To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an “impurely” Christian world

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2009. This is the accepted version of the following article: Chua, L. (2009), To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an ‘impurely’ Christian world. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15: 332–348, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01556.x/abstract.This article seeks to render ignorance analytically and ethnographically productive by exploring practices and tropes of knowing and not-knowing among young Christian Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. It argues that these Bidayuhs' professed ignorance of the old ‘religion’, adat gawai, cannot be dismissed as a simple lack of knowledge or reflection of sheer indifference. Instead, their invocations of ignorance could be understood as a productive, empowering device for dealing with the dangers of living in a world in which religious conversion remains an ongoing, incomplete process. Through this ethnographic analysis, the article also offers a reflexive critique of the knowledge-centred impulses that often shape anthropology's epistemological and methodological projects

Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating "in/dividualism" among Christian Bidayuhs

This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the “individualism” of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showing how both pre-Christian and Christian sociality have been shaped by the shifting intersection of “in/dividual” impulses that derive from the “horizontal” and “vertical” relations in which persons are enmeshed. Tracing the trajectories of these impulses and relations from life to death and beyond, this article attempts to detach questions of in/dividualism from personhood, while arguing for the need to take seriously the variegations and affinities between different strains of Christianity and Western and non-Western socialities.Fieldwork was supported by the William Wyse, Evans, Smuts Memorial, and the Bartle Frere Memorial Funds at the University of Cambridge and a Royal Anthropological Institute Horniman/Sutasoma Award

Everything You Wish to Know About Memristors But Are Afraid to Ask

This paper classifies all memristors into three classes called Ideal, Generic, or Extended memristors. A subclass of Generic memristors is related to Ideal memristors via a one-to-one mathematical transformation, and is hence called Ideal Generic memristors. The concept of non-volatile memories is defined and clarified with illustrations. Several fundamental new concepts, including Continuum-memory memristor, POP (acronym for Power-Off Plot), DC V-I Plot, and Quasi DC V-I Plot, are rigorously defined and clarified with colorful illustrations. Among many colorful pictures the shoelace DC V-I Plot stands out as both stunning and illustrative. Even more impressive is that this bizarre shoelace plot has an exact analytical representation via 2 explicit functions of the state variable, derived by a novel parametric approach invented by the author

Everyday religiosity and the ambiguation of development in East Malaysia: Reflections on a dam-construction and resettlement project

In December 2008, I had breakfast with an elderly Bidayuh man and his daughter in their upland village—one of four due to be resettled to make way for a new dam and reservoir. With an official land compensation ceremony a few days away, the conversation meandered, as it often did, towards the project. My elderly interlocutor—a follower of the old rituals, adat gawai—had been reminiscing about life in the 1950s, ‘before [Sarawak became part of] Malaysia’. Back then, he said, the bus fare to Kuching was under a dollar; food in the city came in generous portions for just ten cents, and trousers cost a few dollars. These days, however, everything was expensive because those Malays who ruled the country didn’t know how to run the ‘economy’ (English). But being Malay was difficult, added his Anglican daughter, since they were Muslim and had to live according to strict observances. Ruminating further, they began to contrast the lives of Muslims with those of Christians, who today form the bulk of the Bidayuh population

Markets, Democracy, and Ethnicity: Toward a New Paradigm for Law and Development

It is by now a commonplace that we are living in a period of radical global transformation. Particularly in the developing world, this transformation has had two watchwords: markets and democracy. Indeed, the reascendant teleology of free-market democracy has redefined the very concept of underdevelopment-a term that has shed its exclusively Third World trappings and today joins in a single embrace countries from Algeria to Azerbaijan, from Pakistan to Poland. Marketization and democratization each have been the site of massive Western legal intervention in the developing world. Legal work on marketization ranges from structuring international project finance to drafting market-oriented laws to developing legal regimes that facilitate the transition from command to market economies. Work on democratization includes not only writing constitutions but also grappling with formidable issues such as the transplantability of Western social and political institutions and postcommunist state building

Robust Simulation of a TaO Memristor Model

This work presents a continuous and differentiable approximation of a Tantalum oxide memristor model which is suited for robust numerical simulations in software. The original model was recently developed at Hewlett Packard labs on the basis of experiments carried out on a memristor manufactured in house. The Hewlett Packard model of the nano-scale device is accurate and may be taken as reference for a deep investigation of the capabilities of the memristor based on Tantalum oxide. However, the model contains discontinuous and piecewise differentiable functions respectively in state equation and Ohm's based law. Numerical integration of the differential algebraic equation set may be significantly facilitated under substitution of these functions with appropriate continuous and differentiable approximations. A detailed investigation of classes of possible continuous and differentiable kernels for the approximation of the discontinuous and piecewise differentiable functions in the original model led to the choice of near optimal candidates. The resulting continuous and differentiable DAE set captures accurately the dynamics of the original model, delivers well-behaved numerical solutions in software, and may be integrated into a commercially-available circuit simulator

Related Studies in Long Term Lithium Battery Stability

The continuing growth of the use of lithium electrochemical systems in a wide variety of both military and industrial applications is primarily a result of the significant benefits associated with the technology such as high energy density, wide temperature operation and long term stability. The stability or long term storage capability of a battery is a function of several factors, each important to the overall storage life and, therefore, each potentially a problem area if not addressed during the design, development and evaluation phases of the product cycle. Design (e.g., reserve vs active), inherent material thermal stability, material compatibility and self-discharge characteristics are examples of factors key to the storability of a power source