1By many people I meet, I am often described as a ‘nomad’, and this colloquially represents the wide movement and travel that I experience within life. I spend a lot of time darting about the world, couch surfing, living with different communities and learning about the different rhythms of how people live out their life… this seems to be enough for many people I meet to describe me as a nomad. However, I think the term nomad has been misinterpreted and what I seek to highlight with this article is that paths of movement in the nomadic lifestyle are not transient but are rather characterised by the ‘return’. And the return is accompanied by a mode of care and commitment to the land. I am writing this article as I think that maybe I can share something that is illuminating about our world in the face of the Planetary Emergency. And I am going to try to show don’t tell, but the reality is that the final argument that I present is an interpretation and reflection of what I have experienced over the last ten years of living and working with communities’ post deforestation.
2The first time I presented this argumentation was at the EASA conference in a panel about futures and fictions, now some years go. I created a filmic essay in the form of satire, where I played the game of looking back on my life and reflecting on the decisions I make today and in recent times, from tomorrow’s perspective (at the end of my life).1 The irony is, in an attempt to be satirical I perpetuated everything I don’t like about anthropology, heralding its problematic binaries of a colonial mentality. The second iteration (2nd attempt), I wrote a letter to the “survivors” — a metaphoric notion those who survived, drawing our attention to the collapse of humanity and society as we know it — aka. The future outlook of the Planetary Emergency. It was a whimsical reflection of the grief I had as a collaborator, who has spent the last ten years working with Penan activist Mutang Tu’o and whole communities within Sarawak, Malaysia. And the third time I shared this research was at Humbolt Forum, in a guest lecture with the “Matters of Activity” cluster. The majority of the interdisciplinary audience were interested in my ethnographic filmmaking practice of climate futures (cli-fi) and the reflections I had about time. However what I am slowly realising is that futures are not always the appropriate framework to describe approaches to time. As such I see this paper as a warning for other researchers and cross-cultural collaborators, that engaging with future(s) is not always the most appropriate framework.
3I am not interested in using tricks to get my point across and I realise how hard it is to try and do something others call anthropology. In this iteration, I want to present some aspects I have learnt about time when I have been living in the secondary forests of Sarawak. But perhaps more specifically, I want to explore how time is perceived, and how that can shift our connection with ecologies. I employ a lot of personal reflection in my writing — sharing my own intimacies with grief cycles, filmmaking and cross-cultural collaboration in the face of the Planetary Emergency. But so too, I will seek to give space to my collaborators to speak for themselves with the included clips. I hope with this article we may see how models of futures and futurity aren’t always the answer… How do we navigate our damaged planet when our imagination has been colonised, and our histories have been contaminated?
“What happened in Sarawak is potentially the greatest environmental disaster of our age.”
Gordon Brown (Ex-Prime Minister of UK), 2011
4Saturated in complexities of a globalised interplay, this practice-led enquiry holds a spotlight up to the Malaysian state of Sarawak, and in doing so delves into the very questions of how nomadic practices have been misinterpreted with resulting material consequences. Where once we tracked the footprints of the wild boar under the rooftop canopy, our search with an objective in sight becomes obscured, muddied and tangled. We may start with a one hundred and thirty million years old forest, but we don’t stay there. Nor do the animals. And nor do trees. The Sarawak State Governments’ ex-Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s accumulation of a personal wealth (USD $15 Billion) from his thirty-three years of monopolising the logging of the state forests, foreshadows this enquiry’s historic context of the interplay of governance and corporate investment on the lives of Penan communities and the ecologies of Sarawak. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Fig.1 “Su’ho” (the past).
“Sarawak Geoportal” by Bruno Manser Fund
5Although I employ the term Anthropocene, there are different terms to characterise the epoch, such as New Pangea (Swanson et al. 2015), the Sixth Great Extinction, “terrestrial” (Latour 2018), the Planetary Emergency or “the great turning” (see Macy). It seems that in academia we are always trying to categorise this time that may be referred to as crisis or the greatest time to be alive. Like Anna Tsing, my “use of the term Anthropocene intends to join the conversation but not accept the worst use of the term, from green capitalism to techno-positivist hubris” (Tsing et al. 2017: G3). Whatever you call it, the Planetary Emergency is a result of continuous environmental exploitation and devastation.
Fig.2 “Tana Da’ha” (the land’s blood)
“Sarawak Geoportal” by Bruno Manser Fund
6In nineteen eighty-seven, Indigenous Penan communities erected the first blockade in an attempt to halt the deforestation of their territory. This emergence of grass-roots activism in attempt to defend their lands, characterised a period of conflict and opposition between indigenous communities and the amalgamated interests of the Nation State and corporate stakeholders profiting from the resource extraction. Since the 1970s, timber companies began to “penetrate the interior” of the region moving into “areas occupied by Penan” with the “most immediate effect” on “forest resources” on which the lives of the Penan “depend upon for subsistence and trade” (Brosius 1997b: 472). The analytic legacy of J. Peter Brosius (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997 a, 1997 b, 1999) details the complexities of logging on the Penan’s lives, under the broader context of what he calls “theories of domination and subordination” (1997b: 504) in “assessing the discrepancy between the hidden transcript and public transcript”, enabling analysis of the “impact of domination on public discourse” (Scott 1990: 26; Brosius: 1997b: 505). Though Sarawak had become a major supplier of tropical hardwood products to global consumers during the nineteen eighties, it was the transcripts of resistance movements and their global circulation, that resulted in a “dramatic upsurge in interests among Northern environmental NGOs,” whereby “the Penan became icons of resistance for environmentalists worldwide” (Brosius 1997a: 40).
7But the context of my engagement in Sarawak is thirty years after the height of deforestation and the corresponding resistance. And no longer are we talking about what is worth preserving but instead we talk about what is grieved. In this sequence below, the viewer is introduced to Unyan Wan. Unyan is the mother of Mutang Tu’o (key collaborator) and at the time of filming (2016) was one of the oldest people in the village of Long Iman. She talks to the dogs, both in which she and the non-human companion are displaced from the forest, in the city of Miri. Unyan is visiting her daughter whom, like many Penan individuals, migrated to the city centres for a more prosperous life — aka. post-logging, the villagers cannot sustain themselves.
8
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5y6KONRNQ0
How much longer will we agree to step aside in silence as masters of the universe turns us into property, write our contracts, rape our bodies, sell our histories? How much longer will you and I choose this extinction? (Tsing et al. 2017: G4)
9How much longer will this trauma continue? Extinction and the collapse of humanity is the threat and fear that has been spoken about by academics (see Morton 2016) and activists (see Read 2019) amidst the harsh climate predictions. But for many around the world, the apocalypse previously came and now we are dealing with the survivors and the aftershocks of the “collective trauma produced by the botched response” (Bonilla and LeBrón 2019).
- 2 Tulin Trilogy (A film about a Virus Outbreak on a Sick Planet). Collaboration with Mutang Tu’o and (...)
10Futures, such as we witness from the classic text Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (2000) often come with a promise to address the asymmetrical power unbalances through writing alternate futures. And though the very nature of this AnthroVision edition is rooted in the promise of futures and fiction as research methods, I seek to argue against it as an appropriate method across all contexts. This has progressively become the case in Penan communities of Sarawak, Malaysia. I did not always think this, and actually spent several years creating a science non/fiction film2 that explored climate futures. With Mutang Tu’o and about two hundred collaborators from several Penan villages, we made a film about the upcoming climate shifts that were predicted for the region. The most dramatic shift that we explored speculatively and what happened in the material world over the years, was shifts in rainfall often causing excessive floods. This equated mass destruction of the village areas and the crops that the villages now rely on. Are futures always the right question?
- 3 However, we must be wary within our distinction of the plantation as not to confuse it with horticu (...)
11As we address the notion of futures and time from an ecological perspective, take for example the plantation,3 not only contextually important for Sarawak’s conversion of monoculture palm oil crops, but in historically situating linearity (and futurity), as the dominant model in which with comprehend time. The plantation produced “one world in opposition to many worlds, and in doing so, helped to unify the globe” (Marques 2020: 191; Tsing 2005: 76). And in unifying the space, it unified time. Limiting the variables and specifying an ecosystem as a conventional space of control, highlighting the colonial relationship between systemic production with future assets / crops, controlled and measured, “(b)y redesigning the present from the standpoint of future capital accumulation, the plantation contributed to the production of a new, more productive present” (Marques 2020:191).
12
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkA_3jHdVk0
13In this above clip, we watch Jimmy from Long Luteng searching for Paku (generic term for jungle fern) within the palm oil plantation. For as far as the eye can see, we look at sawit (palm oil palms). This footage is not footage that is celebrated by Penan audiences (like the footage of the boar being cut up, as per below). Instead this is rather confronting truths depicted. In the villages of Long Luteng and the Upper Baram, companies like Samling Ltd. continue to cause havoc within the region with logging and the transformation of the secondary forests into the palm oil plantations. In the forest we see the growth cycles of multiple species all together, across different temporalities. However, at the same time, the fact that the plantation is the site for foraging could be argued as being positive. Whereby, even though we can delineate that a space like a plantation is developed for future capital and thus follows an ethos of futures, at the same time — the many plant species of our natural world (and life) comes back in its own form. The ferns grow even in amongst the monoculture… perhaps fifty percent of plants don’t grow back after deforestation, but many species continue to show their own resilience.
14A foreigner to a Penan villages has been described as a “person of the Queen” in what J. Peter Brosius (1997b) ascertained as a “tangible symbol of hope” from the Penan conception of the British Period’s legacy, in which the Penan received guns and support from the British Raj governments (Brosius 1997b: 489). Brosius further argued that this legacy of the Colonialism equated the dynamic of acceptance of the Western Environmentalists, including the infamous Swiss Activist Bruno Manser himself, being accepted based on intergenerational conceptions of the non-Malay foreigner as an ally (Brosius 1997b: 487-90). The historic context of the colonial authorities, as Brosius connotes from the “Penan historic narratives” reference three distinct periods - “the distant past”; “the colonial period” and the“post-1963 period” (of Malay ruling) when Sarawak joined Malaysia (Brosius 1997b: 482). The “colonial period” included the Brooke Period (1841-1946) and the British Period (1946-63) “which is often conflated because there was little change in the way that Penan were administered” (Brosius 1997b: 482).
15Though the conceptions of history may remain be easily grasped as su’ho (the past), time is not an easily translated concept within Penan. As Mackenzie (2012) ascertained:
Penan has no word for ‘time’, in the sense «time that passes». Similarly, it cannot express «for some time». If I interpret the latter expression as meaning ‘neither for a short time, nor for a long time’, this also cannot be expressed, for the closest one can come in Penan — bé’ metok bé’ lebé (‘not briefly not lengthily’) — is uninterpretable... Although Penans have expressions denoting ‘in the past’, ‘now’, and ‘in the future’, as well as ‘the time / moment when’, ‘interval’ (between two events), not to mention ‘for a long time’ and ‘for a short time’, they have no linguistic concept of an imaginary axis along which we order events, viewed as a kind of continuum, or a substance that flows. Thus, it is impossible to translate texts such as «kill time», «Time is every mortal’s greatest enemy», or «Chronos, the god of time» (Mackenzie 2012: 399).
16Mackenzie linguistically highlights that though there may be futures, pasts and presents, they do not formulate as a chronology within which time is followed. Thus the question that arises is how are periods of time structured or related? One method that was developed during fieldwork to explore this aspect was the monologue. I developed this method as somewhat of a hybrid between the (semi-structured) interview and an oral history. The key idea of this method was that rather than the interviewer/researcher being the one to find structure with lines of questions, instead the participant is able to find the correlations between seemingly separate questions, and in doing so highlights their own structures of meaning.
17The next example I present is a monologue from E’sak Tu’o, the Tu’a Kampong (Headman) of Long Iman. When we sat down, before pulling the camera out, I asked E’sak to reflect on three different aspects: village settlements on the river; the empty village; and what he wanted for his children. Of these three points, pasts, presents and futures were all explored in a constant movement and flow. The monologue as a method gave E’sak the opportunity to structure a logic of time that is non-linear, but complex in its arrangement. Included in this below clip, is a visual prelude before the monologue in discussion.
18
VIEWER WARNING : The following clip includes killing of an animal.
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKXj2V8MwRM
19In addition to the aforementioned ideas of how E’sak constructs time, I would like to briefly refer to the visual sequence included before hand. Underlying the significance of Esak’s words, this sequence is an example of how film is a process of “messing with time”. Just as E’sak was able to talk about different elements and fluidly move between different chronologies, this visual sequence was an attempt to express multiple cycles of time concurrently. The basic editing technique of the cross cut allows for the sequence to track multiple stories through a collage of footage. The included footage tracks three separate elements : a group of children ; E’sak’s room (where the villagers and guests often meet) ; and traditional Penan games. Visually, what we explored, like E’sak’s concurrent chronologies, are multiple chronologies. We watch the children grow over six years of film footage, woven with footage of the village over time. The significance here is in the idea of multiple times co-existing synchronically.
20The final aspect of this sequence to discuss is the beginning. The opening of this sequence starts with the carving up of the boar. E’sak is watched by the neighbours, the children and the camera. When different iterations of this research have been played at film festivals or screenings (outside of Sarawak), often audiences have responded with the shock of uncomfortable feelings to the depiction of animals being killed on screen. Though this is not the case within the Penan villages. Instead, when animals are caught by hunters, the villages often come to see the catch. Similarly, when I analysed participant’s recorded content on the smart phones within the village, material was often depicting the hunting and carving of game. Hunting and the carving up of game is celebrated, watched and shared — signifying that the participants were “not merely recorders of the event but as part of the event to be recorded” (Turner 1992: 10). Each animal caught signified the return of animals to the region post-logging. Each clip of hunting, held its gravity as a symbol of hope. But of significance for us, the depiction of the death of the boar, tells multiple stories all at once. It’s not merely one life at the end, but multiple lives sustained in the cycles of entanglement. This footage does not just depict the preparation of a meal, but in understanding the complexities of an ecological arrangement — the secondary forest has regrown to an extent where the fruits are in bloom, and the boar has returned. Multiple cycles play out simultaneously.
21We should not forget,
We don’t remember,
The traditions of the Penan,
22Together we go camp in the forest.
In the past the forest had good times,
In the past it was very good,
Life in the forest with good times,
23Follow our grandparents in the past.
24Change came to the past,
We met the hard times,
No company brought with them happiness.
25The forest had a good time in the past,
26All of it knew no problems,
It didn’t have change or pain.
Every time Penan said ‘No’,
No company brought with them happiness.
27Every time Penan said ‘No’,
No company brought with them happiness.
28Transcript of the film Su’ho by Rossa, Long Luteng, March 2017.
29
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiH28lc1n7k
30The above song written and performed by Rossa was an example of how I engaged with young people in my fieldwork. Most of the young people felt a little too shy to give an interview, and so in response my collaborations turned to those who were sharing their perspectives publicly — the musicians. Rossa was one such pop-star of the forest with her music widely distributed amongst the villages. What I appreciate about this song from Rossa, is that we look to a young person’s conception of time, to see the onslaught of the “company” (representing the logging companies) as a marker in time to distinguish, how life was lived in comparison to now. This is a shifting time that I will elaborate on later with nuanced appreciation of how the filmmaking can shift time. But at this stage, we can appreciate the value of the past — kivu tepun (following grandparents) as a modality of following traditions. But the significance of exploring the traditions does not just reference time as the past, but rather can illuminate its own significant points of how a nomadic lifestyle of the past can hold its own unique insights into understanding time.
31Take for example the tebuko. As an adet assen Penan (a traditional Penan custom) the tebuko was often described to me by Mutang in the context of the kubu (the meeting between the Penan villages and the British Raj government). Heralding Brosisus’s sense of a colonial nostalgia, the kubu meeting was described with fondness as being a meeting whereby the colonial authorities would meet in a neighbouring village and the Penan would receive guns from the British. The Penan villages, would leave a meeting and prepare for the next one with the tebuko. Using a thin string of rotan, the tu’a kampong (village headman) and representatives, would take the thin rope and tie a knot for every day within which they would wait for the next meeting. Namely, when the next kubu was scheduled for thirty days time, thirty knots would be tied in the rotan string, held safe around the knee with the other selunang (knee bracelets). And each day a knot would be untied, as they counted down to the next meeting.The tebuko highlights that Penan traditions had their own processes of a measuring days when needed, however rather than an omni-present synchronicity, it was specified between the two entities. Time becomes an active agent within which individuals held the process of measurement between each other.
32
Video-Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCN-V1L-1Z0
33In this above clip, Unyan looks over a pictorial depiction of Penan life during the 1980s and 90s, the time when logging was entering the Tutoh and Baram regions. As Unyan looks through the book Nomads of the Dawn (Davis et al. 1995), she finds images of herself and her late husband. She is looking at ghosts of the past. Landscapes, people and practices that once characterised her life, and now remain in their archive. Unyan finishes this sequence by saying “I am only telling these stories so I won’t forget”. In this way, the book that is the catalyst and subject of the conversation, as well as the film footage itself, is a sort of “time capsule”. An attempt to capture the moment in the name of a time to come. In this sense, time is seen not only as a measure, but a framework of materially orientating the past within the present, through the notion of a trace. Unyan passed away in 2022, which makes this footage hold an added value for the communities of collaborators and her family.
34In this clip, Unyan discusses the significance of medicinal plants. In the ‘Sarawak Campaign,' a central rhetoric of Environmentalist efforts was that of the value of the forest for the “potential medicinal plants,” and the “importance of indigenous knowledge” in their “discovery” (Brosius 1997a: 60-3; Davis and Henley 1990: 117; see Davis 1990). However, after logging, most of the plants didn’t grow back. And as Unyan describes, this is the plight of health for the Penan communities. However, beyond this ‘medicinal plant rhetoric’ and the thematic significance of filmmaking as a ‘time capsule,’ we can also see the camera and film as an active agent. By this I refer to the notion of seeing film and research as an active agent within the environment, not just a documentation of what’s been.
35
Video-Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNorcCU25lo
36There are some things you can’t un-see. There are some things that you can’t un-hear… This is the premise of Bateng’s monologue. In gesturing to the non-human / interspecies relations through the visual representation of Bateng feeding the orphan birds, we hear her talks of “su’ho” (the past). The past is constantly gestured in conversations with the elders of the Penan community, but what is of significance here is the idea of a shifting time. Not only do we see the shifting of the life before and after logging. But also in this context, Bateng poses rhetoric question of before and after — asked to me as a researcher/filmmaker, but echoed to the audiences watching: What happens next when you see the destruction of the primary forests?
37Bateng’s engagement with the camera as an apparatus, is heightened beyond an individual researcher, by ontologically referring to the camera as the “moto omok na’ant” (“the motor that allows you to see”). In this sense Bateng gestures to the deeper cycles of visuality and documentation and the role it can have in changing the material consequences. The direct question she asks is “now that you see the destruction through a camera or a screen what next?” This frame of questioning highlights the shifting time — a time of ignorance (before) into a time of awareness when see the destruction (after). Time is comprehended simply by the markers of change. And though indeed pre-logging to post-logging is the fundamental change, for me as a filmmaker, this shift of seeing to have seen is the legacy of finding the value in my research and filmmaking as an activist. the “political sensibility” of this “new ethnography” (Gledhill 1994: 223; see Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986), actively acknowledges my “involvement” in the context (Garcia: 2000: 91), and its potential consequences.
38Activism is at the heart of my engagement with the Penan communities, akin to the influential notions of resistance research (see Ortner 2016). From the beginning of when I first arrived to the communities, I made a promise to Mutang Tu’o and the all my collaborators that there are some things that audiences will see that can have an effect on restoring healthier ecologies after the destruction of the logging. As aforementioned, the foreigner as “tangible symbol of hope” (Brosius 1997b: 489), may have started with British colonialism, but it continued at the height of the deforestation into the promise that a global audience would be able to help. In the 1980s, Sarawak became a “major supplier of tropical hardwoods on the international market” (Brosius 1999: 39), however it is in 1987 when Eastern Penan communities erect “a series of over a dozen blockades against logging companies”, and within a short period the global circulation of “images” and “transcripts” resulted in a “dramatic upsurge in interests among Northern environmental NGOs”, whereby “the Penan became icons of resistance for environmentalists worldwide” (Brosius 1997a: 40).
- 4 “The Sarawak situation received coverage on NBC Evening News, National Public Radio, CNN, and Prime (...)
39The extensive representations4 of the Environmentalists non-centralised ‘Sarawak Campaign’ developed a “discourse of the sacred” in making the Penan “narratable," whereby “imposing some meanings, it expunges others” (Brosius 1997a: 64; 1999: 41). But as well as making Sarawak narratable and converting lives into stories, the extensive representations also have come as question… is this enough? As I have discussed elsewhere (Kendall 2022), there is a role for the cross-cultural collaboration in response to the planetary emergency. However, the reality is that for Mutang Tu’o and many of my collaborators, the real question is what has been achieved from our research?
40
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs_bnqwSrWY
41This interview with my collaborator Mutang was made in approximately 2014. Respectively, this was early in my engagement with the communities, and I continued to work for over eight years in collaboration with him, and perhaps that’s why I find it so haunting. I ask myself the question, was I listening? Mutang asks the question, who will help us? But it seems that I spent the following eight years perpetuating the same problems he explained to me. In this article, I may be reflecting on the value of filmmaking as an ethnographic method, and attempting to highlight how practise-led research demonstrated many things to me, but the truth is, that I also perpetuated the same problems that Mutang spoke about. Namely, after accompanying many of the academics (in whom I have sited for their own ethnographic fieldwork), Mutang asked the question — what does documentation (books and films) actually do for “us” Penan? Here, he is talking about the vast atrocities that face the communities, and questions what role all of the efforts of mass distribution to global audiences actually achieves.
42Years on, the reality is, I don’t have the answer to equate the value of what we have achieved. In academic contexts, I feel comfortable to lean into the “open ended” as if to take the responsibility off myself within argumentation, and leave with more questions than answers. But the reality is, I made him a promise to Mutang that I would try to help create a better future for him and his people and their land. I have not done this. I’m not discrediting what we have achieved, but the political and material situation have not been influenced by our work. Instead of trying to delineate specifics that we have achieved, what I hope is that I can credit Mutang and the other collaborators by sharing what I have learnt with them. That’s what this article is about as a marker of ongoing commitment. So that even though our films have not changed the outcome of deforestation, palm oil plantations and the plight of the company, perhaps there is still significance.
43
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc0OBiDD2LA
- 5 Apo Uleu’ (‘Our Sago’). The first Penan language children’s book, made in collaboration with Mutang (...)
44Lagu Parei (Rice Song) is perhaps of all of the clips within this article, the greatest signifier of the contemporary period. I don’t mean this because of the digitally compressed audio, nor by the film-clip rhythm of the footage. But instead, because we are watching a more recently introduced practice of rice farming. My first collaboration with Mutang and several others was a children’s book5 about Sago production. This was indeed a quintessential story, whereby I asked Mutang “what is the most typical Penan practice to document?” The result was the harvesting of the uvut and jakah palm consumed in the form of na’o (sago jelly). However, over the years of my returns to the communities, sago was not the staple we often ate. Instead it was lubi (rice). And though rice was omni-present on our meals, on returning at different points of the year, so too it dictated the calendar of life at the time. Namely, there were months of mula (planting) and months of harvesting. Rice production became a marker of the calendar. This highlights several contextual shifts, including modes of subsistence from hunter / gather to horticultural; nomadic movement to stationary village settlements; and practices that follow an annual cycle. What is significant of the last point is that the multiple cycles of time (boar’s movement, sago tree growth and fruit cycles) are replaced by a single cycle of time (rice cycle).
45In order to grasp the significance of multiple verse singular cycles of subsistence, we will look at models of time to help comprehend some of these differences. In The Earth Stories Collection: Volume 1. Myths of the Future (2020), Grian A. Cutanda (GRIAN) has collected and connected with the myths of oral cultures in finding the patterns and seeing the parallels of ecocentrism. GRIAN tracks three models of time that are helpful to articulate, including linear time, circular cyclical time and spiral cyclical time. Starting with our dominant comprehensions of linear time and its inherent relationship with measurement, the ticking clock of a progress story goes from Act 1, 2 & all the way to 3 :
Although, possibly, linear time originated in ancient Rome we could say that it was not socially imposed until the arrival of the modern ages, and above all, the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism, with its thesis of infinite economic growth. These are the same theses that now come against the harsh reality of having to accept a planet with finite resources. It is the same theses that have brought us to the climate emergency and the mass extinction of species... the mechanical — and mechanistic — clock ended up imposing itself on the Western world as populations left rural communities to go to the cities, while production time became the whip with which to hasten the growing working class. (Cutanda 2020 : 32).
46The significance here of linearity is in tracking two dominant poles of economic and ecologic systems that lay in conflict; and acknowledge the mediated modalities as holding pertinence within such a comprehension. Indeed, the polemic virtues of linearity come according to measurement of time — commodified, and thus able to be measured in units. With a stop watch to count time, and thus delineate such conceptions of the great acceleration (Land 1992) and even situate Kurzeil’s (2005) model of the exponential. These models of conflict — “homo economicus” and “homo ecologicus” (de Bruyn and Lütticken 2020: 9) — presuppose that in the multiplicit realm of life on earth, commodified units are themselves measured in isolation, and thus predictions of speculated futures negating systemic complexions of multiple/holism. This is a post “alienation” framework, where the intricate interconnectedness of this world is replaced by an abstract vision of specialisation (Foster and Burkett 2017).
- 6 One of the first signs of Climate Change within Sarawak has been the irregular rain patterns. Often (...)
47I make this distinction in a bridge to GRIAN’s second model of time comprehension — circular cyclical time: “The sun, giver of life, renews itself every year, thus marking the seasons, which determine the sowings and harvests” (Cutanda 2020: 34). Seasons, cycles and a rhythm of life on repeat. There is a time of the year that Penan communities mula — plant their rice. There is a time of the year when they majou — harvest with a resulting surplus that can accommodate for eating over the year.6 However this horticulturally inferred system of comprehending time as patterns according to the solar and lunar arrangements is relatively new to Penan communities. Though agricultural practices were common amongst other indigenous communities (Berawan, Kenyah and Iban), the Penan were nomadic hunters and gathers. It has only been since the primary forests were pillaged and the government established village settlements to gain access to the forest interior, that the communities engaged with agriculture as a material enactment of circular patterns of time comprehension. This also holds a complexion of significance in the current predicament of legal land-based claims of sovereign title.
48Take for example the area of Gurung Mulu National Park, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. For the Penan in this region, a deep conflict is presented with the neighbouring Berawan people. The park as one of the key destinations for tourism in Sarawak pays royalties to the traditional land owners, who were recognised as the Berawan people, not the Penan. This has been controversially comprehended by many of the Penan villagers as being due to the government assessing the land ownership according to historic evidence of settlement. In the case of the Berawan, evidence of agriculture and housing infrastructure presented that they had intergenerational claim to the land as the rightful owners. However, as commonly expressed within these effected Penan villages, only two or three generations ago before the establishment of the National Park, the Penan of the region granted permission to the Berawan communities to settle on their land approximately one hundred years ago. Furthermore, the very notion of historic evidence holds political and socially inferred value in the present. Perhaps the camera and our research comes to be understood as its own historic trace?
49The reason there are no pieces of evidence to specify the intergenerational lineage of Penan on the land becomes apparent when we lakeu tai toro — go on hunting trips. Every time I’d follow Mutang or a group of young hunters into the forest — away from the villages in search of a boar — we’d arrive to a spot and begin a frenzy of activity. All hands involved, cutting thin trees for the structure and rotan and vines to secure the joints. And quickly an elevated structure with a roof overhead would be constructed to house us for our stay. It is, it was the nomadic way... Palm leaves folded in origami contortions to make bowls. Large leaves and bamboo used to cook and hold the meal. And the result being, when we’d leave, all that was used to support our lives on the land, would slowly disintegrate back into the forest floor of decay... without a trace.
50There are approximately two hundred Penan nomads left in Sarawak. They hide high in the mountains and avoid disturbance as some of the last nomads of South East Asia. With these nomadic ways of life, you don’t harvest rice and keep it stored for tomorrow — the forest provides as an ongoing source. Multiple cycles played out simultaneously to accommodate for the dietary staples: uvut or jakah sago palm and boar. This enacted movement and subsistence in the forest holds pertinence for GRIAN’s third model of time — spiral cyclical time. “According to this vision the most recent creations, or events, are not a mere repetition of the original creations or events, rather they adopt a cumulative cyclical development...” (Cutanda 2020: 36) Here visualisation of the moon and the earth in relation to the sun highlight various movements of multiple cycles all playing out in spiral... and somehow it seems to mimic the relation of nomadic movement on the land.
51In the journey of attempting to situate sustainable futures, the lost art of the nomadic life seems to herald some virtue. For too many who live our lives in-doors i’s hard to imagine an everyday that leaves no trace, where we only take as much as we need, where the waste we leave behind is bio-material that degrades as nourishment for all other life. For too many who separated themselves from the natural world, it’s hard to imagine this way of living when you’re inside the walls of a human (only) space — built, sterilised and controlled. For too many it’s hard to imagine because all other elements of life are removed and replaced with landscape photographs, bookshelves of recounts and pot-plants held in solitary confinement. So which path do you chose, Linear consumers, horticultural cycles or nomadic trails that spiral around — only taking what you need and saving the rest for tomorrow…?
52I remember a particular lunch in January 2020, when I was sitting around with many friends and collaborators in Long Luteng. One of the hunters caught a deer the night before and it was shared out amongst the village. It was a huge celebration, as in those days it was incredibly rare for an animal to be caught in those regions. To accompany the feast of deer meat and soup, na’o (sago) was prepared — albeit, using tapioca flour purchased from the store as there were no uvut or jakah to collect. But it was a feast, and we all sat around laughing, eating and sharing. I remember this lunch in particular, because one friend kept repeating to us all, mi modo sagum (don’t save it for tomorrow). She kept repeating the words and we all laughed. Don’t save it for tomorrow.
53When we talk about sustainability and sustainable futures, we are often saving it for tomorrow. And my friend’s words over the dinner table should not be misinterpreted as challenging such a notion. Instead, she was referencing the nomadic legacy, of eating when we can, and not trying to accumulate excess for tomorrow. It’s the forest way, and a pattern amongst many nomadic hunter/gather communities that the land will provide. We take what we need for today, and allow it grow back. And then in time, we can return and repeat the cycles.
54In the face of the Planetary Emergency, there are few peoples living as hunter / gathers. There are few peoples living horticultural modes of subsistence. Instead, industrial agriculture supplies commodities for consumers to purchase store bought sustenance. Linearity has dominated our zeitgeist in the name of progress, and all the multiple cycles of life are replaced by used-by-dates and disposable lifestyles. I hope that this article can perhaps make us question these invisibilities that dominate the globe and move beyond futures. Through reflecting on how time is conceived, how filmmaking articulates diverse perspectives, and how subsistence correlates to models of time, I have tried to honor what I have learnt from Mutang and my collaborators. Albeit, writing this article has left me with more questions of time, and what role looking into the future has for the Planetary Emergency. There is so much still to be done, more to learn and journeys to
55experience. I hope this marks an invitation for you and me to listen in Sarawak and beyond. My relationship with Mutang Tu’o and Penan communities will not end here, but will be marked by a ‘return’ of ongoing commitment and care… I feel like that is the nomadic way.
Penan Children’s Book. https://www.pozible.com/project/179804/ (accessed July 05, 2024)
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