“We are the twins of Komodo dragons”: Multispecies Kinship and Indigenous Spatial Politics in Indonesia’s Ecotourism Frontiers
Dr. Cypri Jehan Paju Dale
Research Fellow
University of Wisconsin Madison
Abstract
In Komodo National Park, the natural habitat of world’s largest living lizard known as Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) and the indigenous people of Ata Modo, a zoning system has been instrumental in the process of commodification of the dragon and the transformation of its habitat into an ecotourism frontier. This talk draws upon an ethnographic and historical analysis of the two large scale ecotourism projects administered by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Indonesian government in the park in the last 30 years: first, to analyze the mobilization of a zoning system as a tool of control over the protected area and its inhabitants in order to ease the capitalist expansion to the indigenous and multispecies territory and second, to elucidate the articulation of Indigenous spatial politics that relies on the revitalization of multispecies kinship relationship with the Komodo dragons to contest the exclusionary nature of the new tourism industry. While the zoning system—and indeed the whole logic of conservation and ecotourism— is based on the modernist separation and hierarchy between human and nature, indigenous spatial politics relies on the intimate relationship with the dragon, perceived in the indigenous cosmology as twins of the human that were born from the same mother and share the same living space on the islands. The presentation wishes to contribute to the conversation on the political ecology of ecotourism by highlighting ecotourism both as a discourse and policy regime that merge conservation and economic development and its entanglement with spatial politics as a process of negotiating social and environmental relationships in the increasingly disruptive capitalist world.
