Not the Mountain We Conquer but Ourselves: Self-formation in a ‘Natural Tourist Attraction’ in Kepulauan Riau, Indonesia
Nick Long, University of Cambridge
Jungle-clad Gunung Bintan, in Kepulauan Riau province, Indonesia, is paradigmatic of a ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ space for people living on the island. This paper examines how competing understandings of ‘the mountain’ and ‘the natural’ are put to work and redefined in the context of mountain climbing. Provincial government officials promote the mountain as a ‘natural tourist attraction,’ thereby enrolling it in their own aspirations for regional ‘development.’ To achieve this, they must render the mountain attractive to foreign tourists. Since ‘Westerners’ are seen as having an environmentalist culture, it is considered economically advantageous for Indonesians to learn to ‘read’ nature in a way that sees potential for development in its preservation, rather than its destruction. The government has therefore harnessed a discourse of ‘pecintaan alam’ (nature loving) to encourage a particular new consumption of nature through camping and trekking. Yet ‘natural’ spaces are also understood as dangerous, because they are home to powerful and irascible makhluk gaib (mysterious creatures). The increasing rates of possessions seen amongst scout and pecinta alam groups are held up as evidence that ‘natural spaces’ are now being moved through in inappropriate ways, generating wider anxieties surrounding the exploitation of ‘natural tourist attractions.’ Structured around the ethnographic analysis of a ‘mountain trekking festival,’ this paper examines how intersections between state and non-state discourses of ‘nature’ play out when scaling the mountain, and how the language of ‘development’ places citizens in new, and often contradictory, relations to ‘nature’.
