Culture and the Question of Rights

by Zerner, Charles; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (CON); Roseman, Marina (CON); Fried, Stephanie Gorson (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822328025
• ISBN10: 082232802X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 Rightsreveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communitiesrs" 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. This collection will prove valuable to anthropologists, political geographers, ecologists, environmentalists, legal scholars, and those interested in indigenous rights.Contributors.Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction
Moving Translations: Poetics, Performance, and Property in Indonesia and Malaysia	1	(23)
Charles Zerner
Cultivating the Wild: Honey-Hunting and Forest Management in Southeast Kalimantan	24	(32)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Sounding the Makassar Strait: The Poetics and Politics of an Indonesian Marine Environment	56	(53)
Charles Zerner
Singers of the Landscape: Song, History, and Property Rights in the Malaysian Rainforest	109	(33)
Marina Roseman
Writing for Their Lives: Bentian Dayak Authors and Indonesian Development Discourse	142	(42)
Stephanie Gorson Fried
Fruit Trees and Family Trees in an Anthropogenic Forest: Property Zones, Resource Access, and Environmental Change in Indonesia	184	(35)
Nancy Lee Peluso
Reflections: Toward New Conceptions of Rights	219	(16)
Donald Brenneis
Afterword
By Land and By Sea: Reflections on Claims and Communities in the Malay Archipelago	235	(14)
Jane Monnig Atkinson
Works Cited	249	(26)
List of Contributors	275	(2)
Index	277