The Evolving Concept of Land Ownership among the Iban of Sarawak, Malaysia

Abstract

There have been two different trends in research on land systems in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Anthropological studies have often dealt with land tenure systems or the nature of property inheritance and exchange in order to grasp kinship relations and social structures in imagined 'traditional' communities. However, this has been criticized for insufficient consideration of the social dynamism or changes brought about by interaction with outside worlds. In contrast, in the fields of development and agricultural economics, discussion has been accumulating about the perspectives and results of various kinds of policies on land administration, but with less regard to the custom or tradition of local communities.Recently, some studies have taken into consideration the vulnerability of smallholders who experience a transition from traditional land tenure systems to new land registration systems or situations of legal plurality. With some exceptions, however, their arguments are focused on the friction and rivalry between governments and smallholders.In this paper I discuss the process in which indigenous smallholders have been becoming conscious of proprietary rights of land through the introduction of commercial tree crops or the acceptance of new land systems. This study is based on field research among the communities of the Iban, shifting cultivators of Sarawak, Malaysia, whose society was based on their own customary law but which has been confronted with drastic legal changes brought about by colonial rule and the ensuing independent government of Sarawak.According to the customary land law of the Iban, the first clearer of primary forest holds right to use the parcel of land and such usufruct may be inherited as long as it is remembered. When the land registration system was introduced into the study area (Kanowit) at the beginning of this century, most of the Iban hesitated to register their customary lands, because they were still satisfied with their customary land tenure system and thought it absurd to pay a survey fee, annual rent or registration fee. Instead, the Iban were eager to plant rubber trees introduced at the time which was almost the same as the introduction of the land registration system. They planted rubber trees on dry paddy fields after harvest because it was much easier to utilize fallow land than felling thick forest.The use of fallow land for cash cropping has recently been evaluated by some scholars, who have argued that land use in rotation (for example, paddy field-young rubber garden-matured rubber garden-paddy field) is sustainable ecologically as well as economically. In the research area, however, the purpose of planting rubber was not only for tapping but also to claim that the land was continuously occupied by the feller. If they leave fallow land without any perennial trees, it is more likely to fail to be remembered as a distinct boundary after some decades and thus it becomes difficult to be imparted to the next generation. In contrast, rubber gardens, which exist as permanent farmland, preserve the boundary of one's land to defend it from another's invasion. By the 1970s, rubber gardens thus rapidly increased in number and spread over hilly areas and have been left standing even after abrupt fluctuations in the price of rubber.Paddy farming as a subsistence activity of the Iban has also changed. In brief, the diffusion of agricultural poison and fertilizer in the 1950s made it possible to shorten the fallow period or even to repeatedly cultivate the same field, and the construction of an irrigation system in 1968 stimulated their wet paddy farming. In addition, due to the population decrease caused by continuous out-migration since the 1980s, the annual production of paddy has fallen.