Maps and counter-maps: Globalised imaginings and local realities of Sarawak's plantation agriculture

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 265-284

  Cooke, Fadzilah Majid ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL WORKER; INDIGENOUS POPULATION; LAND RIGHTS; PLANTATION; PSYCHOLOGY; RURAL AREA;

ASIA; EAST MALAYSIA; EURASIA; MALAYSIA; SARAWAK; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 11044221795     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: 14740680     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463403000250     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (88)

1. Judicial opinion of Justice Datuk Ian H.C. Chin, presiding in the High Court of Sabah and Sarawak at Kuching, on the Rumah Nor case (12 May 2001).
2. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994);
3. Denis Wood, The power of maps (London: Routledge, 1993);
4. Benjamin S. Orlove, 'Mapping reeds and reading maps: The politics of representation in Lake Titicaca', American Ethnologist, 18, 1 (1991): 3-38;
5. Nancy Lee Peluso, 'Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia', Antipode, 27, 4 (1995): 383-406.
6. The term 'countermapping' is from Antipode ibid., pp. 383-4;
7. see also Cristina Eghenter, Mapping peoples' forests: The role of mapping in planning community-based management of conservation areas in Indonesia (Washington, DC: Biodiversity Support Program, 2000).
8. Peluso, 'Whose woods', p. 384;
9. Tania Murray Li, 'Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the tribal slot', Comparative Studies in Society and History [henceforth CSSH], 42, 1 (2000): 149-72.
10. Eghenter, Mapping peoples' forests, p. 3.
11. Fadzilah Majid Cooke, 'Non-governmental organizations in Sarawak', in Social movements in Malaysia: From moral protest to NGOs, ed. Meredith Weiss and Saliha Hassan (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2002), pp. 165-80.
12. Orlove,'Mapping reeds'.
13. Since identity is not the focus of this article, for the sake of convenience 'Dayak' is used as an umbrella term for the Iban, Bidayuh and Orang Ulu peoples; the Kayan have been officially grouped under the latter category. I have written elsewhere about the complexities of identity formation in Sarawak; Fadzilah Majid Cooke, 'Forests, protest movement and the struggle over meaning and identity in Sarawak', Akademika, 55 (1999): 101-33. Identities may become fluid when small groups living close to larger ones emulate linguistic and cultural traits of the latter; even so, these identities may be slow to change, given that the process of self-ascription and of developing a sense of distinctiveness takes time, even if markers such as dress or housing styles may be more easily transformed.
14. Nancy Lee Peluso, 'Fruit trees and family trees in an anthropogenic forest: Ethics of access, property zones and environmental change in Indonesia', CSSH, 38, 2 (1996): 524-32 and 538-41;
15. see also Peter Vandergeest, 'Property rights in protected areas: Obstacles to community involvement as a solution in Thailand', Environmental Conservation, 23, 3 (1996): 260.
16. Wood's discussion of mapping is in his Power of maps, p. 46;
17. see also James Scott, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
18. Tan Sri Datuk Gerunsin Lembat, 'Native customary land and the adat', paper presented at the Seminar on NCR Land Development, Kuching, Sarawak, 29 Sept. -3 Oct. 1994, p. 5. Pulau may be individually or communally owned.
19. Peluso, 'Fruit trees', pp. 510-48;
20. Vandergeest, 'Property rights', pp. 259-68.
21. See the discussion in Vandergeest 'Property Rights', pp. 259-268, ibid.;
22. Scott, Seeing like a state;
23. and Robert David Sack, Human territoriality: Its theory and history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 19.
24. Fadzilah Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a new era?', Development and Change, 33, 2 (2002): 189-211.
25. For a review of community responses to Konsep Baru see Fadzilah Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a new era?', Development and Change, 33, 2 (2002): 189-211ibid,
26. and Dimbab Ngidang, 'Contradictions in land development schemes: The case of joint ventures in Sarawak, Malaysia', Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 43, 2 (2002): 157-80.
27. Interviews, Miri and Kuching, September 2001.
28. Scott, Seeing like a state, p. 45;
29. Peluso, 'Whose trees', p. 388.
30. The three longhouses at the extreme left of Block A in Map 1 are located too far away from Long Lama to be included in the Long Lama RGC and are in any case administratively under the jurisdiction of a different local administrative centre - Loagan Bunut.
31. Interviews, Baram, June 2000 and September 2001. Native customary land (NCL) transcends the land-use zonation system adopted by the Sarawak land administration machinery, which puts land into different planning categories. The Sarawak Land Classification Ordinance categorises land into zones, including 'mixed zone', 'reserved land', 'native area land' and 'interior area land'. In this article, NCL refers to land over which native communities have customary rights claims by way of occupation and/or use, regardless of location or zonation. In some instances, the term 'Native Customary Rights Land' (NCR) is used interchangeably with NCL in official discourse.
32. Interviews, Miri and Kuching, June 2000 and September 2001.
33. Forestry maps in southeast Asia often regard forests as empty. For Indonesia, see Peluso,'Whose trees'; and for Malaysia,
34. see Fadzilah Majid Cooke, The challenge of sustainable forests: Forest resource policy in Malaysia 1970-1995 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin and Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), pp. 37-50.
35. In the Jok Jau Evong case in 1987, the Kayan community of Uma Bawang claimed that part of their customary land was included in the formation of the Lemiting Protected Forest in 1951, without their knowledge. In the 1980s part of Lemiting was opened up to make way for logging into forests of the interior. Kayan blockaded the logging roads; forty-two individuals were arrested, but many years later were compensated for illegal arrests (interviews, Baram May 2000). In a separate case in the late 1990s, the Iban longhouse of Rumah Riggie, Sungei Nat, Ulu Tinjar, part of whose land was also inadvertently included in the Lemiting Protected Forest, similarly claimed that they were not consulted at the time it was established, and were therefore unaware that their land was included in its jurisdiction. According to Raymond Abin, in the late 1990s, several households in Rumah Riggie questioned the validity of a provisional lease (issued to a plantation company) which incorporated part of the land to which they had native customary rights claims but which the state had categorised as 'state land', it being part of the Limiting Protected Forest; Raymond Abin, 'Plantations: Pillage development threatens the survival of indigenous Dayak communities in Sarawak', Indigenous Affairs, 4 (1998): 15-23. From an official planning perspective, one purpose for the creation of the Lemiting Protected Forest was to prevent the encroachment of Iban into Kayan land in the first half of the twentieth century (interviews, Baram, October, 1999).
36. A. J. N. Richards, Sarawak land law and adat: A report (Kuching: Government Printer, 1961), p. 11.
37. Extinguishment of customary rights is allowed under Section 5(3) of the Sarawak Land Code if required for development purposes; New Reality magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2000, p. 22. The latest Land Code Amendment Bill (2000) further strengthened extinguishment. Under this Amendment extinguishment of customary rights was allowable if undertaken for 'public purposes'. Even during the Brooke era, in times of disputes, the land tenure concept of the period worked in favour of a legalised land procedure;
38. see Daniel Chew, Chinese pioneers on the Sarawak frontier, 1841-1941 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 178, footnote 25. The procedure involved according priority to land titles, in conformity with the Torrens system of property entitlement that influenced Brooke land policies of the 1930s;
39. A. F. Porter, Land administration in Sarawak: An account of the development of land administration in Sarawak from the rule of Rajah James Brooke to the present time (1840-1967) (Kuching: Government Printing Office, 1967), p. 51.
40. J. C. Fong, 'Recent legislative changes on the law affecting native customary land', paper presented at the Seminar/Workshop on the Land Code (Amendment) Ordinance, 2000 (organised by the Sarawak Land and Survey Department, Kuching, 6 September 2000), p. 19.
41. Ramy Bulan, 'Native customary land: The trust as a device for land development in Sarawak', paper presented at the Conference on Resource Tenure, Forest Management and Conflict Resolution, Perspectives from Borneo and Papua/Papua New Guinea, Australian National University, Canberra, 9-11 April 2001.
42. Fong, 'Recent legislative changes', p. 24; on the New Paradigm,
43. see Sarawak Ministry of Land Development, Handbook on new concept of development on Native Customary Rights Land (Kuching: Government Printers, no date). A discussion of the way in which Dayak identity/ies are deemed 'vulnerable' in a globalising era is in Majid Cooke,'Vulnerability control and oil palm'.
44. Sarawak Ministry of Land Development, Handbook on New Concept
45. and Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm'; the idea of 'legibility to the outsider' is from Scott, Seeing like a state, p. 45.
46. Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm'; Scott's discussion of Europe is in Seeing like a state, pp. 38-52.
47. Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm', pp. 204-5; interviews, Baram, June 2000.
48. Quotations from interviews, Baram, May 2000.
49. Interviews, Baram, May 2000; the latter remarks are from a farmer turned community development worker.
50. Discussion of these scenarios is in Dimbab, 'Contradictions in land development', pp. 168-70,
51. and Majid Cooke, 'Vulnerability, control and oil palm'; the latter mentions exceptional cases as well.
52. Several villages in the Baram area persistently put up resistance in the late 1990s. In 1997 Iban villagers in the Bakong area tried to prevent their land from being encroached upon by logging companies and met with police retaliation; one longhouse resident was killed and two were wounded; Abin, 'Plantations', pp. 21-2. Their grievances are currently going through the courts. Also in June 1997 at Sungei Bong, forty-two Iban villagers (including nine women) were arrested for putting up a blockade in their attempt to stop land surveying groups from entering their area
53. (Plantations ibid., p. 20). The Sungei Bong case was filed against the Land Consolidation and Development Authority, a parastatal organisation which has prime responsibility for plantation agriculture under Konsep Baru.
54. In 1999 newspapers in Sarawak were full of coverage of violence at Ulu Niah, where villagers killed four people and wounded three others. Villagers claimed that those killed or wounded were gangsters who had harassed them into submitting their land for oil palm plantations, whereas the plantation companies claimed that some of them were bona fide contractors. Newspaper accounts include 'Jangan belakangi undang-undang: Mahmuddin', Utusan Borneo, 23 Sept. 1999;
55. 'Refrain from escalating tensions: Dato Tiong', 'Niah slayings: Post mortem completed', and '18 suspects surrender peacefully', Borneo Post, 4 Sept. 1999;
56. 'The aftermath of a bloody spree' and 'Adhere to law: Chin', Borneo Post, 3 Sept. 1999 ;
57. 'Four killed, 2 injured in Niah clash', Borneo Post, 2 Sept. 1999.
58. 'Rumali' in Iban and Malay means 'house'. An Iban longhouse often carries the name of the headman, so that 'Rumah Nor' indicates a longhouse headed by Tuai Rumah (headman) Nor.
59. I borrow the term from Maarten Hajer's use of 'story-line' to describe the process by which a causal story accords new meanings to 'previously singular and unrelated events'; Maarten Hajer, The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 64. Once accepted, story-lines allow different actors to expand their own understanding about a phenomena beyond the understanding normally accorded by their own expertise or experience (p. 63). Thus the story-line of pollution, for example, provides hunting and gathering communities such as the Penan with a new and (to them) acceptable way of viewing changes in their forest environments. Pollution also provides a new way of understanding reduced fish catches among those fishermen in sedentary Kayan and Iban communities. On resistance in Sarawak
60. see Peter Brosius, 'Prior transcripts, divergent paths: Resistance and acquiescence to logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia', CSSH, 39, 3 (1997): 468-509;
61. and Majid Cooke, Challenge of sustainable forests.
62. Peter Brosius, 'Green dots, pink hearts: Displacing politics from the Malaysian rain forest', American Anthropologist, 101, 1 (1999): 35-6;
63. also see Majid Cooke, Challenge of sustainable forests.
64. Chief Minister Taib Mahmud said, 'We have to transform the rights to our land into much more tangible assets that can increase in value, that can be transferable, and that can fit into our system of trade and business. Otherwise we will be left out' (Borneo Post, 19 May 1999).
65. Interview, June 2000.
66. Interviews, Baram, May 2000.
67. Field notes, October 1999. The quotation is from a remark made by an Iban at the 1999 Bujang Berani celebration.
68. The 1958 Sarawak Land Code Section 5(2) provides for six different ways of establishing customary rights: (a) the felling of virgin jungle and the occupation of the land thereby created; (b) the planting of land with fruit trees; (c) the occupation or cultivation of land; (d) the use of land for a burial ground or shrines; (e) the use of land of any class for rights of way or (f) any other lawful method.
69. The Rumah Nor case (suit no. 22-28-99-1) was heard in the High Court of Sabah and Sarawak at Kuching by the presiding judge, Justice Ian Chin, on 12 May 2001. The judicial opinion was close to 60 pages in length, and different sections of the judgment are used liberally for this section of the article.
70. See Dianne Fuss, Essentially speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989).
71. Eghenter, Mapping peoples' forests
72. and Peluso, 'Whose woods'.
73. Majid Cooke, 'Non-governmental organizations';
74. on Kalimantan, see Eghenter, Mapping peoples' forests.
75. Peter Poole, Indigenous peoples,mapping and biodiversity conservation (Washington, DC: United States Agency for International Development/World Wildlife Fund/World Resources Institute, Peoples and Forests Program Discussion Paper, 1995).
76. For experiences of community mapping in Indonesia see Frank Momberg et al., Drawing on local knowledge: A community mapping training manual, case studies from Indonesia (Jakarta: Ford Foundation WWF Program, 1996).
77. For a clear description of the range of technologies that could be used for community mapping, including GPS, see Poole, Indigenous peoples.
78. Justice Ian Chin, Judgment on the Rumah Nor case, p. 12; emphasis added.
79. Attempts by Dayak communities to use international fora such as the International Tropical Timber Organisation are discussed in Majid Cooke, Challenge of sustainable forests; for an insight into international initiatives in human rights issues surrounding the Penan,
80. see Brosius, 'Prior transcripts'.
81. Borneo Wire newsletter, Winter 2001, p. 6.
82. Interviews, Baram, May 2000.
83. Interview, Baram, October 1999.
84. Interviews with women farmers, Bintulu, August 2002; the Ulu Niah case is mentioned in an earlier footnote.
85. Interviews with women farmers, Bintulu, August 2002; the case is now being appealed to a higher court, and is causing the community some anxiety.
86. John Brohman, Popular development, rethinking the theory and practice of development (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996);
87. Fadzilah Majid Cooke, 'Whither social sustainability? development in East Malaysia in the post-logging era' (manuscript in preparation).
88. Li, 'Articulating indigenous identity', pp. 149-79.