HISTORIES OF THE BORNEO ENVIRONMENT

V E R H A N D E L I N G E N
VAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT
VOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE

231

HISTORIES OF THE BORNEO ENVIRONMENT

Economic, political and social dimensions of

change and continuity

Edited by
REED L. WADLEY

KITLV Press
Leiden
2005
Published by:
KITLV Press
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
(Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies)
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Cover: Creja ontwerpen, Leiderdorp

ISBN 90 6718 254 0

© 2005 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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Printed in the Netherlands

 Contents

Preface vii

Reed L. Wadley 1
Introduction: environmental histories of Borneo

Part One: Distant and local economies

Eric Tagliacozzo 25
Onto the coasts and into the forests; Ramifications of the China
trade on the ecological history of northwest Borneo, 900-1900 CE
Bernard Sellato 61
Forests for food, forests for trade – between sustainability and
extractivism; The economic pragmatism of traditional peoples and
the trade history of northern East Kalimantan
Cristina Eghenter 87
Histories of conservation or exploitation? Case studies from
the interior of Indonesian Borneo
Lesley Potter 109
Commodity and environment in colonial Borneo; Conservation
ideas, forest conversions and economic value

Part Two: Colonial and national resource politics

Reed L. Wadley 137

Boundaries, territory, and resource access in West Kalimantan,
Indonesia, 1800-2000
Amity A. Doolittle 159
Controlling the land; Property rights and power struggles in Sabah,
Malaysia (North Borneo), 1881-1996
Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter 183
The ‘poison tree’ and the changing vision of the Indo-Malay realm;
Seventeenth to twentieth centuries
vi Contents

Part Three: Social transformations

George N. Appell 213

Dismantling the cultural ecosystem of the Rungus of Sabah,
Malaysia; A history of how the ideology of Western institutions
led to the destruction of a Bornean environment
Monica Janowski 245
Rice as a bridge between two symbolic economies; Migration
within and out of the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak
Graham Saunders 271
Epilogue: In the eye of the beholder; Development or exploitation?
Changing perceptions of the Borneo environment

List of abbreviations 295

Glossary 297

Index 301

About the authors 305

 Preface

This book is a product of a two-day, international seminar convened in

August 2000 on ‘Environmental change in native and colonial histories of
Borneo; Lessons from the past, prospects for the future’, held in Leiden, the
Netherlands. The inspiration for the seminar came from a number of sources,
not least of which was the book, Paper landscapes; Explorations in the environ-
mental history of Indonesia (Peter Boomgaard, Freek Colombijn and David
Henley, KITLV Press, 1997), a product of the EDEN-project of the Koninklijk
Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV, Royal Netherlands
Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies). A special focus on one
island, Borneo, seemed an appropriate way to build on this earlier work,
providing a means of crossing colonial and national boundaries which so
often direct scholarship, and building on a concern for linking past histories
and present circumstances.
The seminar was sponsored by the International Institute for Asian Studies
(IIAS), where I was Research Fellow from 1998 until 2001. Supplementary
funding came from the Leiden Universiteit Fonds (LUF) and the Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW, Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences). The Borneo Research Council acted as an
intellectual sponsor, providing its mailing list and invaluable support net-
work. Each of the conference contributors provided much intellectual food
for engaging thought and lively discussion. Most of their contributions are
represented here. Dimbab Ngidang, Jayantha Perera, Antonio Guerreiro and
Adela Baer gave papers which will appear elsewhere, while Freek Colombijn
and Peter Boomgaard provided critical, comparative commentary. Special
thanks are due Marieke Brand for her indispensable efforts in organizing the
seminar, some of which occurred while I was in the field and quite inacces-
sible to electronic communications.
 REED L. WADLEY

Introduction
Environmental histories of Borneo

The closing decades of the twentieth century brought many dramatic envir-
onmental challenges to the peoples of Borneo, the consequences of which
now affect the environment of the rest of Southeast Asia. These problems
included oil palm plantation development, continued logging and mining,
devastating forest fires and controversial transmigration. From the first years
of the new century, this book takes a historical look at the Borneo environ-
ment from native, colonial and national perspectives. It examines change and
continuity in the economic, political and social dimensions of human-envir-
onment interactions throughout the island and over the centuries.
Reflecting the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of environmental
history, the book brings together a diverse, international group of histor-
ians, anthropologists, geographers and social foresters, studying historical
aspects of the environment in the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak,
the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Brunei (Map 1). Drawing on
extensive archival and field research, these ten, original contributions cover
eleven centuries of history in Borneo, examining a set of inter-related topics
that include long-distance trade, conservation, land tenure, resource access,
property rights, views of the environment, migration and development
policy and practice. We come at these topics from a range of perspectives:
from Fernand Braudel’s histoire de la longue durée to actions and perceptions
of local peoples, from colonial construction and imposition of ecological
knowledge to shifts in ‘symbolic’ economies. In addition, political ecological
themes, with a focus on the dynamics surrounding material and discursive
struggles over natural resources, run through many of the chapters, either
implicitly or explicitly.
Romantic images evoked by the mere mention of Borneo are often of
deep, impenetrable forests. Indeed, forests and forest-dependent peoples,
their transformations and images, are dominant features of the contribu-
tions, something that is not so unusual coming from historical studies of
what Lesley Potter (this volume) calls ‘this formerly most forested of islands’.
Yet others show that different aspects of the environment have been equally
2 Reed L. Wadley

N AMITY A. DOOLITTLE
GEORGE N. APPELL

LESLEY POTTER SABAH

BRUNEI ERIC TAGLIACOZZO

MONICA JANOWSKI

CRISTINA EGHENTER

SARAWAK EAST
KALIMANTAN BERNARD SELLATO

WEST
KALIMANTAN REED WADLEY

REGION WIDE
CENTRAL
KALIMANTAN MICHAEL R. DOVE AND CAROL CARPENTER
N
AN H
TA
LI UT

GRAHAM SAUNDERS
KA SO
M

LESLEY POTTER
500 km

Map 1. Contributions by location on Borneo

important, such as marine resources, colonial plantation development and

indigenous settled agriculture. Yet Borneo has long been regarded as periph-
eral to the political and economic centers of Southeast Asia, despite its geo-
graphically central location. This should not imply, of course, insignificance,
and many of the contributions shift the focus back and forth between local
events and wider contexts, relying on localized studies placed within circum-
stances beyond Borneo’s shores and demonstrating the importance of the
island to wider studies of human-environment interactions.
 Introduction 3

Environmental history

Most scholars understand environmental history to be ‘an attempt to eluci-

date the interaction between humans and nature in the past’.1 According to
Timo Myllyntaus (2001:145-9), there are five features that distinguish environ-
mental history: 1. a focus on long-term changes in nature; 2. a perspective
that is not bound by national boundaries, but that is international (I would
add ‘transnational’) and even global; 3. ‘a resolute tendency’ toward inter-
disciplinary approaches; 4. an orientation to timely research problems with
‘wide historical and social dimensions’, reflecting environmental history’s
early focus on North American conservationist and preservationist move-
ments; and 5. a ‘tendency to reassess our views of the past’.
Eschewing the ‘environmental history’ label, anthropologists have favored
the more scientifically sounding, ‘historical ecology’, but have been debating
its definition for nearly a decade. For example, Carole Crumley (1994:6)
equates it with landscape history, ‘the study of past ecosystems by chart-
ing the change in landscapes over time’ and tracing ‘the ongoing dialectical
relations between human acts and acts of nature, as observed in the land-
scape’ (Crumley 1994:9; see Russell 1997). Bruce Winterhalder, taking a lit-
eralist stance, contends that historical ecology ‘is a misnomer’ (Winterhalder
1994:40), for how can there be an a-historical ecology in the modern, dynamic
sense of the term (Winterhalder 1994:18)? The label is appropriate only if we
‘take it to represent an epistemological commitment to the temporal dimen-
sion in ecological analysis’ (Winterhalder 1994:40). He cautions against reli-
ance on concepts like ecosystem, community and succession that anthropolo-
gists have borrowed from the older field of ecology, but that have now been
replaced by such concepts as persistence, resilience and patchiness.
For his part, William Balée (1998:14) argues that historical ecology focuses
on the interpenetration of culture and the environment, instead of ‘humans
merely adapting to the environment’. His four (rather obvious) postulates
that define the field are 1. human activity affects much, if not all, of the
non-human biosphere; 2. human activity neither necessarily degrades nor
improves the non-human biosphere; 3. political economies have different
effects on the environment and historical trajectory of subsequent political
economies; and 4. human communities, cultures, landscapes and regions
can be understood as total phenomena (Balée 1998:14-24). Tristam Kidder
(1998:162) puts it more eloquently:

1 Myllyntaus and Saikku 2001:2. For general reviews of environmental history, see
Myllyntaus 2001; Arnold and Guha 1995; Grove, Damodaran and Sangwan 1998; for a review of
Indonesian environmental history, see Boomgaard 1997.
4 Reed L. Wadley

Historical ecology has as its most persuasive argument the notion that humans are
part of the dynamic environment, and thus not necessarily limited because of the
natural world. Change in human behavior through time is in part the reflection of
humans as they live and adapt within their natural world, but critically too it is
the result of humans as they transform and reach beyond their constraints, natural
or otherwise.

In contrast, Neil Whitehead (1998) questions the paradigmatic status of his-

torical ecology, arguing that it has no theory of history or historiography, and
is dependent on historical anthropology for its conceptual tools. Historical
ecological anthropologists ‘seem largely content with grafting a temporal
dimension onto the chronological study of systems’ (Whitehead 1998:36), but
in the end, the work they have produced has certainly fallen within a broadly
conceived environmental history.2
Donald Worster (1988, 1990) argues that environmental historical research
involves three levels of analysis: 1. the natural environment or historical
ecology, concentrating ‘on the history of nature’s ecosystems and striv[ing]
to reconstruct the natural environment of the past’ (Myllyntaus 2001:152);
2. human modes of production, particularly ‘the interaction between social
conditions, the economy, and the environment’ (Myllyntaus 2001:153); and 3.
perceptions, ideologies and values attached to the environment. Myllyntaus
splits the third level into two separate levels, one focused on ‘environmen-
tal policy and decision-making in society in general’, and the other on ‘the
mental and intellectual history of environmental consciousness, the human
outline of the surrounding world and its natural resources’ (Myllyntaus
2001:153). The task of the environmental historian is the study of the interac-
tion of these levels over time (Boomgaard 1997:2; Knapen 2001:4) as, for most
topics, it may prove difficult to keep the three separate. The contributions
in this book, dealing with both distant and more recent pasts, are primarily
focused on the second and third levels, with the first providing a necessary,
though often implicit, background. This focus is, in large part, driven by the
archival and ethnographic information on which we rely, sources that are not
always amenable to examining the first level.

2 Although some make a case for a distinction between environmental history and historical
ecology (Arnold and Guha 1995:1-4; Knapen 2001:3), in many practical respects these are one and
the same or simply emphasize different levels of analysis, with one borrowing from and relying
on the other.
 Introduction 5

Environmental histories of Borneo

In this volume, we build on a number of recent works on human-environment

interactions in Asia – Southeast Asia and Borneo, in particular. Although
some have emphasized history and others recent trends,3 few have explicitly
combined the two to study links between the historical and the contem-
porary environment, between continuity and change from the distant and
recent past to the present. The contributions here do just that, showing that
the past is very much a part of recent and on-going processes of change, that
continuity forms an important facet of transformation, for both natural and
social environments.
Explicit attention to and emphasis on environmental history is fairly new
to studies of Borneo, although some of this may be a matter of earlier work
simply not applying an ‘environmental history’ label. For example, Derek
Freeman’s (1970) Report on the Iban, though concerned with contemporary
matters of Iban social organization and pioneer farming, gave a nod to set-
tlement history but did not take the next step; that is, by asking how that
specific history might have influenced land use patterns. Conversely, in
James Jackson’s (1970) study of the Chinese gold-miners in western Borneo,
the environment provides an ever present but quite silent background. So
too with Thomas Lindblad’s (1988) study of Southeast Borneo’s economic
history. It is not until we come to the work of scholars such as Michael Dove,
Lesley Potter and Bernard Sellato that we begin to find history and environ-
ment explicitly linked in the ways we might recognize as environmental
history. For example, Dove has investigated land tenure (Dove 1985), forest
preference and warfare (Dove 1988), technology changes (Dove 1989) and
the adoption and integration of cash crops within indigenous economies.4
For her part, Potter has looked at colonial forest policy (Potter 1988) and
forest product collection (Potter 1997), as well as co-authoring a wide-rang-
ing survey of environmental history on Borneo and the Malay Peninsula
(Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995). Sellato’s work has focused on forest
product collection, migration, settlement patterns and geography.5

3 For example, Arnold and Guha 1995; Bankoff 1999; Bennett 2000; Boomgaard, Colombijn
and Henley 1997; Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995; Bryant 1997; Elvin 2001; Grove 1997; Grove,
Damodaran and Sangwan 1998; Hirsch and Warren 1998; King 1998; Knapen 2001; Li 1999;
Padoch and Peluso 1996; Peluso 1992; Parnwell and Bryant 1996.
4 Dove 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997a, 1997b.
5 Sellato 1989, 1994, 2001, 2002. Sellato’s historical environmental interests also come forth in
a recent edited volume (Eghenter, Sellato and Devung 2003); in addition, a recent edited collec-
tion (Lye, De Jong and Abe 2003) on the political ecology of Southeast Asian tropical forests in
historical perspective contains chapters on Borneo.
6 Reed L. Wadley

Others too have tied history and environment together without explicit
use of the label; for example, European intervention into indigenous trade
patterns (Cleary 1996, 1997), fire and drought cycles (King 1996), property
and resource access6 and population dynamics (Eghenter 1999). To date,
the work that most unambiguously fits the label of environmental history is
that of Han Knapen (1997, 1998, 2001) with his detailed study of Southeast
Borneo between 1600 and 1880.7 Within a framework of changing environ-
mental, economic and political uncertainty, he examines a wide range of
human-environment interactions such as disease, climate, physical geog-
raphy, settlement patterns, warfare, forest product trade, indigenous and
colonial politics, systems of subsistence, cash crop cultivation and animal
husbandry. His study provides an important model for future work on the
island, and the contributions here offer examples of other, complementary
research directions.

I have organized the contributions according to three broad themes – 1.

distant and local economies involving trade in forest and other natural prod-
ucts; 2. colonial and national resource politics with a focus on the political
ecology of resource control; and 3. social transformations stemming from
environmental change. There is, however, a good deal of cross-over among
these themes, as one might expect.
‘Part One: Distant and local economies’ focuses on the complexity of the
extraction economy and the trade that drove it into the interior. In his opening
article covering one thousand years of history, Eric Tagliacozzo sets much of
the scene for the other three contributions by examining intertwined ecologi-
cal and trade histories with a wide historical lens. Relying on a longue durée
perspective, he elucidates broad patterns and connections from pre-modern
to late colonial times, with special attention to extraction along the coasts and
in the interior. His main focus is the impact of Chinese trade contacts in what
is today Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei, with particular attention to their pace,
nature and consequences for the ecological history of the island.
From the first millennium CE, this trade was already having a significant
effect on northern and western Borneo; indeed, scattered smelting and trad-
ing sites at the time were probably oriented toward commerce with China. In
the medieval and early modern periods, small ports sprang up in Borneo in
response to this trade as well, funneling sea and forest produce from nearby
hinterlands to waiting Chinese junks. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, entire systems were in place to ferry desired produce from the
island, and Chinese trade commodities ‘onto the coasts, and into the forest’.

6 Peluso 1996; Doolittle 1999; Harwell 2000; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001.
7 See also Wadley 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.
 Introduction 7

Resident Chinese merchants enabled these exchanges, but multi-ethnic

partnerships and competitions were also important, involving (among oth-
ers) Malays, Bugis, Dayak and Europeans. Tagliacozzo thus contributes not
only to the environmental history of the island, but also to the larger history
of regional commerce, to which Borneo has played an integral and long-
standing role.
Taking up the theme of forest product trade, Bernard Sellato examines
an important, though frequently overlooked, distinction between resources
with local subsistence value and those with long-distance trade value. The
focus here is on traditional peoples’ conceptions and practices in their exploi-
tation of their natural environment. Drawing from the subsistence and trade
history of forest exploitation, Sellato analyzes two groups of rice swiddeners,
the Aoheng and the Kenyah (East Kalimantan), as well as by several groups
of nomadic and formerly nomadic peoples. He suggests that these people,
in a situation of low population density, generally display sound and sus-
tainable practices of subsistence resource management (including land and
waters), and that local concepts of estates and of their ownership or guardian-
ship linked to genealogical and residential continuity, play an important role
in generating and maintaining these practices. Conversely, in the exploita-
tion of forest resources with value in long-distance trade, but no local use,
these same people have engaged in severe and opportunistic extractivism.
Sellato uses this distinction to critique the recent environmental discourse
concerning indigenous people as wise stewards of their environment.
Continuing the thread of investigation developed by Sellato, Cristina
Eghenter contends that the interactions between people and forest products
have often been portrayed in academic as well as conservation circles as
either inherently conservative or destructive. She argues that we must move
away from such a dichotomous view and replace it with a strong concern for
contextual analysis. Only in this way can we answer questions about events,
constraints and circumstances that have promoted overexploitation or pro-
tection of forest resources. In doing this, Eghenter outlines the conditions and
modes of exploitation and trade of two forest products in the region of Apo
Kayan (East Kalimantan) – gutta-percha at the beginning of the twentieth
century and gaharu in the 1990s. By comparing these two historically distant
cases of exploitation, she uncovers commonalities between local use and
exploitation of forest products and their social, economic and environmental
circumstances. She identifies key factors in support of sustainable exploita-
tion of forest resources, and shows how social factors as well as the choice
environment of individuals can influence under-use or over-use of forest
resources. Eghenter subsequently uses her findings to suggest an alternative
framework for natural resource management that may prove sustainable
over time while remaining flexible to local conditions.
8 Reed L. Wadley

In contrast to Sellato’s and Eghenter’s emphasis on local actors, Lesley

Potter continues her earlier contributions to Borneo environmental history
by examining the prevailing environmental ideas emerging from the colo-
nial writings on Borneo (including Sarawak, British North Borneo and the
former Dutch territories of Kalimantan) from 1870 to 1930, and the links
between these ideas and the economic value of certain naturally occurring
forest products or replacement crops. From among major colonial attempts
at commodifying the landscape, Potter selects five products that were
dominant at particular times: wild rubbers – gutta-percha (1870-1905) and
jelutong (1903-1915); replacement crops – tobacco (1887-1906) and exotic rub-
ber (Hevea brasiliensis) (1910-1930); and a limited range of timbers, especially
Bornean ironwood (Eusideroxylon zwagerei) (1870-1925). Each of these experi-
enced a significant market boom during at least part of its dominant period,
which elicited intense discussion within colonial circles about the commod-
ity in question. Potter investigates these discussions and the subsequent
policies, some of which related to economic and trade questions, while some
involved political, social and environmental concerns. Ironically, authori-
ties would countenance, even laud, deforestation where conversion was for
replacement by plantation tobacco or rubber for export, while swiddeners
were often criticized for forest clearing and burning, and collectors for forest
destruction. As Potter notes, this attitude and accompanying forest policies
have continued into the national period, a theme explored in more detail by
Amity Doolittle (below).
‘Part Two: Colonial and national resource politics’ deals more explicitly
with state involvement and control of the environment and people of Borneo,
from territorialization to changing visions of the environment. In my own
contribution, I explore the creation and maintenance of boundaries as an
essential component of territoriality, with a focus on the upper Kapuas River
in West Kalimantan, Indonesia over the last two centuries. Boundaries define
rights of access to natural resources and to the social-political resources
of states or communities. For modern and colonial states, boundaries are
most often lines on maps, abstractions and instruments in defining access
to resources. State-made boundaries set off a state’s territory from other
states, but also provide the means for ‘internal territorialization’ within state
possessions. The state often reserves the right to acknowledge or ignore
local-level boundaries, and its boundary-making imposes and shapes social,
economic and political realities locally. When states slice and apportion such
a landscape, the locals variously accommodate, challenge and even ignore
state-made boundaries.
With this comparative background, I examine the history of bound-
ary-making, territorialization and resource access in the borderlands of the
upper Kapuas, with an emphasis on the areas inhabited by the Iban. Of
 Introduction 9

particular historical importance are the creation of the inter-colonial border

between Dutch West Borneo and British Sarawak, and colonial involvement
in drawing use-boundaries between rival ethnic groups for non-timber for-
est product collection. This perspective applies as well to national-era timber
concessions and a recent boom in illegal logging, which has resulted in local
communities reconfiguring and disputing territorial boundaries. This history
has implications for the process of ‘state simplification’, the complexities it
imposes on the local level and the resulting instability of state control.
Doolittle continues these political ecological concerns in her compelling
comparison of ‘strategies of rule’ – the colonial state’s imposition of Western
property law on indigenous people and the post-colonial state’s rural devel-
opment project in Sabah. She argues that in both eras, the state has explicated
access to resources through discourses that marginalize local people while
privileging the ruling European and Malay elite. (Her descriptions here find
a strong echo in Potter’s chapter.) For the colonial period, Doolittle demon-
strates how European law served as a ‘technology of rule’ by constructing
assumptions about local people and thereby strengthening colonial power.
Now, in contrast, officials in the present state in Sabah are not concerned with
delineating (and thus limiting) native land rights. Instead their rule finds
legitimacy in notions of modernity and development which generally justify
state interventions into rural areas.
Through her analysis, Doolittle finds that the colonial and post-colonial
state share some important characteristics: Legal institutions in both privi-
lege ‘private property’ over local, customary practices and thereby control
resource access. Resource commodification and commercialization provides
ultimate advantage to elite over local concerns, and ideologies created by
both justify centralized rule while ignoring or obscuring the positions of
those who depend directly on natural resources. What is more, those ide-
ologies blame rural, forest-dependent people for resource degradation while
simultaneously disregarding how the state structures the ways in which
rural people use resources.
Moving beyond the shores of Borneo, Michael Dove and Carol Carpenter
bring together the themes of forest product trade and political ecology
(particularly the colonial construction of knowledge) in their analysis of
the famous upas tree of the East Indies. As they show, the ‘poison tree’ was
exaggeratedly portrayed by the German, Rumphius, in the late seventeenth
century as a source of incredible natural danger. Two centuries later, the tree
had been de-mythologized, with colonial scholars and officials describing the
tree as little more than an object of curiosity for travelers. These two accounts
concern the same tree, but the images they evoke are very different. Dove
and Carpenter argue that during the earlier colonial era when Rumphius
wrote, the upas tree symbolized the colonial struggle over control of natural
10 Reed L. Wadley

resources; it also represented the challenge that interior plants and their
associated peoples posed to the colonial project. When the colonial project
changed its nature and direction, this challenge shifted too, along with the
portrayal of the upas tree. Using the shifting image of the poison tree, Dove
and Carpenter trace the changing image of state, people and nature in the
Indo-Malay archipelago, and assess its implications for ongoing ethnograph-
ic traditions of the region.
‘Part Three: Social transformations’ concerns just that, social transforma-
tions – from environmental degradation and its social, political and economic
causes and entailments to migration and symbolic economies. While draw-
ing on some relevant colonial era material, the particular concern within
these chapters is more recent histories, often within living memory. They
serve to underscore the point made in most of the other contributions that
environmental histories have important links to the present.
Drawing on over forty years of his own research in Sabah, Malaysia, one
of the senior scholars of Borneo, George Appell, analyzes the history of the
transformations to Rungus society. Reflecting many of the same concerns
seen in the previous section (in particular Doolittle’s contribution), Appell
argues that Western ideology has driven development plans and action for
Borneo people and environments, instituted first by colonialists and mis-
sionaries, and then by the Western-trained post-colonial elites. He contends
that an invariable and deleterious characteristic of this ideology has been a
cavalier ignorance of the environment, indigenous cultures and their inter-
relationships. This ideology has fueled development programs that have
resulted in destructive changes to societies and environments.
In the Rungus case, Appell asserts, such Western-informed ideologies
and developments led to disruptions in the exchanges between the popula-
tion and their environment such that both were transformed to a lower level
of integration and unsustainable resource use. Critical plants and animals
disappeared, and the destruction of sacred groves and the planting of acacia
trees disrupted the hydrological cycle such that the region now experiences
continuing, major droughts. This has necessitated the construction of expen-
sive, regional systems to pipe water. In addition, the traditional agricul-
tural system with its complex association of cultivars that provided secure
resource use has given away to monoculture. At the societal level, some of
the Rungus have moved into the slums of the cities, suicide rates among the
young have climbed, alcoholism has appeared and dysfunctional families
now occur along with many pregnancies out of marriage.
Monica Janowski moves us to the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak. Rice cul-
tivation as an activity and rice as a food form the core of her chapter as they
provide a means for the Kelabit to link old and new ‘symbolic economies’ in
the context of migration within and beyond the Highlands. (Symbolic econo-
 Introduction 11

mies refer to economic systems that are intertwined with and based on the
cultural values attached to different economic activities.) As Janowski shows,
the Kelabit traditionally grow rice in both dry and wet highland fields, but
since the early 1960s, they have increasingly adopted permanent wet rice
agriculture. Additionally, people have migrated in large numbers to nearby
areas suitable for wet fields. In these places, they are able to grow more rice
and send out highly prized wet-rice varieties to regional markets. Rice has
thus become both a subsistence crop and a cash crop. Within the traditional
symbolic economy, rice has played a central role, especially in the huge
rice meals provided at irau ‘naming’ feasts. Now, within the new symbolic
economy with rice as a cash crop, it continues to its focal role in building high
status as its sale allows people to hold irau.
In addition to these changes, the Kelabit have also been migrating to the
coast, mainly to the town of Miri, since the 1960s. While some Kelabit have
stayed in town, others have returned ‘home’; many others go back and forth
between the Highlands and the coast. In town, the new symbolic economy
within which rice has acquired a role as a cash crop changed even more, as
almost everything is monetarized. There is no clear-cut boundary, however,
between the old and new symbolic economies, and the Kelabit are attempt-
ing to negotiate a relationship between the two. Although the new symbolic
economy has considerable weight and power, the older symbolic economy
persists as a powerful force. Janowski tells us that the Kelabit are coming to
something of a compromise in which a mixture of the two symbolic econo-
mies is emerging, bridged by the central importance of rice in both town and
the Highlands.
Finally, in his Epilogue, Graham Saunders explores the myth that in
pre-colonial times the peoples of Borneo lived in partnership with their
environment and that wicked capitalist imperialists from the West, driven
by greed for profits, conquered, exploited and destroyed to the detriment of
Borneo and its people. Like all myths, Saunders argues, there is an element
of truth, but myths are often created to explain events with far-reaching
consequences, to avoid or shift responsibility for what has occurred and to
serve the needs of the present rather than explain the events of the past. In
particular, they often ascribe malevolent motivations to particular protago-
nists in events, without placing those people and their motives in historical
context. Saunders examines the changing perceptions of the Borneo environ-
ment – indigenous, Arab, Chinese and European – as well as the continuities
in those perceptions. In particular, he draws on the views presented and
analyzed in the other chapters of this volume, from Tagliacozzo’s account of
Chinese trade links to Dove and Carpenter’s analysis of the upas myth.
12 Reed L. Wadley

Future environmental histories of Borneo

In many ways, the contributions in this book represent the state of the field
for environmental histories of Borneo, although they do not (indeed can-
not) encompass the breadth of possibilities for research. Much remains to
be done, and in this section, I would like briefly to outline several topics to
which more future attention might be directed.
Historically, rivers and river networks formed the principal means of
transport and communication from the coasts to the interior (although
ridgelines in the interior were more important for people such as the Penan).
Studies of river basins and networks (much like Knapen’s for the Barito
and adjacent rivers) would be of immense value, particularly to those of us
focused on particular areas within a basin or watershed. The Rejang, Batang
Lupar, Mahakam and Kinabatangan rivers come to mind, as does the Kapuas
of West Kalimantan. The historical material available on any of these rivers
varies greatly, of course, with possibly the Kapuas having the deepest docu-
mentation of them all (excepting the Barito covered by Knapen). Related to
this are specific areas within (or between) the rivers. For example, certain
geographic regions, particularly nearer coasts and inhabited by Malay peo-
ples, have been neglected as researchers have been drawn toward the more
romantically-portrayed, Dayak-dominated interior. Such areas as Sambas,
Landak or Sukadana in West Kalimantan and Kutai in East Kalimantan
would be important topics of study, not only for the relative depth of histori-
cal material but also for the long-term transformation of their environments.8
In addition, environmental histories focused on particular ethnic groups
throughout the island remain scarce (Sellato 1989, 1994). Much might be
done, for example, by expanding Knapen’s work on the Bekumpai or Banjar
of southeastern Kalimantan. Such studies have been successfully executed
elsewhere in the world, of both indigenous and settler societies.9
The growth of urban areas has been greatly neglected. This may again
stem from the emphasis on the forested interior and rural areas, along with a
related view of cities as negative factors, as parasites on the hinterlands. Yet
urban areas provide a more diversified economy, outlets for surplus popula-
tion and extra labor from rural areas, stable demands for food and materials
and centers for communication (Knapen 2001). Environmental histories of
such cities as Kuching, Sibu, Brunei, Kota Kinabalu and Pontianak would be
most complementary to those of wider river basins and networks. Related to
urbanization are changes in transportation (for example, shifts from rivers to

8 See Magenda 1991 for a political history of Kutai.

9 Harms 1987; Griffiths and Robin 1997; Balée 1994; Giles-Vernick 2002; Rival 2002; Webb
2002.
 Introduction 13

roads, sail and oar to steam and diesel), the subsequent realignments of set-
tlements and markets and their attendant affect on local and regional social
and natural environments. Along with this is what Claessen and Van de
Velde (1985) call ‘societal format’ – the interaction of physical geography and
human population distribution. At least one contribution here deals with this
explicitly (Wadley, this volume), but for more thorough analyses, more atten-
tion needs to be given to these factors (see, for example, Colombijn 2003).
There are other more or less overlooked topics. On mining, for example,
Jackson’s (1970) study of western Borneo stands virtually alone (compare
Knapen 2001), despite the presence of long-standing mining concerns
throughout the island. Perhaps the largest (for coal) since colonial times has
been that in southeastern Borneo or the antimony mines in western Sarawak,
although numerous other places have had continuous or periodic mining of
coal, diamonds and gold. Studies of the environmental effects on the sur-
rounding peoples and environments, historically and today, would be of
immense value. In addition, just as recent studies have paid attention to the
interior more than coastal areas, so too has the farming of rice received more
attention than other crops. While in many areas of Borneo today, rice is the
preferred and principal grain, it was not always that way (Knapen 2001),
and many peoples relied on different crops at different seasons or different
periods of history. One need only recall the sago exported from the Oya and
Mukah rivers in Sarawak (which provided the Brooke state with its principal
incentive to annex the area from Brunei in the 1860s). Historical and region-
ally focused study of older crops (for example, sago, millet and taro) as well
as more recently introduced crops (for example, maize and cassava) would
go a long way to countering the ‘rice bias’ of today. Although a number of
studies have focused on cash crops or non-timber forest products (including
several in this volume), no comprehensive histories of these commodities
have yet been produced.10 This is equally so for diseases and natural disas-
ters, with Knapen’s study standing largely alone.11
There is also a danger of allowing the borders of the colonial world to
shape research on topics that often go beyond those borders (compare Potter
1997; Kathirithamby-Wells 1997). For example, the land borders of Borneo
may have meant something to the colonial authorities who drew them, but
to local people, animals and plants, these were next to non-existent for a long
while.12 The same can be said of maritime boundaries separating Indonesia,
Malaysia and the Philippines. This is not to deny the importance that colonial

10 See, for example, Totman 1989; Marks 1998; Dean 2002.

11 See Crosby 1986; De Bevoise 1995; Bankoff 2003; Henley 2005.
12 For the irrelevance of borders to disease in animals see Reid et al. 1999. For the importance
of trans-border conservation see Wikramanayake et al. 1998.
14 Reed L. Wadley

and national boundaries had and still have on local ecologies and peoples.
Along the long land border, a tension exists between common ecology and
ethnicity across borders and different colonial and national experience.13
Perhaps future work will investigate environmental histories along the inter-
colonial border. This would involve working with a wider range of sources
– archives in the Netherlands, Indonesia, Britain and Spain. This volume, by
and large, continues the reliance on colonial borders to define the targets of
research, with some exceptions. Tagliacozzo’s study of the China trade neces-
sarily goes beyond colonial borders given the fact that Chinese traders both
pre-dated Europeans in the area and regularly crossed colonial divisions
once established. Potter makes a cross-island comparison of forest products
and tree crops, and Dove and Carpenter take a regional perspective on the
changing conceptions of the upas tree within and outside the area.14
Studies of colonial and national census and mapping projects, as has
been done elsewhere in Southeast Asia,15 would be helpful; particularly in
relation to topics such as economic and environmental policy. Another line
of research might involve selected biographies of colonial officials. While
this might be regarded as being more a concern for history than the envi-
ronment, such work would be of value for environmental history as it was
by and through colonial officials that economic and political policies were
implemented and formed, which in turn affected the local and colonial use
of the environment. Although a good deal of attention has been paid to the
Brooke state (Tarling 1982; Walker 2002), the Dutch side has been rather
neglected (see Heidhues 2003:106, note 93). Colonial figures that come to
mind for Dutch West Borneo include Cornelis Kater who began his career
as a clerk and harbor master in 1852 and retired as Resident in 1885, or S.W.
Tromp who served in both West and South-East Borneo throughout the 1880-
1890s. The Dutch archives would be a rich source for these officials’ actions
and opinions regarding environmental matters. This also brings up the issue
of portraying colonial or national states as negative players. As with most
dichotomies, the state-as-bad versus the local-as-good may be too sharply
drawn (although Doolittle and Appell provide convincing counter-cases
in their contributions here). More nuanced study of state influences on the
environment and local peoples (through, for example, colonial biographies)
are also needed (Knapen 2001).

13 See Ishikawa 1998; Wadley 2000.

14 One thing that is interesting here is the consistency of perception across European nation-
alities.
15 For example, Anderson 1991; Thongchai 1994.
 Introduction 15

There is, most certainly, much more work to be done, and I hope this book
answers some questions and spurs more research on environmental histories
of this complex and fascinating island.

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 PART ONE

Distant and local economies