Beyond the Sacred Forest: Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia(New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

Reflecting new thinking about conservation in Southeast Asia, Beyond the Sacred Forest is the product of a unique, decade-long, interdisciplinary collaboration involving research in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Scholars from these countries and the United States rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; the meaning of conservation; and the ways that conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia. The contributors focus more on folk, community, and vernacular conservation discourses than on those of formal institutions and the state. They reject the notion that conservation only takes place in bounded, static, otherworldly spaces such as protected areas or sacred forests. Thick with ethnographic detail, their essays move beyond the forest to agriculture and other land uses, leave behind orthodox notions of the sacred, discard outdated ideas of environmental harmony and stasis, and reject views of the environment that seek to avoid or escape politics. Natural-resource managers and policymakers who work with this more complicated vision of nature and culture are likely to enjoy more enduring success than those who simply seek to remove the influence and impact of humans from conserved landscapes. As many of the essays suggest, this requires the ability to manage contradictions, to relinquish orthodox ideas of what conservation looks like, and to practice continuously adaptive management techniques. Contributors. Upik Djalins, Amity A. Doolittle, Michael R. Dove, Levita Duhaylungsod, Emily E. Harwell, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Lye Tuck-Po, Percy E. Sajise, Endah Sulistyawati, Yunita T. Winarto

Table of Contents:
About the Series vii Acknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction: Changing Ways of Thinking about the Relations between Society and Environment / Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise, and Amity A. Doolittle 1 Section I. The Boundary Between Natural and Social Reproduction 1. The Wild and the Tame in Protected Areas Management in Peninsular Malaysia / Lye Tuck-Po 37 2. The Implications of Plantation Agriculture for Biodiversity in Peninsular Malaysia: A Historical Analysis / Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells 62 3. Rubber Kills the Land and Saves the Community: An Undisciplined Commodity / Michael R. Dove 91 Section II. Community Rights Discourses through Time 4. Adat Argument and Discursive Power: Land Tenure Struggles in Krui, Indonesia / Upik Djalins 123 5. Redefining Native Customary Law: Struggles over Property Rights between Native Peoples and Colonial Rulers in Sabah, Malaysia, 1950–1996 / Amity A. Doolittle 151 6. The Social Life of Boundaries: Competing Territorial Claims and Conservation Planning in the Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve, West Kalimantan, Indonesia / Emily E. Harwell 180 7. Interpreting "Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Resource Use": The Case of the T'Boli in the Southern Philippines / Levita Duhaylungsod 216 Section III. Reconstructing and Representing Indigenous Environmental Knowledge 8. The Historical Demography of Resource Use in a Swidden Community in West Kalimantan / Endah Sulistyawati 239 9. The Ecological Implications of Central versus Local Governance: The Contest over Integrated Pest Management in Indonesia / Yunita T. Winarto 276 Bibliography 303 Contributors 351 Index 355  

About the Author :
Michael R. Dove is the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Director of the Tropical Resources Institute, and Professor of Anthropology, at Yale University. Percy E. Sajise is an Honorary Research Fellow of Biodiversity International, an Adjunct Fellow at the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (Philippines), and Adjunct Professor in the School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of the Philippines, Los BaÑos. Amity A. Doolittle is a Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Review :
"Beyond the Sacred Forest is a sophisticated and thoughtful engagement with fundamental conceptual pillars of modern-day conservation politics. Based on sustained and systematic field-based studies enriched by deep theoretical development, this book's ideas will educate students and decision makers alike as they grapple with the meanings of progress, justice, and sustainability as shaped via the complex interplay among nature, power, and culture." Arun Agrawal, author of Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects "This timely and important collection is an excellent source of insight into the ways that conservation and livelihoods intertwine, creating new forest landscapes and ecologies. The case studies are firmly grounded in specific Southeast Asian communities, yet they offer keen observations relevant to many other regions of the world."--Dianne Rocheleau, co-editor of Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences