Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Author: Charles Zerner
Published: May 2002
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082232802X
Hardcover Book
Number of Pages: 272

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This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims. Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts-natural resource frontiers-this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts, shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation-from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities' struggles to retain their gardens, forests, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat. This collection will prove valuable to anthropologists, political geographers, ecologists, environmentalists, legal scholars, and those interested in indigenous rights. Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner About the Author

Charles Zerner is Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. A timely and exciting volume. Its cutting-edge scholarship goes to the heart of debates about the relations among land, people, and what is problematically called 'culture.' While offering no easy answers, the contributors' different voices together bring home the point that scholars, activists, development-workers, and local farmers and fishers all need to rethink their ideas about rights and claims to seas, forests, and other resources.
— Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington In this valuable and important book, we see villagers articulating their relationship to the natural environment, not through cadastral surveys and claims of right but through songs, speeches, poems, prayers, and spells. Too often, government officials and other 'experts' tend to ignore such practices and impose rigid conceptions of law, space, and time. These remarkable essays remind us of the extent of the loss that can accompany the triumph of law.
— David M. Engel, University of Buffalo An enormously important volume that is sure to provoke a great deal of discussion about the discourse of indigenous rights. Without question one of the most original interventions into the issue in recent years, it shifts the ground of the debate, providing a way for us to think about the issue of rights in ways that are polyphonic, aesthetic, and performative.
— J. Peter Brosius, University of Georgia

Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving Translations: Poetics, Performance, and Property in Indonesia and Malaysia 1
Cultivating the Wild: Honey-Hunting and Forest Management in Southeast Kalimantan 24
Sounding the Makassar Strait: The Poetics and Politics of an Indonesian Marine Environment 56
Singers of the Landscape: Song, History, and Property Rights in the Malaysian Rainforest 109
Writing for Their Lives: Bentian Dayak Authors and Indonesian Development Discourse 142
Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Property Zones, Resource Access, and Environmental Change in Indonesia 184
Reflections: Toward New Conceptions of Rights 219
Afterword: By Land and By Sea: Reflections on Claims and Communities in the Malay Archipelago 235
Works Cited 249
List of Contributors 275
Index 277

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