The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
The author's photographs. All rights reserved.Mbak Gunarti, one of the women leaders of the peasant struggle of Kendeng came back last month to Indonesia, in the island of Java where she lives among her Samin people, after having spent several weeks in Germany. There she attended the May 1 protest holding the banner “Save Kendeng”. She also met with the executive committee of the multinational company HeidelbergCement – the world’s second-largest cement producer. It had claimed to be ready to build Donald Trump’s Mexico wall, before withdrawing the offer[1]. In Indonesia, it is part of the cement group, Indocement, which along with other on-going cement and mining projects has been destroying the region of Kendeng, located on the northern coast of central Java. Teeming with subterranean rivers, mineral springs and limestone, this region is a geological area, which supplies in water both the locals and the greater region of Java[2]. Peasantry is for them a spiritual practice that is aligned to a Javanese cosmology.
It is also where the Samin people live, a peasant community that has resisted state rule since the colonial era through civil disobedience, non-violence, and self-organization. Cultivating the land is part of their identity. They claim it allows them to be self sufficient, independent from the state or the system of exploitation. More than just work, peasantry is for them a spiritual practice that is aligned to a Javanese cosmology – according to which humans are responsible for constantly ensuring and readjusting an equilibrium between the world and the cosmos. By working the land with love, they thus interact with nature, ancestors, spirits and divinities. It is on such a basis that the Samin people have established themselves since the nineteenth century as an autonomous movement, free from state politics or ideologies[3].
