The Palace and the Plough

<p>This study examines how women farmers in Kulon Progo, Yogyakarta, mobilize cultural and ecological resources to challenge palace-based land authority. The conflict arises when the Yogyakarta Sultanate, legally empowered to govern land outside Indonesia’s Agrarian Basic Law (UUPA), grants mining concessions over coastal areas long cultivated by peasant communities. While previous studies on environmental conflict in Indonesia have focused on corporate–community disputes, this research reveals an internal hierarchy: a struggle between subaltern agrarian groups and a constitutionally protected monarchy. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and Javanese cultural analysis, the study explores how women reinterpret traditional virtues such as <em>sabar</em> (patience), <em>nrimo </em>(acceptance), and <em>alus</em> (refinement) from passive moral codes into active forms of political resistance. Ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and cultural-text analysis demonstrate that women’s everyday farming, rituals, and narratives embody a performative ecofeminism rooted in local moral economies. Their actions reframe environmental stewardship as both cultural preservation and political defiance. The research contributes a new analytical lens to political ecology by shifting the focus from “community versus corporation” to “subaltern versus local elite,” and by situating ecofeminist agency within a patriarchal–monarchical order. In doing so, it exposes how gender, culture, and ecology intertwine in rural Indonesia’s most symbolically “special” province. The study, thus, illuminates women’s crucial yet overlooked role in transforming feudal power into spaces of ecological justice and collective self-determination.</p>