Borneo and Beyond: Connecting the Local and the Global in Borneo’s Past
Type
Double PanelPart 1
Session 7Thu 13:30–15:00 Room 1.505
Part 2
Session 8Thu 15:30–17:00 Room 1.505
Conveners
- Jennifer R. Morris National University of Singapore
- Valerie Mashman Sarawak Museum Campus Project
Save This Event
Add to CalendarPapers (Part 1)
- A Shield for the Rajah: A Gift from the Badeng of Borneo in Rome Valerie Mashman Sarawak Museum Campus Project
Often exotic objects are displayed in western museums for their powerful aesthetic rather than historical value because little is known regarding the provenance and history of the object. A chance encounter with a colleague’s photograph of a shield in the Vatican Ethnological museum reveals a series of transactions: a trusted Madang (Badeng) chief Saba Irang gave a shield in 1899 to Charles Hose to be given to Rajah Charles Brooke as a sign of peaceful acceptance of Brooke Rule, in Sarawak , Borneo. This came after a series of uprisings, punitive expeditions, relocation of communities and reconciliation. The context and act of giving this shield is examined in the context of peace-making and trade.This gift did not stay in Sarawak as a reminder of the relationship this chief had forged with the Rajah but disappeared only to be found exhibited in the Vatican Museum some 120 years later. A case is made for this object to be exhibited in Sarawak for its story to be told with the source community who have spent the intervening time straddling the borderlands in Borneo between Kalimantan Indonesia and Sarawak Malaysia, vying for recognition and their rights as citizens of the state of Sarawak. Their story on the borders of the state is encapsulated in the biography of the shield and its presence can provide a voice for the telling of the history of peace-making from the margins.
- Advantageous Opportunities: Securing Objects from Borneo for Scotland’s National Museum Rosanna Nicolson National Museums Scotland
In 1906 the Royal Scottish Museum purchased part of colonial official Charles Hose's collection through an auction house. In the annual report for the same year the Keeper of the Art and Ethnographical Department wrote: 'Advantage is taken of every suitable opportunity to secure objects from those countries in which the native customs and arts are being changed under the influence of modern civilization'. These opportunities were created because Europeans, like Charles Hose, travelled, lived and worked overseas, flooding the 'market' with material culture illustrative of these countries upon their return home.
This paper will focus on the transnational networks and connections that provided Scotland's national museum with opportunities to acquire, both by purchase and donation, six hundred objects from Borneo. The majority were accessioned between 1870 and 1920, and due to the historic British presence in north Borneo the strength of the collection is material from Sarawak. This area of the collection is under-researched, in part because of this institution's past curatorial and geographic divisions. But, as the largest section of our Southeast Asian collection, research is now underway to establish what we have and to understand the historic contexts of acquisition. This in turn will lead to new networks and connections between Borneo and Scotland.
- Annoying Requests: A Halle Missionary’s Collecting in Borneo (1842–1848) Jutta Kelling FernUniversität Hagen
When in 1878 the first plans came up to build a museum in Sarawak, Brooke’s officers and the local population were asked to contribute and collect for the foundation of today’s oldest museum in Borneo that was opened in 1891. But it is hardly known that some individuals from Europe were collecting and gathering cultural artefacts and natural scientific specimen of various kinds on the remote island much earlier. Missionaries from the German towns Halle and Barmen were working from 1838 on near Banjarmasin. Being sent out to promote Christianity among the Dajak they lived close within the communities and had a pivotal role in exploring the foreign island and its indigenous peoples. Reports, language studies or objects moved from the periphery to Europe crossing more than just geographical boundaries.
One of the missionaries was Johann Michael Carl Hupe (1818-1861) from Halle who even travelled to Sarawak and tried to establish a mission school there. Although there is some awareness of his linguistic work and his existence in Kuching he is still a vague person for Borneo researchers. Of course, the early missionaries on the island were of no exception to others but the vast literature about the contributions made by missionaries to the natural sciences and European ethnological collections during the nineteenth and the early twentieth century has not studied the case of Borneo so far.
This presentation explores the Hupe’s role as a source for European knowledge and images about Borneo drawing on archival material from Halle. The first part follows Hupe’s way to Sarawak and it focuses on how objects and specimen were collected. What were the instructions from Halle and for whom did he collect? What was Hupe’s own attitude? Moreover, the presentation examines the new life of the items from Borneo in Germany. Many of them can still be found in the museum collection of the Francke Foundations others circulated and were passed on in different ways within existing networks. In the end, this small research will also demonstrate how interests in Europe targeted Borneo even in the first half of the 19th century and connected the island to scientific and cultural circuits with the traffic of its objects.
- “Romance, Savagery and Authentic Jungle Thrills”: Exhibiting Brooke Sarawak on the Global Stage 1900–1925 Jennifer R. Morris National University of Singapore
The second Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Brooke, was a passionate advocate of public museums. His founding and design of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching can be interpreted as part of a concerted campaign to shore up his political position in the early years of his rule. Brooke did not, however, confine his museumising to Borneo. He also used the public museum as a tool to influence perspectives on Sarawak and on his own kingship in the UK, founding a second ‘Sarawak Museum’ in his country house in Cirencester. His successor, Rajah Charles Vyner Brooke, adapted many of his father’s strategies to the medium of the international exhibition.
This paper will consider the ways in which the Chesterton House Museum (1904-1923) and Sarawak’s participation in both the 1922 Malaya-Borneo Exhibition in Singapore and the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley represented Brooke Sarawak to regional and global audiences. Each of these three case studies utilised visual spectacles drawing on zoological, ethnographic and economic themes to communicate specific narratives of the Brooke state, tailored to their respective audiences in Southeast Asia and Europe. These exhibitionary strategies, and public responses to them, give insight into shifting perceptions of Sarawak’s place in global and imperial networks.
Papers (Part 2)
- Disruptions from the “In-Between”: Locating Borneo and Its Agency in British Colonial Fiction Marijke Denger Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
My paper interrogates the representation of Borneo and its so-called 'subalterns' in two canonical examples of Anglophone literature concerned with the region, Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) and Somerset Maugham's "Before the Party" (1922). Reading the selected texts against the historical backdrop of Borneo's key position in global networks of economic and cultural exchange, I argue that they represent a form of Bornean agency that itself transcends literal and symbolic boundaries. In relation to Almayer's Folly, I will focus on the mixed-race character of Nina, who illustrates how the connection between the local and the global is inherent to Bornean identity. Specifically, I will analyse Nina's development from a doubly marginalised individual into the voice of a highly potent 'in-between', from where questions of selfhood and belonging can be renegotiated irrespective of existing national and social divides. With regard to "Before the Party", I move from the issue of individual agency to an examination of the agency wielded by Borneo itself. As Maugham's short story evidences both through its plot and its narrative structure, the geographical and climatic characteristics of the island not only impact on the British colonisers while on the ground. They also reach out into the metropole, haunting the characters' lives after their return to England and disrupting the very social order that underpins their supposed superiority over their non-Western subjugates.
- From a Cave in Kansas to the Bodleian at Oxford: The Quest for Documentation on the Colonial Period in “British” Borneo Michael Leigh University of Melbourne
Much has been written about the colonial period, relying upon extensive interviews with leading participants. However gaining written documentation, and records of the 'deals' that were brokered, has been more elusive. We have been involved in a search for written documentation from a wide variety of sources. As a result a wealth of documents have been copied and lodged with the Sarawak State Archives. These include records from the UK National Archives [including the ‘migrated archives’ special collection] and the Rhodes House papers now at the Bodleian Library. From the US National Archives are de-classified records from the CIA, the State Department, the US Consulate Kuching, plus USAF aerial photography of Japanese occupied Borneo. Files copied from the Australian War Memorial and National Archives added significantly to this collection. This two decade long program has been supported by the State Library of Sarawak, the Sarawak Foundation, the Tun Jugah Foundation and the Universiti Sarawak Malaysia. This paper highlights the wealth of historical documents now available for perusal in Kuching, and the challenges locating those invaluable materials.
- South Borneo as an Ancient Sprachbund Area Alexander Adelaar University of Melbourne & Palacký University Olomouc
In South Borneo there are some unusual linguistic features shared among languages that are adjacent but belong to different genetic microgroups. These languages are Banjar Malay (a Malayic language), Ngaju (West Barito) and Maanyan (South East Barito). The same features also appear in Malagasy. They include the following ones:
Ngaju buah 'hit, affected' and Ma’anyan wuah ‘1. affected, hit; 2. correct, hitting the mark’ are function words. Malagasy vua has the same meaning as Ma’anyan wuah, and vua- is a verbal prefix indicating that an activity was carried out successfully. These words (and prefix) do not reflect Proto Malayo-Polynesian *buaq ‘fruit’ but were borrowed from Banjar Malay. The latter has buah which means ‘fruit’ but also became a function word indicating that some activity was successful (Indonesian berhasil).
Both Ngaju and Ma’anyan exhibit “nasal spread”: if the initial consonant of a word with an intermediate y becomes nasalised, this y as a rule also becomes nasalised and changes into ny, e.g. prefixation of N- to the Ma’anyan root wayat yields manyat ‘to pay’. In Malagasy, nasal spread has usually become invisible because of subsequent changes but is still detectable in certain roots. In Banjar Malay the phenomenon appears in some isolated cases but it never became regular.
In Ma’anyan, historical *s became h in all positions of the word, e.g *sungay ‘river’ became hungey, *asiq ‘love’ became ahi, *lawas ‘long time’ became lawah. This change also applies to Ngaju but not to *s at the beginning of a word. In Malagasy the same change took place but s was re-introduced already already very early onwards through Malay influence. In Banjar Malay the change happened frequently but not regularly, e.g. *so’al ‘question’ became hual, *sampai ‘until’ became hampai.
The fact that these features are also shared with Malagasy gives us an indication of the time depth involved in their origin and spread, as contacts between the peoples of South Borneo and Malagasy speakers were severed when the latter migrated to East Africa some 13 centuries ago. It shows us that already before that time there must have been close contacts among the various ethnic groups in the Barito region (including the Malagasy) and between these groups and the Malay metropole.
- The Credit Unions: In Between Social and Commercial Business in West Kalimantan Aji Prasetya Wahyu Utama University of Agder
Since its introduction in 1970s, Credit Unions (CUs) was spreading out in Indonesia, mainly in West Kalimantan. The Catholic missionaries and local activists, together, led introducing CUs amid marginal, remote and poor communities. Indeed, the mission is covering social and moral purposes, not just preparing financial services, but, providing financial education to reduce poverty as well as bringing an opportunity to reach a prosperity living. It was following an original idea from the founder, Raiffeisen in Germany who create kind of credit cooperatives to address poverty problem, especially releasing them from loan sharks dependency. In case of West Kalimantan, the idea was carried to reduce the domination of tokey (the boss) among their anak-buah (clients). CUs emerged as a new patron, providing capital access and replacing roles of the Bank that absent in the rural areas. Becoming one of the main financial services in the region, CUs have been growing rapidly, covering financial services both in rural and urban areas. The development reached its peak since introducing of palm oil business as a new cash crop production. Too many success stories are written, yet, there is remaining poverty problem left. During my ethnographic research, I find that there were remaining poverty and inequality issue, rising in the era of commercial economy. It is almost 50 years since the CUs introduced. Can we say that CUs were unsuccessfully tackling the poverty problem, instead, it turned on a new problem, namely inequality. In the paper, I want to try linking it with the major problem usually faced by a growing micro-financial service. Some scholars called it mission drift (Mersland & Strøm, 2014), paradigm shift (Robinson, 2001), or commercialization. If it also occurs to CUs, then, the question is why they have to be shifted. Then, what interesting in this topic is about the possibility of CUs to become a new market invisible hand that driving frontier communities to act unstructurally based on market logic.
Show Paper Abstracts
Abstract
Borneo is often characterised as a remote, isolated island, peripheral to regional and global networks and narratives. Scholars of Borneo, however, have long recognised the inaccuracies of this perception, given the island’s long history of participation in global trading networks. Eric Tagliacozzo (2013) argues that, in fact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, Borneo was a centre of transnational connection. During this period, European interests on the island targeted trade in mineral resources, forest products and the cultivation of export crops. At the same time, Western explorers and collectors were drawn to the island, motivated by a search for wealth and for knowledge of Borneo’s unique flora, fauna and peoples - knowledge which was highly prized in scientific circles. The introduction of European styles of governance and peace-making gave further impetus to trade, but Borneans remained at the centre of these networks, agents of change in their cross-cultural interactions with global forces.
This panel aims to explore Borneo’s position as a hub in such transboundary networks – economic, political, scientific and cultural - and to highlight the island’s historical significance in regional and global perspective. Participants will demonstrate how a world-history framework can be combined with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Borneo’s past to draw out previously unheard voices in the island’s story. These approaches include the consideration of alternative source material, such as oral histories and material culture; interrogating colonial sources from new perspectives, including recently declassified archives; and the examination of ‘subaltern’ experiences in Borneo societies.
Keywords
My paper interrogates the representation of Borneo and its so-called 'subalterns' in two canonical examples of Anglophone literature concerned with the region, Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) and Somerset Maugham's "Before the Party" (1922). Reading the selected texts against the historical backdrop of Borneo's key position in global networks of economic and cultural exchange, I argue that they represent a form of Bornean agency that itself transcends literal and symbolic boundaries. In relation to Almayer's Folly, I will focus on the mixed-race character of Nina, who illustrates how the connection between the local and the global is inherent to Bornean identity. Specifically, I will analyse Nina's development from a doubly marginalised individual into the voice of a highly potent 'in-between', from where questions of selfhood and belonging can be renegotiated irrespective of existing national and social divides. With regard to "Before the Party", I move from the issue of individual agency to an examination of the agency wielded by Borneo itself. As Maugham's short story evidences both through its plot and its narrative structure, the geographical and climatic characteristics of the island not only impact on the British colonisers while on the ground. They also reach out into the metropole, haunting the characters' lives after their return to England and disrupting the very social order that underpins their supposed superiority over their non-Western subjugates.
Much has been written about the colonial period, relying upon extensive interviews with leading participants. However gaining written documentation, and records of the 'deals' that were brokered, has been more elusive. We have been involved in a search for written documentation from a wide variety of sources. As a result a wealth of documents have been copied and lodged with the Sarawak State Archives. These include records from the UK National Archives [including the ‘migrated archives’ special collection] and the Rhodes House papers now at the Bodleian Library. From the US National Archives are de-classified records from the CIA, the State Department, the US Consulate Kuching, plus USAF aerial photography of Japanese occupied Borneo. Files copied from the Australian War Memorial and National Archives added significantly to this collection. This two decade long program has been supported by the State Library of Sarawak, the Sarawak Foundation, the Tun Jugah Foundation and the Universiti Sarawak Malaysia. This paper highlights the wealth of historical documents now available for perusal in Kuching, and the challenges locating those invaluable materials.
In South Borneo there are some unusual linguistic features shared among languages that are adjacent but belong to different genetic microgroups. These languages are Banjar Malay (a Malayic language), Ngaju (West Barito) and Maanyan (South East Barito). The same features also appear in Malagasy. They include the following ones:
Ngaju buah 'hit, affected' and Ma’anyan wuah ‘1. affected, hit; 2. correct, hitting the mark’ are function words. Malagasy vua has the same meaning as Ma’anyan wuah, and vua- is a verbal prefix indicating that an activity was carried out successfully. These words (and prefix) do not reflect Proto Malayo-Polynesian *buaq ‘fruit’ but were borrowed from Banjar Malay. The latter has buah which means ‘fruit’ but also became a function word indicating that some activity was successful (Indonesian berhasil).
Both Ngaju and Ma’anyan exhibit “nasal spread”: if the initial consonant of a word with an intermediate y becomes nasalised, this y as a rule also becomes nasalised and changes into ny, e.g. prefixation of N- to the Ma’anyan root wayat yields manyat ‘to pay’. In Malagasy, nasal spread has usually become invisible because of subsequent changes but is still detectable in certain roots. In Banjar Malay the phenomenon appears in some isolated cases but it never became regular.
In Ma’anyan, historical *s became h in all positions of the word, e.g *sungay ‘river’ became hungey, *asiq ‘love’ became ahi, *lawas ‘long time’ became lawah. This change also applies to Ngaju but not to *s at the beginning of a word. In Malagasy the same change took place but s was re-introduced already already very early onwards through Malay influence. In Banjar Malay the change happened frequently but not regularly, e.g. *so’al ‘question’ became hual, *sampai ‘until’ became hampai.
The fact that these features are also shared with Malagasy gives us an indication of the time depth involved in their origin and spread, as contacts between the peoples of South Borneo and Malagasy speakers were severed when the latter migrated to East Africa some 13 centuries ago. It shows us that already before that time there must have been close contacts among the various ethnic groups in the Barito region (including the Malagasy) and between these groups and the Malay metropole.
Since its introduction in 1970s, Credit Unions (CUs) was spreading out in Indonesia, mainly in West Kalimantan. The Catholic missionaries and local activists, together, led introducing CUs amid marginal, remote and poor communities. Indeed, the mission is covering social and moral purposes, not just preparing financial services, but, providing financial education to reduce poverty as well as bringing an opportunity to reach a prosperity living. It was following an original idea from the founder, Raiffeisen in Germany who create kind of credit cooperatives to address poverty problem, especially releasing them from loan sharks dependency. In case of West Kalimantan, the idea was carried to reduce the domination of tokey (the boss) among their anak-buah (clients). CUs emerged as a new patron, providing capital access and replacing roles of the Bank that absent in the rural areas. Becoming one of the main financial services in the region, CUs have been growing rapidly, covering financial services both in rural and urban areas. The development reached its peak since introducing of palm oil business as a new cash crop production. Too many success stories are written, yet, there is remaining poverty problem left. During my ethnographic research, I find that there were remaining poverty and inequality issue, rising in the era of commercial economy. It is almost 50 years since the CUs introduced. Can we say that CUs were unsuccessfully tackling the poverty problem, instead, it turned on a new problem, namely inequality. In the paper, I want to try linking it with the major problem usually faced by a growing micro-financial service. Some scholars called it mission drift (Mersland & Strøm, 2014), paradigm shift (Robinson, 2001), or commercialization. If it also occurs to CUs, then, the question is why they have to be shifted. Then, what interesting in this topic is about the possibility of CUs to become a new market invisible hand that driving frontier communities to act unstructurally based on market logic.
Borneo is often characterised as a remote, isolated island, peripheral to regional and global networks and narratives. Scholars of Borneo, however, have long recognised the inaccuracies of this perception, given the island’s long history of participation in global trading networks. Eric Tagliacozzo (2013) argues that, in fact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, Borneo was a centre of transnational connection. During this period, European interests on the island targeted trade in mineral resources, forest products and the cultivation of export crops. At the same time, Western explorers and collectors were drawn to the island, motivated by a search for wealth and for knowledge of Borneo’s unique flora, fauna and peoples - knowledge which was highly prized in scientific circles. The introduction of European styles of governance and peace-making gave further impetus to trade, but Borneans remained at the centre of these networks, agents of change in their cross-cultural interactions with global forces.
This panel aims to explore Borneo’s position as a hub in such transboundary networks – economic, political, scientific and cultural - and to highlight the island’s historical significance in regional and global perspective. Participants will demonstrate how a world-history framework can be combined with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Borneo’s past to draw out previously unheard voices in the island’s story. These approaches include the consideration of alternative source material, such as oral histories and material culture; interrogating colonial sources from new perspectives, including recently declassified archives; and the examination of ‘subaltern’ experiences in Borneo societies.