Living with the Wayapi, and their charismatic leader Waiwai, is a serious adventure. It is demanding, and can turn dangerous in a moment. The environment is a difficult one, but beautiful and baffling in its richness. And the job of learning about the people is like a journey without end. Alan Campbell tells the story of these people, and of the time he spent with them, in an imaginative, beautifully written account which looks back from a century into the future to relate a way of life that is being destroyed. In doing so, he addresses important and complex issues in current anthroplogical theory in a way which makes them accessible without sacrificing any of their subtlety.
Borneo, with its tales of White Rajahs and tribes of headhunters, has long excited the Western imagination. Today, however, there is another green imagination at work. Mention of the island is more likely to evoke images of tropical deforestation and concern about the cruel dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples who once lived in relative harmony with their environment. It is perhaps not suprizing then, that most books dealing with the nomadic hunter-gatherers of Borneo have principally been pictorial studies. There is indeed a dearth of scholarship regarding these peoples, a situation that this first ever comprehensive review of nomadic groups in the Borneo rain forest aims to rectify. Presenting a wealth of new research contributed by an international team of scholars, the volume covers all of those parts of Borneo where nomads (called Penan, Punan, or by various other names) are or were known to exist, and provides a comparative historical-ecological study of these groups. The study is primarily concerned with issues of modernization (including the monetary economy, formalized institutions, centralized power structures, contractual relationships and extraction activities) and development policies. The impact of these policies is analyzed with special regard to the natural environment inhabited by these small scale societies, as well as the use of its resources. The book has no stiff theoretical orientation but informs ongoing debates about changing forms of ethnicity relations between minorities and the state, minorities rights and survival, native discourse, the sustainability of tropical forest use and the neo-romantic environmentalist myth of so-called wise traditional peoples.
