Occupied!

Abstract

This chapter assesses the processes through which property, citizenship, and authority are produced, fabricated, or sometimes conjured up, and the dynamics through which they are reproduced, challenged, undermined, and possibly eliminated. It analyzes how governing institutions in Indonesia have dispossessed different groups of people, and how the categorization of property and citizenship has structured exclusion in rural Java. The chapter then outlines the configuration of recognition and misrecognition of property and political and economic identity claims that effectively entitle actors to possess land. In the process, established categories and entitlements are destabilized, and public authority itself is put on the line. By following the actual relationships, the historical and contingent shifts, the multiple logics and the tensions between them in the two case studies of occupation, the chapter shows how property and citizenship have come about, and how public authority in these domains has been produced as a consequence.