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.
