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Abstract

This research aims to document an indigenous culture in a remote place in the process of actively re-negotiating its identity and connections to a changing landscape. The Kelabit have always interacted with other ethnic groups and other places; they have never been completely isolated in the secluded Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia. But the nature and the pace of their engagements with the outside world have changed dramatically in recent decades; numerous external forces have acted upon the Kelabit community, from colonialism to missionization to globalization. They have had very little control over some of these forces, but neither have they been passive recipients of changes wrought by these forces. The Kelabit have always displayed great agency, ingenuity, pride, entrepreneurship, and political savvy during their interactions with the world outside the plateau, and these characteristics extend to their current engagements with conservation and development in the Kelabit Highlands. Building on recent advances in the historical ecology of anthropogenic landscapes and the political ecology of conservation, my research employed an array of ethnographic methods to address three main objectives: (1) to document the relationship between cultural sites and anthropogenic landscape modification in the Kelabit Highlands; (2) to advance a multidisciplinary methodology of gathering, monitoring, and analyzing spatial and temporal data from different sources; and (3) to promote a multi-level collaborative approach to participatory anthropological research methods in the context of planning for several possible alternative conservation and development scenarios in the Kelabit Highlands. Included in the five articles that serve as chapters are discussions of transboundary conservation, transboundary community-based ecotourism, community mapping and technology transfer, the Heart of Borneo conservation initiative, Kelabit ethnic identity, and the anthropogenic nature of the Kelabit Highlands landscape. I have tried during the fieldwork and writing processes to move beyond the paradigm of extractive research toward inquiry that is truly collaborative and directly relevant to the Kelabit community at this crossroads in their history.

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