See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/263079477

Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating conservation in Southeast Asia, edited

by Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise and Amity A. Doolittle

Article  in  Anthropological Forum · November 2012

DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2012.717025

CITATIONS READS

0 144

1 author:

Sarinda Singh
The George Institute for Global Health
41 PUBLICATIONS   266 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Sarinda Singh on 10 September 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

This article was downloaded by: [University of Western Australia]
On: 11 December 2012, At: 19:25
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Anthropological Forum: A Journal of

Social Anthropology and Comparative
Sociology
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/canf20

Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating

conservation in Southeast Asia, edited
by Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise and
Amity A. Doolittle
a
Sarinda Singh
a
School of Social Science, University of Queensland
Version of record first published: 09 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Sarinda Singh (2012): Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating conservation in
Southeast Asia, edited by Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise and Amity A. Doolittle, Anthropological
Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, 22:3, 318-320

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.717025

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-

conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
 318 Anthropological Forum
back-to-basic approach to curricula, the
high-stakes standardised testing model, and
the urgency of student-centered pedagogy.
The book provides practical suggestions to
teachers and educators to explore the educa-
tional aspects of hip-hop and utilise the hip-
hop genre to educate those students who
often fall through crack. Low argues in favour
of hip-hop education as a movement and
advises teachers to take youth, popular
culture, and identities seriously, while prac-
tising critical pedagogy with hip-hop re-
Downloaded by [University of Western Australia] at 19:25 11 December 2012
sources such as hip-hop curricula and
lesson plans. Low urges teachers to, ‘reima-
gine a classroom and curriculum significantly
shaped by youth culture’, and to, ‘acknowl-
edge the significance, magnitude, and scope
of the global force that is hip-hop culture’
(p. 146). I find this book extremely interest-
ing and attention capturing. The arguments
are articulated powerfully with many sup-
porting sources and viewpoints.
Reference:
Gay, G. 2000. Culturally responsive teaching.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating
conservation in Southeast Asia, edited by
Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise and Amity
A. Doolittle. New Ecologies for the Twenty-
First Century Series, Duke University Press,
Durham and London, 2011, xiii þ 372pp.,
maps, figures, bibliography, index. ISBN:
978-0-8223-4796-5 (paperback).
SARINDA SINGH
School of Social Science
University of Queensland
Ó 2012 Sarinda Singh
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.717025
Beyond the sacred forest offers an admirable
interdisciplinary and collaborative effort fo-
cussed on conservation in the Southeast
Asian region. The overarching argument is
that attention to social, political, historical
and economic issues is critical to under-
standing outcomes from conservation initia-
tives. The authors acknowledge local
contributions to sustainable natural resource
management, but without over-extending to
a romanticisation of ‘tradition’. They present
an explicit engagement with politics and
power and ask why existing local manage-
ment regimes ‘are still routinely ignored and
what are the consequences’ (p. 13). The
contributors are well placed to advance such
interdisciplinary debates with their diverse
backgrounds including anthropologists, a
biologist, a historian, a rural sociologist and
social ecologists. Anthropology is noted as
the main discipline (p. xiii), but a reader
would perhaps better take the interdisciplin-
ary field of political ecology as a unifying
focus (p. 2). Also diverse are the settings in
which conservation is examined, not only in
protected areas, but also through the lens of
indigeneity, property rights and adat, agri-
cultural intensification, colonial and postco-
lonial land management policies, and
swidden cultivation systems. While the argu-
ment for understanding the broader social
context of conservation is certainly not new
to social scientists, it continues to be an
elusive goal in practice.
The editors of the volume highlight that it
is not simply a collection of loosely related
papers and instead the result of a particular
‘pedagogical process’ involving repeated
week-long workshops, ‘designed to help the
participants transcend their own routinized
ways of approaching conservation problems
in the region’ (p. xii). Support from Ma-
cArthur Foundation grants enabled the
project leaders to work for over a decade on
this and an earlier related project. An
excellent outcome is seen with the present
volume having the majority of contributors
from Southeast Asian universities. Some
understandable variability was evident between
chapters in the quality of writing and of depth

of analysis. Also, some chapters seemed a little
dated in presenting fieldwork material from
the 1990s and engaging primarily with litera-
ture from the same period, likely reflecting the
lengthy research process. Yet undoubtedly, the
intensive and long-term research approach has
great merit in building the capacity of local
researchers to critically engage with contem-
porary conservation issues.
The introductory chapter by the editors
provides a wide-ranging overview of the ‘field
of conservation and development’ (p. 1),
Downloaded by [University of Western Australia] at 19:25 11 December 2012
setting the scene in relation to contemporary
trends in social and natural sciences, such as
the turns to the postlocal, postequilibrium,
poststructural and post-Western. Though the
opening situates the book as pertaining to
conservation, the focus is more specifically on
forest conservation since marine ecosystems
that are important in the case-study countries
are not included. The editors then offer a
detailed overview of the following chapters
and how they relate to five ‘cross-cutting
themes of the book’ (p. 10): local complexity;
the importance of history; ideals of planning
and relations of power; knowledge and
discourse; and nature, culture and science.
They acknowledge ‘messier’ analyses result
from messy realities (p. 24). This is reflected in
the headings of the three book sections, where
the terms ‘local’, ‘community’ and ‘indigen-
ous’ are used somewhat interchangeably.
The three book sections encompass nine
substantive chapters, including three chapters
that are updated versions of published
journal articles. The first section—the bound-
ary between natural and social reproduc-
tion—begins with Tuck-Po’s study of Taman
Negara National Park and the importance of
symbolic representations of people, forests
and wildlife in contemporary park manage-
ment practices. Kathirithamby-Wells then
offers an historical examination of plantation
agriculture (rubber and oil palm) in penin-
sular Malaysia and the consequences for
livelihoods and landscapes as extensive
monocultures gradually replaced forests and
Book Reviews 319
less intensive forms of agriculture. Dove’s
chapter considers how, for Dayak in West
Kalimantan, ideas of social and ecological
exchange underpin the divides between
rubber production and swidden farming.
Importantly, he highlights local complexity
and agency and in doing so argues against the
notion of rubber as simply the invasion of
modern markets into marginal places.
The second section—community rights
discourses through time—sees Djalins exam-
ine the complexity of adat as claimed and
contested in relation to damar forest gardens
at a village bordering Bukit Barisan Selatan
National Park in Sumatra. Doolittle considers
the historical dynamics in laws and land
management affecting villagers living in a
‘native reserve’ in Sabah, with implications
for state–society relations and property
rights. Harwell presents an analysis of the
competing claims in the Danau Sentarum
Wildlife Reserve in West Kalimantan where
participatory mapping of rights to resources
are complicated by a ‘fluid landscape’ of
seasonally flooded lakes and forests as well as
by ethnic politics. Duhaylungsod moves the
focus to the southern Philippines, where she
considers the impacts of indigenous politics,
development projects and environmental
concerns for the T’boli in Mindanao.
In the third section—reconstructing and
representing indigenous environmental
knowledge—Sulistyawati draws upon work
by Dove and others with swidden-farmers in
Kalimantan and uses agent-based modelling
to explore the links between household and
landscape dynamics. The final chapter by
Winarto looks at Indonesia’s Integrated Pest
Management program in terms of its uptake
by local farmers and competing state prio-
rities of high productivity supported by
modern technologies.
By the end, this reader felt that the book
title was catchy, but somewhat misleading.
The regional focus was said to be ‘Southeast
Asia’, but the case studies were dominated by
those from Indonesia (five chapters), and the
 320 Anthropological Forum
remainder from Malaysia (three chapters)
and the Philippines (one chapter). Buddhist
countries of mainland Southeast Asia were
not represented at all, but the book cover was
of a Banyan tree tied with cloth offerings in
Thailand. This photograph is evocative of the
notion of ‘sacred forests’, which the editors
soundly critique in their introduction chap-
ter. Yet this notion was not discussed by most
of the substantive chapters and did not
provide a strong link between them. The
editors’ statement that the romanticised ideal
Downloaded by [University of Western Australia] at 19:25 11 December 2012
of the sacred forest is now uncommon
in scholarly debate and used more by
‘community and environmental activists’ (p.
7), suggests that their quest ‘to go beyond this
idea of the sacred forest’ (p. 10) is positioning
the book as primarily as means to bring
insights from social analysis to resource
managers and policymakers. These comments
partly reflect a common challenge for inter-
disciplinary work in that it faces a diversified
audience with varied disciplinary assump-
tions and concerns.
Overall, this collection will stand on the
strength of its impressive interdisciplinarity
and collaborative effort, which will offer a
solid resource and research model for scho-
lars of the region as well as for resource
managers and development practitioners.
Light intervention: Lessons from Bougain-
ville, by Anthony J. Regan. Perspectives
Series, United States Institute of Peace Press,
Washington, DC, 2010, xvi þ 197pp., abbre-
viations, maps, chronology, bibliography,
index. ISBN: 978-1-60127-061-0 (paperback).
VICTORIA STEAD
Globalism Research Center
RMIT University
Ó 2012 Victoria Stead
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.717026
This monograph offers an insider’s analysis of
the peace process which brought to an end the
View publication stats
long-running conflict in Bougainville, now an
autonomous province of Papua New Guinea
(PNG). As an advisor to key parties involved in
the peacebuilding process (lasting from 1997 to
2005), Regan was in a unique position to
observe and document an intervention widely
applauded as successful but relatively neglected
in scholarly literature. In Light intervention:
Lessons from Bougainville, he offers some
corrective to this neglect, and asks how it was
that the international intervention into Bou-
gainville was able to achieve what it did, while
still retaining a ‘light footprint’ on the ground.
Although Regan was both a participant and an
observer in the Bougainville peace process, this
is not an ethnographic work. Its principal
intended audience is, presumably, scholars of
peace and conflict studies and those working in
peacebuilding processes. It will, nonetheless, be
of interest to some anthropologists and others
working in the region.
The organisation of the book is straight-
forward, with chapters dedicated to the main
elements of the peace process. The first
provides a cursory overview of Bougainvil-
lean culture and identity. With relatively little
depth (Regan engages little with existing
literature, anthropological or otherwise, and
this is a weakness throughout the work) this
is unlikely to be very satisfying to an
anthropological reader, particularly one al-
ready familiar with Melanesia. Chapter 2
provides an overview of the conflict, which
erupted in 1988 after agitation by young
Bougainville mine workers and landowners
against the Panguna gold and copper mine,
run by Conzinc Riotinto Australia Ltd.
Damage to mine property (and hence mine
revenues) prompted a violent response from
PNG mobile police squads, and this acted to
catalyse conflict between the Papua New
Guinean state and what soon became known
as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army
(BRA). Secession from PNG quickly became
a key demand. Again, this chapter is relatively
brief, but Regan does a good job of mapping
the basic contours of a very complex conflict.