Chapter 13. Sea Nomads and Rainforest Hunter-Gatherers: Foraging Adaptations in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago

In recent years it has come to be acknowledged that contemporary hunter-gatherers, rather than representing forms of organization that evolved during the Palaeolithic and persisted unchanged ever since, are the products of continuing evolutionary processes and, in some cases, of interaction with other populations, including agriculturalists and even, in recent times, centralized states (cf. Schrire 1984). Thus, while not denying the great antiquity of hunting and gathering, most scholars today would agree with Lewin (1988:1147) that,

… modern hunter-gathering is a largely post-Pleistocene phenomenon. Rather than being an adaptation ancestral to food production, it is [in effect] a parallel development.

Following from this, Headland and Reid (1989:43) apply what they call an “interdependent model” of foraging to reinterpret the situation of one group of Island Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers — the Philippine Negritos. The Negritos are of special interest because, unlike other Austronesian-speaking foragers, they appear to be biologically distinct from the Austronesian-speaking cultivators who live surrounding them. Their ancestors are therefore believed to have been present in the Philippines, and possibly elsewhere in Island Southeast Asia, prior to the arrival of the first Austronesian agriculturalists (Headland and Reid 1989: 46; see also Bellwood 1985:113). On the basis of linguistic evidence, Headland and Reid (1989:46) propose that:

At some time in the prehistoric past, the ancestors of today’s Negritos must have established … contact with the Austronesian-speaking immigrants in the course of which they lost their own languages and adopted those of the newcomers. In order for a language switch of this magnitude to have occurred, [this contact must have been both intense and of long duration. Moreover, …t]he linguistic data suggests that all this happened a very long time ago … well over a thousand years in the case of the Negrito languages that are today most similar to their non-Negrito sister languages and of many thousands of years in the case of those that are least similar.

The evidence thus points to a protracted interaction between Negrito foragers and Austronesian cultivators that must have begun virtually at once, as soon as the first Austronesians arrived in northern Luzon, perhaps 4500 to 5000 years ago (cf. Bellwood 1985:120; Reid 1987). Thus, rather than representing a “static window on the Paleolithic past”, Negrito society must be seen as an adaptive product of prolonged contact.

From the linguistic evidence, Headland and Reid (1989:47) go on to argue that:

The interdependence of Negritos and farming populations observable today has existed much longer than most scholars have thought. [While t]here is no question that the ancestors of the present-day [Negritos] were at one time Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, [the point to be made] is that this Stone Age lifestyle ended long ago, probably by the middle Holocene, and that prehistoric Negritos probably moved into the Neolithic at more or less the same time as their neighbors.

Here Headland and Reid add another element to their argument. This is a notion that the Negritos first moved into the ever-wet rainforests, the habitat with which the majority are now identified, only after they had acquired at least seasonal access to cultivated foods (see also Headland 1987; Peterson 1978; Peterson and Peterson 1977). Until then, Headland (1987) maintains, they probably occupied only the margins of the rainforest, the coastal zone and more open areas of monsoon forest and parklands. Following from this, Headland and Reid (1989:47) propose,

that the symbiotic relationship we find today between tropical forest hunter-gatherers and farmers evolved long ago as an adaptive strategy for exploiting the tropical forest.

This argument they link to one concerning the ethnogenesis of Southeast Asian Negrito cultures generally: namely (1989:47),

that the Negritos evolved culturally into what they are today as they moved into the forest to collect wild products to trade with agriculturalists and overseas traders.

Negrito cultures are thus an innovative product of contact and economic interaction. In this case, contact between pre-existing foragers and Austronesian farmers resulted, not only in the former borrowing the languages of the latter, but in the two becoming mutually enveloped in a symbiotic economy. One consequence of this envelopment was a kind of radial adaptation that allowed the foraging partners in the system to invade and successfully exploit what may have been, until then, a relatively unutilized habitat — the ever-wet rainforest. I will return later to consider a more general form of this argument.

First, however, it must be noted that Headland’s thesis rests upon a view of the ever-wet rainforest as an inhospitable habitat incapable of supporting populations of independent foragers (1987; also Bailey et al. 1989). This view is by no means securely established and recently Bellwood (1993), using archaeological evidence, and Endicott and Bellwood (1991), using both ethnographic and archaeological data, have made a convincing case that self-sufficient foraging is not only possible but has historically been present, both in the prehistoric past and more recently among contemporary Batek Negrito communities living today in the ever-wet rainforests of the Malay Peninsula (see also Endicott 1984). More generally, Endicott and Bellwood (1991) conclude that, while “tropical rain forests vary in their potential for supporting human foraging”, in some areas at least, “small nomadic groups of foragers can live off wild resources alone” and, indeed, have done so in the past, although “the paucity of resources” tends to make such groups opportunistic, and “one of the opportunities they are quick to take up is the opportunity to trade for agricultural produce”.

Whether foragers occupied the tropical rainforests before Austronesian colonization or not, Bellwood (1985:132) argues that, in either case, if Austronesian-speakers initially arrived in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago as cultivators, then, logically, “hunting and collecting societies”, whose members now speak Austronesian languages, can have originated in one of two possible ways. They may

have either survived assimilation by, or have adapted out of [an] expanding Austronesian agricultural economy (1985:132).

In other words, they may, like the Philippine Negritos, derive from an earlier population whose members “resisted acculturation by surrounding cultivators”, or they may have taken up foraging later on, after their entry into the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, “as a result of change from an agricultural ancestry” (Bellwood 1985:132).

Except for the Philippine Negritos, all other Austronesian-speaking hunter-gatherers in Island Southeast Asia appear to be genetically indistinguishable from the agricultural populations present around them. In order to account for their presence it has been suggested for Borneo that such foragers are “devolved agriculturalists” (Blust 1989; Hoffman 1984, 1986), the descendants of Austronesian cultivators who moved into the rainforest in order to engage in the collection of forest products for trade. While this argument has gained some acceptance outside of Borneo (cf. Bailey et al. 1989), the ethnographic evidence supporting it has not been well marshalled, and anthropologists working with contemporary hunter-gatherers in Sarawak and Kalimantan are considerably more critical (cf. Brosius 1988, 1991; Sellato 1988). At the end of the paper I will examine some of the reasons why this is so and look briefly at several alternative arguments. Together, these point up, as we shall see, a rather more complex solution.

First, however, it is useful to consider briefly the adaptive history of the Aboriginal (Aslian) peoples of the Malay Peninsula. Although most are Austroasiatic- rather than Austronesian-speaking, the history of these groups presents us with a valuable comparison; it also interpenetrates, in more recent times, with the story of Austronesian expansion.

Benjamin, in a series of valuable papers (1979, 1985, 1986), has proposed a model for the development of the three major Aboriginal groupings of the Malay Peninsula: 1) nomadic foragers in the north (the “Semang”); 2) sedentary swidden farmers in the central uplands (the “Senoi”); and 3) southern lowland forest collectors-for-trade (the “Aboriginal Malay”).^[1] His underlying argument is that (1986:5),

the present-day array of indigenous cultures in the Peninsula [has] come about through processes of mutual dissimilation or assimilation (as the case may be) within an essentially common cultural frame.

In other words, each of these major traditions arose, Benjamin (1986:10) argues, out of a common cultural matrix, and in assuming its distinctive form, was shaped, not only by ecological forces, but also by socio-cultural choices made by its members in full awareness of the “ways of doing things” practised by the members of each of the other traditions. Each tradition thus emerged, not out of isolation or from lack of contact, but as a result of “differentiated responses to a heightened attachment to foraging, swiddening, and collection-for-trade”, made by groups whose members saw “themselves, complementarily, as part of each other’s environment” (Benjamin 1986:10).

Benjamin suggests that food crops began to be cultivated in the Malay Peninsula by about 5000 years ago and so made sedentism a possible option. Among these crops were both cereals and root-crops (cf. Dunn 1975; Peacock 1979). Initially, however, while allowing for a broader spectrum of subsistence modes, the Peninsula was not, Benjamin (1986:12) maintains, well-adapted to sedentary farming. Instead, its economic hallmark was diversity. Not only was there variation in crops and patterns of cultivation but also in subsistence modes themselves, which besides farming, included forest hunting-gathering, strand-foraging, fishing and trade (see also Dunn 1975). While this diversity allowed for considerable adaptive flexibility, it did not lead, initially at least, to a rapid run up of population or to the development of higher levels of socio-cultural integration. Both came only much later. Initially, Benjamin (1986:14) asserts, the social and demographic patterns of farming communities were not very different from those that continued to subsist by foraging. Indeed, he suggests that most groups probably combined both foraging and farming, much as do upland “Senoi” groups today (Benjamin 1986:13). Thus, while foragers planted crops from time to time, farmers continued to engage in hunting and gathering. In Benjamin’s view, until some 2000 years ago, the Aboriginal cultures of the Peninsula, while internally diverse, remained socially and economically undifferentiated.

Here a cautionary note is in order. Almost certainly Benjamin overstates the in situ nature of these developments (cf. Bellwood 1993). Recent archaeological evidence points to a marked discontinuity between foraging “Hoabinhian” communities and subsequent Neolithic assemblages, indicating that cultivation, and in particular the introduction of rice-agriculture, brought about significant demographic and social organizational changes (Bellwood 1993). Moreover, agriculture appears to have entered the Peninsula from the north and was probably carried southward by Austroasiatic-speakers, including among them, very likely, the ancestors of the present-day “Senoi”. Like the Philippine Negritos, the ancestors of the Semang appear to have similarly undergone an early language “switch” as a consequence of this southward expansion of agriculturalists, thus becoming Austroasiatic-speaking like their neighbours. As Bellwood (1993) notes, this tandem spread of language and agriculture appears to parallel the spread of Austronesian-speaking agriculturalists to the east. Both seemingly represent a continuous expansion of a rice cultivating population to the south, commencing about 3000 BC, with, in this instance, its ultimate products impacting on the Malay Peninsula from two opposed directions, the Austroasiatics from the north, the Austronesians from the south.

These qualifications aside, the fact that the ancestors of the Semang underwent a language “switch”, and that the Austroasiatic languages now spoken in the Malay Peninsula are as highly differentiated as they are, all point, as Benjamin rightly argues, to an impressive history of local contact and development.

Later, in the south, contact with Austronesian mariners began a process of internal differentiation. Thus,

the Peninsular coastline began to be contacted by “oceanic nomads”, making available the further option of trading in forest products with outsiders … At first these Austronesian-speaking mariners would have seemed exotic to the Austroasiatic-speaking land-dwellers, but it would not have been very long before certain parts of the Peninsula (the coastal lowlands and the south in particular) would, by cultural assimilation and intermarriage, have become an extension inland of the Austronesian world (Benjamin 1986:11).

In the northern and central regions of the Peninsula, around the same time, farming became efficient enough to allow for the emergence of a more overtly differentiated array of cultures (1986:14). Thus Benjamin suggests that while swiddeners were able to intensify their sedentism as a result, foragers, the ancestors of the present-day “Semang”, became, in response, even “more nomadic…, cutting down … further their sedentary periods of desultory swidden-tending” (1986:14). Thus, while both sedentism and rainforest foraging had long been options, the marked differentiation of the two came about only much later, through a process of “mutual socio-cultural dissimilation” (Benjamin 1986:15).

In this process of dissimilation, different patterns of social organization were generated as each group came to emphasize what Benjamin (1986:6) calls “deliberately-constructed carriers of ecologically-related meanings and values”. One example he discusses are rules of marriageability. Thus, among the foraging Semang, cross-sex avoidances, especially between siblings- and cousins-in-law, produced, Benjamin argues, “a mental image of anti-sedentism” by picturing the ideal society as one constituted of easily detachable conjugal-family groups, linked together by marriages contractible only between those who are not previously related either by consanguinity or affinity. This image, coupled with low population density, compels a “readiness to wander far and wide in search, not only of food, but of social relations” (1986:14). The result is a social organization that is both well-suited to nomadic survival, but also, through its scheme of values, one which irreversibly commits those who practise it to a nomadic mode of life. In contrast, the agricultural Senoi “switched signs” and imposed joking relations where the Semang imposed avoidance, thereby making it, not proscribed, but desirable to marry someone from the same group into which one’s siblings and cousins had already married. In this way intermarrying kin groups were consolidated and a premium was placed on sedentism rather than mobility. This difference “not only proclaimed that Senoi ways were different from Semang ways”, but provided a further reason for rejecting the other. In consequence,

two quite complementary patterns of social praxis were evolved and locked into place (Benjamin 1986:15).

Finally, by the end of the first millennium AD, among the now Austronesian-speaking peoples of the southern lowlands (and in the neighbouring coastal regions of Borneo and Sumatra), petty chiefdoms became progressively “nested” within one another to form small-scale states (cf. Benjamin 1985; Wolters 1967, 1979). This process of state formation almost certainly involved boat-dwelling mariners — the peoples whose adaptation I turn to presently — who acted as “integrating information-carriers” linking together, as agents in this process, the emerging courts, subsidiary chiefs and a developing peasantry (Benjamin 1986:16).