The Power of Ontologies: The Duty to Take Care of the Land and the Ancestors among the Kenyah

In this thesis, I use ontologies as a tool for political ecology: I shed light on the dynamics at play within and between ontologies, as well as the entanglements of ontologies and landscapes, with a case study from Malaysian Borneo. My findings are the result of field research with the indigenous Kenyah in Northern Sarawak, through interviews, participatory observation and to a lesser degree through the analysis of historical text sources. With a relational approach, I consider how the Kenyah have renegotiated their relationships to rice, forest gardens, the pig, land and the Baram River in the context of fast changes from resource extraction to religious conversion. Whilst production is the priority of the Sarawak Government, the Kenyah value land beyond the resource. They view themselves as caretakers of that land and of their ancestors. Whilst rice farming has been declining, the Kenyah continue to uphold farming in order to take care of their land as a source of heritage, to secure their customary rights and to maintain their identity. Taking care hereby serves as the Kenyah’s “dominant mode of relating” to the world as defined by Philippe Descola and becomes very prominent in their struggle to defend their lifeline, the Baram River, against a proposed dam. The inundation of their land would erase the link to their ancestors and has been associated with the great biblical flood by members of the community. The dam is the culmination of a historical process of dispossession of indigenous lands through Government policy and of a development discourse, which deprecates indigenous practices such as shifting cultivation and indigenous valuation of land. The domesticated/wild pig, which has deep roots in Kenyah history as a sacrificial animal and for hunting, today serves as a marker of identity and a symbol of resistance of a predominantly Christian Kenyah community towards a dominant Muslim society, which considers the pig to be impure. As a politically engaged anthropologist, I make clear political stances and pursue a strategic ethnography in order to avoid doing harm. In addition, I quote my interlocutors at length in an attempt to help decolonise my own writing and the anthropological discipline, developing an approach I call Documentary Ethnography.