ABSTRACT
The Indonesian uplands have been defined, constituted, imagined, managed, controlled, exploited and “developed” through a range of discourses and practices. These include academic work, government policies, national and international activism, and various popular understandings. Common to all of them is a perception of the uplands as a marginal domain, socially, economically and physically removed from the mainstream, “traditional”, undeveloped, left behind. Rather than accept the marginality of the uplands as a “natural” fact, I seek here to locate the constitution of marginality historically and in specific processes of knowledge, power and production.
