Southeast Asia. Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating conservation in Southeast Asia. Edited by M. Dove, P. Sajise and A. Doolittle. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 372. Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Southeast Asia Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating conservation in Southeast Asia Edited by M. DOVE, P. SAJISE and a. DOOLITTLE Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 372. Bibliography, Index. For anyone who has had the good fortune to spend time between the ricefields and rainforests of Southeast Asia, it should be clear that environmental conservation is not a simple topic. Landscape categories such as forest and agriculture intertwine and many commonplace concepts, such as 'sacred forest' or 'conservation', carry influences that do not translate to local contexts. Some well-known debates about 'local' environmental knowledge carry misleading assumptions about spatial scale or indigeneity that hide exactly how 'locality' is defined. This rich collection of essays seeks to redress many of these challenges. The book's aim is to rethink some of the classic--and all too often unquestioned--assumptions about conservation that can result in simplistic categories such as 'East' and 'West'; 'nature' and 'society' or ideas based on ecology in equilibrium. The authors therefore call for a new approach that is, among others, 'postlocal' (p. 1), 'postequilibrium' (p. 3), and 'post-Western' (p. 5). Their key objective is to welcome back some of the complexity that underlies ecological change in dynamic, settled landscapes. This complexity relates to how people use resources and landscapes, as well as to understanding how scientific and analytical approaches can reduce this complexity in unhelpful ways. Together, these arguments point to 'a developing belief that there are no final or fixed endpoints in conservation and development management and intervention' (p. 4). The central concept of the 'sacred forest' is an important illustration. The book reviews the long debate concerning whether traditional resource management constitutes 'conservation' if it is 'unintentional', and how far it represents a happy coincidence between the interests of local people and those of Western conservationists. The editors list the various problems with these views, including the outside influences on making specific forests and people visible as 'spiritually driven conservation', which 'artificially abstracts what has happened on the landscape at one point in time from what has happened on the landscape as a whole over a long period of time' (p. 8). Simple notions also avoid the connection between conservation and the regulation of labour, or the role of forests as 'places of power' (p. 9). The editors ask why the misleading representations of sacred forests, or 'forest fundamentalism' remain so strong. They suggest the answer lies in the Orientalist nature of the concept, and its ability to manufacture 'difference between the metropolitan cultures of environmentalists and the marginal cultures of those having sacred groves' (p. …