Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 5, October 2009

673

Comment: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture

The Social Landscape of Rice within

Vegecultural Systems in Borneo
Huw Barton
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of
Leicester, 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 agriculture and intensive agriculture occurred and, it could be
added, of contexts (e.g., Australia) in which agriculture did
not occur. While the enormous transformations of societies
that adopted agriculture are obvious, the actual nature of
those transformations remains poorly understood, and at a
global scale we must consider that the trajectories toward
seed-based systems of plant food production and those associated with vegecultural practices in the tropics of Africa,
Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and the Neotropics may have been
very different. This response is an attempt to think about
both social and economic motivations behind the manipulation of plants and food production. In particular, I want to
consider the circumstances under which a rice-based system
of agriculture might have been adopted in tropical Southeast
Asia by hunter-gatherers already engaged in some form of
plant management or vegeculture.
Pearsall notes that the Neotropics might be the ideal place
to investigate agricultural origins through human-environment relationships on a landscape scale. Paleoenvironmental
records there include deep sedimentary cores from periods
predating human occupation and include good proxies of
human-induced disturbance such as long-term fire records
and pollen and phytolith sequences. Similar claims might also
be made for the tropics of Southeast Asia. Human occupation
of the rainforests of Borneo is now dated to at least 45,000
years ago (Barker et al. 2007; Higham et al. 2009), and fire
records may indicate a human presence as early as 60,000
years ago in southern Indonesia (Dam, van der Kaars, and
Kershaw 2001). Southeast Asia also provides a rather unique
context in which to hypothesize about the long-term consequences of people-plant interactions; the emergence of vegeculture and possible independent domestication of a wide
variety of tubers, rhizomes, and trees (Barton and Denham,

forthcoming; Barton and Paz 2007; Denham and Barton

2006); and the hypothesized rapid introduction of a completely novel mode of plant food production based on the
freproduction of a short-lived annual, rice (see Bellwood 2009,
in this issue). For example, it is still argued that agriculture
did not occur in Island Southeast Asia until after the expansion of rice-farming peoples into the region during the midHolocene (Bellwood 2009). However, this seems increasingly
harder to support in light of the archaeological and genetic
evidence that shows that the earlier foraging groups may have
been actively engaged in the manipulation of several species
through vegecultural systems of plant propagation (Barton
and Denham, forthcoming; Denham and Barton 2006). It
seems likely that rice and its associated systems of propagation
were adopted by peoples already heavily engaged in their own
systems of plant management, some of which may have already produced domesticates such as the greater yam Dioscorea alata, taro Colocasia esculenta, and bananas Musa spp.
(Carreel et al. 2002; De Langhe and de Maret 1999; Lebot et
al. 2004). It also seems likely that the transition toward the
reliance of rice as a food staple after its mid-Holocene introduction was still occurring in recent prehistory.
Even as late as the early twentieth century in parts of Southeast Asia where rice held center stage as a plant of social
preeminence, this did not necessarily reflect its role in daily
subsistence. Among many groups in interior Borneo, rice remained a relatively minor cropsupplementing other starchy
staples, frequently roots that could be grown in greater quantity 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 supplementary to a diet of taro and imported South American
cultivars 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 (Rutter
1929, 96), suggesting that it may be the introduced swamp
sago Metroxylon sagu Rott. (the timing of this introduction
remains unknown, but the original range of this palm was
not westward of the Molluccas; Flach 1997). Root crops and

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

674

sago (indigenous Eugeissona utilis, Caryota spp., and Arenga

spp.) were also important foodstuffs in the interior uplands
of Borneo (Harrisson 1959, 66), though groups such as the
Kelabit state emphatically that their staple food has always
been rice. In a review of the Kelabit highlands, Harrisson
(1964) considered it highly likely that root crops and sago
palms were major staples until the early twentieth century
and were certainly part of the diet of hunting and trading
parties away from villages (Harrisson 1959, 66). Likewise,
Eghenter and Sellato (2003, 23) considered that the earliest
groups occupying the Kerayan region of interior Indonesia
may have been horticulturists with a subsistence system based
on tubers.
The rice plant in Island Southeast Asia lives and thrives in
a singular duality as a sacred and secular plant, a symbol of
status, wealth, and social stratification, and is frequently important in ceremonial and ritual function (Hayden 2003,
2009; Janowski 2007; Sellato 1994, 212). The Kelabit conceive
of a living thing as being able to grow on its own, mulun
sebulang, while rice can grow only if humans care for it. They
see the cultivation of rice as initiating a particular way of
living in the landscape and in the cosmos (Janowski, Barton,
and Jones, forthcoming). For the Kelabit, the distinction between a rice-growing way of life and a way of life that does
not involve rice growing is very meaningful. The choice of
rice growing in the tropical forest is not an economically
sensible one, and they are quite clear about this; the point of
growing rice is rather to show exceptional ability. If they
wanted only to survive, they could make sago or grow root
crops (Janowski, Barton, and Jones, forthcoming).
Sago palms remain an important wild resource that is encouraged and managed by the Penan and still cultivated
among some agricultural communities as either a staple or a
minor crop. It is often referred to as a famine food, or shortterm food, by many groups of rice farmers in Borneo. Economic return rates from sago palms can be high (3,600 kcal/
h)1 compared with those from many other starchy foods (see
also Denham and Barton 2006, 262; Ulijaszek and Poraituk
1993) and very high compared with those from swidden rice
fields (ranging from 400 to 1,500 kcal/h).2 Sago is more reliable and less risky than hill rice because there are many
independent factors that can induce partial or even complete
failure of the rice crop. Freeman (1955, 104) estimated that,
on average, up to 44% of Iban families would achieve between
51% and 75% of their annual requirements of rice; a shortage
of their staple carbohydrate was not infrequent.
The Kelabit and many other rice-farming groups such as
the Iban frequently converted excess rice into social capitalor 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 Penan
in the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak (H. Barton, unpublished data).
2. Based on energetic calculations of the yield of hulled rice from dry
rice fields (from Strickland 1985).

Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 5, October 2009

gongs or Chinese jars. Each season, some families succeed

in producing a surplus, while others find themselves with a
deficit; and so, year by year . . . scores of different families
exchange gongs for padi, or padi for gongs (Freeman 1955,
105). Among the Kelabit, rice may also be transformed into
the organization of communal labor for the construction of
ceremonial ditches (nabang) or irrigation ditches (abang) and
the erection of celebratory stone monuments, through their
ability to feed people at an irau, or feast (Janowski 2007).
Such a system then allows the conversion of a perishable food
crop into something that is more than just food: a socially
acceptable recognized valuable that can be manipulated in
games of social ranking. Historically, the coastal Melanau (a
group reliant on introduced swamp sago M. sagu Rott.) would
sell sago flour to the Chinese and purchase rice with the
monetary proceeds. In doing this the Melanau traders were
essentially giving away about three and a half times the energy
value of the rice though sale of the sago flour (Strickland
1985, 132). Their rationale for these exchanges is unclear but
was perhaps motivated by the status gained through the acquisition of rice to be consumed in preference to sago, widely
considered to be a low-status food in the eyes of many successful rice-farming communities (Nicholaisen 1986, 76;
Strickland 1985, 148).
Rice may have been attractive within such a system precisely
for the reasons that make it seem to be such an illogical food
crop within the rainforest. Variation in rice production creates
and enhances a system of inequality as yield varies dramatically because of outside forces, such as climate, pests, and
other natural causes, and is largely reliant on the available
labor input (i.e., the time that can be freed up from other
essential activities) that is necessary to increase ones chances
of success come harvest. Variation in rice yields act as a
pump pulling valuables into society and influencing their
redistribution, creating obligations and new status relationships through its inherent instability. As a crop, rice, in a
world of vegeculture with sago and yams, may have been
favored initially not because of its ability to reduce the risk
of going hungry or produce surpluses on a relatively dependable basis (see Hayden 2009) but because its successful
cultivation was inherently risky and prone to failure and, thus,
uniquely, it became highly attractive as a playing piece in
games of social competition between individuals. The Kelabit
example is a good illustration of this. The distribution of small
groves of hill sago palms E. utilis near old longhouse sites
also suggests a time when this plant was cultivated before the
introduction of rice (H. Barton, personal observation). Yet
today, these groups and others define themselves through their
successes at growing domesticated rice in a landscape that
would otherwise not sustain it; it has become part of a social
landscape, a product of human excellence, prevailing within
a physical landscape of food choices, such as taro and sago,
that are more reliable and less risky in terms of mean productive output and variance in return rates.
A key to our understanding of the origins of food pro-

Barton Rice and Vegecultural Systems in Borneo

duction in this region clearly involves an increased understanding of both the potential antiquity of other systems of
low-level food production, such as vegeculture and the multidisciplinary collaborations necessary to identify the antiquity
of plant translocations, and the timing of domestication origins of plants such as taro, bananas, and yams. This is essential if we are to properly understand the role of humans
in the long-term modification of their environments and to
better understand why people in different environmental and
social contexts might have moved from one form of food
production to another.

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