Graduate student Sarah Hitchner, supervised by Dr. J. Peter Brosius, will undertake research in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. Building on recent advances in the historical ecology of anthropogenic landscapes and the political ecology of conservation, her dissertation research will focus on documenting the land use history of the Kelabit Highlands, specifically around the current village of Pa' Lungan. Her two main objectives in creating this land use history are 1) to advance a multidisciplinary methodology of analyzing spatial and temporal data from different sources, and 2) to promote a multi-level collaborative approach to participatory anthropological research methods in the context of a state-led conservation initiative that will affect the Kelabit people. These objectives seek to contribute to theoretical anthropological debates surrounding appropriate representation of local peoples and the production of scientific and local knowledges.
She will apply an array of complementary ethnographic methods, including archival research, participant observation, interviews that include oral history collection and sketch mapping, and guided visits to past settlement sites. She will incorporate these codified ethnographic and ecological data into a GIS database that will also include GPS locations of features and layers of regional geospatial data from existing maps, satellite images, and aerial photographs; this database will allow for the cross-checking of attributed tabular data collected from these different sources. These data, which will allow reconstruction of land use history in the form of a digital map and spatial and temporal analyses of past land uses, will be collected collaboratively and then ultimately managed by the Kelabit people for the protection of their cultural sites and resource areas both within and outside of the boundaries of the proposed expansion of the newly-created Pulong Tau National Park. The interdisciplinary and collaborative methods of this dissertation project, which seek to analyze the process of collaborative map-making and not merely to produce a map and database, can be replicated in research projects that extend beyond ethnography.
