ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the start of Indonesia’s New Order regime, many Eastern Indonesian villages experienced the effects of state-sponsored rebuilding and resettlement programmes. Traditional, multi-family houses were demolished and, in the name of ‘sanitation’, people were encouraged to build smaller, wide-roofed houses on the ground (Fox 1993: 168–9). Dispersed populations were settled in so-called ‘model villages’ (Lewis 1988: 330–1), while highland communities were moved to the lowlands, away from cosmologically-important hilltop sites, and closer to the economic and bureaucratic advantages of roads and markets (Graham 1994: 125). Such resettlements, which continued in many Indonesian regions well into the 1980s and 1990s (Tsing 1993: 45), can be seen as classic exercises in state surveillance and control, an attempt by the state to ‘make a society legible’ (Scott 1998: 2).
