Abstract
Since 1987, Penan foragers in Malaysia have been increasingly affected by the activities of logging companies, and have protested this with blockades. Simultaneously, they have become the focus of a broad-based international environmental campaign. This paper examines the rhetoric of that campaign. In particular, I examine the ways in which Western environmentalists have constructed Penan land rights with reference to Penan knowledge of the landscape and of the biotic elements which exist there. Further, I consider how environmentalists have drawn on ethnographic accounts, and how those accounts are transformed in the process of generating images deployed in the campaign.
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Brosius, J.P. Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge. Human Ecology 25, 47–69 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021983819369
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021983819369