Telling Stories: Representing the Anti-Logging Movement of the Penan of Sarawak

Global collaborations between popular movements involving grassroots movements in the South have often been hampered by problems of cross-cultural representation. This article takes as an example the case of the Penan, an indigenous group in Malaysia, drawing on ethnographic research and examining in comparison the environmentalist and anti-environmentalist representations of the Penan protest movement against logging. Their strategies of representation are compared to the concept of ‘elite historiography’ produced by the Subaltern Studies group. However, I warn that the lesson of that work, given the necessity for ‘subaltern’ groups, of operating within dominant discourses, is the challenge of producing a critical reading, rather than rejecting the narratives of environmentalist or ‘post-development’ discourse as merely the constructions of a Westernised elite.