Seeking the state from the margins From Tidung Lands to borderlands in Borneo Nathan Bond ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8094-9173 A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. December 2020 School of Social and Political Sciences The University of Melbourne i Abstract Scholarship on the geographic margins of the state has long suggested that life in such spaces threatens national state-building by transgressing state order. Recently, however, scholars have begun to nuance this view by exploring how marginal peoples often embrace the nation and the state. In this thesis, I bridge these two approaches by exploring how borderland peoples, as exemplars of marginal peoples, seek the state from the margins. I explore this issue by presenting the first extended ethnography of the cross-border ethnic Tidung and neighbouring peoples in the Tidung Lands of northeast Borneo, complementing long-term fieldwork with research in Dutch and British archives. This region, lying at the interstices of Indonesian Kalimantan, Malaysian Sabah and the Southern Philippines, is an ideal site from which to study borderland dynamics and how people have come to seek the state. I analyse understandings of the state, and practical consequences of those understandings in the lives and thought of people in the Tidung Lands. I argue that people who imagine themselves as occupying a marginal place in the national order of things often seek to deepen, rather than resist, relations with the nation-states to which they are marginal. The core contribution of the thesis consists in drawing empirical and theoretical attention to the under-researched issue of seeking the state and thereby encouraging further inquiry into this issue. I elaborate my findings along a trajectory consisting of two broad parts. First, the entrenchment of the border in the social life of the region. I show that the question of the state is inextricable from the question of what it is to be Tidung. I suggest that for many contemporary Tidung people, the transition to a national political order has come to be considered the most preferable among several plausible alternatives. People have sought to establish positive relations with the nation-states within which they live on either side of the state-drawn border, in the absence of an impetus from their respective central governments. They increasingly acquiesce to the circumscription of their mobility and social lives by the international border. Secondly, life in the light of this national division. I demonstrate that Tidung engagements with Dayak identity in Kalimantan index a shift toward exclusively Indonesian registers of ethnic identification; conversely, Tidung engagements with Malay identity in Sabah index a shift toward exclusively Sabahan registers of ethnic identification. I elaborate on this national division by analysing vernacular understandings of transboundary floods, which function as a commentary on international asymmetry from the borderland. Finally, I examine a recent campaign for a new autonomous district in Kalimantan (Indonesia), suggesting that the latter indexes the point at which borderland transgression becomes a resource for national integration such that vernacular and central political projects converge. ii Declaration I, Nathan Bond, declare that this thesis comprises only my original work toward the Doctor of Philosophy, that due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, and that the thesis is shorter than the maximum word limit in length. iii Acknowledgements Seeing this project through to completion has meant being supported by a great many people. Even though I do not provide a list of names here due to the somewhat regrettable convention of using pseudonyms, I want to thank, above all, my hosts, consultants and friends in northeast Borneo for their immense generosity and hospitality. My gestures to reciprocate the latter cannot even start to measure up to the keikhlasan which has made my work possible. The work has benefited from the feedback of a number of colleagues in and around academia. I am especially grateful for the guidance and encouragement that I have received from Bart Klem and Rachael Diprose. That this thesis is now finished is due, in no small part, to their supervision over the past few years. I also appreciate the dialogue I have had with, and support in practical matters I have received from, Yekti Mauntai, Purwo Santoso, Nanang Indra Kurniawan, Akhmad Wijaya, and the late Pajar Gumelar. I have had the great privilege of being funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and grants from The University of Melbourne’s School of Government, Faculty of Arts, and School of Social and Political Sciences. Any errors to be found in the thesis are my own. iv Contents Maps .......................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Seeking the state ...................................................................................................... 1 Methodology .......................................................................................................... 15 Significance and outline ...................................................................................... 20 1. Framings ................................................................................................................ 25 Just checking ......................................................................................................... 25 The other side ........................................................................................................ 31 Context .................................................................................................................. 37 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 45 2. Histories ................................................................................................................ 47 Interpretation ........................................................................................................ 47 Trajectory .............................................................................................................. 53 Bultiken’s legacy .....................................................................................................61 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 71 3. Two brothers ......................................................................................................... 73 Getting ICs ............................................................................................................. 73 Attracting liveliness .............................................................................................. 82 Diverging orientations ......................................................................................... 90 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 94 4. Strictness ............................................................................................................... 96 Security zone ......................................................................................................... 96 Worthless crocodiles .......................................................................................... 104 Cemented citizenship .......................................................................................... 112 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 118 5. Us Dayaks ............................................................................................................ 120 Becoming Dayak, again ...................................................................................... 120 Guests and hosts .................................................................................................. 127 National transnationality..................................................................................... 137 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 141 6. Those Malays ....................................................................................................... 143 The archipelago divided ...................................................................................... 143 Belonging to nations ........................................................................................... 148 Becoming Malay? ................................................................................................. 156 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 164 7. Malaysian-sent floods ......................................................................................... 166 Disasters .............................................................................................................. 166 Our own misdeeds ............................................................................................... 172 v Settlement dilemmas ...........................................................................................178