The (Plastic) Bird’s-Eve View: Indigenous Critiques of Drone Mapping Technologies in Merauke, West Papua

• In Event: Indigenous Knowledges and Technologies - II

Abstract

Since the rise of the indigenous rights movement in the 1960s, rural communities are increasingly harnessing modern cartographic technologies to assert their claims to customary lands. In rural West Papua, drone-mapping has proven particularly effective in communicating to national and international audiences the rampant ecological destruction caused by monocrop oil palm expansion. Yet indigenous Marind activists are also deeply ambivalent over the value of drones, or ‘plastic birds’, as cultural resources and advocacy tools. Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Papua, I examine Marind communities’ critique of aerial drone-mapping technologies in light of local practices of spatial representation and the moral meaning of the forest as a dynamic, multispecies endeavour. While Marind conceive the landscape to be shaped by the perspectives of diverse sentient organisms, drones are inanimate objects whose movements are entirely dictated by humans. Flying high above ground, drones are also oblivious and indifferent to the multiplicity of sentient lifeforms that animate the landscape. Instead, plastic birds impose a single and putatively transcendent truth about the landscape from a seemingly place-less and life-less standpoint. The omniscient viewpoint of the plastic bird, I argue, also bears uncanny resemblance to the hegemonic gaze of the Indonesian state. Both perceive the world from an elevated and supposedly all-encompassing vantage point in which the perceiver seemingly lies outside the realm that is observed. I conclude by highlighting how indigenous contestations of modern cartographic technologies can inform STS and ontological approaches to perspective, participation, and perception in techno-scientific, moral, and more-than-human terms.

Author

• Sophie Marie Helene Chao, The University of Sydney