Today, contemporary hunter-gatherers in Island Southeast Asia are associated primarily with the equatorial rainforest, an ecosystem that is believed to have expanded in the region around 10,000 BP, replacing in many regions monsoon forests and parklands (see Bellwood 1985:31-36). It is, as yet, unclear when Southeast Asian foragers began to exploit the equatorial rainforest. As indicated earlier, some have argued that this may not have taken place until after cultivated foods became available and the rainforest itself was modified as a result of agricultural clearing (cf. Headland 1987; Bailey et al. 1989; Peterson and Peterson 1977). The details of this argument are beyond the scope of our discussion here, but basically the contention is that “undisturbed” equatorial rainforest lacks an adequate resource base, particularly in starch foods, to support an independent foraging economy, a contention that is open, as we have seen, to serious question (see Brosius 1991; Endicott 1984; Endicott and Bellwood 1991).
For Borneo, Blust (1989) has argued on linguistic grounds that present-day foragers, being Austronesian-speakers, are the descendants of past cultivators. Similarly, Hoffman (1984, 1986) maintains that Bornean foragers are “secondary hunter-gatherers” whose ancestors were former horticulturalists who moved into the forest in order to specialize in the collection of forest products for trade. Harrisson (1949) and Seitz (1981) make similar arguments. However, anthropologists working with contemporary foraging societies in Borneo have disputed these views, particularly those of Hoffman, doing so on both conceptual and empirical grounds (cf. Brosius 1988, 1991; Nicholaisen 1976a; Sellato 1988, 1989). Without denying the significance or long history of trade in forest products, or the close economic ties that typically exist between foragers and surrounding cultivators, most have stressed the lack of a precise time-frame that tends to characterize many of these “devolution” arguments. Thus, Sellato (1989:6) notes that there are no recorded instances in Borneo of horticulturalists having become forest nomads. Instead, over the last two centuries, the observed movement has been entirely in the opposite direction, with virtually all foraging groups adopting some elements of cultivation and sedentism.
Linguistic evidence, although incomplete, also fails to support a notion of recent “devolution”. Hoffman (1986:14-15) argues that adjacent, trade-connected foraging and agricultural groups speak “nearly identical languages”. This, however, is not the case (cf. Brosius 1988:83-84). In Sarawak, for example, the principal foraging population, the Penan, is divided between two dialect groups which Needham (1972:177) calls the Eastern and Western Penan. Although distinct, dialects of both groups are mutually intelligible. In contrast, the settled agriculturalists with whom these groups regularly trade belong to at least twelve different language families (Brosius 1988:84). Thus, while the Penan show some degree of linguistic unity, no close linguistic relationship has yet been demonstrated between them and other major foraging populations in Borneo. Instead, the Penan are linguistically related to the Kenyah, a diverse collection of swidden cultivators. While the present Penan may thus have “devolved” from Kenyah cultivators in the past, the situation is complex, as ethnohistorical evidence strongly indicates that at least some Kenyah have adopted agriculture relatively recently as a result of contact with an expanding Kayan population (Rousseau 1990:245-246). A much stronger probability therefore exists that many, if not all, Kenyah were, like the Penan, rainforest foragers in the past (Rousseau 1990:246).
With regard to nutritional arguments, the debate concerning rainforest foragers has centred chiefly on wild yams (cf. Headland 1987). In Borneo, however, the principal source of dietary carbohydrate is not yams, but rather the starch of the wild sago palm (Eugeissona utilis). Dependence on wild sago not only sets Borneo foragers apart from other Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers, but seriously challenges the more general nutritional arguments against independent foraging (Brosius 1990, 1991). Closely related to this, a second feature which
distinguishes Penan (and other Bornean foragers) from those elsewhere in Southeast Asia, …is that whereas groups such as Agta and Semang live and forage in close proximity to agricultural settlements, Penan inhabit areas in the deep interior, usually one to four days’ walk from the nearest agricultural settlements (Brosius 1991:136).
This is not to say that they live isolated from contact or trade with neighbouring longhouse people. On the contrary,
trade is of vital importance to Penan. However, unlike most other tropic foragers, …trade does not involve the exchange of forest products for food. Penan trade various forest products for items such as tobacco, metal, cloth, salt, and flashlight batteries, but not for food items … With respect to food, [they] are wholly self-sufficient … (Brosius 1991:136).
Here, as Brosius (1991:130) notes, contrary to assumptions made regarding tropical foragers elsewhere (cf. Bailey et al. 1989:64), the existence of a vigorous, long-established trade with settled agriculturalists does not, in itself, rule out the possibility of subsistence independence.
The Eugeissona palm on which the Penan and other Bornean foragers depend occurs throughout the interior of central Borneo, at a wide range of elevations, but is found in greatest concentrations on steep ridges and slopes, where it grows in dispersed groves interspersed with other forest vegetation (Brosius 1991:146). While we lack detailed quantitative data on nutrition and production, Eugeissona is known to be a rich source of carbohydrate and studies indicate that its starch is high in energy (350-400 kilocalories/gram) (Sellato 1989:159). Although much smaller than cultivated sago (Metroxylon), a single trunk yields, on average, about 4 kg of starch,[9] roughly enough to feed a single adult for a week (cf. Sellato 1989:159-60; also Anderson et al. 1982; Kedit 1982). To feed a band of 20-50 persons requires a weekly felling of some 15 to 20 palms.
Wild Eugeissona grows in dense clumps of some 3 to 6 trunks per clump, raised on a mass of aerial roots. While Borneo foragers vary considerably in social organization and settlement, basic subsistence patterns are notably similar. Typically, in processing palms, the men first fell 2 or 3 mature trunks from each clump, cutting the logs into sections, which are then carried to a stream or other water source, where the pith is reduced to flour (Langub 1989:175). This the women wash to extract the starch. Brosius (1986) and Langub (1988, 1989) have both shown how, in the case of the Penan, methods of sago extraction are designed not to interfere with the palm’s natural regeneration. Thus the Penan cut only a small number of mature trunks from a single clump, never felling the entire root-stock, thus leaving the clump to sprout new trunks. In this way stands are regularly harvested on a sustained basis. After the mature sago (nangah) has been cut, the remaining young sago (uvud) is marked (molong) (Langub 1989:174-176). The group then moves on to a new stand of palms where the process is repeated. After 2 or 3 years, the marked trunks are mature enough to be felled and the group returns to the original stand where the individuals who marked them now claim the mature trunks for processing into starch. Thus local groups orient their movements around known palm-stands. In doing so, they follow a pattern of regular rotational re-use not entirely unlike the fallow-rotation pattern practised by established swidden cultivators with regard to parcels of secondary forest (Sather 1990).[10] The entire cycle extends over 5 or 6 years. By marking young sago, families secure for themselves rights of future harvest. These rights are respected not only within the owner’s band, but between neighbouring Penan groups as well. A similar system of marking also applies to rattan, the principal item of Penan trade with outsiders. By means of this system, an orderly supply of sago, rattan and other items is thus assured and the principal forest resources on which the Penan depend are managed in a way that avoids their depletion or overuse (Brosius 1986, 1990; Langub 1988, 1989).[11]
Brosius (1991:131-132) sees in this pattern of management an important point regarding the nature of foraging generally. Foraging and agriculture are commonly treated as dichotomous modes of subsistence. “Yet”, as Hutterer (1983:172-173) notes,
farmers also harvest what nature produces. [And while] It is true that agriculturalists manipulate the environments from which they derive their food … so do hunters …
In the case of the Penan and other Borneo foragers, this manipulation significantly affects the long-term availability of the forest resources these groups exploit (Brosius 1991:131). Farmers are not alone in modifying their environments. For the Penan, too,
the effects of past human exploitation [bear directly] on the present abundance of resources. Penan actively manage the Eugeissona palm, and their exploitation of this resource has a further impact on [its] demography (1991:146).
With an increasing availability of cultivated foods, foragers like the Penan, Brosius observes, may abandon their traditional management of forest resources. This, together with a loss of prime habitats to agricultural settlement, may make these resources less available. As a consequence, they may
drop out of the subsistence repertoire because their management is abandoned … Thus, contrary to the assumption that hunter-gatherers could only have occupied tropical forests with the advent of agriculture,
it is possible, Brosius (1991:133) argues, that the introduction of
agriculture itself [may have] led to the current dearth of carbohydrate resources in most tropic forest ecosystems.
Sellato (1989:154-155) argues, too, against a radical dichotomization of foraging and agriculture, noting that questions regarding the origin of Bornean foragers have been founded conceptually upon just such an opposition. By accepting this dichotomy, observers have been prevented from seeing that the result of interaction between foragers and settled food-producers has been the emergence in Borneo of relatively stable societies combining features of both lifestyles, not of short-lived communities representing “intermediate stages” of either “evolution” or “devolution”. Thus, today while foragers may be in the process of becoming sedentary, the end result is by no means a complete conversion to cultivation, much less to full-time rice-agriculture. Instead, partially settled foragers usually continue to forage, often, in fact, intensifying their collection of forest products as they take up part-time cultivation for subsistence. The reason, Sellato (1989:215) argues, has to do with the importance of trade itself as a social and economic relationship.
Here, it is possible to go even further and to point out that the great majority of Bornean foragers today are neither fully nomadic nor permanently settled (Langub 1989:172). While sedentism is relatively recent for many, Bornean foragers have long displayed marked variation in social organization and settlement forms. Thus, in Sarawak, the Western Penan work sago in large task groups, while the Eastern Penan process it in smaller groups (Brosius 1990: 7). Correspondingly, Western Penan bands represent highly enduring social aggregates, characterized by long-term population stability, not the fluid social groupings generally associated with hunter-gatherers. Reflecting this stability, the Western Penan maintained what Brosius (1986:176) describes as a “two-tier settlement pattern”, consisting of a main settlement, called the lamin jau, and a series of impermanent satellite camps, the lamin tana, located close to the sago stands in which families are currently working. Today, this “two-tier” system has proved highly adaptable to semi-sedentarism, including continuing forest collection-for-trade, with permanent settlements — villages and longhouses — now taking the place of the traditional lamin jau (Brosius 1990:4).
Similarly, upland cultivators in Borneo engage in substantial hunting, gathering and fishing, particularly in areas of expansive forest-pioneering. Here, especially in migratory situations where swidden cultivation is used as a pioneering technique to open tracts of primary forest to clearance and permanent settlement, upland cultivators enjoy both greater opportunity to forage and an increased need to retain foraging skills for survival. For the Iban, a major upland population of west-central Borneo, a significant attraction of primary-forest pioneering is the opportunity it affords for taking game, freshwater fish and wild plant foods. On the other hand, clearing the primary forest is a risky and arduous task, even with metal tools. As a result, in settled areas, as established swiddeners, the Iban, like other rainforest cultivators in Borneo, prefer to re-use the secondary forest well before its full natural succession in order to avoid the larger amounts of labour required to fell fully mature forest. Many also, like the Penan, manage stands of Eugeissona, both wild and planted, particularly in areas of pioneering where new and unfamiliar terrain is being brought under cultivation, as a famine food against possible crop failure.
In a more general way, it seems likely that the early Austronesians, too, as they spread southward through the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, made similar use of foraging, particularly in extending their settlement into forested environments. Indeed, Austronesian expansion may itself have temporarily increased the value of foraging as an adjunct to agriculture. Secondary foraging may also have played a role in the domestication of new cultigens. It seems unlikely that groups narrowly focused on intensive rice agriculture would have been as inclined as those who continued to practise at least some secondary foraging to explore the wild plant resources of the new environments they came to occupy and incorporate not only new plant crops, but also, in the case of palm and tuber crops, new modes of husbandry and propagation. Finally, the early Austronesians, by enveloping foragers in a diversified economy, almost certainly made available technological innovations that rendered hunting and gathering itself more effective (Nicholaisen 1976a, 1976b). Thus, in Borneo, the Western Penan were well-known in the past as skilled iron-smiths (Needham 1972:178). Yet iron-working derived originally from surrounding cultivators. In adopting it, the Penan used iron to produce spears and drill-bits with which to bore hardwood blowpipe shafts. The use of spears and blowpipes both enormously enhanced the effectiveness of hunting and so the productivity of rainforest foraging itself as an economic option (Brosius 1990:5-6).
In other ways as well, the dichotomization of foraging and cultivation may be misleading. Thus, subsistence systems in Borneo show a continuum of stable combinations of rice agriculture, domesticated sago and tuber cultivation, orchard crops, forest foraging, hunting, fishing and marine collection. Rice itself is grown by means of an almost infinite variety of methods. Upland peoples are often characterized as swidden cultivators. However, in Sabah and northern Sarawak many practise irrigated forms of cultivation, some of which are highly distinctive (cf. Talla 1979:309ff.), suggesting a long history of local development. Similarly swidden systems are themselves diverse, not surprisingly so considering the great variety of terrains and cultural settings in which swiddening is practised. Moreover, swidden cultivation is almost never the sole method of farming employed by upland peoples. Thus, in western and central Borneo, swidden cultivation is regularly combined with a variety of intermediate systems known in Sarawak as padi paya or “swamp-rice” cultivation. Padi paya agriculture combines elements of both swiddening and irrigated farming (cf. Pringle 1970:26-27).[12] Thus cultivation begins in the same way as dry-rice farming with cutting, drying and burning, but farms are typically cleared from naturally fooded plots and as in irrigated systems, planting is typically done in seedbeds with seedlings usually transplanted into prepared fields.
In this connection, Sellato (1989) offers an alternative interpretation of the role of foragers in the Austronesian settlement of Borneo. He suggest that initially pre-Austronesian groups occupied the coastline and areas of inland and riverine rainforest before the first Austronesians arrived bringing with them a developed agricultural economy. While these newcomers almost certainly brought rice, Sellato argues that without metal tools, they were unlikely to have been able to extend rice agriculture into the interior rainforests of the island with any degree of effectiveness.[13] Indeed, Sellato argues that the extensive opening of the interior of Borneo to swidden rice-cultivation came about only with the massive proto-historic migrations of groups like the Kayan, Iban and Ngaju Dayaks, all of whom expanded largely through areas previously occupied by only scattered populations of forest foragers. For the Iban, these migrations began in the mid-16th century and involved the settlement of areas inhabited chiefly by Bukitan and Ukit foragers and, in the lower river valleys and estuarine lowlands, by small communities of sago-cultivators (cf. Sandin 1967). Sellato thinks it likely that the early Austronesians were chiefly foragers rather than cultivators. In this, he appears to slip into the same dichotomizing argument he criticizes in others. More likely, they practised both cultivation and foraging. Some groups appear to have remained coast-bound, practising a mixed economy of forest foraging, fishing and horticulture — cultivating sago, fruit trees and tuber crops, and possibly, on a small-scale, swamp-rice. A few, living in the interior headwaters, subsisted as full-time foragers. Only later did swidden agriculturalists spread inland, through the interior of Borneo, bringing with them a permanent system of inland forest cultivation.
Finally, foraging groups, over much of central, southern and western Borneo, have historically maintained some degree of contact with one another (Sellato 1989:153ff.).[14] In addition, they have also maintained long-term trading ties with surrounding longhouse communities. For centuries, probably millennia, trade has been a major feature of the economy of the Penan and other Borneo foragers. In a regional perspective, these groups have long occupied a specific niche in the interior economy, acting as the major source of forest products traded to riverine longhouses and so to the coast (Brosius 1990:6). Historically, this trade shaped important features of longhouse society in many parts of Borneo, including social ranking and external relations with coastal sultanates. But, while trade has played a significant role in the lives of the Penan and their neighbours, it does not, in itself, “explain” the existence of forest foragers in Borneo.
Traditionally, [the] Penan depended on longhouse peoples, particularly aristocrats, to act as mediators with the outside world and to serve as the conduit by which both information and material goods reached them. The traditional type of relationship existing between Penan and longhouse aristocrats was multi-dimensional in that longhouse peoples provided not just trade goods … but other types of “services” as well (1990:6).
Trade, important as it was, did not, however, involve subsistence inter-dependence (1990:6). Thus, foodstuffs were not, for either party, an item of trade. Finally, traditional trading ties were formed primarily with stratified societies. This is because, Sellato (1989:224) argues, egalitarian peoples like the Iban historically engaged in forest collection-for-trade themselves. As a result, when they encountered competing foragers, they tended either to absorb or displace them rather than engage them as trading partners. With stratified groups, trade was, and remains, largely monopolized by upper stratum families, whose economic position it enhances, while stratification itself prevents the easy assimilation of outsiders, thereby allowing trading relations to be maintained on a long-term basis without foragers losing their separate identity (cf. Sellato 1989: 224). Today, these traditional trading ties are breaking down as forests disappear and roads, timber camps and permanent market settlements increasingly penetrate the territories of former nomads.
In conclusion, the evidence from Borneo suggests that Austronesian settlement involved, initially, neolithic populations possessing a diverse economy combining secondary foraging, hunting and fishing with varied forms of horticulture, including the cultivation of sago, fruit and tuber crops, as well as rice, with individual groups radiating, as they settled the island, into a multitude of local economic niches. Even rice cultivation appears to have undergone diversification in Borneo. Thus, while some groups appear to have adapted to the Bornean rainforest as relatively self-contained foragers; others took up a mixed economy combining forest-collection-for-trade with farming; while a fully-developed system of swidden rice-cultivation, rather than being a “primitive” adaptation that early on in its settlement history opened the interior of the island to both horticulturalists and forest foragers alike, may have developed as a relatively late florescence.[15]