me
how life changed following Antam’s arrival in the late 1980s. The region
was home to tens of thousands of residents who historically made their
livelihoods in plantation labor, unlicensed timber extraction, agrofor­
estry, and circular migration to nearby urban centers. Antam’s entrance
brought a surge of new opportunities for temporary work. The company
hired local villagers as laborers to carry mining equipment, work in
construction, and even participate in early, rudimentary gold extraction
activities. These opportunities dried up in the mid-1990s as Antam
transitioned to its regular operations, which primarily employ profes­
sional mining technicians. Pongkor’s residents filled this sudden
employment gap by turning to extraction themselves, often drawing on
knowledge they acquired while working for the company (Libassi,
2020a).
From this beginning, small-scale mining activities in Pongkor grew
and eventually spiked following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. During
this peak, Indonesian government researchers estimated that 26,000
small-scale gold miners were working in the region (McMahon et al.,
2000). The dramatic growth of unlicensed mining spurred conflicts with
Antam and other state forces. In 1998, after an informal miner was
allegedly shot by Antam’s concession security, small-scale miners pro­
tested at the company’s Pongkor headquarters and set fire to company
vehicles. In response, Antam, with the support of Indonesian military
and police forces, cracked down on local small-scale mining (see also
Lestari, 2011; Zulkarnain, Pudjiastuti, & Karomah, 2003). These efforts
succeeded in suppressing small-scale mining in Pongkor for several
years, but the sector gradually adapted to work around policing re­
strictions and became engrained in the local economy (Libassi, 2020a).
Conflict over Pongkor’s gold has continued during the past two de­
cades. Antam argues it alone should exploit local gold deposits, man­
aging them as both a source of revenues for the company and a “Vital
National Object” for the Indonesian nation. However, these ores are also
vital to thousands of local families and circular migrants who depend on
incomes from informal gold. Colloquially, these small-scale miners are
called gurandil, a term rooted in the local Sundanese language. Today’s
gurandil make a living by extracting gold from small veins—typically
sourced from narrow, hand-dug tunnels—on or around Antam’s
concession, returning the ores to local villages for processing, and selling
the resultant precious metal to informal gold buyers. Gurandil are a
heterogenous group, ranging from impoverished stone gleaners to
wealthy mining financiers, though most numerous are laborers who
tunnel or haul sacks of ore (Libassi, 2020b). Many live in communities
that immediately border the mining concession and, though they only
began mining after Antam’s arrival, have long had access to resources in
the adjacent forested areas.
Antam considers small-scale miners thieves and works to stop
M. Libassi
unauthorized access to the concession.6 The company employs more
than 200 security guards who, in shifts, patrol the area twenty-four
hours a day. When a gurandil is found on the concession, their ore
and tools will be seized and they may be arrested. The company also
occasionally initiates broader crackdowns on small-scale mining,
including a 2015 raid that involved over 2,000 corporate security offi­
cers, regional police, and other state forces (Saudale, 2015). As I
describe further in Section 4, Antam’s territorial practices also extend
into the community. Company policy designates three concentric zones
of interest, called Rings 1, 2, and 3, in which Antam conducts stake­
holder engagement activities. Ring 1, a circle of villages very close to the
concession, is especially important. This is where most small-scale
miners live and where the company deploys governmental endeavors
aimed at extinguishing the local informal gold economy.
However, Pongkor residents have ways of circumventing Antam’s
territorial authority. Villagers still farm some parts of the concession,
others travel there to collect forage for their goats, merchants even come
to sell goods—and of course, gurandil extract gold. Rather than labeling
the mining area a concession, local people simply call it “the mountain”
(gunung), avoiding any attribution of ownership. In this way, Antam’s
attempts at control are met by contestation, a dynamic that is often
locally framed as a “game of cat and mouse” (permainan kucing dan
tikus). As I describe in the three sections that follow, shaping sub­
jectivities—in both small-scale and industrial mining—is a key mode of
this territorial competition.
4. “Waking up” gurandil
Sitting in his office, Pak Basri, a senior official at Antam, explained to
me that small-scale mining is ultimately a problem of “mindset.” And,
consequently, he proposed that such problems should be solved through
“brainwashing.”7 In this way, he and other Antam representatives are
explicit about the company’s project of remaking Pongkor’s subjects.
Their goal is not merely to protect Antam’s access to local gold, nor
simply to eliminate unlicensed mining, but to transform thought pat­
terns (pola pikir) and behaviors that they regard as the source of these
problems. I consider this the first, and most obvious, of Pongkor’s sub­
ject formation processes.
While Pak Basri’s word choice seems alarming, it may simply be an
atypically candid expression of what has become standardized practice
in the extractive industries. CSR activities, community development
initiatives, and stakeholder engagement are among the industry’s
preferred means of managing local discontent (Frederiksen & Himley,
2020; Verweijen & Dunlap, 2021; Welker, 2014). This is often referred
to as “maintaining a social license to operate” in the parlance of
corporate mining (Owen & Kemp, 2013). Or, as Antam CSR officials
often put it, a focus on techniques that are “persuasif” rather than “rep­
resif.” But, in reality, these initiatives are about much more than
“persuading” individuals or “maintaining” a social license. They are
about producing persuadable individuals and producing a social license.
In Pongkor, this objective is pursued through the project of “waking
up” gurandil8—convincing them to stop mining and instead buy into
Antam’s vision of resource management and development. This project
is critical to ensuring Antam’s operations are uninterrupted, but many
6 example, Pak Arief will often engage caught miners in debate. He tests
The framing of small-scale mining as theft is pervasive around Antam. The
entrance to the company’s concession is marked by signs that reference the
national law prohibiting theft and this is one of the crimes most captured
miners are ultimately charged with. In my interviews, Antam employees also
occasionally called small-scale miners thieves.
7 9
Pak Basri used both the English word and an Indonesianized form, “cuci
otak.”
8 10
Most commonly, the word used was “sadarkan” (to make realize, to wake up
from some misconception), but occasionally it was “bangun” (literally, to wake
up or rise) or “reform.”
5
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
Antam staff also seem to believe it is genuinely about societal
improvement (see also Li, 2007). Efforts to “wake up” gurandil extend
far beyond lessons on mineral permitting. They are shot through with
moral, religious, patriotic, economic, and environmental values deemed
desirable by the company. Building on Antam’s nationalistic history,
corporate leaders frame the company as a champion of modernity and
rural development (e.g., Hidayah, 2017). Many staff members I spoke
with thus saw it as the company’s natural duty to transform gur­
andil—depicted as morally corrupt and backwards—into proper Indo­
nesian citizens; to transform Pongkor from a Wild West “Texas” (a
comparison I often heard) into a model of entrepreneurship, ecotourism,
and progress.
The project of “waking up” gurandil is the joint purview of two de­
partments within Antam: security and community development. In
engaging Pongkor’s local residents, they are the stick and the carrot. The
former works on the concession and the latter in the village. But both
attempt to reshape local subjectivities. One department works to break
old habits and the other helps build new ones.
4.1. On the mountain
Nearly all small-scale gold extraction in Pongkor takes place on the
concession, or, as local residents call it, “the mountain.” Antam’s secu­
rity patrols attempt to capture trespassing small-scale miners, while
gurandil employ their own strategies to remain undetected. When
caught, gurandil will sometimes be brought to the district police office to
face potential legal action. But before this they are subject to a process
Antam’s security department views as equally significant, “socializ­
ation.” This process involves forms of discipline that do more than
punish; they also aim to reform gurandil beliefs and dispositions.
Pak Tetep, a small-scale mining ore porter, described the experience
of socialization to me. One day, he was caught by Antam security where
his trail through the concession crossed one of the company’s paved
roads. The security team first confiscated the 60-kilogram sack of ore
Pak Tetep had been hired to carry down the mountain. Next, his shoes,
headlamp, and hauling sticks—the simple but essential tools of his
trade—were taken. His hands were bound behind his back with plastic
ties and, standing in the middle of the road, he was ordered to sing.
“Indonesia, tanah airku, tanah tumpah darahku….”9 This rendition of
Indonesia Raya, the national anthem, was followed by another coerced
patriotic act: a recitation of Pancasila, the foundational philosophy of
the Indonesian state. These exercises are just two examples of Antam’s
efforts to contrast small-scale mining with good citizenship. Eventually,
Pak Tetep was set free and allowed to walk home (barefoot). He was
grateful the security team did not bring him to the police, a form of
leniency often afforded to porters. But simultaneously he reflected on his
fear, his shame, and the question of why he felt forced to make a live­
lihood in a manner he knew was illegal.10
Pak Arief, a coordinator of Antam’s field security activities,
explained the socialization process to me from the opposite perspective.
He first outlined that “theft” on the mountain, like theft more generally,
derives from two factors, opportunity and intent. It was the job of his
security team to manage both, limiting opportunities and reworking
gurandil intents. He proudly suggested that every time he catches a
gurandil on the concession is an opportunity to “wake up illegal miners,”
“give education,” and “influence a change in their behavior.” For
their knowledge of common moral codes and Indonesian law, seeking to
point out contradictions and compel them to agree that they have done
“Indonesia, beloved homeland, land where my blood was shed…,” my
translation.
Gurandil caught in more compromising circumstances (for example, inside
one of Antam’s industrial mining tunnels) endure more serious legal conse­
quences, including arrest and years of prison.
M. Libassi
wrong. In additional to using the nationalistic tools described above, Pak
Arief also offers religious lessons from the Quran. He asks gurandil to
recite well-known verses on theft and then reflect out loud on compar­
isons with their current livelihood.
Other security officials told me about their preferred strategies. Pak
Basri said he often likens the mining concession to a house: “Would you
enter someone’s home without first saying ‘As-salamu alaykum’ and
receiving the response ‘Wa ʿalaykumu s-salam’? In the same way, you
must not enter the concession without first receiving permission.”11 The
concession’s designation as a “Vital National Object” is also frequently
deployed to justify exclusion of small-scale miners. Security officers
again draw on nationalist themes to shame gurandil, explaining to them
that they are not only stealing, but stealing from the Indonesian people.
One senior security official told me that he leads gurandil through a
series of simple questions until they are forced to verbally declare
themselves thieves of the nation’s treasures. Antam’s security forces
view these forms of re-education as core to their work on “the
mountain.”
4.2. In the village
The project to “wake up” gurandil continues in the village, spear­
headed by Antam’s community development (ComDev) department.
The department’s programs aim to improve local communities, often by
reshaping the individuals within them. Pak Jefry, a ComDev official,
described the theory behind these programs to me. He wrote four terms
in English on his office whiteboard, “Charity, Infrastructure, Capacity
Building, Empowerment.” He explained that these contributions follow
a sort of temporal progression. Antam’s Pongkor mine was entering the
end of its operational life, and thus the last two were most important.
They are also the most complex. Capacity building and empowerment,
he said, involve a transformation bestowed by the mine that would allow
local people to “become independent” (jadi mandiri), a phrase Pak Jefry
used several times. He further explained, “We give it to the people and
say, ‘hey, let’s wake up,’ so that they don’t just become beggars.”
One strategy for achieving this goal is to “alih profesi gurandil,” to
“shift the profession of gurandil” through alternative livelihood pro­
grams. Pak Basri emphasized to me that gurandil “must change—to
farmers, to merchants, to anything that isn’t mining.” Often, these
transitions were envisioned as a simple return to the agricultural live­
lihoods that many Antam employees envisioned as natural for local
people. In reality, they have proven much more difficult. Antam’s sheep
raising initiative, in which the company purchased a number of highland
sheep and distributed them to residents, demonstrated some of these
challenges. When I asked villagers about this initiative, they often
laughed. They noted that Antam’s training programs ignored the eco­
nomic constraints most would-be farmers faced. The company built an
elaborate demonstration site, including a large barn to house sheep, but
did not detail how individuals could adapt the system on a smaller, less
capital-intensive scale. Other people complained that only local elites
were given sheep. Moreover, the program seemed pretentious and
wasteful—why were expensive highland sheep distributed rather than
conventional goats, which local people are already adept at raising? And
finally, there were technical challenges, with many of the sheep dying
shortly after being distributed.
While one set of alternative livelihood programs aimed to rein­
vigorate Pongkor’s supposed agricultural past, another put forward a
vision of an entirely novel future—a future named “agro­
geoedutourism.” The “grand concept” of agrogeoedutourism (typically
written in English) was invented by Antam staff to combine conven­
tional ecotourism with the region’s unique geological history and
11
These Arabic phrases are standard greetings in many Muslim communities,
including much of West Java. It is typically expected that one use these
greetings when entering another’s home.
6
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
(hypothetically) revitalized agricultural activities. It is the orienting
theme of the ComDev department’s activities and the official title of
their 5-year planning document. Antam and the regional government
would construct facilities for a new “geopark” (further described in
Section 6), while the people of Pongkor would engage in new, tourism-
fueled livelihoods. One official summarized, “Once the gold is gone,
everyone will run to tourism.” In interviews, I often hinted some skep­
ticism that a location known for mining could easily be transformed into
one famed for ecotourism, but ComDev staff were typically more con­
cerned about local people’s capacity to participate in this imagined
future. One staff member referenced the iconic terraced rice fields of
Bali, worrying that people in Pongkor “did not understand how to view
their sawah [irrigated rice fields] as tourism.” To better prepare them,
ComDev has offered a suite of workshops where local people are trained
to make handicrafts, snacks, and other souvenirs. However, when I
visited the site of one of these workshops, a rarely used t-shirt sewing
facility, participants pointed out a key problem: there were not yet any
tourists to buy these souvenirs.
Conveniently, Antam has packaged many of its ideals into a single
place: Taman Rekreasi Pongkor.12 This space, a carefully manicured
park built adjacent to Antam’s waste water processing plant, serves as a
model for Pongkor’s community to follow. One of its purposes, a senior
CSR official told me, is to produce a “multiplier effect for both local
people and the environment.” Its grounds include a fruit orchard, barns
to demonstrate sheep husbandry, a modern mini mosque, and several
artificial waterfalls for selfie tourism—embodiments of the ecotourist
future Antam envisions. On a visit, I found the park also includes a
preponderance of signs. Many seem opportunities for Antam to
communicate a lesson to visitors from the Pongkor community. For
example, approaching the start of a rainbow-painted pathway, one en­
counters a post with eight signs, four attached on either side. All but the
first (the park’s hours) and last (“and always take care”) are pointed
proscriptions or prescriptions—don’t bring animals, don’t destroy plants
or collect fruit, do put garbage in the trash receptacles, don’t sell goods,
don’t hunt, and don’t vandalize. The message is clear: certain behaviors
common in the village are not permissible here.
Similar to other extractive contexts (Frederiksen & Himley, 2020),
Antam’s project of “waking up” gurandil has the goal of shaping local
subjects to facilitate industrial mining. Associated security and com­
munity development activities aim to shift the conduct of nearby resi­
dents by inculcating particular values and beliefs. Uniquely, these efforts
are not primarily about building support for corporate mining, but
rather dissuading unauthorized resource use. The Antam officials I met
were eager to show the success of these endeavors. They even intro­
duced me to a so-called “reformed gurandil,” Pak Ade, who took me on a
tour of several sub-villages near the concession. Our tour began with Pak
Ade pointing out the benefits he believes Antam has brought to the re­
gion, including improvements to the main road and potential sites for
future ecotourism. Although he had worked as a small-scale miner for
more than a decade, he spoke bashfully about this past. He repeated
narratives common within Antam about small-scale mining, suggesting
that it is immoral, motivated by greed, and ultimately bad for the
community. However, as the day wore on, Pak Ade’s message became
less consistent. He critiqued Antam for using CSR funds in ineffective
ways and for misunderstanding gurandil. Eventually, he admitted that it
was difficult to disentangle his own income from small-scale mining and
was expectant that Antam would help him fill this monetary gap. Thus,
as in Welker’s (2012) case, Antam’s local subject formation projects
have been only partially successful. Pak Ade embodies the resulting
contradictory subjectivity, having seemingly internalized Antam’s per­
spectives about small-scale mining, but not yet able to realize a liveli­
hood independent of small- or large-scale mining.
12
A pseudonym. In English, Pongkor Recreation Park.
M. Libassi
5. The political community miner
While Antam officials often frame small-scale mining as a problem of
the mind, gurandil themselves argue it is “soal perut”—a problem of the
stomach. Most collect gold not out of greed or poor judgement, but
because they feel they have “no other choice” if they want to feed their
families.13 This rhetorical reframing, counter to Antam’s claims, is one
sign of the second subject formation process in Pongkor: the emergence
of a political “community miner” subjectivity.
Just as Antam has sought to produce more amenable extractive
subjects, segments within small-scale mining have aimed to reshape
miners into a unified counter-territorial force. Such gurandil view
themselves as a collective of community miners identified by shared
interests and injustices. They are no longer workers opportunistically
pursuing a livelihood, but skilled political agents who argue for a version
of Pongkor where local residents manage its gold.
This positioning is best embodied by Mang Dayat, a young man who
is a vocal advocate for local people. While most Pongkor residents do not
finish high school, Mang Dayat earned a university degree in a nearby
city and returned to the region determined to help support his com­
munity. When speaking with me about Antam, Mang Dayat drew
explicit comparisons with colonialism: “Why are we one of the most left-
behind places in the regency if we are also one of the richest? Because we
do not control our own resources. This area is controlled by Antam. We
are colonized by Antam.” He expresses frustration that local people are
not being trained as mining technicians, learning the skills necessary to
one day manage the mine themselves—part of Mang Dayat’s vision of
the future. He feels that Pongkor’s residents have been intimidated by
the company and that they need to fight back to reclaim local resources.
In contrast to Antam’s governmental efforts, gurandil advocates like
Mang Dayat attempt to cultivate subjectivities among Pongkor’s resi­
dents by doing the work of “articulating” a community miner identity. Li
(2000), drawing on Stuart Hall’s interpretations of Gramsci, describes
articulation as “the process of rendering a collective identity, position,
or set of interests explicit … and of conjoining (articulating) that posi­
tion to definite political subjects” (p. 152). In Pongkor, this means
positioning small-scale mining as a legitimate profession and doing the
boundary work of defining local people as entitled to local resources, as
opposed to the state (see Moore, 2005; Nightingale, 2018). It also means
employing strategic simplifications (Li, 2002) to smooth over differ­
ences among Pongkor’s gurandil (e.g., class, gender, role in the mining
economy)14 and connect their interests with broader dis­
courses—neocolonialism, community-based resource management,
environmentalism, religion, and more. This collective identity is built on
shared experiences of resource struggles and its internalization is evi­
denced by the skill with which community miners counter Antam’s
arguments.
5.1. Antecedents and organizing
Pongkor’s politically engaged gurandil are a product of what Moore
(2005) calls “situated struggles” (p. 2). They emerged through the
layering of successive territorial conflicts, with several key moments in
history informing their current modes of advocacy. The first major
gurandil protest occurred in 1998, when small-scale miners and local
residents stormed Antam’s Pongkor headquarters, causing its employees
to flee in fear, after hearing that a gurandil had been shot by concession
13
The refrain “tidak ada pilihan lain,” “there is no other choice,” is a common
justification for small-scale mining in Pongkor.
14
For additional detail on different social positionings and inequality within
Pongkor’s small-scale mining economy, see Libassi (2020b).
7
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
security forces (previously mentioned in Section 3).15 Antam responded
to the protest with an aggressive crackdown and a revamping of its se­
curity forces. Nevertheless, local people learned that they had some form
of power over the company—in sufficient numbers, protesters could
frighten or influence Antam employees.
In subsequent years, local people continued to harness this power in
efforts to protect small-scale mining livelihoods. Demonstrations
became a regular feature of life in Pongkor for the next decade and a half
(e.g., Rizal, 2015). However, community members also found ways to be
more strategic than large protests. For example, “demo ibu-ibu,” or
women’s demonstrations, became a common type of intervention. When
a man was caught on the concession, a group of miners’ wives would
quickly gather and march towards Antam’s headquarters. They hoped to
intercept the security vehicle containing the captured miner before he
was entered into legal processing. If the women could, they would often
be able to compel the miner’s release. Bu Ratih, a former leader of these
interventions, explained why women felt their gender gave them an
advantage. No Antam staff, she said, would be “brave enough to tell a
mother that their husband or son could not return home.”
Pongkor residents also honed their advocacy skills by fighting for
other, non-gold local resources. For example, community members
protested the tightening of restrictions in forests adjacent to Pongkor’s
villages when the area was designated as a national park in 1992. With
guidance from urban NGOs, they organized and mounted a legal fight,
ultimately winning back access to conduct agroforestry in some areas of
the park (Siscawati, 2012). Several years later, residents mobilized to
demand access to large tracks of agricultural land that had been allo­
cated to, but left unused by, corporate plantations. One community
farmers group, again working with some outside legal assistance, was
successful in securing recognition of squatters’ rights on this land (Lund
& Rachman, 2018). During my research, it was evident that these
layered experiences had helped build local organizing capacity and
instilled belief in the possibility of securing community access to re­
sources. Moreover, these conflicts have produced a set of local leaders
who are confident in their ability to engage with state entities. Similar
rhetoric, strategies, and even some of the same individuals, including
Mang Dayat, have been involved in the fight for gold.
Recently, there have also been attempts specifically to organize
Pongkor’s gurandil. When I visited Pongkor in 2016, the Association of
Indonesian Community Miners, or APRI (Asosiasi Pertambangan Rakyat
Indonesia), was in the process of creating a local branch in the region.
APRI is a nationwide network that advocates for small-scale miners,
claiming to represent millions across the country. Similar to the land
rights NGOs previously, APRI aimed to organize Pongkor’s residents so
that they could argue for legal access to local resources, in this case gold.
The organization found a regional leadership group and collected the
names of hundreds of gurandil to become members of the Pongkor
branch. They produced a document, entitled “Concept for Community-
Managed Mining to Develop the Region,” that made the case for a
novel form of legal small-scale mining based on a proposed partnership
between Antam and local village governments. Moreover, APRI facili­
tated the spread of a new, more positive label for unlicensed miners:
penambang rakyat, or community miner, a term the advocacy group uses
to destigmatize small-scale mining. By the time I returned to Pongkor in
2017, APRI’s organizing initiative had collapsed due to both internal
conflicts and external pressure, including from Antam. Despite this,
several community groups have continued to carry their torch, working
to organize gurandil and advocate for the formalization of small-scale
mining.
15
This event occurred in the wake of nationwide protests that led to the fall of
Suharto’s New Order era and can be seen as part of broader public demands for
decentralized governance in Indonesia (see Thorburn, 2002).
M. Libassi
5.2. Inverted discourses and counterclaims
The emergence of a gurandil cultural politics amidst these resource
conflicts is evident in the ways community miners have learned to
advocate for themselves. They counter Antam’s arguments point-by-
point, often inverting and redeploying the same economic, ethical,
and environmental discourses the company uses against them. Om
Ferry, for example, countered Antam’s claim of exclusive ownership of
Pongkor’s gold during our interrogation by reinterpreting Article 33 of
the 1945 Indonesian Constitution: “The land, the waters and the natural
resources within shall be under the powers of the State and shall be used
to the greatest benefit of the people [italics added].” While Antam officials
emphasized the first clause of the sentence, Om Ferry claimed it was
invalid without strict adherence to the second. Other local residents
dispute the notion that Antam is managing resources for the benefit of
the Indonesian nation, let alone local people. They liken Antam to
multinational mining corporations, popularly understood as neocolonial
entities taking advantage of Indonesia (Warburton, 2017). Several in­
terviewees even told me that the company is owned by the United States
or France.16 Finally, some gurandil remove the state entirely, opting for
a higher authority. To them, Pongkor’s gold is not state property, but
gifts given by Allah that all humans have a common right to use and
enjoy.
One of Antam’s key claims, broadcast to the public and detailed in
annual CSR reports, is that their mining operation brings development to
Pongkor. Political community miners, however, have learned to flip the
discourse of development. Many argue that small-scale mining—not
Antam’s industrial mining—is responsible for any progress the region
has made over the past few decades. Gurandil I spoke with would often
point out roads, small bridges, or mosques that had been constructed
using money from small-scale mining. In some cases, these were chari­
table gifts from Pongkor’s handful of extremely successful miners. In
others, gurandil chipped in through a sort of taxation scheme with, for
example, every mining group contributing one sack of ore per day to­
wards a road paving project. More generally, there is a local consensus
that small-scale mining incomes have increased the well-being of people
in the Pongkor region, a theme paralleled by research elsewhere in
Indonesia (Langston et al., 2015). Money from gold pays for meals,
school fees, and medical expenses and supports thousands of ancillary
jobs. While Antam’s version of development appears as a handful of
jobs, university scholarships, or ecotourism workshops, gurandil advo­
cates argue that small-scale mining has often met more immediate
needs.
Other small-scale miners reversed Antam’s narrative of ethical su­
periority. Reflecting on the company’s moral denigration of gurandil, an
interview respondent told me that he could never work at a place like
Antam. Only his job in informal gold processing would allow him the
freedom to properly pray five times per day and spend each afternoon
helping village children practice Quranic recitations. Moreover, most
local leaders who have attained the ultimate spiritual achievement, the
hajj, did so by accumulating wealth through small-scale gold mining.
These wealthy mining hajis then further promote an image of small-scale
mining-inspired morality through frequent charitable contributions.
Mirroring and sometimes exceeding Antam’s work, they sponsor reli­
gious feasts, pay for mosque renovations, and give alms to local widows.
Gurandil also counter Antam’s claims about environmental degra­
dation, which typically focus on the use of toxic mercury and cyanide in
small-scale gold processing. They contend that Antam is hypocritical
and highlight its own environmental misdeeds. In interviews, small-
16
There is a kernel of truth to this, though not in exactly the way my re­
spondents meant it. Antam is categorized and run as a state-owned enterprise,
but it is only 65 percent owned by the Indonesian state. The remaining 35
percent is traded publicly on the Indonesian and Australian stock exchanges
with foreign financial institutions among its shareholders.
8
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
scale miners pointed out that Antam, too, uses cyanide in its gold pro­
cessing and argued that the company’s expansive infrastructure has
caused far more forest loss than small-scale mining.17 Other respondents
alleged that Antam’s mining activities have altered subterranean water
channels, rendering previously reliable springs dry. Most prominently,
local residents point to Antam’s massive tailings dam. This installation,
used for storing chemical-laden mining waste, is precariously situated
above several communities in Pongkor. Leaks from the waste manage­
ment system have previously caused mass fish deaths in aquaculture
ponds in downstream neighborhoods (Arifal, 2017). Residents worry
that a bigger accident could someday see the tailings come crashing
down upon their homes. With respect to the environment, one gurandil
summed up, “The people are always scapegoated. We haven’t destroyed
nature like [to the degree] Antam has. In fact, it is us who are always hit
with the negative effects and never the positives.”
Having rebutted Antam’s arguments, often by strategically appro­
priating the very discourses the company uses to critique small-scale
mining, political community miners conclude with a different vision
of mineral governance. They draw on discourses of community-based
resource management to demand that local people manage local gold.
While Antam is envisioned as a neocolonial enterprise, Pongkor’s people
are framed as “putra daerah”—“local sons” who have a right to local
resources. Gurandil often told me that they “just wanted to taste a bit of
their homeland.” Moreover, community mining advocates argue that it
does not need to be this way. In the mid-2000s, for example, village
leaders put forward the idea of a “village pit,” a portion of the concession
set aside for and managed by local small-scale miners (Lestari, 2011).
Then, in 2016, a group of miners associated with APRI outlined a new
path for legalizing small-scale mining, as noted in Section 5.1. This
unsuccessful proposal argued that community governance, in coordi­
nation with Antam, was the best way to simultaneously regulate small-
scale mining, generate local economic benefits, and end conflict. Today,
even the least ambitious advocates argue that gurandil should have
control of the mining area after Antam eventually closes its operations.
The company will leave behind countless small gold veins, too narrow to
be profitable for an industrial operation but still valuable to small-scale
producers. Pongkor’s increasingly political gurandil are therefore
learning not only to dispute Antam’s claims, but to lodge concrete
proposals for community-based management of local ores.
Thus, while Antam staff endeavor to shape local subjects amenable to
industrial extraction, Pongkor’s political community miners have
emerged as a countervailing force promoting a very different kind of
extractive subject. Advocates like Mang Dayat work to inspire, articu­
late, and make coherent a collective gurandil identity that understands
small-scale mining not as an opportunistic livelihood, but as an assertion
of local peoples’ right to manage local resources. As with the company’s
governmental projects, these efforts have not been completely successful
in persuading all of Pongkor’s residents. Nevertheless, it is evident that
many members of the community have been transformed by their shared
conflict with Antam, learning new ways to think about and advocate for
themselves, their livelihoods, and their community.
6. Clean and green: corporate mining remade
Antam leadership views Pongkor’s community miners as both a
threat and an opportunity. On the one hand, unlicensed mining is seen as
corrupting. As Pak Basri once told me, “When we discuss illegal gold
mining, we must always be clear in our mind. We must not have our
thoughts polluted.” Senior Antam staff worry that their employees might
17
Indeed, most industrial gold mining operations today use cyanide to remove
gold from ore. Small-scale miners throughout the globe, including in Pongkor,
have increasingly adopted similar techniques, though typically with limited
regulatory oversight and less complex equipment (see Verbrugge, Lanzano, &
Libassi, 2021).
M. Libassi
take pity on, or be tempted to participate in, small-scale mining. On the
other hand, gurandil serve as an ideal foil against which to heighten the
company’s distinction. In a form of socioenvironmental state-making
(Nightingale, 2018), Antam leaders repeatedly contrast the company
with small-scale mining, performing boundary work that positions it as
an environmental authority and gurandil as criminals. These two con­
cerns underlie the third subject formation process in Pongkor: Antam’s
internal efforts to reform its employees. Company programs and symbols
aim to consolidate staff cohesion and inculcate values seen as modern,
moral, and rational. These endeavors are both a response to the
perceived threat of gurandil and a way of leveraging the differences
between large- and small-scale mining to make Antam’s claims to
legitimacy meaningful. Extractive subjectivities are, thus, not only
shaped in communities living near mining operations (as described in
Section 4), or in response to corporate extraction (Section 5), but also
within the corporations themselves.
I view Antam’s project of internal subject-making in terms of twin
themes: clean and green. Antam must be clean—free of corruption,
morally right, and technologically sophisticated. Simultaneously, like an
increasing number of extractive operations around the world (e.g.,
Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Büscher & Davidov, 2014; Seagle, 2012), it
projects itself as green. This is not merely by adhering to environmental
standards, but by presenting itself as a leader in conservation and
ecotourism.
6.1. Antam the example
The lobby of Antam’s Pongkor office is a monument to its organi­
zational values. Positioned around the space are installations that
embody “declarations of commitment” (pernyataan komitmen) from
Antam’s annual planning meetings. Each provides a visual display of the
shared dedication of Antam’s departments. One incorporates multi-
colored paint handprints from each department head; in another, the
company is represented by a model ship with each operating unit a key
functioning component. On a wall, a plaque reads “PONGKOR PEDULI”
(PONGKOR CARES), with each letter of “peduli” signifying a broader
value: P-Produktivitas; E-Efisiensi & Inovasi; D-Dedikasi; U-Utamakan
Keselamatan Pertambangan (Prioritize Mining Safety); L-Lingkungan
(Environment); I-Integritas.18
I heard these buzzwords almost every time I spoke with Antam staff.
They are framed as values that unify the company, orient its employees,
and differentiate it from small-scale mining. But this “komitmen” has not
always been so strong. Antam and associated security forces have his­
torically had difficulty preventing some employees from participating
in, or seeking rents from, small-scale mining. This made effective
policing of gurandil nearly impossible. As Pak Basri put it, “the key to
overcoming the problem of illegal mining is to be clean. To have internal
integrity first.” He pointed to 2013 as a turning point in the effort to
“clean” Antam. That year, dramatic changes in company leadership
spurred the institutionalization of new values, including stricter expec­
tations for staff and an emphasis on consistent enforcement of company
policies. New training protocols, Pak Basri told me, now prevent em­
ployees from getting “too friendly” with local people. One of the leaders
of Antam’s security operations told a similar story. He proudly spoke
about his efforts to professionalize the company’s security teams
through military training techniques—anyone who fails to stand up
straight at work is sent back to basic training.
But creating a clean and committed Antam means more than just
reforming security. This project of internal subject formation extends to
staff involved in administration, mining operations, and engagement
with the local community. Rudnyckyj (2009) provides an eloquent
18
The fact that I do not have to translate most of these terms is indicative of
how Antam selects and portrays its values—they are seen as modern, interna­
tional “best practices” accepted around the world.
9
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
analysis of a similar case at Krakatau Steel, another Indonesian state-
owned enterprise. There, consultants combined Islamic values and
Euro-American business management knowledge to implement a
“reformasi spiritual.” Employees seen indolent were inculcated with
capitalist ethics by reframing work as religious practice. Work at Antam,
too, is frequently interpreted through frames of social and spiritual
obligation. Employees are taught to see themselves as moral examples
for the community, representatives of modernity, and stewards of the
nation’s vital resources.
Attempts to shape model Antam employees are both pedagogical and
embodied. As in Rudnyckyj’s (2009) case, Antam staff participate in
regular corporate training programs and workshops. In addition to
imparting company values, these programs work to reproduce distinc­
tion and authority. They elevate Antam and its staff above local resi­
dents by connecting them with elite business administration trends from
Jakarta, international mining best practices, or the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals. Other processes of subject formation involve bodily
discipline. For example, staff are encouraged to join group workout
sessions, performed in large arrays in front of the Antam office buildings,
in the morning before work. Religion also plays a key role. Antam’s local
headquarters include a large mosque. And, though local villages strongly
identify with religious piety, Antam staff differentiate themselves from
Islamic practice common in the region by having highly regimented
prayer times and practices. Like the “PONGKOR PEDULI” plaque, other
artifacts around the company’s offices signal these values. Posters align
Islamic ethics with business efficiency and signs warn of the health
dangers of smoking (a rare caution in Indonesia). Most of all, they
remind Antam staff that their work is for the good of the nation. One
plaque hung on the wall reads, “Proud to be Pongkor… for Indonesia!”
These programs, performances, and reminders all work to impart
standards—modern, ordered, efficient, pious, clean—that encourage
Antam staff to see themselves as different from gurandil and simulta­
neously obligate them to serve as an example for a community deemed
backwards.
Pak Arief, the security coordinator introduced in Section 4, is a
successful example of Antam’s efforts to mold employees. He is one of
very few people from Pongkor who have climbed the ranks, starting as
low-level security guard, within Antam. He credits this advancement to
the company’s training programs, including courses in business man­
agement. For example, he described to me how SWOT (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, an American business
strategy technique, is a key tool he uses to manage Antam’s conflicts
with gurandil. As a local person, Pak Arief appeared more sympathetic
towards Pongkor’s residents than many Antam employees, but he
nevertheless insisted there was no place for small-scale mining in the
region’s future. For him, Antam’s professionalized knowledge, values,
and adherence to the law were the way forward—even if, as he
admitted, many of his neighbors hate him for believing that. However,
the company’s efforts to produce committed employees are not always
successful. I regularly met former Antam workers, especially from the
first two decades of the mine’s operations, who now work in small-scale
mining. Many expressed dissatisfaction with the company, complaining
that local employees were not shown respect, describing the injustice of
work contracts that abruptly end, or likening Antam’s training programs
to torture. Considering Pak Basri’s strict vision of “internal integrity,”
perhaps it is no surprise that some employees do not last in the company.
They exemplify how Antam’s efforts to create a clean workforce, one
embodying the company’s distinction between proper and improper
forms of extraction, must contend with an array of competing influences
in Pongkor.
6.2. Pongkor Geopark and the mining museum
Like many extractive operations (e.g., Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Seagle,
2012), Antam lauds its environmental initiatives, certifications, and
“best practices.” For example, staff frequently told me about the
M. Libassi
company’s receipt of the PROPER Gold award, the highest designation
offered by an Indonesian government program that evaluates corporate
sustainability. It was clear from our conversations that such achieve­
ments were an important source of internal validation for company
employees. They serve as evidence that Antam is not a destructive force,
but a green beacon of modern, science-based sustainability. Artifacts
around the office continually reinforce this perspective. Grass green wall
calendars show Antam staff planting trees, while a commissioned
painting depicts its mining operations as harmoniously surrounded by
lush forest, Javan hawk-eagles, and rare leopards. Furthermore, the
company’s juxtaposition with small-scale mining has stimulated a
paternalistic tone. Antam’s office staff, largely urban, non-local people,
warn born-and-bred Pongkor residents that local land and water need to
be saved “for our grandchildren.” Company employees also visit local
schools to provide environmental education. Among the accomplish­
ments detailed in their presentations are the company’s efforts to restore
land allegedly destroyed by small-scale miners. Ironically, the resource
extraction operation is not on the defensive about its environmental
record, but rather frames itself as the region’s key advocate for the
environment.
This narrative was elevated to a new level with the Pongkor Geopark.
During my research, Antam’s ComDev office transformed into the
headquarters of the “Pongkor Geopark Secretariat” almost overnight.
The Geopark is an initiative that, combining Antam’s agro­
geoedutourism vision with regency government support, designates the
wider region (spanning 15 districts) as a park showcasing unique
geological features. When I first saw the new Geopark office in August
2018 barely a month had passed since I was interviewing CSR officials in
the very same room. The office had been dramatically redecorated in the
intervening time. A banner over the door proclaimed its new role and
floor-to-ceiling images exalted the region’s “geo-diversity, bio-diversity,
and culture-diversity.” With this sudden transformation, Antam refash­
ioned itself as a conservation unit and remade its ComDev staff into
ecotourism experts (see also Büscher & Davidov, 2014). To these em­
ployees, the Geopark is an appropriate and sustainable way for Pong­
kor’s community to benefit from local geological resources, a potential
future always contrasted with small-scale mining.
A core attraction of the Geopark is the Pongkor Mining Museum, an
underground museum meant to serve as the centerpiece of Antam’s
agrogeoedutourism plan. During one of my first visits to Antam, Pak
Jefry of the ComDev team excitedly described this vision to me. Pongkor
would be the first underground mining museum in Indonesia and one of
the largest in Asia. Even after Antam’s mining activities concluded,
company staff would remain in Pongkor to operate the museum and
associated tourism facilities. This, Pak Jefry explained, would ensure
that the concession never comes under the control of small-scale miners.
Despite his enthusiasm, Pak Jefry side-stepped my requests to visit
the museum for months, telling me it was not yet ready for visitors.
When I found promotional materials for the museum at the new
“Secretariat,” I was finally able to convince him to give me a tour. One
week later, as my tour began, I came to understand his reticence. The
entrance to the museum, a modern steel and brick wall reading “Pongkor
Mining Museum,” is constructed a foot in front of the aging, concrete
mine entrance. It is a façade in both the literal and figurative senses.
Behind it is not a museum, but an actively worked mining tunnel. This
serves as an excellent educational opportunity for geology students,
who, reasonably, it seems are the only visitors permitted to enter. But,
absent some dramatic changes, it appears unlikely the Pongkor Mining
Museum will be ready for general tourists anytime soon. Nevertheless,
the mining museum serves an important purpose. The façade, colorful
brochures, and omnipresent idea of mining tourism propel the narrative
within Antam that the company is a leader in ecotourism. And, for Pak
Jefry and his colleagues, there was no doubt that this was the key to
Pongkor’s future.
Antam’s efforts to remake itself as clean and green thus constitute a
third major subject formation process in Pongkor. Its employees undergo
10
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
training programs, work surrounded by celebratory office symbols, and
repeatedly hear and reproduce official company narratives. Antam
leadership deploys these tools with the often-explicit goals of shaping
employee conduct and inculcating values seen as modern and moral.
These initiatives are not simply about increasing operational efficiency
or improving public relations. Rather, they have everything to do with
Antam’s conflict with small-scale miners. Antam senior staff repeatedly
draw contrasts between their operations and those of gurandil. They use
this juxtaposition to make the company’s claims to authority internally
meaningful, to encourage employees to distinguish themselves from
small-scale miners, and to set boundaries around who is entitled to use
local resources and in what ways.
7. Co-constitutive extractive subjects
This article has analyzed the competition over gold in Pongkor to
advance understandings of resource conflict as more than struggles to
control resources, but also to shape subjects. Frederiksen and Himley
(2020) propose the term “extractive subjects” to argue that industrial
extraction expands through the production of consenting subjects. Other
scholars have similarly pointed to the array of techniques companies
employ to diffuse dissent, win local hearts and minds, and “socially
engineer” extraction (Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Verweijen & Dunlap, 2021;
Welker, 2014). I add to this evidence while simultaneously highlighting
a more diverse set of extractive subject formation processes and
emphasizing the need to understand the relationships between them.
First, Pongkor illustrates a particular challenge to persuading com­
munities to accept industrial extraction: competing claims to the same
resources. Similar to other extractive operations, Antam tries to shape
local subjects to facilitate its mining activities. Its security and ComDev
teams work to “wake up” gurandil and other local people, aiming to
reduce unlicensed mining and encourage its preferred forms of devel­
opment. These tactics are part of broader boundary-making processes
that seek to define the terms of inclusion and exclusion between the
governing and the governed (Nightingale, 2018). Frederiksen and
Himley (2020) identify the exclusion of local communities from the
extractive economy as one of these key boundaries. In most contexts,
this means limited access to benefits associated with industrial extrac­
tion, including company employment or development aid (e.g., Fergu­
son, 1999; Himley, 2013; Welker, 2014). However, in Pongkor it is not
secondary mining benefits that are sought and contested, but the min­
erals themselves. Local residents have their own means of accessing,
managing, and profiting from the gold under their feet. It is thus all the
more difficult for Antam to make the case that the community needs the
company. Therefore, instead of trying to win the support of local people,
Antam’s prime focus is cultivating subjects that will self-regulate and
stop small-scale mining. Perhaps more so than other extractive contexts,
this process is less about “maintaining a social license to operate” than
instilling particular moralistic values to reduce competition. In the
context of conflict over resources, then, industrial mines behave like
governing socioenvironmental authorities (e.g., Agrawal, 2005; Peluso
& Vandergeest, 2001), attempting to shape what people do with local
resources rather than simply how they engage with corporate extraction.
Second, Pongkor’s gurandil demonstrate that extractive sub­
jectivities are not always the result of state or corporate governmental
endeavors, nor do they always facilitate industrial resource control. New
subjectivities also emerge among those who contest (or compete with)
corporate resource extraction. Pongkor’s community miners counter
Antam’s territorial authority, claiming local gold, disputing corporate
expectations of local conduct, and reframing small-scale mining as more
than a livelihood. This finding reinforces research detailing the limita­
tions of top-down forms of environmental governmentality (e.g., Cepek,
2011; Singh, 2013; Welker, 2012). Simultaneously, it demonstrates that
understanding bottom-up responses to industrial extraction requires
more than a simple analytic of resistance. Community miner sub­
jectivities are the joint outcome of collectively experienced “situated
M. Libassi
struggles” (see Moore, 2005) and deliberate political work, such as Mang
Dayat’s efforts to articulate gurandil as a coherent social, political, and
professional identity (see Li, 2000). They are also more than local.
Community miners draw on national and international discourses, from
Islamic values to environmentalism to neocolonialism, to frame their
situation. In many cases, they astutely invert the same discourses Antam
deploys to critique them. Learning to “appropriate the state’s techniques
and manner of representation to bolster the legitimacy of ‘customary’
claims to resources,” as Peluso (1995, p. 384) describes other forms of
counter-territorialization, is thus one way local subjects may change in
response to extraction.
Third, extractive corporations’ efforts to shape subjects are not only
aimed at communities that live near their operations, but also internally.
Corporate mining employees are thus an important type of extractive
subject in their own right. As with many extractive operations around
the world, Antam has worked to reposition itself as a leader of clean and
green development. Existing research emphasizes that such maneuvers
are often used to consolidate companies’ external legitimacy and quell
political opposition (Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Rajak, 2011; Seagle, 2012).
But, as Welker (2014) highlights, corporations are not monoliths, and
the varying views of their employees matter. We must look inside
extractive operations to understand how corporate values are made
meaningful and to what effect. As in Rudnyckyj’s (2009) Krakatau Steel
case, Antam leaders attempt to shape their employees by connecting
international business and sustainability principles with familiar Indo­
nesian nationalistic and Islamic values, a combination of “modern” and
“traditional” likely deployed in many mining contexts. But the specter of
small-scale mining is also key to making these values stick. Senior staff
repeatedly contrast Antam’s industrial extraction with small-scale
mining, working to heighten the company’s authority by drawing dis­
tinctions between proper and improper forms of resource use. Such
comparisons are used to legitimize industrial extraction across resource
sectors—as with swidden agriculture, customary forest use practices,
informal fishing, and so on. When analyzing extractive contexts, re­
searchers must thus be attentive to the subject formation processes that
produce extraction’s torch-bearers: the employees that come to embody,
enact, and reproduce the values their corporate employers espouse.
These multiple types of extractive subjectivities—inside, outside,
and around extractive operations—are made and remade relationally.
Scholars of extraction have consistently pointed to the dynamic rela­
tionship between extractive operations and nearby communities (e.g.,
Anthias, 2018; Golub, 2014; Welker, 2014). For example, Kirsch (2014)
argues that mining corporations and their civil society critics have a
“dialectical relationship” (p. 3), iteratively innovating new legal and
discursive strategies to counter each other. Pongkor’s industrial and
small-scale extractive subjects have, likewise, emerged in response to
one another. However, this interrelation does not simply take the form
of a back-and-forth in the courtroom, in public discourse, or at the
negotiating table (see Golub, 2014; Kirsch, 2014). Instead, the lens of
subjectivity allows me to view the interrelation between Pongkor’s
various resource claimants as embodied within individuals.
As with feminist (e.g., Nightingale, 2011; Sultana, 2009) and
Gramscian (e.g., Jakobsen, 2022; Moore, 2005) analyses of environ­
mental subjects, I view Pongkor’s multiple extractive subjects as
informed by myriad overlapping and intersecting influences. These
include different political-economic positionings, histories, cultural
practices, socio-natural relations, imaginings of the nation, international
environmental best practices, community development discourses, and
many more. Pongkor’s resource claimants work to arrange and accen­
tuate particular influences, less shaping subjects wholesale than
attempting to corral coherent subjectivities amidst a complex field of
competing influences. It is this multiplicity of factors that leads to the
mixed successes of governmental projects in Pongkor, as well as the
sometimes-contradictory subjectivities that result. Moreover, actors in
Pongkor take advantage of these fractures to rework the relations that
define ruling authority and governed subject (see Nightingale, 2018;
11
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
Sikor & Lund, 2009). For Nightingale (2018), “It is through these
boundary-making practices that the possibilities for social change lie as
people adhere to or violate resource governance rules, recognise or
refuse authority, [and] make claims to rights and belonging” (p. 696).
In Pongkor, there are repeated attempts to draw and redraw such
boundaries. Antam programs work to place community members
outside the extractive economy by inculcating particular values. Politi­
cal small-scale miners have responded by rejecting their positioning as
Antam’s stakeholders, articulating themselves as community miners
with rights to local resources, and inverting many of the arguments the
company itself uses. Within Antam, senior staff then use comparisons
with small-scale mining to instill within employees a conviction that
only they are proper stewards of Pongkor’s mineral resources. These
dynamics show how extractive subjects in Pongkor have been made in
relation to, against, and through each other. Neither local gurandil nor
Antam employees would view themselves in the same ways were it not
for the other. This finding complicates commonplace understandings of
power and agency in extractive contexts. Counter to the image of the
domineering governmental mining company, Pongkor shows how
nearby residents can ironically become co-authors of corporate em­
ployees’ identities and conduct. The subjectivities of people in Pong­
kor—whether Antam staff, small-scale miners, or other local
residents—are thus co-constitutive.
Pongkor offers various broader lessons to help scholars interpret the
complex power dynamics observed in extractive contexts (e.g., Côte &
Korf, 2018; Ey & Sherval, 2016; Peluso, 2018). It adds to the literature
that suggests the common discursive binary of mining company versus
community is faulty and misleading (e.g., Anthias, 2018; Valdivia,
2008). In Pongkor, power is often aimed laterally or internally to build
support rather than targeting an oppositional force. The case also helps
connect extractive subjectivity to the spatialized politics of territorial
conflicts (e.g., Moore, 2005; Peluso & Vandergeest, 2001; Yeh, 2013).
Shifting dispositions and conduct are not just the effects of extraction on
nearby communities. They are manifestations of processes of territori­
alization and counter-territorialization; of contests over who gets to set
rules about the ways people interact with resources in space. Under­
standing these dynamics is particularly important in extractive contexts,
where industrial firms are often given state-like authority over conces­
sions spaces. Pongkor demonstrates the significant roles competing ef­
forts to shape subjects play in enacting and contesting this territorial
control, and reminds us that territorialization is as much derived from
authority as it is used to produce authority (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018).
Pongkor can also help us better understand extractive spaces
involving small-scale mining. As mentioned previously, mining com­
panies face particular challenges in engaging “stakeholders” when these
same people are competing resource claimants. These challenges exist,
too, for other governmental endeavors aimed at small-scale mining,
including national and international programs to educate small-scale
miners about the dangers of mercury or train them to participate in
more highly regulated, legal forms of small-scale mining (see Prescott
et al., 2022; Vogel, Musamba, & Radley, 2018). These projects seek to
cultivate certain kinds of environmental and citizen subjects. But, as in
Pongkor, such efforts are likely to operate amidst competing influences,
including small-scale miners’ own repositionings in relation to the state.
The case also adds to research on the potential for small-scale mining to
become a professional identity and a collective political force (Bryceson
et al., 2014; Bryceson & Geenen, 2016; Jonkman & de Theije, 2022).
Pongkor’s gurandil show that such identities are not simply about
shared work experiences. They can emerge through collective struggles,
such as with industrial extraction or the state, as well as through
deliberate efforts to articulate miner identities as more than a livelihood.
Rather than evading the state, unlicensed miners may attempt to make
their demands legible to it through their own arguments about natural
resource management and development. Such small-scale miners are,
thus, engaging in their own forms of cultural politics.
To paraphrase Moore (1993), struggles over resources are
M. Libassi
simultaneously struggles over meanings. In Pongkor, these struggles
entail competing efforts to shape how individuals make meanings. The
terrain of local resource conflict is not merely the mining concession, but
also the dispositions of the people who use it. Its constituent subject
formation processes are not simply top-down governmental endeavors
from a powerful extractive operation, but are multi-directional, over­
lapping, and interrelated. These are the types of intersections of power
that researchers must trace in order to understand the complex and
contradictory subjects who live and work in the midst of extraction.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Fulbright Program, the American
Institute for Indonesian Studies, and the Institute of International
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank
Judith Verweijen, Sara Geenen, Brian Klein, and Annah Zhu for their
detailed comments on earlier drafts. The article also benefited from
discussions with Nancy Peluso’s Land Lab research group at UC Berkeley
and the 2021-2022 Center for Cultural Analysis Seminar at Rutgers
University. Two anonymous reviewers provided suggestions that led to
significant improvements. Finally, I thank the many people in Pongkor
who shared their time and experiences with me.
References
Agnew, J., 1994. The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international
relations theory. Rev. Int. Polit. Econ. 1 (1), 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/
09692299408434268.
Agrawal, A., 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of
Subjects. Duke University Press.
Allen, J., 2011. Topological twists: Power’s shifting geographies. Dialog. Hum. Geogr. 1
(3), 283–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611421546.
Anthias, P., 2018. Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon
Politics in the Bolivian Chaco. Cornell University Press.
Arifal, 2017. Limbah Antam bunuh ribuan ikan [Antam waste kills thousands of fish].
Radar Bogor. December 19. https://www.radarbogor.id/2017/12/19/limbah-antam
-bunuh-ribuan-ikan/.
Aspinall, C., 2001. Small-scale mining in Indonesia. Mining, Minerals and Sustainable
Development, International Institute for Environment and Development. http
://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G00725.pdf?.
Ballard, C., Banks, G., 2003. Resource wars: The anthropology of mining. Ann. Rev.
Anthropol. 32 (1), 287–313. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.
anthro.32.061002.093116.
Basuki, A., Sumanagara, D.A., Sinambela, D., 1994. The Gunung Pongkor gold-silver
deposit, West Java, Indonesia. J. Geochem. Explor. 50 (1–3), 371–391. https://doi.
org/10.1016/0375-6742(94)90032-9.
Bebbington, A., Bury, J. (Eds.), 2013. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining,
Oil, and Gas in Latin America. University of Texas Press.
Braun, B., 2000. Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in late
Victorian Canada. Ecumene 7 (1), 7–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/
096746080000700102.
Brock, A., Dunlap, A., 2018. Normalising corporate counterinsurgency: Engineering
consent, managing resistance and greening destruction around the Hambach coal
mine and beyond. Polit. Geogr. 62, 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
polgeo.2017.09.018.
Bryceson, D.F., Fisher, E., Jønsson, J.B., Mwaipopo, R. (Eds.), 2014. Mining and Social
Transformation in Africa: Mineralizing and Democratizing Trends in Artisanal
Production. Routledge.
Bryceson, D.F., Geenen, S., 2016. Artisanal frontier mining of gold in Africa: Labour
transformation in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. African Affairs
115 (459), 296–317. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adv073.
Büscher, B., Davidov, V. (Eds.), 2014. The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus: Political
Economies and Rural Realities of (un)Comfortable Bedfellows. Routledge.
Camba, A., 2021. The unintended consequences of national regulations: Large-scale-
small-scale relations in Philippine and Indonesian nickel mining. Resour. Policy 74,
102213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2021.102213.
Cepek, M.L., 2011. Foucault in the forest: Questioning environmentality in Amazonia.
Am. Ethnol. 38 (3), 501–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x.
Corson, C., 2011. Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism: Non-state influence in
struggles over Madagascar’s forests. J. Peasant Stud. 38 (4), 703–726. https://doi.
org/10.1080/03066150.2011.607696.
12
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
Côte, M., Korf, B., 2018. Making concessions: Extractive enclaves, entangled capitalism
and regulative pluralism at the gold mining frontier in Burkina Faso. World Dev.
101, 466–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.11.002.
Ekers, M., Loftus, A., 2008. The power of water: Developing dialogues between Foucault
and Gramsci. Environ. Plann. D: Soc. Space 26 (4), 698–718. https://doi.org/
10.1068/d5907.
Elmhirst, R., 2011. Migrant pathways to resource access in Lampung’s political forest:
Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality. Geoforum 42 (2), 173–183. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.004.
Ey, M., Sherval, M., 2016. Exploring the minescape: Engaging with the complexity of the
extractive sector. Area 48 (2), 176–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12245.
Ferguson, J., 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the
Zambian Copperbelt. University of California Press.
Fletcher, R., 2017. Environmentality unbound: Multiple governmentalities in
environmental politics. Geoforum 85, 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
geoforum.2017.06.009.
Frederiksen, T., Himley, M., 2020. Tactics of dispossession: Access, power, and
subjectivity at the extractive frontier. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 45 (1), 50–64. https://
doi.org/10.1111/tran.12329.
Gamu, J., Le Billon, P., Spiegel, S.J., 2015. Extractive industries and poverty: A review of
recent findings and linkage mechanisms. Extr. Ind. Soc. 2 (1), 162–176. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.exis.2014.11.001.
Geenen, S., 2014. Dispossession, displacement and resistance: Artisanal miners in a gold
concession in South-Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Resour. Policy 40, 90–99.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2013.03.004.
Gewati, M., 2016. Penambang ilegal bisa jadi bencana bagi negeri ini [Illegal miners can
become a disaster for this country]. Kompas. October 13. http://nasional.kompas.
com/read/2016/10/13/07560031/penambang.ilegal.bisa.jadi.bencana.bagi.negeri.
ini.
Gidwani, V., 2008. Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work
in India. University of Minnesotta Press.
Golub, A., 2014. Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors
in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press Books.
Hall, S., 1986. Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. J. Commun.
Inquiry 10 (2), 5–27.
Hausermann, H., Ferring, D., 2018. Unpacking land grabs: Subjects, performances and
the state in Ghana’s ‘small-scale’ gold mining sector. Dev. Change 49 (4),
1010–1033. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12402.
Hidayah, I., 2017. Cikotok: Kilau yang Tak Pernah Pudar [Cikotok: Undying Luster]. PT
Antam (Persero) Tbk.
Hilson, G., 2012. Corporate Social Responsibility in the extractive industries: Experiences
from developing countries. Resour. Policy 37 (2), 131–137. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.resourpol.2012.01.002.
Hilson, G., Sauerwein, T., Owen, J., 2020. Large and artisanal scale mine development:
The case for autonomous co-existence. World Dev. 130, 104919 https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104919.
Hilson, G., Yakovleva, N., 2007. Strained relations: A critical analysis of the mining
conflict in Prestea, Ghana. Polit. Geogr. 26, 98–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
polgeo.2006.09.001.
Himley, M., 2013. Regularizing extraction in Andean Peru: Mining and social
mobilization in an age of corporate social responsibility. Antipode 45 (2), 394–416.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01001.x.
Ismawati, Y., Zaki, K., Septiono, M.A., 2018. Mercury Country Situation Report:
Indonesia. BaliFokus Foundation. https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/fi
nal_2018b_indonesia_mercury_country_situation.pdf.
Jacka, J.K., 2018. The anthropology of mining: The social and environmental impacts of
resource extraction in the mineral age. Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 47 (1), 61–77. https://
doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050156.
Jakobsen, J., 2022. Beyond subject-making: Conflicting humanisms, class analysis, and
the “dark side” of Gramscian political ecology. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 46 (2), 575–589.
https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211056442.
Jonkman, J., de Theije, M., 2022. Amalgamation: Social, technological, and legal
entanglements in small-scale gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname.
Geoforum 128, 202–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.10.017.
Jønsson, J.B., Bryceson, D.F., 2009. Rushing for gold: Mobility and small-scale mining in
East Africa. Dev. Change 40 (2), 249–279. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
7660.2009.01514.x.
Kemp, D., Owen, J.R., 2019. Characterising the interface between large and small-scale
mining. Extract. Ind. Soc. 6 (4), 1091–1100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
exis.2019.07.002.
Kirsch, S., 2014. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their
Critics. University of California Press.
Klein, B.I., 2022. Local institutions and artisanal mining: Governance forms in the
goldfields of Madagascar. J. Rural Stud. 92, 269–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
jrurstud.2022.03.030.
Kojola, E., 2019. Bringing back the mines and a way of life: Populism and the politics of
extraction. Ann. Am. Assoc. Geogr. 109 (2), 371–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/
24694452.2018.1506695.
Lahiri-Dutt, K., 2015. The feminisation of mining. Geogr. Compass 9 (9), 523–541.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12229.
Langston, J.D., Lubis, M.I., Sayer, J.A., Margules, C., Boedhihartono, A.K., Dirks, P.H.G.
M., 2015. Comparative development benefits from small and large scale mines in
North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Extract. Ind. Soc. 2 (3), 434–444. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.exis.2015.02.007.
M. Libassi
Lestari, N.I., 2011. Mineral Governance, Conflicts and Rights: Case Studies on the
Informal Mining of Gold, Tin and Coal in Indonesia. Doctoral dissertation. Australian
National University.
Li, T.M., 2000. Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the
tribal slot. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 42 (1), 149–179.
Li, T.M., 2002. Engaging simplifications: Community-based resource management,
market processes and state agendas in upland Southeast Asia. World Dev. 30 (2),
265–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(01)00103-6.
Li, T.M., 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of
Politics. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389781.
Libassi, M., 2020a. Indonesia: Adaptation and differentiation in informal gold mining. In:
Verbrugge, B., Geenen, S. (Eds.), Global Gold Production Touching Ground. Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 321–338.
Libassi, M., 2020b. Mining heterogeneity: Diverse labor arrangements in an Indonesian
informal gold economy. Extr. Ind. Soc. 7 (3), 1036–1045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
exis.2020.06.015.
Lund, C., Rachman, N.F., 2018. Indirect recognition. Frontiers and territorialization
around Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, Indonesia. World Dev. 101, 417–428.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.04.003.
Mann, G., 2009. Should political ecology be Marxist? A case for Gramsci’s historical
materialism. Geoforum 40 (3), 335–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
geoforum.2008.12.004.
Marston, A., Himley, M., 2021. Earth politics: Territory and the subterranean –
Introduction to the special issue. Polit. Geogr. 88, 102407 https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.polgeo.2021.102407.
McMahon, G., Subdibjo, E.R., Aden, J., Bouzaher, A., Dore, G., Kunanayagam, R., 2000.
Mining and the environment in Indonesia: Long-term trends and repercussions of the
Asian economic crisis. East Asia Environment and Social Development Discussion
Paper Series (November).
MEMR (Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources), 2021. Illegal mining violates the
constitution, says director general [Press release]. September 27. https://www.esdm
.go.id/en/media-center/news-archives/dirjen-minerba-pertambangan-tanpa-
izin-melanggar-konstitusi-.
Meutia, A.A., Lumowa, R., Sakakibara, M., 2022. Indonesian artisanal and small-scale
gold mining—A narrative literature review. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 19
(7). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19073955.
Mollett, S., Faria, C., 2013. Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum
45, 116–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.10.009.
Moore, D.S., 1993. Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands: Political ecology,
ethnography, and peasant resource struggles. Econ. Geogr. 69 (4), 380–401. https://
doi.org/10.2307/143596.
Moore, D.S., 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Duke
University Press.
Nash, J.C., 1979. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation
in Bolivian Tin Mines. Columbia University Press.
Nightingale, A.J., 2011. Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material
production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal. Geoforum 42 (2),
153–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.03.004.
Nightingale, A.J., 2018. The socioenvironmental state: Political authority, subjects, and
transformative socionatural change in an uncertain world. Environ. Plann. E: Nat.
Space 1 (4), 688–711. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618816467.
Owen, J.R., Kemp, D., 2013. Social licence and mining: A critical perspective. Resour.
Policy 38 (1), 29–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2012.06.016.
Patel, K., Rogan, J., Cuba, N., Bebbington, A., 2016. Evaluating conflict surrounding
mineral extraction in Ghana: Assessing the spatial interactions of large and small-
scale mining. Extract. Ind. Soc. 3 (2), 450–463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
exis.2016.01.006.
Peluso, N.L., 1995. Whose woods are these? Counter mapping forest terrotories in
Kalimantan Indonesia. Antipode 27 (4), 383–406.
Peluso, N.L., 2018. Entangled territories in small-scale gold mining frontiers: Labor
practices, property, and secrets in Indonesian gold country. World Dev. 101,
400–416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.11.003.
Peluso, N.L., Vandergeest, P., 2001. Genealogies of the political forest and customary
rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. J. Asian Stud. 60 (03), 761–812.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2700109.
Prescott, G.W., Baird, M., Geenen, S., Nkuba, B., Phelps, J., Webb, E.L., 2022.
Formalizing artisanal and small-scale gold mining: A grand challenge of the
Minamata Convention. One Earth 5 (3), 242–251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
oneear.2022.02.005.
Presidential Instruction No. 3, 2000. Coordination to Overcome Problems of Unlicensed
Mining. Government of Indonesia.
Rajak, D., 2011. In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility.
Stanford University Press.
Rasmussen, M.B., Lund, C., 2018. Reconfiguring frontier spaces: The territorialization of
resource control. World Dev. 101, 388–399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
worlddev.2017.01.018.
Rizal, M., 2015. Gurandil di tambang emas Pongkor terus dibersihkan [Gurandil at
Pongkor gold mine continue to be cleared]. DetikNews. September 14. https://news.
detik.com/berita/d-3018494/gurandil-di-tambang-emas-pongkor-terus-dibersihkan.
13
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx
Robinson, E., 2021. Citizens, custodians, and villains: Environmentality and the politics
of difference in Senegal’s community forests. Geoforum 125, 25–36. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.06.017.
Robinson, K., 1986. Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of Development in
an Indonesian Mining Town. SUNY Press.
Rudnyckyj, D., 2009. Spiritual economies: Islam and neoliberalism in contemporary
Indonesia. Cult. Anthropol. 24 (1), 104–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-
1360.2009.00028.x.
Saudale, V., 2015. Ribuan aparat sisir gunung emas Pongkor [Thousands of security
forces comb gold mountain Pongkor]. BeritaSatu. September 18. https://www.berita
satu.com/archive/308157/ribuan-aparat-sisir-gunung-emas-pongkor.
Scott, R.R., 2010. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the
Appalachian Coalfields. University of Minnesotta Press.
Seagle, C., 2012. Inverting the impacts: Mining, conservation and sustainability claims
near the Rio Tinto/QMM ilmenite mine in Southeast Madagascar. J. Peasant Stud. 39
(2), 447–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.671769.
Sikor, T., Lund, C., 2009. Access and property: A question of power and authority. Dev.
Change 40 (1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2009.01503.x.
Singh, N.M., 2013. The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of
environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India. Geoforum 47,
189–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.010.
Siscawati, M., 2012. Social Movements and Scientific Forestry: Examining the
Community Forestry Movement in Indonesia. Doctoral dissertation. University of
Washington.
Sultana, F., 2009. Fluid lives: Subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh. Gend.
Place Cult. 16 (4), 427–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690903003942.
Taussig, M.T., 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of
North Carolina Press.
Thorburn, C., 2002. Regime change-prospects for community-based resource
management in post-New Order Indonesia. Soc. Nat. Resour. 15 (7), 617–628.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920290069227.
Tschakert, P., 2009. Recognizing and nurturing artisanal mining as a viable livelihood.
Resour. Policy 34 (1–2), 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2008.05.007.
Valdivia, G., 2008. Governing relations between people and things: Citizenship, territory,
and the political economy of petroleum in Ecuador. Polit. Geogr. 27 (4), 456–477.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.03.007.
Vandergeest, P., Peluso, N.L., 1995. Territorialization and state power in Thailand.
Theory Soc. 24 (3), 385–426.
Verbrugge, B., 2017. Towards a negotiated solution to conflicts between large-scale and
small-scale miners? The Acupan contract mining project in the Philippines. Extr. Ind.
Soc. 4 (2), 352–360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2016.10.011.
Verbrugge, B., Lanzano, C., Libassi, M., 2021. The cyanide revolution: Efficiency gains
and exclusion in artisanal- and small-scale gold mining. Geoforum 126, 267–276.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.030.
Verweijen, J., Dunlap, A., 2021. The evolving techniques of the social engineering of
extraction: Introducing political (re)actions ‘from above’ in large-scale mining and
energy projects. Polit. Geogr. 88, 102342 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
polgeo.2021.102342.
Vogel, C., Musamba, J., Radley, B., 2018. A miner’s canary in eastern Congo:
Formalisation of artisanal 3T mining and precarious livelihoods in South Kivu.
Extract. Ind. Soc. 5 (1), 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.09.003.
Warburton, E., 2017. Resource nationalism in Indonesia: Ownership structures and
sectoral variation in mining and palm oil. J. East Asian Stud. 17 (3), 285–312.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2017.13.
Welker, M., 2012. The Green Revolution’s ghost: Unruly subjects of participatory
development in rural Indonesia. Am. Ethnol. 39 (2), 389–406. https://doi.org/
10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01371.x.
Welker, M., 2014. Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-
Authoritarian Indonesia. University of California Press.
Werthmann, K., 2009. Working in a boom-town: Female perspectives on gold-mining in
Burkina Faso. Resour. Policy 34 (1–2), 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
resourpol.2008.09.002.
Williams, N.B., 1988. Boom time along “Rim of Fire”: Indonesian miners revive gold rush
spirit of 49ers. Los Angeles Times. December 12. http://articles.latimes.com/1988-
12-12/news/mn-152_1_gold-rush.
Yeh, E., 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese
Development. Cornell University Press.
Zhu, A., Klein, B.I., 2022. The rise of flexible extraction: Boom-chasing and subject-
making in northern Madagascar. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
geoforum.2022.06.005. In this issue.
Zhu, A., Peluso, N.L., 2021. From gold to rosewood: Agrarian change, high-value
resources, and the flexible frontier-makers of the twenty-first century. In:
Himley, M., Havice, E., Valdivia, G. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical
Resource Geography. Routledge.
Zulkarnain, I., Pudjiastuti, T.N., Karomah, U., 2003. Potensi Konflik di Daerah
Pertambangan: Kasus Pongkor dan Cikotok [Potential for Conflict in Mining Areas:
The Cases of Pongkor and Cikotok]. Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, Jakarta.