Retno Handini
Abstrak :
As an ethnic group that lives in the interior part of the Jambi Province, Suku Anak Dalam is inseparable with tropical rainforest. The rainforest is their most essential environment. Therefore, changes in the rainforest have a significant impact on the people's lifestyle Among the lifestyles that represents their dependence to nature is their pattern of subsistence, which is foraging, a combination of hunting and gathering activities that they do in nomadic fashion tracking the food sources provided by nature. That is the reason that the Suku Anak Dalam is also known as foragers, meaning people who roams in search of food.
The topic of this thesis is the foraging lifestyle, which has become very difficult to maintain due to environmental changes. The quantity and quality of the rainforest are declining as the result of the opening of plantations, transmigration areas, illegal logging, road construction, etc. The impact is immediately felt: the food sources of the Suku Anak Dalam are drastically decreasing.
The research method used in this thesis is participant observation, which is implemented in the field by conducting a descriptive technique with the inductive type of reasoning. The optimal foraging analysis by Winterhalder (1981) and Schoener (1971), which emphasizes on four aspects that should go in concert to acquire optimal results, were applied directly to the foraging of the Suku Anak Dalam. The four aspects are the food extent, foraging space foraging period, and group size.
The application of optimal foraging analysis among the Anak Dalam foragers reveals that wild boar and deer are their favorite menu because those kinds of animals are easy to find, have plenty of meat, and delicious. On the other hand, a tuber plant called bazaar (Diascrorea sp.) is also a favorite. Analysis shows that foraging lifestyle mainly depends not on animal hunting but on plant gathering activities. Protein is the supplement of carbohydrate, and the food sources can be found around the habitation camps. The foraging space is in proportion with the condition of the surrounding rainforest: the more infertile/barren a foraging area, the scarcer the food sources; as a consequence, the wider is the roaming area and the higher is the foraging intensity. In the case of the Anak Dalam foragers, the foraging space covers 2 - 6 hour walk or within a radius of 2 - 29 km from their habitation camp.
The Suku Anak Dalam people generally practice foraging for 20 - 30 hours per week, or + 6 hours per day. During the foraging period, 30 % are allocated for hunting and 70 % are for gathering activities. The ideal size for a group of foragers is 20 - 25 people, which includes at least 3 - 4 adult males as hunters. Gathering activities, on the other hand, can be done by any number of people, be it an individual, a small group, or a large group. If a foraging group becomes too large, some of its members will leave the group and form a new group.
Environmental changes have made each Anak Dalam foraging group to employ its own adaptation strategy. As a result, based on their subsistence, there are three types of Anak Dalam groups: foragers, semi-foragers, and crop growing groups. Aside from environmental changes, there are also internal and external factors that changed the lifestyle of the Anak Dalam people. Among the internal factors is their desire to move into what they thought to be a better lifestyle, while one of the external factors is government policy. This thesis will focus on the- causal relationship between environmental changes and foraging activities among the people of Suku Anak Dalam. Various aspects of their daily life will also be described in this thesis, which will include their nomadic tradition, social organization, life cycles, genealogical system, religion system, political and governmental system, and technological system.
Depok: Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik Universitas Indonesia, 2004
T14081
UI - Tesis Membership Universitas Indonesia Library
