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Beyond the Green Myth
Borneo’s Hunter-Gatherers in the Twenty-First Century
edited by Peter Sercombe & Bernard Sellato
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398 pp., illustrations & maps NIAS Studies in Asian Topics # 37 Available from NIAS Press worldwide |
Borneo with its tales of White Rajahs and tribes of headhunters, has long excited the Western imagination. Today, however, there is another green imagination at work. Mention of the island is more likely to evoke images of tropical deforestation and concern about the cruel dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples who once lived in relative harmony with their environment.
It is perhaps not surprising then that most books dealing with the nomadic hunter-gatherers of Borneo have principally been pictorial studies. There is indeed a dearth of scholarship regarding these peoples, a situation that this first ever, comprehensive review of nomadic groups in the Borneo rain forest aims to rectify.
Presenting a wealth of new research contributed by an international team of scholars the volume covers all those parts of Borneo where nomads (called Penan, Punan or by various other names) are or were known to exist and provides a comparative historical-ecological study of these groups.
The study is primarily concerned with issues of modernization (including the monetary economy formalised institutions centralized power structures, contractual relationships and extraction activities) and development policies. The impact of these policies is analysed with special regard to the natural environment inhabited by these small-scale societies as well as the use of its resources.
Press news
- Feb. 29 2016
After a year of 48-hour days and frantic juggling, first copies of the printed volume of End of Empire: 100 Days in 1945 that Changed Asia and the World, edited by David P. Chandler, Robert Cribb and Li Narangoa, finally reached the NIAS Press office this morning.
