Paper short abstract:

When an anthropology student and his informants resurrect a script idea from a Hollywood Film Studio, what ethnographic insight is learnt about deforestation in Sarawak, Malaysia? Exploring fiction filmmaking as a method and modality in ecological enquiries.

Paper long abstract:

At the height of deforestation in Sarawak during the 1980s and 90s, environmentalists campaigning against logging employed a rhetoric highlighting the extensive nature of medicinal plants, as an untapped resource of the forest. This global campaign, regarded as the birthplace of the modern environmental movement, highlighted the Penan's extensive knowledge of medicine plants in an attempt to capture the collective imaginations of the global consumers of tropical hardwood products.

Universal Studios were developing an Ecohorror film, where the Penan's medicinal-plant knowledge saves the world from the threat of a deadly virus outbreak. The script was never finished, the film never made, and the deforestation continued. It was however, during fieldwork between 2015 - 2017, when traces of the script were uncovered, that this enquiry resurrected the story in contemporary context - post deforestation.

In this paper I explore fiction filmmaking as an ethnographic method, through experimentation with re-enactment and polyphonic narratives. With a reflexive practise, the relationship between anthropologist, informant and the camera explicitly grounds the practise-led-nature of enquiry. Narrative and linear structures are interrogated for their de-commodifying properties, posed here as a method to enter field sites of extensive environmental exploitation.

Climate Fiction, made popular in literary and filmic practise, has developed as a genre exploring the 'contingency of futures'. Appropriated from the abstract data of climate-change, with narrative elements of story, the often dystopic fictions explore material realities, with imagined possibilities. This enquiry re-contextualises our 'climate fictions' into the empirical 'now' through Penan informants scrutinising the global stakeholders representations their lives their forest.

A response.