Theorizing ethnographically: No shares without acknowledgement

As anthropologists have long recognized, a share is not a gift. Shares belong to owners. Only someone acknowledged to be the owner of a share of valued goods is entitled to demand the portion that properly belongs to them. This insight invites further ethnographic research and theorizing. What kind of person is acknowledged to be the proper owner of a share? What are the conditions under which demands based on ownership are recognized or disallowed? Where acknowledgement is lacking, how can it be achieved? To address these questions, I draw on my ethnographic research in Indonesia. Indigenous highlanders I encountered in Sulawesi in the 1990s grounded ownership in an individual's labour. Contra popular assumptions about the naturally communitarian nature of Indigenous people, social membership in a kin group or community furnished scant grounds for sharing valued goods such as labour or food. Research I conducted with Pujo Semedi in 2010–2015 in Kalimantan's oil palm zone indicated that villagers whose land had been occupied by plantation corporations were convinced they were rightful owners of a share of plantation wealth. Yet, racial tropes inherited from the colonial era together with the plantations’ social, juridical and spatial arrangements impeded acknowledgement. Plantation corporations and their government allies saw no grounds on which to compensate villagers for their losses, include them in benefits or involve them in plantation affairs. Drawing upon these ethnographic sources and comparative material, I further theorize why there can be no sharing without acknowledgement.