BORNEO RESEARCH BULLETIN VOL 22, NO. 2 SEPTEMBER 1990 PAGE NOTES FROM THE EDITOR ................ 90 RESEARCH NOTES Glimpses of "WhisperingShores": Borneo in a Photographic Archives AnneSchiller ......................... 91 Amak Dare, An Ornamental Sleeping-Mat of the Ngaju Dayak, Central Kalimantan Harry Wiriadinata ..................... 95 Guide to the Varieties of Oral Literature in Borneo G. N. Appell 98 The Borneo Literature Bureau: ~ublickonsin Iban and Other Bornean Languages: A Bibliography Otto Steinrnayer ....................... 114 The Orang Belait of Brunei: Linguistic Affinities with Lemeting (Meting) Peter Martin ......................... 130 The Gunong Api Connection Expedition Ric Halliwell ......................... 138 Notes on Some Iban and Embaloh Communities in Kalimantan Barat Reed L. Wadley ....................... 145 BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS ................. 148 NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS ............ 175 BORNEO NEWS .......................... 223 BOOK REVIEWS, ABSTRACTS, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................... 234 The Borneo Resexch Bulletin is published twice yearly (April and September) by the Borneo Research Council. Please address aU inquiries and contributions for publication to Vinson H. Sutlive, Jr., Editor, Borneo Research Bulletin, Department of Anthropology, College of Wiand Mary, Wiamsburg, Virginia 23185, USA. Single issues are available at US$29. NOTES FROM THE EDITOR RESEARCH NOTES The First Extraordinary Session of the Council was a great success, due GLIMPSES OF "WHISPERING SHORES": primarily to the Local Organizing Committee whose members spent hundreds of BORNEO IN A PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES hours in preparation for the conference. It is impossible to count the contribu- tions of the Sarawak Government, its Chief Minister, Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud, the State Ministers, and the Director Mr. William Song and ANNE SCHILLER the staff of MAMPU, and the staff of the Sarawak Museum. The approval and Ohio University support of the state government were complemented 9 The Tun Jugah Foundation, its Chairman, Datuk Amar Leonard Linggi Jugah, and its staff. We It has been customary... for Borneo to be thought of as a historic cannot name all of the persons who gave unstintingly of their time and vacuum... but here we must revise our knowledge ... (Douwes professional skills, and I ask them to accept this expression of gratitude on behalf Dekker 1951:69) of the Fellows and Members of the Council. In view of the difficulties of obtaining access to pre-World War I1 We are looking forward to a similar Session in Sabah in 1992 and in photographs of Netherlands Indies' peoples, researchers will be interested to learn Pontianak in 1994. If these meetings are as productive as the Kuching conference, of one particular surviving collection, now curated by Cornell University Library. we may anticipate the establishment of a biennial schedule of meetings to be The N. A. Douwes Dekker Papers (Coll. #3480), maintained by the Department held in the several states of Borneo. of Manuscripts and University Archives, is a photographic/textual resource depicting peoples and events in the Netherlands East Indies during the final In the April 1991 issue of the Bulletin we plan to publish a list of topics decades of colonial rule. The collectanea comprises approximately eight thousand proposed for urgent research. These topics were submitted by participants in the photographic positives, many with negatives, together with unpublished Kuching meeting and will provide directions for sessions for the 1992 Sabah manuscripts, copies of Government Information Service (RVD) bulletins and news conference. releases, and other related materials including police reports, troop commands, and miscellaneous correspondence. The photographs and documents assembled One of the topics for urgent research which definitely will be part of our in the collection pose the tumultuous political events of the era against a meeting in Sabah will be the recording, interpretation, and publication of Bomm's backdrop of indigenous folkways and ritual traditions. They afford a rare look rich oral traditions. Participants in Kuching gave this issue highest priority. We at diverse aspects of life throughout the archipelago, as well as at political events intend to conduct a workshop on preservation of oral literatm as part of the specific to a critical period in modem Indonesian history. Of particular relevance 1992 meeting. to Borneanists are two specialized subcollections. The first contains nearly three hundred photographs taken throughout what are now the provinces of Several contributors to this issue of the Bulletin ernphasiix the importance Kalimantan and which emphasize a variety of themes. The second is a collection of language and oral literature: G. N. Appell, Otto Steinmayer, Peter Martin, of images depicting treatment of the dead among Ngaju Dayaks. Judging from Carol Rubenstein, David Szanton, JWme Rousseau, AUen Maxwell, and Peter occasional notations, the photographs of Borneo appear to have been taken from Brosius. The commitment of the Sarawak Government to the preservation of oral about 1947 to 1949. literature, of the Tun Jugah Foundation to assembling lemambang (bards) in Kapit in December for a recording session, the announcement of plans for a Sabah Oral Comell University Library acquired this collection from Niels Alexander Literature Project (p. 176), and the Ford Foundation's interest in an oral traditions Douwes Dekker in 1973. Niels Douwes Dekker, great-grandnephew of Multatuli documentation project in East Kalimantan, are welcome and encowaging (Eduard Douwes Dekker - author of the classic novel of life in the colonial initiatives, and we hope that other scholars and agencies will follow these 1 Netherlands East Indies, Havelaar), was born in Batavia on May 26, 1911. examples. (Cont'd. on page 272) i He received his early education in Bandung and later went on to study architecture in Delft and in '~Gravenhage. A professional photographer, artist, filmmaker, essayist, and specialist in public relations, Douwes Dekker at one time A 1947 series on "Ngabang" Dayaks features a men's dance with swords and men served as head of the Netherlands East Indies Visual Information Service. A and women's dances in ethnic dress. The final shots in the series reveal that the portion of the photographs taken by Douwes Dekker and the members of his staff dances were, in fact, performed on a basketball court ringed by European appear in his book Tanah Air Kita (1951. The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, Ltd.). onlookers. That volume, with modifications in the illustrationsand commentary, was Douwes Dekker had an especial interest in documenting the religious life published in Dutch, Indonesian, and English. Through a wide array of photo- of Netherlands East Indies peoples. Nearly three hundred photographs concern graphs, Tanah Air Kita depicts the lives of the people of the new nation of mortuary practices of the peoples of Borneo, Sulawesi, Bali, and other islands. Indonesia, and conveys Douwes Dekker's vision of that countrfs cultural While some of these photographs were taken by Douwes Dekker himself, many heterogeneity. The chapter on Borneo entitled "Whispering Shores," for example, were produced by the staff of the Visual Information Service and others. These emphasizes the diversity of cultures and livelihoods on a single island. Included images constitute an invaluable record of indigenous religious celebrations as they are scenes of Dayak ritual life, Chinese cottage industries, Muslim shopkeepers, were performed in the 1940s, and provide a rich source of data for the investiga- European coal miners, and indigenous royalty. tion of changes in ritual forms. The eclecticism of Tanah Air Kita belies the fad that the volume features One such set of images concerns tiwah, a sumptuous celebration which only a fraction of the photographs in Douwes Dekker's total collection. Absent, is the climax of the ritual processing of the dead among Ngaju Dayaks, a tribal for example, are photographs of Indonesia's revolution, which had ended shortly people of southern Borneo (now the Province of Central Kalirnantan). The before the book's publication. Also missing are many other scenes of daily life elaborate and complex mortuary observances of the peoples known as Ngaju which make the papers especially attractive to scholars whose research focuses were of great interest to ethnologists, colonial administrators, and missionaries. on Indonesia's lesser known islands. A case in point is the subcollection of F. Grabowsky's 1899 article on "Der Tod das Begrabnis, das Tiwah oder Totenfest Borneo (Kalimantan) photographs, only a few of which appear in the book. bei den Djaken," (in Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographic 2:177-2041, for example, which featured detailed pencil sketchs of death edifices, comprised the The bulk of the subcollection's images were shot in the regions of major ethnographic source utilized by R. Hertz in his classic essay on secondary Pontianak, Sarnarinda, and Banjarmasin. Some are of particular note. One series, treatment of the dead entitled "Contribution a une Etude sur la Representation focusing on life in Samarinda during the 1949 floods, documents the conditions Collective de la Mort" (R. Hertz. 1960 [orig. 19071 Death and The Ri~htHand. of streets, markets, and private homes. Also from Sarnarinda come photos of Translated by C. and R. Needharn. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press). The rituals received school buildings and