Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

Sandra Pannellpromoted in the three-volume guide for visitors to the Park. The TNC-sponsored publicationon the ‘Natural History Guide to Komodo National Park’ states, “people once inhabited thatarea [Gunung Ara on Komodo Island] several hundred years ago. However, the people ofKomodo Village are thought to have settled there less than 100 years ago” (Erdmann 2004:11). In keeping with the pre-dominant view that all of the residents in the Park are‘immigrants’, the guide concludes, “the first settlers of Komodo Village were exiles fromBima” (loc. cit.).Reflecting The Nature Conservancy’s preservationist view of nature as either valorisedpristine areas or demonised expendable environments, the current plan separates thepopulation of the Park into a near (if not already) extinct indigenous minority and anendangering immigrant majority 38 . While previous management plans depicted all of theresidents of the National Park as originating from elsewhere, coming to the region as ‘exiles’,‘convicts’ and ‘resource raiders’, the current plan acknowledges the existence of an ‘original’Komodo culture, independent and pre-dating the subsequent and relatively recent waves ofimmigrants that settled on the island.As this suggests, the idea of authentic identities and customs presented in the currentmanagement plan is based upon the place and temporal depth of people’s origins. Insofaras the management plan and associated guidebooks recognise the resident communitieswithin the Park, it privileges indigenous status over immigrant identities, and prioritisestraditional and relict connections in contrast to contemporary living ones. As previouslyindicated, villages established in the Park in the mid 1950s were deemed to be ‘nontraditional’and their occupants subsequently resettled outside of the Park. The upshot ofthis policy decision is to focus residence within the Park at four locations, whereas in thepast, villagers established fishing camps and temporary garden huts at a number of placeswithin what is now the National Park.In origin narratives from Komodo, the historic arrival of people from Sumba, Sumbawa,Flores, and Ambon is presented as an essential development in the foundation of the villageof Modo and is a critical element in the emerging sense of a common culture and a collectivecommunity identity. When coupled with the written historical record, these origin historiespoint to a long tradition of human movement and settlement in this region. Contrary to theimage presented in the management plan, migration in this area is not a recent response to asituation of scarce resources or growing population pressure elsewhere. In other words, thehistory of Komodo is also a history of successive migrations.As McWilliam (2002: 18) and others have observed, ‘orders of precedence’, based uponrelative priority in time or place, constitute a fundamental form of social organisationthroughout eastern Indonesia. Origin narratives “provide one of the significant and dynamicarenas for negotiating status and the order of relations between socially defined groups” (loc.cit.). The demonisation of immigration and immigrants in the Plan, and the associatedvalorisation of the Ata Modo as the ‘original people’, has certainly cast new meanings uponexisting orders of precedence.Using the plan’s acknowledgement of an ‘original culture’ as a strategy to strengthen theirclaims to traditional land rights and, in part, reclaiming ancestral identities appropriated byTNC as the name of its joint venture company, some individuals from the village of Komodohave taken it upon themselves to challenge the common management scenario that the AtaModo have ‘virtually vanished’ (Ellis 1998: 71) in a “tide of immigration” (loc. cit.). The38 As Adam Kuper points out, the propositions that the “descendants of the original inhabitants of acountry should have privileged rights, even exclusive rights, to resources …[and] immigrants aresimply guests and should behave accordingly … are popular with extreme right-wing parties inEurope” (2003: 390).36