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Shifting Cultivation 61 61 chapter 6 Shifting cultivation The model of shifting agriculture discussed earlier is represented by that practised amongst aboriginal groups for whom shifting cultivation is an integral part of their culture and their lives. This integration and interdependence of economics, social organization and ritual in religion is aptly put by the Iban phrase “adat kami bumai”, which E. Jensen (1974: 5) has translated rather freely as meaning “we farm (hill rice) and live according to the order revealed by the spirits”. This involves not just a system of cropping, but a whole manner of life. Or, to use Conklin’s typology, integral shifting cultivation stems from a ‘more traditional, yearround , community wide, largely self-contained and ritually sanctioned way of life’ (Conklin in Watters 1960: 66–7). The degree to which shifting cultivation is integral to culture is difficult to judge. Of the Iban of Sarawak, for example, Jensen (1974: 5) uses the phrase “rice cult” — such is the importance of the crop. Amongst the Dayaks, ritual “… is founded on the simple conception of the rice as animated by a soul like that which these people attribute to mankind….” (Frazer in Freeman 1970: 153–4). Yet Malays shared with tribal peoples a belief in the “rice soul”: they rarely depend solely upon shifting cultivation , though this may be a supplement to lowland wet-rice cultivation. Equally, the two decades to the 1970s have seen the significant development of both wet-rice cultivation and rubber-growing amongst many of the less remote Iban, Dayak and related groups in Sarawak. The Melako of the First Division are a case in point (Schneider 1977). Amongst the Kadazan (Dusun) groups of Sabah, wet rice is of variable consequence, yet rice rituals remain of considerable importance, acting in a socially integrative way for both families and village groups (Williams 1965). The limited evidence available for Malaysia suggests that it is rice ritual, not shifting cultivation per se which is integral to the tribal cultivators of Sabah and Sarawak. Since no group in that part of 62 Agriculture in the Malaysian Region Malaysia was denied access to land for shifting cultivation, any the question of abandoning beliefs and practices which appears to be integral to the societies concerned was, in the 1970s, premature. Broadly, the peoples for whom shifting cultivation might be considered integral include the two dominant aboriginal groups of Sarawak, the Iban (Sea Dayaks) and the Dayaks (Land Dayaks) together with related groups, as well as the numerically much less important aboriginal groups in the Peninsula. These include the Jakun (Proto-Malays) of central and eastern Johor and southeast Pahang, and the Temiar and Semai of the central ranges from inland Perak to the Kelantan.1 In addition to their fewer numbers, the Peninsular aborigines also differ from those of Borneo in that rice is a recent introduction having been adopted from the Malays (Hill 1977), though the various beliefs and rites associated with the crop are no less rigorously observed (Cole 1959). The total number of people involved in shifting cultivation in the 1970s is hard to estimate. Some tribespeople were largely hunters and gatherers, for instance the Negritos of the Peninsula or the Penan of Borneo, while a further and larger proportion were not necessarily shifting cultivators at all or were sedentary cultivators for whom shifting cultivation was supplementary. In the latter category were numbered the Temuan, a group of about 7,000 people in the southwest of the Peninsula, most of the Bajau, a group of about 95,000 living mainly in the Kota Belud district of Sabah, and many of the Kadazans of Sabah numbering about 218,000. Perhaps 80 per cent of the 55,000 or so orang asli in the Peninsula were shifting cultivators, while in Sabah and Sarawak a somewhat lesser proportion of the Iban, Land Dayak and related groups numbering about 700,000 would have fallen into this category.2 Spencer’s estimates (undated, but presumably early 1960s) suggest that some 175,000 families were engaged in shifting cultivation of one kind or another at that time, with about 300,000 ha of land being cleared annually and a total of about 2.2 million hectares either cropped or in fallow (Spencer 1966).3 Spencer’s data, together with official statistics, 1 These groups are related and are sometimes collectively termed Senoi, see Cole 1959. 2 Carey (1976) discussed in some detail the distribution of orang asli in the Peninsula, while for the...

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