Conserving Nature in Culture: Case Studies from Southeast Asia

Abstract

The broad theme that motivated this collection of case studies is the issue of enhancing conservation outcomes by better incorporating the vast and intimate knowledge and traditions of people closest to and dependent on the area in need of being conserved—conserving natural areas through promoting the cultures of those who have often had a hand in creating or preserving those resources, thus keeping people “in” nature rather than separating them from it (p. 20). Over the course of the last decade or so, this idea has become fairly axiomatic among anthropologists and other social scientists involved in conservation, and the present volume represents a swath of that consensus and is drawn from studies funded in part by a MacArthur Foundation grant to the two lead editors. The fact that I feel like part of the converted being preached to while knowing that there are plenty of others resistant to such ideas means that the conclusions of these studies are very much needed, at once to support those of us who argue for the same things and to challenge those who still regard local people as the fundamental problem. A wide-ranging project produces wide-ranging research, and that is certainly the sense provided by the case studies highlighted here. This diversity, however, is not a bad thing, and the editors make no apologies for it. To introduce the case studies, they provide a conceptual overview outlining the central question: “where, in the interaction between society and environment across space and time, [is] conservation. . .being most successfully and least successfully achieved” (p. 7)? And in answer, they summarize the overall findings: (1) Southeast Asians have long changed their local environments and in doing so have conserved important natural resources; (2) conservation directed and imposed from above generally fails; (3) traditional agricultural landscapes are often important sites for biodiversity; and (4) issues of scale are critical as macro-level events and decisions affect local-level resource use. The case studies begin with Puri’s research on the historical ecology of Penan forest camps in East Kalimantan, Indonesia; the Penan have been one of the traditional foraging groups on Borneo, and Puri shows in his detailed analysis how their activities have affected the composition of the forest—positively from both the Penan and conservationist points of view. In her study of the Batek in Peninsular Malaysia, Lye shows the problematical relationship between professional conservation’s scientific model of the environment and the Batek’s, and Hum Ecol (2006) 34:871–872 DOI 10.1007/s10745-006-9046-9