Forest, Bateks, and Degradation: Environmental Representations in a Changing World

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative way of thinking about the tropical forest, that of the Bateks of Pahang state, Peninsular Malaysia. I will argue that environmental representations are as much about being part of the larger world as they are about the intimate particularities of the local environment. Further, the Bateks' responses to environmental changes are less a sprig of global environmentalism than an independently constructed position, as mediated through their concrete knowledge and sentiments of the place and its history. It is this knowledge, its cognitive and imaginative dimensions, that I explore in this paper. With growing degradation, there is the possibility that people will become more estranged from their geography of knowledge and that, ultimately, landscape lore becomes just lore, history without a place. The conceptual aim is to offer a more imaginative and sensitive understanding of the effects of forest degradation on local communities, their histories, and knowledge.