Managing forests and improving the livelihoods of forest-dependent people: reflections on CIFOR’s social science research in relation to its mandate for generalisable strategic research

CIFOR has been actively engaged in field research in Indonesia focussing particularly on the role of forests and forest products in generating sustainable livelihoods for local users. Issues such as incentives and institutional structures for equitable and sustainable management systems have been highlighted in this research, which has been undertaken with the active co-operation of local NGOs. During Professor Vayda's residency in CIFOR as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, he was requested to conduct a review of CIFOR's social science research, particularly the connections between this Project and CIFOR's other related research on Biodiversity and Non-timber Forest Products. In this review he has assessed the extent to which CIFOR should seek or expect to find "generalisable" research findings to such questions, and whether this particular set of activities was well-located and well-targeted to attain that objective. His report has led to some modification and refinement of this very important component of CIFOR's overall programme

Methods and explanations in the study of human actions and their environmental effects. CIFOR/WWF Special Publication.

Andrew P. Vayda, drawing on his long experience in studying the relations between people and their environments, addresses here the question of how human influences can be better incorporated into ecological studies. Citing relevant sources from the literature of philosophy as well as social and biological science, he argues that we should be guided in our research by the goal of giving causal explanations of concrete human behaviour and its concrete environmental effects. Existing theories and models may have a role in guiding such efforts, but developing or testing the theories and models need not be made the main objective.Before illustrating his advocated approach with various studies (including his own research in Indonesian forests), Professor Vayda considers other approaches and indicates problems with them because of their failure to give due consideration to the chains of causally connected events leading to specific actions and their effects. Among the problematic approaches are those which assume that human behaviour affecting the environment is governed by basic conceptualisations or values concerning nature or the environment. Certain systems approaches to the study of environment-related human behaviour are also critically examined

Bugis settlers in East Kalimantan’s Kutai National Park: their past and present and some possibilities for their future

What policies should be adopted regarding enclave populations in national parks and other protected areas and how should the policies be implemented? These questions are important for protected areas throughout the world. Andrew P. Vayda and Ahmad Sahur report here on socio-economic and historical research that they conducted in the rapidly industrialising Indonesian province of East Kalimantan to help deal with such questions. They use their findings to make practical recommendations about relocating Bugis farmers and fishers from East Kalimantan's Kutai National Park and to assess relocation as an alternative to maintaining the status quo with respect to settlements within the Park's lowland rainforest. In addition, their findings are used to challenge some widely held generalisations about the impoverished condition of forest settlers, the preferability of land to only cash to those who might be resettled, and the inter-relations between urban/industrial employment and forest destruction. The report is methodologically interesting as well. It shows how data collection and analysis may be guided by the goal of obtaining causal histories of events (including such events as forest-clearing in particular places at particular times and past changes in work and residence by settlers in the National Park). It shows how data collection and analysis, thus guided, may lead to significant research findings not obtained by investigators using rapid appraisal and standard survey methods and pre-set questionnaires. Also featured in the report are some methodological reflections on the value and limitations of applying general knowledge and cultural information, and on the need for information about particular historical events, in studies like Vayda and Sahur's. In their research in and around Kutai National Park in 1996, Vayda and Sahur were resuming a collaboration begun in East Kalimantan sixteen years earlier. Andrew P. Vayda is Professor of Anthropology and Ecology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, and was, at the time of the research reported here, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at CIFOR. Ahmad Sahur lectures in anthropology at Hasanuddin University, Ujung Pandang, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and serves there also as an assistant dean

Slash and burn and fires in Indonesia: a comment

A paper published in Ecological Economics [Varma, A. 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997–1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46,159–171] claims to show that slash and burn agriculture is socially inefficient and should be banned. However, its conclusions and recommendations are flawed. It defines slash and burn agriculture too broadly and misrepresents the nature and causes of the 1997–98 fires by virtue of attributing them entirely to slash and burn agriculture. Its economic assessment of the costs of the fires is also problematic. The recommendations to ban land-clearing fires and to provide alternative livelihoods to slash and burn farmers cannot be supported

Matrilocal residence is ancestral in Austronesian societies

The nature of social life in human prehistory is elusive, yet knowing how kinship systems evolve is critical for understanding population history and cultural diversity. Post-marital residence rules specify sex-specific dispersal and kin association, influencing the pattern of genetic markers across populations. Cultural phylogenetics allows us to practise ‘virtual archaeology’ on these aspects of social life that leave no trace in the archaeological record. Here we show that early Austronesian societies practised matrilocal post-marital residence. Using a Markov-chain Monte Carlo comparative method implemented in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework, we estimated the type of residence at each ancestral node in a sample of Austronesian language trees spanning 135 Pacific societies. Matrilocal residence has been hypothesized for proto-Oceanic society (ca 3500 BP), but we find strong evidence that matrilocality was predominant in earlier Austronesian societies ca 5000–4500 BP, at the root of the language family and its early branches. Our results illuminate the divergent patterns of mtDNA and Y-chromosome markers seen in the Pacific. The analysis of present-day cross-cultural data in this way allows us to directly address cultural evolutionary and life-history processes in prehistory

Some problems with property ascription

We discuss the practice of property ascription in anthropology. While recognizing that it is an inevitable and often useful way to convey the knowledge that anthropologists have acquired through ethnographic fieldwork, we identify three of the most common ways in which ascription can be misleading. First, when a property is ascribed to a collective entity, but it is unevenly distributed among social sub-groupings; second, when an ascribed mental property is alleged to cause an individual's behaviour, but the property proves to be empirically unsupported; third, when a belief is ascribed to an individual, while another belief that effectively contradicts the first one is also entertained by that same individual. We review anthropological and psychological solutions to these problems