Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture

This book series is an initiative in conjunction with Springer under the auspices of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam—Institute of Asian Studies (http://ias.ubd.edu. bn/). It addresses the interplay of local, national, regional and global influences in Southeast, South and East Asia and the processes of translation and exchange across boundaries and borders. The series explores a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13611

[Title Page]

Victor T. King • Zawawi Ibrahim
Noor Hasharina Hassan
Editors

Borneo Studies in History,
Society and Culture

v-t-victor-t-king-zawawi-ibrahim-noor-hasharina-ha-2.jpg

[Copyright]

Editors

Victor T. King
Institute of Asian Studies
Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Bandar Seri Begawan Brunei Darussalam

Zawawi Ibrahim
Institute of Asian Studies
Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Bandar Seri Begawan
Brunei Darussalam

Noor Hasharina Hassan
Institute of Asian Studies
University Brunei Darussalam
Bandar Seri Begawan
Brunei Darussalam

ISSN 2364–8252
ISSN 2364–8260 (electronic)

Asia in Transition

ISBN 978-981-10-0671-5
ISBN 978-981-10-0672-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933201

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Preface and Acknowledgements

This volume has had a rather long chequered history. As is often the case a project emerges from chance meetings and happy coincidental circumstances. After delivering an overview paper on the theme of ‘Culture and Identity: Some Borneo Comparisons’ at the Biennial International Conference of the Borneo Research Council, held at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) during 25–27 June 2012, Victor King happened to be speaking with Poline Bala about the progress and development of anthropological studies in Borneo. It was really at her suggestion that we then began to think about providing a more comprehensive overview of Borneo Studies, and it was from this initiative that the current volume emerged. The co-editors, Zawawi Ibrahim and Noor Hasharina Hassan, enthusiastically embraced this project.

When Victor King was actively engaged in teaching and research at the Institute of Asian Studies, UBD from August 2012, and working closely with Zawawi Ibrahim, the opportunity presented itself and the decision was taken to organise, host and fund a workshop on Borneo Studies. This duly took place during 30 November-1 December 2012 at UBD when we brought several leading local scholars together in order that we could consider where we might take this proposal.

What was clear, however, was the following:

We had to try to widen the agenda beyond anthropology (though this remains a vitally important focus) to examine the contribution of the social sciences more generally to our understanding of Borneo societies and cultures and their transformations since the Second World War (which should also include the multidisciplinary fields of development studies, environmental studies, social policy studies, cultural studies and gender studies).
We should try to address a range of conceptual issues as well as more substantive problem areas in that, though Borneo Studies has quite understandably been preoccupied with ‘real world’ issues of modernisation and development and with the application of social science knowledge to practical and everyday problems and processes, there have been some significant contributions to concepts and theory as well.
We should attempt to locate Borneo Studies within the wider studies of Malaysia and Indonesia and within the context of Southeast Asian Studies; widening the frame of reference also applies to the only fully national territory in Borneo, Brunei Darussalam.
We should endeavour to locate Borneo Studies within disciplinary contexts and examine the contribution of the study of Borneo societies, cultures and transformations to the development of the social science disciplines more generally.
And, in contemplating the ‘state of the art’ in Borneo Studies we should be prepared to look to the future, and try to determine where we go from here. What are the urgent matters which we need to address that have not received the attention they deserve? What subjects have we been concerned with already but which need further elaboration and research? What is the scope for disciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration? What is the scope for collaboration between some of the participants in this workshop?

We then invited the participants of the workshop to prepare their papers for publication and we contacted several other active researchers on Borneo to add to the range of issues and topics on what we wanted to cover and present. We do not claim that this is a comprehensive treatment of research on Borneo undertaken since the late 1940s when what we might term modern social science, based on primary field research, emerged in Borneo. Sadly we are still underrepresented in Kalimantan, and, as has always been the case, the field continues to be dominated by social science in Sarawak. We have managed, however, to secure some contributions from our Indonesian colleagues and to ensure that some of the major developments in the largest part of the island have been covered. As the workshop was organised in Brunei we have also been able to include recent research contributions from colleagues at the university there, and we have been fortunate in securing contributions from scholars in Sabah. Nevertheless, we recognise that this is only a modest beginning in the attempt to capture some of the major scholarly post-war developments in Borneo Studies, and much more needs to be done and continuing glaring gaps need to be filled.

The rather extended delay between the initial planning for this volume and its publication requires some explanation. After Victor King’s temporary departure from Brunei in December 2012, though with a brief 10-week revisit in mid-2013, the project stalled due to the pressure of other research and publication commitments. It was re-energised in 2014 when Zawawi Ibrahim, as the local coordinator at UBD, and Victor King, with the assistance of Noor Hasharina Hassan, contacted those contributors who had committed to the publication and then approached other potential contributors to at least begin to fill some of the gaps in coverage. Much of 2014 and 2015 have been preoccupied with bringing together and editing the volume.

The project might not have materialised had it not been for the support of colleagues in Universiti Brunei Darussalam’s Institute of Asian Studies. We wish to acknowledge the financial support provided by the institute to enable the initial workshop to take place, and the copy-editing and indexing to be undertaken, a substantial task given the size of the volume. Had it not been for the enthusiasm and encouragement of the then Director of the Institute, Prof. Tong Chee Kiong, for arguing for the importance of developing a Borneo Studies agenda within the university and securing funding for it, this project would not have been completed successfully. We owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. Sincere thanks are also due to Dr Yabit Alas at UBD for developing the network of Borneo institutions and for providing a framework for the inclusion of our contributors from Kalimantan. Our heartfelt thanks also go to Gareth Richards of Impress Creative and Editorial, Penang, who, in many respects has been our fourth co-editor. His professionalism, good humour, patience and sheer determination to see the project to a conclusion, and his meticulous copy-editing, ably assisted by Julia Tan and Siti Aishah Kamarudin, have ensured that what started as an interesting concept has turned into a publication which we hope will set an agenda for Borneo Studies in the next decade.

Brunei Darussalam
March 2016

Victor T. King
Zawawi Ibrahim
Noor Hasharina Hassan

Abbreviations and Acronyms

AMA-JK	Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Jalai dan Kendawangan (Jalai Kendawangan Alliance of Indigenous Peoples)
AMA-Kalbar	Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Kalimantan Barat (West Kalimantan Alliance of Indigenous Peoples)
AMAN	Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archiplago)
AMBD	Autoriti Monetari Brunei Darussalam (Monetary Authority of Brunei Darussalam)
ANPRI	Aliansi untuk Perdamaian dan Rekonsiliasi (Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation)
ASEAN	Association of Southeast Asian Nations
BATAMAD	Barisan Pertahanan Masyarakat Adat Dayak (Dayak Customary Defence Guard)
BEM	Borneo Evangelical Mission
Berjaya	Parti Bersatu Rakyat Jelata (Sabah People’s United Front)
Bernama	Pertubuhan Berita Nasional Malaysia
BHEP	Bakun Hydroelectric Project
BKCUK	Badan Koordinasi Credit Union Kalimantan (Kalimantan Credit Union Coordinating Board)
BKSNT	Balai Kajian Sejarah dan Nilai Traditsonal (Centre for Studies of History and Tradition)
BMT	Baitul Maal wa Tamwil
BRC	Borneo Research Council
CDD	Curriculum Development Department
CIFOR	Center for International Forestry Research
CoERI	Centre of Excellence for Rural Informatics
CSSRC	Colonial Social Science Research Council
CUSO	Canadian University Service Overseas
DAD	Dewan Adat Dayak (Dayak Traditional Council)
DBP	Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka
EVR	Ethnolinguistic vitality rating
FID	Financial Institutions Division
FPI	Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders Front)
GAD	Gender and development
GMTPS	Gerakan Mandau Telawang Pancasila (Pancasila Dagger and Shield Movement)
GPD	Gerakan Pemuda Dayak (Dayak Youth Movement)
GPPK	Gerakan Pemberdayaan Pancur Kasih (Pancur Kasih Empowerment Movement)
IAIN	Pontianak Institut Agama Islam Negeri (Pontianak State Institute of Islamic Studies)
IAS	Institute of Asian Studies
ICT	Information and communication technology
ICTM	International Council for Traditional Music
IDRD	Institute of Dayakology Research and Development
IDS	Institute for Development Studies, Sabah
INDEP	Institute for Indigenous Economic Progress
INGI	International NGO Forum on Indonesia
ISAI	Institut Studi Arus Informasi (Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information)
Jatam	Jaringan Advokasi Tambang (Mining Advocacy Network)
JKKK	Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Keselamatan Kampung (village development and security committee)
JMM	Jasa Menenun Mandiri
JTB	Jabatan Telekom Brunei
Kalteng	Kalimantan Tengah (Central Kalimantan)
KCA	Kadazan Cultural Association
KDCA	Kadazan Dusun Cultural Association
KKN	korupsi, kulusi dan nepotisme (corruption, collusion and nepotism)
KLF	Kadazandusun Language Foundation
KPA	Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria (Consortium of Agrarian Reform)
LBBPJ	Lembaga Bina Benua Puti Jaji
LBBT	Lembaga Bela Banua Talino (Institute for Community Legal Resources Empowerment)
LCDA	Land Consolidation Development Authority
LGBT	Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
LP2M	Lembaga Penelitian dan Pengabdian pada Masyarakat (Centre for Research and Community Service)
LP3S	Lembaga Pelatihan dan Penunjang Pembangunan Sosial (Institute for Training and Supporting Social Development)
LSE	London School of Economics and Political Science
MABM	Majelis Adat Budaya Melayu (Malay Custom and Cultural Council)
MABT	Majelis Adat Budaya Tionghoa (Chinese Custom and Cultural Council)
MAD	Majelis Adat Dayak (Dayak Traditional Council)
MADN	Majelis Adat Dayak Nasional (National Dayak Traditional Council)
MIKA	Percetakan Mitra Kasih (Mitra Kasih Printing House)
MiSEM	Mitra Sekolah Masyarakat (Public Schools Partners)
MTs	Madrasah Tsanawiyah (Islamic junior high school)
NGO	Non-governmental organisation
OT1	Oral Tradition 1 project
PAR	Participatory action research
PASEA	Performing Arts of Southeast Asia
PBS	Parti Bersatu Sabah
PCN	Personal credit line
PDI-P	Partai Demokrasi Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Struggle Party)
PEK	Program Pengembangan Ekonomi Kerakyatan (People’s Economic Development Programme)
PRCF	People, Resources and Conservation Foundation
PTUN	Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara (State Administrative Court)
RRI	Radio Republik Indonesia (Republic of Indonesia Radio)
RTB	Radio Television Brunei
SDN	sekolah dasar negeri (state elementary school)
SEASREP	Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program
SEDIA	Sabah Economic Development and Investment Authority
SMP	sekolah menengah pertama (junior secondary school)
SMTE	Small-medium tourism enterprises
TAP	Tabung Amanah Pekerja (Employees’ Trust Fund)
Tidayu	Tionghoa, Dayak and Melayu
UBD	Universiti Brunei Darussalam
UMS	Universiti Malaysia Sabah
UNESCO	United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
UNIMAS	Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
UNTAN	Universitas Tanjungpura
USNO	United Sabah National Organisation
VoIP	Voice over internet protocol
WALHI	Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (Indonesian Forum for the Environment)
WID	Women in development
WWF	World Wildlife Fund for Nature
YKSPK	Yayasan Karya Sosial Pancur Kasih (Pancur Kasih Social Work Foundation)

1. Introductory Remarks

Victor T. King, Zawawi Ibrahim and Noor Hasharina Hassan

Part I: Borneo-Wide Perspectives

2. Some Preliminary Thoughts on Early Anthropology in Borneo

Victor T. King

3. Towards a Critical Alternative Scholarship on the Discourse of Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak

Zawawi Ibrahim

4. Material Culture Studies and Ethnocultural Identity

Bernard Sellato

5. Borneo and Beyond: Reflections on Borneo Studies, Anthropology and the Social Sciences

Victor T. King

6. Devolved, Diverse, Distinct? Hunter-Gatherer Research in Borneo

Lars Kaskija

7. Issues and Trends in Media and Communications in Borneo over the Past 30 Years

Fausto Barlocco

8. Identities in Borneo: Constructions and Transformations

Victor T. King

Part II: State-Specific Perspectives

9. The Real and the Ideal: Towards Culturally Appropriate and Collaborative Heritage Practice in Kalimantan

Christina Kreps

10. An Overview of Cultural Research in Sabah

Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan

11. Whither Gender Studies in Sarawak?

Hew Cheng Sim

12. The Rise of Dayak Identities in Central Kalimantan

Kumpiady Widen

13. An Overview of Anthropological and Sociological Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

Poline Bala

14. Borneo Research in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam

Gary M. Jones

15. Institut Dayakologi: The Challenges of an Information and Advocacy Centre of Dayak Culture in Kalimantan

John Bamba

Part III Case Studies

16. Kenyah-Badeng Displacement: Bakun Hydroelectric Project Resettlement

Welyne Jeffrey Jehom

17. Community, River and Basin: Watersheds in Northern Sarawak as a Social Linkage

Jayl Langub and Noboru Ishikawa

18. From Inclusion to Social Exclusion in Resource Stewardship among Members of Migrant Bilik Families in Pantu, Sri Aman

Dimbab Ngidang

19. Stones and Power in the Kelapang: Indigeneity and Kelabit and Ngurek Narratives

Valerie Mashman

20. Social Change and the Contributions of the Tionghoa, Dayak and Melayu (Tidayu) in West Kalimantan

Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo

21. ‘Wild Borneo’: A Study of Visitor Perception and Experience of Nature Tourism in Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

Rosalie Corpuz

22. Challenges in Indigenous Language Education: The Brunei Experience

Noor Azam Haji-Othman

23. Everyday Finance and Consumption in Brunei Darussalam

Noor Hasharina Hassan

24. The Relevance of Contextual Components in the Religious Conversion Process: The Case of Dusun Muslims in Brunei Darussalam

Asiyah az-Zahra Ahmad Kumpoh

25. Borneo Studies: Perspectives from a Jobbing Social Scientist

Victor T. King

Glossary of Non-English Terms

Index

List of Figures

Figure 10.1 Kadazan Dusun bobolian or priestesses chanting rinait during a moginakan celebration in Kampung Sun- suron, Tambunan (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 1987) 236

Figure 10.2 Paluan Murut women (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 2010)................. 237

Figure 10.3 A Makiang woman from the upper Kinabatangan area playing a gabang (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 1989) ............... 238

Figure 10.4 Rungus bobolizan or priestesses (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 2010) 242

Figure 10.5 A lahat or village of the now semi-nomadic Sama

Dilaut near Mabul Island, off Semporna, Sabah (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 1999) 243

Figure 10.6 Constructing the Bonggi house (from Bangi Island) in the grounds of the Sabah Museum complex under the Traditional Houses Project (now Living Heritage

Village) of Sabah Museum (Photograph

Pugh-Kitingan 1989) ........................................................................ 245

Figure 10.7 An Iranun woman playing kulintangan at Kg Merabau,

Kota Belud (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 1998) ............................... 248

Figure 10.8 The late Odun Rinduman, tantagas lawid (high

priestess) of the Lotud Dusun, chanting rinait (long

ritual poetry) during the Mamahui Pogun (Cleansing

the Universe) ritual series in 2003 (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 2003) 250

Figure 10.9 Interviewing village headmen at Kampung Karanaan, Tambunan, in the Ethnographic and Cultural Mapping project (Photograph Pugh-Kitingan 2008) ......... 251

Figure 16.1 The stages of displacement ................................................................... 347

Figure 17.1 Watersheds and Penan migration routes in northern

Sarawak ............................................................................................ 367

Figure 17.2 Genealogy of Julaihi Keti ................................................................. 377

Figure 17.3 Genealogy of Awang Robert bin Awang Osman .............................. 382

Figure 18.1 Genealogy of Penghulu Linang’s bilik families .................................... 393

Figure 19.1 Long Peluan ...................................................................................... 410

Figure 19.2 Map of Long Peluan ......................................................................... 411

Figure 19.3 Ngurek Penghulu Lenjau Kuleh from Sarawak visiting

Ngurek grave at Long Bera, Kalimantan .......................................... 418

Figure 19.4 Dolmen grave near Long Puak. Source de Clayre (2010: 285)......... 419

Figure 19.5 Stone mound (perupun) at Long Senibong ....................................... 420

Figure 19.6 Tama Gerawat uncovering a slab grave at Long Belilin ................... 421

Figure 21.1 First impressions of Borneo............................................................. 450

Figure 21.2 Expectations of Borneo...................................................................... 451

Figure 22.1 Map of Tutong language areas. Source Nothofer (1991) ...................... 468

List of Tables

Figure 15.1 Plant diversity in Menjalin and Jelai Hulu, West Kalimantan ........... 323

Figure 15.2 Oral tradition documentation data, 1991–2007 .................................. 328

Figure 15.3 Documentation data, 1991–2007......................................................... 328

Figure 15.4 Community radio station facilitation ................................................. 331

Figure 15.5 Institut Dayakologi’s documentation and publication output ............. 333

Figure 16.1 Seasonal vegetables in Uma Badeng, Sungai Asap ....................... 356

Figure 16.2 Cost of transportation to market ......................................................... 356

Figure 17.1 Generations of Penan Suai leaders ..................................................... 368

Figure 17.2 Northern Sarawak watershed connecting points and ethnic groups ... 370

Figure 17.3 Marriage profiles of Rumah Julaihi, Penan Saoh, Jelalong and Bintulu 376

Figure 23.1 Consumer indebtedness ..................................................................... 484

Figure 23.2 Popular forms of borrowing ............................................................... 485

List of Boxes

Box 22.1 Short Tutong text ..................................................................................... 470

Box 22.2 Long Tutong text ...................................................................................... 471

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Victor T. King is emeritus professor at the University of Leeds, professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, visiting professor at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, formerly eminent visiting professor at Universiti Brunei Darussalam and currently distinguished visiting fellow at the UBD Institute of Asian Studies. He has long-standing research interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. His recent publications include The historical reconstruction of Southeast Asian studies: Korea and beyond (edited with Park Seung Woo, 2013), Rethinking Asian tourism: culture, encounters and local response (edited with Ploysri Porananond, 2014), and an edited book UNESCO in Southeast Asia: world heritage sites in comparative perspective (2015).

Zawawi Ibrahim is a professor at the Institute of Asian Studies and coordinator of the Sociology and Anthropology Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He conducts research on the rural Malay peasantry and labour, indigenous society, popular culture, the new media, multiculturalism and postmodernist storytelling. Among his publications as author and editor are The Malay labourer: by the window of capitalism (1998), Voices from the Crocker Range indigenous communities, Sabah (2001), Blogging and democrati- sation in Malaysia: a new civil society in the making (with Jun-E Tan, 2008), Representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak (2008), Social science and knowledge in a globalising world (2012) and Masyarakat Penan dan impian pembangunan: satu himpunan naratif keterpeminggiran dan jatidiri (Penan society and their imagined development: narratives of marginalisation and identity) (with Noorshah M.S., 2012).

Noor Hasharina Hassan is a lecturer in economic and social geography at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She participated in the Scholar Exchange Programme at the

East-West Center, Honolulu, USA in 2014 and at King’s College London in 2015. She has conducted research on issues of consumption and housing and has presented research papers at several international conferences.

Contributors

Asiyah az-Zahra Ahmad Kumpoh is a lecturer in the Historical and International Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She teaches Bruneian diplomatic and political history, post-war urbanisation in Southeast Asia, and the evolution of philosophy and theories in historical studies. Her current research interests focus on the intersecting historical evolutions of religion, ethnicity, identity and culture in Brunei and Southeast Asia. Her most recent publication is ‘Understanding religious conversion of the Dusun Muslim converts in Brunei Darussalam: critical engagement of the Rambo model’, in Graffiti, converts and vigilantes: Islam outside the mainstream in maritime Southeast Asia (2015).

Poline Bala is an associate professor and head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, where she is also the deputy director of the Centre of Excellence in Rural Informatics. Her areas of research include the impacts of political boundaries on the formation of cultural, political and economic units in the border regions of Borneo and the role of information communication technologies on development activities in rural Malaysia. Her publications include ‘Changing borders and identities in the Kelabit Highlands’ (2002), ‘Re-thinking methodology through e-Bario project: from participatory methods to a relational approach to information communication technologies for rural development’ (2011), ‘Redeploying technologies: ICT for greater agency and capacity for political engagement in the Kelabit Highlands’ (2014) and ‘Being Christians in Muslim-majority Malaysia: the Kelabit and the Lun Bawang experiences in Sarawak’.

John Bamba co-founded Institut Dayakologi, Pontianak in 1991 and was its executive director from 1999 to 2014. He is now the leader of Gerakan Pemberdayaan Pancur Kasih (Pancur Kasih Empowerment Movement), a consortium of 10 organisations and five credit unions working for the empowerment of local communities. He has been working on Dayak cultural revitalisation and the empowerment of indigenous rights since the early 1980s and has written extensively on Dayak culture and their problems and challenges in Kalimantan. His latest books are Dayak Jalai di persimpangan jalan (Dayak Jalai at the crossroads, 2010) and Credit union gerakan konsepsi filosofi petani (Concept of the credit union movement based on the farmers’ philosophy, 2015).

Fausto Barlocco is a fellow at the University of Florence, Italy, associated with the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, where he follows a set of research projects on cardiac disease and sudden death. He previously worked in the field of special needs education in London, undertook a development consultancy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and has taught and been programme leader for the social sciences at Nottingham Trent International College. His research interests range across the fields of media, political and medical anthropology, and centre on issues of identity, ethnicity, nationalism, lived experience, and life and illness narratives. He is the author of the Identity and the state in Malaysia (2014), based on his doctoral research in Sabah, Malaysia.

Rosalie Corpuz is a freelance consultant based in Sabah, Malaysia. Following a career as a research analyst in London, she set up a social research consultancy in Sabah providing solutions to key decision-makers and environmental conservation managers in government departments, international non-governmental organisations and private companies.

Hew Cheng Sim is a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. Her research interests include gender and development, urbanisation, marriage, family and work with a focus on Sarawak. She has published widely in international journals. Her authored books include Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak (2003) and Tra Zehnder: Iban woman patriot of Sarawak (with Rokiah Talib, 2011), while she is the editor of Village mothers, city daughters: women experiencing urbanization in Sarawak (2007) and For better or worse: marriage and family in Sarawak (2015).

Noboru Ishikawa is a professor of anthropology at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He has conducted fieldwork in Sarawak and West Kalimantan over the past two decades, exploring the construction of national space in the borderland, highland-lowland relations, commodification of natural resource and labour, and the relationship between nature and non-nature. His publications include Between frontiers: nation and identity in a Southeast Asian borderland (2010), and the edited volumes Transborder governance of forests, rivers and seas (2010) and Flows and movements in Southeast Asia: new approaches to transnationalism (2011). His forthcoming edited book Anthropogenic tropical forests: resilience of post-development nature and society examines a high biomass society in northern Sarawak.

Welyne Jeffrey Jehom is a senior lecturer in the Gender Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. A practising applied anthropologist, she identifies as an academic activist who does research on indigenous peoples and issues of poverty. Her current research is on natural dyes and the weaving industry among the Iban, engaging in issues of management and the development of indigenous tacit knowledge as an important livelihood tool. Her most recent publications include ‘Reconstruction of post-resettlement gender relations: the Kenyah-Badeng of Sungai Asap, Sarawak, Malaysia’ (2013), ‘Lily Eberwein: her life and involvement in the anti-cession movement in Sarawak’ (2013) and ‘Governance on compensation: Bakun dam in Sarawak, Malaysia’ (2014).

Gary M. Jones is a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and is currently the director of the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He previously worked in Britain, Germany, Sri Lanka and Abu Dhabi. His research interests include bilingualism, bilingual education and language planning. He is currently working on bilingualism in small states and on various projects linked to the Borneo Studies Network at the IAS. His recent publications include ‘Bilingual and multilingual education in Brunei and Malaysia: policies and practices’ (2015) and ‘Maintaining and revitalising the indigenous endangered languages of Borneo: comparing “top-down” and community-based policy initiatives and strategies’ (with James McLellan, 2015).

Lars Kaskija conducted extensive fieldwork from 1990 to 2001 among the Punan of the Malinau and Tubu Rivers in North Kalimantan, and also worked in Central Kalimantan. His research interests include hunter-gatherer economics and ecologies, and environmental conservation and culture. He is the author of The Punan of Borneo: cultural fluidity and persistency in a forest people (1998), Claiming the forest: Punan local histories and recent developments in Bulungan, East Kalimantan (2002) and Images of a forest people:Punan Malinau—identity, sociality, and encapsulation in Borneo (2012).

Christina Kreps is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted research on museums and participated in museum development and heritage training programmes in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand in addition to the United States and Europe. She was associate professor of anthropology, director of Museum and Heritage Studies and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Denver, USA from 1998 to 2015. She is currently the director of Museum Studies in the Arts and Administration Program in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon. She is co-editor of the series Museum Meanings (Routledge). Some of her publications include Liberating culture: cross-cultural perspectives on museums, curation, and heritage preservation (2003) and Intangible threads: curating the living heritage of Dayak ikat weaving (2012).

Jayl Langub is a retired civil servant, and was engaged as a senior research fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak from 2004 to 2014. Since the mid-1970s he has published numerous papers on the Penan and Orang Ulu, including entries in The encyclopedia of Malaysia. He has also written on adat, human rights issues among Sarawak’s minority groups and social change, and compiled Suket: Penan folk stories (2001). He is currently one of the trustees of World Wide Fund for Nature-Malaysia.

Valerie Mashman is currently pursuing her PhD entitled ‘A history of our people: the end of warfare, the coming of government and Christianity at the borders of the Kelabit highlands’ at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. She is also a visitor at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University (2014–2016) and research associate with the Australian Research Council-funded project ‘Beyond Allied histories: Dayak memories of Word War II in Borneo’.

Recent publications include ‘The Bidayuh of Sarawak: gender, spirituality and swiddens’ (with Patricia Nayoi, 2015) ‘Songs from Long Peluan’ (2014) and ‘Northwestern Borneo’ (2012), as well as articles in the Sarawak Museum Journal and Borneo Research Bulletin on basketry and material culture. She co-edited Sarawak cultural legacy (with Lucas Chin, 1991). She is a member of the Borneo Research Council.

Dimbab Ngidang is professor of development studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, where he was also dean (2001–2003), and served as the Chair of Dayak Studies in the Institute of East Asian Studies (2004–2006). His areas of research include land development, rural-urban migration and contract farming. He is currently undertaking a study on informal native customary land markets and the expansion of oil palm among smallholders in Sarawak. He is also actively engaged in community service as a member of the panel of advisers to the Dayak Chamber of Commerce and Industry and as a board member of the Tun Jugah Foundation.

Noor Azam Haji-Othman is the director of the Centre for Advanced Research, Universiti Brunei Darussalam and is also an associate professor in applied linguistics, teaching on the English Language and Linguistics and Communication and Media Studies Programmes. His main research interests include the interactions between the indigenous languages of Brunei with Malay and English in relation to state policies on language, education and society. He is also interested in bilingualism and bilingual education, and teaching and learning strategies in multilingual classrooms.

Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan is professor of ethnomusicology, and holds the Kadazandusun Chair at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. Her original research was about the Huli, Papua New Guinea. She first came to Sabah in 1977 and has done research among many indigenous communities. Her publications include Selected papers on music in Sabah (2004), ‘An ethnomusicological discussion of bi te, the chanted tales of the Huli’ (2011) and ‘Balancing the human and spiritual worlds: ritual, music and dance among Dusunic Societies in Sabah’ (2014). She is a Borneo Research Council Fellow, a member of the International Council for Traditional Music’s Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia, serves on the Jawatankuasa Pakar Pendaftaran Warisan (Expert Committee on Heritage Registration) of the Department of National Heritage, Malaysia, and was an adjunct research fellow of anthropology, Monash University, Anthropology (2009–2010).

Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo is an assistant professor of religious and cross-cultural studies and vice rector at Pontianak State College for Islamic Studies, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. He has also worked for Save the Children International at the United Nations Office, New York, USA. His research interests include indigenous traditions and environment in western Borneo, particularly focusing on adat and its contribution to environmental management. His published books and articles include ‘Merajut perdamaian di Kalimantan Barat’ (2007), Riots on the News in West Borneo (2008), A little book for wisdom: between Pontianak and Oxford (2010) and ‘Indigenous community identity within Muslim societies in Indonesia: a study of Katab Kebahan Dayak in West Borneo’ (2011).

Bernard Sellato has been working in and on Borneo since 1973, first as a geologist and later as an anthropologist. He is now a senior researcher with Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Paris, France (Centre national de la recherche scientifique and École des hautes études en sciences sociales). He is a former director of the Institut de recherche sur le Sud-Est Asiatique, Université de Provence, Marseille, and for 10 years was the editor of the bilingual journal Moussons: social science research on Southeast Asia. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Hornbill and dragon: arts and culture of Borneo (1989/1992), Nomads of the Borneo rainforest (1994), Innermost Borneo: studies in Dayak cultures (2002), Beyond the green myth: Borneo’s hunter-gatherers in the twenty-first century (with Peter G. Sercombe, 2007) and Plaited arts from the Borneo rainforest (2012).

Kumpiady Widen is a senior lecturer in anthropology and dean at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Palangka Raya, Indonesia. He previously served as vice rector for academic affairs at the university (2007–2013). His research interests include the social, cultural and political dynamics of Central Kalimantan. He is the author of Dayak identity: impacts of globalisation (2002) and numerous book chapters and journal articles on the (re)construction of Dayak identity. He has been also a speaker on Dayak culture in local, national and international forums.

Chapter 1: Introductory Remarks

Victor T. King, Zawawi Ibrahim and Noor Hasharina Hassan

Keywords Chapter summaries • Borneo • Anthropology • Applied studies • Globalisation future

Victor T. King (✉)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

e-mail: V.T.King@leeds.ac.uk

Zawawi Ibrahim

Institute of Asian Studies and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

e-mail: wzi1947@gmail.com

Noor Hasharina Hassan

Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam,

Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

e-mail: hasharina.hassan@ubd.edu.bn

V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture,

Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_1

As we have already indicated, this volume emerged from discussions and deliberations held at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam’s Institute of Asian Studies in 2012, and particularly from a workshop organised towards the end of that year. The focus was to take stock of the development of social science research in Borneo during the post-war period, to assess what had been achieved and to access some recent research by early career researchers.

We then invited the participants of the workshop to prepare their papers for publication, most responded and some did not, and we have since contacted several other active researchers on Borneo to add to the range of issues and topics on what we wanted to cover and present. This is not a comprehensive treatment of social science research on Borneo since the late 1940s when modern social science, based on primary field research, emerged in Borneo. We are still underrepresented in Kalimantan, and, as has always been the case, the field continues to be dominated by social science research in Sarawak. The early advantages that Sarawak enjoyed though the work of the Colonial Social Science Research Council and the Sarawak Museum under Tom Harrisson gave the state an enormous head start which it has continued to build on with the establishment of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) there in 1992 (see Poline Bala, Chap. 13) and other research institutions.

We have managed, however, to secure some contributions on Kalimantan (see Chaps. 9, 12, 15 and 20) and to ensure that some of the major developments in the largest part of the island have been covered. (Some of the general chapters on Borneo also cover literature and research on Kalimantan, see Chaps. 4, 5, 6 and 8.) As the workshop was organised in Brunei we have also been able to include some recent research contributions from colleagues at the university there (see Chaps. 14, 22, 23 and 24), and we have been fortunate in securing chapters from scholars in Sabah (see Chaps. 10 and 21). Nevertheless we recognise that this is only a modest beginning in the attempt to capture some of the major scholarly post-war developments in Borneo Studies, and much more remains to be done.

We decided to divide the volume into three sections to reflect the scope of the reviews. The first section comprises Borneo-wide perspectives and issues. Victor King provides some introductory reflections on the development of anthropological research in the early post-war years in Chap. 2. It serves as something of an extension to these introductory remarks. These pioneer fieldworkers set out the research trajectories for others to follow, and some of the major issues which were to dominate research agendas during the next two decades were guided by particular preoccupations in British social anthropology: social structure and organisation; the defining features of cognatic kinship including kindred relations and networks and affinal relations; cognatic descent categories and groupings; the main characteristics of the household or small family, the longhouse, longhouse clusters, village and community; residential and marriage patterns; jural personalities, corporate groupings, rights in land and other property and the operation of customary laws; social ranking, status, leadership institutions (secular and religious), and succession to office; local economic organisation, agriculture and commercial production; ethnic identities and river-based groupings.

What was also a noticeable characteristic of this early work was that it was pursued by anthropologists who happened to be recruited to undertake research in Sarawak and Sabah, as the early sites of modern field research, or decided that Borneo provided the opportunities to explore various issues which were exercising anthropology at the time. They were not Borneo specialists per se, but some had already completed projects on other parts of the world and then subsequently continued to carry out research beyond Borneo: other field sites comprised Fiji, Samoa, northern Thailand, Yunnan-Burma, mainland China, East Africa and eastern Indonesia. In this regard, they usually became interested in themes, issues and concepts which were rather different from those in which they had been engaged in Borneo (among others, upland-lowland relationships, unilineal descent, alliance and cross-cousin marriage, pluralism, gender relations and the ethical/moral order, religious change and conversion).

The main field research was undertaken in Sarawak and to some extent Sabah; very little was done in the vast territories and the complex mixes of populations and cultures to the south in Kalimantan. Kalimantan remained a relatively unknown area to modern social scientific inquiry until the 1960s. We should also note that the scholarly terrain was set out and delimited by a handful of (male) anthropologists who undertook detailed ethnographic fieldwork, working in a colonial environment with its own demands and interests, and working on a delimited field site within one or more defined communities within one ethnic group, even though there might well be continued debate about what constituted that ethnic group, and how it related to other neighbouring groups, culturally, linguistically and historically. What is also noteworthy in this early work and even that undertaken up to the 1980s and 1990s was that much of it was confined to a particular part, state or province of Borneo. If a researcher worked in Sarawak or Brunei, he or she rarely moved to other parts of Borneo to undertake further research. There was little in the way of comparative studies, and almost no studies which adopted a Borneo-wide perspective.

The great divide, however, was that between the former British territories of northern Borneo and the former Dutch territories to the south. In the north the historical and archival materials were in English and there was early on in the post-war period a research infrastructure, at first established through the state museums (though the Brunei and Sabah Museums came much later than the Sarawak Museum with its internationally recognised journal) and then the universities. In the south invariably researchers had to at least read Dutch, and also for some purposes German, to gain some appreciation of the historical development, the geographies and economies of the societies and cultures there, and of the effects of colonial policies on local communities. For a considerable period of time into the post-war period the physical and research infrastructures were also relatively rudimentary, and sometimes permission to undertake research there was difficult to obtain. The comparative advantages of the northern areas of Borneo were therefore clear for foreign researchers, but these advantages have decreased over time, and now many more local researchers in Kalimantan are producing valuable research, sometimes in collaboration with overseas scholars.

What was to follow after the small number of early studies (mainly in Sarawak) was a burgeoning of research on Borneo from the late 1960s, an increase in the number of women researchers and a truly substantial expansion of work by locally-based social scientists working in local universities and research institutions; a widening of the range of perspectives, concepts and issues (an increasing focus on reflexivity and postmodern concerns; a shift to agency, fluidity and flexibility and away from earlier social structuralist and corporatist concerns; a focus on political ecology and environmental change; an all-consuming interest in identity construction, maintenance and transformation, to do with minorities, majorities, nation-states, borders and boundaries, political party development, the media and globalisation), an increase in research in hitherto unexplored fields (in Kalimantan, Brunei, Sabah) as well as a movement into more applied, developmental and policy-related issues, and engineered agricultural transitions (resettlement, land development, sustainability); and some reliance on collaborative and team research.

Victor King takes the story on from Chap. 2 and in Chap. 5 develops these themes from the later 1960s and 1970s up to the present. Chapter 5 is arranged chronologically, and thematically, as well as in terms of individual legacies and intellectual histories, and on debates and controversies (which include discussion of the factors which might explain variations in land tenure systems and property rights; ethnic nomenclature, classification and identity; the characterisation, definition and explanation for the nomadic way of life; explanations for symbolic forms; the nature of cognation and the analysis of social forms [kindreds, households, longhouses, communities]; and the relationships between egality and hierarchy). His final general Chap. 8 then focuses on a set of themes which have commanded increasing attention in Borneo Studies and that is identities or ethnicities and their constructions and transformations. Major work of international importance has been undertaken on these themes from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s work to that of Jérôme Rousseau, Bernard Sellato and Zawawi Ibrahim. The work is grouped under seven categories: (1) the nation-state, majorities and minorities; (2) religious conversion and identities; (3) the media, identities and nation-building; (4) borderlands, margins, migrations and identities; (5) interethnic relations and violence; (6) arenas for identity construction in tourism and museums; and finally (7) emerging middle classes, lifestyles and identities in urban settings.

Zawawi Ibrahim’s Chap. 3 comprises a critical overview of current scholarship on the issues of representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak. It examines works in anthropology and other disciplines, from both local and foreign scholars (Western, Japanese and Korean), whose contributions have been foregrounded on concrete, recent empirical research. Here a senior Malaysian scholar invites critiques of earlier colonial knowledge on Sarawak society and examines subsequent contributions of new knowledge by both Western and locally-based researchers on its changing communities. By predominantly drawing his theoretical nuances from cultural studies, these alternative writings attempt to pluralise, decentre and contest dominant discourses on Sarawak society by articulating fluidity, agency, alternative representations and reconstruction of identities from the margins of society and the nation-state. Going beyond postmodernist anthropology, and inspired by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s landmark Decolonizing methodologies (1999), Zawawi’s own research draws critical attention to indigenous people’s storytelling as a way that anthropologists should epistemologically mediate their research with ‘the Other’ (also see Chap. 14). His chapter provides an appropriate counterbalance to both King’s theoretical and empirical focus on largely earlier-derived Western literature and anthropological research in Borneo. Some of this work returns us to the important themes of the construction and transformation of local identities.

Other general contributions to the review of Borneo Studies comprise Bernard Sellato’s consideration of material culture studies in Chap. 4, which, as his bibliography suggests comprises a very substantial field of scholarly endeavour. Sellato returns to the importance of the relationship between the material world and ethnocultural identities. He also notes the changing conceptualisations of material culture when he says

The concept of material culture today covers a much broader scope, concerned as it is with the forms, uses, and meanings of objects, images and environments in everyday life. Material culture is the product of the interaction of people and their material world, and one means by which culture is stored and transmitted. An artefact, therefore, can no longer be reduced to the status of a ‘thing’. It is, in an important way, a social, rather than individual creation and, therefore, material culture as a whole reflects the conceptual context of a society.

In two interesting case studies (the Pinyawa’a Bidayuh red basket [juah bireh] and the raong hat, which he extends to the basket-and-hat pair of the Lun Bawang; and the Kenyah-Kayan baby carrier) he demonstrates the malleability of material culture. From their earlier religious, ritual and symbolic contexts, they are translated into new symbols of ethnic identity (‘icons of tradition’), in the Bidayuh case, incorporated into Catholic church-based rituals, and with constructed ethnic costumes worn in public dancing competitions, and, in the case of the Kenyah baby carrier originally serving as an expression and embodiment of social relations and as a protective device, it becomes a ‘trademark artefact’ removed from its sociocultural context and sold in tourist and souvenir shops. Sellato also notes the more recent phenomenon of the appropriation from one ethnic group of items of material culture by another group to transform its ethnic-specific role into a generic symbol of Dayak culture.

From the solidity of material culture we move into the realm of media-generated images and meanings—into the world of mass communications, the electronic, the visual, oral and sensory—in Fausto Barlocco’s overview of research in Chap. 7 on the media in Borneo during the past 30 years, with reference to his own work on the Kadazan of Sabah, Victor Caldarola’s research on the Banjarese in South Kalimantan, and that of John Postill on the Iban of Sarawak, among others, as well as the stream of publications, including Poline Bala’s doctoral research on the eBario project among the Kelabit of Sarawak. Barlocco refers to John Lent’s earlier surveys of research on the media and the fact that high-quality work undertaken by well-trained researchers using appropriate methodologies and with an understanding of the contexts and sensitivities of mass communication in a plural, multicultural society was ‘seriously limited’ up to the late 1970s. The situation had improved immeasurably when Lent undertook a second major survey of the field in the 1990s (popular culture in music, films, cartoons, the press, advertising, educational broadcasting, videocassettes, and in television, radio, telematics and computerisation).

What the detailed ethnographic studies draw our attention to are the ways in which the media are deployed by governments to promote a national agenda and a national culture in both the Indonesian and Malaysian cases. Caldarola reveals these ‘assimilationist policies’ in the case of the minority Banjarese reception of media messages from Jakarta. Postill, in the Iban case, has argued for the success of the Malaysian media (television, clock and calendar time and state propaganda) as they became increasingly national in direction from the formation of Malaysia in 1963 and the incorporation of Sarawak and Sabah into a federal system, in ‘Malaysianising’ the Iban. On the other hand Barlocco, in examining in detail the national government’s messages of modernisation, economic and educational development and national unity, proposes that Kadazan perceptions and feelings of marginalisation and of being second-class citizens as against the Malay political elite, leads them to ‘reject many aspects of the propaganda’. Instead they locate themselves within the oppositional categories of ethnic Kadazan, Christian or local Sabahan.

Barlocco also reviews a set of other studies which rather than conceptualising the media as vehicles of culture sees the media in an instrumental way as a mechanism used by government to institute developmental changes, for example in rural information and communication technology (ICT) projects, and of influencing people to behave in certain ways. He focuses on the very important community ICT and internet programme and the setting up of a telecentre, started by Universiti Malaysia Sarawak in 1999 as a means to promote development and socioeconomic wellbeing in the context of the formation of a knowledge society and as part of a participatory action research approach. Barlocco evaluates the research of Matthew Amster, Poline Bala, Peter Songan and others in demonstrating the successes but also the limitations of the project, and the overriding role of the government as the primary agent of change, a role which is seldom challenged.

Finally in the Borneo-wide reviews, Lars Kaskija explores in Chap. 6 what is now a voluminous and complex literature on hunter-gatherers in Borneo, a category of diverse, small-scale populations which lived by utilising the resources of the tropical forests and waterways in hunting, gathering and fishing. Nevertheless, a seemingly straightforward category in Borneo ethnography and history has generated all kinds of conceptual complexities, debates and disagreements among researchers. Kaskija has undertaken a formidable task in bringing this literature together and making sense of it. He demonstrates their ‘cultural diversity, variation and elusiveness’; he examines their credentials, authenticity and ‘genuineness’ as hunter-gatherers and the physical-anthropological and phenotypical evidence; he explores in detail the controversy generated from Carl Hoffman’s revisionist thesis that the Punan hunter-gatherers are not thus by origin but are agriculturalists who have moved out of farming to specialise in the collection of commercially valuable forest products which they then channel into trading networks. Kaskija argues, however, that it is unhelpful to categorise hunter-gatherers in terms of too simplistic dichotomies and ideal or homogeneous types (between forgers and farmers and pre-Austronesian foragers and Austronesian farmers, for example), or to assume that they have devolved from farming populations. Indeed, Kaskija draws attention to the fact that the process of change has usually operated in the other direction in Borneo from nomadic lifestyles to more settled modes of existence, and trade and commercial gathering have not been central elements or the raison d’être of hunting-gathering economies.

The second section of the book focuses on particular political units in Borneo: Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Kalimantan. These comprise overviews of research or research plans, specific institutions which have been involved in research or areas of research that have commanded significant attention. Christina Kreps in Chap. 9 looks back at her earlier research on Museum Balanga, the Provincial Museum of Central Kalimantan, in the early 1990s and then her later involvement in the Dayak Ikat Weaving Project and the setting up of Museum Kapuas Raya in Sintang, West Kalimantan from the early 2000s up to 2008. This chapter serves to remind us of the important work undertaken by regional and local museums in Borneo. Kreps argues that these case studies provide instructive material on what she refers to as ‘engaged museum anthropology’, which is now increasingly directed to ‘more publicly orientated’ activities and to provide a service to those communities with which they work and interact. Moreover, she demonstrates how different cultures perceive museums and their purposes and collections differently, contrasting Western concerns about the preservation, conservation, storage and handling of collections, and about the ways in which one arrives at a description, understanding and interpretation of particular artefacts with the approaches adopted in Palangkaraya. She warns against imposing a Western scientifically-based museology on other curatorial traditions and practices and instead proposes a move from a ‘colonial’ to a more cross-culturally sensitive, critical, reflexive and ‘collaborative’ museology, and one based on local priorities, interests and agendas. Her case studies of heritage and museum work in Sintang show how an international cooperative programme, utilising ‘multi-pronged’ strategies, and drawing on support and interest from a range of public, private and non-governmental bodies at the local and international level can have positive results.

Reinforcing the importance of identity formation and development, Kumpiady Widen in Chap. 12 traces the emergence of Dayak identities in Central Kalimantan, coordinated in the provincial capital, Palangkaraya. He points to several key moments: the Tumbang Anoi peace meeting of 1894, which for the first time brought representatives from widely scattered Dayak communities together, and encouraged a realisation of common interests and a shared community; the Gerakan Mandau Talawang Pancasila, which was a major movement of Dayak solidarity in the 1950s resulting in the Madara Agreement in March 1956 to secure the establishment of the Dayak province of Central Kalimantan; the appointment of the first Dayak Governor of Central Kalimantan, Tjilik Riwut (1958–1967), and the most recent appointment of Agustin Teras Narang (2005–2015); the Dayak-Madurese peacemaking following the interethnic conflicts of 2001; the strengthening of Dayak customary law institutions from 2008 and the formation of the National Dayak Traditional Council, the Dayak Customary Defence Guard and the Dayak Youth Movement.

Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan in Chap. 10 provides a valuable overview of research and writings on the culture and ethnography of Sabah/British North Borneo going back to earliest times, but particularly drawing attention to important accounts from the mid-nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth century, including the work of Owen Rutter, Ivor Evans and George Cathcart Woolley. She also draws attention to a sometimes forgotten body of literature—the studies undertaken by missionaries (the Borneo Evangelical Mission and the Roman Catholic St Joseph’s Missionary Society of Mill Hill, London, for example). As King has done in Chaps. 2 and 5, Pugh-Kitingan also refers to George Appell’s and his wife’s important work among the Rungus Dusun, Clifford Sather’s research among the Bajau Laut, and Robert Harrison’s among the Ranau Dusun, and the contention between Appell and others and the anthropologist Thomas Rhys Williams and his reports on his field study of the Dusun at Tambunan.

One major setback in the development of research on Sabah, which was not experienced in Sarawak, was the decision by Tun Mustapha Harun, the chief minister from 1967 to 1975, to impose restrictions on Christian missionary work in Sabah and on foreign researchers undertaking social science research in the state. Nevertheless, Pugh-Kitingan points to a momentum being maintained in the 1960s and 1970s with some ethnomusicology studies carried out by Ben Neufield and Edward Frame, and linguistic studies by Don Prentice. From 1978, under the Berjaya state government, Sabah opened up to research again, in linguistics, anthropology, and in material culture through the Sabah Museum, and then from 1985 in development studies through the Institute of Development Studies. Pugh-Kitingan also surveys her own extensive work in ethnomusicology among the Kadazan Dusun and 32 other local groups. She concludes by providing a summary of the enormously improved infrastructure for research on Sabah with the establishment of Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) in 1994.

A similar exercise in surveying the field of studies has been undertaken by Gary M. Jones for Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) in Chap. 14, the first university to be founded in the former northern British territories in October 1985. He points to the important place that not only Brunei Studies plays in the profile of the university, but through the work of the Institute of Asian Studies the increasing focus on Borneo Studies in a multidisciplinary framework. UBD, UMS and UNIMAS have all hosted biennial conferences of the Borneo Research Council (as have Universitas Tanjungpura, Pontianak and Palangkaraya in Kalimantan). Unfortunately we do not have any surveys or work undertaken in Kalimantan universities, but Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo in Chap. 20 outlines some of the locally-based research that has been pursued in West Kalimantan (see below) and John Bamba in Chap. 15 gives us a summary of some of the research and published work produced by Institut Dayakologi in Pontianak.

Poline Bala in Chap. 13 provides us with an overview of the important work that has been done at UNIMAS since its foundation in 1992, a substantial body of research in applied and development-orientated work. A very specific focus has been on gender studies, and Hew Cheng Sim in Chap. 11 explores this area of research in Sarawak. She emphasises the fact that in a part of Borneo which was experiencing rapid transformations and urbanisation then an interest in gender relations naturally drew her to examine these in urban settings, to women’s experiences of rural-urban migration, to local women in the sex industry in Kuching, but also to changing gender relations in an Iban resettlement project. Interestingly Hew draws attention to the blind spots in early Borneo anthropology in that the dimension of women’s roles, activities and perceptions had been ‘buried’ in male-dominated anthropology’s concerns with kinship, marriage and family structures (and we might add with the corporatist, structuralist concerns of this early post-war anthropology). She draws attention pertinently to Monica Freeman’s role as the unpaid (domestic) research assistant of her husband, Derek; and to the

androcentric biases and the absence of gendered perspectives in the edited volume Female and male in Borneo. She then provides a well-argued conspectus on the development of feminist social science.

In addition, Hew draws attention to work undertaken across a range of disciplines which focus on women and gender relations (in the sociological and economic analysis of the organisation of money in marriage [Wee]; in women and health development [Wong]; in women informal traders in the urban sector from a development studies perspective [Junaenah Sulehan]; in psychological research on single mothers [Nor Ba’yah Abdul Kadir and Kamsiah Ali]; on the underrepresentation of women in formal politics [Mowe]). Finally, Hew bemoans the fact that studies on gender relations in Sarawak (but we can extend this to the whole of Borneo) are few and far between. For future research, she argues for historical specificity, social/political/economic contextualisation, a focus on women’s lived experiences rather than on homogenising and essentialising them as a sociological/anthropological/cultural/economic/political category; for feminist ethnographers to mediate and interpret women’s experiences not merely reproduce and privilege them and to adopt a ‘reflexive voice... above the din of the politics of representations and accountability’, and ‘to walk the tightrope of feminist research in good faith’.

For the final section of our volume to reflect a range of recent research on Borneo we decided to group miscellaneous case studies together. Nevertheless, we believe that these give expression to some of the major issues and themes which have exercised researchers on Borneo during the past two decades: there are case studies on rural development and resettlement in Sarawak (Welyne Jeffrey Jehom, Chap. 16 and Dimbab Ngidang, Chap. 18); tourism in Sabah (Rosalie Corpuz, Chap. 21); identities in relation to origins and the association with place in the Kelabit highlands of Sarawak (Valerie Mashman, Chap. 19); identities as part of a context of fluidity, movement and connection (Jayl Langub and Noboru Ishikawa, Chap. 17); identities in opposition to others in relation to the Chinese, Malay and Dayak of West Kalimantan (Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo, Chap. 20); with regard to the viability of the Tutong language and its instruction at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Noor Azam Haji-Othman, Chap. 22); and religious conversion of the Brunei Dusun to Islam (Asiyah az-Zahra Kumpoh, Chap. 24); and finally lifestyles and consumption, in this case again in Brunei (Noor Hasharina Hassan, Chap. 23).

The chapters by Welyne Jeffrey Jehom and Dimbab Ngidang strike depressingly familiar notes in the experience of development in Borneo. Jehom argues that the rationale for government-generated resettlement of rural populations is one of bringing progress, development and jobs to rural people in the context of resettlement and incorporation of small-scale, partly subsistence cultivators into large-scale, centrally managed plantations growing such cash crops as oil palm. Yet the reverse is the case in her findings on the Kenyah-Badeng who have been displaced from their home following the construction of the Bakun hydroelectric dam and reservoir. The government template for modernisation displaces people from their established livelihoods, separates them emotionally and psychologically from their homeland, fails to adequately compensate them for their loss of land and resources, disrupts their social support systems, and transforms them into insecure, low-paid plantation wage labourers. These continue to be top-down decisionmaking processes with little regard for the view of local communities affected by these state-engineered projects. Jehom concludes that the major objectives of the resettlement programme have not been achieved and she illustrates the problems which have arisen in disputes between the Kenyah-Badeng and the oil palm plantation company, and in the failure of the project to commercialise food production.

In the case of the Iban communities of Pantu subdistrict in Sri Aman, Dimbab Ngidang argues that the agrarian transition and the movement of people from the countryside to the town and off-farm employment has resulted in those who left their rights in land and other property in the custodianship of those who remain behind, and in the custodianship of the longhouse chiefs (tuai rumah) in effect to have forfeited their property. They usually do not know where farm boundaries are located and they have no formal records of their rights in customary land. The land can then be sold on for profit to plantation companies in the context of state-promoted commercial joint venture estate development. This situation has resulted in conflicts and disputes over land rights, and the disenfranchisement of a significant number of those who have migrated from their homelands. But it operates under a customary law system which is no longer appropriate to a dynamic situation of capitalistic development, mobility and modernisation.

Tourism is another arena in which local communities are drawn into a national and international level development process. However, in the case of wildlife attractions and ecotourism in Sabah there is a generally positive outlook, at least in Rosalie Corpuz’s three case studies. She examines the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, the Kinabatangan floodplain and the Turtle Islands Marine Park from the perspective of international visitor experiences. There is a lively verbatim recording of visitor impressions, especially visual impressions, in relation to their prior expectations gleaned from their access to pre-Borneo images in television programmes and documentaries, word-of-mouth from family and friends, guide books, the internet, travel and adventure literature, magazines, nature and wildlife photography books, destination advertising, travel brochures and general news coverage. Overall there was a positive visitor experience, but the level of development in Sabah and the large expanses of commercial plantations were not part of their expectations.

The chapters which relate in one way or another to identities are diverse. Valerie Mashman’s chapter can be read as an exercise in interpreting ethno-historical accounts of origins, and migrations on the basis of oral histories about Kelabit- Ngurek relations, claims to a homeland based on the remains of an ancient stone culture among the Kelabit, and the contribution of archaeological investigations to these claims. These oral narratives are invariably arenas for dispute and the Kelabit- Ngurek relationship requires further investigation, but the chapter demonstrates how claims to aboriginal status can be supported by various devices, including the authority of archaeologists and anthropologists. This is an increasingly familiar story and replicated in case studies in Indonesia.

Earlier post-war research on Borneo emphasised the importance of landscape and geography as a means of delimiting ethnic groups or in somewhat outdated terminology ‘tribes’. Derek Freeman’s work on the Iban demonstrated the importance of the interactions and identities formed and generated by residence in a common river basin. These river-based groupings, given that water transport was of vital importance in Borneo, provided a means for anthropologists to draw boundaries around units of interaction, communication and identity. However, Jayl Langub and Noboru Ishikawa’s recent research suggests that we need to rethink this mode of delineation. They examine a complex of ethnic groups (Penan, Berawan, Sebop. Lirong, Punan Bah, Kayan, Kejaman, Kenyah, Seping, Lahanan, Malay and Tatau), and the connecting migratory routes and migrations of people across a wide spatial area of Sarawak. In other words, though communities may not be on the same river system but are distant from one other across watersheds, they are nevertheless closely connected and share identities because of these transriverine movements and relations or as Langub and Ishikawa term them ‘watershed networks’. Excitingly, we may then arrive at a ‘new mental map of Borneo’.

Perhaps nowhere has the strength and some of the unfortunate consequences of ethnic identity and separation been so evident as in West and Central Kalimantan. Kumpiady Widen in Chap. 12 has explored this in Central Kalimantan and the emergence of a Dayak identity from the late nineteenth century. Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo traces this in the western Indonesian Borneo province. There has been a noticeable institutionalisation and deterritorialisation of identities in Kalimantan (with the formation of assemblies, centres, institutes and agencies devoted to one major ethnic group to the exclusion of others) which was encouraged during Suharto’s New Order, but then given full rein during the post-Suharto period of decentralisation when different groups were vying for political advantage and taking a more hardened attitude towards their neighbouring ethnic groups. Prasojo argues for the importance of religion in identity formation in West Kalimantan (Islam and the Malay, Christianity and the Dayak, and Buddhism and the Chinese).

In Brunei the identities of the minority populations is under some pressure. But it is heartening to read Noor Azam Haji-Othman’s chapter on the positive attitude taken towards the teaching of minority languages at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He describes in some detail the Language Centre’s preparations for and delivery of the Tutong language (spoken by some 12,000 people) at the undergraduate level; the decision was also taken to teach Iban and Dusun. However, the substantial demand from the undergraduates to follow courses in Tutong was persuasive. The challenges in teaching a non-standardised and non-codified language, and finding appropriately qualified teachers were significant. UBD managed to overcome these, but, as Azam advises, there are still doubts about the viability of such a programme. The introduction of such a course does not aim to reverse ‘language shift’, but it is an encouraging development in supporting minority identities and instilling a pride among those speakers of minority languages that they are given attention at university level.

From the protection and encouragement of minority languages and addressing ‘language shift’ we move to a much more problematical issue of ‘religious shift’. Whether it involves conversion to Islam, Christianity or Kaharingan, this has significant implications for ethnic identities. Asiyah az-Zahra Kumpoh investigates the process and experience of conversion to Islam among the Brunei Dusun. From her fieldwork findings she sees this as a generally smooth and socially, psychologically and emotionally painless process, but as she notes, the ‘constant exposure to Islam through the education system, mass media and society at large has created a greater familiarity with Islam compared to [young Dusuns’] ancestral religion’. The same issues, as in the religious domain, apply in Azam’s consideration of minority languages—they are non-codified, they have no written records, they are not standardised, and above all they do not command national and international authorisation. Nevertheless, because of the ubiquity of Islam in Brunei the conversion process, as revealed in Lewis Rambo’s stages approach (with modifications) does not engender personal or social difficulties.

Finally, we come to a neglected field of study, and one which needs much more attention in the interpretation and understanding of the trajectories of modernisation in Borneo. King in his Chap. 8 draws our attention to the neglected field of urban social class formation and the fact that the importance of understanding changing lifestyles and consumption patterns has not commanded a great deal of attention in Borneo Studies up to now. Perhaps Brunei is a somewhat extreme version, as an oil- and gas-rich state and fourth in the world in terms of GDP per capita (according to the International Monetary Fund), but Noor Hasharina Hassan’s detailed dissection of consumption patterns, and the changes in credit arrangements to address what is largely a middle-class status phenomenon is instructive for other urbanising and more wealthy parts of Borneo. The aspirations she describes in relation to Bruneians would not be out of place among the ‘new rich’ in Kuching, Sibu, Bintulu, Miri, Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, Samarinda, Balikpapan, Banjarmasin, Palangkaraya and Pontianak. And there will be other urban centres in Borneo where lifestyles and consumption should command greater attention. Moreover, she observes, and this would apply to other social groups in Borneo outside Brunei, that ‘Bruneians often express their modernity through their consumption patterns and the country is often seen as a highly status-driven society’. What she also draws attention to is consumption driven by credit; again an issue which merits attention elsewhere in Borneo, and the consumption patterns of the young, educated, upwardly mobile population, in addition to the need to address traditional obligations and responsibilities as well as to finance a new, modernised, globalised lifestyle.

So we move from the traditional preoccupations of the early post-war colonial anthropologists; to a second generation which continued the legacy with modifications; to a third which became more localised, applied and policy-directed in such areas as rural development and land development; to a fourth which embraced postmodernism and reflexivity, and globalisation in our increasing attention to the power of the media and electronic communications and to concerns with agency, fluidity and deconstructing structures; to a fifth, barely started, which looks at urban Borneo, the middle classes, consumption and lifestyles. The future looks to be exciting, and we hope that this volume does not simply critically evaluate the past and assess the present but also gives some guidance and research agendas in Borneo in the future.

Part I: Borneo-Wide Perspectives

Chapter 2: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Early Anthropology in Borneo

Victor T. King

Abstract The chapter argues that the early post-war study of Borneo, primarily undertaken by anthropologists, and predominantly in what was then the British Crown Colony of Sarawak should not be viewed in narrow, parochial terms. Unfortunately, apart from Sarawak, there was little that was done in modern social science during the first two decades of the post-war era in other parts of Borneo. What was accomplished with regard to the understanding of local social organisation and economies in Sarawak established an agenda for the next generation of researchers. These studies gave Borneo an academic legacy, a profile beyond the island; some publications, findings and the research training of postgraduate students were clearly more significant than others, and this chapter traces that variegated legacy. But importantly those early social scientists then moved on to expand their empirical and theoretical field of vision and link Borneo with major issues which were being debated outside Borneo Studies. Indeed, most of them had already undertaken research and training in other parts of the world prior to their research in Borneo. In that sense this formative research on Borneo was something ofa staging post for the further development of our thinking about social and economic transformation in a rapidly changing world. The studies of Edmund Leach, Derek Freeman, William Geddes, Stephen Morris, T’ien Ju-K’ang, Rodney Needham, Tom Harrisson and George Appell, among others, are considered in a preliminary way to set the scene for some of the later chapters.

Keywords Anthropology • Borneo studies • Research methodology

Victor T. King (✉)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: V.T.King@leeds.ac.uk

V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture, Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_2

2.1 An Early Encounter with the Anthropology of Borneo

In contextualising the objectives which provided the organisational framework for the workshop on Borneo Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam from which this edited book has emerged it is perhaps useful to include some personal reflections from someone who has been involved in research on Borneo for a considerable period of time. Some of these reflections were also presented in an introductory address at the workshop. My preliminary thoughts are devoted primarily to anthropology because this was the dominant disciplinary approach in the social sciences in those early post-war years. But I end this chapter with some consideration of more general overviews and compilations on Borneo in preparation for the subsequent contributions to this volume.

If I look back to the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when I first engaged with Borneo as a young researcher, what was the scholarly landscape like? In the course of about three years of reading around the ethnography, anthropology, history and geography of Borneo at that time, I think I managed to cover much of what had been published. If we compare what was available then to what we have now, then the development of the field of studies has been quite staggering. There are still major gaps in our knowledge, as we would expect. But for a newcomer to the field there is now a truly substantial and wide-ranging literature to cover.

What was it like then? There was not much that inspired me in the pre-war period. There were, of course, the ethnographic compilations of Charles Hose and William McDougall, The pagan tribes of Borneo (1912) and of Henry Ling Roth’s The natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo (1896), and Owen Rutter’s The pagans of North Borneo (1929). But for me there were two stimulating publications: Robert Hertz’s Death and the right hand (translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham and published in 1960), which comprised two essays: the first, ‘A contribution to the collective representation of death’ (1907), which stimulated Peter Metcalf’s admirable work on Berawan funeral rites A Borneo journey into death: Berawan eschatology from its rituals (1981, 1982) and with Richard Huntington, Celebrations of death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual (1991); and the second on ‘The pre-eminence of the right hand: a study in religious polarity’ (1909), which gave rise to a body of work in the late 1970s and 1980s on symbolism and structural analysis in Borneo, in which I was involved, especially in an exchange with Peter Metcalf and his ‘Birds and deities in Borneo’ (1976) (King 1977, 1980 and see King 1985). It had also influenced Erik Jensen in the 1970s, which was hardly surprising given that his supervisor was Rodney Needham, and Needham had then edited Right and left: essays on dual symbolic classification, celebrating the work of Robert Hertz and the Année sociologique (1973). These exercises brought the anthropology of Borneo into a loose alliance with structural anthropology, the study of symbolism and the influential school of French anthropology which had been founded by Émile Durkheim. The other important work, for me at least, was Hans Schärer’s Ngaju religion: the conception of God among a south Borneo people (1963), again translated by Rodney Needham from Schärer’s 1946 publication Die Gottesidee der Ngadju Dajak in SüdBorneo (1946, Brill). This connected Borneo anthropology to the important stream of work that emerged from Leiden structuralism and the studies of Indonesian cultures undertaken by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, W.H. Rassers and their students.

When I entered this field of studies I was faced with the overwhelming importance of studies of Sarawak and the internationally recognised status of the Sarawak Museum because and in spite of Tom Harrisson. I say in spite of because of the tensions and conflicts between Harrisson and various of the overseas visiting anthropologists (including Edmund Leach, Derek Freeman and Rodney Needham; and see Heimann 1998; Sheppard 1977; Winzeler 2008; and obituaries of Harrisson by, among others, Sandin 1976; McCredie 1976; O’Connor 1976). The museum was founded in 1888 and the Sarawak Museum Journal first printed in 1911. Second, there were the major anthropological studies sponsored by the Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) in Sarawak in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

These pioneer developments gave Sarawak a considerable advantage over other parts of Borneo in the formulation, organisation, coordination and execution of research. Borneo Studies in the 1950s, 1960s and even into the 1970s was Sarawak-focused and -dominated. Harrisson had left Sarawak by the mid-1960s, and spent time supporting the development of the Brunei Museum along with its first director, Pg Dato Paduka Hj Sharifuddin, and contributing to the work and research of the Sabah Museum (McCredie 1976; Harrisson and Harrisson 1971). When I arrived in Kuching for the first time in 1972 Benedict Sandin was the curator and government ethnologist in the Sarawak Museum as the protégé and successor of Harrisson, and, among other activities, Stephen Morris, Clifford Sather and Hatta Solhee were working from the museum and were engaged in the Miri-Bintulu regional planning study; Michael Heppell, a student of Derek Freeman, had also arrived to do research on the Ulu Ai Iban (1975). The museum was the magnet which brought researchers together. Peter Eaton also appeared in order to undertake his doctoral research on education and school-leavers (1974). Carol Rubenstein was based in the museum involved in her oral literature project (1973), and Stephanie Morgan had returned from field research in West Kalimantan.

There had not been a great deal of research undertaken in the 1950s. Borneo Studies was dominated by the work that had emerged from Edmund Leach’s report on Sarawak on behalf of the CSSRC (1948, 1950, and see 1954). Leach had been commissioned by the CSSRC to undertake social science surveys of Sarawak and North Borneo (see also Tambiah 1998). This gave rise to the studies of Freeman (1916–2001), William Robert (Bill) Geddes (1916–1989), Harold Stephen Morris (1913–1993) and T’ien Ju-K’ang (1916-) presided over by Raymond Firth (19012002), as the then secretary of the Council. Nevertheless, Leach (1910–1989) provided an important structure and reference point for a considerable amount of field research which was undertaken in those early post-war years and through to the 1950s (Strickland 1989). Subsequently, Stephen Morris provided an informal, insightful and amusing insider’s view of the CSSRC-sponsored socio-economic studies which were undertaken by what local administrators referred to as the ‘socio-comics’ (1977).

2.2 The Commonwealth Connection

Interestingly, the New Zealand connection was dominant in these early CSSRC studies. (Freeman was a New Zealander, with an Australian father and a New Zealand mother; and though born in England and spending his childhood in Rhodesia, Morris’s mother was also a New Zealander; Geddes and Firth also hailed from New Zealand.) Although Leach briefly visited North Borneo in November 1947 for one week and produced a report, the momentum achieved in Sarawak was not replicated in North Borneo other than the study undertaken by Monica Glyn-Jones of the Penampang Dusun and the report which she produced in 1953. Given the brevity of his stay, his Report on a visit to Kemabong, Labuan and Interior Residency, British North Borneo, 1-8^th November, 1947 (1947) could never have matched his Report on the possibilities of a social economic survey of Sarawak (1948) published as Social science research in Sarawak (1950).

In North Borneo there was no obvious research institution to promote field studies, and, though its roots go back some way, a museum was not formally established there until 1965, when it was housed modestly in a shophouse in Gaya Street. In Kalimantan the situation was yet again altogether different; the turmoil occasioned by the Indonesian revolution and the continuing economic and political instability under Sukarno in the late 1950s and 1960s never provided the environment within which sustained social science research could be undertaken or scholarly institutions established and developed. The Indonesians were valiantly attempting to build an educational infrastructure in a situation of economic decline and the Dutch had long departed.

Finally, it was not until the late 1960s when research began to be encouraged by the Brunei government in the remaining British dependency in northern Borneo, still under British protection. The Brunei Museum was established in 1965 and it is then that we witness the first stirrings of anthropological-sociological research there. We should note here the important pioneering role that museums, especially in the northern Borneo territories, played in the promotion of advanced research, but their position in this regard has increasingly been marginalised since the 1980s with the establishment of universities and their importance in funding, organising and sponsoring field research in the social sciences. Nevertheless, there are fields within which museums continue to play an important role, particularly in archaeological and biological research, and in such obvious fields as material culture and local technologies.

For me the highlights of the 1950s and the early 1960s were undoubtedly Freeman’s publications on Iban agriculture and social organisation (1955a, b), and specifically on the concept of the kindred with special reference to his Iban ethnography, and on the Iban domestic family (bilek family) and its developmental cycle. At that time the Sarawak Museum, through Tom Harrisson and his staff, was increasingly involved in archaeological excavations at the Niah Caves and Santubong, and aside from that Harrisson published his rather idiosyncratic World within: a Borneo story on the upland Kelabit (1959) and was undertaking research on the Malays of southwest Sarawak as well as keeping up a prodigious published output in his own Sarawak Museum Journal and other regional journals (1970). Rodney Needham was also pursuing his research on the Penan of Sarawak in 195152 (1953) and publishing papers on them in the 1950s and early 1960s, though neither Harrisson nor Needham were part of these earlier specially commissioned CSSRC studies. (Leach had indicated in his report that these other groups were worthy of study and Harrisson did receive funding support from the CSSRC for his study of the coastal Malays.)

However, it is worth noting that, although he had never worked in Borneo, a scholar who influenced and directed work in the former British territories was Raymond Firth. He held court at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 1944 to 1968 as the professorial successor to Bronislaw Malinowski, and during a formative period in British social anthropology. In my view, Firth was not only a central figure in sponsoring and supervising work on Borneo but also a vital figure in developing a programme of anthropological research on the wider Southeast Asia [following his own field research on Malay fishermen undertaken in the late 1930s (1946), and his wife Rosemary’s research on Malay domestic affairs (1943)].

We have to keep in mind that most of the British-based anthropological work on Southeast Asia, and specifically on Borneo, in the first decade after 1945 was undertaken through or had a connection with Firth at the LSE, and his close associates, Maurice Freedman and Edmund Leach (before Leach went to Cambridge); the major exception was Rodney Needham at Oxford (see Leach 1984). And Freeman, though he wrote his doctoral thesis at Cambridge under the supervision of Meyer Fortes, had been trained at the LSE prior to leaving for Sarawak; even Fortes, who spent most of his senior career at Cambridge from 1950 and between 1946 and 1950 at Oxford, had been a research student at the LSE in the 1930s, had studied there under Charles Gabriel Seligman, and had trained with Malinowski and Firth (see Abrahams 1983; Herskovits 1941; Murdock 1943, 1960a, b; Macdonald 2002; and see Kuper 1996).

More recently in the postmodern, post-colonial, post-orientalist environment within which there has been an important re-evaluation of the work of early anthropology, the conduct of research in such places as Sarawak, the issues which were given importance (and those questions which were ignored or given little attention), the images of ‘native’ populations which were constructed and the ways in which research findings were interpreted have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism. Pamela Lindell’s critique of Geddes’s Bidayuh research (2008) and Robert Winzeler’s examination of Tom Harrisson’s contribution to Borneo ethnology, ethnography and archaeology, and his relationships with visiting anthropologists (2008), are cases in point (and see Zawawi, Chap. 3).

2.3 Social Structure, Kinship and Descent

The period of the 1950s and 1960s, when E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown dominated British anthropology, was characterised by an increasingly sharp division between British social structural and American cultural anthropology (and see King and Wilder 2006). Freeman’s work on the Iban demonstrated the unmistakable influence of the British preoccupation with social structure and the functions which social groups performed (and within that kinship and marriage and the mechanisms and processes which provided social order and continuity), which was also reflected in Freeman’s dialogue with British descent theorists who had worked primarily in Africa.

When I entered Borneo Studies in the early 1970s, one of the major preoccupations was kinship, descent and marriage as central elements within the study of social structure (and within that studies of the domestic family or household, or small family, the kindred, ambilineal, bilateral or cognatic descent, the structure of the longhouse or village, affinal relations, residential arrangements before and after marriage, and relationship terminologies).

Although Borneo societies were not constituted on the basis of unilineal descent groups, Freeman and others analysed the properties of kindreds and ego-focused kinship networks which functioned in some respects like clans and lineages in that they had the capacity to mobilise, organise and coordinate large numbers of people (1961). Even among the Bidayuh, Geddes managed to uncover the elements of ‘community’ which gave coherence and order beyond the household or small family (1954); and Morris examined and presented the main principles of local grouping, kinship, residence and descent and hereditary rank which served to organise and lend coherence and order to the coastal Melanau (see King 1978a, 1978b: 1–36; Morris 1953, 1978; and see Appell 1976a).

Subsequently, George Appell was to reveal in detail some of the inadequacies of Radcliffe-Brownian social structuralism, the failure to address indigenous concepts, the slow adaptation of the concept of the ‘jural’ which is at base founded on indigenous concepts, and the reasons why this approach fails to provide us with the analytical tools to understand and elucidate the forms and processes of cognatic societies like those in Borneo (see, for example, Appell 1973, 1988; also see 1969; and see the discussion of Appell’s work below).

2.4 Anthropology in and out of Borneo

What was striking for me about this early post-war period was that the anthropologists who carried out research in Borneo overall did not continue to be preoccupied with it as a site of fieldwork, nor had some of them commenced their early research career there. Probably this circumstance in part reflects the comparative perspectives of anthropology and the desire and need to draw out similarities and differences across cultures and communities. What this early period of research also demonstrates is that the four anthropologists sponsored by the CSSRC, though they met from time to time, did not work together as a team; they produced their monographs without much reference to their counterparts. Interestingly, the only significant collaborative project that I have come across is that between Freeman and Geddes, but it was directed to research on Oceania and not to Borneo (Freeman and Geddes 1959). It is also clear from Monica Freeman’s diaries that relations between the researchers, and particularly between Freeman and Morris and Freeman and Geddes, were not close and collegial (Appell-Warren 2009).

These early researchers were first and foremost anthropologists and not regional specialists. T’ien produced his The Chinese of Sarawak: a study of social structure (1953; and see T’ien and Ward 1956), but he then carved out a career for himself in mainland China working and publishing on Chinese culture, society, history, and social and cultural change, primarily as professor of history and head of sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai (see, for example, 1986, 1993, 1997). Moreover, his PhD thesis, which was submitted in London before his departure for Sarawak, was on mainland Southeast Asia: ‘Religious cults and social structure of the Shan states of the Yunnan-Burma frontier’ (1948; and see 1986).

Geddes too had received his PhD in London in 1948, in his case on ‘An analysis of cultural change in Fiji’. After his Land Dayak study he went on to become heavily involved in research and the application and administration of research based in the Tribal Research Centre in Chiang Mai in the hills of northern Thailand from 1959 through to the early 1960s, subsequently producing his volume Migrants of the mountains: the cultural ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of Thailand (1976). During this period of his research he also published on peasant life in communist China, based on a visit to China in the mid-1950s (1963). His inaugural lecture at the University of Sydney in 1959 also demonstrates his increasing distance from his research in Sarawak, though his interest in Land Dayak religion (1957) must have informed some of his thinking on the anthropology of religion (1959).

Like T’ien, Geddes never really built up a programme of studies in Borneo anthropology. In comparative terms Geddes and T’ien published very little from their Sarawak research other than the reports commissioned by the CSSRC. Geddes produced his report on the Land Dayaks in 1954 and, aside from a few papers, also wrote what most interested readers will remember him for, Nine Dayak nights (1957) and the way in which he entered Land Dayak culture through the story of a folk hero, Kichapi, told by a village shaman over the course of nine nights of festivities. His ethnographic films, too, have made an impact: two on the Hmong (Miao) of northern Thailand (The opium people and Miao year) and three on the Land Dayaks, The Land Dayaks of Borneo, The soul of the rice and Brides of the gods, which he made following his return to Sarawak and the village of Mentu Tapuh (Appell 2002). Overall Lindell was particularly critical of Geddes’s failure to address in any sustained way various processes of social change, particularly in relation to conversion to Christianity, and the absence in Geddes’s monograph of the interpretation of ‘community’ and social organisation in the context of social and cultural transformations (2008: 50–54; and see Golson 1989, 2007).

Morris is an interesting case in this respect too. He studied forestry at Edinburgh University in the early 1930s and then took up a career in law. It was not until 1945–47 that he moved into anthropology and studied for the postgraduate diploma in social anthropology at the LSE, which then took him to Sarawak. After writing his Melanau report which subsequently appeared in 1953, he spent three years in Kampala and undertook a study of the East African Indians. It was this subject and not the Melanau which was to preoccupy him for the next 20 years. He was 40 years of age before being awarded his PhD, not on the Melanau but on ‘Immigrant Indian communities in East Africa’ submitted to the University of London in 1963. His book on The Indians of Uganda appeared in 1968, and at this time he became interested in the concept of the plural society (1967a). In the late 1950s and into the 1960s he was publishing on East African Indians, though he continued a sporadic engagement with the Melanau (see, for example, 1967b, 1980, 1981) and unlike Geddes, Freeman and T’ien he was then to return to Sarawak on a fairly regular basis and ultimately to produce two important locally published monographs on the Melanau (see Clayre 1993).

In any event, Stephen Morris’s monograph The Oya Melanau was published with the Sarawak branch of the Malaysian Historical Society in 1991, two years before his death. Another of his legacies was the work which he encouraged on the Melanau language by Iain F.C.S. Clayre and Beatrice Clayre. Iain Clayre received his PhD on the Melanau language in 1972, at Morris’s old university, Edinburgh (and see Beatrice Clayre 1997; Chou 1999). And it was the close relationship which Stephen Morris forged with Beatrice Clayre that enabled her to see to press Morris’s posthumously published The Oya Melanau: traditional ritual and belief with a catalogue of Belum carvings (1997, Sarawak Museum Journal, 52 [73]).

The most prolific researcher during this formative period of research on Borneo, however, was undoubtedly Derek Freeman. He too had undertaken research outside Borneo prior to his Iban studies. He had been a language teacher in Samoa in 194043, and he wrote a postgraduate thesis in anthropology on Samoan social structure which was presented to the University of London in 1948; this was around about the same time that Freeman, along with Geddes, Morris and T’ien were undertaking their postgraduate training under Firth at the LSE. From 1949 through to the early 1960s Freeman was engaged primarily with his Iban materials, but then for the next three decades he returned to his Samoan research and became engaged in a sustained critical analysis of Margaret Mead’s work on adolescence and social organisation in Samoa.

Freeman completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge under Meyer Fortes in 1953, ‘Family and kin among the Iban of Sarawak’. His classic reports on Iban shifting cultivation and social organisation were published in 1955 (1955a, b), and then a series of papers on Iban social organisation from 1957 until 1961, including his chapters on the developmental cycle of the Iban bilek family (1957) and his general chapter on Iban kinship and marriage (1960) which culminated in his superb Curl Essay Prize paper ‘On the concept of the kindred’ (1961).

2.5 Derek Freeman’s Legacy and Wider Debates

One of the major legacies from this period was left by Freeman (see Appell and Madan 1988a, b). He revisited Borneo in March 1961 where he was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence of the acrimonious and intense rivalry and argument with Tom Harrisson arising specifically from Harrisson’s alleged mistreatment of Freeman’s research student Brian de Martinoir (who at that time was undertaking a study of the Kajang in the Belaga area). Freeman became convinced that Harrisson was psychopathic and suffering from extreme paranoia. It is said, and Freeman also confirmed this, that the whole experience was part of his personal and academic transformation (‘a cognitive abreaction’, something akin to a religious conversion) and it marked his change of perspective in anthropology from a British-influenced social structuralism to an approach which was directed to discovering the universal psychological and biological foundations of human behaviour. He embraced an ‘interactionist’ anthropological or sociobiological model drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis and a range of studies of the brain’s functions. Perhaps to mark this redirection and rebirth he changed his publication name from J.D. Freeman to Derek Freeman (this is something John Barnes remarks upon in his autobiography Humping my drum, 2008; and see Appell and Madan 1988b; Caton 2005, 2006; Fox 2002; Hempenstall 2012; Heppell 2002; Tuzin 2002).

I remember when I had written a critical piece on Freeman’s work on the kindred in the 1970s, drawing on the doctoral research of John E. Smart (1971), Freeman said that he would respond to this, and sent me a detailed questionnaire relevant to the issues which I had raised (King 1976; and see Appell 1976d). But to my knowledge he never drafted a rejoinder. Instead he sent me theoretical papers on sociobiology which argued strongly for a radically different approach to anthropology (1966, 1973). He informed me in a letter that he had moved on from concerns with kinship and social organisation, and was no longer so much engaged in his Iban material.

From the late 1960s Freeman became intensely preoccupied with Margaret Mead’s work on Samoa and how his new interests and approach to anthropology could decisively demonstrate the fallacy of Mead’s approach which focused on the role of culture in the explanation of adolescence, and sexual and other behaviour. He returned to field research in Samoa in 1966–67 and in 1983 his Margaret Mead and Samoa: the making and unmaking of an anthropological myth appeared to enormous controversy, particularly in the American anthropological establishment (and see Freeman 1996). Freeman later also published The fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead (1999), again to much controversy, in which he argued that Mead’s ethnographic and conceptual errors in her study of Samoan culture were due to her having been ‘hoaxed’ by two of her female Samoan informants.

The shift to concerns with sociobiology and evolutionary psychology can also be illustrated, I think, in Robert J. Barrett’s later penetrating work on Iban psychology and culture (for his publications and data see Chur-Hansen 2008; Chur-Hansen and Appell 2012; and see Barrett and Lucas 1993). Yet the Freeman-Mead controversy rumbles on after Freeman’s death with the more recent questioning of Freeman’s ‘trashing’ of Mead and his argument that she had been the victim of a ‘hoax’ (see, for example, Shankman 2009, 2013).

There were two subsequent and important scholarly interventions, among others, in which Freeman did return to things Bornean. First, his engagement with Rodney Needham’s paper ‘Blood, thunder and mockery of animals’ (1964), which Freeman addressed in his subsequent paper ‘Thunder, blood and the nicknaming of God’s creatures’ (1968). This latter paper gives expression to Freeman’s conversion to biological anthropology, while Needham tended to keep to his particular tradition of Anglo-French-Dutch structuralism and his interests in social organisation [an important and influential comparative and structuralist paper which emerged from Needham’s Penan work was ‘Age, category and descent’ (1966)]. Nevertheless, both Needham and Freeman were moving towards explanations of symbolism and cultural behaviour and interpretation based on the assumption of the unity of humankind.

Needham continued to pursue the fundamental and universal principles of logic which structured ‘collective representations’ and he embraced the notion that certain symbols like fire and stone were ‘archetypal’ or ‘natural’ symbols; while Freeman had moved further down the road of psychoanalytical explanation, the importance of the unconscious processes of the mind and the principle that we share a universal biological heritage and character. His commitment to explanations in psychological and biological terms and to the complex interrelationships between culture and nature can also be seen in other publications on the Iban (see, for example, his analysis in ‘shaman and incubus’ 1967; and his interpretation of ‘severed heads that germinate’, 1979).

Second, there was the rather acrimonious criticism of Jérôme Rousseau’s paper on ‘Iban inequality’ (1980); Freeman’s Some reflections on the nature of Iban society (1981) addressed Rousseau’s argument in robust terms. Contrary to the position taken by Freeman and others that the Iban are ‘egalitarian’ and their society and culture characterised by a high degree of individualism, Rousseau proposed instead that the Iban possess an ‘unequal social structure’, though Rousseau recognised that they also hold to an ‘egalitarian ideology’ (1980: 61). Freeman, in his response, reaffirmed his earlier pronouncements on Iban equality, democracy, individualism and autonomy, but the interrelationships between equality and hierarchy are much more complex than we have hitherto allowed.

Therefore, following a flurry of publications on the Iban, and with the occasional return to his Iban field materials after the mid-1960s, Freeman then moved into other theoretical and ethnographic fields. He usually only revisited Borneo when he wanted to demonstrate the importance of an interactionist paradigm in relation to the interpretation or reinterpretation of the Iban ethnography, and to engage with other anthropologists who had restimulated his interest or had challenged some of his fundamental understandings of Iban society and culture.

But what the early anthropology of Borneo served to do, connected as it was to the wider world of anthropology through the work of Freeman and Needham in particular, and to some extent Leach, was to situate Borneo Studies within wider debates in anthropology. This is most obvious in Freeman’s arguments against what he viewed as the flawed position of ‘cultural determinism’ within anthropology and what he saw as its misguided and radical separation of culture from nature. Moreover, and with reference to Needham’s contribution to Borneo Studies and the wider field of anthropology we should note that Needham had read Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), and much else in French sociology, and was very well acquainted with Dutch or more particularly Leiden structuralism before he embarked on his fieldwork among the Penan.

Perhaps this structuralist perspective compromised, if this is the right word, his desire to pursue and develop his study of Penan social organisation. After Sarawak, Needham then went on to undertake research in Mamboru, Sumba, eastern Indonesia (where he was confronted with the kinds of kinships and marriage systems that he was then to spend a large part of his career analysing). And beyond that he undertook a wide range of total structural analyses (embracing both symbolic and social structures) in mainland and island Southeast Asia, as well as supervising a large number of research students who worked mainly in Indonesia and Malaysia and within the Needham-generated, Oxford-based structuralist tradition (see Forth 2010).

It is intriguing and instructive with regard to the social organisation of nomadic peoples that Needham, though he published much in article form on the Penan, never completed a monograph on them after submitting his DPhil thesis in Oxford on ‘The social organisation of the Penan: a Southeast Asia people’ (1953). When I asked him, in our correspondence about Borneo anthropology, how we, as anthropologists, might understand the Penan in organisational terms, he responded that we should present them ethnographically ‘in terms of a range of cultural particulars’. As Endicott has indicated, and as I discerned in my meetings with Needham, he was rather dissatisfied with his Penan materials (though he had a large amount of data) in providing him with the tools to construct a coherent and ordered social and cultural account, or, perhaps to put it another way, Penan social organisation did not lend itself to the kinds of structural analyses to which he committed much of his professional life; infuriatingly, for him they lacked social structure (Endicott 2007: 16–17). And in describing his doctoral thesis he indicated that it was ‘purely descriptive ethnography’, apart from the last chapter which compared the Penan with other hunting-gathering groups (Sather 2007). I was privileged when he showed me extracts of his handwritten manuscript on the Penan on which he was working in the 1980s during one of my visits to All Souls College; he was intending it to be the monograph which he had never managed to commit to publication. Unfortunately it is now lost to us.

Within the space of 10 years from his Penan doctoral thesis Needham had published his masterpiece of structural analysis of alliance systems in his Structure and sentiment: a test case in social anthropology (1962), essentially a sustained criticism of and the presentation of a radically different perspective from the work of George C. Homans and David M. Schneider in their Marriage, authority and final causes (1955). This was a statement of the fundamental differences between Anglo-French-Dutch structuralism and American cultural anthropology (and see Endicott 2007).

This connection to wider debates in the work of Freeman and Needham did not really happen to any extent through the work of Geddes, Morris and T’ien. They moved into other fields but this did not seem, in my view at least, to provide major contributions to anthropological theory. It did, however, present us with some important and substantial ethnographical material. Nor did they provide a training ground for research students in Borneo Studies; they invariably supervised students who were pursuing research in other parts of the world. This also applies to Needham and Leach. In the case of Needham, he supervised an astonishing range of doctoral work on Southeast Asia, though very little on Borneo, perhaps because, in part, the structural project in anthropology was not realisable in cognatic societies. Erik Jensen was an exception in that he provided one of the first major studies of aspects of Iban religion (1974; and see Iban belief and behaviour: a study of the Sarawak Iban, their religion and padi cult, 1968), though Freeman was to have a number of criticisms of it (1975: 275–88).

Leach also supervised a considerable number of research students, though again under Leach’s supervision only Jérôme Rousseau undertook field research in Borneo (1974), and Leach had adopted an important advisory and mentoring role in Derek Freeman’s work. It is worth noting here that Rousseau was another anthropologist who moved beyond Borneo from his Cambridge thesis ‘The social organisation of the Baluy Kayan’ (1974) to undertake more general theoretical work in the area of social inequality and stratification (for example, Rethinking social evolution: the perspective from middle range societies [2006, and also 2001]). Apart from his major monograph on Kayan religion (1998) Rousseau’s most significant contribution to the understanding of Borneo societies and their interrelationships (in a wide-ranging perspective on identity) must be Central Borneo: ethnic identity and social life in a stratified society (1990). This major excursion into the study of identity was prefigured in his important 1975 paper when he explored, among other things, the ‘folk’ classification of the Kayan in identifying and naming their neighbours (1975).

However, in making an assessment of this early period in Bornean anthropology, it was Freeman above all who left a very substantial legacy. A landmark event to my mind was the publication in the LSE Monographs series in 1970 of Report on the Iban. Prior to this, Freeman’s Iban agriculture (1955a) and his Report on the Iban of Sarawak (1955b) had been out of print for some time and difficult to obtain. He had also had a hand in supervising George Appell’s thesis on the Rungus Dusun, ‘The nature of social groupings among the Rungus Dusun of Sabah, Malaysia’ (1965) (which for me serves as a hallmark of the kind of work that was being done in Borneo in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s). Appell undertook field research on British North Borneo/Sabah as a research scholar at the Australian National University from 1959 until 1964. He received his PhD in 1966. Freeman was his supervisor but then, according to Appell, Freeman moved away from the kind of anthropology that Appell was doing (which was much more in the British tradition focusing on social structure, corporate groups and jural rules); John Barnes took over as supervisor.

Moreover, recent communication with George Appell in April-May 2013 has helped me develop my understanding of what he was attempting to achieve in his fieldwork among the Rungus (personal communication, ‘Response to King’, 7 May 2013). Above all he wanted to discover the social entities or units that the Rungus themselves identified in order to reflect the social world, including the jural domain of the people under study. He was especially concerned with the concepts of ‘corporation’ and ‘corporate group’, and argued that the major diagnostic feature of a corporate group presented by British social anthropologists—that these units existed in perpetuity—was a misleading characterisation, and that corporate groups should instead be defined by their capacity to ‘enter into jural relations’ (Appell 1983, 1984, 1990a). What he also draws attention to is that when he was working on these issues in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, unbeknown to him at that time, a group of Yale anthropologists including Ward H. Goodenough and William C. Sturtevant were working on the same set of problems (that is, the identification of local or indigenous concepts), though they were primarily concerned with the ‘cognitive world’ rather than that of social organisation. Furthermore, his focus on corporate groups, their definition and capacities became of crucial significance in another major area of work on which he was to focus, that of land tenure.

Among Appell’s important legacies, apart from a truly substantial corpus of published work on Borneo, was the founding of the Borneo Research Bulletin (Appell 1990b, c), the organisation of the biennial international conferences, the BRC’s publications series, the advocacy on behalf of Borneo, and the enormous range of networking that he has undertaken, in addition to the work of his daughters, Amity Appell Doolittle (see, for example, her sociohistorical study of property rights and power struggles in Sabah, 1999, 2005) and Laura P. Appell-Warren (see her thesis on the social construction of personhood among the Rungus, 1988, and her editing of Monica Freeman’s diaries, 2009), and his wife Laura W.R. Appell (see, for example, 1991; and with G.N. Appell 1993, and G.N. Appell and Laura W.R. Appell 1993, 2003) have been indispensable in Borneo Studies. Appell too connected Borneo anthropology to broader issues in anthropology (property rights, jural personalities, development and ethics in particular). I have already referred to his two important edited books on The societies of Borneo (1976a) and Studies in Borneo societies (1976b).

Like others before him Appell also engaged in wider debates within anthropology, particularly in what he referred to as ‘cognitive structuralism’ (1973), on the impacts of social change and modernisation on indigenous peoples (numerous papers), on the concept of ‘corporation’, corporate social groupings and cognatic descent, and on the ethics of anthropological enquiry [in, for example, papers in Current Anthropology (1971a), Human Organization (1971b) and Anthropological Quarterly (1976c), and his book Dilemmas and ethical conflicts in anthropological enquiry: a case book (1978)]. There is also his important co-edited book with Triloki N. Madan, in celebration of the work of his one-time doctoral supervisor and mentor, Derek Freeman: Choice and morality in anthropological perspective: essays in honor of Derek Freeman (1988). In that volume Appell, in part at least, returns to his long-established concerns with the relationships between jural relations, social isolates and social structure, but there he also investigates the ways in which choice, individual action and opportunity can be included within his paradigm of social isolates and social groupings, and specifically jural isolates, jural aggregates and jural collectivities (1988). Here too Appell contributed to more general debates in anthropology.

Freeman’s legacy in Iban studies was also continued through his research students who went on to produce important published work on the Iban: Michael Heppell (Iban social control: the infant and the adult, 1975), James Masing (The coming of the gods: an Iban invocatory chant [timang gawai amat], 1977, 1981), and Motomitsu Uchibori (The leaving of the transient world: a study of Iban eschatology and mortuary practices, 1978). Heppell, in particular, went on to undertake research in other parts of Borneo and to publish on a range of issues in Borneo anthropology. For a time Freeman also supervised Brian de Martinoir, a Belgian anthropologist (with no discernible result) and Roger D. Peranio, an American, who studied the Limbang Bisaya (but who returned to the United States from Australia without completing his thesis at that time, and eventually submitted it at Columbia University in 1977). I should also mention my own PhD student, Traude Gavin, who worked on Iban textiles in her Iban ritual textiles (2003/2004), and who received advice not only from Rodney Needham but especially from Derek Freeman, who kindly agreed to allow her access to his field notes, and to Monica’s, his wife’s drawings. Penelope Graham and her work on Iban shamanism also benefited from Freeman’s direction and support (1987).

2.6 Concluding Observations

The roughly two decades after the Second World War comprised a formative period in the development of the anthropology, and primarily a British-influenced social anthropology of Borneo (though focused on the British Crown Colony of Sarawak). These pioneer fieldworkers defined the major issues and formulated the concepts which were to preoccupy researchers during the next two decades and they set down the foundations for those of us who followed. But preoccupied as they were with Sarawak and to some extent Sabah they had little guidance to provide on the vast territories and the complex mixes of populations and cultures to the south in Kalimantan. We should also note that the scholarly terrain was set out and delimited by a handful of (male) anthropologists who undertook detailed ethnographic fieldwork. What was to follow was a burgeoning of research on Borneo, an increase in the number of female researchers and locally based social scientists, a widening of the range of perspectives, concepts and issues, as well as a movement into more applied, developmental issues, and some reliance on collaborative research. I shall take up the story again in Chap. 5 and commence and develop these themes from the later 1960s and 1970s.

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Chapter 3: Towards a Critical Alternative Scholarship on the Discourse of Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak

Zawawi Ibrahim

Abstract This chapter represents a critical overview of current scholarship on the issues of representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak. It examines works by anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines (political science, law and social work), established and young, local and from outside, whose contributions have been foregrounded on concrete empirical research. Inspired primarily by theoretical nuances from cultural studies, these alternative writings attempt to pluralise and decentre discourses on Sarawak society and culture. They seek to problematise and contest the dominant contemporary discourse by articulating fluidity, agency, alternative representations and reconstruction of identities from the margins of society and the nation-state. At the core of the discourse, these studies interrogate and problematise multiculturalism in the context of Sarawak from the concrete historical experience of specific ethnic communities. Since multiculturalism also touches on other relevant epistemological questions, issues of representation, identity formation, including ethnicity, logically become indispensable components and subtexts, requiring their own respective and autonomous space for deliberation.

Keywords Sarawak • Representation • Identity • Multiculturalism • Knowledge production • Critical scholarship

Zawawi Ibrahim (✉)

Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

e-mail: wzi1947@gmail.com

V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture,

Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_3

3.1 Introduction

The academic study of Sarawak society is undergoing a radical and significant change. For too long, our understanding of communities and their creative imaginings has been framed by notions of fixity. Mainstream perspectives have tended to homogenise complex realities and merely reproduce hegemonic texts and ideas. The result has been less than enlightening. It is not an exaggeration to say that analysis of Sarawak society had reached an impasse. By contrast, a new wave of scholarship has begun to take a more critical and self-reflexive approach, seeking to problematise and contest the dominant discourse of the day, the taken-for-granted knowledge(s) and even the ‘grand narratives’. This new wave—comprising both established scholars and a rising generation of writers—is exploring and articulating fluidity, agency, alternative representations and reconstruction of identities from the margins of society and the nation-state. The wider context of this critical approach is the willingness to revisit the notion of ‘multiculturalism’ at the level of the concrete, moving away from the political rhetoric and essentialising predisposition so often associated with the term. Thus an important thrust of the new scholarship is to problematise multiculturalism in the context of Sarawak’s experience. But ‘multiculturalism’ also touches on critical epistemological questions; hence the issue of ‘representation’ automatically becomes a relevant subtext. Likewise, the theme of identity formation, including ethnicity, is another indispensable component of multiculturalism, which requires its own space for deliberation.

It is obvious that in order to realise the core objectives of a new critical social science of Sarawak it is necessary to balance the demands of rigorous theoretical engagement as well as the findings of empirical research. This chapter provides an insight into how this task has been approached through a review of some of the best new critical scholarship that has emerged in recent years. By bringing together these two levels of engagement—the theoretical and the empirical—on the different ethnic communities in Sarawak through the works of anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines (political science, law and social work) the discussion here reflects on both the globality and locality of knowledge production on Sarawak society and culture.

3.2 Anthropological Representations

Sarawak was the object of study for some of the most celebrated anthropologists working within the British structural functionalist tradition in the middle decades of the twentieth century. They left a large body of work that reflects both the particular theoretical predispositions of structural functionalism as well as a good deal of ethnographic data gleaned from extended periods of fieldwork, the classic modus operandi of this intellectual tradition. One of the important questions raised in the critical, postmodernist ‘textual turn’ in anthropology is the question of anthropological representation of ‘the Other’. In the process, classical anthropological texts have been put under critical review and interrogated. Forms of orientalist representations of the Other, the legacy of colonial anthropology and other forms of colonial knowledge, postmodernist ethnographic narratives and representations— all these have become critical themes of the new discourse. One of the key elements of the new wave of critical scholarship, then, has been to deal explicitly with themes of colonial representations of Sarawak’s indigenous subjects through a dissection of major anthropological works. In this regard, the spotlight has been turned in particular on the oeuvre of Tom Harrisson and William Geddes; on gender representation in Sarawak ethnographies; and, on the discourse on indigenous representation of development.

3.2.1 Tom Harrisson: A Reluctant Colonial Anthropologist?

In the context of Sarawakian anthropology, there is none other than Tom Harrisson who is regarded as the most flamboyant among all of the colonial anthropologists ever to have set foot in Sarawak. In the conclusion of a major study of Harrisson, Robert Winzeler (2008: 42) passes the following verdict: ‘It seems safe to say that there will not be another Tom Harrisson in Sarawak’. Winzeler’s biographical foray, in which his archival reading of Harrisson’s correspondence with several social anthropologists is blended creatively with his reading of Judith Heimann’s The most offending soul alive: Tom Harrisson and his remarkable life (1998), provides a refreshing and innovative take on a colonial anthropologist by a fellow Western anthropologist, albeit from the postcolonial era. Winzeler’s study is an important exemplar in tracing the beginnings of anthropology in Sarawak, positioning eminent names of the early fieldwork-oriented twentieth-century British social anthropology, such as Raymond Firth and Edmund Leach in the colonial anthropological discourse, working under the aegis of the Colonial Social Science Research Council. Others such as Derek Freeman, William Geddes, Stephen Morris and Rodney Needham were also part of this early colonial configuration.

Winzeler (2008: 25ff.) subtly unravels the heterogeneous nature of this circle of colonial anthropologists and the intrigues and contestation from within the group, with Harrisson primarily being the point of reference. Contrary to conventional thinking, Winzeler deconstructs the assumption that colonial anthropology is a homogenous category; to this end, his revelations of some of the episodic ruptures between Harrisson and Freeman are especially telling. His portrayal of Harrisson is critical but balanced and fair. He problematises the representation of Harrisson as ‘a colonial man’ and successfully illuminates the different facets of the man—the person, the ethnographer and ethnologist, the archaeologist, also curator of the Sarawak Museum, and finally the anthropologist. Apart from shedding light on Harrisson’s personalised attachment and commitment to one particular social group, the Kelabit community in the Bario, we also sense the dilemma that Harrisson is somewhat of a reluctant writer-anthropologist, even if he leaves behind a legacy of his writings on the Kelabit and the Malays. While his publication on the Malays (The Malays of south-west Sarawak before Malaysia, 1970), amounting to a nearly 700-page monograph, was considered rather unexpected at the time, Winzeler (2008: 37) makes the astute observation that his ‘modest’ contribution on the Kelabit is a case of Harrisson knowing ‘too much rather than too little’.

Nevertheless, whatever there is of his legacy, Harrisson’s writings on these two communities have laid down a knowledge base from which the new generation of younger indigenous scholars are able to extend his works into contemporary Kelabit and Malay society of Sarawak.

3.2.2 William Geddes and ‘Remote’ Bidayuh?

A similar anthropological interrogation has recently been offered by Pamela Lindell’s (2008) study of the very much underwritten community of Land Dayaks or Bidayuh through the ethnographic writings of the anthropologist William Geddes. Geddes was working under Leach’s project on Bidayuh villages, sponsored by the Colonial Social Science Research Council. Lindell praises Geddes as ‘a great humanist’, a trait that apparently shone through his cinematographic works on the Bidayuh as well as on other communities outside Sarawak. She focuses her critique on Geddes’s representation of the Bidayuh through his two well-known anthropological works, The Land Dayaks of Sarawak (1954) and Nine Dayak nights (1973). According to Lindell (2008: 48), in choosing to conduct his research among the Bidayuh of the Upper Sadong area of Serian, Geddes opted for ‘remoteness’ and the ‘native exoticism’ that came with it, ignoring Leach’s (1950) earlier recommendation for him to choose ‘a community undergoing social stress as a result of outside influences’. Geddes’s choice was perhaps drawn by the pursuit of the ‘authentic’, based on the Euro-American presumption that the so-called communities in ‘isolation’ are ‘more valid’ or ‘credible’ than those experiencing externally generated social changes. Indeed, as Lindell (2008: 50–54) argues, the representation of the Bidayuh in history has been rooted in dominant negative colonial stereotypes, contributed by the prejudices of the Brooke-era administrators, travellers and scholars beholden to the ‘shy and withdrawn’ imaging of the Bidayuh whom they felt lacked the fascination of the ‘gregarious and ferocious warriors’ of the Iban. The colonial image of the Bidayuh’s loss of ‘authenticity’ has also to do with their long exposure to contact with outsiders, either by their coastal location or their proximity to mines or townships such as Bau or the capital city Kuching.

In the case of Geddes’s choice of his fieldwork in the ‘remote’ Mentu Tapuh of the Upper Sadong, Lindell points out exactly where Geddes went off the mark in his representation of the Land Dayaks (Bidayuh). She takes issue with Geddes’s contention that ‘Land Dayak society is fundamentally individualistic and lacking in community cohesion’. The author is especially critical of Geddes’s inability to explain these issues in relation to the impact of Brooke’s colonialism on these so-called ‘remote’ and ‘traditional’ communities. First, there was the outlawing of headhunting since the beginning of the Brooke regime, which meant that ‘the community had probably changed a great deal in the hundred years of colonial rule that had gone by before Geddes arrived’, including the decline in the use of the head house for ceremonies. Second, there is the glaring omission in Geddes’s explanation of the exposure and/or conversion to Christianity that had impacted on

Mentu Tepuh and the role that Christianity played in the daily lives of the villagers. Hence, Geddes’s failure to explain the lack of community ties (‘extreme individualism’) of the Bidayuh as a product of the ‘conflicts between Christians and non-Christians’ affecting ‘Bidayuh villages since the beginnings of missionary activity’, or the sociocultural stress caused by conversion, rather than something that arose out of the innate deficiencies of Bidayuh traditional social structure as such. Lindell’s commentary alerts us to the fact that the glory sought by traditional anthropologists to bask in the rite of passage of fieldwork in the favour of remote and traditional communities is no substitute for analytical rigour in anthropological modes of explanation. In retrospect, it is clear that Geddes was still caught in the theoretical trappings of his time, i.e. the old structural functionalist anthropological representation of the ‘primitive’ as viable ‘authentic’ and ‘credible’ traditional communities, ignoring the realities that these societies had long been subjected to the colonial cultural, administrative and political order of the day.

3.2.3 Reflecting on Gender Representations

The new wave of critical anthropology has not only focused on the particular perspectives of individual writers but has also cast a critical gaze on the various thematic lacunae in the anthropological text. In this regard, Fiona Harris (2008) offers an illuminating and reflexive look at the representation of gender in Sarawak ethnographic studies. She finds that except for an edited volume published in the early 1990s by the Borneo Research Council that deals with gender (Sutlive 1991) ‘little attention is paid to gender issues in Sarawak ethnographies’, and even in that publication ‘many of the contributors failed to engage with the anthropology of gender to any extent’. Following Jane Atkinson’s (1990, 1992) lead as it relates to other parts of Southeast Asia, Harris agrees that her reading of the Sarawak literature also shows that it is in the area of religious practice and ritual activity, the primary domain of power and prestige-making, that gender relations and ‘difference’ are best articulated. She cites ethnographic texts on male-dominated prestige-making processes, through Iban headhunting and the institution of bejalai. The notion of ‘travel’, it seems, whether it is in the traditional mode in quest of shamanic practice or, as in the ‘modern’ context, ‘to seek fame and fortune through travel and migrant labour ’, always gives both knowledge and prestige to men to the exclusion of women. This is a form of enclosure which is supported by ‘culturally constructed notions of morality’ which stigmatise women (Harris 2008: 60–61).

Considering the dearth of ethnography on gender in Sarawak, Harris (2008: 62) feels that the question of gender representation should best be discussed in the light of social change, to show how ‘gender relations ... react and adapt to wider social processes’. From here, she moves on to her own empirical data, based in Kampung Gayu, a Bidayuh community in the Padawan area of Sarawak. She explores a society undergoing rapid change, articulated through education, literacy, new religious rituals, accessibility to urban townships, increasing dealings with government agencies and officialdom, declining traditional padi-related activities, an expanding cash economy manifested by new trading and marketing opportunities, the emergence of salaried occupations and consumerism. It is a situation in which ‘the movement of people and commodities between town and kampung flowed back and forth, bringing new ideas and more continuous contact with other ways of life’. By engaging herself with the question of change, she is able to capture what Geddes was not able to do, and explore how ‘the complexity of gender relations is revealed in the way that this is crosscut and infiltrated by “town” and discourses of local models of “modernity”’. In this way gender analysis moves away from ‘monolithic representations’ and embraces ‘several representations of gender’ and ‘multiple perspectives’ linked to variables such as class, age and other indicators.

Harris (2008: 64–68) also highlights early writings and colonial views on indigenous women and the male-biased nature of colonial policy on missionary education and conversion. But the realisation that control over women was crucial to the male converts’ communities led to the opening of mission schools for girls in order to provide Christian wives for the boys. Having observed that women are clearly becoming the mainstay of the congregation of the ‘new religion’ in present-day Gayu, part of her discussion explores gender representation in the ritual practices in both the domain of the ‘traditional religion’ (related to the role of both male and female dukun in the padi harvest rituals) and the Catholic rituals of the village congregation. While noting the relevance of ‘complementarity’ rather than ‘asymmetry’ as being the usual markers of gender relations in Southeast Asia, she notes both domains reveal the presence of ‘gender inequality’ and ‘difference’ with women ‘being the hardest workers in ritual terms’. In the modern congregation, while the males dominate the role of the prayer leaders, hence are more prestigious, Harris is tempted to render a more ‘agency’ proactive interpretation to the role of women as ‘audiences’ of ritual performance, as well as by being the ‘primary agents in maintaining catholic families’ through their participation in the congregation with their children, i.e. as representatives of the household. She notes that, in the context of Gayu village, Catholicism is being caught in the flow of change and urban influence, with education and ‘modern’ occupation fast becoming the new markers for success and status, regardless of gender. As a result, certain ambiguities are emerging (such as the presence of ‘a single female prayer leader’), paving the way for a new strategy for women to negotiate ‘modernity’ or a new vision of identity.

3.2.4 Indigenous Storytelling and Representation of Alternative Development Narratives

Against the dominant state-capital narrations of development, couched in the language of ‘modernisation’, my own work attempts to present a postmodernist-cum- storytelling ethnography with a particular focus on Penan deterritorialisation (Zawawi 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2015). The fundamental premise here is that indigenous narratives are equally capable of generating their own legitimate forms of knowledge and discourse on development (Zawawi and Noorshah 2012a). By working on the Penan ethnographic base that has been paved by scholars such as Jayl Langub (1996) and Peter Brosius (1986, 1997a, b, 1999), I foreground my analysis of Penan deterritorialisation based on fieldwork observation in the Ulu Baram area of Sarawak, via a representation of an overview of the impact of the state-sponsored modernisation process (read: ‘developmentalism’) on the Penan traditional landscape and communitas (Zawawi 2008). The historical perspective of this deterritorialisation evolved together with the division of Borneo between three different nation-states, with Sarawak being part of a colonial governance system from the Brooke raj to Crown colony status, and ultimately as a state of the independent Malaysian nation-state (Zawawi 2015). Penan deterritorialisation intensified under the impact of the both the Sarawak and Malaysian developmental states, especially with the large-scale logging of the rainforest, which was traditionally the home of the nomadic Penan. In the final phase of this process, the Penan, who were initially given a special protected subject status by the colonial rulers, began to be viewed as an object of development, being officially perceived as ‘an ungrounded people who wander aimlessly through the forest in search of food, living a hand-to-hand mouth existence, a people without history and a sense of place’ (Brosius 2000: 22). My argument on the process of Penan being deterritorialised from ‘locality’ and ‘sustainability’ is empowered by the storytelling of Penghulu James, who offers ‘a representation of an indigenous notion of place, space and territory’ in defence of Penan claims to ‘stewardship’ over the land despite their traditional status as non-cultivators, to contest the current bureaucratic rational-legal and official discourse which governs the present Penan landscape (Zawawi 2008: 86–87). I am optimistic for the role of a decolonising anthropology in mediating knowledge from the margins, to narrate not only the realities of deterritorialisation but also, and more importantly, the reterritorialising imaginings of indigenous society. In this context, I perceive Penan storytelling as ‘agency’ (Zawawi 2013: 311n2), as an attempt to subvert colonialising modes of epistemology and their ‘regimes of truth’ (after Foucault). This constitutes a crucial alternative indigenous project of research to contest orientalism and its representation of colonised and indigenous people (Smith 1999; Zawawi and Noorshah 2012b).

3.3 Problematising Multiculturalism

In my overview, I have noted how the more fluid character of Sarawak’s multiculturalism often stands in stark contrast to the more ‘compartmentalised’ character of peninsular Malaysia’s pluralism (Zawawi 2008), an observation that has also been acknowledged in Ien Ang’s review of Asian multiculturalism (Ang 2010: 9). It is also interesting to note that compared to what happens at the national level, public pronouncements at the Sarawak state level of official discourse seldom propagate the idea of a ‘dominant culture’ or ‘dominant ethnie’. Nor does the reference to ‘national

culture’ or ‘national culture policy’ (which in the national context has a Malay dominant ethnie connotation) often figure in its authority-defined political narratives. Instead, Sarawak seems to bask in its pluralism and intercultural fluidity. At the official level, the presence of multicultural symposiums, regularly sponsored by the state government for instance, is a fair testimony of this. It may start off with a major one in which all the different ethnic communities participate. This would then be followed by a series of seminars, each representing a different indigenous ‘ethnic’/ ‘tribal’ community of subgroups, e.g. the Iban Bidayuh, Orang Ulu, Melanau, Melayu, and so on. Special workshop series on traditional music and instruments or dance forms of the various ethnic/indigenous communities are also sponsored and held on a continuous basis, with a view towards preserving Sarawak’s multicultural heritage. Such forums also provide regular outlets for intellectual discourses on relevant aspects of Sarawak indigenous cultures.

But such a seemingly harmonious portrayal of Sarawakian multiculturalism has to be historically grounded since Sarawak is part and parcel of a wider Malaysian nation-state, in which there is another layer of power at the centre. The incorporation of Sarawak into the modern nation-state, and hence the making of the nation itself, has emerged out of a struggle—a contestation between periphery and centre, between community and state or nation. Analysing these sites of struggle, bringing to bear a cultural studies perspective on the relationship between power and the production of meanings surrounding these sites of struggle, is a task that is equally imperative in any attempt at problematising and explaining multiculturalism in contemporary Sarawak.

3.3.1 Everyday Multiculturalism and Selling Multiculturalism in Sarawak

A number of writers have attempted to examine the fluidity of multiculturalism in Sarawak at the level of the community as well as its threshold points. In one interesting example, Welyne Jeffrey Jehom (2008) explores the advantages and disadvantages of colonial policies in relation to fostering or inhibiting Sarawakian multicultural practices of the past and their implications for present-day pluralism. She describes, in particular, the implications arising from headhunting and tribal warfare, trading contacts between the Chinese and the indigenous people, and intermarriages across ethnic groups. In this regard, she is especially critical of the impact of some of the Brooke policies. She then proceeds to analyse her own fieldwork sample based on contemporary Sarawak and confirms that there is still continuing tolerance of intermarriages, and that tolerance has also been extended into other domains of public space and cultural practices, even religion. However, she also notes possible areas of pluralist contestations especially in the field of business and notably the Bumiputera versus non-Bumiputera (Chinese) dichotomy. Nonetheless, her general conclusion is that a sense of pragmatism and goodwill seems to prevail.

Nowhere has there been a more socially engineered promotion and representation of Sarawak multiculturalism and its ‘multiethnicities’ than in the business and public space of tourism. Hence the Sarawak Cultural Village, which was officially launched by the state government in 1990, is an interesting showpiece selling Sarawak to tourists as well as representing Sarawakian multiculturalism, both in terms of its architectural derivatives as well as its regular multicultural stage performances and events. The Korean scholar, Kim Yongjin (2008), takes up the challenge to engage with the critics that ‘the representation in the Sarawak Cultural Village has failed to fulfil its mission of reflecting “real lives” of ethnic groups’. Based on his research, he reviews the discourse of Sarawak Cultural Village’s representation by way of three thematic aspects: the question of ‘authenticity’, the relationship between culture and tourism and multiculturalism as national culture.

He argues that ‘dubious authenticity and ambiguity of multiculturalism do not engender feelings of disgrace to actual performers’, that ‘ethnic categorisations and cultural representations are situated in a “presumed dimension”’ which ‘provides enough buffering space for discrepancy between form and content’ (Kim 2008: 116). On the third theme, Kim detects a discrepancy. There exists the possibility of the Malay/Islam-centred perspective of national culture being decentred and rendered by a different mode of localised representation and meanings. Here the dominant ethnie nuances and the discourse of national culture could be reappropriated and reinterpreted by non-Malay indigenous Sarawakians to gel with the specificities of Sarawak realities—that in the context of Sarawakian Malaysian multiculturalism, it is the non-Malay and non-Muslim Bumiputera majority who are at the centre of Sarawak culture. But again, since the cultural dimension is ‘presumed’, ‘[i]ndividual agents neither internalise them as exact reflections of reality nor negate them as simple fabrications’. Hence different positions and perspectives (including the official discourse) can ‘coexist without any overt contradiction’ and allow the Sarawak Cultural Village form of multiculturalism ‘to continue to persist in the face of logical tensions and conflicting interpretations’ (ibid.).

3.3.2 Multiculturalism Perspectives from the Chinese ‘Centre’ and the Indigenous ‘Periphery’

The plural society conception first advanced in J.S. Furnivall’s (1948) work on Burma and Java suggested that different ethnic groups only meet in the market place. But this flawed conception begs the question of what happens beyond the market place in the postcolonial era of the modern nation-state. In this context, the positioning of the ‘Chinese question’ in the evolving multiculturalism of Sarawak society has to be problematised in the same way as the discourse of the ‘indigenous’. From a historical perspective, it involves engaging with a number of issues: contesting identities and nationalisms; modulating an initial homeland, immigrant and/or business-based trajectory to the imperatives of new-found citizenry or civil society claims; and, the nuances of indigenous pluralism of the host society throughout both its colonial and postcolonial phases.

In light of these questions, Voon Jan Cham (2008) has conducted path-breaking research that offers a Chinese perspective on Sarawakian multiculturalism. Voon foregrounds the Chinese discourse on multiculturalism through both the Brooke and the post-Brooke eras. He throws interesting light onto the dynamic synergies by which the Chinese have attempted to engage with issues of colonialism, Sinocentricity, religions, socio-economy and education under the Brooke regimes. In the post-Brooke period, right up to the post-Malaysia formation, he traces the political evolution of Chinese thinking and ideological positions, and the competing ideologies of ‘multiracial nationalism’ and ‘communal politics’ in the evolving multicultural politics of Sarawak society. In the process, he pays tribute to the works of Wu An, a Sarawak Chinese nationalist poet and the spirit of SA’ATi or ‘sate hati’ (literally ‘one heart’), symbolising unity in the context of Sarawak multiculturalism. Voon also opens up an analysis of the ethnic Taiwanese scholar, Wu Ju Hui, the author of Hua Chiau analysis, who has discoursed on the question of the overseas Chinese in their struggle in mediating their identities between the homeland and ‘the local integrative or assimilative nationalism’.

By contrast, Poline Bala (2008), another younger indigenous scholar, explores what the conception of ‘nation’ and its notion of ‘national culture’ or ‘national integration’ (with its constructed model of ‘multiculturalism’) means to the indigenous minorities inhabiting the margins of the Malaysian nation-state, in this particular case, the Kelabit of the Bario highlands of Sarawak. Taking a lead from Janet Hoskins (1987), she utilises the Kelabit experience as a way to explore ‘heterogeneity in experiences, meanings and historicities within Malaysia’s nation-building process’. She initially locates the Kelabit sense of place in the context of a pre-nation-state localised multiculturalism, undefined by any official political boundaries. However, the aftermath of their active participation in the Indonesia-Malaysian confrontation marks the turning point in the Kelabit perception of a fixed political and cultural unit affirming modern state rule ‘to crystallise a new set of ethnic and national identities in the Kelabit highlands’ (Bala 2008: 143).

Overnight, the Kelabit became statistically defined as ‘the Other indigenous category’, a part of the Bumiputera minority, competing for political status and economic resources as other Sarawakian indigenous groups and dominated by a national discourse at the centre of power which gives prominence to Malayness and Islamness. Bala then goes on to foreground the fact that in contrast to the dominance of official Islam at the level of the national, ‘Christianity offers the Kelabit a distinctly non-Muslim and (non) Malay ethnic/religious identity’. As a result, ‘Christian practice and belief cannot be empirically separated from notions of contemporary Kelabit ethnicity’ (ibid.: 146). With the new religion also comes the acquisition of modern knowledge and skills through formal education. Bala argues that the latter, being a part of the Malaysian nation-state’s development apparatus, has been reappropriated by the Kelabit to strengthen their identity by ‘manipulating’ this medium to attain social mobility, ‘power, class and cultural status’ for themselves in order to be at par or excel in the new modernity framed by the

Malaysian nation-building project. This process is taking place in a context where the Kelabit people have been relegated to the status of a political, economic and ethnic minority. Bala suggests that it is the same reason that explains the recent Kelabit success in embracing the eBario ICT-based project for community development in the Kelabit highlands (ibid.: 149).

Ramy Bulan—a Kelabit like Poline Bala and a scholar of law who has been researching on customary law and issues of legal pluralism related to Malaysian indigenous communities—brings to bear a very crucial dimension of multiculturalism, the place of customary law or adat as a viable and sustainable mechanism in settling conflicts of the present-day Kelabit community living in the Bario highlands. In her research Bulan (2008) outlines the finer details of customary law as an aspect of restorative justice, the constitution in the native courts and its procedures, the different forms of mediation in resolving Kelabit conflicts and disputes, and finally the enforcement of adat through the ritual, restitutionary and compensatory payments. She concludes by emphasising the fluidity and adaptability of customary law to the changing realities of modern society and how for the Kelabit longhouse communities in the highlands adat is still the ‘foundation for community solidarity, survival and continuity’. But she also asks a pertinent question on the current dilemma of Kelabit modernity: ‘As many Kelabit families settle in urban areas because of job commitments and their children grow up with a different kind of legal system, how relevant would the customary law system be to them? To what extent would Gerunsin Lembat’s (1993) notion of adat as ‘source of identity’ apply to them?’ (Bulan 2008: 170). Indeed, Bulan’s question equally underscores the predicament of other indigenous communities in having to balance adat with other sources of identity that emanate from Sarawak’s current modernity and state of multiculturalism.

3.3.3 On Developing a ‘Multiculturalism’ Research Methodology

For practitioners in social science who are not only involved in the knowledge production of multiculturalism but also have to engage with multiculturalism as an applied form of knowledge and social practice (such as in social work), it is equally imperative to develop an effective methodology which will enable them to transverse and mediate the multicultural border crossings of the different cultures and ethnicities with whom they have to negotiate on an everyday basis. It is with reference to the above contextualisation and objectives that Ling How Kee’s (2008) research agenda reflects on her recent research experience of fieldworking in Sarawak to illuminate issues of multiculturalism in social work practice and subsequent knowledge development in the discourse.

Between the two extremities of the ‘outsider perspective’ (starting with Western social work theory and practice to be indigenised to non-Western settings) and the ‘authentication position’ (which is grounded in local worldviews and cultures), Ling opts for a third position, ‘the international, multicultural position [which] draws attention to the “monocultural” view of both the indigenisation and au- thenticisation positions as well as highlights the changing and dynamic nature of culture’. It is a position which adopts the notion of a ‘fluid boundary of the self ... neither that of an insider nor that of an outsider’. She propagates a multicultural practice which takes place ‘in the borderland of a “third” culture ... created by the interaction between the cultures of the social worker and the clients ... which is neither completely that of the informants’ nor the researcher’s culture, but a third culture’. For Ling, when social work moves across the border, it is imperative that ‘the process does not lead to the displacement, marginalisation or domination of the worldviews of local people’. But at the same time, multicultural practice is also ‘a negotiation of similarities and differences, of dialogic exchange in establishing relationship, rather than a mere application of culturally sensitive techniques’. Hence it must allow for the emergence of ‘a borderland in which the culture of the worker and the culture of the clients are in transaction. It is through this borderland that mutual engagement and mutual learning take place’ (ibid.: 186–87).

3.4 Identity and Ethnicity

The other key element in the discourse on Sarawak multiculturalism focuses explicitly on the issue of identity (ethnicity) as reflected by the concrete experience of ethnic communities undergoing social change. Of course the theoretical literature on identity and ethnicity abounds, is diverse and ‘rich for the taking’. Identity is, after all, always evolving and ‘always in the process of formation’ (Hall 2000). But at any particular point in time, it must be historically positioned and contextualised in order to pinpoint the specific socioeconomic and political forces responsible for the particular way in which identity is expressed. Again the relationship between identity and ethnicity is one that has to be problematised and explained rather than assumed. Moreover, there are many levels which locate its articulation, arising either from basic community interactions and dynamics of change on the ground, or as an outcome of the impact of the new modernity, to something that has to be explained in terms of different modes or wider units of contestation.

3.4.1 Iban ‘Mediated’ Nationalism in ‘Centre-Periphery’ Contestation

One prominent scholar who has been grappling with these questions over the past two decades is John Postill. His work moves away from a constructivist to a culturalist and historical approach to ethnicity in underpinning the mediated production of Iban ethnicity and nationalism which emerged during the first phase of media production (1954–1976) in Sarawak (Postill 2008; see also Postill 1998).

He predicates his analysis on the premise that a main site of struggle between centre and periphery is language and ‘that the Iban and other Dayaks, who lack the “political shell” of the state are losing out to the politically stronger peninsular Malays and their Sarawak allies’. Postill (2008: 198ff.) explores in detail the setting up and the subsequent development of two forms of media by the colonial government, Iban Radio in 1954 and the Borneo Literature Bureau in 1958. Both forms of media emphasised ‘the importance of the Iban language’ and ‘preserved ... the uniqueness of a reinvented cultural heritage’ (ibid.: 214). He sees this first phase of media production as ‘one of new opportunities for a generation of young Iban men who had acquired literacy skills at the mission schools and were eager to build a “literate sophisticated high culture” (after Gellner 1983) combining cultural materials from their colonial masters and longhouse elders’. The Borneo Literature Bureau became an important source of textualisng Iban folklore and its disappearing oral tradition which offered ‘unparalleled insights into Iban philosophy and epistemology’ (see Sutlive 1988). Postill highlights especially the works of Benedict Sandin and Andria Ejau, through the print media of the Bureau, as representing ‘two poles of the modernist-traditionalist continuum running through the entire field of Iban media production’: these were products of ‘modern Sarawak’ which ‘bolstered.the generic divide’ that ‘has indigenous, pre-state roots’ and gave a sense of revitalised identity to Iban ethnicity and ‘nationalism’ in the emerging postcolonial society (Postill 2008: 206ff.). With Sarawak independence through Malaysia in 1963, there also came a new national language policy which was eventually implemented through the setting up of a new national education system and other attendant agencies. One such institution is Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), Malaysia’s language planning and development agency, which took over the Borneo Literature Bureau in 1977. While Iban Radio, which ‘posed less of a threat to the fledgling Malaysian nation state.was allowed to live’, Iban print media which foregrounds ‘a minority’s ethnohistory and drama.lost out to the new national language imported from Malaya’. Citing Gellner again, Postill reflects that ‘the Iban teachers lacked an Iban state, for a literate culture.cannot normally survive without its own political shell, the state’ (ibid.: 216–217).

3.4.2 Urban Dayak Predicaments of Modernity and Identity

By contrast, Clare Boulanger’s (2008) research ‘fast forwards’ the Dayaks beyond the nationalism of the past into the dilemma of the new modernity, symbolised by urban living which sets them apart from their rural and traditional past. Her project is simple: ‘to understand how ethnic identity might be changing as more and more Dayaks—the indigenous, non-Muslim peoples of Sarawak—were working and residing in urban environments that were far different from the hinterland spaces in which many Dayaks grew up, and from which ethnic definitions largely continued to be drawn’ (ibid.: 230). Boulanger offers a postmodernist reading of the fragmented and differentiated narratives coming out of her fieldwork notes and ethnographic research undertaken with urban Dayaks (Bidayuh, Iban, Orang Ulu groups and Melanau) in Kuching, the capital city of Sarawak. The author argues that the urban Dayaks are not only able to compartmentalise the past—which was identified with being ‘left behind’, ‘backward belief ’, ‘indigenous religious practices’, ‘frozen’ custom, ‘waste(ing) time’, a ‘not true’ culture, and being ‘entangled’ in ancestors’ things—but they ‘also conform to the modernist view that time proceeds only from the present into the future’. She sees urban residents ‘desperately’ seeking ‘to distinguish themselves from their rural fellows whose futures seemed blighted by the inability to move forward in time’. As the ‘wall thickens’ between past and present, continuity with the past ‘was only acceptable as long as it could be shown that the seeds of the modern were evident in Dayak history’. Indeed, should such a heritage ‘continue to be seen as a liability’, urban Dayaks may be tempted to firm up an ‘ethnic barrier ’ between themselves and their fellow Dayaks by reconstructing other forms of identity. Rather than ‘disowning the past’, the latter choice seems ‘healthier ’ as it will render less ‘psychic damage’ to the Dayak urban mind. While the Christian concept of ‘forgiveness’ provides a way out through ‘repentance’, the Dayak’s ‘malevolent past’ associated with ‘such monstrous sins as headhunting will continue to well up from the past and despoil the present and future’. While wishful thinking may articulate a desire for some to remain pagan into the future (‘because if everybody is Christian ... then we will lose our custom. And when custom is lost, then our identity will be lost’), Boulanger gently reminds us that ‘[t]ruly modern people cannot have their past and future too’ (ibid.: 237).

3.4.3 On Being Penan: Penan Belangan Ethnicity in the Asap Resettlement

A rather different take on the issue of changing ethnic identities is offered by Kelvin Egay (2008) whose empirically grounded work explores the status of Penan Belangan contesting notions of identity as they became relocated in the Sungai Asap resettlement scheme after September 1999 with other displaced indigenous groups including the Kayan. Some time from 1910 to 1915 the Penan Belangan had moved from a former nomadic way of life from the Batu Laga highlands in the Bunut territory to migrate to the Balui region, where they began to interact with the Kayan and partially began to adopt their culture of rice wine brewing, swidden agriculture and growing tobacco. In the late 1950s or early 1960s they finally moved to settle permanently in Long Belangan until they were finally relocated in the Sungai Asap resettlement to make way for the proposed Bakun hydroelectric project.

The Kayan-Penan Belangan relationship was traditionally grounded in a patron-client nexus, in which the Penan occupied a standing in the highly stratified dominant Kayan society by serving as prized hunters for the Kayan aristocrats. Although the relationship was both politically and economically significant to both communities, and although almost all Penan communities in the Belaga area are now leading a sedentary agricultural life, the Kayan perception of the Penan has not changed. They are still treated as ‘social inferiors’, stigmatised by the Kayan externally imposed ethnic taxonomy on all nomadic groups as ‘Punan’, a terminology which is also adopted by Penan to delineate themselves from the non-Penans, albeit as subordinates in social hierarchy of the indigenous social status structure.

Here the concept of ‘being Penan’ for the Penan Belangan simultaneously revolves around the dichotomy: ‘not real Penan’ and ‘retaining Penan identity’. In theoretically grappling with these empirical ambiguities of Penan identity, Egay finds that Fredrik Barth’s (1969) famous notion of ethnicity can no longer accommodate the complexities of being Penan as the structural bases (Barth’s ‘organisational vessel’ concept) of the boundary have already become undermined and weakened as a consequence of social change, as Belangan Penan moved from nomadic hunter-gathering to a cultivator, sedentary economic base. Following the lead by Anthony Cohen (1985), Egay explores Penan ethnic identity and its sustainability in the realm of symbolic meaning rather than structural boundary. He opts for Shamsul A.B.’s (1998) approach on identity built upon the authority-defined and everyday-defined social reality discourse. Hence Kayan imposition of ‘being Penan’ (through the label ‘Punan’) on the Penan Belangan is centred on an authority-defined axis, being situated along the historical sedentary- nomadic Kayan-Penan relationship of the past. This has been challenged by Penan’s own authority-defined version of being Penan as sedentary agriculturalists which is vehemently denied by the Kayan. The contestation remains unresolved at this level, in which two authority-defined versions of Penan identity coexist. However, at the level of the everyday-defined reality, ‘being real Penan’ has also assumed a life of it own, providing a set of independent meanings and sustainability to Penan’s own version of identity regardless of and independent of the Kayan authority-defined one (Egay 2008: 252–253).

3.4.4 Contesting Sarawak Malayness

It is perhaps surprising that the study of the Malay communities of Sarawak has been a rather underresearched subject. Noburu Ishikawa is a scholar who is seeking to rectify this state of affairs (Ishikawa 2000, 2008a, b). In his most recent intervention, he traces the colonial production of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in relation to Malay ethnicity, the outcome of which is the rise to cultural prominence of the perabangan Malay (Ishikawa 2008b). Their status was backed by the Brooke colonial regime; they could apparently claim ancestry to aristocratic lineage and were clustered around Kuching. In contrast, there has also emerged an othered category of Malays, the non-perabangan: these comprise the majority of Malay coastal and riverine dwellers whose main subsistence activity is fishing as well as a not so well-known category of ‘land-oriented Malay peasants’, whose engagement with inland swidden agriculture ‘has generated categorical confusion as to their ethnic affiliation vis-à-vis fellow Dayak cultivators’. According to Ishikawa, ‘in the ethnic discourse moulded over one and a half centuries of Sarawak history, rural Malay agriculturalists have been doubly peripheralised in relation to the urban Malays as well as to fisherfolk in the Sarawak River delta’ (ibid.: 259). He calls for a deconstruction of the dominant ethnic discourse of urban Malays as a point of reference in studies of Sarawak Malay ethnicity.

Faisal Hazis (2008) takes up the challenge raised by Ishikawa by following where Tom Harrisson had left off, to further research on the coastal Malay community in southwestern Sarawak. The study which was initiated under the programme of Nusantara Studies at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, focuses on 14 Malay villages involving about 800 respondents. Faisal provides a glimpse of contemporary Malay life in southwestern Sarawak and concludes that despite the ‘impressive’ indicators of ‘economic growth’ of the state, ‘the coastal Malays in southwestern Sarawak have not been fully integrated into the mainstream economic development, hence hindering real change from taking place’. In engaging the question of Malayness Faisal revisits several competing discourses on Malayness at the level of the ‘authority-defined’ (after Shamsul 1998): the colonial knowledge base propagated by colonial historians and writers during the Brooke period; the local Malay perspective expressed through the early and later writings of Abang Yusuf Puteh (especially contesting the normative understanding of ‘masuk Melayu’ via conversion to Islam); Harrisson’s writings on the Malays; and finally the textual definition of Malayness as adopted by the Federal Constitution which became applicable to Sarawak Malays after the formation of Malaysia. Faisal argues that these ideas of Malayness are by no means homogenous. Nor does the official stipulation of Malayness imply compliance at the level of the everyday-defined. He then examines the various nuances of Malayness at the level of the everyday-defined, firstly by contesting Islam as the marker of Malayness, especially in the examples pertaining to the Melanau and Chinese Muslims in the research sample. He highlights the power shifts between the Melanau and the Malay Muslims as being responsible for the separate assertion of their respective Muslim-cum-ethnic identities, in spite of their similar religion. In the case of the Malay-Chinese Muslim relations, while conversion, intermarriage and adoption are common channels of ‘entering Malayness’, it is normally the offspring who will be regarded as Malay (Faisal 2008: 280–285).

Loyalty to perentah (or kerajaan, literally government) is also traditionally regarded as a marker of Malayness. It was an idea of Malayness constructed by colonialism which has also been appropriated by the ruling party of the postcolonial Sarawak government. But the idea of loyalty also preceded colonial rule, with the Malay datus, the Malay aristocrats (perabangan) acting as the Sultan of Brunei’s representatives, becoming the early source of loyalty for the Malays. However, in the current period of contemporary politics, Faisal questions loyalty to perentah as being based on ‘blind loyalty’. Instead he points to ‘the Malay struggle to survive in the political culture of contemporary Malaysian polity [that] has somewhat shaped and nurtured these subordinate values of “loyalty” to perentah’. But economic dissatisfaction over the ‘slow pace of development’, ‘the fear that their land would be taken over by the government’—all these, according to Faisal, would also assure that ‘(d)espite the prevalence of this docile culture, some Malays including those in southwestern Sarawak are contesting this colonial idea of Malayness’ (ibid.: 291).

3.5 Conclusion

As we have shown, while the new wave of critical scholarship demarcates themes of representation and identity from the discourse of multiculturalism proper, in reality multiculturalism is a terrain of ongoing synergy which involves constant cross-referencing on questions of representation and identity. Theoretically, the new critical perspective rejects not only orientalist and colonial modes of representation but also statist and developmentalist forms of grand narratives. It problematises the type of multiculturalism founded on the old assimilationist and liberal pluralism paradigm, based on the maxim: e pluribus unum, ‘out of many, one’. Instead, it moves towards a multiculturalism based on ‘a multiplicity of legitimate cultural cores or centers’, founded on a ‘brave new world’ social imaginings and ethos: ‘in one, many’ (Kottak and Kozaitis 1999: 49). In this context, it pushes for a reconceptualisation of the existing power relations between cultural communities, hence challenging the hierarchy that privileges some communities to be at the centre while others are relegated to the periphery.

As the new scholarship engages with knowledge based on research, it foregrounds representations and identities in their respective concrete historical formation and trajectories of nation-state-making processes which have given rise to the current state of Malaysian multiculturalism. But at the same time, it recognises that multiculturalism stands for ‘a wide range of social articulations, ideals and practices’ and ‘describes a variety of political strategies and processes’ (of governance and management of diversity) ‘which are everywhere incomplete’ (Hall 2000: 210). In its ideal vision of praxis, many of the critical scholars propose a notion of ‘radical multiculturalism’ which is ‘polycentric’ whose raison d’être is ‘about dispersing power, about empowering the disempowered, about transforming subordinating institutions and discourses.... It thinks and imagines from the margins, seeing minoritarian communities not as “interest groups” to be “added on” to a preexisting nucleus but rather as active, generative participants at the very core of a shared, conflictual history’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 48).

One of the objectives of the new wave of critical scholarship is to set in motion a critical discourse on Malaysian multiculturalism. Hence at one level, issues of Malaysian multiculturalism have to be problematised in the context of a broader landscape of governance, involving questions of the nation or the national, and a critical overview of its agenda of modernity (developmentalism), culture and identity. Emerging critical perspectives are concerned with pluralising and decentring discourses on Sarawak society and culture—an intellectual perspective that articulates fluidity, agency, alternative representations and reconstruction of identities from the margins of society and the nation-state. Yet it is also analytically useful to note that while multiculturalism is a celebration of a multiplicity of cultural cores and centres, for communities the site of struggle over identity (read: over power and meaning) is equally multicentric. This in a sense represents a ‘calling’ to bring into the discourse the perspective of ‘cultural studies’, a moot point, which was raised and concurred to by Sharmani Gabriel (2010) in her review of my analysis of Sarawak multiculturalism. As nearly all the contributors to the new wave of scholarship have demonstrated, the critical task involves not only a cultural contestation against grand narratives (such as development, modernisation and modernity) but also entities—ranging from community, state to nation. In the case of the latter two categories, the engagement may involve both state and national forms of hegemony, of which the Malaysian nation is only one locus of power. Indeed, it is always useful to remind analysts that the Sarawak state power discourse also has its own space and trajectory that is both ‘autonomous’ and ‘dependent’ (Leigh 1998; Aeria 2006). All this only adds to the complexity of the subject matter at hand and merely affirms the fact that in our attempt to understand Malaysian multiculturalism, and in particular the Sarawak variant of multiculturalism, work has only just begun.

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Chapter 4: Material Culture Studies and Ethnocultural Identity

Bernard Sellato

Abstract This chapter briefly exposes the changing focuses of material culture studies through the twentieth century. It then assesses the available corpus of studies in Borneo’s material culture, proposing a rough periodisation of the types of publications and describing in broad categories the material productions examined in these publications. Finally, using some examples, it endeavours to shed light on the linkages between material culture, on the one hand, and social relations and ethnocultural identity, on the other.

Keywords Borneo • Material culture • Ethnocultural identity • Social relations • Trade

Bernard Sellato (✉)

Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales, Rue des Poilus, 23, Saint-Maximin 83470, Paris, France

e-mail: bernard.sellato@wanadoo.fr

V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture,

Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_4

4.1 Material Culture and Material Culture Studies

Material culture, a phrase that appeared in the social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remained centred on the artefact per se up to the latter part of the twentieth century, and material culture studies were then primarily descriptive. Artefacts were (or had been) collected by explorers, colonial civil administrators or military personnel, geologists or missionaries, and stored in museums. Important studies were produced by museum curators, scholars working with museum collections and knowledgeable compilers, though often with only scant information available on the artefacts’ precise geographic and ethnic origins, vernacular names, functions, or their meaning and cultural relevance among the people who produced them. While such collections and studies remain precious assets, they provide little insight into those peoples’ social lives.

The concept of material culture today covers a much broader scope, concerned as it is with the forms, uses and meanings of objects, images and environments in everyday life. Material culture is the product of the interaction of people and their material world, and one means by which culture is stored and transmitted. An artefact, therefore, can no longer be reduced to the status of a ‘thing’. It is, in an important way, a social rather than individual creation and, therefore, material culture as a whole reflects the conceptual context of a society. Artefacts intervene in the construction of society and of social identities (see Journal of Material Culture). Moreover, as fully fledged constitutive elements of social life they also have a social life of their own (Appadurai 1986), through the process of their creation and their use (Lemonnier 1992), hence the need to view objects as agents (Gell 1998). Material culture, therefore, must be examined with the purpose of procuring an understanding of the society that created it.

Material culture studies—now an interdisciplinary field including anthropology, sociology, archaeology, art history and museum studies—are concerned with the social, cultural, economic and symbolic context of artefacts, and thus with the linkage between these and social relations in general, and investigate the ways in which material objects participate in socialising people into culture. In short, the craftsperson ‘weaves the world’ in everything s/he does, and by doing so s/he ‘makes culture’ (see Ingold 2000).

Actually, such studies do encompass other fields, such as environmental studies (landscapes, fauna and flora), agronomy (land tenure systems, cultigens), technology (e.g. architecture, weaponry), cognition science (indigenous knowledge, transmission), health sciences (ethnomedicine, traditional pharmacopoeia), and religion and rituals (e.g. shamanism, headhunting). Despite their name, they are also found to cover such ‘immaterial’ aspects of culture as oral history, oral literature, dance and music performance, as per the broader concept of ‘cultural heritage’ (as defined by UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention; see also the concept of ‘cultural property’ as a basic tenet of people’s identity, as recalled in a 1976 UNESCO recommendation; on the ambiguity in the definition of the so-called ‘immaterial heritage’ see Bromberger 2014). Today, material culture studies are also, for a substantial part, focusing on contemporary ‘cultural change’ in the context of globalisation, as well as on the subject of ‘development’ (on Borneo see, for example, Cleary and Eaton 1992; on material culture change see Regis 1996).

In the course of time, scholars have used a variety of approaches to look at material culture—functionalism, structuralism, symbolism, gender studies, consumerism, etc. (see a review in Davy Ball 2009). In the closing decades of the twentieth century the focus in anthropology shifted towards technological processes and again, more recently, away from the object itself and towards social and cognitive processes.

Due to constraints I shall not try to assess the available corpus of studies in Borneo’s material culture in terms of theoretical approaches or disciplinary fields. Instead, I shall attempt, first, to establish a rough periodisation of the types of publications and describe in broad categories the local material productions examined in these publications; and, second, using examples, to shed light on the linkages between material culture, on the one hand, and social relations and ethnocultural identity, on the other.

4.2 Material Culture Studies in the Literature on Borneo

A number of early accounts of Borneo—for example, Marryat (1848), Schwaner (1853–54), Veth (1854–56), St John (1862), Perelaer (1870), Bock (1882), Whitehead (1893) or Beccari (1904)—do contain information on material culture, though they generally are framed in a narrative format.

Around the turn of the twentieth century Beccari (1904: 365, cited in Leibrick 1989) was already urging for ‘the comprehensive and detailed documentation of the minutiae of Sarawak’s indigenous material culture heritage’. Indeed, at that time substantial pieces of work began to appear. These were rather general, synthetic accounts by explorers (e.g. Nieuwenhuis 1904–7) or colonial administrators (e.g. Enthoven 1903; Hose and McDougall 1912), museum inventories and catalogues (e.g. van der Chijs 1885 in Batavia, Shelford 1904–5 at the Sarawak Museum, Juynboll 1910 in Leiden), or compilations produced back in the West (e.g. Hein 1890; Roth 1896), most of which remain invaluable sources to this day. In the same period, more focused, albeit sometimes notably shorter, studies were published, in which scholars investigated the uses and meanings of things: Dayak pictorial and technical arts (Hein 1889), bamboo ornaments (Loebèr 1903), costume (Tromp 1890), tattoo patterns (Den Hamer 1885; Hose and Shelford 1906), swords (Tromp 1888; Shelford 1901), offering structures and funerary monuments (Grabowsky 1888, 1889), musical instruments (Grabowsky 1905) and decorative motifs (Haddon 1905).

The period between the two world wars saw a relatively limited output of important ‘ethnographic’ books—Elshout (1926) and Tillema (1938) on Apo Kayan, Evans (1922) and Rutter (1929) on Sabah, Lumholtz (1920) on the southern and central regions (some of which were reprinted in the 1980s and 1990s)—and a noteworthy development of generally shorter pieces covering, with a narrower focus, a broader scope of material productions. Apart from Bornean arts (Nieuwenhuis 1925–26), tattoos (Tillema 1930), decorated bamboo (Loebèr 1918–19), funerary monuments (Ten Cate 1922; Bertling 1927–28; Tillema 1931–32) and decorative motifs (Vroklage 1939), new attention was brought to masks (Rassers 1928–29; Tillema 1937; Schârer 1940–41), textiles (Haddon and Start 1936), ornamented shields (Münsterberger 1939), basketry (Woolley 1929; Tillema 1939), woodcarving (Banks 1941), bronze works (Huyser 1929; Tillmann 1939) and megalithic monuments (Banks 1937). Most such pieces appeared in scholarly journals, both Dutch and British, as well as in the Sarawak Museum Journal (from 1911 onwards), though some were released in wider audience journals or magazines in the Netherlands, thus contributing to the general public’s interest in Borneo cultures.

In-depth professional anthropological work started in Sarawak in the early 1950s with social-economic surveys commissioned by the British colonial service (Leach 1950; Needham 1953; Morris 1953; Geddes 1954; Freeman 1955). In these studies, material culture does not feature prominently, as their authors, social anthropologists, seem to almost never have considered it per se, or described and studied it in an ethnographic way, but instead viewed it only as the physical provision for, or medium of, otherwise important social or economic activity.

This trend persisted during the second half of the century in British and American scholarly studies (e.g. PhD dissertations), with scholars often devoting only minor side papers to material culture topics. By the century’s closing decade, the Borneo Research Council’s (BRC) publications (Monograph Series, Proceedings Series, etc.), with few exceptions, had focused on gender, religion, shamanism, headhunting, land tenure, social control, health, language, development and the environment, and only a relatively small percentage of the articles published in the Borneo Research Bulletin were devoted to material culture. However, the BRC is now scheduling several books on material culture for publication.

During that period, a limited number of works dealt, in a more or less general way, with Borneo’s material culture and art (Gill 1968; Brenan 1975; Ave 1982; Heppell 1988, 1994, 2005a; Mashman 1989; Kurui and Kaboy 1989; Sellato 1989, 1992; Tillotson 1994), handicrafts (Alman 1963, 1968; Zainie 1969; Morrison 1972, 1982; Munan 1989a, b; Piper 1992), decorative motifs, design, style and art history (von Heine-Geldern 1966; McBain 1981a; Anggat 1988). Few of these, however, are full-length books or academic productions.

To this day, PhD dissertations in the social sciences focusing, at least partly, on material culture have usually only appeared fairly recently and are still uncommon (e.g. Dunkel 1975; Beguet 1993; Tillotson 1994; Gavin 1995; Thambiah 1995; Lindell 2000; Oley 2001; Westmacott 2002; Davy Ball 2009)—if we set aside a few studies concerned with imported ceramics (B. Harrisson 1984; Cesard 2009).

While large exhibitions of Indonesian arts held in the Netherlands and the United States (e.g. see Chicago 1948; van Brakel et al. 1987; Taylor and Aragon 1991; Capistrano-Baker 1994; van Brakel et al. 1996) sometimes included a sizable section on Borneo, exhibitions specifically devoted to Borneo have been few and, likewise, their catalogues (e.g. Anonymous 1973; Ave and King 1986; Expedition 1988). In the last few years, however, Borneo has received more sustained attention: Maiullari and Arneld (2008), Maiullari (2011), Isler and von Wyss-Giacosa (2011), Dietrich and Pavaloi (2013), and the 2013 joint Dutch-Bruneian exhibition in Bandar Seri Begawan should also be mentioned (see KIT 2013). Scholars in Western museums produced studies based on these museums’ collections: e.g. S0rensen (1972, 1973) in Oslo, Hamilton (1996) in Washington (see also Boruchoff 1986), Remesova (2004) in Prague, Martin (2010) in Dresden. Several Borneo exhibitions in art galleries were complemented with catalogues (e.g. Goldman 1975; Heppell and Maxwell 1990; Heppell 1992; Johnson 2009).

In East Malaysia, the Sarawak Museum produced an important book (Chin 1980), as well as a number of thin booklets on various subjects, and the Sabah Museum later followed suit (e.g. Sabah 1991, 1992, 2007, n.d.). Likewise, the Brunei Museum has put out some publications on material culture (e.g. Harrisson 1973; Warisan 1996; Bantong 2001). Through their periodic journals, these three institutions have also contributed powerfully to expanding our knowledge of northern Borneo’s cultures in general.

Other publications were released in Kuching by the Borneo Literature Bureau (e.g. Alman 1968; Zainie 1969) and the Sarawak Literary Society (e.g. Chong 1987; Blehaut 1997) and, in Kuala Lumpur, by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (e.g. Anggat 1988) and the Museum Association of Malaysia (e.g. Mohd. Kassim 1983). In Sarawak, private publishers, the Tun Jugah Foundation and Society Atelier Sarawak, released several important titles that should be mentioned: Linggi (2001) and Sultive and Sutlive (2001), for the former, and Jabu (1991), Chin and Mashman (1991) and Ong (n.d.) for the latter.

In Indonesia nationwide programmes (proyek) implemented by the Ministry of Education and Culture in the 1980s and 1990s—variously named Proyek Media Kebudayaan, Proyek Inventarisasi dan Dokumentasi Kebudayaan Daerah, Proyek Inventarisasi dan Pembinaan Nilai-nilai Budaya or Proyek Pembinaan Permuseuman—underwrote the publication of series on the collections held by provincial museums (e.g. Album seni budaya, Sekelumit 1989–90; Syarifuddin and M. Saperi 1990–91; Magai 1991; Rasmin et al. 1992–93), traditional architecture (Soenarpo et al. 1986), and many more on various material culture topics (e.g. Anonymous 1982; Surya et al. 1985–86; Husna et al. 1990–91; Taihuttu 1995–96). Kalimantan’s state museums also occasionally published thematic volumes on their collections (e.g. Sjarifuddin 1983–84; Bonoh 1984–85; Achmad 1986; Mulyati and Zularfi 1994; see also Kartiwa 1997). Unfortunately, these publications are poorly disseminated and quite difficult to procure, and keeping up to date with recent releases proves a real challenge.

Finally, a few photographic books (e.g. Morrison 1962; Wong 1979; Hong 1987; Tiong 2001) have documented traditional life, thus providing much visual information on material culture.

Altogether, in the latter part of the twentieth century and up to this day a wealth of information has been produced. A review of these publications by broad thematic categories is presented below.

By far the most popular research and publication topic in material culture studies in the last three decades has been textiles, and especially Iban textiles. Initiated by Haddon and Start’s (1936) book, work on Iban (and Kalimantan ‘Ibanic’) woven fabrics picked up again around 1980 (Fisher 1979; Maxwell 1980; Vogelsanger 1980), then went into full swing 10 years later (Drake 1991; Jabu 1991; Mashman 1992; Gavin 1995, 1996, 2003; Linggi 2001; Heppell 2005b, 2014; Amann 2013), albeit not always exempt of some debate regarding the ambiguous relationship of motif, name and meaning. Apart from the Iban-Ibanic set, we should mention some work on Sabah’s traditional weaving and dyeing (Sabah 1991), Brunei textiles (Warisan 1996) and East Kalimantan’s unusual ulap doyo textiles (Oley 2001, 2007).

The longhouse has also been a popular focus of study, although only some of the works discuss architecture and/or the longhouse as a physical structure (e.g. Lee 1962; Miles 1964; Schneeberger 1979; Kelbling 1983; Kampffmeyer 1991; Ong 1991; Winzeler 1996, 1998, 2004; Lindell 2000). Other works mainly examined the longhouse as a social institution, a ritual structure or a symbolic element of identity (Dove 1982; Guerreiro 1984, 2003; Sather 1993; Alexander 1993; Sellato 1998, 2015a; Metcalf 2010), in an ‘anthropology of architecture’ approach, as Waterson’s (1990) book title stresses—or as a target for the ethnic tourism industry (Kruse 2003; also King 1994; Zeppel 1994).

Woodcarving, especially in hardwood, holds a special status in material culture, due to primitive art dealers’ and collectors’ sustained interest in Borneo’s sculpture, starting with Vredenbregt’s booklet (1981). Large carved pieces were regarded as art, and museums and art galleries published book-sized catalogues on the subject (e.g. Sumnik-Dekovich 1985; Heppell and Maxwell 1990; Maiullari and Arneld 2008; Johnson 2009), while some isolated articles appeared in journals (Chong 1987; Mashman 1994; Kjellgren 1999; Sellato 2001; but see also Chin and Mashman 1991). Shorter studies focused on carved funerary monuments (e.g. Bataille 1974; Metcalf 1976; Rampai 1983; Schiller 1984; Guerreiro 2011). Related to the statuary, due to the primitive art market’s interest, are masks, which were also the subject of several publications: Gill (1966, 1967), Revel-Macdonald (1978, 1981), Mohd. Kassim (1983), Heppell (1992, 2015) and Bantong 2001.

With pottery and basketry, we leave the world of ‘primitive art’ for that of ‘folk crafts’. Both crafts have seen a trickle of mostly minor publications spanning half a century. For pottery: Freeman (1957), Alman (1960), Anonymous (1985), Chin and Mashman (1991), Sellato (1997), Teuteberg (1998), and Arifin and Sellato (1999). For basketry: Klausen (1957), Dunsmore (1983), Blehaut (1997), Sellato (1997, 2012d), Lenjau (1999), Maiullari (2011) and Puri (2013).

Other, slightly less ‘popular’ categories must be mentioned: metalware (including swords) and metalworking (e.g. Morrison 1948; Harrisson 1973; Lim and Shariffuddin 1976; Christie and King 1988; Chin and Mashman 1991; Heppell 2011; Hollestelle forthcoming); megalithic monuments (e.g. Harrisson 1958; Whittier and Whittier 1974; Baier 1992; Arifin and Sellato 2003); tattoos (Dunkel 1975; Thomas 1968; McBain 1981b); decorated human skulls (Ave 1996; Winzeler 1999); wooden ‘calendars’ (Ave 1970; Hopes 1997); baby carriers (Whittier and Whittier 1988; Sellato 2012b); bark cloth (Kooijman 1963; Sellato 2006); to which we may add traditional ‘sports’ (e.g. Anonymous 1982; Dunsmore 1983; Chin 1984), penis pins (Harrisson 1964; Brown et al. 1988), bamboo tubes (Klokke 1993), longboat building (Nicolaisen and Damgaard-Sorensen 1991), hunting weapons and traps (Sloan 1975; Puri 2006), and even, once in a while, local traditional cuisine (Jamuh and Harrisson 1966–69; Dirung and Dirung 1993).

We could also include here works on music and dance (e.g. Seeler 1969; Maceda 1978; Matusky 1986, 1990, 1991; Gorlinsky 1988; Pugh-Kitingan 1988), as well as on crucial, though exogenous, elements of the Bornean material culture: glass beads (Dunsmore 1978; Munan-Oettli 1987; Munan 2005) and ceramic jars (Adhyatman and Abu Ridho 1977; B. Harrisson 1986; Rangkuti and Faizaliskandiar 1988; Wibisono 1990; Sabah 2007; Cesard 2009).

Finally, I shall leave aside very recent works focusing on contemporary cultural change and dealing with topics outside of my sphere of expertise, although some should probably be listed in this chapter, such as Liana Chua’s studies.

4.3 Material Culture and Ethnocultural Identity

In a recent paper, Victor T. King (2012) examined ‘the interrelated concepts of culture and identity, and more especially identities in motion’. Artefacts, of course, often display visual evidence of ethnocultural affiliation.

As already noted, locally crafted objects, present everywhere in traditional societies to fulfil all sorts of practical, daily life functions, also pervade the social, economic, political and religious spheres. They are involved in sharing and exchange networks, feature prominently as symbols of social status and prestige, and perform primary roles in ritual activities, and thus they are constitutive elements of social life, and strongly contribute to building and upholding ethnocultural identity.

The discussion below, intentionally focusing on ‘traditional’ artefacts of local commercial, social or ritual significance—rather than on recently appropriated ‘modern’ objects—attempts to investigate, among the communities that produce them, their evolution into new icons of identity—or ‘icons of tradition’, as Taylor (1994) puts it—in a wide open and fast-changing world.

4.3.1 The Bidayuh Red Basket

A good example of this evolution is presented by Mashman and Nayoi (2012) with the so-called ‘red basket’ of the Pinyawa’a subgroup of Bidayuh in western Sarawak. Traditionally, this red basket (juah bireh) was used for sowing and harvesting, as well as in rituals of the paddy cult (adat gawai), particularly at harvest time, as a container for offerings to the rice spirits; it also features in traditional marriage exchanges (ibid.:89). However, ‘[i]n its most profound context’, the authors write, the red basket is used for supernatural purposes during the healing ceremonies, with each household owning one; here called ‘soul basket’, it is a container for the soul of a sick person (ibid.:80, 91).

In the 1960s a Catholic mission and school were set up at a nearby bazaar, and most of the community have since converted (ibid.:81). The red basket is now put to mundane use—for carrying personal belongings around—but ‘[i]t is most publicly conspicuous at the weekly church service, when it serves for the collection’ (ibid.:89). Interestingly, it is now used by both Catholics and practitioners of the paddy cult in shared rituals and celebrations: Catholic families partake in the paddy cult rituals, using their own red baskets and saying Catholic prayers, and non-Catholics also attend a thanksgiving ceremony held at the church, during which young women in ethnic costumes, carrying red baskets, ‘dance around the altar to the beat of the gongs in a manner reminiscent of the priestesses who dance to entertain the spirits of the rice’ (ibid.:91).

Later, in the 1970s, a strong movement within the Bidayuh community aimed at popularising ritual dances for public performances, and encouraged younger Catholic women to practise them (ibid.:92). The women’s new ethnic costume, partly deriving from the priestess’s dress, includes the red basket, along with the typical raong hat, which was worn to protect a baby’s soul. This costume is worn for dancing contests, ceremonial occasions and special masses in church.

Both the hat and basket, now as an inseparable pair, have thus become key components in the Pinyawa’a community’s ethnocultural identity (ibid.:80–81, 92). If ‘the red basket provides a sense of cultural continuity as the belief systems change’ from the traditional adat gawai to Christianity, as Mashman and Nayoi rightly noted (ibid.:89; see also Mashman 2000), the iconic value of the hat-and-basket pair, and of this Bidayuh ethnic costume as a whole, has now spread out to the social and political sphere beyond the community, and to Sarawak’s cultural stage.

In a similar process, among the Lun Dayeh (or Lundaye) of North Kalimantan (the new Indonesian province of Kalimantan Utara) and the Lun Bawang and Kelabit of Sarawak (with some degree of variation between these groups), the ritual raung basung (or rong) hat and tayen (or ra’ing) basket were originally used for sowing and harvesting, and appeared in rice cycle rituals, as well as in traditional marriage exchanges. Nowadays, the hat-and-basket pair is mostly manufactured and sold for use in Christian wedding ceremonies, which still rally broad kinship networks, even in town (Mashman 2012: 180–181; see Davy Ball 2009: 365; Sellato 2012a).

Among the eastern Sarawak Lun Bawang, Mashman (2012: 181) concludes, these hats and baskets are now worn as part of the ethnic costume at weddings and formal occasions as a mark of identity. Likewise, Kalimantan Lun Dayeh women, dressed in a standard ethnic costume, perform group dances at events such as the annual Birau festival at the district’s capital and in the course of National Day celebrations, in which the raung and tayen are recognisable ethnic identity icons (Sellato fieldnotes).

4.3.2 The Kenyah Baby Carrier

Among Kenyah, Kayan and related groups, which display distinctive, named and operative social strata (including nobility, commoners and slaves), both in Sarawak and Kalimantan, social ascription and status used to be visually discernible through the exclusive use of certain types of objects and decorative patterns (see, e.g. Rousseau 1990: 186–187; also Whittier 1973; King 1985). The baby carrier, a trademark artefact of these groups, offers a clear example of this, as both the motifs decorating it and small objects attached to it are not only protective devices against spiritual danger (for the child carried in it) but also indicators of social status (for the family owning and using it).

‘Functionally analogous to the ... cloth slings used to carry infants by many people around the world’ (Whittier and Whittier 1988), the baby carrier is a simple structure built of a half-moon wooden board and raised rattan plaitwork, and is equipped with shoulder straps. Its decoration is what makes it spiritually and socially significant: a large beadwork panel, animal fangs, bronze bells, shells, etc. Baby carriers, particularly their decorative elements, are part of family heirlooms. They are used, associated with a broad, decorated sun hat, in name-giving ceremonies, as well as, among some groups, in weddings and other rituals (see Whittier and Whittier 1988; Sellato 2012b; Lenjau et al. 2012: 217).

Noble families have a strict monopoly on the creation and use of certain decorative motifs and objects to be displayed on a baby carrier (and other items), e.g. anthropomorphic motifs or tiger and leopard fangs (for recent sources, see Armstrong 1992: 203; Lenjau 1999: 174; Lenjau et al. 2012: 219–20, 223; Sellato 1997: 230, 2012b: 272). Among the Kenyah of the uppermost Bahau River, only women of the noble stratum may create the anthropomorphic kalung kelunan or kalung ela’ motifs, as only the souls of noble people are strong enough to be exposed to the power of the motif. Yet, the spiritual risk incurred calls for a ritual payment or a blood sacrifice to the spirit of the motif, and such a motif may only be used for children of the noble category (Sellato 1997: 230).

Supernatural sanctions are believed to befall any non-noble person who would be so bold as to make or use an object carrying such a powerful spirit. In the 1990s Lenjau (1999: 171–72) wrote that the Kenyah still carefully heeded this taboo (see also Armstrong 1992: 203). Baby carriers, along with the broad sun hats (sa’ung seling) also carrying anthropomorphic motifs and restricted to nobility (see Sellato 2012c), are usually displayed on house walls. Altogether, as the Whittiers (1988) conclude: ‘The ... baby carrier [is] a work of art, a device for protecting a child’s health, a display and confirmation of social rank, and a mechanism for creating and strengthening social relations’.

Sun hats have long been, and still are, often requested by and given away to visiting officials (Sellato 1997: 230), and this also holds, albeit less often nowadays, for baby carriers. Indeed, such officials were naturally viewed as foreign ‘nobility’, so the taboo question was never raised. Moreover, since the hat or baby carrier would be owned or used away from the village, this would have no negative spiritual impact on the source community.

In recent years, however, baby carriers have been manufactured by urban Kenyah communities, in Samarinda and elsewhere, and even in certain Kenyah resettlement villages closer to urban centres. These Kenyah craftspeople, whether or not they belong to the nobility, but no longer worrying about spiritual risk, create attractive decorative beadwork panels displaying anthropomorphic motifs. Such baby carriers are now marketed, with no reference to their ritual or social meaning, to airport souvenir shops or ‘antique’ shops in town. Some Kenyah families in Samarinda, as early as the 1990s, were running a baby carrier cottage industry and flying their goods to Kuching, where they fetched much higher prices. I was told that part was sold to souvenir shops there, and part to well-to-do Sarawak Kenyah, who needed them for rituals or heirlooms.

This, of course, reflects the dissolution of traditional social organisation and the emerging dominance of individualistic values, especially in urban contexts. Yet, this process strongly contributes to promoting the baby carrier as an iconic craft of the Kenyah on the provincial and even the national scenes.

One traditionally typical Kenyah craft, the cloth patchwork sun hat, has spread widely to other ethnic groups and other regions of Borneo, to the extent that it is now viewed as a symbol of a generic ‘Dayak’ culture and a standard souvenir from Borneo—and no longer a specifically Kenyah icon.

In the upper Bahau region, a development project has set out recently (2013) to assist local Kenyah craftswomen in producing and marketing the sa’ung seling ritual sun hat in order to generate some revenue for these isolated villages. These women, highly concerned with the possible spiritual risk that might ensue, referred the project staff to the subdistrict’s customary chief (kepala adat), who granted special permission for commoner women to manufacture sa’ung seling with anthropomorphic figures (Iris Hardy, personal communication). The sa’ung seling is now manufactured and marketed as a specific product of the Kenyah groups of the uppermost Bahau area, and in the process is becoming these groups’ ethnic identity icon in broader regional official settings.

4.4 Material Culture, Identity Icons and Trade

For the record, I should stress here the ritual significance, Borneo-wide, of the pair of artefacts comprising a ‘container ’ (a basket or, here, a baby carrier) and a hat (as the container ’s cover; see several examples, among various groups, in Sellato 2012d). In the Kenyah case, the sun hat and baby carrier pair forms a ‘total’ protective device, as well as a sort of ritual enclosure, which in other ethnic contexts outside Borneo would often consist of a ritual textile. It should not be unexpected, somehow, that these artefacts, rather than others of lesser ritual value (e.g. the blowpipe), have been turned into icons of identity. The fact that they carry ethnically distinctive decoration is also quite relevant here.

The Bidayuh’s red basket and raong hat and the Lun Dayeh’s basket-and-hat pair, whose ritual roles in farming or other traditional ceremonies have notably faded away, now feature in Christian ceremonies and, quite prominently, in public displays of ethnic identity, illustrating a general historical shift from a traditional religion to Christianity, another, related shift from the religious to a non-religious or mundane sphere, as well as yet another, from internal (intra-community) to external (inter-community) use.

The Kenyah baby carrier (and associated hat) offers an example of broadened practices transgressing the traditional social order. This clearly hints at the progressive crumbling of social stratification and of the nobility’s power over its commoners, even in the most old-fashioned, isolated communities. At the same time, it signals the emergence of new, often urban or peri-urban ethnic communities now estranged from erstwhile ritual prohibitions, and displaying individualistic economic behaviours. It also emphasises the repositioning and marketing of these artefacts by their makers as trade goods of a high economic importance—and these goods also happen to carry ethnic identity value.

Therefore, the role of trade in the promotion of such icons of ethnic identity, if not in their original construction, should not be underestimated. The Lun Dayeh hats and baskets are made mainly for intra-community circulation and sale, although they are also marketed to souvenir shops, which probably also applies to the Bidayuh hat and basket. The Kenyah baby carrier, although it is to some extent circulated among Kenyah groups scattered in various parts of Borneo, appears to mainly target the tourist trade. And the sa’ung seling case illustrates an interesting, ongoing speedy swing from social status marker to trade good to identity icon—the acceleration of the process being a sign of the times.

As the discovery and confirmation of these objects’ trade value outside the communities that use/d them—especially in the tourist trade networks—trigger an intensification of their production, they certainly also contribute to boosting their value as ethnic identity icons within these communities (for a discussion of the impact of trade on material culture change, see Sellato 2015b). The tourist trade, in turn, promotes these icons among other regional ethnic groups, as well as to the national scene and beyond.

With regards to trade, the role of external agents—running or supporting local economic development projects, e.g. non-governmental organisations or foundations, state agencies—in the creation and promotion of iconic artefacts is also of relevance and should be taken into account, as is the case for Penan communities’ rattan baskets in Sarawak or for the sa’ung seling of the Kenyah in East Kalimantan. Indeed, the advent of iconic objects may not always be a spontaneous endogenous process.

Finally, the question of cultural property should be raised regarding iconic material culture items. The commercial takeover of one group’s specific traditional artefacts by another group has become a familiar occurrence, even in Borneo (e.g. the ‘tree of life’ rattan mat of the Ngaju made by Banjarese, or fake Bahau statues sold by Bugis in Samarinda). And ‘iconic takeover’—one group’s specific traditional artefact being selected by another group as its own iconic object—is not unheard of (e.g. Sellato 2015b). More generally, the patenting of particular items of material culture, as well as of decorative motifs, is now a pending problem in Borneo, as elsewhere. A recent controversy around the bidai mat of the Seluas people of West Kalimantan being claimed by (and patented in) Malaysia as an iconic product of Sarawak (Okezone 2013) is telling enough, as are earlier and ongoing ‘cultural’ debates between Indonesia and Malaysia about ‘ownership’ of batik and the shadow puppet theatre (Jakarta Post 2012).

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Chapter 5: Borneo and Beyond: Reflections on Borneo Studies, Anthropology and the Social Sciences

Victor T. King

Abstract This overview of research on Borneo, which moves on from Chap. 2, draws attention to Borneo-wide studies, reference materials, bibliographies and a range of sources of information. It arranges the survey chronologically, thematically and in terms of debates and controversies. With regard to themes, it is argued that George Appell’s categorisation of concepts, themes and materials on the Iban could, with modification, provide the basis for a Borneo-wide arrangement of research. The survey proceeds from a consideration of early materials on Kalimantan, ethnic and ethnographic infilling with some conceptual development in the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the development of field research in Brunei, extension of research in Sabah, a considerable increase of research in Kalimantan, and the consolidation of research on the Iban of Sarawak. The 1980s witnessed a significant focus on development issues, policy and practice, primarily carried out by local researchers. The 1990s and beyond saw an increasing interest in issues of culture and identity across a range of thematic concerns (see Chap. 8). The discussion of debates and controversies, aside from those discussed in Chap. 2 arising from Freeman’s work, comprise land tenure and rights in property; the Hoffman-derived Punan devolution issue; the intense debates about the traditional categorisation of Borneo societies as either egalitarian or hierarchical; the movement from a structuralist/corporatist interest in defined social units to one that emphasised fluidity, individual agency, networks and gender; and the definition and characterisation of the identity and social organisation of the Maloh of West Kalimantan.

Keywords Borneo studies • Anthropology • Social science • Social transformation

Parts of this chapter, now in revised form, were presented at the Borneo Studies workshop held at Universiti Brunei Darussalam on ‘Borneo Studies: the State-of-the-Art and Future Directions’ hosted by the Institute of Asian Studies, 30 November-1 December 2012. The workshop paper was then modified and appeared in the Institute’s Working Paper Series under the same title as this chapter, Working Paper No. 3, 2013.

Victor T. King (✉)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: V.T.King@leeds.ac.uk

V.T. King et al. (eds.), Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture, Asia in Transition 4, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0672-2_5

5.1 The Context

In many respects this is a very personal review of the anthropological and related social science literature on Borneo which has been produced in the post-war period. I have already presented a preliminary excursion into the early anthropological work undertaken on Borneo, heavily Sarawak-dominated, in Chap. 2 which laid the foundations for the generation of researchers who followed in the later 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s. In this chapter I intend to take the story forward from then, when there was a major upsurge in research across the social sciences in Borneo.

It is impossible to cover even a reasonably comprehensive segment of what is an extremely large amount of material. Therefore, I have had to be selective, though I trust in attempting to evaluate some of the major achievements of anthropological and other social science research on Borneo, I have addressed those contributions which have been recognised and acknowledged as of some scholarly significance.

This has been an interesting and constructive exercise for me in that I have not been actively engaged in field research in Borneo since the 1990s, though I have attempted to keep in touch with the development of this field of studies, primarily by continuing to read in the literature, reviewing books, supervising research students, assessing papers for publication and examining research theses. However, from mid-2012 I have taken up where I left off and, on my return to research on Borneo after a relatively long absence, I thought it worthwhile to take stock of past and current achievements in preparation for considering how we might formulate and carry forward a research agenda for the future. What struck me forcefully in examining and in some cases re-examining both published work and doctoral materials produced during the past two decades is the preoccupation with issues of identity and cultural politics. Of course, there is much else in this recent literature on Borneo, but it seems to me that the theme of identity and more specifically ethnicity and ethnic relations is one of increasing and significant interest in the literature, and one which has resonance in other parts of Southeast Asia as well.

In order to give this theme the attention it deserves I have devoted separate publications to the relationships between culture and identity (see, for example, King 2012a) and in this volume as Chap. 8. These two chapters (5 and 8) are therefore interrelated, but I do make reference to some of the literature on identity in this more general chapter. By way of introduction we have to pose the question: Why is it that we have witnessed this upsurge in concern and interest in Borneo Studies in issues of identity construction and transformation, and the ways in which identities are formed, sustained and changed in social and cultural encounters and in the context of processes of globalisation (see, for example King 2012b; Zawawi 2012)?

Cultural politics has been an important phenomenon across Southeast Asia in recent years (see, for example, Kahn 1995, 1998, 2005), but I think in the Borneo context that this is in no small part due to the dramatic events in Indonesian Kalimantan from late 1996 to 2001 when serious and bloody conflicts ensued between the native Dayaks, Madurese and Malays in the provinces of West and Central Kalimantan. In some respects they form part of a wider series of ethnic conflicts in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago following the collapse of Suharto’s New Order in 1998, the institution of policies of decentralisation and the politicisation of ethnic identities. Nevertheless, some of the conflicts predated these events and evidence of Dayak-Madurese tensions and anti-Chinese actions go back to at least the 1950s (Tanasaldy 2012). Therefore, these interethnic encounters involved not only various Dayak groups but also Malays, immigrant Madurese and Chinese in what were primarily openly conflictual relations.

Even from 1945 there was a politicisation of ethnicity in the continuing struggle between the Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch colonialists, and before the introduction of Sukarno’s Guided Democracy in 1959 and the implementation of the highly centralised and authoritarian policies of the New Order from 1966, the Dayaks of Kalimantan had already begun to organise themselves politically and to build a pan-Dayak identity (König 2012, and see Kumpiady Widen’s chapter in this volume). This occurred well before the non-Muslim indigenous populations of Sarawak and British North Borneo (Sabah) began to develop and express a Dayak and other sub-Dayak identities in the run-up to independence within Malaysia in 1963 (see for example, Leigh 1971, 1974; Zawawi 2008a, b). Dayak identities were also formed in relation to, or we might say in opposition to, the development of politically conscious movements among immigrant communities, particularly the Chinese across the former territories of British and Dutch Borneo, and in what came to be the Federation of Malaysia, and among the Indian populations as well. After 1963 the Malaysian Borneo territories were drawn into the model or template of ethnic difference which had been progressively rationalised in peninsular Malaysia. The sultanate of Brunei too has addressed the issue of ethnicity, language and culture which it has embedded in racial or ethnic categories and distinctions in its 1959 Constitution (see, for example, King 1994a).

Leaving aside these considerations my focus in this chapter is on topical issues which are at the forefront of concerns about social and cultural transformations in post-war Borneo; some of these concerns also have important policy dimensions. I have also attempted to capture chronologically significant moments and debates, primarily in the field of anthropology.

5.2 Overviews and General Books

There have been several reviews and overviews of disciplines and subjects within the field of Borneo Studies, a significant number of which have tended to give prominence to work in Sarawak. Moreover, the Borneo Research Bulletin has begun to commission a series of overviews in particular disciplines and subject areas. I also undertook a review of development studies in Sarawak many years ago (King 1986) at a time when I was moving more and more in the direction of applied studies, and, although the purpose of a subsequent paper for the Malaysian journal Akademika in 2009 was not to present an updated overview, I did make reference to a range of studies in the broad fields of development, change and modernisation (and see King Chap. 25). But these focused on Sarawak and did not provide material on the other parts of Borneo. George Appell had already provided a more general overview of social science research in Sarawak in 1977 (and with Leigh Wright 1978), and Peter Kedit addressed the issue of the then current anthropological research in Sarawak in 1975.

Of course, subsequently there have been a number of edited books and a few jointly authored and single-authored books covering the whole island as well. The Borneo Research Council’s proceedings series are usually Borneo-wide, as are some of the monograph series (and see Appell 1990a, b). These embrace a number of themes, but are broadly within the areas of social change, rural development, environmental change; language and oral traditions; gender, material culture and religion and ritual. The edited publications comprise: Vinson Sutlive, Female and male in Borneo: contributions and challenges to gender studies (1991) and Change and development in Borneo (1993); Robert L. Winzeler, The seen and unseen: shamanism, mediumship and possession in Borneo (1993) and Indigenous architecture in Borneo (1998); James T. Collins, Language and oral tradition in Borneo (1990); Peter Martin, Shifting patterns of language use in Borneo (1995) and with Peter Sercombe, Languages in Borneo: diachronic and synchronic perspectives (2009); Victor T. King, Tourism in Borneo (1995) and Rural development and social science research (1999a); William Wilder, Journeys of the soul: anthropological studies of death, burial, and reburial practices in Borneo (2003); and Peter Eaton, Environment and conservation in Borneo (1999).

Then there are the books published outside the work of the Borneo Research Council. These include: Jan Avé and Victor T. King, Borneo: the people of the weeping forest: tradition and change in Borneo (1986a, and the Dutch edition also published in 1986b); and Victor T. King, Essays on Borneo societies (1978b) and The peoples of Borneo (1993); Mark Cleary and Peter Eaton, Borneo: change and development (1992); Fadzilah Majid Cooke, State, communities and forests in contemporary Borneo (2006); Cristina Eghenter, Bernard Sellato and G. Simon Devung, Social science research and conservation management in the interior of Borneo (2003); Robert L. Winzeler, Indigenous peoples and the state: politics, land, and ethnicity in the Malayan Peninsula and Borneo (1997); Reed L. Wadley, Histories of the Borneo environment: economic, political and social dimensions of change and continuity (2005); Peter G. Sercombe and Bernard Sellato, Beyond the green myth: Borneo’s hunters-gatherers in the twenty-first century (2007); Christine Padoch and Nancy Lee Peluso, Borneo in transition: people, forests, conservation, and development (1996); Amarjit Kaur, Economic change in East Malaysia: Sabah and Sarawak since 1850 (1998); Bernard Sellato, Nomades et sédentarisation à Bornéo: histoire économique et sociale (1989 and 1986), published in English as Nomads of the Borneo rainforest: the economics, politics, and ideology of settling down (1994), and his Innermost Borneo: studies in Dayak cultures (2002); Harold Brookfield, Lesley Potter and Yvonne Byron, In place of the forest: environmental and socio-economic transformation in Borneo and the eastern Malay Peninsula (1995); and Gerard A. Persoon and Manon Osseweijer, Reflections on the heart of Borneo (2008).

These are valuable reference materials and they have informed our current work on Borneo. However, they certainly do not exhaust the range of Borneo-wide collections available, and other relevant publications are referred to in other chapters in this volume.

Other general reference materials are located in the Borneo Research Bulletin [and see the valuable index of the Bulletin, volumes 1–42 (2012) compiled by the Borneo Research Council], the Sarawak Museum Journal, the Brunei Museum Journal, the Sabah Society Journal, the publications of the Sabah Museum, and Institut Dayakologi in Pontianak, particularly the Institute’s Kalimantan Review (see also John Bamba, Chap. 15 on the voluminous literature on Kalimantan published in Indonesian), as well as the journals and publications of the universities and other research institutions in Borneo such as the Sarawak Development Journal, and including the proceedings of the Borneo-Kalimantan Inter-University Conferences which were held at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, and in Pontianak and Banjarmasin. In addition, the local interest in Borneo seems to be on the increase with the recent launch at Universiti Malaya of the Borneo Research Journal.

There is also a number of bibliographies which require our attention, among others those by Jérôme Rousseau on Central Borneo (1988, and see 1970), Jan Avé, Victor T. King and Joke de Wit on West Kalimantan (1983), the checklist of Iban materials in the Iban encyclopedia (King et al. 2001), A.A. Cense and E.M. Uhlenbeck on Borneo languages (1958), Hans J.B. Combrink, Craig Soderberg, Michael E. Boutin and Alanna Y. Boutin (compilers) Indigenous groups of Sabah: an annotated bibliography of linguistic and anthropological sources (2 volumes, 2008; earlier editions, 1984, 1986, 2006), and Mohd. Yussop’s bibliography of bibliographies (2001).

5.3 The Iban and Appell’s Categorisation

With regard to compilations we should also emphasise the importance of the monumental four-volume Encyclopedia of Iban Studies edited by Vinson and Joanne Sutlive (2001); within that there is the important overview paper by George N. Appell (which reviews research up until about a decade and a half ago) on Iban Studies (2001: 741–785). The categories he devises, though specific to the Iban in relation to more general Borneo ethnography, do provide the beginnings of a more general categorisation of research. I should also draw attention to Appell’s bold statement about Iban Studies because it provides us with an orientation to the general field of Borneo Studies and it does provide a focus for debate. In other words, to what extent and in what ways has the study of the Iban and culturally and historically related populations in West Kalimantan provided an agenda for anthropological and other related social science research (see below)?

Again with reference to my Chap. 2 in this volume, Appell’s proposals have in part been stimulated by the work of Derek Freeman. I think it can be argued that of all anthropological monographs on Borneo communities it has been Freeman’s very widely quoted Report on the Iban (1970, and see 1953, 1955b) and Iban agriculture (1955a) which have been the most influential and which have provided a baseline and set a standard for the study of cognatic societies and for our understanding of shifting or swidden agricultural economies in the humid tropics. It is also true that of all Borneo peoples it is the Iban, both in Sarawak and in West Kalimantan, who have been the most extensively studied across a wide range of subjects and themes. After all only the Iban have a four-volume encyclopaedia devoted to them and several dictionaries of their language. Students of other Borneo societies most certainly view with enormous envy the considerable level of scholarly work and publications on the Iban. In support of their importance Appell also says:

This uniqueness of [Iban] culture and optimistic vitality have brought researchers from around the world to study Ibanic society and culture, not only to make an ethnographic record for posterity but also to learn what contributions a study of their society and culture would make to social theory.... Furthermore, because of this extensive study, Iban society now provides the model, the background phenomena, on which all other ethnographic inquiries of Borneo societies can proceed. Iban research has informed the discussion of many theoretical issues in anthropological inquiry, particularly those dealing with the structure of cognatic societies, i.e., societies without any form of descent group. Thus, Iban culture forms the fundamental grounds against which other cultures are compared in order to elicit cultural information and to test hypotheses in social theory (2001: 741).

With specific reference to the study of social organisation and kinship I had also noted some time ago that Freeman’s publications on the Iban had ‘provided the base-line for comparison and most Bornean scholars have assessed at least some of their findings in relation to Freeman’s observations on such features of Iban society as the bilek-family (or household), the kindred and the longhouse’ (King 1978a: 6). Furthermore, George P. Murdock’s edited book on Social structure in Southeast Asia (1960a) served to consolidate the importance and influence of Freeman’s Iban material by including a chapter by Freeman (1960) in his volume as a case study of a cognatic social system which would serve to provide templates for ‘the types and organizational variations of cognatic societies’ (Murdock 1960b: 7).

In exploring his particular proposition in relation to the importance of the Iban for anthropological contemplation and theorising, Appell also devises a very useful categorisation of the major themes in research on the Iban. Some of these can most certainly provide the basis for a wider categorisation of the literature on Borneo Studies whilst others are rather more specific to the Iban.

Appell’s categories for his discussion of the Iban literature comprise: (1) social organisation and the nature of cognatic societies; (2) the cultural ecology of swidden agriculture; (3) the analysis of land tenure; (4) the nature of egalitarian society; (5) ethnogenesis; (6) gender studies; (7) warfare, headhunting and the expansion of the Ibans; (8) religion, ritual and symbolism; (9) oral literature; (10) regional variation in Ibanic cultures; and (11) problems of social change. These categories not only reflect the emphases in the literature on the Iban, which of course also reflect some of the major characteristics of Iban society, culture and history, but they also reflect some of Appell’s own theoretical concerns, particularly in his own work on social organisation, land tenure and social change. Of course, there has also been a significant amount of research which has emerged since the publication of his paper which would require the elaboration of his categories. But if we wish to use this categorisation for a more general exploration of the literature on Borneo then obviously we would need to widen some of the categories and also rearrange them. Nevertheless, the strength of Appell’s paper is that he provides a detailed summary and evaluation of the literature in the categories which he formulates. Let us consider these in more detail.

Social organisation and the nature of cognatic societies is certainly a theme which has played a major part in research on Borneo, and the Iban have been a paradigmatic case in this respect, as I have already said. I would suggest that this theme should include such other organisational principles as residence and territory, age, class, status and power (I would bring the issues raised by Iban egalitarianism, and the debates on equality and inequality, into the general category of social organisation), and likewise gender (Appell’s category of gender studies seems more appropriate in a general consideration of social organisation).
The emphasis on the cultural ecology of swidden agriculture could be broadened to include a wide range of studies on rural development, agricultural modernisation and resettlement among the Iban and other populations in Borneo, and I would bring land tenure into this category in addition to broader environmental issues and environmental history (see, for example, Wadley 2005).
The concept of ethnogenesis, which refers to the emergence of identities and the ways in which groupings and categories of people come to a consciousness of their difference from others in what has come to be called ‘ethnic’ terms and the ways in which this consciousness is expressed, sustained and transformed, perhaps requires a greater stress on interethnic relations and boundary-crossing, and, as with the work of such researchers as John Postill, an increasing emphasis on the whole field of the media, nation-building and identities (1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2008; and Barlocco 2008, 2009, 2010). I would bring Appell’s category of regional variation in Ibanic cultures into this category of ethnogenesis, interethnic relations and identity.
Warfare, headhunting and the expansion of the Iban is a very important theme in Iban history, but processes of migration, expansion and interethnic conflicts have a more general importance in Borneo, and certainly these considerations along with ethnohistory can embrace other literature as well.
Religion, ritual and symbolism can also serve as a general category along with processes of religious conversion.
Although Appell indicates oral literature within his major categories we might want to expand this into the fields of language and linguistics to provide again a more general delimitation of a field of studies.
Problems of social change (perhaps we should extend this to cultural, economic and political change) also embrace rural-urban migration and urbanisation, and this area of study both within the Iban literature and more widely should include such matters as urban identities and the emergence of an urban middle class [we should note that in the concern with migration, perhaps for the Iban at least more attention might be given to the changing institution of bejalai to carry on Peter Kedit’s work (1993, and see 1980)]. There is also the interesting phenomenon of the Iban diaspora (and this applies to other Borneo communities as well) now residing and working outside Borneo (in peninsular Malaysia and Singapore especially). Studies of tourism are gaining ground in Borneo, but they can also be included within the general field of social, cultural and economic change.
There are other areas which are not really covered directly in Appell’s categorisation, one of which is that of material culture and museum studies.
There is also the category of film, photography, dance and performance.

Therefore, with appropriate modifications in Appell’s scheme there seems to me to be several of these which can be applied across Borneo. However, I think a thematic categorisation should be brought together with a chronological treatment of the field of studies whilst also drawing attention to significant debates and controversies and to the work of prominent scholars who have made major contributions to our understanding of social and cultural organisation and change.

There is more to say about Appell’s contribution at this juncture (and see Chap. 2). Given his long involvement in Borneo Studies and the Borneo Research Bulletin, and his coordination of gatherings of Borneo scholars, particularly at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, George Appell has also produced important Borneo-wide edited volumes. I have already referred to his general study of cognation (1976a) along with another edited book which covers a range of issues including religion and symbolism (1976b). He has also undertaken other surveys of social science work on Borneo, for example his edited volume with Leigh Wright on social science research in Sarawak (1978, and see Appell 1969a, 1977), and Sabah (for example, 1968) and his direction of our attention to urgent anthropological research which is required for Borneo (for example, 1969b, 1970).

5.4 Early Materials on Kalimantan

With reference to Chap. 2 I take up here the review of research and publications on Borneo from when I entered this field of studies in the late 1960s to early 1970s. I have already set the scene in a consideration of the pioneering work of the late 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s. Looking back on my preparation for field research in Kalimantan, there was precious little modern field research to access, in contrast to what was then available on Sarawak and to some extent Sabah. Having learned to read Dutch I covered about everything that was relevant in missionary journals and archives and in the work of A.W. Nieuwenhuis (1900, 1904–1907, 1994; and see van Goor 1995 and Sellato 1993), J.J.K. Enthoven (1903) (enormously important for my historical work), P.J. Veth (1854–1856), Donatus Dunselman (see, for example, 1955, 1959), M.C. Schadee (see, for example, 1903-1904-1905-19061907), G.A.F. Molengraaff (1900), as well as Karl Helbig’s work in German (1955) (see, for references King 1985; and for a commentary on Dutch sources Avé, King and de Wit 1983).

But in English there had only been a handful of studies. Those scholars whom I contacted were unfailingly helpful: Herb and Pat Whittier whom I met in Hull in 1971 on their return from Kalimantan and who had undertaken work on the Kenyah in the Apo Kayan [see Herb Whittier’s thesis (1973) on symbols of social differentiation which had a great influence on some of my subsequent work on the symbolism of social stratification, and Pat Whittier’s (1981), on systems of appellation]; Alf and Judith Hudson (1978) who had worked on the Ma’anyan in southeastern Borneo (his doorstep of a thesis at Cornell (1967) on their social structure and culture was an excellent model of its time on how to handle cognatic social systems). The Hudsons’ work, and then through the linguistic work which Alf Hudson did (see, for example, 1977), also had a major ethnographic influence on me (and see 1967). I called on them to contribute to Essays on Borneo societies (1978) along with George Appell (Rungus) (1978b), Jay Crain (Lun Dayeh) (1978), Stephen Morris (Melanau) (1978), Jérôme Rousseau (Kayan) (1978), Cliff Sather (Bajau Laut) (1978), William Schneider (Selako) (1978) and Herb Whittier (Kenyah) (1978).

Though perhaps less useful there was also the mission-based work of William Conley on The Kalimantan Kenyah: a study of tribal conversion in terms of dynamic cultural themes (1976). In correspondence with Needham (who directed me to Hans Scharer’s work, 1963), with Tom Harrisson (rather terse exchanges), and in my meetings with Anthony Richards and Edmund Leach in Cambridge I accessed much of what I could on Indonesian Borneo and other relevant literature on the northern Borneo territories. Though I did not contact him directly, I had also read all the published work in article form of Douglas Miles on the Ngaju of Central Kalimantan. Subsequently he published his Cutlass and crescent moon: a case study of social and political change in outer Indonesia (1976) which was an early study of interethnic relations between Banjarese Malays and Ngaju Dayaks, based on field research undertaken in 1961–63 (and see Alexander 2008 and Miles 1994). The most valuable pre-fieldwork meeting was with Jan B. Avé in Leiden and through him my introduction to the world of Dutch ethnology and history, museum collections on Kalimantan, photographic materials and the Leiden school of structural anthropology (see King 2012c), and his recommendation that I read, among many others, Waldemar Stohr’s Das Totenritual der Dajak (1959). A rather curious though also important book which he recommended was Tjilik Riwut’s Kalimantan memanggil (1958).

5.5 Expansion in the 1960s and 1970s: Ethnic and Ethnographic Infilling, with Some Conceptual Development

There was a veritable explosion of doctoral studies on Borneo in the 1960s and into the 1970s which I kept track of and read avidly, though these were primarily presenting ethnographic data on social organisation and, on occasion, such cultural matters as religion, and various dimensions of change and development. These latter themes or what we might term social and economic transformations (whether spontaneous or government and institutionally driven) were to become much more important from the late 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s. In other words, while this early body of work might well be structured in terms of a particular research theme or interest or in relation to a particular concept or conceptual framework, their main purpose was to present an ethnographic record on a population, which usually had not been the subject of previous detailed, first-hand field study. The tendency for foreign researchers (myself included) was to go where others had not been and studied before; many of us were into anthropological imperialism in those days, laying claim to peoples and places which others had so far not managed to claim before our arrival. Perhaps we might refer to this as a period of ethnic and ethnographic infilling, and in some cases ethnographic elaboration.

Apart from the studies of the Iban which continued to proliferate, the rest of Borneo seemed to be a landscape of opportunity for anthropologists. What, I think, characterises this period is the undertaking of research primarily by overseas researchers, primarily American, still primarily male, still primarily in Sarawak, and primarily pursuing projects of their own choosing for their doctoral studies. There was also a scatter of researchers from other English-speaking countries: Britain, Australia, Canada. During this early period there was little evidence of local scholars undertaking research [with the exception of such Iban experts as Benedict Sandin (for example, 1967) and Peter Kedit (1980)], and this, along with changing government priorities in Borneo resulted in a very marked shift from the mid-1970s in what was to be studied and how it was to be done.

But this early period of activity saw other parts of Borneo (other than Sarawak) gradually coming into the purview of modern social science. I have already referred to the early anthropological studies in Kalimantan by the Hudsons, the Whittiers, Douglas Miles and William Conley, and by me as the lone British researcher (though in terms of its size and ethnic diversity Kalimantan was only sparsely covered, see also Martin Baier, ‘Das Adatbusrecht der Ngaju-Dajak’, 1977). Brunei also began to be the subject of serious and sustained research with the studies of Donald E. Brown, best known for his Brunei: the structure and history of a Bornean Malay sultanate (1970), based on his Cornell doctoral thesis ‘Socio-political history of Brunei: a Bornean Malay sultanate’ (1969), and a wide range of papers on social organisation and sociohistorical analysis (see King 1994a, 1996, 2001).

Brown, like some other senior anthropologists, particularly Freeman and Needham, was also to make a contribution to wider anthropological debates.

He moved beyond Borneo in his later work, most prominently in his Principles of social structure: South East Asia (1976). In that book he explored the concept of ‘corporation’ and its utility in the structural analysis of social forms and processes, and then illustrated the operation of a range of principles of organisation: sex/gender, age, ethnicity, locality, descent, ritual and belief, common property interests, occupation, rank and voluntary association; and demonstrated the interrelationship between different principles of organisation in the Brunei case.

In addition, a theme which Brown had developed in relation to his Brunei materials was that of the relationship between social stratification and historiography in his Hierarchy, history, and human nature: the social origins of historical consciousness (1988). He later turned this interest into a wide-ranging comparative study which examined, in the context of social hierarchy, the question of why some societies suppress history or at least do not take a particular interest in it, and why some celebrate and emphasise it. Finally, in his Human universals (1991), and the subsequent papers which developed from it (for example, 2004), Brown comes close to Derek Freeman’s concerns in his exploration of the fields of human biology, genetics, ethology, neurology and psychology. (We have already noted Freeman’s conversion from a British-based social structure-focused perspective and one which was critical of the ‘culturalist’ position of such American anthropologists as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead.) Rather than cultural relativism and the emphasis on human differences, Brown, moving from a concern with ‘corporations’ and social structure, searches for similarities in human behaviour, personality and culture rooted in human nature and the human mind, in interaction with the natural and cultural environment within which they are embedded.

There is another interesting connection between some of Brown’s and indeed Freeman’s work with that of Rodney Needham in the latter ’s increasing interest in with what he himself referred to in Lévi-Straussian terms as the ‘fundamental structures of the human mind’ and ‘radical factors’ of thought and action. For Needham, in his later work, there was no such thing as ‘beliefs’ or ‘inner states’; these are the product of the working of the human brain, independent of language and culture. Needham therefore searched for the ‘cognitive universals’ or ‘primary factors’ generated by the human mind. These comprise such elements as colours, sacred numbers, symbolic polarities and their associations, right and left, percussion and transition, the sacred and the secular, and certain archetypal figures. For Needham kinship systems too can be reduced to a small number of organisational forms and marriage rules; and relationships between categories, groups and symbols can also be reduced to a limited number of possibilities (opposition, exchange, alternation, reversal, inversion, transition and complementarity). He published a series of tightly written and succinct volumes on these general cultural principles which he had been adumbrating since the 1970s (1978a, b, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, and see Forth 2010).

Two other contributions to the early development of Brunei anthropology came from Allen Maxwell and Linda Amy Kimball; there was Maxwell’s ethnographic thesis on the Kadayan in which he also explores issues of ethnic identity, ‘Urang Darat: an ethnographic study of the Kadayan of the Labu Valley, Brunei’ (Yale, 1980) and Linda Amy Kimball’s ‘The enculturation of aggression in a Brunei Malay village’ (Ohio, 1975). Maxwell also undertook work on the Brunei Malay language and literature and on linguistic, historical and ethnographic matters in Sarawak; but he did not stray far from Borneo. Apart from her Borneo medicine: the traditional healing art of indigenous Brunei Malay medicine (1979) and Alam Brunei: the world of traditional Brunei Malay culture (1991), Linda Kimball also wrote with Colin Tweddell Introduction to the peoples and cultures of Asia (1985) and with Shawna Craig and Dale K. McGinnis Anthropological world: an introduction to cultural anthropology (1986).

A large amount of work was undertaken in Sarawak in the late 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, with a significant proportion of it on the Iban. Those studies which covered other groups included James Deegan on change among the Lun Bawang (1973), Roy Bruton on sociocultural transmission through schooling among the Bidayuh (1981), Roger Peranio on Bisayan social change (1977), Peter Metcalf on Berawan concepts and rituals of death (1976, 1981, 1982), Jérôme Rousseau on Kayan social organisation (1974), Iain Clayre on a grammatical description of the Melanau language (1972), B.G. Grijpstra on issues of Bidayuh rural development (1976), William Martin Schneider on Selako social organisation (1974), Richard Fidler (2010/ 1973) on a Chinese urban community in an upriver bazaar, and Zainal Kling on the social, economic and cultural organisation and values of the Saribas Malays (1973).

The substantial amount of work on the Iban included studies by Robert F. Austin on Iban migration (1977), Don David Cobb on Iban shifting cultivation (1988), Rob Cramb on Iban land tenure (1987), Michael Heppell on social control and socialisation (1975), James Jemut Masing’s analysis of an Iban invocatory chant (1981), Motomitsu Uchibori on Iban eschatology and mortuary practices (1978, 1997), Margit Ilona Komânyi on the involvement in decision-making of Iban women (1973), Christine Padoch on migration and its alternatives in long-settled Iban areas (1978), Richard L. Schwenk on the reasons underlying family innovativeness among the rural Iban (1975), James M. Seymour on rural schools and development (1972), Robert Pringle on the Iban under the Brooke raj (1967, 1970), Vinson Sutlive on the movement of Iban from the longhouse to the town (1972) and Clayton Hsin Chu on Iban shamanism (1978).

There was also more general work on rural settlement (Gale Dixon 1972), the social history of urban development in Kuching (Craig Lockard 1974, 1987), the development of political organisations (Michael Leigh 1971) and post-independence bureaucratic change and ethnicity in both Sarawak and Sabah (William Wu Shou-Chiang 1972).

Although not as significant in its quantity there was also important research undertaken in Sabah particularly following Appell’s studies and publications in the 1960s; among others, David H. Fortier’s study of cultural change among Chinese communities in rural areas (1964), Robert Harrison’s study of socioeconomic variation among different Ranau Dusun agricultural communities (1971), Clifford A. Sather’s study of Bajau Laut kinship and domestic relations (1971, 1978), Jay Bouton Crain’s work on marriage and social exchange among the Lun Dayeh (1970), Elizabeth Koepping’s study of Kadazan social relations (1981) and

Han Sin Fong’s work on occupational patterns and social interaction among the Chinese (1971). A later edited volume by Sherwood G. Lingenfelter on Social organization of Sabah societies (1990) continues this earlier focus on social forms including kinship, and covering a range of other communities as well; and Jean Morrison addressed issues of gender among the Bajau (1993). Most recently scholars at Universiti Malaysia Sabah have carried on this tradition of field research (see, for example, Pugh-Kitingan 2004, 2012).

5.6 Studies in the 1980s: The Turn towards Development and Practice

In Kalimantan there was also a resurgence of studies: they include Michael Dove on the subsistence strategies of the Kantu’ (1981), Richard Allen Drake on Mualang ‘material provisioning’ (1982), Francis McKeown on the Merakai Iban with special reference to dispute settlement (1983), Joseph Aaron Weinstock on religion and identity among the Luangan (1983), Bernard Sellato on the sedentarisation of hunting-gathering communities (1989), Carl Lewis Hoffman’s controversial thesis on the Punan (1983, 1986), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s study of politics and culture among the Meratus Dayaks (1984, 1993) and Olivier Sevin on a socio-geographical study of the Ngaju of the Seruyan and Kahayan (1983).

There was also a developing tendency in ethnic terms to begin to build upon work that had already been done, including the emphasis on Iban-related peoples in West Kalimantan which continued the focus on the Iban initiated by Freeman in neighbouring Sarawak; the development of work on the Barito-speaking populations initiated by Hudson; and comparative research on hunting-gathering or previously nomadic groups which had been pioneered by Needham in Sarawak. Research also continued on the Ngaju, a large and important population which had been the subject of interest in the work of Scharer and Miles, among others.

In Sarawak, too, we began to see the development of important work on the upriver Kajang groups related historically and culturally to the coastal Melanau and Morris’s studies: Simon Strickland on the Kejaman and Sekapan (1986, 1995); Ida Nicolaisen on the Punan Bah (1976, 1977–1978, 1983, 1986, 1995), though she had also worked among other peoples as well which provided, among other publications, The pastoral Tuareg (with Johannes Nicolaisen 1997), and Elusive hunters: the Hadded of Kanem and the Bahr el Ghazal (2010); and Jennifer Alexander on the Lahanan (1987, 1989, 1990, 1992, 2006/1993), and with Paul Alexander (1995).

But from the late 1970s and onwards we can detect a significant shift in thematic interest and focus, prompted in no small part by the closer control which the three governments responsible for Borneo exercised over research undertaken by foreign researchers in particular. It was marked, among other developments, by Peter Kedit’s announcement the Sarawak Museum Journal (1975) that henceforth research in Sarawak should be much more practically oriented and should address the problems of sociocultural change in the state. This in turn coincided with the rapid increase in commercial logging in Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan and the obvious environmental, economic and social costs of the exploitation of the rainforests and the impacts on local communities. Reflecting on this period of research it is my view that we witnessed a significant shift in research themes, and I was certainly part of this movement towards applied studies and policy issues.

Of course, research of a more practical, applied nature was undertaken before then in the 1960s and 1970s (as we can see in some of the references above) and it was one of the principles underlying the much earlier Colonial Social Science Research Council-sponsored studies. But its prominence in government and academic agendas became especially pronounced in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and this is where the work of local researchers came to the fore as well. This was for obvious reasons. Local scholars were grappling with the serious issues of economic development and growth and their consequences, and government funding was very much directed to these concerns. However, I should state very strongly here that this stream of work is by no means devoid of theoretical content.

I have already made the case for the importance of the relationships between theory and practice in my Anthropology and development in South-East Asia (King 1999b). Only a brief catalogue of work can be provided here. In Sarawak there is a wide range of materials available [much has emerged from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) and government institutions, and see Poline Bala, Chap. 13], and quite a lot of the research appears in the form of doctoral theses (primarily written at overseas institutions). It includes work by Abang Azhari Hadari (1991), Abdul Majid Mat Salleh and Mohd Yusof Kasim (1990), Abdul Rashid Abdullah (1993), Warren Aris (1998), Poline Bala (2008), Madeline Berma (1996), Henry Chan (2007), Chin See Chung (1984), Dimbab Ngidang (1993), Hatta Solhee (1984), Hew Cheng Sim (2003, 2007, and see Chap. 11), Evelyne Hong (1977, 1985, 1987), Morni B. Kambrie (1990), Jayl Langub (1983), Jayum Jawan (1991), Jegak Uli (1996), Francis Jana Lian (1987), Salfarina Abdul Gapor (2001), Peter Songan (1992), and many others.

Overseas researchers also undertook work relevant to various practical development concerns, including Hanne Christensen (1997), Robert Cramb (1987, 2007), Arabella E. Duffield (1999), Robert Gerrits (1994), Monica Janowski (1991) and Jill Windle (1997). A similar account can also be given for Sabah where there has also been a very prominent emphasis on applied work through Universiti Malaysia Sabah [and such researchers as Fadzilah Majid Cooke (1999, 2006) and Paul Porodong (2010) among many others] and the Institute of Development Studies. There is also the work of foreign researchers such as Alison L. Hoare (2002), and the impetus given to development-oriented concerns early on through the advocacy of George Appell (1985a, and see Amity A. Doolittle 1999, 2005) among others. In Sabah, too, there has been a particular emphasis on issues to do with tourism and development; see for example, Goh Hong Ching (2007), Timothy Maurice Pianzin (1993), Ong Puay Liu (2000, 2008) and Zainab Khalifah (1997); on land settlement and rural development (Anna Hewgill 1999); and on issues to do with health and illness (Ismail Simon Charles 2004).

I have said elsewhere that this more practically oriented work demonstrates ‘the crucial need to address the human dimensions of development, the complexity of development interventions and the need to listen to the voices of ordinary people who are the targets of centrally planned policies’ (King 2009: 28, and see Zawawi 2001). Earlier on George Appell had made a similar case, and was especially concerned about the undermining of indigenous rights to land in Borneo and the emergence of landlessness (see, for example, 1985a, and Appell’s chapters on the Rungus and Bulusu’ in that volume). In Kalimantan, and especially in the eastern province, much of the research has focused on such issues as rainforest clearance, changing systems of shifting cultivation, sustainable agricultural systems, responses to such hazards as fire, off-farm work and rural-urban linkages, poverty, resettlement and transmigration, health issues and rural development, and ethnobotanical knowledge and use of medicinal plants. Among others there is the work of Syamsuni Arman (1987), Lucia Carol Cargill (1996), Carol Pierce Colfer (2008, and see Colfer, Peluso and Chin 1997), Stacy Marie Crevello (2003), Rokhmin Dahuri (1991), Michael Dove (1981), Cristina Eghenter (1995, and Eghenter, Sellato and Devung 2003), Stephanie Theresa Fried (1995), Mary Beth Fulcher (1983), Lisa Gollin (2001), Julia C. Hall (1993), Michaela Haug (2007, 2010), Aleksius Jemadu (1996), Han Knapen (2001), Indah D. Kusuma (2005), Danna Jo Leaman (1996), Cynthia Mackie (1986), Judith Hannah Mayer (1996), Frank Momberg (1993), Muhammad Yunus Rasyid (1982), Nancy Lee Peluso (1983), Nick N. Salafsky (1993), Donna Mayo Vargas (1985), Andrew P. Vayda (1981, 1983 and his senior role in the Man and Biosphere programme in particular), Reed L. Wadley (1997a), Danny Wilistra (2000) and William Bruce Wood (1985).

5.7 Culture and Identities

The applied, practical, policy concerns in Borneo research have continued within what we commonly refer to as development studies. But during the past 20 years there have been other developments which have emerged from and addressed issues which have come onto the wider social science agenda, and indeed which have a resonance in Borneo itself. Most of them can be captured within the frame of cultural studies, and have been taken up in my working paper Culture and identity which provides a much more extensive consideration of the relevant literature (2012a, and see Chap. 8). It is in the cultural realm (in the construction and contestation of identities and the relations between identity formation, nation-building and globalisation), and the discourses which are generated in the interfaces between people and the nation-state on which we need to focus. I will only summarise the contributions here which come under seven headings: (1) the nation-state, majorities and minorities; (2) religious conversion and identities; (3) the media, identities and nation-building; (4) borderlands, margins, migrations and identities; (5) interethnic relations and violence; (6) arenas for identity construction in tourism and museums; and finally (7) emerging middle classes, lifestyles and identities in urban settings. These dimensions are considered in much more detail in the separate Chap. 8 in this volume, and only a brief summary is provided here.

5.7.1 The Nation-State, Majorities and Minorities

The first category covers the literature which moves from a focus on a local or defined population to one which sees a particular community or group within the nation-state and in engagement with political elites and associated dominant groups through which they have to negotiate their identity and resources. This category is best illustrated in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s study of the Meratus Dayaks (1984, 1993), Kumpiady Widen’s studies of Ma’anyan Dayaks (2001, 2002, and see his Chap. 12 in this volume; see also Zaenuddin Hudi Prasojo, Chap. 20, Kusni 1994, 2001), Kustanto’s study of the Sungkung (2002), Hui Yew-Foong’s (2011) and Mary Somers Heidhues’s (2003) work on the Chinese in West Kalimantan, Laura Steckman’s recent thesis on Dayak identity in relation to state action (2011), and Robert Winzeler’s edited collection on the relationship between the state and minorities (1997), though there are many other studies which could be cited (see also King 2012a).

5.7.2 Religious Conversion and Identities

The literature on religious conversion and on transformations in religious ideas and practices has increased substantially in recent years and it points to a social and cultural process which has assumed much greater prominence in the context of nation-building in Borneo. To provide a context for these changes we are fortunate in having major studies of ‘traditional’ religions, which address issues of ritual performance, the language of ritual (in prayer, song, chant, myth, invocation), cosmology, symbolism, and the transitions involved in birth, initiation, marriage and death, the architectural and material expressions of religion, the ways in which health and illness are conceptualised and dealt with (in shamanism and spirit mediumship), and the interrelationships between religion and the mundane, everyday activities of securing a livelihood, particularly in the traditional pursuits of agriculture, and hunting and gathering. These studies include Ann L. Appleton’s Acts of integration, expressions of faith: madness, death and ritual in Melanau ontology (2006); Jay Bernstein’s study of Taman shamanism Spirits captured in stone: shamanism and traditional medicine among the Taman of Borneo (1997, and see 1991); Pascal Couderc and Kenneth Sillander’s Ancestors in Borneo societies: death, transformation, and social immortality (2012); Julian Davison’s Image and metaphor: an analysis of Iban collective representations (1987); Henry Gana Ngadi’s Iban rites of passage and some related ritual acts (1988); Penelope Graham’s Iban shamanism: an analysis of the ethnographic literature (1987); Eva Maria Kershaw’s A study of Brunei Dusun religion: ethnic priesthood on a frontier of Islam [2000, see also the work by Brunei Dusun researchers Bantong Antaran, The Brunei Dusun (1993) and Binchin Pudarno’s recent study Singing Siram Ditaan (2014)]; Lake’ Baling’s The old Kayan religion and the Bungan religious reform (2002); James Jemut Masing’s The coming of the gods (1981, and see the extended published version 1997); Peter Metcalf’s A Borneo journey into death (1981, 1982) and Where are you, spirits: style and theme in Berawan prayer (1989); Stephen Morris’s posthumous study of Melanau religion in The Oya Melanau (1997); Jérôme Rousseau’s Kayan religion: ritual life and religious reform in central Borneo (1998); Benedict Sandin’s Iban adat and augury (1980); Clifford Sather’s Seeds of play, words of power: an ethnographic study ofIban shamanic chants (2001); Hans Scharer’s important work on Ngaju religion (1963, 1946); Vinson Sutlive and Patricia Matusky’s Tears of sorrow, words of hope: an ethnographic study of Iban death chants (2012); Motomitsu Uchibori’s The leaving of the transient world (1978). It should be noted here that Metcalf, like some of the other anthropologists to whom I have referred in the context of the process of carrying debates beyond Borneo, has also produced work in the more general anthropological field [for example, his introductory text Anthropology: the basics (2005) and his reflective piece on doing fieldwork and its problems, They lie, we lie: getting on with anthropology (2002)].

Following Conley’s early study of Kenyah religious conversion (1973), we have enjoyed a spate of studies, mainly examining processes of conversion and its social and cultural consequences, as well as the continuities and discontinuities which result from changes in religious belief and practice. Among others, there are studies by Asiyah az-Zahra Ahmad Kumpoh (2011), David G. Bonney (1995), Donald R. Bryant (1985), Liana Chua (2007a, b, 2009, 2012), Jennifer Connolly (2003), Michael Coomans (1980), J.A. Fowler (1976), Fridolin Ukur (1971), Annette Suzanne Harris (1995), Fiona Harris (2002), Arnold Leon Humble (1982), Sian Eira Jay (1991), Pamela Lindell (2000, 2008), Anne Schiller (1987, 1997, 2005), Tan Sooi Ling (2008), Larry Kenneth Thomson (2000), Mariko Urano (2002), Karen Westmacott (2002), and Zhu Feng (2004). Of course, particular religious configurations, specific beliefs and practices, and the connections established between myth, cosmology and ethnic origins are important ingredients in the construction and maintenance of identities. The major focus in research on Borneo has been on conversion to Christianity rather than to Islam, and the impetus for this has come from American missionary activity, though with a more modest interest from Britain and Germany. These issues are taken up in more detail in Chap. 8.

5.7.3 The Media, Identities and Nation-Building

The third category of research on identities in Borneo has taken the media route to nation-building and has posed the important question: How are communities and ethnic groups in Borneo responding and reacting to media-generated nation-building in Malaysia and Indonesia? This is an emerging area of research pioneered by John Postill (2000, 2006), Fausto Barlocco (2008) and Poline Bala (2008), among others, and it explores dimensions of identity formation and the different ways in which minority populations respond to the opportunities and constraints presented within a nation-state structure.

5.7.4 Borderlands, Margins, Migrations and Identities

Research within the fourth category has focused primarily on Indonesian border populations and the responses of these marginal communities in territorial terms to the pressures of what is perceived to be a remote central government (which is dominated by culturally and ethnically different populations with different priorities); the work of Michael Eilenberg (2012) and with Reed L. Wadley (2009) is important here. Research on the Sarawak side of the border has also focused on spatially marginal populations, cross-border relations and the ambiguous and shifting relations with the nation-state (see Ishikawa 1998, 2010; Amster 1998; Bala 2002); this work also presents us with a range of case studies which complement and overlap with those on media-generated nation-building and the responses of minorities to the actions and ideologies of dominant political elites.

5.7.5 Interethnic Relations and Violence

As I have already indicated in my introductory remarks, this category of research has emerged in the necessary engagement with the violent interethnic conflicts in West and Central Kalimantan in the 1990s and the relationship between the construction, transformation and expression of ethnicity, the politicisation of identity, the underlying reasons for ethnic conflict, and its cultural patterning and local interpretation, in the work of an increasing number of anthropologists, historians and political scientists, among them Colombijn (2001), Colombijn and Lindblad (2002), Davidson (2002, 2008), Dove (2006), Harwell (2000), Hawkins (2000), Heidhues (2001), König (2012), Peluso (2003, 2006, 2008), Peluso and Harwell (2001), Sukandar (2007) and van Klinken (2004).

5.7.6 Arenas for Identity Construction in Tourism and Museums

I like to think that I encouraged an interest in tourism research in Borneo with the panel which I organised at the BRC conference in Sabah in 1992 (see King 1995).

This was a time when tourism began to be promoted very vigorously in Borneo. But, of course, there was already some work being undertaken on tourism by, among others, Heather Zeppel (1994). Encouragingly this interest has continued in, for example, studies by researchers in Sabah (already referred to above, Goh, Pianzin, Ong, Zainab), and Sarawak, including William Kruse’s Selling wild Borneo (2003).

Prior to the establishment of universities in Borneo the museums were the major supporters and managers of research, the obvious example being the Sarawak Museum and subsequently the Brunei Museum. Yet their major influence has been in categorising ethnic groups and presenting particular interpretations of culture and identity by attaching items of material culture to them. What is more their role in relation to the general public and to tourist visitors has become increasingly important as state governments have seen museums as a significant government institution in tourism promotion. It is clear from the work of Dianne Tillotson (1994) and Christina Kreps (1994, and see her Chap. 9, and Bernard Sellato on material culture in Chap. 4) that museums are important agents for constructing and presenting culture, and as departments responsible to government they usually present a nation-state view of what ethnic groups are important and how they are defined (and see Gill 1968; Sellato 1992, 2012).

5.7.7 Emerging Middle Classes, Lifestyles and Identities in Urban Settings

Globalisation is one of our current preoccupations and we might have anticipated that research on Borneo would have reflected this concern. Unfortunately it has not. There is very little research available on urban societies in Borneo which documents what local people experience in relation to the most immediate manifestations of global processes and late modernity, through encounters with the state and bureaucracy, nation-building symbols and actions, the media, technology and consumerism, international tourists, and representatives of other ethnic groups. There is nevertheless an emerging, though still rather modest interest in identity construction in urban areas and the lifestyles of an expanding middle class (see, for example, Boulanger 1999, 2000, 2002, 2008, 2009).

5.8 Some Controversies

An additional way in which we can usefully survey some of the field of Borneo Studies is by examining particular debates and controversies. It is interesting in surveying the field of studies that several of the debates turn on the problem of identities and the identification, labelling and depiction of ethnic groups and categories and the ways in which these groups have interacted with and encountered each other through time. Other issues tend to concern themselves with problems of ethnographic accuracy and those to do with social organisation, including the relationships between social groups and rights in property and access to material resources.

In the pages of the Borneo Research Bulletin one could point immediately to George Appell’s excursion into ethnographic errors in Borneo Studies (1991, 1992), and Roger Kershaw’s emulation of this exercise with reference to ‘errors and imbalances’ in ‘foreign analysis’ of ethnic minorities in late twentieth-century Brunei (2010). A specific example of these kinds of ethnographic debates can be found in the exchanges between George Appell, Peter R. Goethals, Robert Harrison and Clifford Sather, on the one hand, and Thomas Rhys Williams (1969), on the other, in relation to the latter’s work on the Sabah Dusun (see Appell 1965, 1966, 1967; Appell et al. 1966; Sather 1967).

Another rather long-running debate was directed to systems of land tenure and property-holding groups in Borneo with reference to ‘ecological determinism’ which started with a brief and exploratory paper in the Borneo Research Bulletin by George Appell on the possible relationships between such environmental variables as rainfall and soil and the kinds of rights and access which farmers establish in land (1971a). Appell’s interesting proposition emerged from his ongoing concerns with land tenure, property systems and jural relations (see, for example, Appell 1971b, and see 1974, 1997a, b).

His paper sparked a whole series of interventions, ethnographic additions, rejoinders and disagreements among several anthropologists who published their views primarily in the Borneo Research Bulletin; there was also a wider literature relevant to these concerns: Gale Dixon (1974), Victor King (1975), Joseph Weinstock (1979a, b, 1981), Michael Dove (1980, 1982), and a later follow up on Kayan land tenure with Jérôme Rousseau (1987) and George Appell (1986, and see Appell 1997a), and on Iban land tenure (Cramb 1989; Wadley 1997b). Debates turned on the reliability of the data, the specific cases used and the importance of using indigenous terms and categories and not externally imposed and generated ones, the complexity of the combination of factors at play—social, cultural, economic, environmental, historical, political—and the lines of causality involved, keeping in mind the possibility of multiple or plural causality (see, for example, Dove 1982: 31–33). Appell’s subsequent research among the Bulusu’ of northeastern Kalimantan added a further dimension to his understanding of these issues and he recognised the importance of addressing historical circumstances (1983, 1985a, b), and the ecological significance of sacred groves (1997b).

Returning to some of the debates and controversies on ethnic identities, these have revealed sharp differences of view over the nomenclature of ethnic groups which in turn is related to how these groups are constituted and differentiated in the interpretations presented by anthropologists and other social scientists. Tom Harrisson’s and Rodney Needham’s exchange over ‘Punan’ and ‘Penan’ comes to mind immediately (Harrisson 1949a, b, 1959, 1975; Needham 1953, 1954a, b, 1955, 1972; Jayl Langub 1975). Needham was arguing against the dangers of viewing hunter-gatherers as linguistically and culturally homogeneous, and there has been a subsequent intense debate about hunting-gathering as a definable mode of livelihood, about the origins of hunter-gatherers, whether or not they are best understood in terms of ecological autonomy and independence or as engaged in a relatively regular way with agriculturalists, about the appropriateness of the distinctions between an agricultural and a hunting-gathering way of life, and about processes of sedentarisation and devolution (see Lars Kaskija 2002, 2012, and his Chap. 6 in this volume).

Much of this debate was instigated by Carl Hoffman’s provocative thesis entitled Punan (1983, and see 1984) and the book published from it The Punan: hunters and gatherers of Borneo (1986, and see Hildebrand 1982) based on his argument that hunter-gatherers are devolved agriculturalists, specialising in the collection of valuable products from the rainforest which are channelled into Asian networks of trade through persisting relations between forest nomads and neighbouring agriculturalists. This in turn led to deliberations on the constitution of the Punan as a category of populations in Borneo which could in some way be differentiated from others, or a category which was more appropriately characterised as diverse in sociocultural, ethnic and ecological terms.

Hoffman’s thesis led to a series of counter-arguments about, among others, (1) the viability of hunting-gathering without the need to engage in trade in forest products; (2) that rather than devolution from settled agriculture the most common processes at work in Borneo have been in the reverse direction from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture; and (3) that it is misleading to characterise livelihoods in terms of a too simple distinction between agriculture and nomadism; instead there is a continuum of activity from farming to horticulture to hunting-gathering, and various populations move between various of these activities or practise them simultaneously. These detailed studies of nomadism have come from Bernard Sellato on a range of forest nomad groupings in Kalimantan (1986, 1988, 1989, 1994, 2002), J. Peter Brosius on the Penan Gang (1988, 1991, 1992), Nicolas Cesard on the Punan Tubu’ (2007, 2009), Shanthi Thambiah on the Bhuket of Sarawak and West Kalimantan (1995), Rajindra Kumar Puri on the Penan Benalui (1997, 2006), Katherine Holmsen on the Punan Kelai at Long Suluy (2006), Henry Chan on Punan Vuhang (2007) and Lars Kaskija on the Punan Malinau and other groups in East Kalimantan (2002, 2012), among others. The enormous literature on hunter-gatherers and logging and that which relates to Bruno Manser (2004) and other opposition activities certainly merits examination, probably starting with Tim Bending’s work on ‘contentious narratives’ (2006, and see King for a review of Bending and Puri 2006).

As for other discussions and debates, I have already referred to some of these in Chap. 2, in relation to Derek Freeman’s work (see 1953, 1957, 1960, 1961, 1970), particularly with regard to the concept of the kindred and familial units (see, for example, King 1976, 1991, 1994b, 2013; Appell 1976c; Smart 1971); on ritual and symbolic interpretation (Barrett and Lucas 1993; Jensen 1968, 1974; King 1977, 1980; Needham 1964; Freeman 1967, 1968, 1975, 1979); and between Freeman (1981) and Rousseau (1980) on Iban social inequality. Following on from this debate, the issues surrounding so-called ‘egalitarian’ and ‘ranked’ or ‘stratified’ societies and the concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ in Borneo have been explored in considerable detail by a range of researchers. The most significant issues and arguments have been brought together in an insightful and meticulous paper by Clifford Sather ‘All threads are white’ (1996). Our understanding of the complexities of the relations between equality, autonomy, hierarchy, control and dependence have also been advanced and debated by, among others, Jennifer Alexander (1990, 1992, 2006) with reference to the Lahanan, and Rita Armstrong (1991, 1992, see also 1998) with a focus on the Kenyah-Badeng. Christine Helliwell further develops our understanding of these relationships between equality and their more subtle conceptualisations arising from her field research among the Gerai of West Kalimantan (1990, 1994, 1995, 2001, 2006). I noted these developments briefly in a reprint of my Essays on Borneo societies (King 1994b: vii-x) and argued that the relations between cognation, equality and hierarchy also required much greater attention and analysis (King 1991).

Rather than the simplistic distinction between egalitarianism and hierarchy and equality and inequality these later contributions to the debates argue for the need to examine the relationships between ideology and practice (an egalitarian ideology can coexist and interrelate with unequal relations and outcomes in practice); the ‘equality of potential’ can exist in a dialectical relationship with the ‘attainment of achieved inequality’ in the operation of ideas about individuality, autonomy and merit (Sather 1996: 73–78); inequality in the domain of politics can be found in relation to relative equality in matters of material life and gender and there are often differences between relationships in the domestic or internal and the public or external spheres of life; ethnic groups characterised or categorised as either ‘egalitarian’ or ‘stratified’ are commonly not homogeneously organised social entities and the boundaries between ethnic groups are frequently fuzzy and ill-defined; and we should acknowledge that social forms are dynamic and are subject to change by human agency over time. In other words, in any given social unit the principles of equality and inequality are in dynamic tension one with the other.

The earlier preoccupations with the delineation, definition and description of bounded social groups such as households, longhouses and villages, and the debates about the nature of kindreds and their utility in helping us to capture the main forms and processes of social life in Borneo societies (see, for example, the debate between King 1976 and Appell 1976c) (and the same can be said for debates about whether or not a particular society or ethnic group is egalitarian or hierarchical) have given way to much more fine-grained analyses and discussions of individuals, groupings and communities (which are usually not clearly demarcated). The work of Christine Helliwell on the Gerai of West Kalimantan demonstrates the problems of defining longhouses and communities in terms of clearly defined, independent households (‘Never stand alone’: a study of Borneo sociality, 2001, and see 2006), and Rita Armstrong’s work has addressed the problematical distinction between egalitarian and stratified societies with reference to the Kenyah-Badeng (see People of the same heart: the social world of the Kenyah Badeng, 1991, and 1992). The concepts of sociality, domesticity, domestic conflict, personhood, rice/ritualised hearths, ‘house societies’, and authority and social action are also explored to demonstrate the complexity of social relations, which in the earlier literature on Bornean societies tended to be seen in terms of corporate and bounded units of one kind or another or ‘jural personalities’ (see, for example, Véronique Béguet on Iban 1993; Monica Janowski on Kelabit 1991; Antonio Guerreiro on Modang 1984; Kenneth Sillander on Bentian 2004; Fudiat Suryadikara on Banjarese 1988).

Studies of social units such as the household have also given way not only to studies of individuals and networks and the permeability of boundaries but to studies of gender in relation to such processes as socioeconomic change and culture (see, for example, Hew Cheng Sim on Bidayuh 2003, and see 2007 and Chap. 11 in this volume; Morrison on Bajau 1993; Mashman 1991; and Gavin 1996, 2003/2004 on Iban; and for more wide-ranging coverage Sutlive 1991). But, as Harris says in relation to research on Sarawak (which applies to the other parts of Borneo as well): ‘Little research has been published that includes a discussion of gender issues, and Sarawak women have little or no voice in the ethnographies’ (2008: 57, and see Graham 1996).

Perhaps to conclude this brief review of debates and controversies, I should make reference to one in which I have been involved in relation to the Maloh of the Upper Kapuas and my monograph on the ethnography and sociohistory of social inequality (1985). It brings together a number of issues which I have just raised, particularly in relation to debates and differences of view about identities and the identification of ethnic units in Borneo, interethnic relations, the nature of cognatic society and the problematical conceptualisation, analysis and sociocultural expressions of equality and inequality. Although it is difficult to reflect on one’s own work in relation to studies of other societies in Borneo, it might be suggested that my study of the ‘Maloh’ has produced considerable controversy in which both foreign and local scholars have been involved (aside from myself there have been local researchers from the Embaloh and Taman communities themselves, from Java working in French, from the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States); or, if not directly involved in the debates they have at least contributed to the ethnography of the debate.

It is gratifying that so many researchers, including local social scientists have undertaken studies of this complex of communities in West Kalimantan which I originally labelled ‘Maloh’, following Iban convention and the commonly used nomenclature in the Sarawak literature (see, for example, Harrisson 1965, 1966). Debates have been conducted on ethnic identity and the appropriateness or otherwise of certain ethnic referents as well as on the forms of social structure and actions, relations and behaviour which flow from particular principles of organisation. I have tried to capture the sense of these debates, and to resolve some of the differences of opinion in two papers, one in the Borneo Research Bulletin entitled ‘Who are the Maloh? Cultural diversity and cultural change in interior Indonesian Borneo’ (2002) and ‘A question of identity: names, societies and ethnic groups in interior Kalimantan and Brunei Darussalam’ in Sojourn (2001), the latter paper bringing together issues raised from the Maloh literature, and also from discussions in which Donald Brown (1998) and Allen Maxwell (1996) became involved stemming from my arguments in ‘What is Brunei society? Reflections on a conceptual and ethnographic issue’ (1994a, 1996; and see Kershaw 2010). The major issues of ethnic labelling were also brought together by Reed L. Wadley in ‘Reconsidering an ethnic label in Borneo: the Maloh of West Kalimantan, Indonesia’ (2000).

Literature relevant to the Maloh debates includes work by Y.C. Thambun Anyang (1996, 1998, and see Sellato 1998), Mudiyono Diposiswoyo (1985), Henry Arts (1991), Jay Bernstein (1991, 1997), Jacobus E. Frans (1992, and Irene A. Muslim and Jacobus E. Frans 1994), Anna Samagat Juliana (1992) and Katsumi Okuno (1997). These debates raise the interesting question of how and why certain ethnic labels gain currency and are adopted by the people in question (the term ‘Iban’ is a case in point) and others remain the subject of dispute and are not accepted by those so named, and the role of the anthropologist and local scholars in this process. Another element in the debates is the issue of social inequality, how it is expressed in the society in question, by whom, and how the anthropologist interprets it. My view is clear on this: that systems of social organisation are flexible and subject to change; they cannot be easily and firmly categorised; individuals and groups deploy concepts of equality and inequality in a language of contestation and competition; and the communities and ethnic groups we study are interrelated and interact with their neighbours, and given increased physical and social mobility are embedded in wider, globalising systems; this in turn suggests that we cannot understand how societies and cultures are constructed and are changed within the confines of any one unit however defined (whether Bidayuh, Iban, Gerai, Maloh, Modang, Kenyah or Kayan).

In formulating my views about centres and margins/peripheries, and in my excursions into the examination of the complex interrelationships between ethnic groups, communities, and political units, I have of course been much influenced by the work of Leach (1950, 1954), but also by, among others, Christopher Healey on ‘tribes’ and ‘states’ in Borneo (1985, though I do not agree with everything he has to say about interethnic relations), and on a wider scale Bennet Bronson’s perspectives on upstream and downstream interactions (1977).

5.9 Final Thoughts

5.9.1 My Top Twenty

In undertaking such a stock-taking exercise and by way of conclusion I thought it useful to try to list what we might consider to be the top 20 contributions to Borneo Studies in the field of the social sciences, broadly defined. This is a very personal list and one which I found most difficult to compile. Perhaps I should have included journal papers and book chapters. Instead I have only selected books. I do not rank them in order of priority, but my guess is that several of the books here would appear on most researchers’ lists. It is important to think about the major contributions to our knowledge of the societies and cultures of Borneo, and also to think about how those key contributions have influenced and changed our under- standing.uunor

My twenty most significant books on Borneo are:

Derek Freeman. 1970. Report on the Iban.

Robert Pringle. 1970. Rajahs and rebels: the Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke rule 1841–1941.

Robert Hertz. 1960. Death and the right hand.

Hans Schârer. 1963. Ngaju religion: the conception of God among a South Borneo people.

Alfred B. Hudson. 1967. Padju Epat: the ethnography and social structure of a Ma’anjan Dayak group in southeastern Borneo.

W.R. Geddes. 1957. Nine Dayak nights.

Jérôme Rousseau. 1990. Central Borneo: ethnic identity and social life in a stratified society.

Benedict Sandin. 1967. The Sea Dayaks of Borneo before white Rajah rule.

Bernard Sellato. 1994. Nomads of the Borneo rainforest: the economics, politics, and ideology of settling down, and as Nomades et sédentarisation à Bornéo: histoire économique et sociale (1989).

Tjilik Riwut. 1958. Kalimantan memanggil.

Donald E. Brown. 1970. Brunei: the structure and history of a Bornean Malay sultanate.

J.J.K. Enthoven. 1903. Bijdragen tot de geographie van Borneo’s westerafdeeling.

Han Knapen. 2001. Forests of fortune? The environmental history of Southeast Borneo, 1600-1880.

John Postill. 2006. Media and nation building: how the Iban became Malaysian.

George N. Appell, ed. 1976a. The societies of Borneo: explorations in the theory of cognatic social structure.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 1993. In the realm of the diamond queen: marginality in an out-of-the-way place.

Peter Metcalf. 2010. The life of the longhouse: an archaeology of ethnicity.

Waldemar Stohr. 1959. Das Totenritual der Dajak.

Traude Gavin. 2003/2004. Iban ritual textiles.

H.F. Tillema. 1938, and 1989. Apo-Kajan, een filmreis naar en door Centraal Borneo.

In presenting an overview of the field we should reflect on and recapture what has already been discussed and reconsider the ways in which we are best able to arrange and evaluate the literature. We have used an overlapping set of organisational principles based on chronology, themes, individual legacies and contributions, and debates and controversies.

5.9.2 An Overall Perspective

Chronological: we have moved from earlier studies and those which set the baselines for future work; through to ethnographic expansion and infilling; the shift to applied work and policy-related concerns; the increasing concern with agency and fluidity and away from earlier social structural and corporatist analyses of Borneo social organisation; the all-consuming interest in identity construction, maintenance and transformation (including issues, among others, to do with minorities, nation-states, borders and boundaries, the media; and local agency and response to wider forces of change and globalisation).

Thematic: we have considered the main areas of social and cultural life which have engaged researchers in Borneo: cognation and kindreds; equality and inequality; the symbolism of death, shamanism and religion; rural development and change; ecology, the destruction of the rainforests, swidden agriculture and hunting-gathering; culture and identity, and so on.

Debates and controversies: here we have considered what issues have encouraged researchers in this field to engage in debates and scholarly exchanges; these include discussions of the factors which might explain variations in land tenure systems and property rights; ethnic nomenclature, classification and identity; the characterisation, definition and explanation for the nomadic way of life; explanations for symbolic forms; the nature of cognation and the analysis of social forms (kindreds, households, longhouses, communities); and the relationships between egality and hierarchy.

There is much more I could have referred to and discussed in this introductory overview. It is, in many respects, a starting point in the consideration of research on Borneo as a field of studies which has both relied upon and contributed to the more general field of anthropology and the wider social sciences. It is the first major attempt, I think, to take stock and to reflect on what has been achieved in scholarship in the post-war period and it has said something about what has been achieved during the period of independence and the era of nation-building and development.

What is clear, however, is that there has been a noticeable increase in the amount of work undertaken by institutions and scholars based in Borneo, and this trend will undoubtedly continue. It was to be expected that, in the early stages of research in Borneo Studies, foreign scholars would be dominant. But this situation has been changing certainly since the 1980s. Moreover, we are now witnessing a very welcome development—there is now much more collaboration between foreign and locally-based researchers, and the workshop which was organised at Universiti Brunei Darussalam provides an excellent example of this scholarly collaboration in evaluating what has been achieved and where we might go from here.

Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to George N. Appell for his detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper and for a subsequent reading with further suggestions, and to Bernard Sellato and Jérôme Rousseau for pointing me to literature which I had neglected to include.

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