This paper makes a comparison between mechanisms of rule used during colonial and postcolonial Sabah. Despite Sabah's political independence from Britain in 1963, subjugation of native traditions by modern ideals continues. The author posits that knowledge was and continues to be invented and confirmed in the service of elite actors controlling access to natural resources. The discourse associated with this type of knowledge functioned in colonial times to favor commercial plantation agriculture and is presently employed in the pursuit of biodiversity conservation.

In order to analyze colonial constructions of power, Doolittle references property laws and archival records of correspondence between land administrators, government officials and plantation owners. She shows how their rhetoric was aimed at 'civilizing' the native population according to Western scientific and legal principles and at making Sabah's natural resources available for global consumption. Native rights to land were legally declared but in practice were overridden by the government´s priorities to support private plantations that yielded state revenues. Shifting swidden agriculture by native people was vilified as a wasteful and destructive practice while in fact there was no evidence to prove this and the colonial plantations destroyed incomparably vast amounts of forest. Such discourse, in addition to the gazetting and information classification by which colonizers interpreted and re-ordered the landscape, is what Doolittle refers to as the “invention and confirmation of knowledge”, and is used as a “technology of rule” (p. 823).

A year of fieldwork contributed to the author's conclusion that this technology of rule is still operating in post-colonial Sabah. She references the discourse of forest officers that debases indigenous knowledge and practices in favor of what they consider proper and modern uses of the forest, such as scientific research, relaxation, sport hunting and biodiversity conservation. Also included in her analysis of contemporary Sabah is the controversy over state appropriation of native land for inclusion into Kinabalu Park and the subsequent burning of this forest by the local inhabitants in 1990. Retracing the history of the state's chronic and corrupt manipulation of native rights for this piece of property, the author justifies this extreme act as local people's last resort for retaining their rightful land.

“Every action of the state associated with land and natural resources, from the colonial and throughout the postcolonial period, has taken rights away from the native population in Sabah” (p. 841), asserts the author. People and institutions in power continue to regard native people´s needs for natural resources as unimportant and necessitating intervention. In analyzing this rhetoric in Sabah, we are able to see that in other parts of the world as well, similar dogmas and paradigms underpinning conservation and development agendas could benefit from critical re-examination.

Prepared by Megan Glore