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Working with Indigenous Communities and Orangutan Conservation in Borneo - Ep 81
652 Plays11 months ago
On today’s episode, Jessica talks with Dr. Liana Chua (social anthropologist and Tunku Abdul Rahman University Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies at the University of Cambridge) about her work with Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo and looking at international orangutan conservation efforts. We talk about her projects looking at culture change and the impact of Christianity, as well as various responses to and the impact of resettlement in the face of a dam project. Finally we talk about the methods and findings from her efforts on The Global Lives of the Orangutan and POKOK projects.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/81
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- The Global Lives of the Orangutan Project Website
- Pokok Project Website
- Dr. Liana Chua’s Page on the University of Cambridge’s Department of Social Anthropology website
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Transcript
Introduction to Indigenous and Conservation Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 81. I'm Jessica Equinto and I'm your host. And today we are talking about working with Indigenous communities and orangutan conservation in Borneo.
00:00:21
Speaker
Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch or Ute People's Treaty Lands, the Dinata, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
Exploring Ethnic Politics and Conservation in Borneo
00:00:32
Speaker
Today we have Dr. Chua on the show. Dr. Liana Chua is a social anthropologist and Tuncu Abdul-Rahman University Assistant Professor in Malay World Studies at the University of Cambridge.
00:00:45
Speaker
She has long-term research interests in Malaysian Borneo, where she has explored conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, and experiences of development and resettlement among Badeu communities. She currently works on the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the global nexus of orangutan conservation, tracing its operations, transformations, and effects across national and cultural boundaries.
00:01:10
Speaker
So welcome to the show, Liana. Thank you, Jessica. Nice to be here. Yes. I'm so excited to have you on. We never get to talk about apes. So like you said, that's exciting. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. But yeah, so I wanted to ask you first, how did, how did you get into social anthropology and what interested you in this type of work?
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of got into it by accident. So I grew up in Singapore where nobody had ever heard of social anthropology. And so for my first degree, I studied history and it was actually through this undergraduate degree in history that I first became exposed to anthropology and also kind of realized that what really, really
00:01:56
Speaker
grabs my attention and really interested me with those small human stories about what people ate, what people lived like, the differences but also the similarities between humans, and particularly the way that these manifested themselves in very stark cross-cultural or international encounters like moments of trade or religious conversion. So it was kind of
00:02:18
Speaker
I think during my undergraduate in history that I started to develop a bit of an anthropological sensibility. I then went off and worked very briefly in a museum and thought I was going to go into a kind of museum career. But then I discovered this M. Phil in Cambridge University called something like social anthropology and museum work. And I thought, oh, this sounds interesting. Kind of combines both my interests. So I rocked up in Cambridge, you know, did this 12 month degree and
00:02:47
Speaker
within about two months suddenly, you know, had this moment of realization that this was really, really what I wanted to do. So I then applied for a PhD and I was very lucky. I got a studentship and then ended up doing a PhD in Malaysian Boreal with an Indigenous group called the Bideyu.
Cultural Influences on Anthropological Curiosity
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So I want to back up a little bit to kind of what you were saying at the very beginning, because Singapore is really its own really interesting, you know, anthropological, I don't know what you would call it exactly. But so looking back, you know, cause you're talking about all these people coming together and how that shapes people and things like that.
00:03:28
Speaker
Did it change the way that you think about Singapore after having this experience in social anthropology? Oh, yeah, completely. And in fact, I think the seeds were already planted when I was growing up in Singapore because
00:03:43
Speaker
I think I became very conscious of the fact, you know, when I was a teenager, that Singapore was, as you say, a very, very strange, it's a strange bubble. It's a strange kind of microcosm, right? It's this weird little first world, uber-modern, uber-developed, and very self-consciously so, you know, country right in the middle of a much larger region in maritime Southeast Asia.
00:04:04
Speaker
Very unusually, it's got a Chinese majority population. It's got a very specific history of immigration and integration. I think, growing up, I was very aware that we were kind of unusual in the region, but I was also very aware that
00:04:19
Speaker
there was this very strong narrative in Singapore that we always heard day in, day out in school about, I guess you could call it Singaporean exceptionalism, right? We were different, we were special, we were somehow better than the rest of the countries around us because we're more modern, more progressive, you know, whatever. I sort of absorbed that a lot when I was at school, but I also found it slightly disturbing, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why I found that, you know, uncomfortable.
00:04:44
Speaker
And so I think that was partly why I became interested in going back to my own region, back to Southeast Asia to do my PhD fieldwork. Because I think I saw this as an opportunity for me to save that curiosity and to actually have a chance to look more carefully at some of these places that we just kind of
00:05:06
Speaker
dismissed as these slightly backward neighbours that we were somehow better than, and to actually try to look behind those sorts of stereotypes and these strange images that I've grown up with in Singapore, and to try and understand what exactly was going on behind those stereotypes. So I guess in a way, doing this PhD in anthropology was also partly an attempt to kind of look back
00:05:29
Speaker
my Singapore upbringing in a slightly different way and maybe try to disrupt some of the assumptions that I had grown up with that very much informed the sort of education system and the way Singaporeans thought and in some ways still think about themselves. Mm, interesting.
Investigating Cultural Transformations with the Bideyu
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, so that led you to look at wanting to work in the region, but what specifically drew you to Malaysian Borneo and what specifically drew you to this community that you were working with?
00:05:57
Speaker
Yes. So I think when I decided that I was going to try and go back to Southeast Asia, try and understand a little bit more about my own backyard, I then went and did a load of reading in the libraries. And while I was doing this reading, I came across this really interesting article by an anthropologist called Robert Winsler. I think he was based in Nevada, I think. And he wrote this really interesting piece about how these rural Bedayu communities, but also Bedayu communities in town,
00:06:23
Speaker
was starting to recast their old ritual architecture, and particularly a building that's sometimes been called the Head House. It's a kind of ritual house that has historically been used for rituals, but also been used to store the heads of enemies that they'd taken previously as these new sort of cultural artifacts. He was kind of looking at this transformation of a ritual building with various ritual uses into a cultural space. I read this article and I was absolutely intrigued because
00:06:52
Speaker
What I've been finding in my readings was that a lot of the existing anthropological research on Borneo on Southeast Asia, so this was kind of in the early 2000s. It was very culturally centered. It was about trying to understand traditional cultures, traditional ways of life, old rituals, old religions.
00:07:11
Speaker
but not very good at dealing with transformations and changes, which I was fairly sure was happening in this region. So actually reading an article that looked explicitly at that process of change and the way you were kind of rethinking identities and ritual and so on got me really interested in trying to understand various kinds of transitions.
00:07:30
Speaker
and how people in places like Borneo were living through those transitions and the way that they were exercising their own agency in these moments. I decided that I would try to find out a little bit more about Bidei society. At this point, this was a bit of a leap into the dark. I got in touch with
00:07:50
Speaker
various people in Singapore who were in touch with various people in Malaysian Borneo. These were all through regional Catholic networks, which was very interesting, who then put me in touch with a very well-respected and well-known Bideu Catholic leader. He hosted me for a few weeks. He took me
00:08:12
Speaker
he took me driving around various regions in his car. We basically visited a whole bunch of villages, including a number of places that Winslow had written about in his article. I was trying to find a village that was undergoing those sorts of very self-conscious cultural transformations that Winslow was writing about.
00:08:32
Speaker
eventually came to a place called Kampongbunuk. Kampong means village, and Bunuk was the name of the village. And here we found that there was a little mini-museum, as it called itself, that had been set up by the quite elderly son of the village's last ritual chief. So just to give you a little bit of context, most Bidois were followers of an animist ritual complex known as Gaoi,
00:08:55
Speaker
up to about the 1960s, 1980s, and then from about the 1980s, this process of very rapid and large-scale Christianization began. This guy who owned the mini-museum had converted to Catholicism a while back, but he still kept his family heirlooms like jars and gongs and
00:09:12
Speaker
ritual items as a repository of a video culture. He was kind of transforming these old ritual items into forms of culture in the way that Winslow had described. What I didn't realize at the time was that this was also a means of trying to reassert his family's authority and saying, yeah, we used to be really, really potent and really
00:09:35
Speaker
influential and powerful in the village. And we kind of still are. And here's the proof. Here are our heirlooms and all our old ritual collections. I didn't know that at the time, but that was also one of the motivations, I think, for him setting up that mini museum. So we had a little chat. I was just learning Malay, which is the lingua franca.
00:09:53
Speaker
And he basically said, yeah, you know, if you want to come back and learn about Big Day U culture from me, if you want to come and work with me on the mini museums collection, you'd be very welcome to, you know, come and live in the village, we'll adopt you as our granddaughter.
Rethinking Cultural Preservation and Religious Influences
00:10:07
Speaker
And, and, you know, just just feel free. So, so I did. So I kind of hung on to those Catholic connections and
00:10:15
Speaker
several months later was introduced to another well-respected Catholic lady, a Catholic leader, who was from the same village, was from Kampungbunuk, and she ended up becoming my adoptive mother. I ended up living with her and her family for
00:10:31
Speaker
my total of 15 months during my PhD and spent a lot of time working at the mini-museum. I didn't know it at the time, but this combination of Christianity, which was very, very influential and central to people's lives,
00:10:49
Speaker
And this interest in old ritual objects ended up becoming the focal point of my PhD research and eventually a book that I wrote about it. Yeah, so that's kind of interesting too, because in a way you're almost tying back to that.
00:11:04
Speaker
original interest in social anthropology and museums, which is kind of an interesting tieback there. So could you talk a little bit about maybe what these collections meant to the community and basically what you found during your time there, what you learned?
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, so my experience with a mini museum was revelatory in all sorts of ways, but not necessarily in the ways that I expected. So one of the first things that happened after I arrived, so I spent about a month and a half, I think, working with this elderly guy and his wife, who taught me a lot about these ritual objects in the museum.
00:11:46
Speaker
And then he suddenly died, which was really, really unfortunate. He'd been ill for a while and then one day he just passed really quickly and everybody was a bit shocked and taken aback and his wife was in total shock and really upset. And so that threw open all sorts of questions about what would happen to the mini museum, what was going to happen to this old ritual knowledge that I'd been partially documenting. I wasn't quite there yet.
00:12:12
Speaker
That sent my research in all sorts of new directions. I remember distinctly this moment when I wandered down into the mini museum during his wake. With Catholic wakes, you have about seven nights of prayers in the deceased household.
00:12:31
Speaker
And then what you get is you get the whole village ideally coming to the deceased household, bringing gifts, bringing food, bringing money to try and give the bereaved family a little bit of support so that they don't feel ill, they don't feel sad, they don't feel lonely. So it's an incredible moment when you really kind of get this idea of communitas in action.
00:12:53
Speaker
And so I remember wandering down to the mini museum and it had been turned into a sort of gambling den because people often kind of, you know, do a bit of gambling, you know, play some cards, they drink beer, they were kind of eating peanuts and chopping the shelves on the floor, very, very normal stuff for a wake. And I had a chat with a group of, you know, kind of middle aged men who were sitting there and they were asking me about the research that I was doing.
00:13:16
Speaker
And I said, yeah, I'm here to study your culture. I want to understand all about your culture. And one of the guys turned to me and he said, oh, yeah, well, you know, you know, all this stuff is our culture. So he kind of gestured around the room, you know, towards all the objects that were on display, all the stuff that this guy had put together in the museum. This stuff is our culture. It's the old ways. But, you know, if you come back here in about, you know, 10, 15, 20 years time,
00:13:43
Speaker
It's not going to be here anymore. You're just going to find us sitting here eating peanuts and drinking beer. And that's basically it. And I think at that point, I suddenly realized that actually people were not as interested in culture, in this concept of culture as I thought they had been. I suddenly realized that the sorts of processes of transformation of ritual things into culture that Winsler had been describing and that this guy had been doing through the mini museum
00:14:10
Speaker
was not being shared across the village. People were not that interested in creating a sense of Bidoyou culture in the same way. This was very much the project of one particular guy. So although I learned a lot from him, I suddenly realized that he was a very specific section of that village. And to really, really understand what was going on in the village, I had to start looking elsewhere. I had to try and understand
00:14:35
Speaker
what was actually going on in people's everyday lives. That's one of the great things about anthropology. You've got that inductive impulse. You realize that the questions that you started out with were not the same, and then you find other questions that really matter to people. I had a bit of a panic at that point. I was like, oh my God, what do I do? They're not interested in culture. What am I going to talk about? At that point,
00:14:57
Speaker
I then realized, I was sitting there, it was awake, they were saying the rosary and lots of prayers upstairs, and I suddenly realized that actually what seemed to matter in these situations was Christianity. It was Christianity that was structuring people's lives, Christianity that absolutely infused the way they understood what was going on around them.
00:15:14
Speaker
And as I later discovered, Christianity that was shaping the way they related to the old ritual objects and the old ritual practitioners and the spirits and what they were doing. So again, I sort of ended up doing this strange loop where I started with culture and museums veered away from it because I realized that people weren't talking about culture in the same way.
00:15:37
Speaker
then came back to this question via a rather circuitous route through the study of Christianity. What I was realising was that the experience of converting to Christianity was what was encouraging people to differentiate between the old ways, ritual as performed properly by the old practitioners, the spirits that were associated with these rituals, and culture.
00:16:01
Speaker
as it could be manifested in objects, in certain items of dress, in certain songs and dances that could be safely incorporated into their everyday Christian life. So culture is something that was based on the old ways, but that was somehow compatible with Bedayu Christianity.
00:16:17
Speaker
And I don't think I would have quite set off on that path if I hadn't had that moment sitting in the mini museum with those guys who just said, no, we're not that interested in culture really. So yeah, that's what happened in a nutshell. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting, interesting journey, like going back and forth in the different directions. I feel like that's how it always goes with, with anthropology, but we are already at our first break point, which is crazy, but we will be back here in a minute.
00:16:49
Speaker
Okay. So we're back.
Impact of Development Projects on Indigenous Communities
00:16:51
Speaker
We were just finishing talking about your PhD experience. And can you, can you talk a little bit more like after you finished your, your PhD?
00:17:03
Speaker
How did you decide where to go from there and where did you go from there? Okay. So after my PhD, I thought I should try and make full use of the linguistic, the cultural skills I picked up because it'd be a bit of a shame otherwise. And I thought I'd really like to carry on doing research with bidetus. And so as I was writing up my PhD, I was back in Surawa catching up on stuff. When I heard about this
00:17:30
Speaker
dam project that was being planned, about half an hour's drive away from where I'd been doing my fieldwork. This was a neighbouring, quite closely related Bidei region, where a very large tributary of the Sarawak River had been earmarked by the government to create a new
00:17:50
Speaker
dam that would help to secure the capital city's water supply. It wasn't a hydroelectric dam, it was just a straightforward reservoir that would benefit the capital city. There were relatively remote Bidei villages that were located in the mountain range
00:18:10
Speaker
that this tributary ran through. They were between about three to five hours walk from the nearest road up these quite steep hills and across lots of small rivers and things, and big rivers in fact. And so I became really interested in this situation. And I thought,
00:18:28
Speaker
religious change and ethnic politics in my PhD fieldwork, it might be quite interesting to look at a different kind of change, which was all about environmental transformations and the way that people were experiencing what could be really quite a radical rupture from a sort of swidden agriculture-based life up in the hills to a much more urban
00:18:48
Speaker
and quite likely wage earning life in an official resettlement site along the road that was not in their customary land. So a year after I finished doing my PhD fieldwork, I got a research commission and funding to come
00:19:04
Speaker
back and start a new research project with these four villages that were affected by the dam. What I was basically trying to do was understand their perceptions, their experiences of resettlement, but also by extension really quite drastic environmental change.
00:19:21
Speaker
So this was only meant to be a kind of two- or three-year project because the inundation was actually due to start, we thought, in about 2010-2011. As it happened, this turned into a much, much longer research commitment that I'm still very invested in in all sorts of ways, albeit mostly from a distance these days, because it took a lot longer than that for the whole thing to play out. There were various complications along the way. There were a lot of disagreements among the affected communities. And one of the most interesting things I found
00:19:49
Speaker
was that a pretty significant majority of the affected villages were actually keen to move to the resettlement site. There were lots of different reasons for this. Some people felt that they really wanted to give up the backbreaking work of rice planting and quite a
00:20:06
Speaker
difficult to reach area where they didn't necessarily have easy access to hospitals, to schools, to shops and their relatives in town and stuff, and to become modern and to start earning wages instead of being rice farmers. Some people just weren't that keen on moving, but then they felt they had to move because the little village schools and village health facilities were being closed down and moved to the resettlement sites. They had to move with these facilities to make sure that their children had a good future.
00:20:36
Speaker
and some people just fancied a bit of a change. Quite a lot of people were actually keen to go, even if they weren't necessarily happy about leaving their customary lands behind. A small but fairly significant minority were very against moving out of their ancestral lands. As my research progressed, I initially started out working with a broad cross-section of the four affected villages in
00:21:01
Speaker
exceptions of resettlement, why different people wanted to do different things. But as time moved on, I sort of gradually became more interested in a small group of people who were quite actively resisting resettlement and who undertook this very painful and very long-running legal case that went on for about six years to obtain official recognition of their customary land rights in their areas directly above the inundation zone, so right above the new reservoir.
00:21:30
Speaker
rather than be forced to move down to the resettlement site. And so I ended up, as my research progressed, focusing a little bit more on their experiences of going through this Indigenous rights case, the way they worked with lots of different parties, including lawyers, politicians,
00:21:50
Speaker
indigenous movements, the media, all sorts of well-meaning journalists who are coming from different parts of Malaysia and the world, to try and build up this project to stay where they were for various reasons.
00:22:08
Speaker
I didn't quite mean it to end up that way, but once I started getting pulled in that direction, it became harder and harder to maintain my connections with the other people who are all dispersing and moving out to the resettlement side or to urban areas with their compensation money. It was an interesting case, again, of following a lead. But in this case, it ended up really narrowing my research focus
00:22:34
Speaker
onto this one particular case and the experiences of these people who resisted resettlement. And in the end, after about six years and against all expectations, these guys won. They ended up building a brand new village from scratch in the ancestral lands right above the dam itself, and they're still there today. And now I've sort of slightly shifted my research focus to try and understand what exactly it is they're doing to survive in this new village that
00:23:01
Speaker
had previously been just inconceivable that the state and they simply had no conceptual room to imagine. But it is there. So the question is, what do we do when we're actually in this place? How do we make a new village a new village?
00:23:18
Speaker
and keep it going somehow. So yeah, that's where I am now. But it's been a really long-term research thing that's stretched out for over 15 years now. Yeah. I mean, first of all, that's very impressive, amazing, very exciting for this group of people that they were able to make that happen. You hear so many stories where that doesn't happen, so that's
00:23:42
Speaker
That's really awesome. And I'm curious, you know, going through that experience, you know, with this group of people, I'm sure that there were a lot of learning moments.
Understanding Resettlement Desires and Resistance
00:23:53
Speaker
So can you talk about what some of those were for you?
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I know there were there were loads of learning moments. And I think, I think possibly the biggest learning moment was, was when I realized, you know, after having started doing research in these four villages, that I think all my kind of slightly romantic, you know, I wanted to change the world preconceptions had to be held in check for a bit. Because, you know, normally, if you start coming in from the outside, and you look at a situation like that,
00:24:25
Speaker
Generally, my instinct is to think, oh my goodness, you know, small squashed Indigenous groups
00:24:31
Speaker
bravely fighting against big bad government that's trying to resettle them. And I think I realized very quickly that actually it was much more nuanced and complicated on the ground than I could have expected just coming in from the outside, realizing that actually so many people, for whatever reason, wanted to move to the resettlement side and genuinely believed in this project of modernity and becoming modern and people
00:24:59
Speaker
and becoming urban really sort of disrupted any preconceptions I might have had about what Indigenous people might actually want. And I think at that point I suddenly realized that there was a risk that I'd been sort of slotting them into a slightly naive, you know, black and white moral dichotomy.
00:25:18
Speaker
And so that kind of pushed me to start taking a lot more seriously the different ways in which people were articulating the desire to move, the different aspirations and hopes and concerns and fears that they had. It wasn't as if all of them were brainwashed or something or that they were all kind of selling out. There were lots and lots of different reasons that people felt that a move to the resettlement site was a good idea.
00:25:40
Speaker
And I had to take those seriously. So, you know, I've been very, very cautious in writing about the situation of making it sound like this was just a straightforward case of an Indigenous group, you know, being squashed by a government. I mean, I think, you know, it's important not to downplay the power dynamics that were involved in the fact that no matter what happened, these communities were still very much on the back foot.
00:26:06
Speaker
But at the same time, there were various glimmers of agency and hope and aspiration that we really can't dismiss. We have to really try to understand and grapple with as anthropologists, even if it feels uncomfortable to us. So that was one thing, learning to take seriously the people who genuinely wanted to be resettled, the guys who did want to move eventually. But I think the second thing, and this is related, was trying to figure out
00:26:35
Speaker
how to deal with the anti-resettlement group, because I think in many ways the anti-resettlement group saw me as a potential resource. Here I was, an anthropologist with good connections, big schooling as they say, who could help them with their resistance to the resettlement scheme. Now, I was in a slightly awkward situation because I was there on a research permit.
00:27:00
Speaker
which very, very clearly said, you know, you are not to get involved in any of this stuff. They were aware that this was a very, very contentious scheme, and they very clearly said, you know, if you get involved in any sort of activism or anti-resettlement activity, you're out, right? And I think, you know, actually, that's one of the constraints that, as anthropologists, we very often don't talk about. We have to deal with these bureaucracies and these threats and risks.
00:27:24
Speaker
And we need to take those seriously as well. But of course, the other point was that I was also very aware that it was difficult to paint a simplistic, you know, black or white moral picture of the situation because I knew there was so many people in the situation who actually did want to move. So there really wasn't a clear sort of, you know, right or wrong.
00:27:40
Speaker
in this case. And so I think knowing that made me pause and try and figure out how best I could work with this anti-resettlement group. And so I made it very clear to them that I was limited in how much I could support them and that I would basically be there to try to help them document and talk through their experiences. I try to capture the stories, the lived experiences that they were going through, but I could not in any way advocate.
00:28:08
Speaker
for them in any sort of explicit way, because that really wasn't within my remit or my capabilities. And I think they understood that. So I stepped back. I spent a lot of time listening and learning and recording. I captured oral histories, stories about villages, about ancestors, particular families, individuals, relations with the environment, ritual, religious beliefs, including with Christianity. And I wasn't quite sure what I'd do with a lot of this material in the end, but I felt that it was important
00:28:37
Speaker
to be listening and documenting the stuff. And then eventually, as it happened, at one point when the Indigenous Rights case was being prepared, one of the people who was helping with this case, who was in fact also an anthropologist from the local university who was working with the lawyers, got in touch and said, look, you know, you've got all this documentation, all these oral histories, you know, all these stories about the landscape,
00:29:04
Speaker
We need to collate material and evidence for this case. Are you willing to share that with us? And for me, that was one way that I felt that I could actually help and stand with my interlocutors without necessarily being overtly involved in resisting the scheme. And so I sort of handed over a lot of the material that I collated, and that was then combined along with other material, including archive sources, other oral histories.
00:29:33
Speaker
into this much bigger portfolio of evidence that was then used to make a case for their native customary land rights in the area. I played a very, very small part in that. I think what that made me realize was sometimes it's not about shouting as loud as you can or getting directly involved in
00:29:55
Speaker
politics or activism, sometimes it is about just stepping back and just shutting up and listening and documenting and collecting stories. Sometimes that will then give you a chance to make a difference in a small way, but in a way that can actually be beneficial to your interlocutors. That's a really important learning moment that I've hung on to, I think.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, so obviously it's been some time, it sounds like, since this legal battle happened and you mentioned this interest in, you know, how do you create a new village? So how are things going for this community? What has been happening to
Legal and Community Triumphs in Ancestral Lands
00:30:36
Speaker
them since then? Yeah, that's very much an open question. So the new village was created in the mid 2010s, so kind of
00:30:45
Speaker
2013-2014, inundation happened in 2015. At that point, the old villages in the mountain range were inundated. They're underwater now, mostly. My friends can still stand above their old village and look down on the waters. You can see exactly where things were. It's a very, very strange, eerie, drowned landscape. We've got these dead tops of trees and tall clumps of bamboo sticking out of the water.
00:31:15
Speaker
So they've been very adaptable. So one of the difficulties is that although they got the legal recognition to their native customary land rights in the area, the government has still not recognized their new village. So, you know, the government's recognized their land rights, but it has not agreed to register this village as a village. And so it hasn't given them
00:31:40
Speaker
the same sorts of amenities and support like medical care and funding for gravity feed, water systems, solar panels, that sort of thing that they normally give to rural villages. This means that my friends are having to be very, very resourceful and creative about finding ways of surviving in this new place. At the moment, I've been looking at the different strategies they've come up with to try and
00:32:03
Speaker
make things liveable in this new village. These include things like they've been trying to set up their own ecotourism scheme where they pick up visitors at the dam entrance and they zip across the water in this new boat for half an hour and they get there and there's beautiful views and an ecotourist lodge and everything. They've been setting up new small-scale agricultural schemes where they can sell
00:32:27
Speaker
nice organic village produce to supermarkets, to buyers in town. There's lots of different ways that they've been trying to make things work. They've been trying to create these new alliances as well with NGOs and donors and churches who will then give them the material and financial support to
00:32:45
Speaker
to do things like create a mini hydro system for their electricity and to build a new village chapel and so on. It's been really interesting watching these different strategic and often very speculative efforts coming together in this one space, but it is tough. There's still very much
00:33:04
Speaker
in a marginalized and quite sort of, I guess, difficult position, uh, without official governmental support. So there's still a very big question mark here as to what, what's actually going to happen to this village and how sustainable it's going to be in the longterm. So yeah, that's what I'm looking at now. And on that note, we are at our second break point. So when we come back, we'll talk about your work with indigenous communities and Orantans. So everybody stay tuned for that.
00:33:33
Speaker
Okay, so we are back from our break.
Transition to Orangutan Conservation
00:33:36
Speaker
So yeah, let's dive in. How did you get from that work that you were doing to your current work working with these, or I don't know if it's even these same communities, but indigenous communities and orangutans?
00:33:49
Speaker
So with the resettlement project, I began thinking a lot about how people experience very radical and very rapid environmental change. And at the same time, I was also looking at how people, especially my interlocutors who were in the anti-resettlement group, were engaging very strategically and very creatively with a whole range of different international or national rights movements, activists, advocates.
00:34:17
Speaker
in very different ways in order to draw attention to their cause and try and build support for the anti-resettlement legal case. That combination of experiences of environmental change and engagement with international movements and politics got me started thinking about what was going on elsewhere in Borneo.
00:34:39
Speaker
At that point, I started thinking more about how these questions could be applied to another major industry across the island of Borneo, but also Sumatra, which is orangutan conservation. Very, very well-known, very charismatic and prominent inhabitant of the island. At that point, I decided to try and shift my attention a little bit to
00:35:01
Speaker
to understanding the social, political, cultural and also aesthetic dimensions of orangutan conservation and especially the sort of ground level complications and tensions that conservation programmes could generate, you know, by looking at the interactions between conservationists and indigenous villages and orangutans.
00:35:22
Speaker
Now I should say that this research has been very different to my previous research in the sense that it's all been done collectively as part of two research projects, one called Bokok and the other one called the Global Lives of the Orangutans, which involved me working with a small team of postdocs and PhD students
00:35:40
Speaker
on creating this multi-sided ethnography of this global network of orangutan conservation. I think this was really important for a couple of reasons. One was a very pragmatic reason, which was when I started doing this research, I was not in a position to actually do long-term fieldwork in Borneo. I had two small children at the time, and it was just impossible for me to do
00:36:04
Speaker
what I'd done with my PhD and my postdoctoral research. I thought it'd be much more useful for me to be able to work with a team of people who could in fact do that sort of work, but then keep that conversation going as a team. The second reason was simply that this
00:36:19
Speaker
Conservation is a huge, sprawling, incredibly complicated and problematic global field. It's exactly the sort of thing that you can't study in one place, which is what anthropologists have conventionally done. What these two projects tried to do was actually pull together ethnographic research and fieldwork and perspectives from quite specific nodes of orangutan conservation across the world, including the UK, international scientific and artistic imaginaries, which was what I was working on,
00:36:49
Speaker
and then very specific rural areas where conservation programs were unfolding, and very often causing these complicated interactions between humans and apes and conservationists. We've just tied up both of those projects. It's been a really, really exciting and very rewarding
00:37:09
Speaker
experience working with my colleagues and I just want to say that anything else I say at this point is reflective not simply of my own research but also of our collective discussions and the way we've been thinking and writing together as a team for the last several years. So I think essentially
00:37:28
Speaker
What we're interested in is trying to understand how ideas and people and finances and all sorts of other things move from one place to another across the globe in orangutan conservation. The effects that these movements generate in different sites on the ground
00:37:45
Speaker
And also the way that these movements may or may not enable orangutan conservation to hang together. So we were as interested in the sorts of gaps and slippages and points of conflict in orangutan conservation as we were in the way that things actually connected and held together and kind of moved from one context to another. So yeah, that's basically where we got to. I can't remember what the question was.
00:38:10
Speaker
The question was basically just how the one led to the other. So can you talk a little bit more about your specific role and what that has looked like on more of a
00:38:29
Speaker
I guess, day-to-day basis?
Global Networks in Conservation Efforts
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of my work has been in kind of leading these two research projects. So, you know, making sure we're doing, we're reading together, we're thinking together. I usually take the lead on co-authored pieces. You know, there's quite a strong sense of responsibility for all the research that's been carried out as part of these two projects. My specific research ended up focusing on the digital manifestations of around
00:38:56
Speaker
the social media scape of orangutan conservation as this really strange dispersed space in which people who shared a common interest in saving these apes from extinction came together and the kinds of politics and modes of intervention that arose as a result of those interactions. In one of my articles, I wrote about how
00:39:18
Speaker
Very often, orangutan conservation organisations try to raise funds and awareness for their courses by using what I call a logic of small acts. It's this idea that even though you're somewhere in the West and you don't have the expertise or the time or the money to actually be physically there in the field, in the forests, saving orangutans, as people like to see it, you can still
00:39:41
Speaker
contribute in lots of small ways and cumulatively those small acts can make a genuine difference on the ground. So that's the kind of logic through which many conservation organisations raise their funds and get people invested in their causes. Another thing I did was look at how
00:39:58
Speaker
different visualizations of orangutans, but also orangutan extinction, biodiversity loss. All these related questions were being produced by both science and popular media. Extinction is a very, very difficult thing to visualize, to pin down in concrete terms. One of my questions was, how do you visualize the extinction of the orangutan? How do these things come to take visual shape and visual form?
00:40:23
Speaker
and what kinds of politics do these give rise to? I was looking a lot at how these discourses, these narratives, and these visual imaginaries that shape orangutan conservation and get sent out across the world to places like Borneo and Sumatra, where orangutans actually exist,
00:40:42
Speaker
are being created, what they actually do, what effects they have as they move across this global network of orangutan conservation. And I was also drawing partly on my earlier research, you know, up in the hills with Bidoé communities where orangutans are not
00:40:57
Speaker
you know, they're not really seen very much. They're not very much a feature of everyday life, but people are sort of vaguely aware of them because they occasionally do pop up and so do conservationists. But that's a slightly different story. So I was trying to pull all these different insights together, you know, to try and understand what's going on at the source of these conservation narratives and organisations. And then I had a number of different people working on different
00:41:18
Speaker
nodes of orangutan conservation that we could then pull together. It was like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw to try and pull together this bigger picture of how this network operated. I was here looking at these visualizations and ideas as they moved around the world in digital spaces. One of the postdocs on my team was working with UK-based orangutan adoption schemes. It's these schemes that UK-based charities run to try and
00:41:45
Speaker
get money and get support for orangutans that are being rehabilitated over in Borneo and Sumatra. And then two PhD students, both of whom were working at very specific conservation sites, but very much looking at the interactions between ordinary people and conservationists. And then another postdoc who was in rural central Kalimantan looking at a new
00:42:08
Speaker
community conservation scheme in an area where there are lots of wild orangutans that have been set up by this western conservation research group. We're all doing fieldwork and research at the same time and we're all talking to each other constantly and trying to pull together our insights and findings and descriptions from these different bits of orangutan conservation to try and build up this
00:42:30
Speaker
slightly fractured and slightly weird picture of how this one conservation nexus operates. And it was absolutely fascinating stuff. So yes, that's, that's, that's what I did, but it was very much in relation to other bits of that, of those two research projects. Okay. So first of all, when you said that, when you were talking about orangutans not being, or, you know, popping up every now and then, and then conservation's popping up. I just had this image of like the stereotypical conservationist with like their Indiana Jones outfit, like just popping out of nowhere.
00:42:59
Speaker
But before we get too far from your methods, I'm just curious, your experience as you're from Southeast Asia, but not the communities that have orangutans or that you've worked with, but then you're also looking at this project at communities in the UK, where you're living and across
Navigating Cultural Perceptions and Stereotypes
00:43:23
Speaker
the world.
00:43:23
Speaker
As a social anthropologist, what was that like for you looking at... Obviously, you're connected in some ways to all these different communities and also did it affect the way you related to the people you were studying in the UK versus
00:43:44
Speaker
you know, in Borneo, for example, just if you had any reflections on that experience. It's a really tricky question because, you know, I think in many ways that
00:43:55
Speaker
this experience has really blurred the binaries, the divisions that tend to dominate contemporary popular understandings of anthropology. Because historically, there's very much this stereotype of anthropology, which in some ways gets reproduced in doctoral training programs and universities all over the global north, as the science of
00:44:20
Speaker
you know, white Western individuals going out to study non-Western radically different cultural others. And that, you know, obviously anthropology has changed a lot since those days, but I think that image is very much alive and well, and it still gets baked into, you know, the way we teach our students about field work, you know, participant observation, dealing with otherness, taking seriously, you know, that sort of thing.
00:44:50
Speaker
And it also, you know, it very often infuses our theory because a lot of our sorts of conceptual insights come from the revelations that you're expected to get when you're confronted with radical otherness, you know, radical cultural difference. And so, you know, I think I've always been very aware of this because as a sort of, you know, as a Singaporean Southeast Asian anthropologist working in the UK for a long time, but with indigenous roots and Borneo, I've been very aware that I don't quite fit that
00:45:19
Speaker
that white Western anthropologist mold. This was absolutely clear to me even when I was doing my PhD. I didn't necessarily feel like I fitted very well into that stereotype, which in a way we were all being encouraged to live up to in our PhD training program.
00:45:40
Speaker
And so I think it became a little bit more obvious to me when I was doing this research on Orangutan conservation, because in some ways it felt sometimes like when I was talking to people at events in the UK, at demonstrations, at charity events, I sometimes felt a little bit uncomfortable in the sense that it almost felt as if they were looking at me as if I was one of those one of those Southeast Asians, very generic Southeast Asians, one of those people who lives over in Southeast Asia.
00:46:08
Speaker
not quite alongside orangutans, but in the same countries, in the same regions. I think in people's minds, if you sort of mentioned that, I'm pretty sure they'd say, no, no, no, you're obviously different because you're Singaporean and they're indigenous people in Borneo or Sumatra or whatever. I often sort of felt like there was an assumption of complicity, which made me feel quite
00:46:32
Speaker
weird, in the sense that it was assumed that because I was over here and I spoke good English and I was an anthropologist, that I would therefore be complicit with this slightly
00:46:45
Speaker
not slightly, I mean, very often, you know, completely colonial view of what was going on in Borneo and Sumacho, where, you know, there were these ignorant, uneducated, you know, cruel natives who did not understand the value of orangutans and were not good environmental subjects, just kind of, you know, just shooting them at will and being really horrible to them and either that or just not understanding why they were important, right? So we've got to educate these poor people. And there was a little bit of a sense that, you know,
00:47:16
Speaker
I was being pulled into that space, that there was an assumption that I sort of belonged in that space. But at the same time, people were a little bit wary of me just in case I didn't necessarily share the same values as they did. So I remember having this slightly weird conversation where we were talking, I can't remember who it was, but I was talking to somebody at some random event about how
00:47:43
Speaker
some people in Borneo still hunt and consume orangutans, because why not? There's just any other game that you might encounter in the forest. And this guy was like, yeah, these people will just eat anything, won't they? You just never know what sort of diet they have. And then he paused and looked at me, and I could almost imagine him thinking, ooh, is she Chinese? Chinese eat everything, don't they? Ooh, weirdos.
00:48:11
Speaker
they're saying the right thing here. And so there was always this really uneasy, you know, I wasn't quite sure, and they were never quite sure whether I was fully complicit and fully with them, or whether I was part of that other, who they were trying very hard to be sympathetic towards and understand. So it was a really weird one, you know, there was no overt hostility, but there's very much the sense of, oh, do I or do I not get enrolled into these very sort of colonial assumptions about what's going on on the ground in places like Borneo?
00:48:39
Speaker
Yeah. So did that experience like make you think at all about like, or think in different ways about, you know, how you might've been perceived by the communities in Borneo?
00:48:51
Speaker
Just curious. No, I don't think so because I was, I mean, certainly for the Bedouye communities that I've worked with for a long time, I've always known how they perceive me. They've always perceived me as, or I mean, certainly, especially when I was younger, they always called me Tina, which just means Chinese person, right? That Chinese girl, because I was from Singapore, by definition, most people in Singapore are Chinese and most people in Singapore are rich.
00:49:20
Speaker
There was always a little bit of that going on anyway, and sometimes I get requests like, could you buy me a nice present? Or could you help me find my cousin a job in this or that Chinese shop in the town? Obviously, I couldn't because I basically couldn't, but there were these stereotypes that they had as well.
00:49:43
Speaker
They were very clear that I was not a white Western anthropologist. I was a girl from Singapore who was doing big schooling, as they said, in the UK, but they didn't relate to me necessarily as a white person. I think I've always been aware of that. As to how I might be perceived by
00:50:02
Speaker
some of the Indigenous communities that maybe my postdocs and PhDs worked with, that's a really interesting question. I think that would depend on the context in which I was introduced to them. If I came in, for example, under the auspices of a conservation organisation, I might either be seen as – they know I was – they call me Chinese anyway, but I think they'd sort of
00:50:27
Speaker
basically link me with either, you know, these middle-class urbanites from Jakarta or, you know, the cities or with white people. And that would be a slightly different proposition because they're often quite suspicious of conservation. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about what, you know, so we talked about methods, but what did you actually find when you were doing this research?
Challenges of Conservation on Indigenous Lands
00:50:52
Speaker
We found some very interesting things. Maybe they're not entirely surprising, but they were still very interesting. So I think maybe the first thing to say is that it became very, very clear to us very early on. And I think I only knew this anyway from my previous fieldwork, that this kind of international, you know, mostly Western global north fascination with orangutans as this charismatic, unique endangered species isn't necessarily shared in the forests where orangutans actually live.
00:51:22
Speaker
So a lot of our time was spent actually trying to understand what people thought about orangutans in these spaces. Generally, I think we can say that most Indigenous communities in Borneo don't see orangutans as particularly interesting or special or exceptional. They're very much part of this wider multi-species environment, an environment in which there are lots of living beings, including trees, rivers, animals, humans, spirits,
00:51:52
Speaker
that are bound by certain relations and certain ties of, you know, accountability and reciprocity. So there's certain moral codes that you expect to find across all living beings in a lot of these environments. And so, you know, I mean, most of the time if you're an Indigenous person and you encounter an orangutan in the
00:52:12
Speaker
jungle, you'd be like, whatever, no big deal, nothing interesting. Sometimes you might hunt it and kill it and eat it, but you wouldn't necessarily see it as particularly special or particularly interesting or different to any other primate that you might encounter. I think one of the big problems and one of the big sources of tension that we found in our research is that
00:52:36
Speaker
What conservation does is it disrupts this moral and social fabric, because with the backing of the state and with laws and stuff, it comes in and it plucks this one animal that nobody necessarily sees as special or exceptional out from this multi-species fabric, this wider environment, and makes it special. It makes it super visible, super protected, and therefore
00:53:02
Speaker
no longer bound by the same sorts of relations and conventions that govern life in these environments. It's conservation that makes the orangutan exceptional. This very often comes, people feel, at the expense of Indigenous
00:53:20
Speaker
land rights, their access to their customary land, to their livelihoods, because what you tend to find in these spaces is that conservation programs will come in and in the name of saving orangutans will demarcate certain areas that they see as theirs, their customary lands as protected forests in order to save orangutans.
00:53:40
Speaker
This means restrictions on livelihood, so you can't stop people doing Sweden cultivation because there's a lot of burning going on, stopping people logging trees in their own forests, restricting people's access to their customary lands, and so on. The problem here is that conservation doesn't only pluck orangutans out of this wider moral fabric.
00:54:02
Speaker
it also does so at the expense of indigenous people's wellbeing and rights and access to land. And that causes tremendous problems in these spaces and a lot of resentment about what exactly these conservationists are doing in these spaces. So, you know, another interesting thing that we found is that for many of our indigenous interlocutors, you know, conservationists are very often not seen as any different to
00:54:26
Speaker
other external players, like companies, or the state, or tourists, or whatever. They're all seen as these quite powerful and well-resourced outsiders that have some sort of vested interest in Indigenous peoples' lands, just for different reasons. Companies might want to extract stuff from it, and conservationists might want to protect it. But in both cases, local communities just end up losing out. So yeah, it's not very cheerful, but there you go. That's the reality on the ground at the moment.
00:54:58
Speaker
Well, on that cheerful note, we're right at the end. Was there any last, you know, little things that you wanted to share or make sure that our listeners understood before
Improving Conservation through Cooperation
00:55:10
Speaker
we go? Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't want to end on too depressing a note. So, you know what? Well, I think it's really important to be
00:55:17
Speaker
aware of the many historical and contemporary problems that conservation has caused. I think there are also various organizations and individuals who are working very hard to make conservation better and to improve their engagement with local communities, make sure that what they're doing doesn't only benefit
00:55:40
Speaker
a particular species, but can also work to benefit humans and their environments. It's a very, very difficult balancing act, but there are openings and there are possibilities, and there are people who are really trying to make that change on the ground, many of whom are from the region, from Borneo and Sumatra themselves.
00:56:02
Speaker
who have a very different kind of vested interest in what goes on in these spaces. I think what we're seeing emerging at this point is new ways of doing conservation that are relatively unusual, but that I hope will create more room for the coexistence of different values, different methods.
00:56:22
Speaker
And yeah, different ways of relating to both humans and non-humans. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Really appreciate you taking the time, especially since you're in the UK. So it's much later where you are right now. It's getting dark now. But yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.
00:56:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
00:57:11
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org.
00:57:29
Speaker
You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at Living Heritage Anthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council or on Twitter at LivingHeritageA. As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
00:57:53
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.