![]() ![]() Thinking about hornbills-in-peril is an opportunity to understand the different modes of responses or understandings, particularly from various Indigenous and local communities’ responses to acts of conservation or development. That in turn is a cipher for the different ways of engaging or responding to what more-than-humans face in a time of environmental crisis. The complexity of Indigeneity in Borneo and the rest of Malaysia, and hornbills-in-peril, compels me to think about how different epistemic communities or logics would react or interpret the peril as such. My father’s people, the Bidayuh, is another collective term within the Dayak grouping itself, to describe Indigenous minority groups located in southern Sarawak and northern West Kalimantan, who are linguistically diverse from each other, and that are culturally distinct from the more politically dominant native groups. The Dayak are recognised as (mostly) non-Muslim native peoples of Borneo but is not the conclusive umbrella term for Indigenous peoples of Borneo. To understand hornbills as often described by species or by their local names as named by the Indigenous peoples, I first acknowledge the several demonyms to describe native peoples of Borneo. Hornbills also play an important cultural role in Dayak culture in shaping the landscape and through bird augury. The hornbill, alongside the similarly charismatic orang utan, is very much part of the state conservation psyche where the striking rhinoceros hornbill ( Buceros rhinoceros) is the state’s emblem. My home state of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo is known as the “Land of Hornbills” where eight out of 54 hornbills species of the world reside.
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