Culture and the Question of Rights

Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Häftad, Engelska, 2003

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This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims. Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts-natural resource frontiers-this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation-from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities’ struggles to retain their gardens, forests, fishing territories, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat.Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2003-04-16
Mått156 x 235 x 17 mm
Vikt426 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor304
FörlagDuke University Press
ISBN9780822328131

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List of Figures ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction. Moving Translations: Poetics, Performance, and Property in Indonesia and Malaysia / Charles Zerner 1Cultivating the Wild: Honey-Hunting and Forest Management in Southeast Kilimantan / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 24Sounding the Makassar Strait: The Poetics and Politics of an Indonesian Marine Environment / Charles Zerner 56Singers of the Landscape: Song, History, and Property Rights in the Malaysian Rainforest / Marina Roseman 109Writing for Their Lives: Bentian Dayak Authors and Indonesian Development Discourse / Stephanie Gorson Fried 142Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Property Zones, Resource Access, and Environmental Change in Indonesia / Nancy Lee Peluso 184Reflections: Toward New Conceptions of Rights / Donald Brenneis 219Afterword. By Land and By Sea: Reflections on Claims and Communities in the Malay Archipelago / Jane Monnig Atkinson 235Works Cited 249List of Contributors 275Index 277

“A timely and exciting volume. Its cutting-edge scholarship goes to the heart of debates about the relations among land, people, and what is problematically called ‘culture.’ While offering no easy answers, the contributors’ voices together bring home the point that local farmers and fishers, scholars, activists, and development workers all need to rethink their ideas about rights and claims to seas, forests, and other resources.”-Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington “An enormously important volume that is sure to provoke a great deal of discussion about the discourse of indigenous rights. Without question one of the most original interventions into the issue in recent years, it shifts the ground of the debate, providing a way for us to think about the issue of rights in ways that are polyphonic, aesthetic, and performative.”-J. Peter Brosius, University of Georgia “In this valuable and important book, we see villagers articulating their relationship to the natural environment, not through cadastral surveys and claims of right but through songs, speeches, poems, prayers, and spells. Too often, government officials and other ‘experts’ tend to ignore such practices and impose rigid conceptions of law, space, and time. These remarkable essays remind us of the extent of the loss that can accompany the triumph of law.”-David M. Engel, University of Buffalo