Changing Pathways: Forest Degradation and the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia

by Lye Tuck-Po

The Batek are hunter-gatherers who live in the lowland tropical forests of northeastern Peninsular Malaysia. Over the past few decades, as more and more of their forest home is degraded, they are developing an acute sensitivity to what this means, for them and for the broader world. In fact, they would like the world to know about their worries and their critiques of the causes of degradation. Changing Pathways was inspired by that need. Beyond a straightforward recounting of Batek environmental concerns, this book examines the cosmological basis for those concerns, the changing focus of the cosmology, the stories and histories through which the Batek express their place in the world, and suggests how environmental degradation might affect their knowledge, perception, and politics. Changing Pathways is an invaluable resource not only for environmental anthropologists and hunter-gatherer specialists but applied resource managers around the world.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 2004

About the author

Lye Tuck-Po is an environmental anthropologist whose primary research focuses on the environmental knowledge and relations of local communities, especially Southeast Asian tropical forest dwellers. Her long-term work is with the mobile, hunting-and-gathering, forest-dwelling Batek (Orang Asli) of Pahang. This study developed into an abiding interest in the knowledge and knowing of landscapes and in indigenous epistemologies.