Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how changing environmental conditions and practices connect with shifting social values and valuations of sociality in a Ngaju Dayak village in the swamplands of southern Borneo.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how changing environmental conditions and practices connect with shifting social values and valuations of sociality in a Ngaju Dayak village in the swamplands of southern Borneo. It proposes that the production of values and social relations is indivisible from the production of a livelihood through material means in the local environment. The paper focuses on how different forms of livelihood and organizing labour in the radically transformed local swamp forest environment have influenced and been influenced by two central, dialectically conjoined Ngaju values: relatedness and autonomy. These elementary social values have remained important over time although their meanings and people's orientations to social relations have shifted. The paper describes how changing Kahayan Ngaju orientation to social life and the natural landscape have been interlinked with fluctuations in the local valuescape. It argues that the valuation of social relations crucially reflects the valuation of land and nature, and changing trajectories of human and more-than-human interaction within the local peat landscape.