Email: butet_manurung@sokola.org

Affiliation: Sokola Institute, University of Amsterdam

Nationality: Indonesian

Co-Animating Indigeneity: Collaborative Storytelling and Orang Rimba's Agrarian Struggles in Sumatra

Abstract

As agrarian landscapes across Southeast Asia face escalating threats from land dispossession and environmental degradation, indigenous communities are increasingly forced to navigate corporate interests, state policies, and cultural erasure. This research focuses on the Orang Rimba of Sumatra, a contemporary hunter-gatherer community whose ancestral territories have been encroached upon by agribusiness plantations and conservation projects. While indigeneity has become a central political tool in struggles for land and resource rights, it is often framed through rigid legal and bureaucratic structures that fail to capture the lived experiences of those who claim it. This paper explores how indigeneity is not a fixed identity but a dynamic, co-animated process shaped through everyday struggles, storytelling, and strategic mobilization within agrarian conflicts.

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic approach and participatory stop-motion animation, this research engages Orang Rimba youth and children in co-creating narratives about their experiences of displacement, resistance, and adaptation. The resulting films are screened in community forums, where members actively discuss and debate the issues raised, creating a space for collective knowledge production. This approach facilitates an accessible and inclusive method of gathering information and generating insights, moving beyond traditional interviews and participant observation. By bringing stories to life, it highlights how indigenous actors actively construct and contest their own representations, resisting state-imposed definitions while forging solidarities with agrarian movements and environmental activists.

By centering co-animation as both a methodological and epistemological framework, this study underscores the role of storytelling in reconfiguring relationships between indigenous peoples, agrarian politics, and legal systems. It contributes to critical agrarian studies by demonstrating the deep interconnections between indigenous and agrarian struggles. Furthermore, it interrogates how scholar-activism can foster more participatory and reciprocal forms of knowledge. By integrating creative methodologies into critical agrarian research, this study aims to amplify marginalized voices in both academic and policy spaces.

This research is still in development, requiring further refinement of its arguments, deepening of its theoretical framing, and strategic planning for international publication. I hope my participation in this conference contributes to collective discussions on how scholar-activists can challenge dominant narratives and co-create more inclusive, transformative knowledge practices in the pursuit of agrarian and indigenous justice.

Bio

Butet Manurung is an anthropologist, education activist, and co-founder of the Sokola Institute, an initiative that has provided literacy education to over 15,000 Indigenous people across 17 locations in Indonesia since 2003. Her work began with the Orang Rimba in the tropical forests of Sumatra, where she introduced literacy. With over 20 years of experience, Butet explores the challenges faced by contemporary hunter-gatherer communities as they navigate rapid socio-political and environmental transformations. While various external actors – states, conservation groups, and NGOs – offer alternatives to Indigenous ways of life, Butet critically examines her dual role as an activist and researcher, questioning her ethical positionality. To move beyond extractive research and superficial participatory methods, she developed a multimodal co-creative approach that places agency in the hands of local youth. Through stop-motion co-animation, Orang Rimba youth craft narratives about their experiences of displacement, resistance, and adaptation. These films are then screened in community forums, fostering collective reflection and knowledge production. This methodology not only facilitates community-driven storytelling but also challenges dominant narratives surrounding indigeneity and land rights.

Butet's work has received international recognition of the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2014) while her organization received the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy (2024). She is the author of Sokola Rimba, which inspired a feature film of the same name. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, further developing her research on co-animation as an epistemological and activist practice.