Performance Knowledge: uncovering the dynamics of biocultural diversity of Borneo’s tropical forests through a Penan hunting technique

This chapter illustrates a kind of local ecological knowledge, which I call performance knowledge, that develops and is applied in the course of resource use activities, in part, to deal with contingency and the dynamics of biocultural diversity. Performance knowledge emerges and evolves through the practice of subsistence activities, and is procedural in form and strategic in function, allowing a practitioner to “manage” people, wildlife, tools, materials, and various contexts of a particular activity and to respond to change in these components and contexts in the course of that activity. To illustrate performance knowledge, I describe a hunting technique known as nedok, performed today only by a very few expert hunters of the Penan Benalui people of Indonesian Borneo.