The Jungle, the Nation and the Market, an Indonesian Chronicle

In Indonesia, like in many countries of the world, announcing bad tidings is a difficult art, an art that the natives do at their own risk, under the watchful eye of a suspicious army. The traveller from the West in his ignorance has often come to his own preconceived conclusions.
Frédéric Durand has let himself be drawn into the Indonesian experience more deeply than into the stereotype of a developing country and its exotic nature. He presents us with an account that is not only varied but astonishing and tense.
The Jungle, the Nation and the Market, is rather like Cassandra in the role of a geographer who understands, from island to island, that the jungle of the Indonesian archipelago, the object of his research, is nothing more than a memory. Most of it has either gone up in smoke or been sawn up into planks.
But just condemning the death of the forest would be forgetting the Indonesians. The pride and the best part of a whole country must be acknowledged while at the same time recounting the worst, the cursed part of a society launched into chaotic development: a chaos of contradiction that has today become a political and ecological state of emergency.

 

German translation sample available.