A Question of Identity: Names, Societies, and Ethnic Groups. in Interior Kalimantan and Brunei Darussalam.

Publication: SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

Publication Date: 01-APR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)

One of the major preoccupations of the anthropological literature on Southeast Asia in general and the island of Borneo in particular is that of the problem of identifying, defining and naming ethnic categories (the conceptual dimension of ethnicity) and ethnic groups (ethnicity at the level of social interaction and group formation) (Rousseau 1990; Wadley 2000). This paper addresses a set of issues raised in two case-studies of ethnic identities in Borneo. First, I wish to examine a recent debate among both foreign and local scholars about the appropriateness of various ethnonyms or ethnic labels used to designate an indigenous or "Dayak" population of interior West Kalimantan among whom I undertook fieldwork in the early 1970s. This debate touches on recent postmodernist concerns to question claims to authoritative knowledge and deconstruct particular interpretations of social and cultural life, and following Pierre Bourdieu (1977), to analyse how and why human actors create, reproduce, and change identities and taxonomies. These ethnic taxonomies in turn comprise symbolic representations which express and shape the social and cultural world which people experience and to which they give meaning. Not surprisingly the issue of competing claims to authoritative knowledge is thrown into even sharper relief when native intellectuals contest the interpretations of their own communities by foreign, usually Western scholars.

Secondly, and more briefly, I would like to return to a debate initiated some six years ago in a seminar paper which I delivered at a workshop on Brunei Studies at the University of Hull and then, in revised form, at the Academy of Brunei Studies, when I posed the question "What is Brunei Society?" (King 1994, 1996). At that time I raised problems in the definition of the ethnic categories and groups which comprise the modern sultanate of Brunei Darussalam and their interrelationships in an overarching social, economic, political, and cultural system presided over primarily by Brunei Malays. Although it is not my intention to prolong the discussion unduly, the responses to my 1994 paper by Allen Maxwell (1996) and Donald Brown (1998) deserve a summary comment in relation to my consideration of the problem of defining and naming ethnic categories and groups in Borneo and the way in which this debate bears on the problem of ethnic nomenclature in the West Kalimantan case.

Ethnic Identity: General Comments

At an important and well-attended symposium on "Sarawak Cultural Heritage" held in Kuching in 1988 a large number of the participants discussed the problems of ethnic nomenclature and classification in Sarawak; four special volumes of the Sarawak Museum Journal were published as Symposium Proceedings. One particularly interesting contribution from a local participant, Mohd. Yaakub Haji Johari (1989) of the Institute for Development Studies in Sabah, pointed to the important practice of naming populations in Borneo in relation to specific localities and geographical features such as rivers. He also drew our attention to a number of other matters including the fluid quality of local identities and the difficulty of fitting these into neat conceptual "boxes"; the complexities generated by such processes as cultural exchange, religious conversion, intermarriage, and assimilation; the differences between self-identity and external categorization by outside observers; and, very significantly, the more recent creation of broader ethnic identities as an important element in processes of political and economic change. Mohd. Yaakub says, "In reality the reason why a particular group would like to change its name, renegotiate, or reinterpret its boundary is often coloured by other issues, including political consideration[s]" (1989, p. 217), and, in this connection, he discusses the emergence of "Kadazanism" in Sabah and the subsequent rejection of the term "Dusun" to refer to several interrelated native communities in the western coastal and plains areas of the state; in Sarawak and Kalimantan one can point to the political phenomenon of "Dayakism" and the appropriation of the term by indigenous elites in their efforts to create and develop "Dayak" political consciousness and political parties. Frequently in the history of Borneo, an ethnic term created by one ethnic grouping to refer to another and then used by colonial administrators and scientists has been subsequently adopted and accepted by those so named, even though the term might well have had pejorative connotations in its original meaning. What I want to emphasize here and return to later is the rather chance way in which in certain cases and at certain moments an externally generated ethnonym (or exonym) may be adopted by certain communities for political or other purposes whilst in other circumstances external ethnic names are rejected as entirely inappropriate.

Aside from the politically motivated creation of broader identities we must also appreciate that the numerous folk or indigenous taxonomies in Borneo, which comprise overlapping yet often conflicting sets of ethnic categories, labels, and defining criteria, constitute indigenous attempts to comprehend and bring order to complex and dynamic local social and cultural relations. Two neighbouring communities might well have very different systems of classification for themselves and each other. These taxonomies are then usually extended beyond the local context in a relatively piecemeal way to include more geographically and culturally distant communities. Rousseau has noted helpfully in this connection that a folk classification serves both conceptual and social purposes, that frequently it is not entirely the creation of its users, and that "new elements are added to the taxonomy as they become available, and they do not necessarily fit neatly with the rest" (1990, p. 53).

It is also noticeable that some demographically and politically dominant populations in Borneo are much more easily defined both in terms of self-identity and external categorization whilst minority or marginal ones often prove more problematical to delimit and denote. Three dominant ethnic axes across a wide span of northern and central Borneo comprise the Malays, Iban, and Kayan with which smaller satellite communities usually have to interact and to which they have to accommodate; minorities frequently create and sustain their own identities in relationship to the majority populations as Rousseau has demonstrated convincingly for the ethnic complex in Sarawak usually labelled "Kajang" (1975). The languages of the dominant ethnic categories are also important lingua franca across large parts of the island, and particularly in the face of the expansion of Malay language and culture and Islam, some smaller communities have been progressively absorbed into a Malay social and cultural world. Nevertheless, it should not be assumed that the definition of these dominant categories and their constituent groups in contrast to the minorities is itself without difficulties. As Wadley has noted, the Iban, for example, did not begin to perceive themselves as a relatively homogeneous and explicitly defined ethnic category until well into the nineteenth century when colonial rule brought them into wider administrative and educational systems, established connections and communications between far-flung river-based groupings, imposed law and order between previously warring factions and undertook ethnographic investigations, classifications, and censuses of the native populations. It seems that the Iban have taken over an external term, though the "exact origin of the label is still unclear", and used it for their own purposes (Wadley 2000, p. 86). The weight of opinion suggests that the term "Iban" was first used by the Kayan (in their language "Hivan") to refer to those aggressive and migratory peoples who were moving into the Rejang Basin from the regions to the south and west during the nineteenth century. The source communities from which these migrants derived were usually referred to as "Sea Dayak" or simply "Dayak" by Brooke officers in Sarawak, and the so-called "Sea Dayak" commonly referred to themselves by river-based names. Over time the external referent "Iban" gradually replaced "Sea Dayak" and was adopted by the people themselves. Nevertheless, this wider "Iban" ethnic identity, which has been created over the past 150 years, continues to embrace considerable diversity and factionalism. There is a further complication in that neighbouring peoples in Kalimantan, including the Kantu', Mualang, Bugau, and Desa, who are culturally and historically related to the Iban, do not refer to themselves by this name and are usually not so designated in the anthropological literature, although Wadley notes that Kantu' and other "Ibanic" peoples usually "take on the Iban label while engaged in wage labour in areas of Sarawak where self-identified Iban form a majority" (personal communication, 2000).

Therefore, with regard to ethnic identity, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic change in Borneo I have suggested in several previous publications that attempts to define and delimit particular ethnic categories and groups in isolation from others on the assumption that these are socially and culturally homogeneous and bounded entities are fundamentally mistaken and that one needs to understand and analyse ethnic units as interrelated one with another in broader sets of conceptual and social relationships (King 1993, pp. 36ff).

My proposal to study ethnic groupings on a broader canvas is hardly an original one; among others, Leach had already shown the advantages of adopting a wider ethnographic perspective embracing interrelated ethnic categories and groups in his classic study of Highland Burma society (1970 [1954]) and in his survey of Sarawak societies (1950). Rousseau notably has contributed to our understanding of an overarching central Borneo society (1975, 1990) by examining it as "a number of related [ethnic] groups". He says:

It was very difficult to identify recognizable ethnic units, because groups with the same name might speak different languages, while groups with distinct ethnic names seemed to be identical. Central Borneo appeared as a checkerboard pattern of ethnic units distributed randomly through the vagaries of migrations. (1990, p. 1)

Bernard Sellato has also undertaken a similar wide-ranging study of the island's numerous hunting-gathering communities, which he refers to by the collective designation "Punan" (1994, p. xix). He notes that, unlike some other Bornean peoples, "nomads are not in the least concerned with the names used to refer to them" (p. 16).

I have long argued for the analytical utility of this kind of "middle range" analysis in the case of various of the ethnic categories and groups of the Upper Kapuas region of West Kalimantan (King 1979, 1982, 1985), and more recently I have attempted the same for the Brunei sultanate (King 1994, 1996). In other words, rather than study one community as in some sense a separate, defined, and autonomous entity, I have proposed that we take a particular region of West Kalimantan and a particular social system in Brunei which comprise several interrelated taxonomies and interacting groups and try to understand the dynamics of ethnic identity and nomenclature in this wider context. Obviously, there is an arbitrariness about this approach since ethnic categories and groups shade into one another and there is usually no clear regional, political, or socio-cultural boundary which one can establish. Instead the exercise is guided by one's specific analytical and ethnographic objectives at the time and it has to be recognized that any unit of study is not a natural geographical nor a real social and cultural entity. Nevertheless, I think this perspective avoids some of the difficulties experienced by anthropologists who have focused on a particular "category", "society", or "ethnic group" and been preoccupied with the discovery of essential core qualities which are assumed to coincide and define this unit as separate from others. There is also, I maintain, a tendency in this approach to search for concrete social and cultural elements which are seen as "traditional" and a corresponding tendency to see ethnic identity as largely unproblematical, given that core features of a unit can be revealed and described, and separated out from other accretions which are assumed to be the result of culture contact and change. It is this frame of reference which has resulted in...

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