Dr Alice Rudge (UCL)
Divorcing the Dead, Sharing with Others: Precarious Alterities on a Malaysian Rainforest Frontier
This paper explores how Batek people formulate alterity in a context of marginality at the edges of a Malaysian rainforest. There, how people narrate, encounter, and enact alterity is often through and about acts of sharing. Through exploring a diverse set of instances in which questions of how and whether to share produce tension, this paper investigates the conditions of alterity that underly sharing’s very possibility among not only living Batek people, but also with the dead, and those they term gɔp ‘outsiders’. In tracing the everyday working out of these unpredictable alterities, an attitude of ‘social grace’ (Rosaldo 1993) comes to the fore, in which alterity is a responsive, indeterminate process of managing detachment and connection in the immediacy of life’s encounters. The pain of environmental destruction can thus be understood as produced, in part, by the forceful denial of the indeterminacy of Batek social relations.