Heritage Voices · The Archaeology Podcast Network

Working with Indigenous Communities and Orangutan Conservation in Borneo - Ep 81

·58 min·3 clips

Chua says her oral histories and landscape notes were handed over for the native customary land rights case.

1. Heritage Voices episode 81 centers on indigenous communities and orangutan conservation in Borneo, with Jessica Uquinto hosting Dr. Liana Chua. 2. Jessica Uquinto hosts the show, and Liana Chua is a social anthropologist and University of Cambridge assistant professor in Malay World Studies. 3. The episode asks how Bidayuh communities, resettlement politics, and orangutan conservation connect across Malaysian Borneo. 4. Chua says she discovered social anthropology through a history degree in Singapore and an MPhil at Cambridge. 5. She describes being drawn to "small, small, small" human stories about what people ate, how they lived, and cross-cultural encounters. 6. Chua says Singapore felt like a "strange bubble" and links that experience to her interest in Southeast Asia. 7. Her doctoral work in Malaysian Borneo began after reading Robert Winslow's article about Bidayuh ritual architecture becoming a cultural space. 8. She traveled through Bidayuh regions with a respected Catholic leader and eventually found Kampung Bunuk and its "mini museum." 9. The museum keeper was the elderly son of the village's last ritual chief, and he preserved jars, gongs, and ritual items as family heirlooms. 10. Chua says that during a Catholic wake, a man told her, "This stuff is our culture," which changed her understanding of the museum. 11. She realized villagers were not uniformly invested in "culture" as an anthropological category. 12. She then saw Christianity as shaping how people separated old rituals, spirits, and culture. 13. After her PhD, Chua returned to Sarawak and heard about a dam project affecting four Bidayuh villages. 14. The planned reservoir was meant to secure the capital city's water supply, and the villages were located three to five hours' walk from the nearest road. 15. Chua says many villagers wanted the resettlement site for schools, hospitals, shops, and wage work, while others resisted moving from ancestral land. 16. A smaller group pursued a six-year legal case to secure native customary land rights above the inundation zone. 17. Chua says she had to avoid simplistic moral language because many people genuinely wanted resettlement, while others were trying to stay. 18. She explains that, under her research permit, she could not join anti-resettlement activism, so she focused on oral histories, landscape stories, and documentation. 19. Those materials later fed into the legal case through an anthropologist working with lawyers, showing a measured interview style built around long fieldwork and reflection. 20. The episode will suit listeners interested in Bidayuh history, indigenous land rights, and orangutan conservation, but it may not suit listeners wanting a fast, purely animal-focused discussion.

As heard by us

A patient conversation about orangutan conservation, resettlement, and lived experience in Borneo.

Heritage Voices episode 81 follows Jessica Uquinto and Dr. Liana Chua through a grounded conversation about orangutan conservation in Borneo. Chua, a social anthropologist, draws on work in Malaysian Borneo, development and resettlement, and the social, political, and aesthetic…

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Why you'd press play

For a thoughtful conversation about orangutan conservation in Borneo, where Indigenous communities, resettlement, and policy meet.

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