Beyond the Sacred Forest: Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia edited by Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise, and Amity A. Doolittle (review)

This fascinating book is the result of an extended collaborative research project that has sought, as the subtitle states, to complicate thinking about a wide range of aspects of what we usually think of as “conservation” in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Most of its chapters report on research in ethnic minority areas of Indonesia and Malaysia during the 1990s; one chapter concerns the Philippines. Three are revised versions of papers previously published elsewhere. The authors represent an impressive range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, history, rural sociology and social ecology, and their institutional affiliations are roughly evenly divided among Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. The overall quality of the scholarship and the writing in Beyond the Sacred Forest is very high, and the book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working on conservation, natural resource management, and agrarian political economy in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The introductory chapter by editors Michael Dove, Percy Sajise and Amity Doolittle begins with a succinct and stimulating overview of some of the main changes that have taken place in scholarly approaches to conservation and development since the early 1990s. Prominent among these, they argue, is the emergence of a “postlocal, postequilibrium, poststructural, and post-Western” intellectual stance (p. 1). They then proceed to put the book’s chapters into conversation with one another by examining the ways they engage with five core themes: “the complexity of the local communities and natural resource management”, “historical perspectives on natural resource use”, “ideals of planning and relations of power”, “knowledge and discourse”, and “nature, culture and science” (pp. 10–11). In setting up the volume, the editors do not give their contributors a set of marching orders; rather, they lay out the broad contours of a field of research and allow the chapters to take their places within it. This approach to framing the chapters complements the book’s commitment to interdisciplinarity and its argument that deviations from master plans, scepticism about equilibrium states, and conflict are all potentially positive and productive.

While there is not space here to survey the contributions to the volume individually, the chapters, when read together, give a clear sense of the complexities, the conundrums, and the sheer range of issues with which research on conservation must grapple. A few empirical themes stand out particularly clearly. The first is the ways in which state policies relating to natural-resource management can conflict with one another. Conflicts are often due to the contradictions among conservationist, modernizing, and other goals, or to what happens in the interstices between state agendas. A second theme is the importance of intra- and inter-community differentiation for natural-resource management. A third is the historical dynamism of “community” approaches to, and knowledge about, conservation, and an accompanying critique of assumptions — scholarly, policy, activist — about communities and conservation. Fourth, the volume highlights the (at times quite self-conscious) mobilization of ideas about environmental stewardship and territorial belonging by people trying to hold on to land, and the unanticipated consequences of such strategic essentialisms. Prominent amongst the latter are the ways in which “affirmation by the central state of local values and institutions seems inevitably to undermine them” (p. 27).

These themes are developed through sophisticated analyses of agrarian political economy and natural resource regimes which move deftly across historical time periods and between analytical scales. Endah Sulistyawati’s chapter deserves special mention for developing and drawing conclusions about issues such as landlessness and deforestation from a computer simulation of swidden rice cultivation and rubber tapping by Kantu’ households in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Few volumes comprised mostly of work by anthropologists and social ecologists would include a chapter by a biologist. This chapter, with its very clear description of the rationale behind its model, substantially broadens this volume’s interdisciplinary scope...