Peter Sercombe and Bernard Sellato (eds): Beyond the Green Myth—Borneo’s Hunter-Gatherers in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This book is a compilation of papers on hunter-gatherers. It will be of interest to students of hunter-gatherer societies and their post-colonial and post-independence development as well as to a broader academic and general public interested in the tropical rainforest and its management since time immemorial. It should also be read by anyone, particularly NGOs and development banks, concerned about a very uncertain future for very small indigenous groups in Borneo, whose cultures and languages, remarkably, remain largely intact. The book, despite its sub-title, is more a projection of the past into the 21st century, setting a socio-political context to the position of small groups of hunter-gatherers under the quite different jurisdictions of Brunei, the state government of Sarawak in Malaysia and the provincial governments of Kalimantan in Indonesia. There are, sensibly, no prognostications about the future though the prospects in the Kalimantans appear very much better than in Sarawak. The green myth, essentially, is that of an anthropological Garden of Eden which the noble savage manages and conserves for his heirs and for posterity. It has been constructed by outsiders and serves as a charter for conservationist NGOs seeking funds from international donors to promote community based forest conservation. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Sellato, in an excellent history of a number of hunter-gatherer groups exploiting three remote areas largely in East Kalimantan, shows that a number of NGOs have done a power of good in persuading governments (particularly Indonesia) that hunter-gatherers should have their rights to territories and resources recognized. He and a number of other authors in the book describe the traditional hunting and gathering strategies of a range of groups across the Borneo landscape. It is clear from these descriptions that hunter-gatherers did conserve sago groves, practice horticulture and kill only what they eat. Sedentization has not changed their economies greatly as they are, at best, occasional agriculturalists. Chan provides an excellent account of how subsistence activities among the Punan Vuhang have changed with sedentization and gives a useful calendar showing how the group traditionally moved from food scarcity and hunger to food glut and excess. Everything was shared. A number of authors remarked on the better health profile of hunter-gatherers than swidden agriculturalists. That might partly be an attribute of food being shared equally among all members of a group. With swidden agriculturalists, the households of unsuccessful farmers are more prone to ill health as they are chronically undernourished. With no outside influences, the ‘green myth’ did have a basis in reality. The myth was ushered in only when the ‘global market’ reached the hunter-gatherers. A number of chapters show that the economist’s view of a market system having important self-stabilizing features is an even greater myth. Once certain scarce resources had a sufficiently high market value and hunter-gatherers found they had uses for what they could earn from exploiting those resources, the economist’s equilibrium market model went into a tail spin. The most extreme example concerns the Sumatran rhinoceros. The horn had value; so the carcass could be left to rot Hum Ecol (2009) 37:391–392 DOI 10.1007/s10745-009-9244-3