Nancy Lee Peluso

Professor, Society & Environment Chair
Ph.D.  Sociology of Agriculture and Natural Resources    Cornell University, 1988
B.A.   Anthropology    Friends World College, 1978

139 Giannini Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
npeluso@nature.berkeley.edu
office: 510-643-2797   lab: 510-643-2797   fax:  510-643-5438

     Recent publications      People

My students and I conduct research on the social processes that affect the management of land-based resources. My work explores various dimensions of resource access, use, and control, while contrasting local, national, and international influences on management structures and processes. I ground my analyses of contemporary resource management policy and practice in local and regional histories. I am particularly interested in how people who identify with different and multiple social groups (e.g., by ethnicity, class, gender, age, or citizenship) and government and non-government agencies define, make claims upon, contest, and attempt to manage natural resources.

Since 1979, I have conducted research on forest and agrarian politics and socio-environmental change in Indonesia. In early research, I studied the trade in non-timber forest products in East Kalimantan; village-state conflicts in the teak and montane forests of Java; the role of forestry and social forestry in state formation and changes in forest management practices and resource rights among indigenous swidden cultivators in West Kalimantan. In the past ten years, I have expanded my research scope through the projects discussed below.

The History of Political Forests in Southeast Asia.

In this comparative study of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, my colleague at York University, Peter Vandergeest, and I are looking at the formation of what we call "political forests" during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We examine the role and origins of forest and land law, professional forestry institutions and the ways "emergencies" and insurgencies during the Cold War shaped forests and empowered territorializing states. We also examine the ways customary practices were integrated as "Customary Rights" or ignored in the law, and how and why the law and state forest practices have affected people's livelihoods.

Violence, territorialization, and the production of landscape history.

I am working on a book that examines the entanglements of violence and territoriality in landscape history in West Kalimantan, a province in Indonesian Borneo. Drawing from my fieldwork and writing on West Kalimantan since 1990, as well as archival and secondary sources, I examine how conjunctures of violence, territoriality, and landscape production have reshaped access to and control over agrarian and political resources. Though it draws on my previous writing, the analysis takes on new, multi-sited approaches to the 1997 communal violence between Dayaks and Madurese in West Kalimantan.

I use multiple histories and scales of analysis in West Kalimantan to make a series of broad claims about the relations between violence, territory, and landscape. I contend that landscapes, as working, material domains of practice and sites of remembrance, are territories. I argue that the production of territories through practice and representation, or territorialization, is a mode of claiming. This differentiates territorialization from "place-making." As territories are produced and multiply, they become contested sites of identity production, resource control, and historical representation. In twentieth-century West Kalimantan, competing territorialities have led to repeated incidents of state and communal violence. In the wake of violence or its threat, those remaining in place produced new landscapes and new representations of their identities and histories, as part of their own and others' territorializing projects.

Refereed journal articles and book chapters

Nevins, Joseph, and Nancy Lee Peluso, eds. 2008. Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, People, and Nature in a Neoliberal Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (in press).

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2007. “Enclosure and Privatization of Neoliberal Environments: Some comments.” In Neoliberal Environments. Nick heynton, James McCarthy, Scott Prudham and Paul Robbins, eds. Routledge. In press.

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2006. "Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1. Environment and History 12 (1):31-64.

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2006. “Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 2. Environment and History 12 (4):359-393.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2006. (translated by Landung Simatupang). Hutan Kaya, Rakyat Melarat: Penguasaan Sumberdaya dan Perlawanan di Jawa. Yogyakarta: Konphalindo. Printed by INSISTPRess. Indonesian Translation of Rich Forests, Poor People with a new introduction.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2006. "Passing the Red Bowl: Creating Community through Violence in West Kalimantan, Indonesia." In Charles Coppel, ed. Violent Conflict in Indonesia. New York: Routledge.

Hart, Gillian, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2005. "Revisiting Rural Java: Agrarian Research in the Wake of Reformasi: A Review Essay." Indonesia Number 80, October, 2005:177-197.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2005. "Seeing Properties in Land Use: Local Territorializations in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Geografisk Tidsskrift: Danish Journal of Geography, V. 105, No. 1.

Ribot, Jesse, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 2003. "A Theory of Access." Rural Sociology 68 (2): 153-181

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2003. "The Politics of Specificity and Generalization in Conservation Matters." Conservation and Society, 1 (1): 61-64.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 2003. "Weapons of the Wild: Strategic Deployment of Violence and Wildness in Borneo Rainforests of Indonesia." In Candace Slater, ed. In Search of the Rainforest. Duke University Press.

Zinoman, Peter and Nancy Lee Peluso, Guest Editors. 2002. Asian Survey 42 (4) July-August: 545-549. Co-authored Special Issue Introduction (and co-edited the issue): "Rethinking Aspects of Political Violence in Twentieth Century Indonesia and East Timor."

Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Peter Vandergeest. 2001. "Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand." Journal of Asian Studies 61(3).

Peluso, Nancy Lee and Emily Harwell. 2001. "Territory, Custom, and the Cultural Politics of Ethnic War in West Kalimantan Indonesia." In, Violent Environments. Nancy Lee Peluso, Michael Watts, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fairfax, Sally K., Fortmann, Louise P., Hawkins, Ann, Huntsinger, Lynn, Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Wolf, Steven A. 1998. "The Federal Forests Are Not What They Seem: Formal and Informal Claims to Federal Lands." Ecology Law Quarterly. 25(4):630-646.

Peluso, Nancy Lee. 1998 "The Role of Forests in Sustaining Smallholders," in John Gordon, Ralph Schmidt, and Joyce Berry, eds., Creating Integrated Forest Strategies. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Christine Padoch and Nancy Lee Peluso, eds. 1996. Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. (Second edition 2003).

Peluso, N.L. 1996. "Fruit trees and family trees in an Anthropogenic rainforest: Property rights, ethics of access, and environmental change in Indonesia." Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (3):510-548.

Books and Monographs

Hutan Kaya, Rakyat Mlarat:Penguasaan Sumberdaya dan Perlawanan di Jawa (2006) Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, People, and Nature in a Neoliberal Age (2008).
Borneo in Transition:People, Forests, Conservation and Development (1996; 2003) Violent Environments (2001)
Rich Forests Poor People:Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992)