INTRODUCTION

TRADITION AND MODERNITY

This chapter will examine how Malays in Peninsular Malaysia perceive the Bateks and how the Bateks’ ways of life and thought challenge the official perception. These mutual perceptions are reflected in the peoples’ respective enactments of environmental relationships. Fundamentally, the administrative discourse tends to order the world into oppositional categories: the convenient tropes of “tradition” and “modernity”. While “tradition” is equated with indigenous, “modernity” is equated with progressive. Hence the former is identified with “folk” and “unchanging” while the latter is identified with “Western”, “developing”, and “scientific”. Such linkages are widespread (see, for example, Frossard 1994; Hobart 1993).

It goes almost without saying that for anthropologists “tradition” and “modernity” are at best heurisms and at worst political ideologies that are deployed to obfuscate the true nature of power relations between state and local social entities (see Hobsbawm 1983). On the other hand, that we routinely continue to challenge this distinction reveals just how embedded, and therefore how politically useful, the fiction has become.

The popular imagination would have it that there is a discontinuous break between tradition and modernity. In recent years, the dichotomy has resurfaced forcefully in the study, dissemination and application of so-called indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge as viewed in this manner, being passive, unchanging and vulnerable, threatens to slip our grasp because it simply cannot stand up to the virile force of modernity. As Brush (1996, p. 6) notes, “this opposition blurs the actual fluidity and permeability of knowledge and cultural boundaries. Indigenous knowledge very often includes information that has been adopted from the dominant culture …. Likewise, the culture of the dominant group includes ideas and precepts from minority cultures.” However, he continues, “the urge persists to reify knowledge systems and set artificial boundaries around culture where none exists in everyday life” (p. 6). A notable attack has been sounded by Agrawal (1995). He in turn suggests that “the attempt to create distinctions in terms of indigenous and Western is potentially ridiculous. It makes much more sense to talk about multiple domains and types of knowledge, with differing logics and epistemologies” (p. 5).