2 - Foraging People in a Nation-State and Global Economy: The Orang Asli Batek in Malaysia

The framework of nation-state was introduced by the colonial rules in many regions in Southeast Asia, which authorized the governance of the environment as territorialized land and people as a nation or/and ethnic groups. While its process entails the transformation of diverse landscapes and the various lifestyles of the people there, some people generate and reproduce their own vernacular practices.

This paper explores how an Orang Asli group has responded to the national policies and the wave of economic globalization. Peninsular Malaysia is a region that has a diverse ecological environment. According to each environment, people have formed diverse lifestyles by adjusting each way. In the colonial era, those considered under the Malay Muslim rulers were officially categorized as Malay. At the same time, the remaining diverse populations were positioned within the state system as Orang Asli (Aborigines) by the colonial administration. Therefore, 18 groups with different languages, customs, and ways of living are included in Orang Asli, and all of them have experienced rapid changes in their lives and environments, especially after the 1960s. The Batek, one of the Orang Asli groups, is a people who lived a foraging lifestyle combined with hunting and gathering, trading forest products, and providing labor to Malay peasants until the 1960s. This presentation will focus on how the Batek continue their economic practice of hunting and gathering, an economic activity that requires mobility to obtain resources, in the context of economic development such as plantation development, sedentarization policies, and road construction.