• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

BORNEO RESEARCH BULLETIN ISSN: 0006-7806 VOL. 39 2008 Clifford Sather, Ph.D., Editor 10048 SW Balmer Circle Portland, OR 97219-7363 U.S.A. e-mail: [email protected] Louise Sather, Assistant Editor A.V.M. Horton, Book Review Editor/Bibliographer Please send all inquiries, Fellowship and Membership fees, subscriptions, changes of address, contributions, etc., to: Borneo Research Council, Inc. P. O. Box A 29 Golden Road Phillips, ME 04966 U.S.A. www.borneoresearchcouncil.org e-mail: [email protected] © Borneo Research Council, Inc The Borneo Research Bulletin is the annual journal of the Borneo Research Council. Published since 1968, the primary purpose of the Bulletin is to provide a communication link for researchers in the social and natural sciences, stimulate research activity, identify areas where research is needed, and provide a forum for the publication of current research findings relating to all regions of Borneo. The Bulletin provides up-to-date information on research activities through its Research Notes, Review Essays, Brief Communications, Regional Notes, Announcements, and Book Reviews, Abstracts and Bibliography sections. With an international board of editors, Research Notes and Review Essays are peer reviewed. International Board of Editors K. Alexander Adelaar (University of Melbourne) Adela S. Baer (Oregon State University) Bjorn F. Dahlen (University of North Dakota) Amity A. Doolittle (Yale University) Michael R. Dove (Yale University) Christine Egenter (Trento, Italy) Jayl Langub (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak) Peter Metcalf (University of Virginia) Arlo H. Nimmo (San Francisco, USA) Leslie M. Potter (University of Adelaide) Rajindra K. Puri (University of Kent at Canterbury) Bob Reece (Murdoch University) Clifford Sather (University of Helsinki) Bernard Sellato (CNRS-IRSEA) Vinson H. Sutlive (College of William and Mary) Nicolas Tarling (University of Auckland) Motomitsu Uchibori (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) Andrew Vayda (Rutgers, State University of New Jersey) BRB Editors General Editor: Clifford Sather Editorial Assistant: Louise Klemperer Sather Book Review Editor: A.V.M. Horton Environmental Studies Editor: Amity A. Doolittle History Editor: Bob Reece Honorary Editors George N. Appell Donald R. Brown Alfred B. Hudson Vinson H. Sutlive Vol. 39 Borneo Research Bulletin 1 NOTES FROM THE EDITOR In This Issue We begin this issue with a memorial section dedicated to two extraordinarily gifted scholars, Reed Wadley and Robert Barrett. Both died, tragically, at the peak of their intellectual powers. Of the two, Reed was the youngest. I first met Reed in 1994 at the BRC meetings in Pontianak. He had just come down from the Emperan, the low-lying border region of West Kalimantan, where he was then doing fieldwork. As others who knew him will attest, his vitality was palpable. It was impossible, too, to miss the seriousness with which he approached his work, his intellectual generosity, and, for me, his devotion and shared enthusiasm for all things Iban, including, in his case, ukir tanah bau (Iban, ‘shoulder tattoos’). From then on, we corresponded regularly right up to the last weeks of his life. As evidence of his strong sense of professional duty, among the last work he completed was a review of Rob Cramb’s book, Land and Longhouse, which he, like your Editor, greatly admired. As a tribute to his memory, Reed’s review appears in the Book Review section later in his volume. Reed, in addition to being a BRC Fellow, was also a member of the Borneo Research Council’s Executive Board and his untimely death was a particularly grievous loss for the BRC, as many of us saw him as playing a pivotal role in the Council’s transition to a younger generation of active members. He was also, of course, much more. To the many of us who had the pleasure of knowing and working with him, Reed was a wonderful friend and an exemplary colleague. Even while undergoing painful medical treatment, he devoted precious time to putting in order his unpublished research notes and arranged for their deposit in archival collections in the United States, the Netherlands, and Sarawak (see “Brief Communications” in this issue), in order that this material would be available for the use of future scholars. In one of his very last email messages, he wrote that he was preparing letters of introduction and notes to be conveyed to his Iban “family” on behalf of a graduate student who was about to depart for West Kalimantan. That’s the sort of person he was. As some of you may know, in the months before his death, a colleague and friend, the historian Eric Tagliacozzo, invited those who knew Reed to record their experiences and thoughts in a memory book, which was then printed and bound in Japan and presented to Reed’s wife, Dr. Oona Paredes, as a remembrance for both her and their young son, Lucas. Following his death, Dr. George N. Appell, on behalf of the Borneo Research Council, established a special fund in Reed Wadley’s memory, the Reed L. Wadley Memorial Fund, to provide supplemental grants to graduate students in anthropology who are planning to do research in Borneo. More information on this fund can be found in Dr. Appell’s memorial for Reed that immediately follows these Notes and on the BRC website (www.borneoresearchcouncil.org). Finally, as a further tribute, the BRB is planning, with the help of Dr. Carol Colfer and others, to put together a future special issue, or a section of a future issue, in honor of Reed which will deal with the Danau Sentarum project, to which he was deeply committed (see BRB, 2000, Vol. 31). Dr. Appell opens our memorial section with a personal tribute to Reed, a shorter 2 Borneo Research Bulletin Vol. 39 version of which appeared in the American Anthropologist Newsletter. This is followed by a bibliography of Reed’s published writings. Next, Dr. Carol Colfer gives us a vivid account of her experiences of working with Reed as a professional colleague and of knowing him over the years as a friend. Finally, we are grateful to Christina Pomianek, who, writing as a graduate student, offers a moving appreciation of Reed as a teacher and mentor. Rob Barrett I knew for a somewhat longer time. We first met in 1988 at an Iban cultural symposium in Kapit, Sarawak. Over the next year I saw much more of Rob in the Saribas. At the time, he had begun fieldwork at Ulu Bayor. The beautiful old Ulu Bayor longhouse was then, before the construction of an access road, most easily reached by traveling up the Ulu Paku road, beyond the longhouse where I was working, to Danau longhouse on the Paku River, and from there hiking across the watershed separating the upper Paku from the Bayor stream. Shortly after he had settled in, the people of the Ulu Bayor longhouse decided to organize a Gawai Antu celebration to honor their recently deceased ancestors. The celebration was one of the grandest in living memory. Over a thousand people attended, including three groups of performing bards. Rob was appointed to the entertainment committee and I joined him in arranging for the printing of Gawai programs and invitations to be sent to guests. We also purchased and had engraved trophies for the Kumang and Keling beauty contests which are now an essential part of major longhouse ceremonies in the Saribas. Rob had a great sense of humor and took a special delight in this conjunction of modern novelties with what continues to be an elaborate and venerable ritual occasion. But beneath his sense of fun, Rob was also acutely sensitive to the feelings of others, and much of his humor took a self-deprecating turn. Rob was a remarkably insightful fieldworker. He was keenly observant of interpersonal relations, social contexts, and subtle nuances of speech. Partly, this reflected, no doubt, his extensive clinical training as a psychiatrist, but it was also part, I think, of his personality. News of his death brought sadness to many people in Sarawak, where he had a large circle of friends, including many longhouse elders, whose knowledge and understanding of human affairs he greatly admired. Rob and I shared many interests in common, among them Iban shamanism; poetic language, verbal arts and humor; and a number of binary metaphors, like hot/cold, seen/unseen, that function for the Iban, not so much as oppositional, but more as complementary or mediating categories. I, for one, profited enormously from our conversations and correspondence. During the early 1990s, when I was a senior fellow at the Australian National University, I saw a good deal of Rob and we corresponded regularly. Later, our correspondence became more intermittent. This was due, I think, to the fact that Rob’s primary career was in psychiatry, and in becoming Director of the discipline at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, he assumed a great deal of administrative responsibility. He also taught, had an active clinical practice, and was involved in a major cross-cultural research project concerned with schizophrenia. It was in this latter connection that my wife and I, later on, enjoyed a number of memorable dinners with Rob in Kuching. In his study of schizophrenia, he had become particularly interested in auditory hallucination and the cross-cultural problems of identifying it and other diagnostic symptoms in an Vol. 39 Borneo Research Bulletin 3 Iban cultural context. He was also interested in the genetic dimensions of schizophrenia. For pursuing this latter interest, the Saribas region was an ideal setting. The Saribas Iban have historically preserved lengthy genealogies (tusut), which, from independent evidence, appear to be remarkably reliable for at least the last 8 to 10 generations. As a consequence, by using family tusut, it is possible to trace remembered instances of sakit gila (mental illness) back through family lines over a number of generations.

Load more

  401

Copy Link