1 Introduction 2 Communicating Degradation 3 The World of the Forest 4 In the Beginning 5 A Sense of Place 6 Gathering in the Forest 7 To See, To Hear, To Walk, and To Know 8 Changing Pathways
Lye Tuck-Po is Quillian Visiting International Professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College.
Batek foragers of central west Malaysia have an important message
for the rest of the world, one which other west Malaysian indigenes
also voice: if world-conquering globalized developmentalism
continues to destroy the forest, it is not only their world which
will go down into hot death, but ours as well, the world of our
common humanity. Lye Tuck-Po delivers this message to nonBatek as
her friend Tebu told it to her; and gives the ethnographic context
that allows us to understand it. A meticulous, engaging, and
disturbing work.
*Robert Knox Dentan, professor emeritus, SUNY Buffalo; author of
Overwhelming Terror: Love, Fear, Peace, and Violence among the
Semai of Malaysia*
The Batek of Pahang charged Lye Tuck-Po with communicating to the
wider world their belief that their land is threatened and their
sense of their own failure in communicating this fact to the
Malaysian state. Tuck-Po has eloquently discharged this commission,
but she has also done far more. She has given us what she calls an
'ethnography of a landscape,' which falls within a long-established
academic tradition of ethno-ecology but is given added nuance and
power through use of a more interpretive, discursive, experiential
approach. Tuck-Po offers her readers a local, 'inside' view of
deforestation, environmental degradation, and feeling of cultural
loss that is perhaps without equal in the literature today.
*Michael R. Dove, Yale University*
This gracefully written, scholarly book deserves a wide readership.
Lye's sensitive, thoughtful analysis of one small society has
implications for anyone concerned about human disregard for the
environment or for peaceful human relationships....It is a
wonderful work.
*Bruce Bonta*
As one of the few remaining hunting and gathering peoples in
Southeast Asia, the Batek of Malaysia possess a unique and precious
body of knowledge of the tropical rain forest. This knowledge is
embedded in a worldview and philosophy of life that arguably
contains a prescription for sustainable use of tropical forests. In
recent years the Batek have become alarmed by the logging and other
government-supported programs that threaten to destroy the forest
and, in their view, the world as a whole. Concerned Batek have
asked anthropologist Lye Tuck-Po to convey their fears and views to
the outside world as a warning of this impending disaster. In this
well-written book, Dr. Lye draws on her vast knowledge of tropical
forest ecology and Batek culture to delineate a remarkable
worldview that challenges many of the assumptions of
development-obsessed planners and environmentalists alike.
*Kirk M. Endicott, Dartmouth College*
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