"In the late 1980s the Penan or Sarawak, East Malaysia, became an environmentalist cause celebre for a campaign of protests, blockading logging roads in an attempt to preserve the rainforest areas in which they lived. The explanation of this eruption of protest became a focus of political dispute. Penan histories shows how this dispute was centred on the construction of different actors as the subjects of the protests - Should the protests be written off as the work of meddling environmentalists? Or do the Penan have something of their own to say? - and examines how any narrator of social events must make such assertions and be responsible for the political consequences thereof. Against this background, Penan histories sets out to re-narrate the recent past of a Penan village."--BOOK JACKET.