Abstract
Smallholders are key political figures produced or reproduced in resource frontiers where new forms of property or land use emerge. In this paper, I present what I call the ‘smallholder slot’, as read off state practices and small-scale miners’ and farmers’ histories of work in plantations and mines in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The smallholder slot has been transformed through changes in patterns of land use and land control, racialized and violent land politics, and geological and geopolitical accidents that have located smallholders in sites of commodity booms. By expanding the definition of ‘agrarian’ beyond agriculture, I show that the smallholder slot can be occupied by small-scale gold miners as well as small farmers. It is a powerful discursive category that has had critical material, symbolic, and political effects.
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