PEOPLE AND PLANTS

Barait

These plant portraits come from the Projek Etnobotani Kinabalu, further described below. Feel free to send good quality slides of seeds, leaves and textures that illustrate a project in which you are involved, or of local ethnobotanists with whom you work. We will try to include them in a future issue of the Handbook.

Textures, from a basket (barait) made by Dusun weavers around Kinabalu Park. The framework of the basket shown in the background of the Viewpoints section is made from Calamus ornatus (Arecaceae), a robust rattan palm which grows in primary dipterocarp forests of Malaysia, Indonesia, Phillipines and Southern Thailand.

 The baskets are woven with the stems of a weedy species of Lygodium, a climbing fern common in lowland secondary forests. Barait were originally made from Calamus caesius (Arecaceae), but the design and materials are changing as a response to increasing scarcity of this rattan in areas where there are high rates of deforestation and intensive harvesting of the cane. 

    Baskets made from C. ornatus and Lygodium require less labor than those made from C. caesius, and are in demand by tourists who visit the region. Increased marketing of these baskets is now leading to scarcity of C. ornatus in some weaving communities, and to substitution with other rattan species.

Leaves, from the thatch of a house used for cultivating mushrooms in Kiau, a Dusun community around Kinabalu Park in Sabah, Malaysia. The thatch is made from the leaves of Metroxylon sagu (Arecaceae)

   The palms around Kinabalu Park have been a special focus of the Projek Etnobotani Kinabalu, an ethnobotanical program coordinated by Sabah Parks, the state conservation agency, in collaboration with the Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation (IBEC) of the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), and the WWF-UNESCO-Kew People and Plants Initiative, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In creating the PEK, these partners proposed to develop activities that contribute to:   

1. ethnobotanical research, focused on building a team of local Dusun people, park personnel and visiting researchers who study patterns of Dusun classification, management and use of plants; 
2. conservation of pristine areas, by developing the ability of park personnel to assess the ecological, cultural and economic importance of locally used botanical resources and by strengthening links between the park research staff and Dusun communities; 
3. environmental education, by providing research and training opportunities for students from Malaysia and other Asian countries and by enriching interpretive programs and exhibits for the more than 200,000 people who visit the park every year; and 
4. community development, through improving the management of unprotected forests in buffer zones around Kinabalu Park and promoting the viability of Dusun ecological knowledge.   

Seeds? No, these are pellets of sago, the starchy food produced from the stem pith of Metroxylon sagu and other palms in Southeast Asia and Polynesia. The Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari described how it was made during his visit to Sarawak, Malaysia in 1865:

5.            ‘The operation of “tindjak,” or washing, is performed by placing the pith in the mat or basket, and treading it steadily with the bare feet while an assistant pours water over it from time to time. Even the pails used for this purpose are constructed from the sago palm. They are conical in shape, and are made from the thin laminar and coriaceous portion of the base of the fronds where they encircle the stem. 

6.      This method of treading the baskets with the feet causes the stuff expressed to be carried off by the water through the meshes of the mat or basket, and to collect in a vessel placed beneath, which is usually a small canoe. Here it settles down, and after the water has been drained off constitutes what the natives call “lamanta.” After it has been dried and reduced to a granular form (pearling) it becomes the sago we all know.’