This interesting and well-written ethnography examines the well-known but variegated Punan of Borneo. It is also a contribution to forager studies, to the study of what Lars Kaskija calls ‘encapsulation’, to our understanding of identity politics generally and of Indonesian identity politics in particular. Punan have captured the imagination of conservationists around the world (a fact that occasions Punan some merriment, as Kaskija shows, e.g. in the wonderful photo on p. 30). For these reasons, and given the continuing Punan struggle for survival, Kaskija's ethnography is timely and important reading not only for anthropologists and Southeast Asianists, but also for political scientists, economists, conservationists and anyone interested in ‘economic development’. An index would increase the book's already considerable value as a reference.
The book, originally presented as a masters thesis, is an updated, reedited and rewritten compilation of Kaskija's earlier reportage. This method of composition results in some repetition; but the reiteration is not only salient but even adds to the impact of the facts. The book is one of the Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology series, which has also published excellent work by Ing-Britt Trankell on the peoples of mainland Southeast Asia. Here, readers should also consider the contributions of Finnish Southeast Asianists like Kenneth Sillander and Karen Heikkila.
After an introductory chapter that includes a description of the conditions of his fieldwork in 1990–92, 1997 and 2000, Kaskija turns in chapter 2 to salient controversies in hunter-gatherer studies. The first is the question of whether hunter-gathering is/was a ‘survival’ of Paleolithic ecological adaptations or whether it always involves dependence on agriculturalists. A related question in Southeast Asia is whether foragers could survive on their own in the purported ‘green desert’ of tropical rainforest (e.g., Headland 1987). Kaskija's next topic is generic hunter-gatherer sociality, stereotypically based on sharing, egalitarianism, individual autonomy and ‘immediate-return’ economies. He would add opportunism and encapsulation (=enclavement) to the list. In the end, he questions the utility of the term. My own opinion is that the line between ‘foragers’ (a more accurate descriptive label for most rainforest hunter-gatherers) and ‘swiddeners’ is porous and transitory, especially in Borneo; the ‘green desert’ argument ignores the fact that most foragers ‘tend’ and even plant trees. As Ellen has shown, this porosity is especially marked in sago-producing areas like Borneo. In short, the difference between rainforest ‘gathering’ and agroforestry/swiddening is statistical and conditional, not qualitative. This human flexibility suggests also that the distinction, which Kaskija discusses, between ‘primary’ (=‘primordial’) and ‘secondary’ foragers (the latter driven from agriculture by poverty or attracted to foraging by commercial opportunities) is academic to the point of metaphysicality. (In the following chapter Kaskija does recognise that the distinction between horticulture and foraging is, at best, blurred [pp. 75–6, 79]). Finally, ‘immediate return’ economies characterise impoverished people everywhere as part of a ‘culture of poverty’. Conservative scholars often phrase this tendency as a psychological deficit (‘inability to delay gratification’) and use it politically to bludgeon the poor. Kaskija explicitly rejects this negative interpretation.
After surveying the ethnographic literature on central Borneo, chapter 3 discusses how the upsurge of ‘green’ politics has fostered interest in ‘unspoiled’ and ‘indigenous’ foragers. Politically, the image of such peoples fits into much the same set of tropes as ‘charismatic megafauna’, dramatising conservationist agendas. Kaskija's discussion of the relevance of the existential unreliability of such categories, including the question of whether Punan are ‘devolved’ agriculturalists, is useful and well-informed. He dismisses the tidy old idea that Taiwanese Austronesians were the original people of Borneo and tries out conjectural linguistic and economic histories, raising, for example, the question of whether Borneo and other sections of Indonesia had significant Austroasiatic-speaking (agriculturalist?) populations as well as Austro-Melanesian agroforesters. Kaskija does not discuss foxtail millet, Setaria italica, the cultivars of which were extraordinarily numerous among Semai of Malaysia in the mid-twentieth century, suggesting a crop more ancient than rice. Kaskija's overall conclusion is that Borneo's history seems as untidy and fluid as its ethnography.
The next two chapters focus on Malinau, ‘the area with the highest concentration of Punan in Indonesian Borneo’ (p. 81). Chapter 4 surveys the main named ‘ethnic groupings’ there, subject to the aforementioned difficulties with such groupings. Next Kaskija distinguishes different categories of Punan, mostly by location and subservience to particular named sets of stratified agriculturalists and customs like brideprice and burial customs. He concludes by sketching out subgroups of Punan Malinau. The following chapter speculates about the ethnohistory of the upper Malinau before the 1920s, based mainly on the genealogies of aristocratic families in the class-ridden societies upon which Punan depend. The original inhabitants seem to be ‘Ngorek’, famous for secondary burials and megaliths. It is tempting but rash to compare this ethnonym to the Sanskrit word nagara ‘country’, which appears in Malaysian Austroasiatic languages as nngeri' / lnggri' and Malay as negeri. Another Austroasiatic word for ‘country’, sraa', is an autonym for west Malaysian Austroasiatic-speaking hill peoples. Anyway, Merap replaced Ngorek as the dominant ethnic group in Malinau until the arrival of Kenyah and of the Indonesian authorities in the 1970s. The government's ‘civilising mission’ (proyek civilisasi), which began at this time, involved sedentising peoples and resettling them downstream. The discussion focuses on Merap Langap and their dependents, Punan Malinau [= Punan Bau = Punan Merap). The chapter concludes by discussing the Punan diaspora, a topic of interest mainly to specialists in Punan ethnography.
Punan economy, according to chapter 6, is variegated, though at the time of Kaskija's studies the trade in NTFP (non-timber forest products) was the most salient. Subsistence hunting and swiddening played important subsidiary roles. Contrary to Western green mythology, Punan showed little interest in wild plants, though they knew quite a lot about them. The hunting regime differed significantly in one way from that of peninsular Malaysia. (That difference may have had an impact on gender relations and the incidence of violence, as I will discuss at the conclusion of this review.) The NTFP trade, via middlemen, puts pressure on Punan to grow cash crops and otherwise settle down in order to legitimise their right to exploit particular areas, although time spent collecting NTFP typically comes out of time spent on agriculture. In this context, Punan notions of territoriality, a sentiment traditionally not much more formalised than the Anglo-American image of ‘home’, became increasingly tied to sedentism, first in camps and later, under colonialism, in settlements. From these settlements Punan mufut, make expeditions into the forest, not just to hunt or gather fruit, but also for recreation and to avoid the diseases attendant on sedentisation. A settlement has a government-appointed ‘headman’, usually a traditional elder. Punan claim to have a stratified social system, as east Semai in 1962 claimed many titled leaders, but both groups were egalitarian in practice. Non-ideological egalitarianism in practice, but without commitment, also seems characteristic of other peninsular Malaysian indigenes. It appears attendant on a mobile lifestyle and on built-in human proclivities, without requiring a ‘cultural’ component.
Chapter 7 develops a notion of Punan sociality, which stresses not only social equality and sharing ‘but also their preference for immediate gain, their opportunism, pragmatism and individualism’ (p. 176). Kaskija argues that this distinctive sociality, which shares characteristics with other Southeast Asian ways of life, reflects the complex and ambivalent pressures of encapsulation among more powerful peoples, as shown in Gibson and Sillander's edited collection of essays. Kaskija's interpretative tendencies are psychological, as discussed below. The economic analysis is a bit unsophisticated, for example, the assertion that the ‘combination of social stratification and economic immediacy is surprising’. As noted earlier in this review, the lowest stratum of stratified societies, including slaves and the lumpenproletariat of the modern West, manifest a ‘culture of poverty’ that includes a stress on immediate returns as well as several of the other patterns resembling those of Punan sociality. (The term ‘culture’ is problematic here, since in most instances there is no need to hypothesise an ideological causation of these patterns). Indeed, Kaskija criticises the arbitrariness of immediate-vs. delayed-return distinction (p. 184). The chapter concludes with a brilliant and enlightening discussion of the psychological sequelae of encapsulation. Underlings, Franz Fanon remarked, tend to pay more attention to their rulers, and therefore to know more about them, than the rulers know about their subjects or clients. To rulers, underlings ‘all look alike’. This phenomenon is the cognitive background for the ego defence mechanism of ‘identification with the oppressor’, common among encapsulated peoples like Punan. A realistic assessment of their lot in life manifests itself in what Kaskija usefully calls ‘collective commiseration’ (Punan pelulup urip), conversations in which people express the universality of suffering. This discussion is thought-provoking and ethnographically valuable.
In general, Kaskija's analyses of the social phenomena he investigates are well within the mainstream of current ethnographic usage and take no theoretical risks. For example, the account of Punan sociality in chapter 7 stresses psychological variables (preferences, choices, trust, lack of foresight / forethought, etc.) as embodied in a ‘foraging ethos’ that Kaskija pieces together from presumably fragmentary observations. Such (re)construction is standard operating procedure in Southeast Asian ethnography. But the process imputes both a dominant role to conscious thinking and a counterfactual homogeneity of thought (ethos, values) to the lives of ordinary people performing ordinary routines, even when, like Kaskija, the analyst is careful to specify that not all Punan think alike. The procedural problem is more basic than that, as I have argued elsewhere. But for readers unbeguiled by the arcana of current ethnographic methodology, this account is useful and insightful.
The ‘ethnographic present’ in chapter 8 moves forward from the 1990s, when Kaskija did most of his fieldwork, to around 2000. By then, ‘economic development’ had thoroughly penetrated Malinau. Infant mortality was over 40 per cent, higher upriver. Punan had come to value formal education highly, but still obtained little. Outsider penetration of traditional NTFP areas was on the upswing, though only Merap, traditional Punan patrons, asserted ownership of such areas (p. 225). Still, Punan were talking about moving back upriver to territories traditionally ‘theirs’ and obtaining IPPK (Indonesian government) recognition of their traditional rights in the area. The hope is that outsiders will then pay for access to their resources. Punan aspire to Sarawak-style wages from timber companies and mining interests. They are also cash-cropping to establish landownership in areas targeted by would-be exploiters. In response to their iconic status in Green politics, the people are beginning to appreciate the economic and political opportunities of commodified cultural reification and reconstruction. One by-product is the recreation of a Punan ‘ethnic group’, complete with its own ‘fakelore’.
One way of assessing how rich an ethnography is by asking whether it provides enough material to answer questions which the author does not, or to provide answers with which the author might disagree. My own interest in (non)violence has led me to an interest in its origins among foragers, who seem to have been peaceable until the development of big game hunting, which generally involves hunting gregarious ungulate. Such hunting correlates strongly with the formation of ‘fraternal interest groups’ (FIGs), groups of young men, often kinsmen, bonded together by the skills required in such hunting. Now, one puzzle of Southeast Asian ethnography is why Punan seem less strikingly nonviolent than peninsular Malaysian foragers and swiddeners living under much the same ecological conditions (pp. 179–80). One perhaps consequential difference between traditional Punan subsistence and that of West Malaysian foragers (‘Semang’) has to do with the traditional focus of hunting. Both peoples tend to focus on arboreal prey, for which blowpipes are appropriate weapons. For the Malaysians, wild pigs, Sus scrofa, were less salient as prey, although they are becoming more important, especially now that large dogs and shotguns are widely available and the meat has entered the NTFP trade. When I first went there in the early 1960s, Semai told me about an animal that sounded a lot like the bearded pig, Sus barbatus; but the acknowledged expert on peninsular fauna thought there were none in the peninsula, so rare had they become by then. But hunting bearded pig (Punan bafui), as Punan do, differs from hunting scrofa, not to mention from hunting relatively little monkeys and lemurs: ‘it is only the meat of the bafui … that is avidly sought and endowed with an exceptional symbolic value’ (p. 146). Bearded pigs are larger than scrofa, and occasionally travel in large herds. Such circumstances tend to produce fraternal interest groups, FIGs, made up of young men who are used to strategising together and engaging in dangerous activities together, thus forming a strong esprit de corps that reinforces and reflects the higher value put on larger, more dangerous herd ungulates. The rise of FIGs in a community of people otherwise equal tends to increase the influence of men and the ‘heroic’ values, especially violence. Kaskija would not agree with this analysis, but his ethnography is rich enough to allow such an interpretation.
All told, this is a book that belongs on the shelves of every Southeast Asianist.
