Changing pathways: Forest degradation and the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia

To the memory of my parents, Lye Toong Lee and Chung Ling Yoke Contents Illustrations Tables Maps Abbreviations and Acronyms Spelling and Writing Conventions Notes on Names Acknowledgments 1. Introduction ix xi xiii xv xvii xix xxiii 1 2. Communicating Degradation 19 3. The World of the Forest 49 4. In the Beginning 77 5. A Sense of Place 95 6. Gathering in the Forest 123 7. To See, to Hear, to Walk, and to Know 147 8. Changing Pathways 165 Maps Appendix A. Tebu’s Message: Transcription and Translation Appendix B. Route Descriptions Appendix C. Notes on Wild Yam Species Glossary References Index About the Author 179 189 195 197 201 211 221 229 Illustrations Figures 3.1 3.2 4.1 Pheasants drawn by Kad0y Two Batek depictions of pathways A Batek child’s image of trees 62 65 88 Photos Plate 1 Plate 2 Plate 3 Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6 Plate 7 Plate 8 Plate 9 Plate 10 Plate 11 Plate 12 Plate 13 Moving camp On a new road At work and play on the Tahan River Portraits of Batek children Mounting a newly fallen tree Kechau campsite Relocating a lean-to A camp astride a future swidden field Logging roads criss-cross the hills of Kecau Malay trader laying out his wares The transmission of yam-digging skills Birds are the favorite target prey of children Young men visiting the camp at Tabu7 3 27 37 48 57 69 72 75 98 122 125 153 159 Tables 1.1 1.2 4.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 Population statistics for Batek camps Average camp populations, 1993, 1995–1996 Lists of Batek original trees Plant parts of yam species: Summary of terms Ripening stages of ba7ko7 (Artocarpus integer var. silvestris Corner) Population statistics of fruit season camps, 1995 and 1996 12 12 87 126 134 141 Maps 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The states of Malaysia Distribution of Orang Asli groups Lipis and Jerantut districts, Pahang The Batek territory in Pahang, Kelantan, and Terengganu The fieldwork area in relation to the Tahan Mountain Range Batek camps in Pahang Locations of Batek camps in Kechau Locations of Batek camps in Tembeling 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 Abbreviations and Acronyms a.s.l. DWNP ha JHEOA K. Kg. km lit. m Sg. UMNO above sea level Department of Wildlife and National Parks; formerly the Game Department hectares (10,000 square meters; 2.471 acres) Jabatan Hal-Ehwal Orang Asli (Department of Orang Asli Affairs); formerly the Department of Aborigines Kuala (Malay for “confluence”) Kampung (Malay for “village”) kilometer literally meter Sungai (Malay for “river”) United Malays National Organisation, the dominant political party in the ruling coalition Spelling and Writing Conventions Words in Batek are transcribed in this volume according to the orthography currently used in Mon-Khmer linguistic studies. The symbols employed are pronounced approximately as indicated below: Symbols Pronunciation Examples i e 3 1 as the ee in English bee, but shorter as the ai in English bait as the e in English bet approximately as the oo in many varieties of English good or the u in Scottish hus (house) as the e in English the as the u in English fun as the u in English bull as the oa in English boat as the au in English taut, but shorter as the ch in English change as the ny in English banyan as the ng in English singer (not as in finger) glottal stop, as the tt in London Cockney little as the k in English kite (never as a glottal stop) labi? (river turtle) te? (land; earth) kab3n (kinfolk; friends) 9 a u o 0 c 4 7 ? k c1p (to walk) b9law (blowpipe) kap (to bite or sting) Gubar (thunder-god) jok (to move) kiy0m (under; below) can (foot) 4o? (to tell a lie) ba7kol (eaglewood) na? (mother) k9pok (orphans) Nasal vowels are written with a superscript tilde: lõ? (to wash into the river) Grammar and word formations Batek grammar and word-formation conventions have not been fully studied yet. Recognized word modifiers that appear in this book include: bah- (locator, usually suggesting directionality); pi- (causative marker); p9- (causative marker); k9(relative marker; possibly also a locator); t9- (relative marker); -m (intention marker); b9- (progressive, modifying both nouns and verbs). All but the intention marker are separated from the modified word by a hyphen. For example: k9-s3n (that is past); t9-b9w ([specified subject] that is big); bahkiy0m (to-below, i.e., downriver or underside); pi-d37 (to cause to see, i.e., to xviii Spelling and Writing Conventions point); p9-hin#k (lit. to cause to imitate: i.e., to show how something is said or done); hehm (you-all and we-all want); b9-k9pok (“to be orphaning”). Also written in the same way are reduplicative verbalization of nouns (for example, kiy-kuy [to be heading] from kuy [head]) and verb distributives (for example, bit-b#t [to hang on tightly here and there, i.e., to be entwined] from b#t [to hang on tightly]). Derivations are written as single words (for example, b9lah0t [term of abuse for takop yams] from b9lh0t [watery tubers]). I have slightly simplified the spellings of some personal names. For example, the name ?al0r appears here as Al0r; G? appears as Gk. Relationship terms prefixed to teknonyms (see “Notes on Names”) are treated as words rather than names and not capitalized except for when they start a sentence. For example, ?eyGk; na?Al0r; ta?Kad0y; ya?Kaw. The glossary (pp. 201–9) contains notes on the most frequently used words and particles in this book. Sorting order. Phonemes in the glossary and index are sorted as follows: a, ã, b, c, d, e, 3, #, 9, ¾, g, h, i, 1, j, k, l, m, n, 4, 7, o, õ, 0, p, r, s, t, u, w, y, ?. Notes on Names As the Batek say, only after the creator beings had named the primordial plants, animals, and landscape features could we know them. Many other cosmologies and religions around the world feature the naming process as a necessary business of creation. Likewise, anthropologists are fond of names: of the people we work with, the places we work in, the things and relationships that the people consider nameworthy. Of course we could put too much emphasis on language. Many practices, beliefs, environmental features, and relationships are never named (and some names are so dangerous that to utter them is to invite chaos). And many groups of people never had names until there were people who needed names to call, codify, or colonize them by. Still, giving names and labels is the easiest way to show (among many things) “This is what I’m talking about, not that.” So some explanation of naming conventions is in order here. For personal names, I follow Batek conventions: personal names for children, nicknames for childless adults, and teknonyms for other adults. Teknonyms, as translated from the Batek words for them, mean “children’s names” or “grandchildren’s names.” They are easily recognized through one of these prefixes (all relationship terms): ?ey (father), na? (mother), ya? (grandmother), and ta? (grandfather). So when an adult male is named (for example) ?eyT9ltil, that means “father of T9ltil” and T9ltil is probably his oldest unmarried son or daughter. A teknonym with the prefix “ya?” or “ta?” should therefore signal that the person in question is an adult of at least (by Batek standards) middle-age. There is one exception: Tebu, who is central to this book. He should have a teknonym, since he is already a grandfather, and he does. However, I expect that readers of this book will not find it easy to remember all the teknonyms, and Tebu’s name must be easily remembered. So I have given him a Malay pseudonym (it means “sugarcane”), which is also widely used by indigenous communities in Malaysia. For place-names, where there is an official name and a Batek name for a location (a toponym) or river (a hydronym), as far as possible the Batek name is given first, followed by the official name in parentheses, such as “Was Taha4 (Malay1 Kuala Tahan).” Unless the official name is more appropriate for the discussion context, subsequent references will be to the Batek name. All official names follow the current spellings and versions: for example, Taman Negara rather than King George V National Park (the founding name that lasted until Independence in 1957), even when the context of discussion is colonial. As for the Batek’s group name (their “ethnonym”), I do not use dialect group labels here. Following the Batek’s usual practice, I identify subgroups by the state where they generally live: Pahang, Kelantan, or Terengganu (see map 4). xx Notes on Names In the linguistic and some anthropological literature, the Batek’s language is commonly identified as Batek De’. The dialect group classifications were first announced by Kirk Endicott, who distinguished several subgroups that were associated with defined geographical areas: Batek De’ (the numerically dominant group), Batek Nòng, Mendriq, Batek Teh, Batek ’Iga,’ and Batek Te’. Recently, he has argued more forcefully that dialect groups do not hold constant through time—which means that there are no true “dialects” or dialect speakers.2 I agree with this newer position. Further, the subgroup names are too ephemeral to be meaningful. I found that people were often puzzled when asked to identify who belongs in which dialect group, a line of questioning that inevitably ended with the firm sendoff “Everyone is Batek” (I cannot say this for the Mendriq, as I have never met them). As far as I can tell, only two dialect group labels are widely recognized by the Pahang Batek: Batek ’Iga’ and Batek Te’. It is more natural for the Batek to identify people by hydronyms. Thus, the Batek Te’ are better known as bat3k K0h (“Koh people,” after the Koh River valley in Kelantan where they lived). Hardly anyone that I’ve met will confess to being the Batek De’, though their language belongs in that category! However, it is possible that dialect group labels have more meaning in Kelantan (where Endicott focused his studies) and Terengganu; the amnesia described earlier seems to lift—a little bit—when there are visitors from these other states. There are two other “Batek” groups in Pahang who are usually lumped with them (this lumping tendency means that official census numbers for the “Batek” category are not reliable). These are the Batek Nòng and the Batek Tanum. The Batek do not consider their languages intelligible with theirs. They know of, but have almost no interaction with the Nòng people, who do not even neighbor them geographically. So this group is almost certainly not a “dialect group” of the Batek but an entirely separate population of people, who took up agriculture some time in the 1920s or so. The Tanum people were identified as Mintil by Geoffrey Benjamin,3 a name that those I’ve met fully reject. They are enclaved by Malays on one side (especially in the Tanum River valley from which they take their name) and the Batek on the other (along the Kechau River) and therefore no longer have the land they need to maintain a fully mobile way of life (see maps 2 and 4). Today they are found mainly in three small villages, which receive government attention: Sg. Garam near the Malay village of Dada Kering (most visited by the Batek and known by them and the Tanum as Mar3m), Paya Keladi, and Telok Gunong in Cegar Perah on the Temetong River near Jerantut town. The combined population total was 175 in 1995 government records (but I have some reason to think this number an underestimation). One clue to their customary adaptation is the old folk Malay name for them, which is now remembered in Batek as bat3k b9luk3r (secondary forest people). There is some intermarriage between them and the Batek and what appears to be an expanding socioeconomic domain. I have never met the Nòng but have stayed on and off with the Tanum for a few days each time. I collected an approximately 600-word Mar3m Tanum vocabulary (unpublished), but little socioeconomic information of any scholarly Notes on Names xxi value. As such, these prefatory remarks are practically all that I will say in this book about either group. Unfortunately, no contemporary linguist or anthropologist has done systematic, long-term fieldwork with either the Nòng or Tanum peoples (although there is enough early documentation to give a reasonably adequate impression of life in pre-World War II days).4 On present evidence, I recommend that Batek Nòng and Batek Tanum be considered as distinct from the Batek and therefore classifiable as two additional ethnic minorities in the Peninsula. Notes 1. See chapters 1 and 5 for further discussion of Malay influences on Batek language and culture. 2. Kirk Endicott 1997. 3. Benjamin 1976. 4. The main references are indexed in Lye 2001. Acknowledgments The first words of the manuscript that became my doctoral dissertation flashed into my head while I was still at fieldwork—one afternoon as I sat in a long wooden boat powered with an outboard engine, rounding a bend of the Tembeling River in Pahang, Malaysia. Months later in Honolulu, with fieldwork over and a computer screen in front of me, I was surprised that those words still rang true. Soon enough, the dissertation was done. I then took various drafts of this manuscript from Hawai‘i back to Malaysia, then to Japan and back again to Malaysia. I worked on it as time permitted and brought portions of it into the wide-open spaces of seminars and conferences around the world. The years went by, and this book came to look less and less like its forebear. As my focus was pulled away by an undertow of stresses and crises, I comforted myself with the conceit that I was doing exactly as a true hunter-gatherer should: seek my knowledge and inspiration on the move, wherever the opportunity presents itself. The ride has not been smooth; if not for the friends, companions, and mentors who joined me on this long journey, I would never have arrived. There are many people and institutions that I must thank. To start, I’d like to thank those who have passed on: from my grandmother Ng Foong Lin and my father Lye Toong Lee to, among the Batek, those whose names appear in chapter 8 (pp. 167–68). I truly regret that they did not live to see this book. I am intensely sustained by the memory of my grandmother, to whom I owe the greatest debt of all. My earliest lessons in kinship and social roles and responsibilities were learnt literally at her feet. My father, who sank into a long silence when I announced my intention to study anthropology, did not know how much he himself had started it all, when he gave me my first stamp collection and stirred my curiosity of places and peoples far far away. I am grateful that he always intuited the force of my ideals and never, ever, pulled me from my path. The people who most shaped the route taken by this book are of course the Batek. It seems terribly unfair to mention some names and not others and I will not do so. Though not everyone was equally involved in my studies, collectively they hosted, tolerated, fed, taught, and worried over me. If a year passes and I do not go back to the forest, I know I will hear about it next time. They opened their homes, made their time available, and shared my sorrows. They are kin, friends, and mentors. Those families who let me live in their lean-tos and houses need special mention. They willingly endured my frequent and sometimes exasperating requests for information and left me alone when I needed time to think, sleep, or write. Certainly they will also remember the many times they protected my fieldnotes and kept the children from bothering me! xxiv Acknowledgments What sparked my first professional interest in the Batek was Kirk Endicott’s monograph on their religion. I am grateful beyond measure to Kirk for his invaluable correspondence, sharing his insights on the Batek, and responding to my work. He and his wife Karen Lampell Endicott have given us a pioneering record and set high standards of excellence in research and writing; they have raised challenging questions that forced me to consider more nuanced interpretations. Christian Vogt finished his dissertation fieldwork with the Batek as I arrived for mine and offered important insights. Stepping on the heels of other fieldworkers has for me been one of the great joys of doing research. Most of this book is based on data collected during the 1993 and 1995–1996 fieldwork seasons and, as such, I must thank those teachers who supervised the early florescence of my ideas. Michael R. Dove and Alice Dewey were the two mainstays of my years at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa. Michael, despite being snowed under by his new responsibilities in New Haven, continues to read and comment on my work and he remains a source of great inspiration. During our sojourn in Hawai‘i, he spent much time pulling me out of one scrape or mood after another. I am indebted to him for all his help. Alice long ago provoked me to question some of the conceptual frameworks that I too lazily pinned my ideas on. In the last three years, the main supervision of my work was taken over by P. Bion Griffin—my committee chair, teacher, and friend. Bion’s enthusiasm for huntergatherer comparisons and willingness to spend hours in chat and counsel had a galvanizing effect, made the dissertation-writing process seem much more fun than it probably was, and gave me a necessary ethnological perspective on my fieldwork data. Even now, he continues to let out a loud and much-appreciated email guffaw at the latest comic anecdote from the field. Lots more people have taught, inspired, encouraged, provoked, or helped me in one way or another. I wish I could name them all: but I’d never be able to finish such a list. I thank Gordon P. Means for sharing insights from the unpublished notes of Paul Means and, further, Saw Leng Guan at the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia for his botanical identifications. For teaching me everything I know about Aslian linguistics, I’ll always be grateful to Geoffrey Benjamin, Niclas Burenhult, and Gérard Diffloth. Long chats with Sonja Brodt, Geoffrey Davison, Deanna Donovan, Edmond Dounias, Mitsuo Ichikawa, Jenne Lajuni, Jean Kennedy, Jane Mogina, Ong Hean Chooi, Raj Puri, and Dennis Yong helped to unravel the mysteries of fieldwork and forest ecologies. Among teachers, I hope I do no one a disfavor by singling out Carolyn Bell, Robert K. Dentan, Jon Goss, Alan Howard, Terry Rambo, and Leslie Sponsel. Not all have taught me formally but all have suffered through enough of my prose to deserve my gratitude. For their warm hospitality, during which some of this manuscript was written, I’d like to thank Alex and Carolyn Bell, Lee Swee Fun, David Loh, and Mano Maniam. Mano read drafts of manuscript chapters, as did Donna Amoroso, Niclas Burenhult, Bob Dentan, Michael Dove, David Frossard, Tom Gill, Bion Griffin, Kirk Endicott, Rosemary Gianno, and Colin Nicholas. Their feedback has been indispensable. Acknowledgments xxv For making possible the conditions for writing this book, I am especially grateful to Koji Tanaka for inviting me to take up a Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellowship (1998–2000). Research and writing were further enabled by Visiting Fellowships in 2001: at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (to which I returned in 2002 and 2003) and the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific project of the RSPAS, the Australian National University. For their kind invitations to these institutions, I thank, respectively, Ken-ichi Abe and Fadzilah M. Cooke. By the time I put the finishing touches to this manuscript, I was enjoying a fruitful year at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. I am grateful to the college for inviting me to take up the Quillian Visiting International Professorship; most of all, I thank the students in my courses on tropical forest ethnographies. Their curious and insightful questions about the Batek were always provocative, and I hope they will continue to ask questions. Portions of this book were first prepared for workshops and seminars in Kyoto, Kuching, Los Baños, Perth, and Halle. For inviting me to these venues, which gave me the chance to explore the wider relevance of Batek ideas, I would like to thank, in order, Katsuyoshi Fukui, Michael Leigh, Michael R. Dove and Percy S. Sajise, David Trigger, and Thomas Widlok. This book has also benefited from comments received during presentations at Dartmouth College and the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, and I am indebted to Kirk Endicott and Sumit Mandal for inviting me there. Fieldwork in 1995–1996 was funded by the East-West Center and the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided additional support through the project, “The Conditions of Biodiversity Maintenance in Asia.” For making possible that assistance and the further support from the project, “The Institutional Context of Biodiversity Conservation in Southeast Asia” (1999), I am indebted, once again, to Michael R. Dove and Percy S. Sajise. Later field visits were enabled by the JSPS postdoctoral fellowship and I must thank, as ever, Koji Tanaka. I also thank the Economic Planning Unit in the Prime Minister’s Department, Kuala Lumpur, for granting research permission; the State Economic Planning Unit in Kuantan for permitting me to work in Pahang; and the Wildlife Department for permitting me to travel in and out of the national park, Taman Negara. Within this last agency, I especially thank staff members at the Kuala Tahan park headquarters. Hood M. Salleh and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, were my local sponsors in 1995–1996. I am most grateful to Hood, foremost for his role in facilitating the granting of my research permit. His company is well-appreciated too. Finally, there is one person whose help has been indispensable. This is the Batek’s rattan trader, Towkay Mang, who keeps me informed about the Batek’s current locations and goes out of his way to ferry me to and out of Batek camps whenever I ask. I have had relatively trouble-free field experiences, thanks in large part to the kindness of traders like him, and of those anonymous individuals who responded to my thumbs for rides. On the Tembeling River, local villagers, xxvi Acknowledgments park rangers, and tour guides readily boated me around. I am most grateful for these acts of random kindness—invariably offered without any question—that made it so much easier to move around. Portions of chapters 3, 5, and 7 were originally published in the journal Southeast Asian Studies as “Forest, Bateks, and degradation: Environmental representations in a changing world” (volume 38, 2000, pp. 165–84) and “The significance of forest to the emergence of Batek knowledge in Pahang, Malaysia” (volume 40, 2002, pp. 3–21) and are reproduced here with permission of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. 

1 Introduction On June 3, 1993, I began to record stories from a small group of Batek men and women on the Kechau River in north central Pahang state, Peninsular Malaysia. Strong winds had blown up late that afternoon. Thunder rumbled; rain pelted down. Some people ran out to the foliage-clear logging road beside the camp. They urged me to do the same. If any of those wind-tossed trees fell over the camp, we would be prime targets. A felicitous moment to start asking questions. That night, after the winds had calmed, the rain lessened, and everyone returned to their lean-tos, I asked a group to tell me stories: stories about the thunder-god, Gubar; about animals and, then, as I put it in Malay, apa-apa pun boleh (lit. anything also-can). It wasn’t long before they introduced the myths of origin, of fire and rivers, the world, and ethnic groups. Half-a-dozen people, two women and four men of various ages, sat by the fire. Others sat in, walked out, put in a voice or response here and there. I daresay still others were listening from their lean-tos. Two or three hours later, as one story led to another and one idea connected with another, they started to tell me about the problems of losing the forest. Well into the night, I heard about Gubar the thunder-god: not the mischiefmaker as portrayed in some of the popular tales, but a fearsome being whose anger can cause violent destruction. In this persona, he represented something else—the moral order. The messages from the shamans, I heard, amounted to this: People—the townspeople, the royalty, and government officials—must believe the Batek. If people do not believe in their stories and continue to open up the forest for development purposes, to carve out roads, to turn natural forest into monocrop plantation estates, there will be no forest left. Gubar will be angry, the 2 Chapter 1 floods will come, the land will dissolve, the underground snake (a kind of Earth deity) will surface, and the world will collapse. “Our stories,” said one man and his wife to silent agreement from the others, “you may regard as surat [letters] that we give to you that you may deliver them to the orang bandar [Malay: townfolks].”1 This couple was ?eyTow and na?Tow, who had appointed themselves my “parents.” People don’t believe Batek stories, he continued. “Luckily, I’ve a daughter who’s come here to ask me for our stories. If people don’t believe, I don’t know what we’ll do. I think we’d surely die.” “If they don’t believe, let them come here. I don’t have money to go to them,” na?Tow’s father ?eyBajaw added. These comments, and the setting in which they were gathered, provide an apt introduction to the major concerns of this book. This is an anthropological account in the sense that it contributes to the literature on the Batek, who are little known even in Malaysia, and offers a certain perspective on their perceptions, norms, activities, and modes of behavior. I hope, however, that this is more than another record of, in popular parlance, “a vanishing way of life.” This way of life is changing and always has changed; following a common pattern in Peninsular Malaysia, the Batek’s ideas and concepts, social relations, economic activities, and even their language and stories show evidence of long-term openness to influences from outside. I am not worried about cultural survival issues. Those will take their course and the Batek will deal with them as they have always dealt with sociocultural change. My major concerns are the material conditions that enable and constrain the Batek’s capacity to pursue their chosen modes of life, conditions that are vastly contemporary and of global relevance: the degradation of the forests from which the Batek take their identity. My approach, then, is environmental. I focus on the implications of degradation for the Batek and for the world that is enveloped in the notion of the surat (letters), which I examine in more detail below. The political intent of my study is to further along the process of communication between the Batek and readers of this book. Like the Batek’s stories, this book can be considered a surat. Before elaborating on my concerns and the origins of this book, I present below an introduction to the Batek and to the general issues of social change and environmental degradation in Malaysia. The Batek, the Environment, and Change The Batek call themselves bat3k h9p (people of the forest). They are among the score or so indigenous ethnic minorities of Peninsular Malaysia, the Orang Asli (Malay: original people; see map 2), and live in lowland tropical forests in the states of Pahang, Kelantan, and Terengganu (see map 4). I’ve worked only in Pahang and, within that, Kecau and Tembeling, which are subdistricts of Lipis and Jerantut districts (see maps 3, 7, and 8). Introduction 3 Plate 1. Moving camp: a halt along the journey down the Tenor River, Taman Negara, January 1996. The most established town in this area is undoubtedly Kuala Lipis (Batek Was Lipis), strategically located at the confluence of the Jelai and Kechau rivers and, until the rise of Jerantut town in recent decades, the main gateway into the interior of Pahang. These hinterlands were long renowned for their wealth of forest products and minerals (especially gold). Lipis district’s importance in the state economy declined as coastal and maritime travel quickened pace in the nineteenth century, and it remains among the least built-up districts of this largely rural Malaysian state. At 35,965 square km, Pahang is the largest state in the Peninsula (and the third largest after Sabah and Sarawak in East Malaysia [Borneo]), containing the tallest mountain (Gunung Tahan) and the longest river (Pahang River). And, Geoffrey Benjamin remarks, it exhibits the greatest indigenous linguistic diversity of any Malaysian state.2 Once entirely covered in forest (mainly lowland dipterocarp), it remains one of only four states where forest cover exceeds 50 percent of the land area. One factor hindering forest clearance in the past was the remoteness of its interior. Thus in the 1920s and ’30s when plans were mooted to protect forest within the future Taman Negara national park (which straddles parts of Kecau and Tembeling districts), the state government was willing to surrender land because it saw no clear commercial interests there (for more on Taman Negara’s founding, see chapter 5, pp. 106–7). Until quite recently movement in Pahang was almost entirely by water, with the Pahang River and its major tributaries being the standard highways. Indeed, population was sparse and settlements tended to hug the banks of these rivers, thus leaving the interior to those who knew how to work their way around 4 Chapter 1 it: Orang Asli. Today, population density remains one of the lowest among the states. The critical natural barrier to land development is the Main Range, formed of ancient sedimentary rocks. Malaysians commonly depict this in metaphors: a “spine” or “backbone” dividing the Peninsula into two distinct halves, the east and west coasts. Pahang occupies a somewhat anomalous position in this division, its northern regions sheltered by the Main Range but its southern half largely comprising deltaic plains that could be reached from neighboring states. For example, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Penarikan trade route led from the east coast, through Pahang River and the upper reaches of the Muar (in present-day Negri Sembilan), and thence to Melaka (Malacca) on the west coast, for a long time the major commercial and religious center in the Peninsula. Thus, though travel was arduous and lengthy and the forest inhibited settlement, Pahang was never isolated geographically. The Main Range did hinder the building of east-west land links. The East Coast railway line connecting Kelantan state on the northeast with the populous west coast was not completed till 1931; this line runs through Lipis and Jerantut districts, serving many rural communities, and remains the line most familiar to the Batek (see map 3). In 1995–1996 when I occasionally traveled to fieldwork on this train, the travel time from Kuala Lumpur (the capital city) to Kuala Lipis was something like eight to nine hours. This is a considerable investment of time for most west coast Malaysians, for whom the interior of states like Pahang continues to seem quite remote. My own father traveled around Pahang in the 1960s and, he recalled, it seemed like miles upon miles of “nothing.” Surfaced roads first appeared in the Malayan landscape in the decade after the introduction of the car in 1902, but initially road networks were fragmentary and, as Ooi puts it aptly, were designed to serve the river traffic; i.e., to take people to the rivers where the “real” traveling was done.3 Even up till 1958 the road maps show a blank space for the interior of Pahang; only one main road connected Kuala Lipis with the state capital on the east coast, Kuantan. Another important mountain range is the Tahan on the northeast corner where Pahang abuts Kelantan and Terengganu. In Gunung Tahan, it rises to an elevation of 2187 m. Today the mountain has achieved fame as a climbing destination but it has always been an orographic barrier to human settlement. There is another ancient trade route along this range; this route starts from the coast up the Tembeling (Batek T9mili7) and thence the Tahan (Batek Taha4) Rivers, from there crossing the mountains and down into Kelantan on the other side. Today perhaps only the Batek have an intimate knowledge of the various passes and passages through these mountains, but they tend to shun the truly rugged, high-altitude areas. The watersheds of all the major Batek rivers in the three states are in this mountain range. The borders of the Batek territory in Pahang are the two rivers that give their names to the subdistricts: K9ciw (Malay Kechau) on the west and T9mili7 on the east. The K9ciw rises in the Tahan mountain range and feeds into the Jelai, which in turn meets the T9mili7 at Kuala Tembeling. The T9mili7 in turn is a tributary of Introduction 5 the Pahang River. Innumerable rivers and streams drain into the K9ciw and T9mili7; the hills and valleys of those tributaries are where I have done most of my work (see maps 5 to 8). Government authorities, following (if unself-consciously) the classification system first codified by Paul Schebesta in 1926, recognize three ethnolinguistic groupings among the Orang Asli: Semang, Senoi, and Aboriginal Malay. These names are also used by anthropologists, whose criteria for classification is slightly different. The Batek are categorized as Semang, which refers to a cluster of classically mobile hunting-and-gathering societies living mainly in the northern and north-central parts of the Peninsula and the bordering areas of Thailand. Semang are commonly known by the racial term “Negrito” but as this Spanish word means nothing more than “little black people,” it is best dropped altogether. Even as a racial term, “Negrito” disguises the high degree of physical heterogeneity among Semang populations. Semang and Senoi peoples speak varieties of Aslian, the name given by linguists for the Mon-Khmer languages that are found in the Peninsula (Mon-Khmer is a division of the Austroasiatic language family). In current linguistic opinion, the Aslian history in the Peninsula is at least three millennia old. Semang are speakers of the North Aslian sub-branch, which includes the languages of Batek, Batek Tanum, Batek Nòng, Kensiw, Kintaq, Jahai, Mendriq, and the various Meniq peoples of South Thailand. Aboriginal Malays (or Melayu Asli) peoples are speakers of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages, which includes Malay, the official language in Malaysia.4 The total Batek population is not determined but is unlikely to exceed seven to nine hundred, i.e., roughly 0.73 percent of all Orang Asli or less than 0.004 percent of all Malaysian citizens in the 2000 census.5 As of 2001, the Pahang population is around 450. Most of the other Semang peoples have to some degree or another become sedentarized, although that sometimes means that they use settlements like base camps, relocating periodically for a range of social and economic reasons. Sedentarization (the cessation of mobility) is pronounced among Batek in Kelantan and Terengganu; following the general model, the Kelantan Batek were reported (as of 1990) to spend up to three months a year in the forest collecting rattan and other forest products.6 Quite a number of Kelantan groups migrated to Pahang at different times in the past twenty years, mainly to flee environmental destruction. Not much is known of the Terengganu Batek, other than that some have intermarried and co-reside with Semaq Beri in Ulu Trengganu villages. In view of the general trend, the Batek of Pahang are the only statewide Semang population who remains as full-time mobile hunter-gatherers. By mobile hunting and gathering is meant that way of life so often chastised by government officials as “nomadic.” We will encounter these criticisms again. For now, a straightforward description of the Batek way of life will suffice. The Batek’s mobility is not “nomadic” in the sense of being utterly free of ties to the land. Indeed, as we will see in this book, if the Batek did not have ties to the land, they could not be mobile. One cannot just wander randomly around the forest; it is much too complex a landscape for that. Without topographic and resource knowledge to start with, it is not possible to be mobile. The development 6 Chapter 1 of that knowledge over generations fosters important bonds and sentiments: both among people who share a place, and between people and the land. Contrary to popular perception, hunter-gatherers tend not to be expansionist. They do not habitually move into other people’s territories unless it makes absolute sense: land loss, displacement, outmigration of neighboring populations, and government resettlement are among the usual reasons. For one thing, they rarely have the military muscle to just take over a territory. They depend rather on social networking, either among themselves or with friendly dominant groups, to extend the spatial resources available to them. This seems to be a common theme around the world. Practically, the traditional mode of dwelling in the forest is to live in a camp (hayã?); these camps are connected by an extensive series of pathways that traverses over walking trails, rivers, and logging roads, in a topography marked by the alternation of land and water. The Batek’s preferred ecological niche is the forested foothills where altitude rarely exceeds 200 m above sea level (a.s.l.). The forest formations are classified as lowland dipterocarp (<300 m a.s.l.) and hill dipterocarp (300–700 m a.s.l.) forests, which together form the lowland evergreen rain forest. Here there is a complex interlacing of feeder streams and tributaries and the terrain is characterized by rolling hills, humpback ridges, ridge crests, river meanders, rounded capes, and escarpments. In other words, despite the absence of a rugged surface, this environment contains many distinctive landforms and is not featureless. The Batek do not ascend to the higher elevations that lack food sources and they demonstrate no knowledge of montane ecology. Batek social-economic strategies, and their concern over environmental degradation, must be placed within the broader context of change in Malaysia. Driven by export-led growth, general aspiration is towards development, with industrialization being the objective. In the 1980s up until the Asian financial crisis of 1997, this was characterized by high growth rates. As promulgated in the 1991 National Development Policy, the government is targeting 2020 as the year for achieving fully developed status. The growth of urbanization (due to natural increase, net migration, and reclassification of urban areas) is one indicator of just what’s happening all around. Just over a quarter of the population was classified as “urban” in 1970; thirty years later, that number has exceeded 60 percent. Consumption of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) is alarmingly high and there appear to be no government efforts to systematically disengage this from economic growth. Income levels (and, correspondingly, material consumption) have gone up as well, from RM6099 per capita in 1990 to RM14788 per capita in 2000 (at the current exchange rate, from USD1605 to USD3891.58). General statistics of this sort can be misleading. As Gomez and Jomo summarize: “although the reforms instituted by the New Economic Policy (NEP) reduced poverty substantially and led to the growth of ethnic Malay middle and business classes, there has been growing concern over the influence of political patronage on the business sector, the increasing inequitable distribution of wealth, and the apparent increase in corruption and other abuses of power.”7 A disproportionate number of Orang Asli rank among the officially defined “hardcore poor.” The development model is very much one of “trickle down,” with a slant towards development of “growth poles” (urban Introduction 7 nodes) and social-economic services there (including health care and education) being superior to those in less densely populated rural areas. Poverty eradication is a major objective of social development programs. Historically, development has been fueled by the liquidation of natural assets: timber, minerals, and offshore oil and gas reserves. The trend has been towards increasing openness and globalization of the economy. Until the mid-1980s, rubber, oil palm, timber, and tin were the main income generators. In the mid-1980s, due to the fall in commodity prices, there was a structural transformation in the economy with alternative sectors, notably industrialization and tourism, assuming more importance. By 1997, the “agriculture, forestry, livestock, and fishing” sector stood at 12.2 percent of the GDP (down from 30.8 percent in 1970), while “manufacturing”—focused on export-oriented production since 1980—was at 35.5 percent (up from 13.4 percent in 1970).8 Overall, sustainability concerns tend to be sidelined. The twenty-first century will not be able to proceed like the last one. . . . [T]here are too few natural renewable resources remaining to sustain the excessive exploitation rates of the previous century. . . . [T]he steady output of greenhouse gases, toxic chemicals, hazardous waste and even organic loads into the environment overwhelms the natural capacity of forests, oceans, land and the atmosphere to absorb pollutants and contaminants. Nature also has its limits and Malaysia is on the verge of testing that hypothesis to the extreme.9 The process has long been unfolding, but as far as contemporary Batek forests are concerned the artificial “jumping off” point would be the large scale rural development projects that began in the 1960s and 1970s. A key feature has been forest conversion and clearance for a range of purposes. Initially, the main culprits were probably the establishment of extensive plantation estates and the roads and infrastructure to link up rural areas with market centers. (There has been a parallel history of smallholder plantations; the environmental impact of these has not been as great and therefore will not concern us here.) The history of large-scale plantation estates goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, when rubber was introduced as the main export crop. That has now been overtaken by oil palm; Malaysia has cornered the market in palm oil. In the early 1970s, forest clearance began to make inroads into hitherto remote areas, including much of the Batek territories in interior Kelantan. Latterly, with the shift towards manufacturing and industrialization, the built environment has expanded dramatically, with more and more forest lost to property development, industrial parks, and infrastructure like airports, ports, highways, and hydropower projects. Since the adoption of tourism as a key revenue earner in the 1980s, this has included rapid construction of tourist resorts and other recreational facilities (like golf courses), even in ecologically fragile areas like hillsides and, as we’ll see, protected areas. All these continue or are in planning and have led to the irreversible 8 Chapter 1 fragmentation of the forest landscape. There are important implications for the configuration of space: Land is increasingly valued for its site and locational attributes rather than its inherent ecological properties. Land-use changes accelerated by leap-frogging urban-industrial impositions into rural areas and the appreciation in the value of adjoining agricultural land at almost exponential rates further diminish the significance of ecological attributes of land. Land is invariably held for speculative purposes and to build up the “land bank” of corporate bodies awaiting further high value-added transformations at opportune moments.10 To put all this in simple terms, the city is moving into the village while the forest is retreating. The traditional divisions between rural and urban, forest and village, are increasingly breaking down as are local values of land (especially those concerning rights of tenure, access, use, and property distribution) while new divisions have appeared—notably, increasing disparities of wealth both within indigenous communities and in broader Malaysian society generally. There are effects on soils, waters, air, biological species, and, less discussed, human psychology in the face of rapid change. For forest-dwelling Orang Asli, most of whom do not have title to land, these translate into the loss of subsistence bases, social-political impacts aside. Land security now ranks high on any list of the Orang Asli’s pressing needs. Internationally, Malaysia has made a commitment to keep at least 50 percent of the total land area under permanent forest cover. However, the actual extent of land remaining under forest cover is fiercely disputed, with government agencies using a variety of criteria—depending on what the statistic is being used for—to determine what constitutes “forest.” These criteria may not correspond to their scientific or indigenous counterparts. As Sahabat Alam Malaysia (an environmental group) points out: “Sorting out the statistics on forest cover in Malaysia is a difficult task. Depending on the source, whether it be the Department of Forestry, Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) or the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (MOSTE), each has its own methodology and reasoning for presenting the numbers.” One fundamental problem is in how these various agencies determine what category a block of forest should be placed in: “data presentation from different agencies is neither uniform nor consistent, thus leading to discrepancies and conflicting analyses.”11 A Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM) report on the effects of climate change on the forestry sector (presumably drawing on official sources) shows what can be achieved by playing with categories. In 1994, the size of “forested land” was put at 58.61 percent of the total land area (in the Peninsula, 44.1 percent of the land area) but this included plantation forests (comprising fast-growing afforestation species, chiefly eucalyptus, pine, and Acacia mangium). When “agriculture tree crops” (oil palm, rubber, cocoa, coconut) were included, “total tree cover” went up to 72 percent of the land area!12 This is close to the high Introduction 9 number that government officials will sometimes cite as “land under forest cover” but at least 15 percent of it is composed of planted, often alien, species, which come nowhere near to reproducing the natural habitats and ecosystems of the tropical forests. Geographers Teh et al., drawing on a variety of sources and official forestry statistics, note that between 1947 and 1995, the annual deforestation rate was 0.9 percent or a loss of 156,250 ha per year (defining deforestation as “the complete clearing of tree formations and their replacement by some other use of land”).13 According to the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) of the federal-level Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment, the period 1966 to the 1980s saw a loss of forested areas in the Peninsula of some 25 percent. Analysing land use data for 1990, the DWNP concluded that only 47 percent of the Peninsula’s land area was covered in forest by their criteria (note the discrepancy with the FRIM report cited above). Most of the loss is in the lowland dipterocarp forest; the DWNP recognizes that those at altitudes of less than a hundred meters are among the key threatened habitats in the country.14 Pahang is regularly recognized among the states where most of the forest loss in this period has occurred. (It is also regularly identified among the states that exceed their annual allowable cuts of timber.) In Sahabat Alam Malaysia’s summary: “By the judicious use of the term ‘tree cover,’ which includes man-made forests of tree crops, around 75% of the country’s total land area is said to be covered in leafy goodness. In reality, natural forests cover less than 60% of the landscape, but in Peninsular Malaysia the percentage dwindles to less than 45%.”15 Even these revised statistics might be too high for some. For example, according to Teh et al. “the forest cover is now 67.2%, 59.8% and 41.5% in Sarawak, Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia respectively.”16 Whatever the actual numbers involved, the unquestionable trend is that “as natural forests are harvested for wood products, tree crops and plantations increase to keep the green meter running at acceptable levels.”17 For forest peoples, this trend promotes “de-territorialization” in more ways than one. Plantations of the sort favored by governments are high input, high capital investment monocultural systems that are humanly uninhabitable. As forests (both primary and secondary) shrink, not only do indigenous claimants lose land area, the range of ecosystem services that they derive for everyday needs (food, water, biomass for fuel and construction, soil protection and conservation, arable land, etc.) will decline both in quantity and quality. The general summary is that there are few lowland dipterocarp forests left outside the protected area system. Remaining in good forest condition are timber reserves (officially, “production forest”), game, bird, and marine sanctuaries, state parks, and totally protected areas (national parks). Ultimately, many of these are remnants; with growing landscape fragmentation they are becoming “forest islands” that may not be extensive enough to sustain the original biodiversity. Enrichment planting of secondary and logged-over forests is, though promoted, poorly implemented. 10 Chapter 1 The oldest and, in the Peninsula, largest totally protected area is Taman Negara (4343 sq. km; 1677 sq. miles), the national park founded in 1938/1939, which mostly sits astride Batek territory in Pahang, Kelantan, and Terengganu. The park is run by the DWNP, which maintains park headquarters at Was Taha4 (Malay Kuala Tahan). The Tembeling River forms the southeastern border of the park as well as the traditional boundary between Batek and Semaq Beri territories. Historically, the primary goal of protected areas is the protection of wildlife habitats; however, in the past twenty years this ideal has been somewhat subordinated to tourism imperatives. Taman Negara remains the largest unbroken tract of forest available to the Batek, who are permitted to live there and travel in and out of the park at their will, but not to collect forest products, including fauna, for sale. They are regarded as the original inhabitants of the park but do not have an administrative role and are not consulted on management issues. Park borders are vulnerable to commercial development and encroachment. On the Terengganu side some parts of the park are flooded within the catchment area of the Kenyir hydroelectric dam and new dams are in planning in Kelantan. The highway to Gua Musang (a town in Kelantan) slices through a corner of the western part in Pahang (see map 3). Much of the fringe forests outside the park are in various logged-over conditions. In some areas, these forests are converted to monocrop plantations (primarily of oil palm) while in others they are left to regenerate. The ecological ideal of maintaining unbroken stretches of forest corridor for the free passage of wildlife is probably elusive in some places. The Batek make extensive use of the fringe forests. They will return to logged-over forests so long as standing trees remain and food resources are available. Other responses to environmental change include: • • • • • • they are less mobile, meaning that they stay longer in a place; there is more sharing of space, so people are not as widely dispersed as before and camp group populations might also be higher than under conditions of land abundance; they incorporate logged-over areas into their territorial network—which, of course, may have been part of their territory all along; they buy more of their food than before, thus maintaining a fairly even impact on the ecology; they are more conscious of territorial boundaries like those of Taman Negara; and some groups tend to spend more time in semi-permanent settlements. There are two settlements in my fieldwork area, Was ?ato? (Malay Kuala Atok) and Was Y07 (Malay Kuala Yong), located an hour’s boat ride from each other and considered by the Batek to lie in distinct ecological zones and territories (see map 5). Though there is much contact and family groups may move between them, as communities they are distinct and the people do not want to be relocated (in Malaysian administrative idiom, “regrouped”) as one. Was ?ato? is a government-provided settlement situated just outside park borders. Was Y07, located inside the park, was spontaneously established by the Batek after they were told to leave their original settlement at Was Taha4 (a ten-minute boat ride Introduction 11 away). I am intimate with Was Y07 and its habitual residents but hardly know Was ?ato?. At any point in time, there may be some ten different groups dispersed throughout the forest. The population in a camp (called here a “camp group” following Kirk and Karen Endicott) averages 36.2 persons, though if several groups are co-residing, this number might be tripled (for details, see Table 1.1). Flux is an ever-present part of life. This is well described by Kirk Endicott: “The composition of a group might change daily, as some families left and new ones joined it.”18 I would add that youths, especially the young men, are most likely to be changing camps frequently and restlessly. Some of this flux is shown in Table 1.2, which details average camp sizes and deviations from the norm. It shows that only two camp groups underwent no population changes. The norm is that within the life cycle of a camp, the population will fluctuate and sometimes quite greatly (for example, going from forty-nine to seventy-two in one day alone). As people jok (travel from one place to another), they bring information with them and take information along. This is how groups keep in touch with each other’s news, from gossip (like who’s done what or who’s given birth) to location details and intended movements. Flux therefore serves the larger purpose of enabling people to schedule movements, plan itineraries, and communicate with each other. Social relations in the camps are integrated enough that each camp group should be considered a distinct community. There is a misleading impression that a camp is “just” a “temporary camp” as though it has no social meaning beyond its physical structure. Indeed, each camp is a village unto itself. Within the camp, the dwelling is a palm-thatched lean-to (also called hayã?) mounted on at least five posts; these days, plastic sheets (tarpaulins) are used, either as a substitute for the thatch or as an additional covering (see Plates 6 and 7). The most common type of domestic group living in a lean-to is the nuclear household, which might be a k9mam, a basic family unit consisting of parents and children, or a k9lamin, a childless couple. Usually there are around eight such lean-tos in a camp, with the remaining lean-tos housing aged (often widowed) elders or single-sexed groups of unmarried males and females (including young teenagers who have moved out of their parents’ lean-tos). A group might average two weeks in a camp; the distance between successive camps is from five to ten km, or one to two hours’ walk. After three or four months, roughly corresponding to the end of a season, camp groups disband and splinter groups may move to other river valleys, joining and forming groups anew. Movement is predominantly on foot but longer journeys (like from one river valley to another) might involve hitching rides from traders. Membership in a camp is open to all but people tend to travel with and to kinfolk (kab3n). Never in my experience has someone joined a camp where he or she did not have any prior ties, however attenuated. Economically, hunting and gathering have been the production base but the Batek undertake a variety of other activities too. There are daily, seasonal, and annual changes in production activities. The core of the economy remains subsistence-based hunting and gathering. This does not mean that quantitatively 12 Chapter 1 Table 1.1. Population statistics for Batek camps All camps (1993, 1995, 1996) Mean population 36.20 Median 35 Mode 24 Standard deviation 14.73 Minimum population 6 Maximum population 72 Total days counted 226 (1) Data only for camps where continuous population changes were recorded Table 1.2. Average camp populations, 1993, 1995–19961 Camps (month/year) Pagar Sesak (6/93)4 K9ciw (7/93) Felda 6 (8/93)5 K9ciw (7/95–8/95) Yu7–?ato? (8/95) T9r7in (9/95) Tab3n (9/95) R9mpay (10/95) Ta70y (12/95–1/96) Bum9k9l (1/96) Tab3n (3/96) C9rah (7/96) Ruwiw camps (8/96–10/96): P9nacik Pacew downriver Pacew W#c Sok Bawac Was Ruwiw Was Tia7 Was Y07 (10/96–11/96) Mean population SD2 Range3 Total days counted 20.64 20.00 25.18 61.38 41.00 31.71 20.58 21.50 38.29 33.89 22.22 23.44 7.05 0 1.4 5.27 4.07 4.48 6.1 3.21 2 0.33 12.81 1.67 6–29 no change 24–27 50–67 37–50 26–43 10–26 17–25 34–44 33–34 13–42 19–24 11 15 11 29 8 14 12 6 21 9 9 9 21.00 27.40 36.40 40.54 33.55 47.00 53.43 0 7.89 3.46 1.76 7.38 8.66 8.7 no change 21–36 31–43 36–43 28–48 42–57 49–72 4 5 14 13 11 3 21 All camps 36.20 14.73 6–72 (1) Data only for camps where continuous population changes were recorded (2) Standard deviation (3) Minimum to maximum population (4) Name of the Malay village from which I sought the camp, not of the camp (5) The camp was adjacent to a block of an oil palm estate named Felda 6 226 Introduction 13 more time is spent on such activities; rather these activities are undertaken even when there are competing income-generating opportunities. They have high cultural value. Importantly, hunting-and-gathering activities constitute a critical route through which children develop early foraging skills and come to know the forest. Seasonal activities are honey- and fruit-collecting. I will describe some of the major components of the hunting-and-gathering economy more extensively in chapter 6. The main source of cash income is commercial extraction of forest products: primarily rattan (Batek ?awey; mainly Calamus spp.) and eaglewood or gaharu (Batek ba7kol; Aquilaria spp.). When opportunities arise, men may do some day laboring and occasionally there is some casual planting of fast-growing vegetables. Full-blown agriculture (permanent field farming) is the least favored of activities; the Batek dislike the monotony of the work. Those living close to the headquarters of Taman Negara national park are also involved in tourism, both in hosting the visits of tour groups to their camps and settlement (Was Y07) and in guiding tourists to the summit of Gunung Tahan. The former is an image-selling enterprise that involves whoever is present when tourists come; this is supplemented by the manufacture and sale of bamboo wares (blowpipes, quivers, darts, combs, etc.). The latter attracts primarily young and middle-aged men, who may come in from other parts of Pahang to take advantage of opportunities. In recent years, one small dimension of tourism is when individuals or groups are taken out of the forest to put on exhibitions and performances, for example to promote a hotel. So far this seems marginal. Kirk Endicott has argued that there is an economic logic to the mix of activities: those the Batek prefer give the highest returns for labor expended. Moreover, there are social pressures to contribute and share, which I call a background chorus of expectations. These do affect procurement behavior. Someone who does not like to go to the forest would be considered lazy (as marked by one word, taso7, whose sole meaning is “lazy to go to the forest”). In the negative assertion, they say they want to go to the forest because “I don’t feel like sitting in camp.” In the positive sense, they express an intention to go out and do something, whether to look for food generally, or to hunt, dig, fish, etc. This is how they talk about work. Only one activity is explicitly identified as “work:” commercial collection of rattan or k9rja? ?awey (“working rattan,” from the Malay kerja [work]).19 Egalitarian norms of behavior characterize social life. Leadership is situational and activity-oriented rather than ascribed. Decisions are made at the level of individuals; group decisions tend to be the best possible (though not infallible) compromise between blissful consensus and anarchic dissension. “Bossing” occurs but is frowned upon; even children have the power to object and refuse compliance. Following a typical hunter-gatherer pattern, conflict and tension can be resolved through physical withdrawal; for example by moving away from disputants. There are some beliefs and practices that protect individual autonomy. Forcing another person to do something he does not want to could cause that person to fall sick. The primary unit of production and consumption is the nuclear household. Interhousehold sharing of food is the primary idiom of social life and an intricate 14 Chapter 1 display of social performance. The larger wild game, the most “public” of all procured foods, is shared among the members of the hunter’s household, their closest kin (usually the primary kin of the parents), and, if portions remain, to other members of camp. Wild yams, fish, and forest fruits are less shared, though are never withheld from anyone who asks for them. It is better to give than to ask, and social life is a dance between making things available to others and retaining control of the products of one’s labor. The government agency tasked with administering the Orang Asli is the federallevel Department of Orang Asli Affairs (in Malay, Jabatan Hal-Ehwal Orang Asli, the JHEOA); its raison d’être is the assimilation of the Orang Asli into Malaysian society. Assimilation is expressed as assimilation into Malay society through Islamic conversion. Probably the majority of the Kelantan and Terengganu Batek has converted to Islam (maso? gob [lit. entering Malayness], from the Malay masok Melayu); we don’t know to what extent this is just “nominal.” JHEOA was established in the early 1950s as a response to the exigencies of the Emergency (counter-insurgency war; 1948–1960). Prior to that, the colonial authorities had taken a “benign neglect” approach to aboriginal administration. The Emergency was largely fought out in the forest, with a number of aboriginal groups providing food and aid to the communist terrorists. Authorities recognized that winning the “hearts and minds” of the aborigines was critical to military success. Hence the establishment of the Aborigines Department (the forerunner of JHEOA) and the introduction of the official category Orang Asli to designate all indigenous ethnic minorities in the Peninsula. The Batek first came under the department’s attention around 1956 or so, when an attempt was made to “regroup” Kelantan groups and persuade them to settle down and take up agriculture. The experiment was not successful.20 The Batek, however, retain fond memories of the British period, for they were given food rations and medical aid. Today, one practical problem for JHEOA officials, in the face of the Batek’s extensive land use system, is that the people are not all concentrated in one place all the time and cannot easily be reached. This makes the provision of government services a challenge that, however, can be surmounted. It does put the people out of the direct control of the state. Following the Path To return to the opening narrative, I was delighted with how this fieldwork was launched. Fieldwork, as I was to learn the hard way, does not usually have so much shape. It’s one long process of uncovering information, searching for patterns and connections, and collecting, sometimes at dull, decelerated, monotonous speed, bits and pieces of answers to the questions we ask. Shape comes only later, after fieldwork, when it’s time to organize information coherently, make insights concrete, analyze, and write. In 1993, I was fresh from my first year of graduate studies at the University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu. Everyone I knew at the East-West Center, which funded my Introduction 15 studies at the university and where I lived in dorm with other student Fellows, was still doing fieldwork, just back from the field, or preparing for the field. No matter what their disciplinary focus, be it in the humanities, social or biological sciences, they all seemed to take it for granted that fieldwork was the incomparable medium for gathering data and contributing to knowledge. To me, this was heady stuff. I badly itched to have my first try. So I read up on the Orang Asli and returned to Malaysia to look for “my people.” I hoped to spend the summer with a little-known people, the Batek Nòng (see “Notes on Names”). The project I had designed involved studying environmental perceptions through the analysis of folklore. A series of fortuitous misdirections intervened, and I found myself trudging up a logging road and walking into a Batek camp, my first ever. I never did find the Batek Nòng but I did not need to. I knew I had found my fieldsite when I saw that camp and that logging road, side-by-side, defiantly challenging me to rethink everything I thought I knew about tradition and modernity. Now, with the intervention of ?eyTow et al., the Batek had given me a direction; all I had to do, it seemed, was follow the path. To where it would lead me, I had no idea at the time; the nuances and implications were not clear yet. At once, though, I was intrigued. That idea of the “surat”—the letter—for one thing. The Batek had a story to tell, me to tell it to, and they were encouraging me to see the equivalences between their oral literature and the written word. And to extend the reach of the surat, I was given a practical role: a courier of information who crosses boundaries between forest and town. Oral literature does have a letter-like quality, and in the way it works it bridges both time and space. “Passed on down, all the old old people, passed on down from one to another. Down down down down until now, until when, until what year we have this world. All this happened in this world. If that was a different world, maybe I couldn’t tell this story,” as ?eyJudiy, a man about twenty-four years old, told me a few weeks later when he narrated the myth of the world’s origin. To paraphrase, the stories are passed on from generation to generation, from before till now, from now till forever, till the end of the world. If the events he described had happened in a different world, the stories could not exist. That this world exists gives the stories their continuity, their meaning, and their validity. By assigning the role of courier to me, the Batek imply that I and, by extension, my audience, have a place in their world. Because everyone belongs to this world, which to the Batek is centered on the forest, so must everyone hear and recognize Batek stories. Lest one imagines that my visit to the Batek had in some momentous way instigated them to redefine their notion of the world, here’s ?eyGk two years later on December 23, 1995, months into my second research period when I was doing work for my dissertation. I had moved beyond stories. One of the side paths I took was to examine the roles of shamans; shamans are all-important in the organization (and to some degree systematization) of cultural knowledge. I was interested in shamans less for their knowledge than for their roles as leaders. Kirk Endicott had 16 Chapter 1 already written a monograph on the religion, which includes much discussion about shamanistic knowledge.21 Christian Vogt, who worked with the Batek from 1994 to 1995 (dissertation still in preparation), had taken off where Endicott’s study ended and also focused on the religion. I saw no need to duplicate these excellent studies. The shaman, ?eyGk said, looks at the “eye” (m#t) of the cosmos. His (or her) main concern is the safety (and I take it the sense of security as well) of the people; safety from threatening skies, ground subsidence and landslides, attacks from predators like tigers and elephants. In his dreams and trances, he looks for the right way to do things, looking everywhere, in the world beyond the forest, the world of the Chinese, the white people, the Japanese. As ?eyGk elaborated, the shaman does not and cannot know everything. But his vision has to be all-encompassing. The purview of the shaman includes the world outside the forest. And the shaman guards the world from harm because he is the first to find out things and he is perfectly poised to warn people when destruction is afoot. The degree to which he succeeds in guarding the world is the measure of his prestige and the source of people’s faith in the ways of the forest. People can be disobedient and heedless. Part of the shaman’s role is to tell people what they are doing wrong and what will happen if they transgress the moral order that deities like Gubar represent. I mention all this because the Batek’s desire to reach out to the urban world might come as a surprise. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the Batek vision of the world is quite extensive and inclusive, rather than introspective. The Batek’s pattern of tracing affinities between the forest and the broader world is delineated in a central myth of origin, known to them as the bakar lala7 (burning of the grasslands) story: In the beginning, all ba7sa? [races, ethnic groups] were the same. All were Batek. One day, Tohan’s younger brother ?adam set fire to the lala7 [grass, weeds] where the Batek were living. . . . One family fled into the forest. They left behind their surat kitab [religious books or papers]. They got burnt and that’s why their skins are black and their hair is crinkly. . . . Another family was near the riverbank. They jumped into the river and took the surat kitab with them downriver towards the sea. These became the Malays. The Batek looked for their surat kitab but the Malays had hidden them. This is why the Malays pray now.22 So the surat kitab belonged to the Batek first. Versions or variants of this myth or its structure can be found among many indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia.23 More pertinent for the present, the myth explains how an original population of one became differentiated into the ethnic mix of today and shows how the Malays are the Batek’s “most important outside reference group.”24 The Malays (called gob) are the politically dominant ethnic majority in Malaysia and are never far from the Batek’s thoughts; almost all the government officials and local villagers they encounter on a regular basis are Malay. Introduction 17 In other tellings, the Batek will tack on the names of other groups whom they have met over the years. Though the Malays are the prototypical outsiders, the Batek say that the Chinese, white people, Japanese, and so on also originated from this fire. What is interesting about the myth, which resonates with the theme of this book, is the idea that surat—that key concept again—standing for writing, knowledge, and wealth, also came from the Batek. In short, whether we look to individual opinion, cultural notions, or mythic markers, to the Batek the world beyond the forest is and always has been part of their history. In older days, that outside world would have been represented by Malay villages on the forest margins; now, with more people like myself visiting them (researchers of various kinds and stripes, government officials, tourists both local and foreign, etc.) and they themselves becoming more urban-savvy, the towns and cities have been brought into the Batek definition of the world. Many individuals have never stepped out of the forest but the forest is not isolated and representatives of the urban world are continually dropping in. Furthermore, the urban world is a lot closer to the Batek’s everyday experience than it ever was before. I once took just four hours to reach, by truck and taxi, the capital city Kuala Lumpur from the edges of Taman Negara. In short, the Batek have an endless fund of experiences, impressions, and observations to draw from, as they examine the outside, whether for inspiration or for cautionary lessons, comparing and contrasting it with their own world, measuring themselves against it. In some sense they consider themselves to look after it. They have a certain view of their place in this world. They identify themselves on the one hand as people whose stories are not heard, not believed, not taken up (recall the words of ?eyTow and ?eyBajaw on p. 2). People without influence; people on the edges; people left behind. By contrast, the Batek never tire of stressing either how we from the world outside the forest do not have access to their knowledge. How they know the stories of the forest and we don’t. How the stories of the forest are theirs and not ours. So there is a boundary of some sort between the forest and its exterior, and the Batek do see that they have something of value. They are not abjectly powerless. What they want, as we will see shortly, is to share some of their knowledge with the broader world, a process that I, as the courier and cultural broker, could participate in. The aim of this book is, accordingly, to take up the role that the Batek suggested for me, and communicate some of their ideas. In my focus on forest degradation, the main inspiration is the shaman Tebu, who is anxious that we hear what they, the Batek, have to say about environmental problems. To Tebu’s thoughts and what he means for us to know, then, we turn next. Notes 1. The language of fieldwork throughout this first visit was Malay, the lingua franca in Malaysia which the Batek are fluent in. On subsequent field trips, I changed my research 18 Chapter 1 policy and communicated exclusively—to the best of my ability—in the Batek language. As such, quotations from 1993 are translations of Malay. 2. Benjamin 1997. 3. Ooi 1963, 357. 4. Schebesta 1926 on Orang Asli classification; Benjamin 2002, 28–29 on Aslian history. 5. The population of Malaysian citizens in the 2000 Census was 21.89 million. The Orang Asli population, according to 1997 government figures, was a disputed 106,131 (Nicholas 2000, 13–14 n. 1). 6. Ruslan 1990/1991. 7. Gomez and Jomo 1997, 1. See Cooke 1999, who examines the context with Pahang timber licensing in pp. 121–23. 8. Ministry of Finance reports, cited in Teh et al. 2001, 233. 9. Sahabat Alam Malaysia 2001, 10. 10. Teh et al. 2001, 240. 11. Sahabat Alam Malaysia 2001, 19, 23. 12. Abdul Rahim 2001, 307–8. 13. Teh et al. 2001, 223. 14. Cited in Sahabat Alam Malaysia 2001, 18–24. 15. Sahabat Alam Malaysia 2001, 123. 16. Teh et al. 2001, 223. 17. Sahabat Alam Malaysia 2001, 19. 18. Kirk Endicott 1995, 245. 19. Karen Endicott 1979, 62. 20. Recounted in Carey 1976; Carey was Commissioner for the Aborigines at the time. 21. Kirk Endicott 1979a. 22. A reference to Islam: Malays are largely Muslim, and strongly identified by themselves and others as such. 23. See, for example, Borie 1887, 291; Father Dunn 1992, 29; Evans 1923, 146; 1937, 161–62; Keyes 1979; Nishimoto 1998; Schebesta 1973, 89, 216–17; Sellato 1993; Skeat and Blagden 1906a, 346–57, 536; 1906b, 219, 378. 24. Kirk Endicott 1979a, 86–87.