Academic literature on the topic 'Ibans (Bornean people)'

Abstract This essay reads the Taiwanese Malaysian author Chang Kuei-hsing’s 1998 novel Elephant Herd from an ecological perspective. A novel about the Sarawak communist insurgency (1963–90)—an important but underrepresented conflict during the Cold War in Asia—Elephant Herd reappraises the legacies of this conflict through its ecological impact on the Bornean landscape and peoples. It critiques existing historical recollections of this period, which take the perspectives of either the colonial British government and its subsequent Malaysian inheritors or the largely ethnic Chinese leftist insurgents who sought to establish an independent Borneo state. The novel argues for a postcolonial remapping of Borneo beyond colonial statecraft and Cold War geopolitics in this contested territory, which are narrated through Chinese civilizational and Malay and British national narratives of place. It does so by staging a transformation of the settler Sinophone subject in Borneo, manifesting encounters in the Borneo rainforest that reveal the Indigenous experience of this insurgency and the cost of state-making projects in Borneo through environmental ruins such as elephant tusks. The novel concludes by proposing a postcolonial Bornean identity that begins from the perspective of the Indigenous Iban people, whose voices reframe the Sinophone narrator’s assumptions about land, history, and place beyond a settler point of view.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on October 2, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Reed Wadley. Includes bibliographical references.

University of Technology, Sydney. Institute of International Studies.
Within Borneo, the indigenous Iban pua kumbu cloth, historically associated with headhunting, is steeped in spirituality and mythology. The cloth, the female counterpart of headhunting, was known as women’s war (Linggi, 1999). The process of mordanting yarns in preparation for tying and dyeing was seen as a way of managing the spiritual realm (Heppell, Melak, & Usen, 2006). It required of the ‘women warriors’ psychological courage equivalent to the men when decapitating enemies. Headhunting is no longer a relevant cultural practice. However, the cloth that incited headhunting continues to be invested with significance in the modern world, albeit in the absence of its association with headhunting. This thesis uses the pua kumbu as a lens through which to explore the changing dynamics of social and economic life with regard to men’s and women’s roles in society, issues of identity and nationalism, people’s relationship to their environment and the changing meanings and roles of the textiles themselves with global market forces. By addressing these issues I aim to capture the fluid expressions of new social dynamics using a pua kumbu in a very different way from previous studies. Using the scholarship grounded in art and material culture studies, and with particular reference to theories of ‘articulation’ (Clifford, 2001), ‘circulation’ (Graburn & Glass, 2004) and ‘art and agency’ (Gell, 1998; MacClancy, 1997a), I analyse how the Dayak Iban use the pua kumbu textile to renegotiate their periphery position within the nation of Malaysia (and within the bumiputera indigenous group) and to access more enabling social and economic opportunities. I also draw on the theoretical framework of ‘friction’ and ‘contact zones’ as outlined by Tsing (2005), Karp (2006) and Clifford (1997) to contextualize my discussion of the of the exhibition and representation of pua kumbu in museums. Each of these theoretical frameworks is applied to my data to situate and illustrate my arguments. Whereas in the past, it was the culture that required the object be made, now the object is made to do cultural work. The cloth, instead of revealing hidden symbols and meanings in its motifs, is now made to carry the culture, having itself become a symbol or marker for Iban people. Using an exploration of material culture to understand the complex, dynamic and flowing nature of the relationship between objects and the identities of the producers and consumer is the key contribution of this thesis.

University of Technology, Sydney. Institute of International Studies.
Within Borneo, the indigenous Iban pua kumbu cloth, historically associated with headhunting, is steeped in spirituality and mythology. The cloth, the female counterpart of headhunting, was known as women’s war (Linggi, 1999). The process of mordanting yarns in preparation for tying and dyeing was seen as a way of managing the spiritual realm (Heppell, Melak, & Usen, 2006). It required of the ‘women warriors’ psychological courage equivalent to the men when decapitating enemies. Headhunting is no longer a relevant cultural practice. However, the cloth that incited headhunting continues to be invested with significance in the modern world, albeit in the absence of its association with headhunting. This thesis uses the pua kumbu as a lens through which to explore the changing dynamics of social and economic life with regard to men’s and women’s roles in society, issues of identity and nationalism, people’s relationship to their environment and the changing meanings and roles of the textiles themselves with global market forces. By addressing these issues I aim to capture the fluid expressions of new social dynamics using a pua kumbu in a very different way from previous studies. Using the scholarship grounded in art and material culture studies, and with particular reference to theories of ‘articulation’ (Clifford, 2001), ‘circulation’ (Graburn & Glass, 2004) and ‘art and agency’ (Gell, 1998; MacClancy, 1997a), I analyse how the Dayak Iban use the pua kumbu textile to renegotiate their periphery position within the nation of Malaysia (and within the bumiputera indigenous group) and to access more enabling social and economic opportunities. I also draw on the theoretical framework of ‘friction’ and ‘contact zones’ as outlined by Tsing (2005), Karp (2006) and Clifford (1997) to contextualize my discussion of the of the exhibition and representation of pua kumbu in museums. Each of these theoretical frameworks is applied to my data to situate and illustrate my arguments. Whereas in the past, it was the culture that required the object be made, now the object is made to do cultural work. The cloth, instead of revealing hidden symbols and meanings in its motifs, is now made to carry the culture, having itself become a symbol or marker for Iban people. Using an exploration of material culture to understand the complex, dynamic and flowing nature of the relationship between objects and the identities of the producers and consumer is the key contribution of this thesis.