Borneo Research Bulletin ISSN: 0006-7806
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BORNEO RESEARCH BULLETIN ISSN: 0006-7806 VOL. 41 2010 Clifford Sather, Ph.D., Editor 10048 SW Balmer Circle Portland, OR 97219-7363 U.S.A. e-mail: [email protected] Louise Sather, Assistant Editor A.V.M. Horton, Book Review Editor/Bibliographer Please send all inquiries, Fellowship and Membership fees, subscriptions, changes of address, contributions, etc., to: Borneo Research Council, Inc. P. O. Box A 29 Golden Road Phillips, ME 04966 U.S.A. www.borneoresearchcouncil.org e-mail: [email protected] © Borneo Research Council, Inc Vol. 41 Borneo Research Bulletin 1 NOTES FROM THE EDITOR In This Issue Danau Sentarum Essays The present volume of the BRB departs somewhat from our usual format. It is divided into two principal parts. The first part comprises what, in effect, is a special issue in its own right—a set of ten essays plus an editorial introduction—which are presented here as a memorial in honor of the late Reed Wadley. These essays, written by specialists in different fields, all focus on the Danau Sentarum National Park and the region of West Kalimantan that surrounds it, an area closely identified with Reed Wadley, and where he carried out major anthropological fieldwork over a period of nearly two decades, until his untimely death in 2008 (see BRB, 2008, Vol. 39: 16-25). The authors were his colleagues and friends, many of whom worked with Reed on collaborative projects related to the park or the indigenous peoples who live in and around it. As the editors make clear, Reed’s intellectual concerns were wide-ranging and by no means confined to the park; but Danau Sentarum was clearly an empirical touchstone of his work and a lifelong source of interest. Here, on behalf of the Borneo Research Council, I wish to thank the contributors for making this well-deserved memorial a reality. In addition, I thank Carol Colfer and Linda Yuliani for organizing the project and seeing it through to completion, for writing an informative introduction that not only introduces the park, but the long-term research and conservation efforts that have taken place there, and for their part in editing the ten essays that, as indicated here, follow their introduction. While these essays stand on their own merits, they take on added value, I think, by their appearing together. In addition, as the editors note, the Danau Sentarum National Park was also the focus of an earlier volume of the Borneo Research Bulletin (Vol. 31, 2000), which, as a single-topic issue, dealt almost exclusively with the park. Hence, this memorial also provides a timely update of work that has taken place since 2000. The earlier Danau Sentarum volume concentrated primarily on the natural features of the park, its topography, ecology, plant and animal communities, interrelationships between these communities and features of the physical environment, the history and demography of human settlement, and patterns of local resource use, particularly of forest and freshwater fishing resources, the latter associated with the vast network of seasonal lakes that form the single most distinctive feature of the park. The present volume, by comparison, focuses more on the cultural and sociological side of conservation activities, including issues of park management and policy, external politics and outside economic threats to the park’s future, population growth within the park, conflicts over the use of local resources and methods of conflict resolution, sustainable development and projects aimed at identifying the benefits of conservation efforts for local communities. In addition, the contributors also provide a useful background history of past and current research projects and an overview of changes that have occurred since 2000. Perhaps, the most notable among these changes are an accelerating rate of population growth that now threatens the sustainability of park resources, continued 2 Borneo Research Bulletin Vol. 41 illegal logging, potential dam construction, and the very real intrusion into the park’s buffer zone of large-scale oil palm plantations. These problems, of course, are not unique to Danau Sentarum, but have their parallels elsewhere in Borneo. The final essay in the memorial section is of special note. The idea behind it was originally formulated by Reed Wadley in discussions with the present co-authors and others. It concerns what Reed termed the “social life” of conservation—that is to say, the human interactions and interpersonal relations that play themselves out between conservation workers, research teams, and local people—which tend to pass unexamined, but upon which the success or failure of conservation efforts very often hinges. Reed’s motive in writing the paper was to heighten awareness, particularly among those trained in the natural sciences, of the social implications of their work. The essay draws in a highly illuminating way on a number of projects undertaken at Danau Sentarum from 1991 onward. Reed completed a first draft of the essay, but failing health prevented him from putting it into final form, a task which the present co-authors here have admirably completed. A somewhat shorter version of this paper, directed more explicitly to an audience of conservation biologists, is scheduled to appear, more or less simultaneously with the appearance of this longer version, in the journal Ecology and Society. In the Remainder of This Issue The second part of the present volume follows our usual format and opens, in this case, with two Research Notes. In the first, Robert Pringle records diary entries for a trip which he and his wife Barbara made to Bario and the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak in 1966. As he notes in his opening introduction, this trip came at the end of an extended period of ethno-historical research. The topic of this research was a history of Iban relations with the Brooke Raj. In a way, then, the trip to Bario represented something of a diversion. At its conclusion, the Pringles left Sarawak and returned to Cornell, where Bob wrote up his materials on Iban history, first as a dissertation, and, shortly afterwards, in book form, as Rajahs and Rebels: The Iban of Sarawak under Brooke Rule, 1841-1941 (1970, Macmillan).1 Although a brief diversion, the trip clearly provided material for historical reflection. At the time, Confrontation with Indonesia was still in full swing and, as he notes, the excellent relationships that existed between the Kelabits and British and Gurkha troops then fighting along the nearby Sarawak-Kalimantan border owed much to a legacy of comparatively benevolent colonial rule initiated by the Brookes. Given the remoteness of the Kelabit Highlands and the area’s sparse population, the impact of these troops and the modern technology used to sustain them in the field was obviously immense and appears to have reaffirmed the Kelabits’ already well-established commitment to a program of deliberate self-modernization. In his diary entries, Pringle comments on this commitment at some length and with considerable admiration. Hastened by the events of Confrontation, the “World Within,” as Tom Harrisson had called the Kelabit Highlands, was now being drawn rapidly into the wider “World Without,” a process which the 1 Which, your Editor is happy to be able to report here, has just been republished with a new introduction by the author by the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS). Vol. 41 Borneo Research Bulletin 3 Kelabits themselves actively embraced, but on their own terms, selectively, without at the same time giving up their own unique sense of cultural grounding (cf., Poline Bala, “An engagement with ‘modernity’?” BRB, 2009, Vol. 40: 173-85). In passing, Pringle briefly comments on the influx of Iban newcomers into the Baram district and its potentially unsettling consequences. Throughout the 1970s, other commentators similarly warned of an Iban “takeover” of the region. This “takeover” never happened, however, although the Iban remain, as they had become by the late 1960s, a substantial local presence. Beginning over the next two decades, a contrary movement occurred as a younger generation of rural people flowed from the countryside to the cities, not only within Sarawak, but, for the ever-adventuresome Iban, even further afield, to Sabah, Singapore, and Peninsular Malaysia. The second Research Note, “Ethnic Minorities in Late Twentieth Century Brunei,” by Roger Kershaw, a regular contributor to the BRB, surveys what the author sees as errors or imbalances in recent writings about ethnic minorities in Brunei Darussalam since the state gained its formal independence in 1984. A major point that Kershaw makes is that a significant source of error, or, perhaps, more accurately, of distortions in writings about Brunei’s ethnic and religious minorities stems, not so much from poor scholarship (although he detects evidence of this as well) as from the influence of an official state ideology— i.e., the “Malay Islamic Monarchy” (MIB) —that, as he describes it, quite simply, “leaves no room for pluralism”—whether of a religious, political, or ethnic variety. Reflecting the influence of this ideology, foreign scholars have, he argues, whether wittingly or not, tended to write non-Malay ethnic groups “out of the record” or have been inclined to see them through this ideological lens as incipient Malays, well-advanced along an inevitable process of total cultural and religious assimilation. Similarly, the presence of awkward, but, nonetheless, vital, non-indigenous groups, like the Iban and Chinese, is glossed over or ignored. Another way noted by Kershaw in which the influence of official ideology can be seen is in an ongoing rewriting of history, by, for example, playing down the degree of ethnic autonomy that existed in the pre-modern Brunei sultanate, ignoring the presence of an early autochthonous Bisaya kingdom in Brunei Bay, passing over Brunei Malay myths of their own non- autochthonous origins, and, in various other ways, writing non-Malay groups out of historical accounts of Brunei’s past.