Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
. . .an unwritten understanding of common things that everybody should know. Adat
is not only important in how we deal with our resources but also in how we live.
It isn't like the concept of managing but rather that two things happen in the same
time. While you might manage something, what you manage is also managing you.
A person is part of a greater single action, a larger balance or harmony.
This is the key. Adat shapes people's interactions with nature; people, in
turn, are shaped by everything around them. Salfarina Gapor recently
completed a study of the Melanau people in the coastal regions of
Sarawak. Here, adat means harmony between spirits, humans, animals and
plants, and it dictates social systems of joint bearing of burdens, reciprocal
assistance and an ethic that protects the land and species biodiversity. The
main staple for the Melanau is sago palm, and adat dictates a finely tuned
set of management strategies. The contrast with modern rice methods
elsewhere in the region is stark. The main predators of sago are monkey,
boar and termites. At planting time, farmers plant just one palm sucker
in the cleared field, and surround it with a variety of plants that are
variously itchy, bitter and poisonous. They leave the field for three days
to allow monkeys and boar the chance to come to the sago, and learn that
it is not tasty. Farmers then plant out the rest of the sago, and the monkeys
now eat the pests rather than the crop. But Gapor also found that adat is
under severe pressure. Many young people do not know about it, and
modern agricultural and plantation methods do not account for its
sensitive understanding of ecosystems. The worry is that cultural and
ecological knowledge are under threat. 23
Modern Dispossessions
Every continent has its own tragic histories of the dispossession of those
who treat the land, or parts of it, as a common resource. The dark side
of the world's first national park at Yellowstone is that Crow and Shoshone
Native Americans were driven out of their lands by the US army, who
then managed the park themselves for 44 years. Today, similar exclusions
persist in parks that are constituted as strictly protected areas. The
assumption that the conservation of natural resources is only possible
through the exclusion of local people is pervasive throughout history.
Local mismanagement has been used as an excuse to exclude people who
may be in different tribes or who move about, rather than engage in settled
farming. States adopt a variety of value-laden terms, such as scheduled
tribes in India, minority nationalities in China, cultural minorities in the
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