Locations and representations: Writing in the political present in Sarawak, East Malaysia

Since 1987, the Malaysian state of Sarawak has been the focus of a broad‐based transnational environmental campaign concerned with large‐scale mechanized logging and the dispossession of indigenous communities. In the present discussion I examine a series of concerns relating to my efforts to write a history of the Sarawak campaign. I do so as a way of elucidating the argument that taking seriously the multi‐sitedness of such research projects, particularly those that focus on subaltern social movements, demands that anthropologists and other scholars engaged in the study of such movements rethink the implications of their ethnographic presence and their efforts at representation. This in turn might have a transformative effect on their thinking about the possibility of alternative forms of ethnographic practice.

Key words:

• Social movements
• Multi‐sited ethnography
• Environmental politics
• Sarawak (Malaysia)
• Penan