Borneo and Beyond: Reflections on Borneo Studies, Anthropology and the Social Sciences Victor T. King Working Paper Series 3 Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam Gadong 2013 1 Editor-in-chief, Working Paper Series Prof. Dr. Victor T. King, Eminent Visiting Professor, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam Editorial Board, Working Paper Series Prof. Dr. Lian Kwen Fee, Professor Sociology/Anthropology, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Dr. Paul Carnegie, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Dr. Robina Mohammad, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Author Prof. Dr. Victor T. King, Eminent Visiting Professor, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti of Brunei Darussalam. Contact: [email protected]; [email protected] List of IAS Working Papers Working Paper No 1 King, Victor T., Culture and Identity: Some Borneo Comparisons. Gadong: Institute of Asian Studies-Universiti Brunei Darussalam 2013 Working Paper No 2 Evers, Hans-Dieter and Solvay Gerke: Local Knowledge and the Digital Divide: Focus on Southeast Asia. Gadong: Institute of Asian Studies-Universiti Brunei Darussalam 2013 Working Paper No 3 King, Victor T., Borneo and Beyond: Reflections on Borneo Studies, Anthropology and the Social Sciences. Gadong: Institute of Asian Studies-Universiti Brunei Darussalam 2013 The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute of Asian Studies or the Universiti Brunei Darussalam. © Copyright is held by the author(s) of each working paper; no part of this publication may be republished, reprinted or reproduced in any form without permission of the paper’s author(s). 2 Borneo and Beyond: Reflections on Borneo Studies, Anthropology and the Social Sciences Victor T. King Abstract In many respects, this paper is 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. I believe that this represents the first attempt to take stock of and to reflect on what has been achieved in scholarship on Borneo in the post- war period and it has also considered the post-war colonial legacy and what has been achieved in research during the period of independence in Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo and Brunei Darussalam and in the era of nation-building and development. In presenting an overview of the field I have reflected on the literature and attempted to arrange and evaluate it in a more consistent and ordered fashion. I have used an overlapping set of organisational principles based on chronology, themes, individual legacies and contributions, and debates and controversies. There is much more I could have referred to and discussed in this introductory overview but the intention has been to stimulate reflection and debate on the development of our understanding about the societies and cultures of Borneo since the 1940s. Keywords: Borneo Studies; anthropology: social sciences; chronology; major themes; individual legacies; debates and controversies. 3 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 since the Second World War. 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 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 on Borneo, supervising research students, assessing papers for publication and examining research theses. However, within the last year from mid-2012 I have begun to take up where I left off and, on my return to research on Borneo after a relatively long absence, I thought it would be 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 at least, 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 a separate paper to the relationships between culture and identity (see King, 2012a), but I do make reference to some of this literature in this general paper. By way of introduction we have to pose the question why it is 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 Ibrahim, 2012)? Cultural politics has been an important phenomenon across Southeast Asia in recent years (see, for example, Kahn, 1995, 1998, 2004), but I think in the Borneo context that this is in 4 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 pre-dated these events and evidence of Dayak-Madurese tensions and anti-Chinese actions go back to at least the 1950s (Tanasaldy, 2012). Therefore these inter-ethnic 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). 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 (1974; Zawawi Ibrahim, 2008a, 2008b). 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. After 1963 the Malaysian Borneo territories were also 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). I have already indicated elsewhere (King, 2012a) that even though the identification of ethnic groups and categories has enjoyed some prominence and a long history in Borneo Studies, it has become an increasing preoccupation during the past two decades with, for example, the important stimulus provided by the publication of the four special issues of the Sarawak Museum in 1989, organised primarily in terms of the major ethnic groups identified in the state (Chin and Kedit, 1989). These followed the government-sponsored Cultural Heritage of 5 Sarawak Symposium held in Kuching in 1988 to mark 25 years of Sarawak’s independence within Malaysia. Other key moments were the publication of Jérôme Rousseau’s Central Borneo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a Stratified Society (1990), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993) and Bernard Sellato’s Nomades et Sedentarisation à Borneo. Histoire Economique et Sociale (1989) and Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest (1994, and see 1986). A more recent manifestation of this rapidly expanding interest in identity is the edited book by Zawawi Ibrahim Representation, Identity and Multiculturalism in Sarawak (2008a, 2008b), and Peter Metcalf’s tour de force The Life of the Longhouse: an Archaeology of Ethnicity (2010). The opportunity for me to bring together a wide range of literature on the theme of culture and identity in a comparative way across Borneo was provided at the Borneo Research