Liana Chua

Fixity and Flux: Bidayuh (Dis)engagements with the Malaysian Ethnic System

Abstract This article explores conceptions of the Malaysian ethnic system from the perspective of certain Bidayuhs, an indigenous group of Sarawak, Borneo. Recent scholarship has highlighted the ‘fluid’ and ‘shifting’ nature of Malay identity; but less attention has been paid to how ethnic minorities in the region depict Malayness. I suggest that for many Bidayuhs, Malay-ness is marked by an inescapable flxity which stifies a fluidity that they value as intrinsic to Bidayuh-ness and other aspects of life. Moreover, this sense of flxity has been mapped onto their conceptions of the (Malay-dominated) Malaysian ethnic system, in which they are inescapably entangled. The article investigates some of the consequent tensions arising from Bidayuh (dis)engagements with Malaysias ethnic ‘flxity’, while tracing certain trends and changes in this relationship.

Gifting, dam(n)ing and the ambiguation of development in Malaysian Borneo

ABSTRACT This article seeks to move beyond the critical politicizing impulse that has characterized anthropologies of development since the 1990s towards a more open-ended commitment to taking seriously the diverse moral and imaginative topographies of development. It explores how members of four small Bidayuh villages affected by a dam-construction and resettlement scheme in Sarawak draw on both historically inflected tropes of gifting and Christian moral understandings in their engagements with Malaysias peculiar brand of state-led development. These enable the affected villagers not to resolve the problems posed by Malaysian developmentalism, but to ambiguate them and actually hold resolution at bay. I conclude by considering the implications of such projects of ambiguation for the contemporary anthropology of development.

What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection

This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Pakas ‘big name’-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gells seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his ‘big name’, Pakas photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation of ‘power’ and ‘objecthood’ in Southeast Asianist anthropology.This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Pakas ‘big name’-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gells seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his ‘big name’, Pakas photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation...

Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating "in/dividualism" among Christian Bidayuhs

This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the “individualism” of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showing how both pre-Christian and Christian sociality have been shaped by the shifting intersection of “in/dividual” impulses that derive from the “horizontal” and “vertical” relations in which persons are enmeshed. Tracing the trajectories of these impulses and relations from life to death and beyond, this article attempts to detach questions of in/dividualism from personhood, while arguing for the need to take seriously the variegations and affinities between different strains of Christianity and Western and non-Western socialities.