Pemulai ke Nanga Jela/Return to Nanga Jela
About the Talk: The history of hinterland communities is largely written in remote landscapes that today are often targeted for infrastructural development that forcibly relocates existing residents and transforms the land, obliterating those histories, and weakening communities.
In 1984/5 the Iban longhouse at Nanga Jela on Sarawak’s Engkari River in Malaysian Borneo, along with twenty-one other communities and a land area of 8500 ha disappeared because of the building of the Batang Ai Hydroelectric Dam and the creation of a 33 sq mile reservoir. With the drowning of these houses, lands, forests, and of multiple rivers and streams, the history of one of the longest-occupied and most historically rich Iban territories in Sarawak was gone. Many of the 3000 people who were displaced moved to government-created resettlement areas. Some left for other parts of Sarawak, and their descendants scattered around the world. All of those who were forced to leave their Batang Ai and Engkari homelands found their livelihoods completely transformed; none were free to pursue the rice agriculture and forest- and river-centered lives that they had known since their childhoods.
Three decades after this event, the ex-residents and descendants of Nanga Jela engaged in a process of reconstructing that submerged history and reconstituting an Engkari and Nanga Jela identity. Rescuing and sharing what images exist of the longhouse and its surrounding land- and waterscapes, collecting oral histories, geographical memories, genealogies, and a plethora of other local data, and employing multiple social media tools, the increasingly diverse, geographically dispersed community is regaining its history, knowledge of the lost land- and riverscapes, and its identity.
A team comprising Bobby Anak Nyegang and Itin Anak Langit, both born in Nanga Jela, and Christine Padoch, an anthropologist who spent more than two years in the longhouse, led the effort to assemble these and other materials into an image-rich bilingual (English and Iban) book that would be accessible to all in the Nanga Jela community, as well as a community-based archive. In this presentation, Padoch will discuss that complex process of writing the book, recently published as Pemulai ke NangaJela/Return to Nanga Jela and creating an archive together with the longhouse community to provide present and future descendants of the great longhouse on the Engkari River a written history of a landscape and a livelihood that has disappeared.
About the Speakers:
Christine Padoch is a Senior Curator Emerita in the Center for Plants, People and Culture of the New York Botanical Garden. From 2011 to 2017 she was the Director of Research on Forests and Human Well-Being at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). An anthropologist by training, she has spent about 50 years carrying out research on smallholder patterns of forest management, agriculture, and agroforestry in the humid tropics, principally in Southeast Asia and Amazonia. Previous to her position at CIFOR, Padoch was the Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany at the NYBG. She is the author or editor of a dozen books and of approximately 100 scientific articles and book chapters. Christine Padoch has served as a scientific advisor to many international projects and has been a member of the boards of several international research institutions, including the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), and the Earth Innovation Institute (EII). She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Environmental Social Science and Resource Policy in the College of Natural Resources and the Program Director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics, housed in the Institute of International Studies. She serves as a faculty member in the Society and Environment Division of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, where she teaches courses in Political Ecology. Her research since the 1980s has focused on Forest Politics and Agrarian Change in Southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia. She has done field research in various parts of Indonesia—West and Central Java, East and West Kalimantan and in Sarawak, Malaysia. Her work addresses questions of property rights and access to resources, forest policy and politics, histories of land use change, and agrarian and environmental violence. She is the author or editor of three books: Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (UC Press, 1992 – still available); Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (Oxford Press, 1996 and 2003, ed. with Christine Padoch); and Violent Environments (Cornell Press, 2001, ed. with Michael Watts.), and nearly fifty journal articles and book chapters. Professor Peluso speaks or reads four languages besides English. In 2003, she was awarded a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship and is finishing a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Ways of Seeing Borneo: Landscape, Territory, and Violence”. She is currently working on a comparative study on the formation of “political forests” in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand as well as a book examining the entanglements of violence and territoriality in landscape history in West Kalimantan.
