Reed L. Wadley

The Demise of Swidden in Southeast Asia? Local Realities and Regional Ambiguities

Abstract Swidden farmers throughout Southeast Asia are rapidly abandoning traditional land use practices. While these changes have been quantified in numerous local areas, no reliable region-wide data have been produced. In this article we discuss three linked issues that account for at least some of this knowledge gap. First, swidden is a diverse, complex, and dynamic land use that data gatherers find difficult to see, define and measure, and therefore often relegate to a “residual category” of land use. Second, swidden is a smallholder category, and government authorities find it difficult to quantify what is happening in many dynamic and varied smallholdings. Third, national policies in all countries of Southeast Asia have tried to outlaw swidden farming and to encourage swiddeners to adopt permanent agriculture land use practices. Drawing on specific, local examples from throughout the region to illustrate these points, we argue that an accurate assessment of the scale and pace of changes in swidden farming on a regional level is critically important for identifying the processes that account for these shifts, as well as evaluating their consequences, locally and regionally.

Autonomy, identity, and ‘illegal’ logging in the borderland of West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Borderland identity and traditional community autonomy affect the practice of ‘illegal’ logging and the impact of regional autonomy among the Iban along the upper Kapuas borderland in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. We examine these issues with attention to the historical development of the Kalimantan Iban as a border people, their struggle to maintain control over their traditional forest resources under the fluctuating power of the Indonesian state and their approaches in dealing with regional and cross-border interests in the harvesting of their forests.

Conserving Nature in Culture: Case Studies from Southeast Asia

This volume is the product of a four-year research project that was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The project rejects the problematization of local communities in conservation contexts and is concerned, instead, to identify the ways that local communities support the maintenance of biodiversity and the ways that extra-local forces undermine it. It is both inter-disciplinary and collaborative in character, representing the work of both U.S. and Southeast Asian scholars and students. Considerable project resources were devoted to translating and editing the writings of some of the Southeast Asian contributors, making this their first international, English-language publication.

Religious Scepticism and its Social Context: An Analysis of Iban Shamanism

In recent years, anthropological studies of religion have increasingly touched on the importance of religious scepticism, often within the context of modernity or cultural and political change (e.g., Goody 1995; Gable 1995, 2002; Pigg 1996; Robbins 2001; Kirsch 2004). Yet much earlier, anthropologists recognised the necessity of including scepticism in accounts and analyses of religious communities (e.g., Radin 1953, 94–95; Lévi-Strauss 1963, 169–72; Geertz 1966, 43). Radin (1957, 34–35) argued eloquently that people in small-scale societies place great value on ‘unhampered selfexpression’, under the condition that sceptics take responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour. Thus, scepticism about religious claims may incite ridicule or cause concern among close associates (ostensibly tied to the supernatural repercussions said to result from disbelief), but people may otherwise allow such ‘self-expression’ unless sceptics directly or indirectly bring harm to others through their claims (pp. 50, 55). Indeed, concern over religious scepticism’s potential to damage social ties may be ubiquitous in human society, and scepticism may usually be acceptable only when one does not reject the wrong person’s influence, such as someone in authority or on whom one is dependent. In this paper, we consider the social context of religious scepticism with an examination of shamanism among the Iban of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Rather than focusing exclusively on the often discussed connection to modernity, we examine more broadly the various ways scepticism affects close social relations in a small community. This parallels a cross-cultural study we have done that finds a close correspondence between religious scepticism and social context (Pashia, Wadley and Palmer 2005); however, we have also found that, although scepticism directed at religious practitioners such as shamans is particularly frequent cross-culturally (e.g., Atkinson 1989; Wirtz 2003), there is often insufficient information to determine the exact nature of relations among practitioners, their critics and audience, which we

Treachery and Deceit: Parallels in Tribal and Terrorist Warfare?

The use of treachery (a deliberate betrayal of trust) and deceit (the ensnaring by guile) are generally overlooked aspects of warfare, whether in tribal or state societies. What distinguishes treacherous attacks from other forms of ambush is the necessity of peaceful social interaction between attacker and victim immediately prior to the assault. This article examines the cross-cultural evidence for its use in tribal societies, and relates the implications of these findings to the apparent use of treachery and deceit in a number of guerrilla/terrorist conflicts, including the Al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001.

On tools and traditions. Author's reply

We agree with McNabb et al. (CA 45: 653–77) that a focus on the relationship between tradition and the manufacture of stone tools is the key to finding the “holy grail of lithic studies” (p. 67). However, along with White (p. 671), we question whether “the evidence presented justifies dismissing the presence of knapping traditions.” To resolve this debate, we propose an alternative approach to the meaning of social traditions. McNabb et al. set up the following alternatives for stone tool manufacture (p. 654): either strong lines of social learning with direct imposition or sanctioning of “standardized values” or “individualized memic constructs,” the product of “habituated” manufacture through “a highly developed capacity for routine” (p. 667). We suggest that their definition of “social tradition” (“any regularity that arises from the pressure inherent in living within a tightly bounded social group, whether or not it takes a group-specific form”) (p. 654) has an obvious flaw, namely, that it requires the existence of “a tightly bounded social group.” Social traditions exist despite good evidence from human foragers indicating that localized gatherings of humans are fluid and fuzzy, not tightly bounded (Palmer and Wright 1996, Palmer, Frederickson, and Tilley 1997, Marlowe 2004). Further, anthropologists not only talk as if the world were carved into tightly bounded “cultures” or “societies” but also reify these abstract entities by attributing to them the ability to do such things as exert pressure on individuals in order to create regularity in their behavior (e.g., tool manufacture). However, the identifiable reality, as Murdock (1971) made clear, is one in which individuals influence the behavior of others. Fortunately, the word “tradition” (including “social tradition” and “cultural tradition”) can be defined in terms of individuals’ influencing others. Specifically, traditions are behavior copied from ancestors (usually

Does Environmental Talk Equal Environmental Knowledge? An Example from Newfoundland

To paraphrase Roepstorff, composite concepts consisting of a catchy or value loaded first word such as local, indigenous, traditional, environmental followed by knowledge have recently become popular in the environmental literature (2000, p. 165). Indeed, the recognition of “the value of traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples, and particularly their traditional environmental knowledge [has] unleashed a flood of research” (Johnson 1992, p. v). This has been motivated in part by the possibility that such knowledge serves as a guide to better resource management (McGoodwin and Dyer 1994), combined with an awareness of “the erosion of indigenous knowledge (IK) systems” (Grenier 1998, p. 4) and of their potential use in securing resource tenure rights for marginalized peoples worldwide. Despite this recent surge in interest, the “concept of Traditional Environmental Knowledge or TEK [and similar acronyms] draws on two older traditions, namely ethnoscience and cultural ecology” (Neis et al. 1999, p. 217).