Explore reflections, analyses, and field notes.
Halfway through the project, we have almost finished the ethnographic fieldwork. More on that later. The second, explanatory part of the research has now begun, and we would like to give a short update on that. Apologies to the casual reader: this will get a bit technical.
Coming home from the field or the river, they often enjoy some afternoon drinks and meals in someone’s house, talking about anything to kill time. But this afternoon felt special, like a celebratory feast, reflecting something about how the landscape is changing.
Cik Gu’s story represents a dilemma facing all village residents: whether to hang onto ancestral lands that they struggle to manage, or hand them over to others and gain time and funds to do other things, such as running their PUMK.
“So long as this is state forest, then it is the problem of the state”, he notes. However, with a permit, “we will be ordered to guard the forest, and if it is destroyed, we are the ones who will be scolded”. He concludes that it is better to have no permit at all than a permit that you can’t do anything with.
Kak Desintha and I were rather surprised. We had assumed the salt and tamarind would be used to massage the foot, but it turned out they were applied to the mouth instead. You could say we got our first real taste of fieldwork in Mengkalang Jambu.