10-11 AUGUST 2000
LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS
Environmental Change in Histories of Borneo
During the closing decades of the twentieth century, the island of Borneo and its peoples have faced many critical environmental challenges. Controversial transmigration, oil palm plantation development, continued logging and mining, and devastating forest fires are only a few of those problems. Set against the transition into a new century, the international seminar, 'Environmental Change in Native and Colonial Histories of Borneo: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future', focused on environmental change in Borneo historically through native, colonial, and national perspectives, and considered what these processes might bring for the island's future.
* By REED WADLEY
This seminar focused on histories of human-environment interactions and included contributions from a wide range of scholars and researchers working throughout Borneo. The notion of history here was broad and concerned both the ancient and the recent. The past, therefore, was viewed with no arbitrary beginning or end points. A major emphasis was on transitions and ongoing processes of change and continuity. Equally important was what the past can tell us about how things have come to be as they are today and the lessons it might have for the future.
The themes included in the seminar were long-distance trade ties, conservation and extraction, land rights, health and disease, perceptions of the environment, social and linguistic change, and development. The presentations covered eleven centuries of history in Borneo from trade ties with China to new development policies. Political ecology, with its focus on the dynamics surrounding material and discursive struggles over natural resources was the dominant, though often implicit, theoretical perspective. In addition to the presentations, Freek Colombijn (IIAS) and Peter Boomgaard (KITLV) gave some comparative commentary in order to place the contributions within the broader context of Southeast Asia. Discussions were enlivened by the participation of scholars attending from Germany, Denmark, Australia, Russia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and the Netherlands.
Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell University, USA) opened the seminar with his examination of ancient trade ties with China and their ramifications on the ecological history of northwest Borneo. Cristina Eghenter (University of Hull, UK) and Bernard Sellato (CNRS-IRSEA, France) looked at issues of conservation, sustainable resource use, and extraction of forest products for trade in East Kalimantan. Lesley Potter (University of Adelaide, Australia) provided a comparative analysis of commodity and economic value in forest product collection and trade. Land tenure and settlement patterns in East Kalimatan, territorialization and resource access in West Kalimantan, and property rights and power struggles in Sabah respectively formed the topics presented by Antonio Guerreiro (EHESS, France), Reed Wadley (IIAS), and Amity Doolittle (Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, USA).
Adela Baer (Oregon State University, USA) considered historical and modern responses to malaria, while Graham Saunders (University of Leeds, UK) looked at changing perceptions of the Borneo environment throughout history. Following up on this theme, Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter (Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, USA) used historical writings about the upas 'poison' tree to examine changing visions of the Indo-Malay enviroment. Social change formed another important theme, with Sujarni Alloy (Institut Dayakologi, Indonesia) and James T. Collins (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) examining environmental, social and linguistic change in southwestern Kalimantan, and Monica Janowski (University of Greenwich, UK) looking at how rice has come to form an important symbolic bridge between economies produced by internal and external migration in Sarawak.
On the theme of development, Jayantha Perera (New Delhi, India) presented a critique of development policy and local impoverishment in Sarawak, while Dimbab Ngidang (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia) examined transformations of native farming systems to a plantation economy in Sarawak.
A selected set of the seminar papers are being prepared into an edited volume under the tentative title, Histories of the Borneo Environment: Economic, Political, and Social Dimensions of Change and Continuity. Other seminar papers will be submitted to academic journals.
The International Institute for Asian Studies was the principal sponsor of the seminar, and the Leiden Universiteit Fonds and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences contributed supplementary funding. The Borneo Research Council acted as an intellectual sponsor, providing its mailing list and invaluable support network.
Dr Reed Wadley is an anthropologist who specializes in the environmental and ethnohistories of West Kalimantan and the Iban. He is presently a research fellow at the IIAS, Leiden.
E-mail: rwadley@let.leidenuniv.nl