It Takes a Village to Dismantle a Longhouse

The author\u27s long-term fieldwork among the Kelabit people informs this discussion of the decline of longhouse living in favor of nuclear households

Where Spirit and Bulldozer Roam: Environment and Anxiety in Highland Borneo

This paper explores changing perceptions of the natural environment among the Kelabit, an indigenous people of the Borneo interior. It considers both traditional and post-Christian conversion understandings about forest spaces. The former animistic ritual practices of the Kelabit centered on a spiritual dialogue with the natural world and this dialogue was often marked by active efforts to avoid or mitigate danger through ritual practice. One key example presented here is the former ceremony of \u27calling the eagle\u27 (nawar keniu), a ritual employed in times of crisis that exemplifies the dialogical and entwined relationship Kelabit had to the natural world. Such former animistic beliefs are contrasted with contemporary Christian practices, including a local mountain retreat on Mount Murud and present-day political and economic anxieties over logging in the Kelabit Highlands, as a means to consider relationships between religion and attitudes toward the environment among the Kelabit

The Diary of a District Officer: Alastair Morrison\u27s 1953 Trip to the Kelabit Highlands

In 1953, Alastair Morrison, then acting District Officer for the Bara, traveled to the Kelabit Highlands along with his wife, photographer Hedda Morrison, and ever changing entourage of \u27coolie porters and guides. This journey was part of his regular responsibilities as a District Officer. During such tours, Morrison surveyed longhouse communities and collected information about the local population and spoke to people about government policies, school fees, taxes, the registering of guns, and often sought to resolve local disputes. Such journeys were summarized in formal reports. However, Morrison also kept travel notebooks, which he later used to write his memoir, which summarized the highlights of his life in Sarawak (Morrison 1993). These handwritten travel notebooks from his journeys are preserved, along with his wife\u27s photographs, in the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Cornell University. This article is based on a close reading of Morrison\u27s Kelabit notebooks, where he recorded his daily thoughts during a one month trip on food through the Kelabit Highlands in 1953. Whereas Morrison\u27s published memoir (1993: 86-88) summaries in just over two pages the main issues encountered on the journey, the original notebooks provide much additional information

Returning Urbanite

Christian is not a typical returning urban-rural migrant. Unlike most men who come back to the Kelabit Highlands after living in town, he did not return having struggled to make a decent living, nor did he return expecting to get married and start a family. Christian had already done both, leaving behind a good job and returning with his wife and children. What he did not anticipate is how out of place and misunderstood he would be once back home. [excerpt

The Many Mouths of Community Gossip and Social Interaction Among the Kelabit of Borneo

This paper considers the role of gossip and social interaction among the Kelabit of Sarawak, Malaysia Focusing on gossip in everyday life, the paper explores the tension between desires for individual privacy, concerns for group cohesion and, more broadly, desires to adopt a more modern style of living and social interaction. These tensions are vividly manifested in discourses about the problematic nature of gossip in the Kelabit community. Critical to this is a discussion of Kelabit styles of interpersonal interaction and conflict management, including the role of meditation. Offering a range of examples illustrating the social contexts of Kelabit gossip, this paper focuses on meta-discourses of gossip, contestations of community life, and gossip as a motivating force affecting decisions relation to choices of group affiliation

Borderland Tactics: Cross-Border Marriage in the Highlands of Borneo

The first time I traveled to Borneo was near the end of 1989. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen and the economics of Southeast Asia were booming. The towns of Sarawak, an oil-rich state of East Malaysia, were experiencing rapid economic growth - due to both the oil company and an expanding logging industry. Rural-urban migration was draining indigenous people from the longhouses of the interior and swelling the populations of coastal towns. Traveling at that time to the Kelabit Highland - a remote interior plateau located in the northeastern corner of Sarawak along the Indonesian border - was to enter a place negatively impacted by outmigration. As young people moved to towns, especially the town of Miri where the majority of Kelabit now live, they seemed to be taking with them much of the vitality and energy of their home communities. A common Kelabit phrase to describe this state of affairs was da \u27at ali, a kind of \u27bad\u27 silence or lack of activity, something that the elders I met lamented. Given what I saw on this initial trip, I assumed, somewhat incorrectly, that in the coming years few youth would remain or return to their home communities after completing their schooling in town, and that the longhouse communities of this part of central Borneo would continue to decline. I formulated a research project aimed at exploring the relationship between those who remained in the rural homelands and the growing population of Kelabit living in Miri and other towns, with the aim of looking at changing expressions of ethnic identity and the ongoing relationships between urban migrants and their rural counterparts. What I had failed to account for at the time was how proximity to the border of Indonesia, with its weaker economy, and mobility of people from the other side of this permeable jungle frontier, would also factor quite significantly into this situation. I had also not though about the implications of doing fieldwork along an international frontier and the kinds of practical and ethical issues this would raise. [excerpt

It’s Not Easy Being Apolitical: Reconstruction and Eclecticism in Danish Asatro

Chapter Summary: This article looks contemporary Norse neo-paganism (Asatro) in Denmark, and how this movement has engaged with concerns about the political implications of their religion. In contrast to other parts of Europe, where reconstructionist forms of paganism are sometimes associated with nationalistic movements, in Denmark there is widespread concern among contemporary pagans of avoiding conflating religion and politics, leading to some tense group dynamics as well as ritual innovations that are the main focus of this article. Book Summary: Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform

Animism and Anxiety: Religious Conversion Among the Kelabit of Sarawak

Book Summary: Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. [From the Publisher