Jennifer Alexander

Protecting Peasants from Capitalism: The Subordination of Javanese Traders by the Colonial State

Colonial Java represents the paradigmatic case of an ethnically stratified economy. The Dutch controlled large-scale agricultural production and processing and the sale of these products in European markets. They also monopolised the import of European manufactured commodities, such as cloth. The Javanese provided labour for the cultivation and processing of export crops, maintaining themselves by subsistence farming and subsidiary occupations, such as petty trading and handicrafts. The Chinese linked the other two groups, providing supervisors and skilled workers in export agriculture, bulking peasant crops for interregional trade and export to other Asian countries, and wholesaling the imported and manufactured commodities that the Javanese required. Although ethnic monopoly of economic function was never quite this absolute, the basic hierarchical structure was only momentarily threatened in the mid-1930s, when the Japanese began importing their own commodities and selling them in their own stores to challenge the position of both the Dutch and the Chinese (Cator 1936:75–7; Liem 1947:66).

Douglas Miles and Borneo

In 1976, Douglas Miles published a book entitled Cutlass and Crescent Moon based on research carried out in South Borneo in the early 1960s. I take up some of the themes of that work to provide a narrative account of trade, barter and exchange across the Indonesian–Malaysian border on the upper Balui River of Sarawak in the last decades of the 20th century. Doug supervised my PhD thesis on rural commodity markets in Java for a short period and the advice he gave at that time was crucial, not only for the development of the thesis, but also for ensuing publications. The gist was that all research detail is important, but that one should not lose track of the main theme. In other words, good ethnographic writing should paint both the big picture and the small.

Economic Change and Public Health in a Remote Sarawak Community

Physical health standards in remote Sarawak communities have been raised by a series of public health measures including the virtual elimination of formerly widespread diseases, improved maternal and child care, lower infant mortality, and rapid treatment of illness and injuries. But these undoubted successes should be contextualized by situating public health interventions within the broader processes of economic and social change that are rapidly transforming such communities. From the point of view of the Lahanan, a small group of horticulturalists living on the upper reaches of the Rejang River, each welcomed benefit has had a concomitant cost: new needs have been created faster than the means to satisfy them.

Belonging in Borneo: Refiguring Dayak Ethnicity in Indonesia

Politically divided into Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), Brunei and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, Borneo is an island of considerable ethnocultural diversity. The indigenous population...

Lahanan Lunettes: Images of a Borneo Long House

This paper frames the fieldwork and life experiences of an anthropologist over the course of twenty-five years in terms of dreams and practicalities. The dreams are vivid accounts of fieldwork relived in a liminal state, following the death of my spouse, but are primarily taken from field notes, diaries and publications. The dreams took on a particularly intense quality in the two years following his death, because of the unexpected nature of the death, my isolation in an unfamiliar environment and the feeling of tasks left unfinished. The practicalities are a commentary on the nature of fieldwork; the problems faced and solutions sought for the difficulties that all anthropologists face in the field.

Connecting the Miles: Introduction

[Extract] The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA) is proud to celebrate the career of Douglas Miles, who pioneered Anthropological studies of Southeast Asia in Australia, through major fieldwork among the Ngadju Dayaks of Borneo (1959-60, 1961-63) and the Yao of Northern Thailand and Laos (1966-69, 1970, 1996-97).

Migration, Imagination and Identity in Modern Sarawak

This analysis of changing perceptions of ethnic identity in Sarawak revolves around migration and imagination. The research is based on a case study of one longhouse, Levu Lahanan, and its imagined community from the mid-1980s on the Balui River to their resettlement in the Bakun Resettlement Scheme in 1999. One of fifteen longhouse communities belonging to five different ethnic groups, they were resettled to make way for Bakun Dam, which was completed in 2012. My use of the term imagination is linked to Sarawak state planning in organising the staged migration of the fifteen longhouse communities, the appeal to emerging Christian communities by calling the operation Exodus, and the exercise in salvage ethnography by recording oral histories, songs and other evidence of migration and difference. My argument is linked to recent developments in communication technology in the form of Facebook, WhatsApp and mobile phones which link the Lahanan longhouse and its urban and international diasporas. In their imagination, if not in reality, members of the diaspora return to their apartments of origin to revive their sense of belonging to a longhouse community, a place and an ethnic identity in a time of state, national and global change.