Based on ethnographic and archival research from inland and border regions of Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), this edited volume explores frontier-making and unmaking through the interplay of state and capitalist forces, environmental change, and human and more-than-human relations.
The chapters critically examine the socio-environmental transformations associated with infrastructure development, resource extraction, and frontier expansion in Indonesian Borneo. Through case studies centring local perspectives and experiences, the chapters illustrate how frontiers are actively produced, contested, and reconfigured, highlighting the historically layered, agentive, and multispecies character of frontiers. Adopting a frontier-making and unmaking approach, the book offers a novel perspective on frontier dynamics, emphasising their temporal, relational, and more-than-human nature.
This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in anthropology, political ecology, human geography, Southeast Asian studies, and environmental humanities. Readers interested in environmental change, resource frontiers, and the social dimensions of development and conservation in tropical forest regions will also benefit.
Table of Contents:
Introduction. Making and Unmaking Frontiers in Borneo: Trajectories of Human and More-Than-Human Lifeworlds
1.Negotiating Space at a Frontier of Violence: The Upper Mahakam Region, 1885-1910
2.State Authority and Road Frontier Temporalities in the Barito Basin, Southeastern Kalimantan (1840-1940)
3.Crossing the Border in Borneo: The Law and Reality at a Northern Jetty
4.The Political Economy of Swidden Agriculture and Fire on the Indonesian Forest Frontier
5.The Inferno Around Them: Frontierization and Emerging Firescapes in Central Kalimantan
6.More-Than-Human Frontier Making in the Peatlands in Central Kalimantan: Human-Plant Boundaries and Belonging
7.Gendered and Generational Dynamics of Frontierisation: Uneven Livelihood Struggles and Dynamics at East Kalimantan’s Extractive Frontier
8.Aspiring Self-determined Lives: Exploring Rural Transformation as Future-making on a Bornean Resource Frontier
9.Frontier Culture: Open Ways of Life at an Oil Palm Frontier in East Kalimantan
10. Preserving Autonomy and Diversity in Oil Palm Frontiers in West and Central Kalimantan
11.Counterpublics and Haunted Publics: Media Imaginaries of Landscape Transformation in Central Kalimantan
12. Afterword: Borneo Frontiers and their Afterlives
About the Author :
Anu Lounela is an Anthropologist and University researcher in Global Development Studies and Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her anthropological research focus on forest and climate change disputes, state formation, frontiers, and more-than-human and land-water relations in the context of all-encompassing environmental crisis with a geographical focus on Central Kalimantan and Java, Indonesia. Some of her recent publications include: Transformation of the Agrarian Landscape and Hope in the Central Kalimantan Peatlands (2026) and Haunting the Factory: Indonesian Modernity and the Spiritual Landscape of Central Kalimantan (2023).
Michaela Haug is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg. Her research focuses on socio-ecological transformations and human–forest relations in Indonesia. Her most recent work centres on how competing visions of the future shape forest-use change and related social, economic, and environmental processes in East Kalimantan. She is the author of Framing the Future through the Lens of Hope: Environmental Change, Diverse Hopes and the Challenge of Engagement (2020) and co-editor, with Timo Duile, Kristina Großmann, and Guido Sprenger, of Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia: Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence (Routledge, 2023).
Christian Oesterheld is currently Chair of the Social Science Division at Mahidol University International College (MUIC) in Nakhonpathom/Thailand, where he teaches anthropology, sociology and conflict studies. He has been engaged in long-term field-research in Kalimantan since 2000, working on ethnic conflicts between indigenous Dayak communities and Madurese migrants between 2000-2007 and, since 2007, on the ethnography and cultural history of Mahakam Ulu Regency.
Kenneth Sillander is senior university lecturer at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research with the Bentian Dayak of Indonesian Borneo since the 1990s. His research interests include kinship, religion, rituals, naming, ethnicity, values, and sociality. He has edited Anarchic Solidarity (2011), Ancestors in Borneo Societies (2012), and Human Nature and Social Life (2017), and the special issues Belonging in Borneo: Refiguring Dayak Ethnicity in Indonesia (2016), Qualifying Sociality through Values (2021), and Borneo Youth: Anxieties and Aspirations for Uncertain Futures (2024).
