ABSTRACT
Indonesian plantations were thrust into the global limelight in 1997 by dramatic episodes of social and environmental violence in Kalimantan. The former involved an outbreak of tribal warfare in the vicinity of huge oil and rubber plantations in West Kalimantan in January and February, and the latter involved the engulfment of plantation lands throughout Kalimantan by wildfires so great as to imperil human health in several neighboring countries. These developments, unique in both scope and character, can be interpreted as signs that something is fundamentally wrong with the social and environmental relations in the state plantation sector (Dove 1997). Yet public representation of these relations, which has been dominated by the official views of plantation managers, gave no prior hint of this. The social and environmental conflagrations of 1997 suggest that these official views have been distorted and self-serving. The purpose of this study is to examine how and why this distortion occurs.
