The Last in a Long Line Historical and Ethnographic Tropical Forest Encounters

On the basis of the plethora of evidence for tropical forest agricultural practices and urban networks in Chapters 5 and 6 it seems somewhat surprising that these environments, and their human occupants, could ever come to be seen as static, primordial, or ‘elusive’ (Biesbrouck et al., 1999). Yet, today, Indigenous peoples living in tropical forests are often depicted as being isolated from the outside world, and as equally, passively threatened by external agricultural, economic, and political forces as the habitats in which they reside. As I showed in Chapter 2, the hunting and foraging practices of these groups can provide useful insights into how our prehistoric ancestors may have made a diverse living in environments that have frequently been considered too poor in crucial resources for long-term human occupation. Somehow, however, these parallels and comparisons have also seen these groups framed as relics of some of the earliest members of our species. This has been encouraged by claims that some of these groups genetically represent ‘archaic’ lineages of Homo sapiens that survived in dense forest habitats in different regions (Endicott et al., 2003; Ranaweera et al., 2014; Ranasinghe et al., 2015).Whether this is the case or not, it is now clear from historical and ethnographic information that tropical forest foragers, the world over, have been involved in complex economic and political networks to varying extents at different points in time. Moreover, the present cultural and subsistence systems of many of these groups have been significantly affected by the infiltration of colonial and imperial regimes from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as the more recent, disruptive effects of global capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to document how Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest environments. In response to this, I review evidence for historical and ethnographic connections of tropical forest hunter-gatherers, and agriculturalists, with societies in neighbouring territories.

Re-thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of Thuâ[dot under]n-Qua[hook above]ng, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries

This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.