Possession/Dispossession: Making Property at the Edge of the Anthropocene

Property (in its currently most powerful form) is made through the violence of dispossession. Property-making requires the transformation of landscape; prior residents, both human and nonhuman, are no longer welcome. This process is particularly clear in ‘frontiers’, that is, places where property is in formation through the displacement of Indigenous peoples and ecologies. This article takes up wetland drainage and mining for concrete aggregate as exemplars of this kind of property formation. In Sorong, a frontier city at the western edge of Indonesian Papua, transforming the landscape builds property for settler occupation. Indigenous land rights are channeled into alliances between settlers and Indigenous clan leaders to hasten the transformation of land for settler economies. ‘Intimate violence’ shapes relations not only with settlers but also among and within Indigenous clans. At the ‘edge of the Anthropocene’, we argue, landscape transformation reshapes both ecologies and human subjectivities, creating property as ecological ruin.