Abstract:

In West Papua, a self-identifying term that refers to the provinces of Papua and West Papua, the remote and highly marginalized provinces of Indonesia, road construction does not merely represent a technological ambition or a means to deliver progress and development. With its rugged and mountainous terrain, West Papua has kept more than 261 Papuan ethnic groups isolated for long periods of time and made it one of the last territories in the world to be charted, mapped, and occupied by foreign forces. The construction of the Trans-Papua Highway should be seen in this way; it is meant as a conduit for progress as well as a political tool to chart, map and occupy the ungovernable. As an anthropologist, I passed through this difficult and fragile highway and drew a connection between the roads that I have taken, traces that the construction left and multiple possibilities of extraction that it allows.

Publisher's Version