Colonizing Borneo: State-building and Ethnicity in Central Kalimantan

Abstract

The formation of Central Kalimantan province in 1957 was not, as is often thought, a successful revolt by local ethnic Dayaks against a centralistic Jakarta. It was part of a state-building process driven from Jakarta. In order to establish its authority in remote areas at a time of instability, Jakarta sought out loyalist partners in the regions. This was a form of indirect rule, whose ethnic idiom contradicted Indonesia's ideology of modernity.