Anthropogenic Tropical Forests

The studies in this volume provide an ethnography of a plantation frontier in central Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on the expertise of both natural scientists and social scientists, the key focus is the process of commodification of nature that has turned the local landscape into anthropogenic tropical forests. Analysing the transformation of the space of mixed landscapes and multiethnic communities—driven by trade in forest products, logging and the cultivation of oil palm—the contributors explore the changing nature of the environment, multispecies interactions, and the metabolism between capitalism and nature.

The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment.

Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements—commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia.

Chapters ‘Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier’ and ‘Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene’ are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

“Building on a rich history of collaboration between Japanese and Malaysian academics, Anthropogenic Tropical Forests presents a nuanced, empirically grounded picture of one ‘plantation frontier’ in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, tracing its social, political, economic, and ecological transformations over time and gesturing toward new possibilities for its future. … this is a groundbreaking contribution to Borneo studies and an exciting model of cross-disciplinary collaboration from which scholars in Southeast Asia and beyond can learn.” (Liana Chua,Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 10 (1), April, 2021)

Noboru Ishikawa is a professor of anthropology at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He has conducted fieldwork in Sarawak and West Kalimantan over the past two decades, exploring the construction of national space in the borderland, highland–lowland relations, commodification of natural resource and labour, and the relationship between nature and non-nature. His publications include: Between frontiers: nation and identity in a Southeast Asian borderland (2010), and the edited volumes Transborder governance of forests, rivers and seas (2010) and Flows and movements in Southeast Asia: new approaches to transnationalism (2011).

Ryoji Soda is a professor in geography at the Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka City University, Japan. He has conducted field research in Sarawak and other Asian countries focusing on human mobility of ethnic minorities. His recent interest is in human–nature interactions and environmental humanities. His publications include: People on the move: rural–urban interactions in Sarawak (2007); The diversity of small-scale oil palm cultivation in Sarawak, Malaysia. The Geographical Journal 182 (2015); and Culture and acceptance of disasters: supernatural factors as an explanation of riverbank erosion. Ngingit 9 (2017).