In the late 1980s the Penan of Sarawak, East Malaysia, became an environmentalist cause celebre for a campaign of protests, blockading logging roads in an attempt to preserve the rainforest areas in which they lived. The explanation of this eruption of protest became a focus of political dispute. Penan Histories shows how this dispute was centred on the construction of different actors as the subjects of the protests--Should the protests be written off as the work of meddling environmentalists? Or do the Penan have something of their own to say?--and examines how any narrator of...

This volume is the result of a two-year research project at KITLV. It brings together an international group of 24 scholars - mainly from Indonesia and the Netherlands but also from the United States, Australia, Germany, Canada and Portugal.

The proceedings of the 30th International Geological Congress held in Beijing, China in August 1997. This volume focuses on the geology of fossil fuels, specifically oil and gas. It aims to present a view of contemporary geology to researchers interested in the geological sciences.

In this article, the author attempts to demonstrate that the study of inland fisheries can provide additional insight into the culture of the Meybrat, a tribal community living around the Ayamaru lakes in the northern part of the Western Bird's Head of Irian Jaya. The author discusses the following: the significance of pusaka (sacred hereditary goods) in fishery; the role of ancestor worship and cosmology; the rise of a class of native immigrant 'big men' such as 'bankers' in ikat textiles (kain timur); the role of imported kain pusaka as part of the so-called kain...