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...