Laughing when you shouldn't Being "good" among the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia

Batek people describe their many laughter taboos with utmost seriousness, and in ethical terms of good and bad. Despite this, people often get it wrong—sometimes laughing all the more when the taboos forbid it. Because laughter can be ambiguous and impossible to control, being wrong can be accepted without the need for discussion or reflection. People thus act autonomously while holding deeply shared ethical orientations. Here, ethics can be both culturally predefined and shaped by individuals, as when it comes to laughter people draw on individual and shared concerns in an ad hoc, flexible manner. Laughter's tangled contradictions thus demonstrate that people's understandings of being “good” are mutually implicated with their understandings of what it means to be a person in relation to others

Making Friends in the Rainforest: Negrito Adaptation to Risk and Uncertainty

The so-called negritos adapt not just to a tropical forest environment but also to an environment characterized by perturbations and fluctuations. As with other hunter-gatherers in the region and, indeed, throughout the world, they use both social and ecological methods to enhance their chances of survival in this changing environment: socially, they have developed networks of trading and marriage partners; ecologically, they maintain patches of key resources that are available for future harvesting. As evidenced in the case of the Batek (Orang Asli), patterns of forest structure and composition are sometimes direct outcomes of intentional resource concentration and enrichment strategies. While little of the above is controversial anthropologically, what has drawn some debate is the nature of the relationship with partner societies. Conventional wisdom posits relations of inequality between foragers and others : foragers and farmers are often construed as hierarchical dyads where foragers supply products or labor to farmers in exchange for agricultural harvests and other trade goods. This kind of adaptation appears to be one of divergent specialization. However, there are cases, such as in the relationship between Batek and Semaq Beri, where both societies follow a roughly similar mode of adaptation, and specialization has not materialized. In sum, while not denying that hierarchy and inequality exist, I suggest that they have to be contextualized within a larger strand of relationships that includes both hierarchy and egality. Further, such relationships are part of the general portfolio of risk reduction strategies, following which access to widely scattered environmental resources, and passage from one location to another, is enhanced not by competing with and displacing neighbors but by maintaining a flexible regime of friendly exchange partners

The Significance of Forest to the Emergence of Batek Knowledge in Pahang, Malaysia

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました

Forest, Bateks, and Degradation: Environmental Representations in a Changing World

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました。This paper offers an alternative way of thinking about the tropical forest, that of the Bateks of Pahang state, Peninsular Malaysia. I will argue that environmental representations are as much about being part of the larger world as they are about the intimate particularities of the local environment. Further, the Bateks' responses to environmental changes are less a sprig of global environmentalism than an independently constructed position, as mediated through their concrete knowledge and sentiments of the place and its history. It is this knowledge, its cognitive and imaginative dimensions, that I explore in this paper. With growing degradation, there is the possibility that people will become more estranged from their geography of knowledge and that, ultimately, landscape lore becomes just lore, history without a place. The conceptual aim is to offer a more imaginative and sensitive understanding of the effects of forest degradation on local communities, their histories, and knowledge

Being Forest Peoples: Globalizing Local Sustainability?

Conventional discussions of sustainable development are often biased by technical and managerial considerations. In the current search for sustainability, we look for models of sustainability and seek to render them more transparent to scientific testing and investigation. The problem, however, is that the terms of the investigation are laid down by the external paradigm; thus, even if we find local models of sustainability, we may not be able to recognize them—or we misconstrue them. The epistemology of the Batek of Malaysia suggests that an ontological approach may be a powerful local paradigm. The Batek interpret environmental disasters as indicators of the superhuman beings’ displeasure with the human world. The onus for maintaining stability is on the forest people, for if they do not heed the messages from the superhuman beings, they endanger their own lives. However, a cosmological interpretation of this sort is not easily translatable into the practical concerns of resource management.Les débats conventionnels sur le développement durable sont souvent biaisés par des considérations de technique et de gestion. Notre démarche actuelle consiste à rechercher des modèles de sustainabilité et à tenter de les rendre mieux à même d’être scientifiquement testés et étudiés. Pourtant, les termes de l’étude sont fixés par le paradigme externe; ainsi, si nous pouvons trouver des modèles locaux de sustainabilité, nous pourrions bien ne pas les reconnaître, ou encore les interpréter de travers. L’épistémologie des Batek de Malaysia indique qu’une approche ontologique peut se révéler un solide paradigme local. Les Batek interprètent les catastrophes naturelles comme des témoignages du mécontentement des êtres surnaturels envers le monde des hommes. Il incombe donc aux Batek de maintenir la sustainabilité, car ils mettraient en danger leur propre vie en ignorant les messages des êtres surnaturels. Cependant, une telle interprétation cosmogonique est difficile à transposer dans les préoccupations pratiques de la gestion des ressources

The Significance of Forest to the Emergence of Batek Knowledge in Pahang, Malaysia

This paper argues that the landscape is an important source of knowledge and continuity. The case material is from the Batek, who are mobile forest-dwellers of Pahang, Malaysia. They are a good example of an egalitarian society that does not need political leadership to reproduce its sense of cultural distinctiveness. The question is how do they do it? What, if any, are the mechanisms? The Batek, when they talk about their identity, emphasize the forest. The forest has many salient characteristics, among them the network of camps and pathways (which includes both walking trails and rivers). Pathways, I argue, are where a lot of environmental and social knowledge develops. But they are not only trails to knowledge. They are also routes to remembrance. When people walk along these pathways, they can keep in touch with their history and also learn much that is new about the world. Movement is therefore an integral part of knowledge development and communication. This paper fleshes out these claims and offers a way to look at the landscape from the point of view of mobile peoples. It also rejects the classic anthropological bias towards declarative knowledge (knowledge that can be expressed in language). Ultimately, it examines how cultural persistence depends on people having continued access to and interactions with their landscape and why hunter-gatherer studies need to give more attention to the role of landscapes in knowledge production.この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました