Please read the reading (attachment) and write a least 200- words discussion.
292 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
Chapter 7 China
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INSULAR SOUTHEAST ASIA
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s we noted in the introduction to part V, Southeast Asia is a geopo- litical concept invented during World War II to denote a theatre of war. It never had a civilizational center such as South and East Asia
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have had, although it had a pattern of nagaras, small state centers or sacred cit- ies with a god-king and a ruling ideology based on Hindu-Buddhist notions of legitimacy. These were to be found both in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. Chapter 10 focused on some of the better-known examples, particularly Bali (in Indonesia), Angkor (in Cambodia), and Thailand. Chapter 12 will return to this region as we conclude with a discussion of colonialism and the creation of the modern nation-state across the region.
In this chapter, we take a somewhat different approach to several cultural traditions distributed across much of mainland and insular Southeast Asia out- side the nagara-style systems, among peoples who resisted the reach of these labor-hungry states. Standard histories tend to overlook these peoples and their customs, as we discussed in chapter 4, because they are determined outsiders to the civilizing mission of ever-growing states. Their lifestyles, religious prac- tices, life-cycle rites, and kinship systems have often been viewed as baffling and barbarous. In turning to insular Southeast Asia, with its thousands of islands and loosely incorporated ethnic groups, we have selected a few classic studies by anthropologists to illustrate some of these traditions (mortuary rites, head- hunting, child rearing, and cockfighting) beyond state centers. They take us to groups in Borneo (especially the Dayak and Berawan), the largest island in Indonesia and briefly to the Alor on a tiny island in Indonesia. To understand the lingering culture of head-hunting (without actual head-hunting) we turn to a group in Luzon (the Ilongot), the largest island in the Philippines. And finally we turn to villagers in Bali, the most studied place in insular Southeast Asia, for a famous study on character formation and another one on cockfighting.
Borneo
Haddon in Borneo
At the end of the nineteenth century, a British administrator working in Bor- neo named Charles Hose learned that a respected anthropologist he had met in London was on a scientific expedition to the Torres Straits, a string of islands stretching between New Guinea and Australia. Why not come to Borneo? The two had met in London several years earlier, and Hose understood that Alfred Cort Haddon was pioneering a new approach to scientific research, the intensive study
Chapter opener photo: Children playing on bamboo raft at Kuching on the Sarawak River.
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of limited areas. Haddons method involved spending significant time encounter- ing people in their own societies rather than chatting up travelers from distant shores when they got back to the comforts of London. I will do my very utmost to make everything a success for youI will have all sorts of feasts and native festivi- ties arranged to take place during the time you are here, you will see what others have never seen, and I will undertake to see you will never regret the time spent in Borneo (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). It proved to be an irresistible offer.
© Robert Cribb 2009
Map 11.1 Borneo in 1901. Note that the island is divided into British and Dutch territories (dashed line).
414 Part V: Southeast Asia
Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia
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The above Dutch map depicts Borneo in 1901, the year Haddon published his study of Borneo and the Torres Straits, Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown. It bears a bit of scrutiny. Note that the island is divided into British and Dutch territories (the dashed line). Before lines could be drawn on maps, Bru- nei controlled much of the surrounding area from an ancient trade port that by 1901 had been reduced to the lines on the map (and is roughly the same area today). Sarawak (which today is a province of Malaysia) was under the control of a British adventurer who was called Raja Charles Brooke, the White Raja, until it became a British protectorate in 1888. Today, Sarawak and north Bor- neo (now Sabah) are part of Malaysia, which stretches across from the south- ern part of the Thai Peninsula (except Singapore) with a capital at Kuala Lumpur. The larger part of Borneo, south and east of the dashed line, was con- trolled by Dutch Indonesia, and is now a part of Independent Indonesia. (See also map 12.2.)
Charles Hose worked on the island of Borneo for Raja James Brooke, who had helped the sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion and, in 1841, was made governor of Sarawak in gratitude. The title governor wasnt enough, and soon he was being called raja, in a process not all that different from the early British adventurers in India like Clive of Bengal. The dynasty of the Brooke family reigned over Sarawak for over a century, squeezing Brunei into its present con- figuration. For a thousand years prior to the period of the White Rajas, Brunei, controlling a large inland area that fed tropical goods into the global market, had been a major port city on the southern global trade route that began in Arabia and stretched through Goa, Calicut, Madras, Malaka, Jahor (Singa- pore), Brunei, Manila, and Canton. Both Arab and Chinese ship masters were sure to stop in Brunei for the goods that Brunei merchants collected from the interior tribes, jungle produce, much of which was crucial ingredients for Chinese medicines. Brunei ended up as a tiny independent city-state on the northwest coast of the island. (Not to worry: Today, the Sultan of Brunei, one of the few remaining absolute monarchs, is said to be worth $20 billion and was once the richest man in the world.)
Hose was an amateur ethnographer himself, having already established a museum, and collected a library of more than 700 volumes. His offer to host Haddon promised to connect his own amateur work with the foremost ethno- logical endeavors of the day. Haddon had all the latest equipment and hoped to move anthropology forward while bringing knowledge of the remote societies of Southeast Asia and Melanesia to the West. He could make photographs in stereoscope and in color. He could capture sound by wax cylinder. And he could capture moving pictures by cinematograph (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). Photography, according to these early ethnographers using these mod- ern recording devices, could capture the real world. Photography accurately reproduced reality in a way never before possible, it was thought; because of its mechanical nature, and its automatism, [it] produced objective visual evi- dence of the real thing, averting the danger of any subjectivity of interpreta-
tion (Daston and Galison 1992). He published his findings from Borneo and the Torres Straits in 1901 in Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown. The Sarawak material was based on the itinerary Hose had prepared for him, illustrating the mutual support of early anthropology and imperialism:
It included excursions by boat along rivers and into the wilderness, visits to interior villages, religious ceremonies and opportunities to collect artifacts. Hoses guests also attended a peace-making ceremony that attracted more than 6,000 members of many different ethnic groups. The gathering was organized as a means of pacification and of addressing tensions between the different ethnic groups under the control of the colonial administration. The event was doubtless also staged to serve Hoses position of authority among local people. (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013; Haddon 1901)
Some of these photographs have been reproduced by Chiarelli and Gun- tarik (2013), to whom they appear mediocre and unremarkable. There are shots of rivers from boats and of curious villagers gazing at the photographer. At least the photos appear unstaged, with no attempt at faux authenticity by keeping foreigners out of sight, a very common practice later on. White jacketed expeditioners in pith helmets mix with local people in traditional garb. Already at that time there were best practices being written up in a scientific publica- tion called Notes and Queries in Anthropology, and Haddon managed the section on photography, but he does not seem to have followed his own advice in Bor- neo (with his mediocre and unremarkable shots and foreigners in full view). Perhaps because Borneo was an excursion at the end of his primary work in the Torres Straits, and several of his companions had already departed, Haddon was himself disappointed in the Borneo images (Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013).
Another regret is worth noting. At this time (the end of the nineteenth cen- tury) scientists were attempting to put the identification of races and tribes and ethnic groups on a scientific footing. The hope was that this could be accomplished through biological data, and so fieldworkers like Haddon spent a great deal of time taking anthropometric statistics, identifying skin color, height, and head and face measurements. As Haddon writes in Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown, One of our objects in visiting Sarawak was the hope that by measuring a large number of people, and by recording their physical features, we might help towards a solution of the ethnic problems (Haddon 1901:320; quoted in Chiarelli and Guntarik 2013). A measure called the cephalic index was a ratio of head width to height that produced three types: long-headed (dol- ichocephalic), medium-headed (mesocephalic), and short-headed (brachyce- phalic). There was an effort to classify the many inhabitants of Borneo into two original races in another widely read book by Haddon (The Races of Man and Their Distribution, 1909), but this effort was soon abandoned by anthropology. Even the term tribe became so laden with controversy and mistaken assump- tions that it has been largely abandoned as a technical term. It continues to be used as a rather generic term for nonstate cultural or ethnic groups of all types throughout much of Asia (as in the Hill Tribes of Thailand).
Discussions need to present one or more key ideas, introduce them, and explain their relevance.
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