Transformation and endurance of Indigenous hunting: Kadazandusun-Murut bearded pig hunting practices amidst oil palm expansion and urbanization in Sabah, Malaysia

Land-use change and political–economic shifts have shaped hunting patterns globally, even as traditional hunting practices endure across many local socio-cultural contexts. The widespread expansion of oil palm cultivation, and associated urbanization, alters land-use patterns, ecological processes, economic relationships, access to land and social practices. In particular, we focus on the socio-ecological dynamics between Kadazandusun-Murut (KDM) hunters in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, and bearded pigs (Sus barbatus; Malay: ‘babi hutan’), the favoured game animal for non-Muslim communities throughout much of Borneo. We conducted 38 semi-structured interviews spanning over 50 hr with bearded pig hunters, asking them about contemporary hunting practices and motivations, changes in hunting practices, changes in pig behaviour, and patterns of animal protein consumption in village and urban contexts. Amidst widespread land-use change, primarily driven by oil palm expansion, respondents reported substantially different characteristics of hunting in oil palm plantations as compared to hunting in forests. Additionally, 17 of 38 hunters—including 71% (10/14) of hunters who started hunting before 1985, compared to 26% (6/23) of hunters who started hunting in 1985 or later—mentioned that bearded pigs are behaving in a more skittish or fearful way as compared to the past. Our respondents also reported reductions in hunting frequency and wild meat consumption in urban contexts as compared to rural contexts. However, despite these substantial changes in hunting and dietary practices, numerous KDM hunting motivations, hunting techniques and socio-cultural traditions have endured over the last several decades. For some, bearded pig meat remains deeply tied to food provision, gifting and sharing customs, and cultural components of celebrations and feasts. Oil palm has cultivated new hunting practices that differ from those in forests, and has potentially contributed to altered bearded pig behaviour due to increased hunting accessibility. Together, oil palm and urbanization are helping reshape the KDM-bearded pig socio-ecological system. In light of these reshaped connections, we recommend location-specific management approaches that ensure fair access to the dietary and social benefits of bearded pig hunting while preserving the critical conservation needs of bearded pig populations and habitat. These twin goals are particularly urgent given the confirmed outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF), and mass deaths of domestic pigs and wild bearded pigs, in Sabah and Kalimantan in 2021

Entangled Extraction: Informal Miners, Companies, and Competition for Gold in Indonesia

Who controls the underground, how, and with what consequences? National resource management policies worldwide maintain that subsurface resources should be owned by states and extracted by permitted industrial firms. However, a rapidly growing number of small-scale miners across the globe challenge this longstanding governance maxim. They insist that mineral deposits are resources that should be open to direct use by local people. Today, an estimated 134 million people spanning 80 countries depend on this use for their livelihoods. In this dissertation, I examine an increasingly common form of resource conflict that has emerged from this context: the juxtaposition of, and competition between, large-scale and small-scale gold mining.Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research, I explore the history, dynamics, and consequences of competing claims to gold between industrial and small-scale mining. I examine the case of Pongkor, a mining region located in upland West Java just outside Indonesia’s massive Jabodetabek metropolitan area. In Pongkor, the state-owned mining company, Antam, and thousands of independent, technically illegal, miners have competed over the same gold deposits for more than twenty-five years. Antam insists that it alone holds legal rights to local minerals, but nearby residents have challenged this authority, claiming that informal extraction has benefited the community more than the company ever has. In my analysis, I complicate the outward appearance of this environmental “conflict,” showing the many ways Antam and informal, small-scale miners are entangled. Together, they have co-produced Pongkor’s overlapping extractive landscape—a space in which competition over gold has transformed livelihood strategies, labor dynamics, modes of governing territory, personal identities, and regional politics.I describe these processes of transformation and their uneven effects on the people who live and work in Pongkor through five interlinked chapters. I focus especially on two groups of mining workers: Antam’s employees and small-scale miners. In Chapter One, I dive into Pongkor’s history, arguing that present conflicts between Antam and small-scale miners are rooted in earlier efforts by the state and industrial mining operations to order and extract profit from the region. In Chapter Two, I examine mining labor in Pongkor. I describe the social organization of local gold production, argue that small-scale miners are increasingly differentiated, and demonstrate that insecurities also plague industrial mining workers. I move underground in Chapter Three to examine how the materialities of the subsurface have shaped competing territorial projects in intersecting small-scale and industrial mining tunnels. By analyzing various ways of accessing, navigating, and knowing the subterranean, I demonstrate the specific, three-dimensional challenges entailed in maintaining and contesting vertical territory. In Chapter Four, I trace the movement of labor, capital, and information between Antam and small-scale miners and detail the interpersonal connections that tie them together. These forms of everyday entanglement blur the boundary between industrial and small-scale mining, undermining the discursive distinction that the state-owned company attempts to construct. Finally, in Chapter Five, I examine the battle over hearts and minds in Pongkor. Though Antam attempts to shape local residents into subjects amenable to corporate extractive development and to steer them away from unlicensed resource use, many have instead become politically active advocates of small-scale mining. I argue that the identities of all miners, both corporate and informal, in Pongkor have been remade in the process

The cyanide revolution : Efficiency gains and exclusion in artisanal- and small-scale gold mining

Since its advent at the end of the nineteenth century, cyanide processing facilitated the intensification and global expansion of industrial gold mining. Today, there are important indications that artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is on the verge of a similar cyanide revolution: while ASGM is typically associated with mercury-based processing, mercury amalgamation is increasingly replaced with, or complemented by, cyanidation. Relying on evidence from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Burkina Faso, we demonstrate how this transition is having a deeply transformative impact on ASGM communities. On the one hand, cyanidation produces clear efficiency gains. Together with rising gold prices, it is fueling a dramatic expansion of ASGM by enabling the profitable extraction of lower-grade gold deposits. On the other hand, it contributes to the emergence of new and often highly unequal labor and revenue-sharing arrangements. More broadly, these findings demonstrate the highly uneven impact of socio-technical transformations. Consequently, the growing number of efforts to intervene in the technological make-up of ASGM, usually in the name of efficiency and sustainability, should be wary of having unintended consequences.</p