Mending the Broken Clock: Gender and Socioecological Changes in Postconflict North Sumatra

Abstract

This article investigates a counterintuitive occurrence whereby indigenous Toba women in Pandumaan and Sipituhuta, North Sumatra, Indonesia, retained significant grievances despite successfully challenging a landgrab in their community. Juxtaposing ethnography, labour time records and interviews with soil sampling, the article explains how continued soil depletion and river erosion following the failed land grab correlate with women's increased and undercompensated labour time. In addition to these postconflict ecological damages, women's increased labour burden also reflected patriarchal expectations for female labour to help rebuild the village economy. Together, these factors fuelled the women's postconflict grievances despite community success in recovering lost land. By focusing on the relationship between environmental change and gendered agrarian relations, the article concludes by emphasising the necessity of a socioecological remedy based upon a rehabilitative framework for the reparation for social and environmental problems that are often left unaddressed in the aftermath of land conflicts.