— 10 —

Diplomat: The Politics
of Biruté Galdikas

Biruté Galdikas often dreams about orangutans; for her this is as natural as dreaming about people. She doesn’t set much store by dreams and usually forgets them. But one dream stays with her. She told me about it in Kalimantan; she recalled it breathlessly, its terror intact, hurrying her usually soft, well-chosen words:

“There was a cheek-padded male orangutan, and the forest was being cut down, and there were trucks, and there was a highway, and he was running, and somebody, some people, were trying to find him and kill him. Concrete and huge megaton trucks, like you find on a California freeway—a huge urban center right next to the orangutan habitat. I was running. . . .”

In the dream Biruté is running through the forest, trying to get to the orangutan before the people and their megaton trucks overrun him. But the orangutan keeps disappearing—“He’d be over here, and then the next minute he’d be over there.” He is long-calling, bellowing the ear-splitting, soul-shattering call that adult males use to announce their territories—“and I kept wishing he would stop, thinking, he’s giving himself away! If only he would be quiet, and I could get to him first. These people were trying to kill him.”

She paused as if to recover. Then, composed, she said: “I still have dreams like that.”

The dream is so terrifying because it is chillingly close to reality. Near the village of Kumai, where Biruté sometimes stops for supplies, is a shallow, bulldozed soil mine, white and sterile as sun-bleached bone. Huge trucks like those in her dream have taken the topsoil away for sale. Without the top six inches of living earth, a layer seething with bacteria, viruses, lichens, and humus, only pale clay remains. And here are roads where two years ago was forest, gaping raw wounds flanked by severed tree trunks.

Like the mountain gorilla and the chimpanzee, the orangutan is an endangered species; fewer than 50,000 of the orange apes remain, confined to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. When Biruté and Rod first arrived in Borneo, orangutan females were routinely shot so that their babies could be taken as pets. Orangutans are still killed in fear or for food sometimes. But today it is human encroachment—concrete and huge trucks—that threatens orangutans with extinction.

An Indonesian resettlement scheme, begun in 1979 and financed with World Bank loans, moved nearly a million Javanese to Indonesian Borneo, or Kalimantan, and encouraged the immigrants to clear tropical forest and create new cropland. Biruté told me that government plans to make roads throughout the province of Kalimantan Tengah were proceeding remarkably on schedule. As a result, areas that the year before required a two-week journey by boat were accessible to loggers and farmers in two days by truck. As people poured into these forested areas, trees poured out, like blood from a wound.

And the picture has only gotten worse since. Nearly a third of the rain forest that stood in Borneo in 1985 has now been destroyed. In the past twenty years, monoculture crops of oil palm have spread like a cancer across Borneo to supply growing markets for cosmetics, soap, desserts, and biofuel. Tanjung Puting itself is under assault: in July 2008, loggers finished stripping and bulldozing a 40,000-acre swatch in a northeastern corner of the park, where at least 560 orangutans lived, to clear ground for oil palm, according to the Orangutan Foundation. Oil palm plantations, says the foundation’s local project manager, Ichlas al-Saqie, are poised to overtake as much as 5 million acres of orangutan habitat in the park and in the larger Sebangau National Park. Some 15 million acres are now under cultivation in Borneo, and projections are that this figure may double by 2020. “If the immediate crisis in securing the future survival of the orangutan and the protection of national parks is not resolved,” concluded a 2007 United Nations Environment Program report, “very few wild orangutans will be left within two decades. The rate and extent of illegal logging in national parks may, if unchallenged, endanger the entire concept of protected areas worldwide.”

Biruté wakes to these realities with the urgency of a nightmare. But Indonesia defies conventional conservation solutions; it is a notoriously difficult place for biologists and conservationists to work.

Tom Struthsaker, a primatologist who worked in Uganda through the reign of Idi Amin, says he could never work in Indonesia; the bureaucracy is tangled and slow, the government notoriously corrupt, and the social etiquette so subtle and layered it is nearly impossible to figure out how to work with the officials. (Said one anthropologist who worked there: “I don’t mind paying bribes, but in Indonesia, I couldn’t even get a straight answer on who to pay or how much.”) Hank Reichart was appointed World Wildlife International representative in Indonesia in 1986, but he left after a year and a half. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “You cannot work with these people on the same level you work with any other people in the world.”

Even getting the right research permits is a nearly insurmountable hurdle: primatologist John Mitani has run field expeditions there for the past eleven years; his last research permit took seventeen months to secure. He once counted the offices from which he had to get permits, from the time he left America to the time he arrived at his camp. They numbered seventeen. Tanzania, he said, required only two.

In the face of such red tape, nepotism, and corruption, what Biruté has done is nothing short of miraculous. She virtually eliminated trade in captive orangutans in her province. At her bidding two entire villages were moved from a nature reserve and relocated. Her work at Tanjung Puting is the reason the 250,000-hectare area was declared a national park in 1981, for which she wrote the management plan. From 1996 until the Suharto government toppled in 1998, Biruté served as senior advisor to the Indonesian Ministry of Forests on orangutan issues. Her efforts helped designate 76,000 hectares of the park as an orangutan preserve.

“As a guest here in Indonesia, public criticism and activism is not my place,” Biruté once told an interviewer. Indonesian culture sculpts her conservation strategy: its shadowy politics, primitive ritual, and elaborate protocols. After more than three decades in the Bornean jungle, this white-skinned Canadian of Lithuanian heritage has become not only an insider in Indonesia but one who, slowly and subtly, wields a profound influence.

The remote Dayak village of Kanepan is decked with ceremonial banners and long woven baskets hanging from bamboo poles. The wide dirt streets, bordered with bamboo and ironwood houses on stilts, are alive with people, the women in sarongs, the men in T-shirts and pants. They are waiting for the celebration to begin.

A shout goes up when a boat appears upriver. At its prow stands a man bearing a sword, wearing only a yellow loincloth and a ceremonial hat tipped with a hornbill feather. Music throbs like a fever dream: men strike drums and wooden xylophones, kelenangan, the high notes like chimes, the low ones like gongs calling from the underworld. The rhythm is irregular but fluid, like the muscles of an animal stalking its prey: briefly hushed and crouching here, quickening there, then slowing again.

Now begins the main event of the tewa, an occasion of great import in the life of a Dayak village. The three-day ceremony celebrates the rejoining of the two halves of the soul, which part at death. Half of the soul journeys to rest in the palm of the goddess of the underworld; the other half stays with the body. Only many years later, when the body is exhumed at the tewa, does the soul again become whole.

Biruté has traveled for two days, over excruciatingly bad roads and up rapids deep in Kalimantan’s interior, to attend the ceremony, which few whites have ever witnessed. It is the body of the vice governor’s mother, who died twenty-eight years ago, that is to be exhumed. The vice governor, Pak Victor, personally invited Biruté to attend, to add honor to the occasion.

Because we have arrived late, we have missed the exhumation of the body. Even the woman’s bones have been consumed by the earth; only six pieces of the skeleton remained, and the top crescent of her skull, tiny as a child’s. The bones, we are told, were then packed up in a suitcase—a new element in the tradition, presumably—and reburied rather quietly. But the main drama is yet to take place.

Pak Robin, the man with the sword, disembarks from the wooden boat and hacks through each of the three barkless logs of a ceremonial gate fringed with palm leaves. The crowd shouts, voices swelling to a frenzied “Wwhooo!” with each strike of the blade. A white and gray spotted pig, its trotters bound with rope, lies screaming on the other side of the gate. It is slaughtered slowly, the sword slicing a cross down its back and shoulders, as the pig screams and screams. Pak Robin climbs a coconut tree; he hacks off the top fronds, the lower fronds, the coconuts, and finally fells the tree itself; he slices through decorative bamboo poles holding baskets and flowers and hanging parcels of betelnut wrapped in leaves.

The crowd shouts its frenzy. An elder turns to Biruté and smiles widely; his gums glisten with dark red fluid, his teeth are black. When he spits the juice of the betelnut, it stains the dirt like a clot of blood. Finally the sword’s work is done. While the elder men dance—the slow-motion movements precisely muscled, joints angled like a sculptured crane’s—the slaughtered animal’s blood, mixed with water, is spewed over the crowd, like rice thrown at a wedding.

That night there is a feast and rice wine and dancing. Then at three A.M. the celebrants are awakened. By lamplight the mandau, or headhunting sword, is unsheathed. The celebrants, one by one, are made to kiss the blade. Holding the mandau over their own head, they are passed the ceremonial rice wine, called tuac. The bowl they cup to their lips is a human skull.

———

Indonesians, Biruté says, are exquisitely generous, gentle, courteous people—“probably the nicest people on this planet.” Passing another on a path, an Indonesian will duck his head and stoop his back, extending one arm forward and requesting permisi, permission, please, to pass. Indonesians do not point their feet, the lowliest part of the body, at others; to do so would be an insult. Any conversation begins with an inquiry about your well-being and that of your relatives; your arrival or departure from any village is likely to be marked with a ceremony honoring the occasion. The people are always smiling.

Biruté explains, “For an individual Indonesian, the most important thing is that he or she be in harmony with his or her family, with his or her group, with his or her universe.

“You’ll never know if some Indonesian absolutely hates you,” Biruté says. “They would smile. There’s nothing in their body language or their eyes or the way they speak that reveals themselves.”

But beneath this serene surface, hidden like a crocodile submerged in a tea-colored river, is another aspect of these charming, gracious, gentle people.

“You couldn’t have a worse enemy in the world than an Indonesian,” says World Wildlife’s Hank Reichart. He remembers the story circulating in Java while he was posted in Djakarta: an American woman with a small child was driving along the street when an Indonesian child darted in front of her car. Though she tried to swerve, she hit the child, killing it instantly. The villagers pulled her own child out of the car and killed it in front of her eyes.

Indonesians, as Biruté puts it, do not tolerate disharmony well. She once heard of an auto accident in Sumatra. At first the drivers seemed to be discussing the situation quietly. “Then all of a sudden, the face of one of the drivers—it was like a mask fell over it. There’s a name for it: ‘the face gets dark.’ He pulled out a knife and killed the other person on the spot.” In Indonesia killing a person for an insult is not considered a major offense. Killing a person in a robbery may carry a twenty-year jail term, but the penalty for murder provoked by insult may bring only a year and a half in jail.

This is the culture from which the term “to run amok” arose. It is a land of headhunters who did not spare women or children. The Dayaks were eating Dutch people until the 1900s, and there are reports that headhunting still occurs. German anthropologists recently reported that the Sea Dayaks, of northern Borneo, took several heads to celebrate a tewa.

“But still,” says Biruté, “the Indonesians are gracious, gentle people—as long as the universe is at equilibrium.”

Preserving equilibrium is the foundation of Biruté’s conservation strategy, from which all else proceeds. Immersed in a culture delicately balanced between courtesy and violence, she works, carefully and subtly, within this equilibrium.

“I’m amazed she’s been able to stick it out under such tough bureaucratic conditions,” said John Mitani. What she’s been able to accomplish “reflects her incredible degree of rapport with the officials there. It is a remarkable feat.”

“She has earned the respect of almost everybody there,” said Gary Shapiro, who worked with Biruté at Tanjung Puting for two years. There he met and married an Indonesian; now he lives in California and serves as vice president and treasurer of Biruté’s Orangutan Foundation, which helps fund her work. “That’s how you effect change over there; you work within the system, you need to be very astute about the ebb and flow of political life, you need to know the importance of paying the right calls, observing the rituals. Everything she is doing is to consolidate her position.”

In Western conservation circles, Biruté’s name is not widely known. She isn’t called upon to help draft American policy statements or legislation affecting Southeast Asian rain forests or animals. Some of her colleagues were alarmed by her marriage to Pak Bohap. Former Leakey Foundation director Ned Munger comments, sounding distressed, that she has “gone native.” But this is precisely her strength.

For it is here in Indonesia that the wild orangutans live. Here, in the hands of her neighbors, their fate will be decided. So it is here, over cups of hot, sweet tea, in conversations about weather and children, that she exerts her influence. In fluorescent-lit offices of town officials and in the shadows of lamp-lit long houses, she augments her status. Though it is almost imperceptible to the Western eye, Biruté is constantly lobbying, influencing, building, and consolidating her power.

Biruté goes nowhere in public without an entourage of Dayak assistants. In Indonesia respectable people do not walk alone; status is read in the size of one’s entourage. When the director of nature protection once visited her at Camp Leakey, he brought two hundred people with him; Biruté’s assistants had to move out of their quarters and sleep in hammocks in the forest to accommodate them.

Biruté’s entourage for the journey to the tewa is modest in comparison, but still, with their gear and gifts, they fill three large speedboats: three Dayak assistants, three visiting German officials, Biruté’s Californian volunteer, Dianne Taylor-Snow, myself, a middle-aged American tourist who heard about the tewa where she was vacationing in Palangka Raya, a journalist from Java, and two policemen.

The Indonesian government insists on police escorts for whites traveling to the interior. One reason is that the Malayu suspect that the Dayaks poison people. The accusation seems verified by the fact that almost every Westerner who visits the interior becomes ill afterward. But Biruté assures us that these illnesses are not the result of intentional poisoning. Water for drinking and cooking comes from the river, which in remote villages also serves as bath and latrine; when you lift a plastic scoop of water out of the river to rinse shampooed hair, it’s important to preview the contents for globs of fecal matter. And at the tewa everyone shares communal glasses of the urine-colored ceremonial rice wine. Tuac is often flavored with the corpse of a fetal barking deer, which pickles like the worm in a bottle of tequila. You don’t need to be deliberately poisoned to become ill.

Biruté, however, will not become ill. The vice governor has set aside for her a private bathroom—a bark-walled room of the guest house on stilts above the river. The toilet is two slats missing from the floor. Her Dayak assistants will bring boiled water for her bath. And she, alone among the few whites to attend the celebration, can politely refuse the tuac without offending the vice governor. He reserves for her a seat of honor near himself and his wife at the nighttime ceremonies at the long house.

When she was a graduate student at UCLA in 1979, Biruté’s first expedition outside of the United States was a summer archeological dig in rural Serbia, in Yugoslavia. “I was absolutely shocked,” she remembers. “The American anthropologists could not deal with the Yugoslavs. It was the equivalent of moral warfare.”

The Yugoslavian archeologists wanted to unearth cities, discover the whole pattern, make bold, quick brushstrokes of discovery. The Americans, on the other hand, wanted to painstakingly examine every sliver of bone, every preserved scrap of food.

The Americans, said Biruté, treated their hosts “as if the Yugoslavs didn’t know anything, you know, like they were stupid? They made absolutely no concessions to the Yugoslavian way of doing things. To me it was unbelievable—I was trained as an anthropologist, right? And we weren’t in the United States, we were guests in their country. I was appalled to watch this.”

The polite, reserved Indonesians couldn’t be more different from the boisterous, open Yugoslavs. But, says Biruté, “the lessons were the same.”

“One thing I learned is you can never, never, never make assumptions about people unless you totally understand them. And I began to learn this possibly as a child, and certainly in Yugoslavia, and in Indonesia. And that is, if you see somebody act in a certain way, maybe it makes no sense to you, but for that person it makes perfect sense. I always try to figure out how it makes perfect sense.”

When Biruté and Rod first met with Indonesian conservation officials in Djakarta to get their scientific permits, the officials wanted the couple to change the only solid plan they had: their study site. When the officials suggested they go to Borneo instead of Sumatra, Biruté and Rod agreed without hesitation.

“They liked us, and I don’t know why they liked us,” Biruté says today. “I think the thing was,” she says, “we listened.”

Unlike Dian Fossey, whose study animals were being slaughtered in front of her eyes, Biruté had time to listen. But although orangutans were protected by law, the law was not enforced; the local pet trade in orangutans was openly flourishing. To protect her study animals, she and Rod quickly realized they would have to stop the trade.

Dian took up her machete in defense of her gorillas. To defend chimpanzees, Jane Goodall took up the microphone. Biruté’s strategy was far less direct: she pulled up a chair and sipped tea.

In Indonesia, “if there’s a problem, you can’t just rush in and solve it,” Biruté says. There is first the labyrinthine etiquette to be observed, relationships built, harmony established. “You establish that you’re not going to make troubles,” said Biruté. “I am careful about what I ask for. I don’t impose myself on them. My gut feeling is that when I walk through somebody’s door, they don’t say, ‘Ah, here comes a problem.’ They say, ‘Ah, here comes my friend.’ ”

Biruté and Rod began not by citing a problem but by agreeing to a favor: they’d be happy, they said, to provide the forestry’s nature protection agency with a place where ex-captive orangutans could be rehabilitated and released. This gave the agency a reason to confiscate illegally owned orangutans. Biruté and Rod often relieved these officials of the embarrassing task of actually confiscating the animals. They would show up at the owner’s house and try to persuade him that the best place for an orangutan was the forest. Usually they succeeded.

Biruté and Rod spent hours “harmonizing” with the local officials; often conservation was not even a topic of discussion. “We in America think that people are most themselves when they are frank and honest,” says Mount Holyoke anthropologist Frederick Errington. “But in Indonesia the cultural value is on indirect ness. To be refined is to be indirect, and this is carried to elaborate extremes. The real self, the valued self, is the self that has mastered these elaborate forms of etiquette.”

So between the talk of weather and grandchildren and the latest news of the progress of ex-captive orangutans, Biruté and Rod gradually, subtly, began to hint at the topic that bothered them. An hour’s journey upriver from Camp Leakey, within the borders of Tanjung Puting, was a Malayu village of two hundred people. They were cutting trees and trapping forest animals. Their fishing disturbed the river. Biruté and Rod intoned to the head of forestry: “This village isn’t allowed. This is a nature reserve, and you can’t have a village in a nature reserve.”

Actually, Tanjung Puting was not a nature reserve. Everyone involved in these discussions knew it was a game reserve, and villages are allowed within its boundaries. In fact, a game reserve carries no restrictions on what can be done to the land; only killing the animals is outlawed. “But we pretended it was a nature reserve,” said Biruté. “And when I look back at how we did it, it’s incredible to me that we persuaded them to move the village, when in reality the village had every right to be there. But again, remember: this is Indonesia; you’re dealing with people who if you talk to them long enough, you can persuade them.”

“Remember, this is Indonesia,” Biruté often says. A nation that runs on both courtesy and corruption, it is riddled with paradox and protocol, a land where words and actions are layered with obscure meaning.

Among the Minangkabau of western Sumatra, the Indonesian tribe that anthropologist Errington worked with in 1975, every word, every movement, down to the angle of the knees, carried meaning. Attending one formal ceremony at which the celebrants sat cross-legged with both knees to the floor, Errington inadvertently let his knees rise. Members of the tribe thought the anthropologist had become so seriously upset that he had forgotten where he was—the only explanation they could think of for this serious breach of protocol. Within such an elaborate social system, said Errington, “it was difficult for me to function as a competent human being. I found it a struggle.”

“There are so many things you need to know,” said Gary Shapiro. “You can say something with good intentions and it may haunt you later on.” A few years ago he came up with what he thought was a good idea: on a trip to Palangka Raya he thought he’d visit Pak Binti, a former government official and Biruté’s “adopted father.” Even in retirement, Pak Binti still had Djakarta’s ear. Gary wanted to suggest to Pak Binti that the government help fund Biruté’s work. The ex-captive orangutans consumed enormous amounts of bananas, sugar cane, and rice; money for their food would be appreciated.

Biruté advised Gary against this plan, but he went ahead anyway. Within weeks Biruté was shocked to see an article in the local newspaper claiming that the orangutans at Tanjung Puting were starving. She was summoned to the administration center at Bogor; government officials were angry. “If you can’t feed these orangutans,” they said, “maybe you shouldn’t be there.”

Biruté straightened out the mess, and the province’s governor even donated part of his discretionary fund toward the ex-captives’ food at her camp. But for Gary it was a painful lesson: in Indonesia the words matter less than the way in which they are spoken.

The village of Tanjung Harapan, by decree of the forestry department, was evicted in 1977; later a second village was moved at Biruté’s request. Today Tanjung Harapan is officially a park headquarters. A visitor’s center was being erected in 1988. The building under construction bore the graffiti Di Sini Ada Hantu: There are ghosts here. The forest has overtaken the remains of the houses. Only the cemetery, its ironwood headboards obscured by tall grass, recalls that people once lived, and died, here.

That same year, 1977, was the first in history that a resident of Indonesia was fined for illegally keeping a pet orangutan. The amount of the fine—fifty dollars—wasn’t as important as the fact that by having to appear in court the owners were publicly shamed. Word got around.

Biruté is careful about whom she will align herself with. “She’s always warned me, you don’t want to get too close to the top,” Gary said. Once he suggested publicizing her project by having her photo taken with a certain high Indonesian official. She rejected the suggestion; if the official fell from power, she could fall too. “You want to watch the powerful people who are coming into play in the lower echelons,” Gary remembers she told him. “These are the people you need to work with.”

Biruté has always made the training of Indonesian students a top priority at her camp. (Dian Fossey never hosted a Rwandan student until the last year of her life; Jane Goodall’s students were mainly Westerners until politics prohibited long-term studies by Western students.) More than thirty Indonesian students have completed their Sajana degrees (roughly equivalent to a master’s) from data gathered at Tanjung Puting; after such prestigious training they often rise to positions of power. Several of her former students now serve in the Indonesian government; others are teaching at local universities; one served as an adviser to a cabinet minister and founded a prominent Indonesian nature conservation foundation.

Biruté is no longer merely a guest in Indonesia. Since her marriage to Pak Bohap and the births of their two children, she is assured permanent residency. This is a culture that affirms nepotism, and Pak Bohap’s status—many have tried to recruit him for local political office, but he has refused—enhances Biruté’s power. When she is asked to reflect on her status in this society, she recalls the words of Prince Charles: “I have absolutely no authority; I just have influence.”

Expert at concealing their own emotions and intents, Indonesians seem almost prescient about reading the feelings and motives of others. Once Pak Bohap, who understood no English, watched two Earthwatchers talking together in the dining hall. After dinner he said to Biruté, “They are boyfriend and girlfriend.” Neither Biruté nor the other Western volunteers detected a hint of romance between the two. But after the team had left camp, a postcard arrived announcing their marriage.

“Westerners are like an open book to Indonesians,” says Biruté. But what an Indonesian and a Westerner read from the book may be very different.

Biruté speaks with a questioning lilt in the middle of her sentences (“I was trained as an anthropologist, right?”) as if requesting the listener’s permission to continue. In her lectures to volunteers she prefaces many statements with a self-effacing, “Well, I don’t know, but I suspect . . .” She listens intently to others, and seldom interrupts someone who is speaking. Biruté also does you the honor of remembering what you say to her: she often will repeat, almost verbatim, something you said many days earlier.

Yet many Westerners come away with the impression that she is arrogant. One of her former long-term volunteers says Biruté exudes an aura of “entitlement.” She is notorious for keeping people waiting. Biruté arrived late at the air force commander’s orangutan exchange ceremony; a London Times reporter was kept waiting for four days in Pangkalanbuun for an interview with her. Earthwatchers have complained that they have waited till nightfall for a lecture she had scheduled for noon. One of her American volunteers was kept waiting in a hotel room for three days. Biruté was in town the whole time. When the volunteer finally ventured out for a restaurant meal, one of Biruté’s assistants tracked the woman down. “The professor is very angry,” he told her. “She has been waiting for you for an hour.”

Other visitors to camp are dismayed by Biruté’s control over the lives of her Indonesian staff. If volunteers or visitors donate items to camp, Biruté strictly controls who gets to keep what. Leaving a gift of boots or pants or a backpack to a specific staff person is discouraged. And no one, Indonesian or white, calls her Biruté. It is always “Professor” or “Dr. Biruté.” Even American volunteers use one of these terms. Two Western women her own age call her “Ibu,” a term of respect that means “mother.”

Some visitors—usually older men—have come away with the complaint: “She’s running a little empire out there.”

But Indonesians apparently see the situation differently. Once Biruté was visiting Djakarta with Rod when the police there confiscated a captive orangutan from Sumatra. A Swiss woman who worked with a rehabilitation and release program in Sumatra planned to take the animal back to its country of origin.

The next time Rod and Biruté were in Djakarta, they saw the animal in the Djakarta zoo. “We asked the Indonesian police chief what had happened, why didn’t you turn the orangutan over to the Swiss woman?” Biruté remembered. “And he said, ‘She was conceited. She was proud. She was arrogant. I refused to meet with her.’ He said, ‘I heard her ask for me at the door, and I didn’t like the way she asked for me. I don’t have any dealings with people who are conceited or arrogant.’ ”

But the police chief’s anger softened as he talked to Biruté. He told her, “From the moment I saw you, I felt a kinship with you.”

“It’s very interesting that some foreign people in Indonesia think I am arrogant, that I deal with Indonesians not in the right way,” Biruté muses. “The foreigners don’t understand what is happening. I have never had trouble with Indonesians. The relationship is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it.”

One winter while Biruté was teaching in Canada, she received a letter from an American graduate student she had left in charge at camp. “The Indonesians say I no longer have the pusaka,” the student wrote. This was grave news. It meant that the student no longer was perceived as having control of the camp.

A pusaka, as an item, is an embodiment of power. In Kanepan the pusaka of four villages, a Buddha-like figurine, was enshrined in the five-hundred-year-old long house; visitors paid their respects by sprinkling rice over its head, dropping coins inside it, and placing a cigarette—a popular gift to both living and dead—in its mouth. The pusaka of the Republic of Indonesia is the red and white flag made by former president Sukarno’s wife that flew at the republic’s declaration of independence.

A pusaka may be stolen. But if you steal it and you don’t have the power, the pusaka, it is said, will return to the person who has the power.

When not represented by an item, pusaka is the power itself. And once the graduate student lost that, she was unworthy of the respect accorded to either an employer or a leader.

One must understand two things about the Indonesian concept of power. First, explains Biruté, power, like the light from a light bulb, is finite. There is only so much of it in the universe. Biruté once had a problem with the former acting head of national parks. “Whenever something good would happen to me, he would become very upset,” she said. She couldn’t understand this at first; she had thought they were friends, and he should be happy at her good fortune. But one day she had a talk with him. “I sat him down and I said, ‘My power and your power come from different sources. My power has nothing to do with your power.’ And after I explained that to him, it was like he saw the light, you see?”

Second, once the power begins to slip away, it cannot be retrieved. Indonesians are always watching, monitoring, waiting for signs of weakness in their leaders, signs that the power has begun to slip.

“If somebody stands up in the dining hall and says ‘No’ to me, in America it is seen as insubordination. But in this context it is seen as a sign that the power may begin to slip away,” Biruté says. “Everybody is watching to see if indeed the power is slipping away. And I would have to fire the person on the spot.”

One day I went out on an orangutan follow at Tanjung Puting with two Dayak assistants and an Earthwatch volunteer, a fit, fortyish American teacher. From five A.M. until about one P.M., through clawing thorns and boot-sucking swamp, through heat that the sweat pouring from our bodies could not cool, we followed the dark shape moving through the canopy above us. Our target animal was a female erroneously named Pete who was due to give birth any day.

Then Pete came to the edge of a shallow lake. The Dayaks insisted that Pete was leaving the study area and that we couldn’t follow her farther.

The teacher and I thought it odd that we should turn our backs on an orangutan about to give birth, a crucial event for the study. For about ten minutes, in fractured English and Bahasa Indonesia, we argued with the assistants. Couldn’t we follow at least a little farther? Wouldn’t the Professor be mad if we left? Finally, as Pete faded, like a whisper, into the trees, we acquiesced. We concluded that there must be some security reason for our not being able to go beyond the lake.

On the two-and-a-half-hour walk back to camp, the teacher was hit in the eye with a thorn from a thread-thin rattan, which pained her enormously. When we arrived back at camp, drenched in sweat, plastered with mud, covered with insect welts and bleeding from leech bites, our first thought was to dive into the Sekoyner-Cannon River. But Biruté was giving a lecture in the dining hall to some Indonesian visitors, and we waited for her to finish. When she saw us back so early, she was surprised. “The assistants told us Pete had left the study area, and we had to come back,” we told her.

“Pete did not leave the study area,” she said to us. “You’ll have to go back and find her.”

“Professor,” said the teacher, “I have a thorn in my eye, and I would really rather not go back.”

The teacher, I told Biruté, needed to lie down and rest. I would be happy to go back without her, in the company of the assistants, to try to relocate Pete. I knew, as Biruté surely knew, that our chances of finding the orangutan, wary before her impending birth, were virtually nil. Because we had turned our backs on her, we would probably not see her again until after the birth. We were being sent out again to punish the Dayak assistants with our slow but overeager presence.

Biruté addressed her reply to the Earthwatch volunteer. She did not raise her voice. Her face, smooth as a calm lake, betrayed no feeling, but something in her flashed like a knife blade. “If you have a thorn in your eye,” Biruté said, slow and controlled, “then you should put some antibiotic cream on it. But I think you really should go back and find Pete.”

While crossing the swamp on the way back to the lake, the teacher began to cry. And five hours later, when dark had come and we still hadn’t found the orangutan, one of the Dayak assistants was sobbing. He was sure he’d be fired.

But there is another twist to the Indonesian concept of power. Biruté has fired assistants many times, then hired them back. “One assistant I have fired three times—and nobody respects me more than he does,” Biruté says.

On the way to the tewa in Kanepan, we spent a night in the Dayak village of Panopa on the river LeMondu. Told that the Professor was coming, the whole village turned out in the dark for Biruté’s arrival.

In the village long house, a fifty-foot-long wooden hall built on stilts over the river, we sat, listing with exhaustion, trying to stay awake in the flickering shadows. Biruté sat in one of the few chairs, erect and regal, talking with the headman.

Hot, sweet tea appeared on trays, and later a feast of ladang rice and meat and seaweedlike vegetables. It was well past midnight when the headman informed Biruté, “Now we have to have a ceremony.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “do we have to have a ceremony?”

“Yes, we’re tired too,” he replied, one elder speaking frankly to another, “but we must have a ceremony.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

We filed wearily into another long house with the other villagers. The kelenangan was already being played.

Biruté was directed to sit on a cloth-covered series of wooden blocks, like a shallow throne. Behind her two women draped her shoulders with narrow golden scarves. Carefully and with reverence, they draped her head in a sarong.

A priest knelt in front of her. He held a knife-shaped wooden blade and touched it slowly to her temples, her neck, her lips—points of power. And finally, as is done with a pusaka, dry rice was sprinkled over her head.