I lived for many years in places where books were not readily available—in Turkey as a child, for decades during my adult years in Indonesia, in the Sultanate of Oman for four mid-life years. Now (in my dotage), I live in Etna, NY, a place where access to books is unparalleled. Cornell University has 13 or 14 libraries; it includes what is widely considered the best Indonesia collection in the entire world. I have access to all of that, plus the books in something called ‘Libraries Worldwide’. I can order a book, and even if it’s not at Cornell, it normally comes in a few days! Cornell even has a system that will deliver the book I want from the Cornell library in which it resides to the one nearest my office!
During the past decade and a half, in Indonesia, I worked at CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research), which had a small, if nice collection of books related to forestry; but the bias in that institution was toward the biophysical on the one hand, and toward journals and journal articles, on the other. These latter were considered more ‘impactful’ and ‘prestigious’ than books, by my colleagues. In my own field, books are perhaps more important, since we anthropologists write in prose, with far fewer figures, tables and graphs. We need the verbal fullness [some would say, verbosity] offered by books, to understand the complexity of systems, in detail; the word limits for articles are just too confining for many of our studies.
I am now working on a paper on swidden fallows. Swiddens are the fields that form part of the kinds of systems also called ‘shifting cultivation’ or, more pejoratively, ‘slash-and-burn agriculture’. I think I want to make a point about a possible difference in official and academic attitudes toward swiddens that relates to the respective colonial experiences of different countries and regions—but I’m still not sure if this is correct. In the pursuit of information on this issue, I have recently read two books that I enjoyed so much I wanted to share their delights.
The first was by Michael Dove, whose writings I always enjoy. This brand new book (2011) is called The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo. Since so much of my own academic work has focused on Borneo, I was particularly anxious to read this book; and it did not disappoint. One focus of the book was on the two commodities, pepper and rubber, which Dove addressed both historically and currently. He also managed to locate these commodities in the human systems with which they interacted. Without ignoring the histories of the crops themselves, he explained how these related to the social and political systems of their time (from past to present). He complemented these historical and broad-sweep analyses with the specifics of cases. He analyzed, for instance a historical document from the Bornean (Banjar) courts of the 17th century, pulling out the pertinent bits relating to pepper, the unusual view, for instance, that planting pepper would create political chaos. He used his own doctoral field experience among the Kantu’ dayaks of West Kalimantan to illustrate social and political features of rubber cultivation there.
The Kenyah dayaks I’d worked with in East Kalimantan had experimented with a variety of crops, including pepper and rubber, though certainly not on the scale of the Kantu’. Still, Dove’s discussions of local people’s creativity and experimentalism, their constraints to and opportunities for production, the historical search for balance between cash crops and the main subsistence crop, rice, all rang true. What a pleasure to have easy access to this book!
Then…again in search of information on swiddens, fallows and colonialism, I turned to a 2009 book by Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Peter Geschiere’s name was long familiar to me, as I’d supervised research for a decade or more in Cameroon (though never done long term research there). Yet, I’d felt some personal embarrassment not to have read any of his works. I looked forward with interest and curiosity to reading this book, which, like Dove’s, dealt with both the present and the past. Although my search for information on swiddens was not fulfilled, the book filled in many gaps in my knowledge of Central and West Africa. Geschiere wrote of political and human conditions in Cote d’Ivoire—the first country I ever visited in Africa. [I remember my incredible excitement in 1995, on my first visit to ‘the dark continent’. This was also the country where I sought with some difficulty to resuscitate the French I’d learned and loved in college, four decades earlier. And indeed, this was the country where I was introduced to the concept of autochthony, as immigrants streamed in from the North, the East and the West, some fleeing war, others fleeing ecological disaster, in search of a livelihood, but creating both benefits and difficulties for their local patrons, the autochthones.] Geschiere also provided details of Cameroon’s history, dates about colonial and recent history that I imagined needing for future writings, statements about colonial attitudes toward locals vis-à-vis immigrants, changing definitions of what it meant to be an in-migrant (an allochthone) and the political ramifications thereof, age-related differences I knew to be important in much of Africa. Like Dove, he used detailed cases from his indepth doctoral research in eastern Cameroon to provide a fuller understanding of what the historical and political realities meant to individual human beings and to the functioning of local systems.
I have ordered and received a 1980 book by Joel Kahn (Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World-Economy) and a 1957 book by Furnivall (Colonial Policy and Practice: a Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India), both of which I’ve read before—long ago. In these, I seek this same concatenation of local, global and historical material, hoping again for insights on swidden fallows and related colonial policies/attitudes. I seek broader scale information on areas I also know well [I lived for three years (1983-86) among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra; and several decades in “Netherlands India” (Indonesia)]—that I might better assess the accuracy of the information.
The luxury of having an endless supply of books continues to delight. Whither next?