The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden Read Free Book Online Page A

that not only boar but also barking deer were nearby.
    The obsession with fruiting seasons may seem strange to those of us from temperate climes—after all, in one weekend any American schoolkid can learn when trees and berries fruit in New England—but the Borneo rainforest doesn’t work like that. By far the dominant trees are dipterocarps, and, given all the seed predators waiting to pounce on fruit once it appears, the trees have evolved a strategy called masting to ensure their reproduction. What this means is that they produce an overwhelming amount of fruit at unpredictable intervals. This strategy, along with the great diversity of trees in the rainforest, reduces the odds that predators will adapt to a fruiting cycle and enhances the probability that seeds will survive. Thus, flying scouts like birds or insects provide invaluable intelligence to Penans and possibly animals as well about where the fruit and those animals who eat it can be found.
    And yes, all the forest Penans gathered in Marudi knew about the butterfly. They called it yap lempuhan, a fast-flying insect that appears rarely but serves as a sign of fruiting season for many types of trees. Later, in Miri, I was introduced to a Penan secondary school student away from the highlands for his studies. When I asked him about the butterfly he looked at me as if I had three heads.
    To put in perspective what I had heard from the Penans in Marudi, and during subsequent trips to longhouses in the highlands, I sought out Dr. Jayl Lanjub, an anthropologist trained at McGill University, then working with the state planning unit. He was fully aware of the problem of the loss of indigenous knowledge, noting that there were glimmerings of awareness in the government that something noble was vanishing. The maddening thing for Lanjub was that efforts to help the Penans were doing just as much damage as the destruction of the forests. “When a kid goes to secondary school,” he remarked, “he’s only home for three weeks a year. That’s not much time to go out into the forest and learn.” One of his proposals was to arrange for schooling in service centers that were a lot closer to the longhouses. From what I can gather, this policy has been implemented, though not to the degree the Penans would like.
    He also said that he took the Penans’ own protestations about their devotion to traditional knowledge with a grain of salt. “They talk a good line,” he told me, “but like anybody, given the opportunity they are going to take the path of least resistance.” For instance, he noted that whenever the planning unit visited the rural villages, its inhabitants requested guns. “Hunting with a blowpipe is very difficult,” he explained.
    When I left Borneo in 1990 there were eight nomadic groups. Now there may not be any that are truly nomadic, though a number of settled Penans still hunt and gather in the dwindling forests. The decline of nomadic groups has been matched by an increase in settlements, from about 78 in 1990 to 121 today. Some sense of deep identification with fellow tribe members might maintain Penan identity long after the last Penan forgets the significance of yap lempuhan, but that is only partial solace for what will be lost.
    The march of so-called progress has been accompanied by a cultural entropy in the metaphorical sense, as distinct, well-ordered societies disperse into an undifferentiated mass after encounters with modernity. We can only hope that cultural dynamics are not as rigid as the laws of physics.

CHAPTER 3
    New Guinea: The Godsend of Cargo
    I f the ragged edge of the world is that moveable frontier where modernity, wildlands and indigenous peoples collide, then New Guinea has been on the front line of that silent struggle almost continuously since first contact between Europeans and the island’s hundreds of tribes in the nineteenth century. (Contact with outsiders dates back