Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. xiii, 372 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4796-5.
Recent social, economic and ecological changes in Southeast Asia have been both rapid and comprehensive, with people, livelihoods and landscapes undergoing major transformations (D. Hall, P. Hirsch and T. Li, Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia, NUS Press, 2011). Transnational governance pressures, heightened boom-crop production, the rise in cross-border flows of labour and capital, and the related out-migration of people to new areas of economic opportunity have shattered older categories of peoples, livelihoods and landscapes in Southeast Asia. The prospect of conserving forests and biodiversity according to long-standing binaries—such as traditional vs. modern or indigenous vs. migrant—quickly break down as globalizing processes “go local” in the region, confounding simple management formulae or “final or fixed endpoints in conservation and development” (4). In this context, the diverse theoretical and empirically grounded collection of essays in the book Beyond the Sacred Forest aim to engage the contemporary challenges facing policy makers and conservation practitioners in Southeast Asia today.
Edited by Dove, Sajise and Doolittle, Beyond the Sacred Forest develops new perspectives and insights about how conservation policy and practice can no longer afford to achieve its objectives by reinvesting in older, dualistic categories that oversimplify the process and outcomes of local interventions. The book represents an excellent attempt to move conservation thinking and practice beyond its colonial-era hangover to examine how historical and contemporary processes have constructed certain assumptions and ideals that guide conservation policy and practice today. The chapters draw together authors with varied theories and empirical perspectives that challenge long-standing disciplinary ideas and societal ideals that inform policy of how people and landscapes “ought” to be or become. In doing so, the editors and authors do an admirable job of critically engaging the received wisdoms of overused terms such as tradition, community and conservation. As the initial chapters show, the editors’ overview of the cross-cutting themes in the book—local complexity, the significance of history, and power, knowledge and discourse—aim to challenge from a non-Western, Southeast Asian perspective the myths produced by Eurocentric stereotypes embedded in colonial and post-colonial governance interventions. They challenge, for example, the romantic and over-stated notion of traditional knowledge, indigenous conservation, homogenous communities and unidimensional, static views of livelihood often found in conservation planning. In embracing analytical complexity, the authors continue to honour the subjective values and realities of local people and those (extra-local actors) they engage with, as well as the structures and constraints of material realities. The book does well to engage the limits of structural materialism and post-structural “over critique” that now defines much analysis in human-environment relations.
Three book sections cover nine theoretically informed empirical chapters addressing rural conservation and development themes in insular Southeast Asia, principally Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The first section, titled “The Boundary Between Natural and Social Reproduction,” includes Tuck-Po’s chapter on Taman Negara National Park and how the symbolic representation of forest, people and wildlife intersect with and inform management ideals, beliefs and practices with direct consequences for people, fauna and flora inside of park boundaries. Kathirithamby-Wells’ chapter offers a deeper historical analysis of the origins and impacts of rubber and oil palm plantation agriculture and how extensive commercial intensification has progressively decimated natural forests with mono-cropped systems, taking away from smallholder resilience. Next, Dove’s chapter offers a nuanced empirical account of Dayak cultural interpretation of the symbolic, biophysical and economic value of rubber in swidden systems, where the income from and lifecycle of rubber in swiddens may give life to livelihood (e.g., due to sustained, enhanced income) but death to fields (e.g., rotational cycles, other crops). The chapter reveals why some rubber may well be suited for smallholder plots and their agro-ecological conditions. In section 2, “Community Rights Discourses Through Time,” Djalins’ chapter discusses the social and political construction of adat tenure, from the Dutch colonial era’s strategic use of the concept for social control of subjects to civil society’s current use of adat to denote traditional occupancy and sustainable use to leverage project legitimacy. Doolittle examines how local social relations of access and use are intertwined with the changing nature of property rights and community dynamics in the context of state land laws, management and political economy. Harwell considers how boundary making in the Danau Sentarum Widlife Reserve is inflected by and shaped through state and local identity politics, and the values local people assign to resources within boundaries. She notes how boundary mapping is embedded within and influenced by seasonal landscape variability, community change and the dynamics of state-civil society relations. Duhaylungsod similarly examines how in the southern Philippines, notions of indigeneity and community among the T’boli of Mindanao have been constructed through and impacted upon by a range of upland development projects and native title mapping that articulates with socio-political movements, conservation efforts and broader landscape changes. In section 3, “Reconstructing and Representing Indigenous Environmental Knowledge,” Sulistyawati engages Dove’s earlier work by using simulated modeling to examine (across a diverse range of micro variables) how household knowledge, family demography and livelihood changes affect forestland availability, the viability of swidden and broader landscape changes. The final chapter by Winarto offers detailed insights into how the paradigm of integrated pest management has had differential uptake, impacts on pest control and crop yields, and contrasting effect on farmer value, knowledge and adoption as compared to state interests in modern, capital-intensive inputs.
The book’s focus on insular Southeast Asia was refreshing and while not representative of the region, provided much needed insights on how changing forms of conservation and development are intersecting with and influencing local livelihoods, identity politics and landscape change in insular environments. While the chapters varied in quality, overall the volume achieved its goals of trying to integrate critical social analysis with appropriate theory and empirical analysis that accurately captured the reality of the localities in which the authors had worked. It is a serious attempt to ground critical social analysis with interdisciplinary perspectives that are theoretically informed and empirically robust.
The edited volume offers strong interdisciplinary analysis from a range of scholars across insular Southeast Asia, thereby positioning this book as a truly collaborative, regional effort. The volume will be of use to academics, practitioners and policy makers who hope to gain further insights from critical, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research that problematicizes simplified and romanticized notions of people, communities and forest conservation in the region.
Wolfram Dressler
Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands
pp. 185-187