Revisiting gender and forestry in Long Segar, East Kalimantan, Indonesia: oil palm and divided aspirations

Dramatic and devastating changes in East Kalimantan's forest landscape over recent decades reflect the impact of intensified resource extraction through timber concessions, transmigration settlement and the expansion of agri-business, including oil palm. This chapter revisits a Dayak community that was subject to extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the 1980s to examine the gendered impacts of oil palm expansion. Findings show that whilst some aspects of gender norms remain resilient (e.g. women's responsibility for rice cultivation), oil palm has opened up substantial differences between those able to capitalize on the oil palm boom, and those for whom oil palm constitutes a signficant threat. Changes associated with oil palm in Long Segar reflect the interplay between resource histories, gender, class, generation and ethnicity, opening up divisions in a once relatively egalitarian forest-based community.