(Opposite) Dayak man walking through his tembawang, or managed forest orchard, in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Note the tapping scars on the rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) tree to the left, and the squirrel tail poking out of the woven palm-leaf basket.
Various Dayak villages in Sambas, Sanggau, and Kapaus Hulu Regencies in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, 1989–1994
During my early days in West Kalimantan, I was always on the lookout for a good piece of forest to study. Driving up the coast from Pontianak I saw little intact vegetation, but soon after turning inland at the bustling market in Sungei Penyuh, I noticed several steep hills along the road that were densely covered with forest. Too small, too close to town, and too steep for me to climb every few weeks to use as a study site, they were nonetheless forested and definitely worth a look—at some point.
A few weeks later, in the early morning when the canopy trees were just emerging from the fog, I pulled off the road in front of a small farmhouse and decided to go have a look. An older Dayak man came out of the house in a sarong, bearing a parang (bush knife) and a smile. We struck up a conversation, and I soon conveyed in my halting Bahasa that I was from the United States, that, yes, I was already married, and that I wanted to explore the forest on the hill behind his house.1 As far as I could tell, he said something about his community controlling access to the forest, but that it was all right with him if I wanted to look around; he would show me the way. After I solicited his help in identifying the trees we might encounter, we hurried off to the forest up a rocky, steep, and virtually imperceptible trail.
I felt a notable drop in temperature when I moved under the canopy. The forest was relatively open, yet multistoried, with numerous palms and climbers. Many of the canopy trees were heavily buttressed and over a meter in diameter; I was immediately smitten. After noticing a few durian husks on the ground, I asked about some of the trees around us. My host knew them all, and he also knew when they produced fruit, how many baskets of fruit they yielded, what the market price for the fruit was last year, and roughly how old the trees were. And then he told me the name of the person who had planted each tree.
My field notes show that we walked through about two hectares of hill forest that day. I was shown five species of mango trees, seven species of breadfruit, six species of rambutan, eleven species of rattan, and three beehives. I counted forty-six large durian trees, sixteen sugar palms (Arenga pinnata),2 and several dozen canopy trees that produce milky latex or other exudates of value. While I sat down to catch my breath, I reflected that local villagers were managing thirty to forty species of trees and an inestimable number of palms, climbers, shrubs, and herbaceous plants. To my untrained eye, I appeared to be in a beautiful, relatively undisturbed, piece of mixed Dipterocarp forest.3 How had these people created such a marvelous homemade forest?
The Dayak communities in Borneo have traditionally lived in large, communal dwellings known as longhouses. As many as thirty or forty families might share the dwelling, which is frequently elevated on stilts and, at least in the past, was made of ironwood (Eusideroxylon zwageri),4 a huge forest tree with dense beautiful wood that is extremely resistant to insects, bacteria, and fungi. The front half of the longhouse consists of a large public space where the families can gather; the back is divided into bedrooms, each with its own door.
After a group of Dayak have selected a strategic spot with a good view and accessible water, they clear a small tract of forest for the longhouse. The area in front of the house is kept open so that mats with freshly harvested rice can be laid out in the sun to dry. An assortment of fruit trees, especially durian, are also planted around the house. Over time, these fruit trees will grow so tall that they start to cast shade over the open area used for drying rice. Rather than cutting down or pruning the trees, the residents dismantle the longhouse—carefully saving the ironwood boards and posts for the next house—and look for a new site to build on.
Every time a community moves its longhouse, little pockets of fruit trees remain in the forest, and over the years the members of the household will periodically revisit these trees, usually during the fruiting season, to weed, collect fruits, and plant new trees, as well as to squat on their heels, smoke, and share stories about life in the old longhouse. Over time, the clumps of fruit trees coalesce and form a small tract of forest in which almost every plant species has been planted or protected, each of the species having a particular value to the community. These small tracts of intensively managed forest orchards are known as tembawang. The term refers specifically to former house sites, and the majority of the indigenous Dayak groups in Borneo have been creating these species-rich, forest orchards all over the island for centuries.
When the durian trees in Bagak-Sahwa start to fruit, the entire village moves out to the tembawang. The women bring pots and pans and sacks of rice, while the children generally run around, squealing with glee at the prospect of living in the forest for a while. Meanwhile, the men get busy fixing up the palm-thatched huts from the previous year and slash weeding under the trees to make the fruits easier to find. This selective weeding, especially around the durian and illipe nut trees, is an important management tool used to maintain tembawang. During these weedings, the seedlings and saplings of valuable species will be spared, while unwanted species will be cut. And the decision—cut this one, save that one—occurs spontaneously during the swing of a bush knife.
The community stays out in the tembawang for the entire durian season, eating and sleeping in the huts, weeding and planting new seedlings, washing plates, cooking rice, and periodically, and always with an upward glance, going out to collect the durian fruits that crash to the ground.
The children are usually sent out to collect the fruits, which fall with greater frequency at night, when everyone is in the hut talking, smoking, and eating durian. At the sound of a large thud, the father will glance over at one of his children, who will grab the kerosene lamp and run out to find the fruit. The procedure sounds straightforward, but an entire village protocol lies behind it. Only certain people can harvest the fruit from certain durian trees. Families can collect only fruit that was produced by a tree planted by a relative. Old trees might have dozens of “heirs,” and every one of them retains a partial right to the fruit, even those who no longer live in Bagak Sahwa. But the community looks after its own: villagers who do not have “official” collection rights to any trees will be allowed to collect a certain number of fruits from families that control a lot of trees. So when a fruit hits the ground, not everyone runs out to get it. The villagers can tell whose fruit it is by the location of the sound, and only the designated child will scurry out to pick it up. Everyone else will continue smoking and eating durian.
Many villagers eat durian each evening and toss out the husks and seeds. By the end of the season, dozens of large piles of durian husks and seeds can be seen scattered throughout the tembawang. A year later, these piles of seeds will have become dense populations of seedlings. Villagers thin out these seedlings during the slash weeding that precedes the fruit harvest, and the tallest and best seedlings will be spared to produce the next crop of durian trees. This might well be the most casual method of regenerating a tree crop ever devised.
I had several friends who were conducting anthropological research in different Dayak villages in West Kalimantan, and I was able to do botanical inventories in the tembawang at each village. The inventory sites were located at varying distances from Pontianak, in villages of differing size, ethnic makeup,5 and degree of market involvement.
Although I had not planned it that way, the study sites offered a useful sequence for examining how differing degrees of market involvement affect the diversity and structure of an indigenous system of forest management. Current economic theories suggest that the diversity of plant species in these managed systems would decrease as the communities sold more of their products—there would be a strong motivation to plant and manage only the most valuable market species. At the highest level of market involvement, the communities would be driven to produce intensively managed plantations of a few resources, concentrating their management efforts on one or two species that generate the largest revenue stream.
The inventories in all the tembawang were made in close collaboration with local Dayak. I was able to ask them the local name of every tree, enlist their help in collecting herbarium specimens of the plant species I could not identify, and solicit information about the use of every plant resource and their reasons for maintaining it in their tembawang.6 I was also able to leave a list of the tree species that did not bear flowers or fruits during the inventory with the villagers, so they could collect these specimens for me the next time they saw the tree in bloom.
The villages closest to Pontianak sold the greatest number of durians and fresh fruits. Farther away from Pontianak, however, illipe nuts became a more important component of local tembawang because the seeds could be dried and would remain usable long enough for villagers to carry them to the nearest road, either on foot or by motorcycle, where they could be loaded onto a truck and transported to Pontianak. Given this pattern, I was surprised to learn that one of my most remote study villages in Kapuas Hulu was growing and selling a great deal of durian fruit. They were certainly not sending the fruit on thirteen-hour trips in a truck to Pontianak. I later discovered that they were sneaking them across the border through the forest into Sarawak, where the durians were fetching an inflated price. The business skills of these Iban villagers were impressive. They would carry baskets of durian fruit across the border, negotiate a price, and sell them. But rather than simply returning with the cash and empty baskets, they would use the profits to buy cases of 7-Up, which they would sell in Kalimantan. The profit margin on the soft drink was apparently much higher than that on the fruit.
The diversity of tree species in the tembawang I inventoried ranged from 56 species per hectare to 125 species per hectare. The lowest diversity was found in the tembawang at Bagak Sahwa, which is located off a main road a couple of hours north of Pontianak. During the three years that I worked in this village, I repeatedly saw buyers from Pontianak arriving in large trucks and buying all the fruit harvested from local tembawang—durians, manogsteens, rambutans, mangos, langsats, jackfruits, everything. There was a large, thriving market for native fruits, and the farmers at Bagak Sahwa were very much involved with it. Fruiting season brought windfall profits that allowed villagers to renovate their houses, take care of sick children, buy a karaoke machine with huge speakers, send a child to college, or stuff a wad of rupiahs into their mattress. Yet they still maintained over fifty species of trees per hectare in their tembawang. Why? Their reasons varied: their grandparents had planted some of the trees, their children liked the wild, somewhat sour rambutans, the women cooked the rock-hard, green mangos. Perhaps they simply liked to collect a lot of different species in their orchards, regardless of whether or not they were worth anything in the market.
Kenyah Dayaks in the Sanggau Regency create and maintain the highest-diversity tembawang. This remote community had little involvement with the market, and the only forest product that the villagers sold was illipe nut. All the other species were used for subsistence purposes. Whatever their reason for doing so, the Kenyah are simultaneously managing 125 tree species per hectare in a forest orchard— an unprecedented feat of silvicultural prowess. In my opinion, based on what I have seen, studied, and measured over the past thirty years, these villagers are the most gifted foresters in the world.
An extension agent from the Indonesian Department of Agriculture would drop by the village of Tae a couple of times each year to talk to the farmers about improved seed, fertilizers, and the newest herbicides. He was an enthusiastic young fellow who had studied agronomy at the Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB), reported to be the best agricultural school in the region, and he was on a mission to move local agriculture away from primitive slash-and-burn to more state-of-the-art, Green Revolution rice cultivation. The forests surrounding Tae contained some beautiful and well-maintained tembawang with almost a hundred species of trees, palms, and climbers. The agronomist could not avoid walking through these on his way to the rice fields. I once asked him what he thought of the sophisticated management practices employed by the Tara’n Dayaks in Tae in making these forests. He didn’t know what I was talking about. The tembawang were invisible to him—just as they had been for me when I first arrived at West Kalimantan.