GEOG 002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Moe Williams, Dayak People
15 Jul 2020
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Document Summary
Gaps are conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations (i. e. , categories) do not travel well. Gaps are zones of erasure and incomprehensibility; some people"s lives fall into these gaps. Meratus dayaks fall into conceptual gaps between categories that conservationists and developers use; they are nomads. Thinking about the world in terms of binaries creates these gaps (nature v. society, civilized v. wild, settled culture vs. wild, farms v. forest reserves) Dominant attempt to categorize (by race, by relationship status) create gaps. Attempted binary: either natural, wild, untouched rainforest, or development (timber plantations, agriculture) There are social histories in these rainforests that aren"t visible at the surface. Rainforests that are neither cultivated or wild (the landscape of the meratus) Relationship between humans and fruit trees sustains the landscape and humans second-growth : how humans modify the rainforest by eating fruit and spitting seeds onto the ground for new growth (swiddens)=conservationists and developers don"t understand this.
