Sarawak

The documentary “Tribe” which features the lives of an indigenous tribe from Sarawak, Malaysia, the “Penan”, is absolutely an absolute eye-opener. Not only did it inform the viewers about the Penan people but it also left an impact of the growing awareness of the people to unjust abuse to the environment and the simplicity of life. According to my search, The Penans are a nomadic aboriginal people living in Sarawak and Brunei. Penans are one of the last such peoples who remained as hunters and gatherers. The Penan language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. It forms an own Group within the Borneo branch of the Borneo–Philippines languages. The Penan tribe’s main concern or social issue in the documentary is about their struggle to in resistance to the growing deforestation in the Malaysian forests. The Penan came to national and international attention when they resisted logging operations in their home territories of the Baram, Limbang, Tutoh and Lawas regions of Sarawak. The Penan’s struggle began in the 1960s when the Indonesian and Malaysian governments opened up large areas of Borneo’s interior to commercial logging. These massive loggings caused a large part of the forests in Sarawak to deteriorate. The Penan, being a nomadic tribe, struggles to stay put in a place since the loggers keep on roaming around the forests of their territory just to look for trees to cut down. The tribe is in constant battle against modernization and the roots of globalization. They lived as simply as they can yet the effects of human intervention to natural resources challenge them. In the documentary, the host lived with the tribe for some days. This method of ethnographic understanding is called the participant-observation. In this method, the social scientists monitor the behavior of a certain group of people with his/her own input. Sadly