This dilemma allows for the idea of countermounment (as a provocative proposal) to create a dynamic relationship between the state and society. In this case, it allows the Penan community to exercise political authority in requesting a substantial amount of public land as long as they can argue in the functional system (legal system). Here, they should transform representation into event (Jeffrey C. Alexander 2012), memory into history (Pierre Nora 1989), oral culture into written culture, and presence culture into meaning culture (Gumbrecht 2004). In this regard, they have something to argue for the claim of self-determination. It would make them easier to define its territory through this transformation since they have faced the disappearance of stable ground for many decades.
Penan’s Cultural Trauma
The community map has provided a counter-narrative, and displays a historical continuity for the Penan community, whereas the PPP is the location for the politics of space in asserting the Penan’s historical discontinuity by facing deforestation. If we take time and space as a carrier of meaning, therefore the Penan community beautifully reflects the dimension of time and space via the map and the park. This is a way for the Penan community to recuperate from the cultural trauma of deforestation. Imaginatively, they have taken deforestation to another level; by doing an active remembering. In other words, they simply refuse to forget.
Ingatan 