Authorizing the Malaysian Rainforest: Configuring Space, Contesting Claims and Conquering Imaginaries

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 144-166

  Sioh, Maureen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONSERVATION ETHICS; DEFORESTATION; ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; FOREST MANAGEMENT; PERCEPTION;

MALAYSIA;

EID: 0031878559     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409800500202     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Han Suyin, And the rain my drink (St Albans, Granada, 1976), p. 12. Han based her novel on her experiences working as a doctor during her 10-year residency in Malaysia. Much of this material was recounted as factual experience in her autobiography, My house has two doors (London, Cape, 1981). Her position, as the pro-communist wife of a British Special Branch (Intelligence) officer, was unusual to say the least.
2. N. Barber, The war of the running dogs: how Malaya defeated the communist guerrillas, 1948-60 (London, Collins, 1971), p. 13
3. Malaya became Malaysia six years after achieving independence from Britain, when Malaya was consolidated with Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore in 1963. Singapore was expelled from the union two years later because of Malay fears of a predominantly Chinese population. Since most of the Chinese were concentrated in Singapore, forcing Singapore out of the union preserved the balance of power in favour of the Malays.
4. The Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) is a government agency created to oversee the development of agricultural land for landless Malay peasants; see Tunku Shamsul Bahrin and Lee Boon Thong, 3 decades of evolution (Kuala Lumpur, FELDA, 1988).
5. The first-tier NICs financed their industrial transition through a combination of western aid and soft loans that were largely due to their position as pro-western buffer states in the Cold War. See M. Castells, ‘Four Asian tigers with a dragon head: a comparative analysis of the state, economy and society in the Asian Pacific Rim’, in R. Appelbaum and J. Henderson, ed., States and development in the Asian Pacific Rim (Newbury Park, CA, Sage, 1992), pp. 33-70.
6. D. Haraway, Primate visions (New York, Routledge, 1989), p. 1.
7. I have taken Edward Said's comment about territory in general and applied it to the rainforest; see Culture and imperialism (New York, Vintage, 1994), p. 7.
8. A. Vidler, ‘Bodies in space/subjects in the city: psychopathologies of modern urbanism’, Differences 5 (1993), pp. 31-51.
9. S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: iconography and landscape’, in S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, eds, The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).
10. S. Daniels, ‘The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’, in Cosgrove and Daniels, The iconography of landscape, p. 61.
11. S. Schama, Landscape and memory (Toronto, Random House, 1995), pp. 185-205.
12. R. Grove, Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1. However, one can dispute Grove's argument that the search for El Dorado was motivated by theology by suggesting that greed may have exerted at least an equal influence.
13. M. Taussig, Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man: a study in terror and healing (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1987).
14. C. Merchant, Ecological revolutions: nature, gender and science in New England (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 2.
15. Said, Culture and imperialism, p. 69.
16. Controversial projects in contemporary Malaysia, such as the Pergau Dam which is being financed by the British government, are still justified in the evangelizing language of development and modernization.
17. This section on the early colonial history of Malaya is taken from R. O. Winstedt, A history of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Marican, 1988), pp. 65-222. Malaya is taken to mean the peninsular portion of present-day Malaysia.
18. P. Ramasamy, Plantation labour, unions, capital and the state in Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7.
19. Charles Hirschman claims that this system of ethnic classification was a colonial invention. See ‘The meaning and measurement of ethnicity in Malaysia: an analysis of census classifications’, Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987), pp. 555-82.
20. Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the way thither (repr. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1967); Sir Frank Swettenham, Malay sketches (London, The Bodley Head, 1895; repr. Singapore, Graham Brash, 1984); John Turnbull Thompson, Glimpses into life in Malayan lands (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1864; repr. 1984). Swettenham, Bird and Thompson all describe how the early British administrators frequently had to resort to boats to investigate their territorial possessions because of the lack of roads.
21. The material for this paragraph on Malay settlements and changing land tenure comes from H. Brookfield, A. S. Hadi and Z. Mahmud, The city and the village: the in-situ urbanization of villagers and their land around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 28-45.
22. J. Jackson, Planters and speculators: Chinese and European agricultural enterprise in Malaya, 1786-1921 (Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya Press, 1968).
23. The usefulness of Chinese planters to the colonial authorities is commented upon by Isabella Bird's frequent approving (albeit racist) comments on the honesty and industriousness of these planters and her assessment of the economic value of their revenue contribution to British coffers. See Bird, The Golden Chersonese. Financing came from Chinese merchants and shopkeepers in the Straits Settlements. Some of these Chinese merchants had become wealthy from tinmining and others were descendants of the Baba community. These wealthy Chinese, depicted by J. Jackson in Planters and speculators and Yeap Joo Kim in The patriarch (Singapore, Times Printers, 1975), were the builders of the abandoned mansions described in the opening paragraph of this paper.
24. These potentially cultivable areas were known as kangkars, and covered between 2500 and 20000 acres. Kangkars consisted of both cultivated land, known as bangsals, and forested land. The bangsals were worked on by groups of 10 men (there were very few women). See Jackson, Planters and speculators.
25. Isabella Bird reports 300 tiger attacks in one year on Singapore plantations alone; The Golden Chersonese, p. 110. Sweetenham, Malay sketches, and Thompson, Glimpses, writing in the nineteenth century, also devoted chapters in their books to describing attacks by tigers.
26. Bird, The Golden Chersonese; Sweetenham, Malay sketches; Thompson, Glimpses; Sir Hugh Clifford, Bush whacking and other tales from Malaya (Kingswood, Surrey, Windmill Press, 1929); Winstedt, A history of Malaya; Jackson, Planters and speculators; R. Aiken, Imperial belvederes (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1994).
27. Bird, The Golden Chersonese, p. 244.
28. L. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, Academic Press, 1979).
29. Brockway's Science and colonial expansion and Grove's Green imperialism offer good descriptions of the various crop experiments in the colonies.
30. Jackson, Planters and speculators is a discussion on the transition from Chinese to European primacy in plantation agriculture in Malaya.
31. See Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn's discussion of the political economy of wild rubber in the Amazon in The fate of the forests: developers, destroyers and defenders of the Amazon (London, Verso, 1989); and Brockway's discussion of the theft and transport of rubber seedling from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Ceylon and Singapore, in Science and colonial expansion.
32. P. R. Wycherley, ‘The Singapore Botanic Gardens and rubber in Malaya’, Malaya, Sept. 1960.
33. D. Headrick, The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism 1850-1940 (New York, Oxford University Press), p. 245.
34. Jackson, Planters and speculators, p. 91.
35. Lalang is the tall, coarse grass that ecologically colonizes land that has had its primary forest cut down and is left uncultivated.
36. Ramasamy, Plantation, p. 14.
37. Headrick, Tentacles, p. 246. Also see Ramasamy, Plantation, p. 12, for changes in acreage dedicated to rubber.
38. R. Jackson, The Malayan Emergency: the Commonwealth's wars 1948-1966 (New York, Routledge, 1991), p. 5.
39. For a history of the agency houses, see Voon Phin Keong, Western rubber planting enterprise in Southeast Asia 1876-1921 (Kuala Lumpur, Penerbit Universiti Malaya, 1976).
40. Headrick, Tentacles, p. 246.
41. Letters between planters and Rubber Research Institute (RRI) scientists published in the annual reports of the RRI 1928-32.
42. F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, ‘Tensions of empire: colonial control and visions of rule’, American Ethnologist 16 (1989), pp. 609-21.
43. R. Stubbs, Hearts and minds in guerrilla warfare: the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960 (Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 51; and Ramasamy, Plantation, pp. 32.
44. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion, p. 161.
45. Ramasamy, Plantation, p. 23, argues that the decision to import Tamil labour rather than more Chinese labourers was a political strategy to reduce the chances of a single ethnic group gaining a preponderance in the country.
46. Haraway, Primate visions, p. 10.
47. An example of colonial retaliation is in the case of the murder of James Birch, the British Resident in Perak; see Swettenham, Malay sketches, pp. 227-47.
48. See nn. 72 and 73 below.
49. Windstedt, History of Malaya, p. 247.
50. Cheah Boon Kheng, Red star over Malaya: resistance and social conflict during and after the Japanese occupation, 1941-1946 (Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1987). Local elites in some countries cooperated with the Japanese as much out of fear as in the hope of once and for all getting rid of their European colonial masters.
51. Older Chinese women in Malaysia relate how even those who chose to remain in urban areas would flee into the forest at the approach of Japanese troops looking for women to rape. My mother recalls hiding in the undergrowth and hearing the soldiers pass by only a few feet away. To many women, the dense tangle of the forest offered protection in a dangerous period.
52. With the fall of Malaya to the Japanese imminent and with the British decision to flee, the latter had to cooperate with the communists, as they were the only group organized enough to make up a network of subversive agents during the Japanese occupation, see R. Jackson, The Malayan Emergency, p. 8. Also see F. Spencer Chapman, The jungle is neutral (London, Chatto & Windus, 1949) for a description of the temporary forest-based British-Chinese communist guerrilla alliance against the Japanese.
53. Stubbs, Hearts, p. 10.
54. See Ramasamy, Plantation, for a discussion of labour unrest.
55. Chapman, The jungle is neutral; Cheah, Red Star, Han, And the rain my d;rink Barber, The war of the running d;ogs Stubbs, Hearts and minds; Jackson, The Malayan Emergency; and Leary, The importance of the Orang Asli in the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960.
56. Quoted by Sir Gerald Templer, the British high commissioner to Malaya, in Stubbs, Hearts, p. 148.
57. Barber refers to the jungle as the ‘battlefield for a strange and terrible war, as relentless and cruel as the jungle itself. See Barber, The war of the running dogs, p. 14.
58. All the statistics are from T. R. McHale, Rubber and the Malaysian economy (Singapore, MPH, 1967).
59. Forest populations were always seen as uncontrollable; the British and later, the Malayled governments regarded the Orang Asli with frustration because they could not claim their allegiance. The situation continues today in the current stand-off between the Malaysian government and various indigenous groups in Sarawak.
60. Taken from Sir Henry Gurney's Despatch no. 5 to the secretary of state for the colonies, 30 May 1949. See J. Coates, Suppressing insurgency: an analysis of the Malayan Emergency 1948-1954 (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1992), p. 78.
61. Stubbs, Hearts and minds, p. 99.
62. M. L. Pratt, ‘Scratches on the face of the country: or, what Mr. Barrow saw in the land of the Bushman’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), pp. 119-43.
63. This is the motif that runs through Han's novel, And the rain my drink. A local Marxist writer like Puthucheary, who did challenge British control of the Malayan economy, ended up writing from his prison cell: M. Puthucheary, Ownership and control in the Malayan economy (Singapore, Eastern Universities Press, 1955).
64. Descriptions of this defensive landscape were culled from the Malayan newspapers The Straits Times and The Malay Mail from the 1950s.
65. Han, And the rain my drink, p. 88.
66. Jackson, The Malayan Emergency, p. 23.
67. Barber, The war of the running dogs, p. 55, notes one case where the communists camped 3 miles away from the American-owned tinmine that they attacked.
68. A example of the predominance of race within this class war is that the wage differential by race was approximately three times bigger than the wage differential by gender for the same type of work on the estates. These comparisons are given for Indian and Chinese workers; European staff obviously earned several times more in their managerial positions and few Malays worked on the estates. See Ramasamy, Plantation, p. 65.
69. While their political positions were mainly determined by race and/or class, the women who did play active political or military roles were assigned these roles on preconceived notions of female mobility. For example, women were commonly used as couriers by the communists because, for a while, the guise of going about domestic chores or indulging in ‘feminine’ pastimes such as window shopping allowed them to move about relatively unscrutinized by security forces. This subject forms a separate section in the larger historical work of which this paper is a part.
70. Ramasamy claims that the British authorities had earlier antagonized unions by providing estates with Japanese POWs to replace striking workers. Furthermore, Ramasamy suggests that the British trade union adviser in Malaya was responsible for devising the strategy of setting up rival pro-British unions to the ones sponsored by the MCP; see Plantation, pp. 61-97.
71. For examples, see Chapman, The jungle is neutral, p. 47; Jackson, The Malayan Emergency, p. 61; Barber, The war of the running dogs, p. 263. The books abound, in examples of the terrors that beset jungle life.
72. H. Miller, Jungle war in Malaya (London, Arthur Baker, 1972), pp. 110-16, 144-49.
73. Chapman, The jungle is neutral, p. 115.
74. This unpopular and dictatorial decree known as the Briggs Plan is documented in all accounts of the Emergency (Jackson, The Malayan Emergency; Barber, The war of the running dogs; Stubbs, Hearts and m)in,ds and is also described in Brookfield et al., The city and the village, in the context of urbanization in Malaysia.
75. For various social restrictions incurred due to Emergency regulations, see File CO 1030/1 in the Public Record Office.
76. Ironically, one of these new villages was Petaling Jaya, which today is one of the three most expensive residential areas surrounding Kuala Lumpur and is the hub of the professional expatriate community in Malaysia.
77. Barber, War of the running dogs, p. 184.
78. Jackson, The Malayan Emergency, p. 115.
79. In 1958 my parents were travelling on the train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur when it was attacked by the communists. Government troops on board exchanged gunfire with their attackers who then withdrew, allowing the train to continue on its way.
80. Quoted in Stubbs, Hearts and minds, p. 259.
81. Leary, Orang A;sli Jackson, The Malayan Emergency, p. 38, adds that the British also used Dayak trackers from Sarawak.
82. See Winstedt, History, p. 25; Coates, Suppressing insurgency, p. 88; M. Morgan, ‘The rise and fall of Malayan trade unionism, 1945-50’, in M. Amin and M. Caldwell, ed., Malaya: the making of a neo-colony (Nottingham, Spokesman, 1977).
83. H. Salleh, ‘Peasants, proletarianization and the state: FELDA settlers in Pahang’, in J. Kahn and F. Low, eds, Fragmented visions (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1992), pp. 107-32.
84. P. Hurst, Rainforest politics: ecological destruction in Southeast Asia (London, Zed, 1990), pp. 46-121. Hurst describes the interlocking political and economic interests involved in the timber industry.
85. Castells, ‘Four Asian tigers with a dragon head’, pp. 33-70.
86. Even as the Malay word rimba, which technically means virgin forest, is increasingly used in the literature on ecotourism, government and private sector plans to develop the resort potential of the park and rubbish dumps from urban areas all threaten the survival of the park in its present state.