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About this episode

A presentation by Monica Janowski, Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008.This paper focuses on the Kelabit Highlands in Sarawak, the highest inhabited area in the island of Borneo. It draws on anthropological fieldwork carried out over the past 20 years by Janowski and on a new anthropological-archaeological-environmental science collaborative project, The Cultured Rainforest. The Cultured Rainforest aims to explore the history of settlement, agriculture and the human relationship with the landscape and the environment in this forested, highland area. Through myth and stories, personal and group histories, data from archaeological investigations and data from pollen cores, our aim in the project is both to attempt to understand ‘what really happened’ in the recent and ‘deep’ past through confronting, comparing and triangulating different kinds of information, and also to explore the social and cosmological underpinnings of myths and stories about the past, linking these to present-day human behaviour, social structure, beliefs and cosmologies. The paper will attempt to draw some conclusions about the ways in which the past can be used by different actors in the service of the present and the future in the context of very rapid environmental change and profound social transformations.

• Category

  Learning

• Release Date

  May 31, 2008

• Runtime

  28:12