� 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5005-0015$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/605492

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 5, October 2009 673

Comment: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture

The Social Landscape of Rice withinVegecultural Systems in Borneo

Huw Barton

School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University ofLeicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom (hjb15@leicester.ac.uk). 4 V 09

The papers by Hayden (2009, in this issue) and Pearsall (2009,in this issue) highlight the importance of our understanding,to quote Pearsall, of the social landscapes in which early ag-riculture and intensive agriculture occurred and, it could beadded, of contexts (e.g., Australia) in which agriculture didnot occur. While the enormous transformations of societiesthat adopted agriculture are obvious, the actual nature ofthose transformations remains poorly understood, and at aglobal scale we must consider that the trajectories towardseed-based systems of plant food production and those as-sociated with vegecultural practices in the tropics of Africa,Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and the Neotropics may have beenvery different. This response is an attempt to think aboutboth social and economic motivations behind the manipu-lation of plants and food production. In particular, I want toconsider the circumstances under which a rice-based systemof agriculture might have been adopted in tropical SoutheastAsia by hunter-gatherers already engaged in some form ofplant management or vegeculture.

Pearsall notes that the Neotropics might be the ideal placeto investigate agricultural origins through human-environ-ment relationships on a landscape scale. Paleoenvironmentalrecords there include deep sedimentary cores from periodspredating human occupation and include good proxies ofhuman-induced disturbance such as long-term fire recordsand pollen and phytolith sequences. Similar claims might alsobe made for the tropics of Southeast Asia. Human occupationof the rainforests of Borneo is now dated to at least 45,000years ago (Barker et al. 2007; Higham et al. 2009), and firerecords may indicate a human presence as early as 60,000years ago in southern Indonesia (Dam, van der Kaars, andKershaw 2001). Southeast Asia also provides a rather uniquecontext in which to hypothesize about the long-term con-sequences of people-plant interactions; the emergence of veg-eculture and possible independent domestication of a widevariety of tubers, rhizomes, and trees (Barton and Denham,

forthcoming; Barton and Paz 2007; Denham and Barton2006); and the hypothesized rapid introduction of a com-pletely novel mode of plant food production based on thefreproduction of a short-lived annual, rice (see Bellwood 2009,in this issue). For example, it is still argued that agriculturedid not occur in Island Southeast Asia until after the expan-sion of rice-farming peoples into the region during the mid-Holocene (Bellwood 2009). However, this seems increasinglyharder to support in light of the archaeological and geneticevidence that shows that the earlier foraging groups may havebeen actively engaged in the manipulation of several speciesthrough vegecultural systems of plant propagation (Bartonand Denham, forthcoming; Denham and Barton 2006). Itseems likely that rice and its associated systems of propagationwere adopted by peoples already heavily engaged in their ownsystems of plant management, some of which may have al-ready produced domesticates such as the greater yam Dios-corea alata, taro Colocasia esculenta, and bananas Musa spp.(Carreel et al. 2002; De Langhe and de Maret 1999; Lebot etal. 2004). It also seems likely that the transition toward thereliance of rice as a food staple after its mid-Holocene intro-duction was still occurring in recent prehistory.

Even as late as the early twentieth century in parts of South-east Asia where rice held center stage as a plant of socialpreeminence, this did not necessarily reflect its role in dailysubsistence. Among many groups in interior Borneo, rice re-mained a relatively minor crop—supplementing other starchystaples, frequently roots that could be grown in greater quan-tity and that were considered more reliable come harvest(Harrisson 1949, 142). Among the Dusun of North Borneo,though rice was planted by all tribes, it was considered sup-plementary to a diet of taro and imported South Americancultivars such as cassava, sugar cane, and maize (Rutter 1929,75). Wild fruits and sago were also considerably important,though the latter more so in the swampy lowlands (Rutter1929, 96), suggesting that it may be the introduced swampsago Metroxylon sagu Rott. (the timing of this introductionremains unknown, but the original range of this palm wasnot westward of the Molluccas; Flach 1997). Root crops and

674 Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 5, October 2009

sago (indigenous Eugeissona utilis, Caryota spp., and Arengaspp.) were also important foodstuffs in the interior uplandsof Borneo (Harrisson 1959, 66), though groups such as theKelabit state emphatically that their staple food has alwaysbeen rice. In a review of the Kelabit highlands, Harrisson(1964) considered it highly likely that root crops and sagopalms were major staples until the early twentieth centuryand were certainly part of the diet of hunting and tradingparties away from villages (Harrisson 1959, 66). Likewise,Eghenter and Sellato (2003, 23) considered that the earliestgroups occupying the Kerayan region of interior Indonesiamay have been horticulturists with a subsistence system basedon tubers.

The rice plant in Island Southeast Asia lives and thrives ina singular duality as a sacred and secular plant, a symbol ofstatus, wealth, and social stratification, and is frequently im-portant in ceremonial and ritual function (Hayden 2003,2009; Janowski 2007; Sellato 1994, 212). The Kelabit conceiveof a living thing as being able to “grow on its own,” mulunsebulang, while rice can grow only if humans care for it. Theysee the cultivation of rice as initiating a particular way ofliving in the landscape and in the cosmos (Janowski, Barton,and Jones, forthcoming). For the Kelabit, the distinction be-tween a rice-growing way of life and a way of life that doesnot involve rice growing is very meaningful. The choice ofrice growing in the tropical forest is not an economicallysensible one, and they are quite clear about this; the point ofgrowing rice is rather to show exceptional ability. If theywanted only to survive, they could make sago or grow rootcrops (Janowski, Barton, and Jones, forthcoming).

Sago palms remain an important wild resource that is en-couraged and managed by the Penan and still cultivatedamong some agricultural communities as either a staple or aminor crop. It is often referred to as a famine food, or short-term food, by many groups of rice farmers in Borneo. Eco-nomic return rates from sago palms can be high (3,600 kcal/h)1 compared with those from many other starchy foods (seealso Denham and Barton 2006, 262; Ulijaszek and Poraituk1993) and very high compared with those from swidden ricefields (ranging from 400 to 1,500 kcal/h).2 Sago is more re-liable and less risky than hill rice because there are manyindependent factors that can induce partial or even completefailure of the rice crop. Freeman (1955, 104) estimated that,on average, up to 44% of Iban families would achieve between51% and 75% of their annual requirements of rice; a shortageof their staple carbohydrate was not infrequent.

The Kelabit and many other rice-farming groups such asthe Iban frequently converted excess rice into social “capi-tal”—or perhaps social “potential” might be a better phrase—through the purchase or trade of prestige items such as brass

1. Calculations from dry weight of sago flour processed with the Penanin the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak (H. Barton, unpublished data).

2. Based on energetic calculations of the yield of hulled rice from dryrice fields (from Strickland 1985).

gongs or Chinese jars. “Each season, some families succeedin producing a surplus, while others find themselves with adeficit; and so, year by year . . . scores of different familiesexchange gongs for padi, or padi for gongs” (Freeman 1955,105). Among the Kelabit, rice may also be transformed intothe organization of communal labor for the construction ofceremonial ditches (nabang) or irrigation ditches (abang) andthe erection of celebratory stone monuments, through theirability to “feed” people at an irau, or feast (Janowski 2007).Such a system then allows the conversion of a perishable foodcrop into something that is more than just food: a sociallyacceptable recognized “valuable” that can be manipulated ingames of social ranking. Historically, the coastal Melanau (agroup reliant on introduced swamp sago M. sagu Rott.) wouldsell sago flour to the Chinese and purchase rice with themonetary proceeds. In doing this the Melanau traders wereessentially giving away about three and a half times the energyvalue of the rice though sale of the sago flour (Strickland1985, 132). Their rationale for these exchanges is unclear butwas perhaps motivated by the status gained through the ac-quisition of rice to be consumed in preference to sago, widelyconsidered to be a low-status food in the eyes of many suc-cessful rice-farming communities (Nicholaisen 1986, 76;Strickland 1985, 148).

Rice may have been attractive within such a system preciselyfor the reasons that make it seem to be such an illogical foodcrop within the rainforest. Variation in rice production createsand enhances a system of inequality as yield varies dramati-cally because of outside forces, such as climate, pests, andother natural causes, and is largely reliant on the availablelabor input (i.e., the time that can be freed up from otheressential activities) that is necessary to increase one’s chancesof success come harvest. Variation in rice yields act as a“pump” pulling valuables into society and influencing theirredistribution, creating obligations and new status relation-ships through its inherent instability. As a crop, rice, in aworld of vegeculture with sago and yams, may have beenfavored initially not because of its ability to reduce the “risk”of going hungry or produce surpluses on a relatively de-pendable basis (see Hayden 2009) but because its successfulcultivation was inherently risky and prone to failure and, thus,uniquely, it became highly attractive as a playing piece ingames of social competition between individuals. The Kelabitexample is a good illustration of this. The distribution of smallgroves of hill sago palms E. utilis near old longhouse sitesalso suggests a time when this plant was cultivated before theintroduction of rice (H. Barton, personal observation). Yettoday, these groups and others define themselves through theirsuccesses at growing domesticated rice in a landscape thatwould otherwise not sustain it; it has become part of a sociallandscape, a product of human excellence, prevailing withina physical landscape of food choices, such as taro and sago,that are more reliable and less risky in terms of mean pro-ductive output and variance in return rates.

A key to our understanding of the origins of food pro-

Barton Rice and Vegecultural Systems in Borneo 675

duction in this region clearly involves an increased under-standing of both the potential antiquity of other systems oflow-level food production, such as vegeculture and the mul-tidisciplinary collaborations necessary to identify the antiquityof plant translocations, and the timing of domestication or-igins of plants such as taro, bananas, and yams. This is es-sential if we are to properly understand the role of humansin the long-term modification of their environments and tobetter understand why people in different environmental andsocial contexts might have moved from one form of foodproduction to another.

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