Article

Ethnography

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Ethnography

Scope and Historical Definition

Ethnography, as practised across the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and the broader maritime world of the Straits of Melaka, has been a discipline of sustained and evolving inquiry into the material culture, social organisation, spiritual systems, and linguistic practices of indigenous and semi-indigenous populations. The body of work preserved in the Society’s journals reveals a field that has shifted from the typological and racial framing characteristic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial scholarship to the participant-observation and theoretical synthesis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The regions documented span the highlands of North Formosa, the interior and coast of Borneo, the archipelagoes of Riau and Singapore, the highlands of central and northern Sumatra, and the Isthmus of Kra, with each area contributing distinct methodological challenges and analytical frameworks to the discipline.

The earliest substantial ethnographic contribution in the record is J. Dodd’s 1885 account of the hill tribes of North Formosa, which establishes the physical typology and material culture of the northern aboriginal peoples from the vantage of a British resident with direct access to the Chinese borderlands [1]. Dodd’s work, explicitly marked “To be continued,” represents the first instalment of a multi-part series and reflects the period’s preoccupation with racial classification, arguing for the distinct character of the Formosan hill tribes and speculating on ancient mixtures of Malay, Philippine, and Polynesian blood with indigenous stocks [1, pp. 70–71]. By contrast, the most recent entries in the record—Porath’s 2015 study of maya in indigenous Riau world-view and Wee’s 2018 analysis of jemberang and Alam Melayu—employ long-term participant observation and engage directly with theoretical frameworks in anthropology, recovering concepts that earlier syntheses had overlooked or omitted [2], [3].

Material Culture, Language, and Social Organisation

A recurring concern across the ethnographic record is the documentation of material culture as a marker of social identity, economic exchange, and cultural continuity or dissolution. Dodd’s description of the northern Formosan hill tribes details the likus (a sleeveless hempen coat embroidered with scarlet or blue long-ells), the habbock (a woven hemp girdle), and the lalao knife, whose scabbard often bore the tail of a slain Chinese enemy [1, pp. 75–76]. Cuttle-fish bone served as a “circulating medium” of exchange and was fashioned into necklaces, earrings, forehead ornaments, and bead strings, indicating a barter economy in which decorative material and currency were functionally indistinguishable [1, p. 73].

In Borneo, E. Banks’ 1940 essay on the natives of Sarawak proposes a unified aboriginal substrate—characterised by sago dependence, a shared linguistic core, and a distinctive healing ceremony complex—that once extended across the island before being modified by successive waves of external influence [4]. Banks identifies specific cognate pairs between Land Dayak (Sadong) and Milano (Mukah) dialects—mudip/tidup (alive), ramin/lamin (house), keping/beling (ear), betiha/petai (pregnant)—and estimates at least ten per cent lexical similarity excluding Malay loan words, despite the two groups being two to three hundred miles apart with no trade or political connection [4, pp. 49–50]. The berayun healing rite, involving a rotan swing, a spirit-snare, and the rabong (sickness boat) into which evil spirits are decoyed with food and drink before being drifted away, is documented among Milanos and, to Banks’ astonishment, observed in near-identical form among Lara and Slakau Land Dayaks at Lundu [4, pp. 50–51].

The documentation of cultural dissolution represents a distinct strand within the ethnographic literature. Kaplan and Viner’s 1981 study of the Pakpak Batak of North Sumatra presents a case of comprehensive cultural erosion: the last adat house crumbled in 1965, the traditional writing system of eighteen phonetic letters is known only to a small group of old men, and bark books command prices of 100,000 to 200,000 rupiah in Medan, most of which have been sold by their inheritors [5, pp. 96–97]. The authors document a developing triglossia in which Bahasa Indonesia functions as the High variety, Toba as an intermediate register, and Pakpak as the Low variety confined to ordinary domestic interaction [5]. In Kepas and Pegagan, the Pakpak are outnumbered by outsiders two to one, and nearly all school teachers are Toba, with the language of instruction for the first three years being Toba [5, p. 102]. The scattered stone equestrian statues and phallic figures found in Simsim are treated not as evidence of a grand lost civilisation but as a metaphor for the totality of contemporary Pakpak culture: fragments, worn by weather, of a system of symbols and social organisation that no longer coheres [5].

In the Riau Archipelago, Wee’s 2018 study reframes the civilising process as one of increasing sedentism, whereby permanent settlement becomes a marker of social superiority and nomadic origins become a source of stigma requiring genealogical amnesia [3]. Communities with known Orang Laut origins develop marriage taboos and genealogical amnesia to expunge memory of nomadic ancestors, a mechanism through which they claim civilisational superiority over those with visible nomadic lineages [3, p. 129]. The people of Karas Island, of known Orang Laut origin, describe themselves as Orang Berniaga (People who Trade) and maintain active trading routes from Singapore to Jambi via Sungai Jodoh in Batam [3, p. 130].

Spiritual Systems, Ritual, and Medical Anthropology

The ethnographic record contains substantial documentation of indigenous spiritual systems, healing practices, and the relationship between supernatural aetiology and material well-being. Metcalf’s 1982 study of the Berawan people of the lower Baram river system in Sarawak argues that their supernatural aetiologies of illness function as a classification of causes of affliction rather than of diseases, which is precisely what enables their seamless coexistence with Western biomedical treatment [6]. The Berawan do not theorise about the physical mechanisms by which a given symptomology develops; instead, their supernatural system addresses the question of why a particular person becomes afflicted at a particular time [6]. Four named states of ritual danger exist—sijang, padju, tulah, parit—each triggered by specific acts; sijang is particularly associated with attack by dangerous wild animals, while pale is the most common and can account for virtually any affliction [6, pp. 118–119]. The only ritual recourse for pale is direct appeal to the Creator Spirit Bik’Ngaputong through shrine construction and prayer; no shamanic intervention can lift this state [6, p. 119]. The ratio of shamans to population in the two intensively studied communities was approximately fifty people per daiyung, a rate Metcalf notes compares favourably with general practitioners in Western society [6, p. 121].

Banks’ 1940 compilation of rice-planting customs in the Baram District documents the extensive periods of enforced retreat—pantang (or lali)—that the Kayan, Kenyah, Kalamantan, and Punan peoples observe at each stage of the rice-growing cycle [7]. The Kayan Uma Poh spend a total of 117 days in pantang retreat over the course of their rice farming cycle, not counting additional pantangs for births, deaths, and other events [7, p. 85]. Banks draws a sharp typological distinction between the groups: the Kayans are “far and away the most fanatical,” the Kenyahs are “much more philosophical,” the Kalamantans are “comparatively very vague,” and the Punans are “wandering” in their observance [7]. He situates the Bornean lali within a broader comparative framework by drawing an extended parallel with the genna ceremonies of the Sema Nagas of Assam, as recorded by J. H. Hutton (1921), noting that the correspondence in sequence is close but the Naga gennas each last a single day whereas the Bornean pantangs stretch from three to thirty days [7, p. 86].

Porath’s 2015 study of maya (image) in indigenous Riau world-view recovers a concept of central importance to Malayan animic ontology that had been dropped from the literature by the most influential modern synthesis [2]. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with the Orang Sakai of Riau, Porath demonstrates that maya is not merely a synonym for semangat but a distinct aspect of the pan-soul-substance (Semanget) that gives inanimate physical objects their form, appearance, and use without conferring life-full consciousness [2, pp. 10–13]. During the kelonkap (all-night celebratory shamanic ritual), palm-leaf model offerings are made for their maya; the models shimmer yellow at the start of the ritual and begin to wilt as the maya departs, after which the shaman enters trance to hand the maya to his spirit-familiar [2, pp. 17–18]. Photographs are understood as capturing a splinter of a person’s embodied semanget materialised as maya on paper, a practice that explains why Sakai individuals resist having their photographs taken [2, p. 16].

The ethnographic record is inseparable from the administrative and legal contexts in which it was produced. Banks’ compilation of Baram rice-planting customs was produced as an administrative reference document for the Sarawak government’s engagement with Baram communities rather than as an independent scholarly inquiry, compiled from information provided by Native Officers and Upriver Agents at the direction of Mr. F. H. Pollard [7, p. 83]. Banks repeatedly notes the friction caused when Kayans refuse entry to government officers during pantang periods, framing the ethnographic description in terms of its practical utility for colonial administration [7, pp. 83–84].

Watson’s 1982 note on the Rawa and Rinchi addresses a persistent confusion in nineteenth-century sources over the identity and origins of the people called Rawa who appear in records of local disputes and migrations in the Malay Peninsula [8]. Watson challenges the prevailing identification of the orang Rinchi as followers of the Padri leader Tuanku nan Renceh, arguing instead that “Rinchi” is a corruption of “Kerinci” and that the Rawa who migrated to the Peninsula were in fact descendants of a mixed Kerinci-indigenous community established at the source of the Rekan river [8]. The most populous area within Kerinci is itself called Rawang, and its inhabitants are locally known as orang Rawa, providing a direct etymological link [8]. Marsden (1811) observed that the inhabitants of the Rao country wore the same “peculiarity of dress” as the Korinchi people, which Watson interprets as evidence that the Rao people were Kerinci settlers [8, p. 85].

Hill’s 1955 article on Manggeng and Datu Merpati examines two interrelated Bornean origin legends and argues that both are historical figures whose lives oral tradition has distorted and partially conflated [9]. Hill reconstructs the Manggeng legend by comparing three printed versions and situates both legends within the political and religious transformations of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, drawing on Javanese written sources, Portuguese accounts, and Brunei annals [9, pp. 154–156]. Generation counts place Manggeng at approximately sixteen generations before 1955 (c. 1500–1550) and Datu Merpati at fourteen to sixteen generations back (c. 1450–1475) [9, pp. 154]. Gold ornaments with patterns characteristic of the Majapahit period have been found across Malaysia, including flexible gold armlets excavated at Fort Canning Hill, Singapore, in 1928 [9, p. 157].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on ethnography reveals a discipline that has undergone significant methodological and theoretical transformation over more than a century. The earliest contributions—Dodd’s 1885 account of the Formosan hill tribes and Skeat and Ridley’s 1900 note on the Orang Laut of Singapore—reflect the typological and racial framing characteristic of the period, treating physical description and linguistic comparison as the primary instruments of ethnographic inquiry [1], [10]. Skeat and Ridley’s brief field visit to Kampong Roko on the Kallang River in November 1899 attempted to collect linguistic and ethnographic data from the last identifiable remnants of the Orang Kallang, a pre-British native group of the island, documenting the oral testimony of the village’s oldest inhabitants and a small vocabulary of non-Malay words [10, pp. 247–249].

The interwar and post-war period saw a shift toward synthetic, comparative approaches. Banks’ 1940 essays on the natives of Sarawak and on Baram rice-planting customs represent the colonial administrator’s ethnography: impressionistic, typological, and oriented toward administrative utility, yet proposing the unified aboriginal substrate for Borneo’s interior peoples at a time when such populations were typically treated as discrete, unrelated groups [4], [7]. Shelford’s 1905 illustrated catalogue of the ethnographical collection of the Sarawak Museum represents the museum-based approach to ethnographic documentation, in which material artefacts serve as the primary evidence for cultural analysis [11].

The post-1970 literature marks a decisive turn toward participant observation, theoretical engagement, and the documentation of cultural change. Kaplan and Viner’s 1981 study of the Pakpak Batak, based on fieldwork conducted in 1977 and early 1978, fills a significant gap in the literature, as no social research had been conducted in the Pakpak areas since the Dutch-era monographs of Ypes (1907, 1932) and Kreemer (1916, 1922–23) [5, p. 94]. Metcalf’s 1982 study of Berawan supernatural aetiologies, based on fieldwork between January 1972 and February 1974, positions itself explicitly as a footnote to Elshout’s 1923 monograph and engages with the comparative shamanism literature and functionalist theory, contributing to the medical anthropology of Borneo by demonstrating how a supernatural aetiological framework can be structurally compatible with biomedicine [6].

The most recent contributions—Porath’s 2015 recovery of maya and Wee’s 2018 analysis of jemberang and Alam Melayu—represent a historiographical intervention that simultaneously recovers neglected concepts from the colonial-era literature and applies contemporary theoretical frameworks to indigenous spatial cognition and ontological systems [2], [3]. Porath’s work intervenes in the historiography of Malay animism by recovering a term present in the primary colonial-era sources (Annandale and Robinson 1903) but subsequently dropped by the most influential modern synthesis (Endicott 1970), and by demonstrating through contemporary ethnography that the concept remains structurally operative in indigenous Malayan-speaking communities [2]. Wee’s argument, grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Riau Archipelago conducted since 1979, contributes to the study of pre-modern maritime political formations by linking Geertz’s pasisir typology with indigenous spatial cognition, and by reframing the civilising process as a process of increasing sedentism rather than a linear progression toward fixed territoriality [3].

The overall trajectory of the ethnographic literature in the Society’s journals thus moves from the descriptive and typological to the analytical and theoretical, from the documentation of static cultural traits to the study of cultural change, dissolution, and the negotiation of identity under the pressures of state formation, migration, and globalisation.

Malaya

For ethnographic study of Malaya, see Malay culture and society

Orang Asli

For ethnographic study of Orang Asli, see Orang Asli

MBRAS Sources

Borneo

Fiji, Formosa, and Indo-China

Singapore and Riau

Sumatra

Thailand

References

  1. J. Dodd (1885). A glimpse at the manners and customs of the Hill tribes of North Formosa JSBRAS 15: 69–78.
  2. N. Porath (2015). Maya (image) in indigenous Riau world-view: a forgotten concept of Malayan animist thought and practice JMBRAS 88(2): 3–24. Read on JSTOR
  3. V. Wee (2018). Jemberang and Alam Melayu: crossing the Straits of Melaka, Singapore and Riau JMBRAS 91(2): 124–133. Read on JSTOR
  4. E. Banks (1940). The natives of Sarawak JMBRAS 18(2): 49–54. Read on JSTOR
  5. E.L. Kaplan and A.C. Viner (1981). The changing Pakpak Batak JMBRAS 54(1): 93–105. Read on JSTOR
  6. P. Metcalf (1982). Supernatural etiologies of illness in Central Northern Borneo JMBRAS 55(2): 115–125. Read on JSTOR
  7. E. Banks (1940). Rice planting customs in the Baram District, Sarawak JMBRAS 18(2): 83–104.
  8. C.W. Watson (1982). Rawa and Rinchi: a further note JMBRAS 55(1): 82–86. Read on JSTOR
  9. A.H. Hill (1955). Manggeng and Datu Merpati JMBRAS 28(1): 148–158.
  10. H.N. Ridley and W.W. Skeat (1900). The Orang Laut of Singapore JSBRAS 33: 247–250. Read on JSTOR
  11. R.S. Shelford (1905). An illustrated catalogue of the ethnographical collection of the Sarawak Museum JSBRAS 43: 1–67. Read on JSTOR