Entangled Territories in Small-Scale Gold Mining Frontiers: Labor Practices, Property, and Secrets in Indonesian Gold Country

Small-scale gold mining territories emerge at the nexus of land use, property, and labor relations in some of Indonesian Borneo’s most vibrant and populated spaces, entangling state actors while sitting comfortably beyond the reach of formal state authority. Based on 7months of field research in a key gold-producing region of West Kalimantan, I argue that gold’s presence, discovery, and informal extraction creates resource frontiers, and that within these frontiers, mining labor practices, property relations, and gold mining-related secret knowledges converge to generate resource territories. While development practitioners, agrarian scholars, and government officials represent mining sites as chaotic and lacking institutional order, I show that a clearly understood organization of life and work animates the territorial subjects and territorialized spaces that small-scale mining populates in both urban and rural mining territories. The article challenges views of territory and territorialization as an imposition of government on the people and resources within spatial boundaries. Territories with no formalized boundaries in Indonesian gold country emerge through specific production practices engaging labor, resource access, and situated knowledges. The complex entanglements of legalities and illegalities suggest that smallholder gold production spaces are ungovernable through centralized state regulatory institutions.