HISTORIES OF THE BORNEO ENVIRONMENT

V E R H A N D E L I N G E NVAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUTVOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE

231

HISTORIES OF THE BORNEO ENVIRONMENT

Economic, political and social dimensions of change and continuity

Edited byREED L. WADLEY

KITLV PressLeiden

2005

Published by:KITLV PressKoninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde(Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies)P.O. Box 95152300 RA LeidenThe Netherlandswebsite: www.kitlv.nle-mail: kitlvpress@kitlv.nl

KITLV is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)

Cover: Creja ontwerpen, Leiderdorp

ISBN 90 6718 254 0

© 2005 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en VolkenkundeNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any informa-tion storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner.

Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Preface vii

Reed L. Wadley 1 Introduction: environmental histories of Borneo

Part One: Distant and local economies

Eric Tagliacozzo 25 Onto the coasts and into the forests; Ramifications of the China trade on the ecological history of northwest Borneo, 900-1900 CEBernard Sellato 61 Forests for food, forests for trade – between sustainability and extractivism; The economic pragmatism of traditional peoples and the trade history of northern East KalimantanCristina Eghenter 87 Histories of conservation or exploitation? Case studies from the interior of Indonesian Borneo Lesley Potter 109 Commodity and environment in colonial Borneo; Conservation ideas, forest conversions and economic value

Part Two: Colonial and national resource politics

Reed L. Wadley 137 Boundaries, territory, and resource access in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, 1800-2000Amity A. Doolittle 159 Controlling the land; Property rights and power struggles in Sabah,

Malaysia (North Borneo), 1881-1996Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter 183 The ‘poison tree’ and the changing vision of the Indo-Malay realm;

Seventeenth to twentieth centuries

Part Three: Social transformations

George N. Appell 213 Dismantling the cultural ecosystem of the Rungus of Sabah, Malaysia; A history of how the ideology of Western institutions led to the destruction of a Bornean environment Monica Janowski 245 Rice as a bridge between two symbolic economies; Migration within and out of the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak Graham Saunders 271 Epilogue: In the eye of the beholder; Development or exploitation?

Changing perceptions of the Borneo environment

List of abbreviations 295

Glossary 297

Index 301

About the authors 305

Contentsvi

Preface

This book is a product of a two-day, international seminar convened in August 2000 on ‘Environmental change in native and colonial histories of Borneo; Lessons from the past, prospects for the future’, held in Leiden, the Netherlands. The inspiration for the seminar came from a number of sources, not least of which was the book, Paper landscapes; Explorations in the environ-mental history of Indonesia (Peter Boomgaard, Freek Colombijn and David Henley, KITLV Press, 1997), a product of the EDEN-project of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies). A special focus on one island, Borneo, seemed an appropriate way to build on this earlier work, providing a means of crossing colonial and national boundaries which so often direct scholarship, and building on a concern for linking past histories and present circumstances.

The seminar was sponsored by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), where I was Research Fellow from 1998 until 2001. Supplementary funding came from the Leiden Universiteit Fonds (LUF) and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). The Borneo Research Council acted as an intellectual sponsor, providing its mailing list and invaluable support net-work. Each of the conference contributors provided much intellectual food for engaging thought and lively discussion. Most of their contributions are represented here. Dimbab Ngidang, Jayantha Perera, Antonio Guerreiro and Adela Baer gave papers which will appear elsewhere, while Freek Colombijn and Peter Boomgaard provided critical, comparative commentary. Special thanks are due Marieke Brand for her indispensable efforts in organizing the seminar, some of which occurred while I was in the field and quite inacces-sible to electronic communications.

REED L. WADLEY

IntroductionEnvironmental histories of Borneo

The closing decades of the twentieth century brought many dramatic envir-onmental challenges to the peoples of Borneo, the consequences of which now affect the environment of the rest of Southeast Asia. These problems included oil palm plantation development, continued logging and mining, devastating forest fires and controversial transmigration. From the first years of the new century, this book takes a historical look at the Borneo environ-ment from native, colonial and national perspectives. It examines change and continuity in the economic, political and social dimensions of human-envir-onment interactions throughout the island and over the centuries.

Reflecting the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of environmental history, the book brings together a diverse, international group of histor-ians, anthropologists, geographers and social foresters, studying historical aspects of the environment in the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Brunei (Map 1). Drawing on extensive archival and field research, these ten, original contributions cover eleven centuries of history in Borneo, examining a set of inter-related topics that include long-distance trade, conservation, land tenure, resource access, property rights, views of the environment, migration and development policy and practice. We come at these topics from a range of perspectives: from Fernand Braudel’s histoire de la longue durée to actions and perceptions of local peoples, from colonial construction and imposition of ecological knowledge to shifts in ‘symbolic’ economies. In addition, political ecological themes, with a focus on the dynamics surrounding material and discursive struggles over natural resources, run through many of the chapters, either implicitly or explicitly.

Romantic images evoked by the mere mention of Borneo are often of deep, impenetrable forests. Indeed, forests and forest-dependent peoples, their transformations and images, are dominant features of the contribu-tions, something that is not so unusual coming from historical studies of what Lesley Potter (this volume) calls ‘this formerly most forested of islands’. Yet others show that different aspects of the environment have been equally

2 Reed L. Wadley

important, such as marine resources, colonial plantation development and indigenous settled agriculture. Yet Borneo has long been regarded as periph-eral to the political and economic centers of Southeast Asia, despite its geo-graphically central location. This should not imply, of course, insignificance, and many of the contributions shift the focus back and forth between local events and wider contexts, relying on localized studies placed within circum-stances beyond Borneo’s shores and demonstrating the importance of the island to wider studies of human-environment interactions.

Map 1. Contributions by location on Borneo

BRUNEI

SABAH

EAST

KALIMANTAN

SARAWAKSO

UTH

KALI

MAN

TAN

CENTRAL

KALIMANTAN

WEST

KALIMANTAN

N

REGION WIDE

500 km

LESLEY POTTER

GEORGE N. APPELL

ERIC TAGLIACOZZO

AMITY A. DOOLITTLE

BERNARD SELLATO

MONICA JANOWSKI

CRISTINA EGHENTER

LESLEY POTTER

MICHAEL R. DOVE AND CAROL CARPENTER

REED WADLEY

GRAHAM SAUNDERS

3Introduction

Environmental history

Most scholars understand environmental history to be ‘an attempt to eluci-date the interaction between humans and nature in the past’.1 According to Timo Myllyntaus (2001:145-9), there are five features that distinguish environ-mental history: 1. a focus on long-term changes in nature; 2. a perspective that is not bound by national boundaries, but that is international (I would add ‘transnational’) and even global; 3. ‘a resolute tendency’ toward inter-disciplinary approaches; 4. an orientation to timely research problems with ‘wide historical and social dimensions’, reflecting environmental history’s early focus on North American conservationist and preservationist move-ments; and 5. a ‘tendency to reassess our views of the past’.

Eschewing the ‘environmental history’ label, anthropologists have favored the more scientifically sounding, ‘historical ecology’, but have been debating its definition for nearly a decade. For example, Carole Crumley (1994:6) equates it with landscape history, ‘the study of past ecosystems by chart-ing the change in landscapes over time’ and tracing ‘the ongoing dialectical relations between human acts and acts of nature, as observed in the land-scape’ (Crumley 1994:9; see Russell 1997). Bruce Winterhalder, taking a lit-eralist stance, contends that historical ecology ‘is a misnomer’ (Winterhalder 1994:40), for how can there be an a-historical ecology in the modern, dynamic sense of the term (Winterhalder 1994:18)? The label is appropriate only if we ‘take it to represent an epistemological commitment to the temporal dimen-sion in ecological analysis’ (Winterhalder 1994:40). He cautions against reli-ance on concepts like ecosystem, community and succession that anthropolo-gists have borrowed from the older field of ecology, but that have now been replaced by such concepts as persistence, resilience and patchiness.

For his part, William Balée (1998:14) argues that historical ecology focuses on the interpenetration of culture and the environment, instead of ‘humans merely adapting to the environment’. His four (rather obvious) postulates that define the field are 1. human activity affects much, if not all, of the non-human biosphere; 2. human activity neither necessarily degrades nor improves the non-human biosphere; 3. political economies have different effects on the environment and historical trajectory of subsequent political economies; and 4. human communities, cultures, landscapes and regions can be understood as total phenomena (Balée 1998:14-24). Tristam Kidder (1998:162) puts it more eloquently:

1 Myllyntaus and Saikku 2001:2. For general reviews of environmental history, see Myllyntaus 2001; Arnold and Guha 1995; Grove, Damodaran and Sangwan 1998; for a review of Indonesian environmental history, see Boomgaard 1997.

4 Reed L. Wadley

Historical ecology has as its most persuasive argument the notion that humans are part of the dynamic environment, and thus not necessarily limited because of the natural world. Change in human behavior through time is in part the reflection of humans as they live and adapt within their natural world, but critically too it is the result of humans as they transform and reach beyond their constraints, natural or otherwise.

In contrast, Neil Whitehead (1998) questions the paradigmatic status of his-torical ecology, arguing that it has no theory of history or historiography, and is dependent on historical anthropology for its conceptual tools. Historical ecological anthropologists ‘seem largely content with grafting a temporal dimension onto the chronological study of systems’ (Whitehead 1998:36), but in the end, the work they have produced has certainly fallen within a broadly conceived environmental history.2

Donald Worster (1988, 1990) argues that environmental historical research involves three levels of analysis: 1. the natural environment or historical ecology, concentrating ‘on the history of nature’s ecosystems and striv[ing] to reconstruct the natural environment of the past’ (Myllyntaus 2001:152); 2. human modes of production, particularly ‘the interaction between social conditions, the economy, and the environment’ (Myllyntaus 2001:153); and 3. perceptions, ideologies and values attached to the environment. Myllyntaus splits the third level into two separate levels, one focused on ‘environmen-tal policy and decision-making in society in general’, and the other on ‘the mental and intellectual history of environmental consciousness, the human outline of the surrounding world and its natural resources’ (Myllyntaus 2001:153). The task of the environmental historian is the study of the interac-tion of these levels over time (Boomgaard 1997:2; Knapen 2001:4) as, for most topics, it may prove difficult to keep the three separate. The contributions in this book, dealing with both distant and more recent pasts, are primarily focused on the second and third levels, with the first providing a necessary, though often implicit, background. This focus is, in large part, driven by the archival and ethnographic information on which we rely, sources that are not always amenable to examining the first level.

2 Although some make a case for a distinction between environmental history and historical ecology (Arnold and Guha 1995:1-4; Knapen 2001:3), in many practical respects these are one and the same or simply emphasize different levels of analysis, with one borrowing from and relying on the other.

5Introduction

Environmental histories of Borneo

In this volume, we build on a number of recent works on human-environment interactions in Asia – Southeast Asia and Borneo, in particular. Although some have emphasized history and others recent trends,3 few have explicitly combined the two to study links between the historical and the contem-porary environment, between continuity and change from the distant and recent past to the present. The contributions here do just that, showing that the past is very much a part of recent and on-going processes of change, that continuity forms an important facet of transformation, for both natural and social environments.

Explicit attention to and emphasis on environmental history is fairly new to studies of Borneo, although some of this may be a matter of earlier work simply not applying an ‘environmental history’ label. For example, Derek Freeman’s (1970) Report on the Iban, though concerned with contemporary matters of Iban social organization and pioneer farming, gave a nod to set-tlement history but did not take the next step; that is, by asking how that specific history might have influenced land use patterns. Conversely, in James Jackson’s (1970) study of the Chinese gold-miners in western Borneo, the environment provides an ever present but quite silent background. So too with Thomas Lindblad’s (1988) study of Southeast Borneo’s economic history. It is not until we come to the work of scholars such as Michael Dove, Lesley Potter and Bernard Sellato that we begin to find history and environ-ment explicitly linked in the ways we might recognize as environmental history. For example, Dove has investigated land tenure (Dove 1985), forest preference and warfare (Dove 1988), technology changes (Dove 1989) and the adoption and integration of cash crops within indigenous economies.4 For her part, Potter has looked at colonial forest policy (Potter 1988) and forest product collection (Potter 1997), as well as co-authoring a wide-rang-ing survey of environmental history on Borneo and the Malay Peninsula (Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995). Sellato’s work has focused on forest product collection, migration, settlement patterns and geography.5

3 For example, Arnold and Guha 1995; Bankoff 1999; Bennett 2000; Boomgaard, Colombijn and Henley 1997; Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995; Bryant 1997; Elvin 2001; Grove 1997; Grove, Damodaran and Sangwan 1998; Hirsch and Warren 1998; King 1998; Knapen 2001; Li 1999; Padoch and Peluso 1996; Peluso 1992; Parnwell and Bryant 1996.4 Dove 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997a, 1997b.5 Sellato 1989, 1994, 2001, 2002. Sellato’s historical environmental interests also come forth in a recent edited volume (Eghenter, Sellato and Devung 2003); in addition, a recent edited collec-tion (Lye, De Jong and Abe 2003) on the political ecology of Southeast Asian tropical forests in historical perspective contains chapters on Borneo.

6 Reed L. Wadley

Others too have tied history and environment together without explicit use of the label; for example, European intervention into indigenous trade patterns (Cleary 1996, 1997), fire and drought cycles (King 1996), property and resource access6 and population dynamics (Eghenter 1999). To date, the work that most unambiguously fits the label of environmental history is that of Han Knapen (1997, 1998, 2001) with his detailed study of Southeast Borneo between 1600 and 1880.7 Within a framework of changing environ-mental, economic and political uncertainty, he examines a wide range of human-environment interactions such as disease, climate, physical geog-raphy, settlement patterns, warfare, forest product trade, indigenous and colonial politics, systems of subsistence, cash crop cultivation and animal husbandry. His study provides an important model for future work on the island, and the contributions here offer examples of other, complementary research directions.

I have organized the contributions according to three broad themes – 1. distant and local economies involving trade in forest and other natural prod-ucts; 2. colonial and national resource politics with a focus on the political ecology of resource control; and 3. social transformations stemming from environmental change. There is, however, a good deal of cross-over among these themes, as one might expect.

‘Part One: Distant and local economies’ focuses on the complexity of the extraction economy and the trade that drove it into the interior. In his opening article covering one thousand years of history, Eric Tagliacozzo sets much of the scene for the other three contributions by examining intertwined ecologi-cal and trade histories with a wide historical lens. Relying on a longue durée perspective, he elucidates broad patterns and connections from pre-modern to late colonial times, with special attention to extraction along the coasts and in the interior. His main focus is the impact of Chinese trade contacts in what is today Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei, with particular attention to their pace, nature and consequences for the ecological history of the island.

From the first millennium CE, this trade was already having a significant effect on northern and western Borneo; indeed, scattered smelting and trad-ing sites at the time were probably oriented toward commerce with China. In the medieval and early modern periods, small ports sprang up in Borneo in response to this trade as well, funneling sea and forest produce from nearby hinterlands to waiting Chinese junks. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entire systems were in place to ferry desired produce from the island, and Chinese trade commodities ‘onto the coasts, and into the forest’.

6 Peluso 1996; Doolittle 1999; Harwell 2000; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001.7 See also Wadley 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.

7Introduction

Resident Chinese merchants enabled these exchanges, but multi-ethnic partnerships and competitions were also important, involving (among oth-ers) Malays, Bugis, Dayak and Europeans. Tagliacozzo thus contributes not only to the environmental history of the island, but also to the larger history of regional commerce, to which Borneo has played an integral and long-standing role.

Taking up the theme of forest product trade, Bernard Sellato examines an important, though frequently overlooked, distinction between resources with local subsistence value and those with long-distance trade value. The focus here is on traditional peoples’ conceptions and practices in their exploi-tation of their natural environment. Drawing from the subsistence and trade history of forest exploitation, Sellato analyzes two groups of rice swiddeners, the Aoheng and the Kenyah (East Kalimantan), as well as by several groups of nomadic and formerly nomadic peoples. He suggests that these people, in a situation of low population density, generally display sound and sus-tainable practices of subsistence resource management (including land and waters), and that local concepts of estates and of their ownership or guardian-ship linked to genealogical and residential continuity, play an important role in generating and maintaining these practices. Conversely, in the exploita-tion of forest resources with value in long-distance trade, but no local use, these same people have engaged in severe and opportunistic extractivism. Sellato uses this distinction to critique the recent environmental discourse concerning indigenous people as wise stewards of their environment.

Continuing the thread of investigation developed by Sellato, Cristina Eghenter contends that the interactions between people and forest products have often been portrayed in academic as well as conservation circles as either inherently conservative or destructive. She argues that we must move away from such a dichotomous view and replace it with a strong concern for contextual analysis. Only in this way can we answer questions about events, constraints and circumstances that have promoted overexploitation or pro-tection of forest resources. In doing this, Eghenter outlines the conditions and modes of exploitation and trade of two forest products in the region of Apo Kayan (East Kalimantan) – gutta-percha at the beginning of the twentieth century and gaharu in the 1990s. By comparing these two historically distant cases of exploitation, she uncovers commonalities between local use and exploitation of forest products and their social, economic and environmental circumstances. She identifies key factors in support of sustainable exploita-tion of forest resources, and shows how social factors as well as the choice environment of individuals can influence under-use or over-use of forest resources. Eghenter subsequently uses her findings to suggest an alternative framework for natural resource management that may prove sustainable over time while remaining flexible to local conditions.

8 Reed L. Wadley

In contrast to Sellato’s and Eghenter’s emphasis on local actors, Lesley Potter continues her earlier contributions to Borneo environmental history by examining the prevailing environmental ideas emerging from the colo-nial writings on Borneo (including Sarawak, British North Borneo and the former Dutch territories of Kalimantan) from 1870 to 1930, and the links between these ideas and the economic value of certain naturally occurring forest products or replacement crops. From among major colonial attempts at commodifying the landscape, Potter selects five products that were dominant at particular times: wild rubbers – gutta-percha (1870-1905) and jelutong (1903-1915); replacement crops – tobacco (1887-1906) and exotic rub-ber (Hevea brasiliensis) (1910-1930); and a limited range of timbers, especially Bornean ironwood (Eusideroxylon zwagerei) (1870-1925). Each of these experi-enced a significant market boom during at least part of its dominant period, which elicited intense discussion within colonial circles about the commod-ity in question. Potter investigates these discussions and the subsequent policies, some of which related to economic and trade questions, while some involved political, social and environmental concerns. Ironically, authori-ties would countenance, even laud, deforestation where conversion was for replacement by plantation tobacco or rubber for export, while swiddeners were often criticized for forest clearing and burning, and collectors for forest destruction. As Potter notes, this attitude and accompanying forest policies have continued into the national period, a theme explored in more detail by Amity Doolittle (below).

‘Part Two: Colonial and national resource politics’ deals more explicitly with state involvement and control of the environment and people of Borneo, from territorialization to changing visions of the environment. In my own contribution, I explore the creation and maintenance of boundaries as an essential component of territoriality, with a focus on the upper Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia over the last two centuries. Boundaries define rights of access to natural resources and to the social-political resources of states or communities. For modern and colonial states, boundaries are most often lines on maps, abstractions and instruments in defining access to resources. State-made boundaries set off a state’s territory from other states, but also provide the means for ‘internal territorialization’ within state possessions. The state often reserves the right to acknowledge or ignore local-level boundaries, and its boundary-making imposes and shapes social, economic and political realities locally. When states slice and apportion such a landscape, the locals variously accommodate, challenge and even ignore state-made boundaries.

With this comparative background, I examine the history of bound-ary-making, territorialization and resource access in the borderlands of the upper Kapuas, with an emphasis on the areas inhabited by the Iban. Of

9Introduction

particular historical importance are the creation of the inter-colonial border between Dutch West Borneo and British Sarawak, and colonial involvement in drawing use-boundaries between rival ethnic groups for non-timber for-est product collection. This perspective applies as well to national-era timber concessions and a recent boom in illegal logging, which has resulted in local communities reconfiguring and disputing territorial boundaries. This history has implications for the process of ‘state simplification’, the complexities it imposes on the local level and the resulting instability of state control.

Doolittle continues these political ecological concerns in her compelling comparison of ‘strategies of rule’ – the colonial state’s imposition of Western property law on indigenous people and the post-colonial state’s rural devel-opment project in Sabah. She argues that in both eras, the state has explicated access to resources through discourses that marginalize local people while privileging the ruling European and Malay elite. (Her descriptions here find a strong echo in Potter’s chapter.) For the colonial period, Doolittle demon-strates how European law served as a ‘technology of rule’ by constructing assumptions about local people and thereby strengthening colonial power. Now, in contrast, officials in the present state in Sabah are not concerned with delineating (and thus limiting) native land rights. Instead their rule finds legitimacy in notions of modernity and development which generally justify state interventions into rural areas.

Through her analysis, Doolittle finds that the colonial and post-colonial state share some important characteristics: Legal institutions in both privi-lege ‘private property’ over local, customary practices and thereby control resource access. Resource commodification and commercialization provides ultimate advantage to elite over local concerns, and ideologies created by both justify centralized rule while ignoring or obscuring the positions of those who depend directly on natural resources. What is more, those ide-ologies blame rural, forest-dependent people for resource degradation while simultaneously disregarding how the state structures the ways in which rural people use resources.

Moving beyond the shores of Borneo, Michael Dove and Carol Carpenter bring together the themes of forest product trade and political ecology (particularly the colonial construction of knowledge) in their analysis of the famous upas tree of the East Indies. As they show, the ‘poison tree’ was exaggeratedly portrayed by the German, Rumphius, in the late seventeenth century as a source of incredible natural danger. Two centuries later, the tree had been de-mythologized, with colonial scholars and officials describing the tree as little more than an object of curiosity for travelers. These two accounts concern the same tree, but the images they evoke are very different. Dove and Carpenter argue that during the earlier colonial era when Rumphius wrote, the upas tree symbolized the colonial struggle over control of natural

10 Reed L. Wadley

resources; it also represented the challenge that interior plants and their associated peoples posed to the colonial project. When the colonial project changed its nature and direction, this challenge shifted too, along with the portrayal of the upas tree. Using the shifting image of the poison tree, Dove and Carpenter trace the changing image of state, people and nature in the Indo-Malay archipelago, and assess its implications for ongoing ethnograph-ic traditions of the region.

‘Part Three: Social transformations’ concerns just that, social transforma-tions – from environmental degradation and its social, political and economic causes and entailments to migration and symbolic economies. While draw-ing on some relevant colonial era material, the particular concern within these chapters is more recent histories, often within living memory. They serve to underscore the point made in most of the other contributions that environmental histories have important links to the present.

Drawing on over forty years of his own research in Sabah, Malaysia, one of the senior scholars of Borneo, George Appell, analyzes the history of the transformations to Rungus society. Reflecting many of the same concerns seen in the previous section (in particular Doolittle’s contribution), Appell argues that Western ideology has driven development plans and action for Borneo people and environments, instituted first by colonialists and mis-sionaries, and then by the Western-trained post-colonial elites. He contends that an invariable and deleterious characteristic of this ideology has been a cavalier ignorance of the environment, indigenous cultures and their inter-relationships. This ideology has fueled development programs that have resulted in destructive changes to societies and environments.

In the Rungus case, Appell asserts, such Western-informed ideologies and developments led to disruptions in the exchanges between the popula-tion and their environment such that both were transformed to a lower level of integration and unsustainable resource use. Critical plants and animals disappeared, and the destruction of sacred groves and the planting of acacia trees disrupted the hydrological cycle such that the region now experiences continuing, major droughts. This has necessitated the construction of expen-sive, regional systems to pipe water. In addition, the traditional agricul-tural system with its complex association of cultivars that provided secure resource use has given away to monoculture. At the societal level, some of the Rungus have moved into the slums of the cities, suicide rates among the young have climbed, alcoholism has appeared and dysfunctional families now occur along with many pregnancies out of marriage.

Monica Janowski moves us to the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak. Rice cul-tivation as an activity and rice as a food form the core of her chapter as they provide a means for the Kelabit to link old and new ‘symbolic economies’ in the context of migration within and beyond the Highlands. (Symbolic econo-

11Introduction

mies refer to economic systems that are intertwined with and based on the cultural values attached to different economic activities.) As Janowski shows, the Kelabit traditionally grow rice in both dry and wet highland fields, but since the early 1960s, they have increasingly adopted permanent wet rice agriculture. Additionally, people have migrated in large numbers to nearby areas suitable for wet fields. In these places, they are able to grow more rice and send out highly prized wet-rice varieties to regional markets. Rice has thus become both a subsistence crop and a cash crop. Within the traditional symbolic economy, rice has played a central role, especially in the huge rice meals provided at irau ‘naming’ feasts. Now, within the new symbolic economy with rice as a cash crop, it continues to its focal role in building high status as its sale allows people to hold irau.

In addition to these changes, the Kelabit have also been migrating to the coast, mainly to the town of Miri, since the 1960s. While some Kelabit have stayed in town, others have returned ‘home’; many others go back and forth between the Highlands and the coast. In town, the new symbolic economy within which rice has acquired a role as a cash crop changed even more, as almost everything is monetarized. There is no clear-cut boundary, however, between the old and new symbolic economies, and the Kelabit are attempt-ing to negotiate a relationship between the two. Although the new symbolic economy has considerable weight and power, the older symbolic economy persists as a powerful force. Janowski tells us that the Kelabit are coming to something of a compromise in which a mixture of the two symbolic econo-mies is emerging, bridged by the central importance of rice in both town and the Highlands.

Finally, in his Epilogue, Graham Saunders explores the myth that in pre-colonial times the peoples of Borneo lived in partnership with their environment and that wicked capitalist imperialists from the West, driven by greed for profits, conquered, exploited and destroyed to the detriment of Borneo and its people. Like all myths, Saunders argues, there is an element of truth, but myths are often created to explain events with far-reaching consequences, to avoid or shift responsibility for what has occurred and to serve the needs of the present rather than explain the events of the past. In particular, they often ascribe malevolent motivations to particular protago-nists in events, without placing those people and their motives in historical context. Saunders examines the changing perceptions of the Borneo environ-ment – indigenous, Arab, Chinese and European – as well as the continuities in those perceptions. In particular, he draws on the views presented and analyzed in the other chapters of this volume, from Tagliacozzo’s account of Chinese trade links to Dove and Carpenter’s analysis of the upas myth.

12 Reed L. Wadley

Future environmental histories of Borneo

In many ways, the contributions in this book represent the state of the field for environmental histories of Borneo, although they do not (indeed can-not) encompass the breadth of possibilities for research. Much remains to be done, and in this section, I would like briefly to outline several topics to which more future attention might be directed.

Historically, rivers and river networks formed the principal means of transport and communication from the coasts to the interior (although ridgelines in the interior were more important for people such as the Penan). Studies of river basins and networks (much like Knapen’s for the Barito and adjacent rivers) would be of immense value, particularly to those of us focused on particular areas within a basin or watershed. The Rejang, Batang Lupar, Mahakam and Kinabatangan rivers come to mind, as does the Kapuas of West Kalimantan. The historical material available on any of these rivers varies greatly, of course, with possibly the Kapuas having the deepest docu-mentation of them all (excepting the Barito covered by Knapen). Related to this are specific areas within (or between) the rivers. For example, certain geographic regions, particularly nearer coasts and inhabited by Malay peo-ples, have been neglected as researchers have been drawn toward the more romantically-portrayed, Dayak-dominated interior. Such areas as Sambas, Landak or Sukadana in West Kalimantan and Kutai in East Kalimantan would be important topics of study, not only for the relative depth of histori-cal material but also for the long-term transformation of their environments.8 In addition, environmental histories focused on particular ethnic groups throughout the island remain scarce (Sellato 1989, 1994). Much might be done, for example, by expanding Knapen’s work on the Bekumpai or Banjar of southeastern Kalimantan. Such studies have been successfully executed elsewhere in the world, of both indigenous and settler societies.9

The growth of urban areas has been greatly neglected. This may again stem from the emphasis on the forested interior and rural areas, along with a related view of cities as negative factors, as parasites on the hinterlands. Yet urban areas provide a more diversified economy, outlets for surplus popula-tion and extra labor from rural areas, stable demands for food and materials and centers for communication (Knapen 2001). Environmental histories of such cities as Kuching, Sibu, Brunei, Kota Kinabalu and Pontianak would be most complementary to those of wider river basins and networks. Related to urbanization are changes in transportation (for example, shifts from rivers to

8 See Magenda 1991 for a political history of Kutai.9 Harms 1987; Griffiths and Robin 1997; Balée 1994; Giles-Vernick 2002; Rival 2002; Webb 2002.

13Introduction

roads, sail and oar to steam and diesel), the subsequent realignments of set-tlements and markets and their attendant affect on local and regional social and natural environments. Along with this is what Claessen and Van de Velde (1985) call ‘societal format’ – the interaction of physical geography and human population distribution. At least one contribution here deals with this explicitly (Wadley, this volume), but for more thorough analyses, more atten-tion needs to be given to these factors (see, for example, Colombijn 2003).

There are other more or less overlooked topics. On mining, for example, Jackson’s (1970) study of western Borneo stands virtually alone (compare Knapen 2001), despite the presence of long-standing mining concerns throughout the island. Perhaps the largest (for coal) since colonial times has been that in southeastern Borneo or the antimony mines in western Sarawak, although numerous other places have had continuous or periodic mining of coal, diamonds and gold. Studies of the environmental effects on the sur-rounding peoples and environments, historically and today, would be of immense value. In addition, just as recent studies have paid attention to the interior more than coastal areas, so too has the farming of rice received more attention than other crops. While in many areas of Borneo today, rice is the preferred and principal grain, it was not always that way (Knapen 2001), and many peoples relied on different crops at different seasons or different periods of history. One need only recall the sago exported from the Oya and Mukah rivers in Sarawak (which provided the Brooke state with its principal incentive to annex the area from Brunei in the 1860s). Historical and region-ally focused study of older crops (for example, sago, millet and taro) as well as more recently introduced crops (for example, maize and cassava) would go a long way to countering the ‘rice bias’ of today. Although a number of studies have focused on cash crops or non-timber forest products (including several in this volume), no comprehensive histories of these commodities have yet been produced.10 This is equally so for diseases and natural disas-ters, with Knapen’s study standing largely alone.11

There is also a danger of allowing the borders of the colonial world to shape research on topics that often go beyond those borders (compare Potter 1997; Kathirithamby-Wells 1997). For example, the land borders of Borneo may have meant something to the colonial authorities who drew them, but to local people, animals and plants, these were next to non-existent for a long while.12 The same can be said of maritime boundaries separating Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. This is not to deny the importance that colonial

10 See, for example, Totman 1989; Marks 1998; Dean 2002.11 See Crosby 1986; De Bevoise 1995; Bankoff 2003; Henley 2005.12 For the irrelevance of borders to disease in animals see Reid et al. 1999. For the importance of trans-border conservation see Wikramanayake et al. 1998.

14 Reed L. Wadley

and national boundaries had and still have on local ecologies and peoples. Along the long land border, a tension exists between common ecology and ethnicity across borders and different colonial and national experience.13 Perhaps future work will investigate environmental histories along the inter-colonial border. This would involve working with a wider range of sources – archives in the Netherlands, Indonesia, Britain and Spain. This volume, by and large, continues the reliance on colonial borders to define the targets of research, with some exceptions. Tagliacozzo’s study of the China trade neces-sarily goes beyond colonial borders given the fact that Chinese traders both pre-dated Europeans in the area and regularly crossed colonial divisions once established. Potter makes a cross-island comparison of forest products and tree crops, and Dove and Carpenter take a regional perspective on the changing conceptions of the upas tree within and outside the area.14

Studies of colonial and national census and mapping projects, as has been done elsewhere in Southeast Asia,15 would be helpful; particularly in relation to topics such as economic and environmental policy. Another line of research might involve selected biographies of colonial officials. While this might be regarded as being more a concern for history than the envi-ronment, such work would be of value for environmental history as it was by and through colonial officials that economic and political policies were implemented and formed, which in turn affected the local and colonial use of the environment. Although a good deal of attention has been paid to the Brooke state (Tarling 1982; Walker 2002), the Dutch side has been rather neglected (see Heidhues 2003:106, note 93). Colonial figures that come to mind for Dutch West Borneo include Cornelis Kater who began his career as a clerk and harbor master in 1852 and retired as Resident in 1885, or S.W. Tromp who served in both West and South-East Borneo throughout the 1880-1890s. The Dutch archives would be a rich source for these officials’ actions and opinions regarding environmental matters. This also brings up the issue of portraying colonial or national states as negative players. As with most dichotomies, the state-as-bad versus the local-as-good may be too sharply drawn (although Doolittle and Appell provide convincing counter-cases in their contributions here). More nuanced study of state influences on the environment and local peoples (through, for example, colonial biographies) are also needed (Knapen 2001).

13 See Ishikawa 1998; Wadley 2000.14 One thing that is interesting here is the consistency of perception across European nation-alities.15 For example, Anderson 1991; Thongchai 1994.

15Introduction

There is, most certainly, much more work to be done, and I hope this book answers some questions and spurs more research on environmental histories of this complex and fascinating island.

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PART ONE

Distant and local economies