Part 1

• Searching for Borneo in British museums: interrogating the colonial legacy of the Charles Hose collections Jennifer Morris The British Museum

  UK museums contain a vast repository of Borneo’s cultural heritage, much of which was collected during the colonial period and is largely under-researched and under-utilised today. A significant proportion of these collections were acquired through one man: Charles Hose. An officer for the Brooke government in Sarawak between the 1880s and 1907, Hose contributed more than 2000 ethnographic objects to multiple British museums. In doing so, he positioned himself as the conduit through which knowledge about Borneo flowed to Europe and the US, and as a prominent expert in Borneo cultures after he retired to England. As a result, Hose’s ideas, theories and classificatory systems have had an enormous impact on the interpretation of Borneo and its cultures all over the world. Although much of his anthropological scholarship has since been discredited, Hose’s voice can still be heard loud and clear in wider representations of Borneo’s cultural history.

  This paper introduces an ongoing project that seeks to interrupt Hose’s voice in contemporary interpretations of Borneo in UK museums, by compiling data on these scattered collections and exploring how they might be made more accessible to the burgeoning grass-roots cultural heritage and identity movements in Borneo. The paper will share, and invite feedback on, current plans to work alongside Borneo communities to facilitate collaborative reinterpretation of the Hose collections and the updating of museum documentation to privilege Bornean voices.

• Exploring the cultural heritage of Borneo through objects from the Cabinet of Artefacts and Natural Curiosities of the Francke Foundations in Germany Giulia Speciale Francke Foundations Halle (Saale) Jutta Kelling FernUniversität Hagen

  In Germany as in other European countries there is an ongoing discussion about cultural objects and artifacts from colonial contexts and their representation in museums. Most of these debates focus on objects and human remains from former colonies and claims for their restitution, for example in the case of the Benin Bronzes. But the discussions have also brought to light lesser-known issues that are equally entangled with colonial power. One of these topics is the role of mission museums and other institutions with affected collections. They manage and preserve a wide range of documents, archival material and objects from foreign countries, cultures and religions.
  The lecture presents a newly started research project in Halle (Saale), in which about 100 objects from the Francke Foundations’ Cabinet of Artefacts and Natural Curiosities (established 1698) are to be examined. This three-year project is funded by the German Lost Art Foundation and based at the Research Department. The artefacts originate from Southeast Borneo and Sarawak and were sent to Halle in the 1840s for the Francke Foundations’ collection. They are still on display there today partly in a specially made collection cabinet and also on the walls of the cabinet.
  The project analyses the provenances and acquisition circumstances of the objects, their original purposes, meanings as well as the cultural-historical background in the society of origin. It aims to highlight the local perspectives and to challenge the western and colonial narratives on Borneo. The results of the project will be incorporated into a digital exhibition with substantiated object biographies.
  What was the intention of the missionaries and the Francke Foundations for collecting and for what purpose where the objects originally used? What was the political context in which the missionaries operated? How were these objects presented to the public in the cabinet? What image of Borneo was presented and what stories were told about the remote island and its inhabitants?
  These are some of the questions on which the project focuses and which will be discussed in this presentation.

• Kenyalang Circus: the spectacle of institutionalized identities Marcos Kueh MARCOSLAH

  A key interest in my artistic practice is regarding the production of cultural influence that comes with the establishment of traditional anthropological museums and the roles it plays in reinforcing the idea of the Bornean human. With the arrival of western sciences and taxonomy, myths and ghosts were replaced by metrics and calculations; intangible information spoken from the fleeting, polytheistic memory of the tongue were permanently etched on paper as secular facts; perishable objects that were made to be day to day tools were denied their rightful chance to disintegrate, so as to be kept as artifacts of study and observation.

  With the contemporary description and perception of the Bornean man in global institutions, studied and documented with the envoy of science for the academic entertainment of the privileged public in the weekends, what then is left for the current living Borneans in between all of this to make sense? How progressive are we as a global culture from the days of human zoos when we still find it acceptable for cultural beings to be stripped naked of their own objects that signifies their ethnical expression and appropriated as artifacts behind glass walls? On the other end, how do we start the discourse of encouraging more diverse ways of critical, independent thinking when it comes down to the ownership of our own cultural integrity? When we take control over our own narratives as Borneans, to reconsider what our identities are to ourselves, for ourselves separate from the validation and caricature ideas of tourists, how then will own cultural institutions such as the Borneo Cultures Museum and The Sarawak Village sit in this framework?

  These are the discourses that I wish to start up both, with the European and South East Asian audience through the artworks that I am contributing to the industry. When all the ideas of what it means to be a freak from the rainforests are amalgamated into giant woven posters, explicitly trying to sell our exotic culture as a form of entertainment, will we then be able to reflect critically on the absurdity of the situation that we are locked in with our relationships to cultural institutions?

• The Archives are Alive: Re-Centering community voices in museum collections Catriona Maddocks Catama - Borneo Boat Lute Revival

  Museums and institutions across the world hold flora, fauna, craft and cultural artifacts from Borneo within their collections. However much of the information held within the databases contains limited documentation and errors in the name, function, materiality, and origins of the artifacts alongside problematic, outdated terminology. This is often due to artifacts and associated data collected and provided by colonial officers in the nineteenth century, rather than recorded directly from the community members from which they originate.
  This research paper explores how members of Borneo Boat Lute Revival are engaging cultural practitioners from throughout Borneo to provide accurate information about artifacts and discussing how to elevate and give provenance to indigenous communities whose cultural items are within the museum collections.
  The paper has a special focus on boat lutes, a family of plucked string instruments traditionally played by indigenous communities throughout Borneo. Whilst in modern times some boat lutes, such as the sape’ have been adapted and evolved to become contemporary instruments played on international stages, others such as the sundatang and belikan have become rare and endangered within their community, meaning the information held in museums holds a significant role in the research and reimagining and reintroduction of these instruments.
  For the past five years Borneo Boat Lute Revival, a group of artists, researchers, instrument makers and musicians based throughout Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan (Borneo) have been working with rural and urban cultural practitioners and elders to learn and document the music, techniques and stories of these instruments, as well as facilitating connections, collaborations and conversations between institutions and museums both locally and internationally.
  Representatives from Borneo Boat Lute Revival have collaborated with Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University and British Museum to explore and enhance their archives and collections from Borneo, with a specific focus on their boat lute collections and associated performance and customary items. Research findings and detailed information on the instruments are being returned to boat lute makers within Borneo in order for them to reproduce museum items lost to their communities.
  With a focus on counteracting problematic colonial narratives and documentation and centering indigenous voices within collections, the research aims to address complicated histories and produce contemporary content by Borneo creatives for international institutions.

Part 2

• Peace-systems and oral histories in the Kelabit highlands: disrupting colonial narratives Valerie Mashman Institute of Borneo Studies

  The Brooke regime left a legacy of histories written from a European perspective which documented that peace, law and order were maintained in the early years through military intervention. Officers were ordered to “collect a force sufficient to maintain order, if the peace of their districts was challenged” (Talib 1999:15) and it has been noted that repression, military interventions, and trade embargoes were all important parts of the Brooke pacification strategy (Helbing 2021:127). A punitive expedition was dispatched from the Baram district to the Kelabit highlands in 1905 to quell attacks from Pa Ibang over the border. Some three years later, Resident R.S. Douglas led peacemaking in the Kelabit highlands, vaunting the success of the punitive expedition: “It was shown to the border tribes that they can no longer treat the Government’s laws with impunity” (Douglas 1909a: 30). From his reports, it could be argued that the Brooke regime acted as a catalyst for the establishment of peace in the highlands. Yet this view overlooks the mechanisms for peacemaking within the communities involved.

  The analysis of two Kelabit historical narratives gives an alternative view of peacemaking, indicating that peace came about through the agency of a local leader and through features in his community which are characteristic of peace-systems. Examples of these factors are story-telling, heterogenous identities, alliances, the use of genealogies, the importance of kinship, attachment to land, rituals and symbols, which identify that peace came about more through the agency of indigenous people, than through the mediation of the Brooke regime, with warfare and repression. The concrete example of this is seen in the story of building of the government fort at Lio Mato, close to the border, which is done by communities, from both sides of the border as a means of bringing government into their own sphere on their own initiative.

• Borneoputera Unborn: the Covert Contest for Political Indigeneity in Colonial Kalimantan Lezhi Wang NUS

  Engaging in lifelong critique on politicized nativism, Mahmood Mamdani highlighted the colonial preoccupation “with defining, locating, and anointing the traditional authority—in the singular.” (Mamdani, 2012, p. 49) On the Southeast Asian island of Kalimantan, colonial epistemological projects helped cement a group called “Dayaks” as uncontested indigenes, rupturing local political memories not dissimilar to those of Congo and Rwanda. A closer inspection of the historical becoming of such claim over nativeness would reveal long overlooked intellectual dissonances by the colonized peoples that may challenge existing narratives on indigeneity.

  Before Dutch invasion, the only functioning political hegemon on the expansive island of Kalimantan was a feudal Islamic state called the Banjar Sultanate. After its dismemberment by the colonial forces in 1864, Banjar’s ex-subjects remained economically dominant on Kalimantan. Colonial ethnographers were quick and persistent in dismissing the “Banjars” as essential foreigners to the island in favor of the more “pure” local pagans, who later assumed the collective identity of “Dayaks”. By 1910, however, the concept of Borneo-Poetera began appearing in Banjar-owned newspapers. In the 1920s large number of political organizations hinting on nativism emerged in the Banjar heartland, spearheaded by the Persatoean Poetera Borneo (PPB). A comparison between Dayak and Banjar media strategies during the prewar era shows their parallel yet discursive engagements in constructing indigeneity, the Banjar part of which had never been seriously researched. Amidst the archipelago’s all-engulfing quest for modernization and sovereignty, the Dayak-Banjar discord on nativism represented a significant project of border-drawing that ultimately defined their respective visions of citizenship.

• Dayak tourism in Papua. Cultural intercourse, memories and memorabilia, alternative narratives, discordant museum artefacts Bernard Sellato CNRS

  Large numbers of Dayak men hailing from communities in interior Dutch Borneo were recruited as teams of “jungle and river experts” to participate in major exploration expeditions across western New Guinea in the period 1900-1940. Research among these communities is bringing to light memories and stories about New Guinea and Papuans, photographs, and memorabilia, feeding the construction of alternative “Dayak” narratives contrasting with those available in Western books and reports. Moreover, in their New Guinea encounters, these Dayak travellers traded cultural artefacts with Papuans, and scores of Papuan artefacts must have reached Dayak villages, from where they circulated across Borneo as trade items, amulets, or souvenirs, some to be found today in museum collections, subject to inquiries about their itineraries, and further contributing to Dayak narratives. A second part of this project intends to investigate the memories and cultural artefacts that Dayak visitors to New Guinea left among Papuan villages.

Abstract