A.J.N. Richards: a brief autobiographical note, 1981.

I was an administrative officer and magistrate in Sarawak for 26 years, from 1938 to 1964. There was no formal training and we learned on the job from seniors and local officers and leaders. Our job as we saw it was to help the people in our districts over problems and disputes, keep the peace, collect the revenue, and coordinate public services like agriculture and forestry, education, public works, health, [and] communications. We were required to learn Malay, and were encouraged to learn a second language and enough about the law and customs of the people--Malay, Chinese, Iban or whatever--to help us in the work. If this was anthropology and linguistics, well and good--but we are not academics and did not label the practical knowledge we bad. We were required to be accessible to the public at all times, in or out of the office, and this meant that we were an accepted part of the local scene and did not need to suffer loneliness. All this was part of the undefined "Brooke tradition," the way of administration we used.

Because of this local orientation--parochial it might be called--I am going to tell you how I came to know what I do about the Iban, and how I incorporated that knowledge in a dictionary of their language.... Before I tell my own story, I had better give you some account of Sarawak and the Iban.

Sarawak was a possession of Brunei 150 years ago. Sir James Brooke became Rajah of Sarawak proper in 1841.... By cession, sometimes entailing payment to Brunei, he came to rule the Second Division in 1853, [and] the Rejang and the coast as far as Bintulu in 1861. Charles Brooke succeeded as Rajah in 1868. He acquired the Baram (Fourth Division) in 1882. The Fifth Division became part of Sarawak in 1885 (Lawas) and 1890 (Limbang).

[T]he First Rajah followed the Malay style of government by consultation and negotiation, having no power with which to impose his wishes.... Laws were few--the earliest set standards for weights and measures so as to assist trade--all in the form of Rajah's Orders, though by the time I got there they were written formally as ordinances or statutes. Council Negeri, a sort of royal durbar for consultation with leading people, used to meet every 3 years from about 1863, but a constitution was given in 1941; and, since 1946, it has come to be a fully elected body. Sarawak became a British Colony in 1946, and achieved independence within Malaysia in 1963....

The population is about.... a third Iban, a third Chinese, and the remainder Malay, Melanau, Kayan, Kenyah, and other races. Trade and industry are mostly in the hands of the Chinese. Malays are now the ruling race once again.... There have been migrations within Borneo from south to north--in the east the Murut, the Kayan/Kenyah group next to them, and the Land Dayak (Bidayuh) in the far west. The Iban and related peoples spread from the district of Matan in the S.W. corner of Borneo, moving north and then east into the Kapuas, probably in the fifteenth century. They began to enter Sarawak by the Batang Lupar probably 300 years ago and have spread northeastward in Sarawak more rapidly during the last 150 years. Their main areas in Sarawak are the 2nd Division, the Rejang and Baleh, and along all the lower hills near the coast to the Baram and Limbang [Rivers]. Related peoples, now called "Ibanic," remain distributed all over Kalimantan Barat.

There are indications that the Iban began to grow rice and replaced bronze with iron relatively recently ("fines" are in terms of bronze ware..). They clear forest, burn it, and plant by dibbling. Traditionally there is no cultivation as we know it, though there have been very rapid changes in recent years--with high-yielding rubber, and now pepper, and a few Iban planting rain-fed swamp rice, all of which need cultivation. The Iban build longhouses, mostly of 10-20 interrelated families, which are the ritual centers of their lands (the menoa). But they may sometimes spend more than half the year in scattered farm houses.

They are a shortish brown people, racially mixed by absorption of previous peoples, and in other ways. Traditional dress is the loincloth for men and a short skirt of homewoven cotton for women (usually black except at festivals)--but they have now mostly adopted western and Malay styles.

They used to depend much on omens and dreams, but many are now Christian. In war they used to take captives who became serfs--not slaves in our sense of the term. They also took the heads of those they killed.... Men gained good repute by successful raiding and women by skill in weaving. Generally they admire physical vigor and skill in all the crafts necessary for living in a forested country.

There is no hierarchy of status by birth, and women have equal rights with men. There is no formal division of labor or occupation--except between men and women: men cut wood and build, clear forest and hunt; women cook, mind the house and young children, plant, weed, and begin the harvest.

Having no rulers or power of sanction among themselves, disputes are arbitrated by senior members of the community if not settled privately. Offences are wiped out not by penalty but by compensatory, and often token, ritual payment, usually in kind. In the case of offences purely against persons or their property, the payment is to the one offended. In the case of ritual offences--those that offend the gods and may bring disaster to everybody (the most serious being perhaps incest), the payment is much greater and is made to the arbitrator for the community as provision for a public ritual offering and sacrifice of appeasement. The system works as well as any. Michael Heppell's thesis, Iban social control." the infant and adult, deals with this (1975).

I was appointed to the Rajah's service--the Third Rajah, Vyner Brooke, who succeeded in 1917--and I went out by sea in 1938. The pay was just over 300 [pounds sterling] a year, and a bit better than my father's as a country parson. Bungalows, or accommodations in a fort, where it is the office and court as well, were provided, with basic furniture. We were expected to engage at least one servant as "cook boy" (a gardener was only needed in Kuching, and a sais only if you kept ponies). The "boy" was usually a Malay who would manage the house and kitchen, and with luck teach the language, go along on journeys, and generally be batman, companion, and source of local information and gossip. This changed after the war, when more were married--we ended up with two Chinese girls.

My first tour of duty was supposed to last four years--then 7 months' home leave (counted from Singapore and back by sea). Marriage was not allowed until after a second spell of four years. As events happened, my first tour lasted 7 years, because after 3 years the Japanese invaded and kept us all behind barbed wire for nearly another four.

I spent my first year in the Secretariat, which then consisted of the Chief Secretary, the Assistant Secretary, four local clerks and two messengers. The Chief Secretary was, in effect, Chief Minister. The Assistant Secretary had recently been brought down from Kapit to be "civilized" as they said--he first introduced me to the Iban world.

My second introduction to the Iban was on the arrival--under the usual very gentlemanly arrest--of the last of the Iban "rebels" or "outlaws," as they were called, who had been defying the Government over taxation and other matters for several years--some had taken a few heads, too. One of them, Banyang, has long been a Penghulu (chief) and a Senator--he called on me in 1980 when bringing his son, Paulus, to study law in England.

In 1939 I was posted as Cadet to Bintulu and sent off with an experienced Malay officer to do my first traveling among Iban. We walked the 30 miles of forest to Tatau, toured the Anap by boat, and walked back over to the Sebauh. In the Sebauh I first met Penghulu Jalin, a migrant from the Skrang--he was just building a new longhouse. One of his sons, Hermanus, was later one of my District Officers. I spent a night in the Sebauh again in 1962 but, because a group of us stayed up the whole night talking of important matters like bird omens, cockfighting, and house building, they said the visit didn't count as spending the night and I must come again.

One of my jobs was to see to the prison, and I learned that there was (then) no stigma attached to conviction or imprisonment, because they were regarded as irrelevant taxes, jail was "taking Government wages," and did nothing to settle a dispute or offence by ritual compensation. Later in the Rejang, the first man I ever put in jail greeted me when he came out as if I were an old friend.

In 1940 I went to the lower Rejang where I had to visit rural Chinese schools and charcoal factories, and Melanau fishing villages, so that there was less time for the Iban. There were Iban in the hilly parts, and a few in the delta padi lands, and I met more of them when I moved to Binatang--it was there I used to attend the regular cockfighting meets outside the town. I also had an Iban girlfriend at the time.

In 1941 I was promoted from Cadet and was posted to the Saribas as D.O. The fort there was one of the smaller ones, built as usual of ironwood, and even then nearly 100 years old--built by the first of my predecessors, when warfare was rife, and he only 18 years old.

The population of the Saribas District is half Iban, half Malay, with a few Chinese trading in the towns. The Iban there were among the first to take advantage of mission schooling (Anglican) and to become affluent from rubber plantations, with the result that they readily found employment outside the district and so appear to visitors from outside Sarawak as the only true Iban. Dr. Rousseau of McGill University recently published a paper in Bijdragen (1980) in which he criticized Freeman for not seeing the stratified nature of Iban society, and ignoring the Saribas where this is evident. This provoked Freeman into writing a long paper (1981)--in which he explained that the Saribas Iban were indeed considered for his research but were found to be too beset by Malay customs and concepts to be useful for the report he was then commissioned to make. Rousseau's field is among the class-conscious Kayan; but he may have been deliberately provoking [Freeman], because Freeman had not yet published much from his very large collection of texts and notes. Perhaps, he will now that he has retired....

In January 1942 I was taken from Betong as a civilian P. O. W. and was a prisoner of the Japanese in Kuching until September 1945.

I married in 1946 and, on return to Sarawak, was sent to Kanowit. A lot of rebuilding and reorganization was needed and traveling to areas left unvisited for nearly five years. Living was pretty basic--water from rain or the river, paraffin lamps, no fridge, army rations--and it was then we came to depend largely on flesh local supplies, and so continued for the rest of our time in the country. (1)

I did a three-week tour of the Entabai early on--leaving my wife to learn Malay the hard way--there was nobody who spoke English much, except the nuns at the Mission. I learned much during that tour, and made my first acquaintance with a shaman, manang Awar--and the really tough hill dwellers, among whom even the girls thought nothing of carrying a hundredweight of padi home over steep hills. I met Asun, the leader of the rebels of the 1930s, now back from banishment, a friendly old boy with a hooked nose; and heard about early migrations, and family connections in the area. From the ridge you can see Sadok Mountain close at hand, where Rentap held out against the Rajah from 1858-61, and away to the west, the sea beyond the Saribas.

During every such tour, Iban was the only language, of course. Old Temenggong Koh was sent with me by the Resident. He was a bit nervous--having fought for the Second Rajah up there against warring Iban (in fact, distant relatives of his) forty years before. His companion, I found later, was a neighbor of his who had married a lady divorced by Koh.

At Kanowit I found what a great help R.C. Fathers could be. They are not allowed to give evidence in court but reckon they also have a responsibility in the district, and were always happy to relate useful gossip and local knowledge over a drink or two at home. They tended to converse in a delightful mixture of English and Iban with a Dutch accent. They were tolerant and immensely patient: though they deplored some local customs they took pains to understand them, never publicly decried them, and never tried to change anything except very slowly.

In 1951 I was posted to Kapit where Freeman had done his research. The District, now a Division, is 15,000 sq. miles in extent, with an Iban majority in a population at the time of about 30,000. Much of it is forest, of course. Travel was chiefly by longboat--40 feet long and 3 feet wide, with palm-thatch roof, and driven by an outboard engine, with a crew of two (driver and bowman). It took 7 hours to reach Sibu (Div. H.Q.) and 1 1/2 to 2 days to reach Belaga--negotiating 3 miles of rapids at Pelagus. The rare occasions when you could walk, or paddle or pole a small boat were much more enjoyable--you could hear the wild life, and talk to your companions without shouting.

Needless to say I learned still more at Kapit--something or other from everyone I met, and particularly from people like Jugah, afterward a minister, and other chiefs. Jugah died last July, but his son Linggi is a lawyer and has now become a minister too. Linggi was at the Methodist school with my daughter--the junior classes there were taught in Iban.

It was the time of recruiting for Malaya, during the Emergency. Iban would come over from Kalimantan to relatives and join up. Many were disappointed--on medical grounds, because there were far too many volunteers, or because they were prevented from going at the last moment by dreams or omens. Many such went instead to the oilfields to seek work, with varying fortunes, and there was a succession of wives coming to the fort trying to get their men back, or simply trying for form's sake to enable them to claim desertion and marry someone else. When those in Malaya began to serve for more than six months at a time as enlisted soldiers (not unarmed trackers), the old restrictions on the wives' activities lapsed--it was simply not possible to keep lights burning and avoid weaving cloth or plaiting baskets and mats for so long.

The men came back with shotguns, or the means of buying an outboard engine or a padi mill. They were also much fitter, and copied British soldiers in manner. One young man of 25 or so had a neat military moustache--Iban are usually beardless--and I saw he had grey eyes. How come? Sir! You must have heard of the peacemaking at Kapit? Yes--in 1924. And that a Dutch officer came over and down the river to attend? Yes. Well! He spent a night on the way at our longhouse!

His name was Chemaru--rhinoceros--probably because somebody killed one about the time he was born. A lot of names are like that, marking an event or a visitor. There are Iban called Champion for instance--alter the spark plug. The oddest was the name of the highly respected bar steward at the Sibu Club, named "Gladys" because he was born when the new ship "Gladys" made her first voyage to Sibu. There is also an Anthony Richards, son of an Iban officer at Belaga, who was born when I first arrived there.

Another practice in naming is to skip two generations before using names again. A man called Merom came to pay his gun license fee in a longhouse near Lubuk Antu: afterwards I asked if he [had] anything to do with the Merom who rebelled against the Rajah at Bukit Batu (Stone Hill) in 1881. The young man looked blank, but his father said Yes--he was my grand uncle--and proceeded to relate his version of that war.

While on the subject of names: the names of in-laws may never be uttered and other names are generally avoided. Your wife or husband is mother or father of so-and-so. And nephews and nieces will be called anak, child, and vice versa. This is apart from ordinary forms of address where I would call old Koh "father" or "uncle" and someone my own age "brother." All very confusing till you know the relationships in a longhouse, or, if it is important to know, can ask the right question--but of somebody else.

On journeys by boat or in the forest there was often one of the party who could entertain the company with a long epic in prose and verse--usually about the serpent gods and their rivalry with the bird gods, or the adventures of a hero in those realms, or comical and often bawdy tales of the unsuccessful trickster, "man in the street," or "just so" stories and fables of animals or trees. At ritual festivals there might be contests of witty verses, or riddles. All these are related to the invocatory prayers and long chanted poems sung to invite the appropriate gods to a major ritual, where the language is not archaic, as generally supposed, but all riddles and double meanings--not that they are any easier to understand on that account. (2) This oral literature is very rich, but is varied to suit the audience or circumstances or style of the teller. There are formulae of rhythm or assonance, used like a composer's store of musical phrases and harmonies, and major stories and poems have a set framework, but the wording is individual and often topical. Recording is difficult--it must be of a real performance--in a studio the tale will alter, and few can dictate slowly without getting lost. Even with a tape recorder, which I did not have till very late, you have to transcribe, check back, and annotate at once. Another session may be quite different.

One festival I remember was Koh's Hornbill Festival in 1952: attended by Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, the Governor, and all ranks down, including myself in charge of transport. It is a war festival, preparatory to entering the next world with honor and therefore a serious matter, although you might not think so from the drinking and visiting and general fun and games taking place at the same time. The distinguished visitors hardly understood this, so some youngsters were told to keep them amused with party games while the ritual got under way in the rest of the longhouse. I was awake most of 3 nights, taking part in some of the ritual in Iban garb.

All this was really incidental to the work for which I was paid: dealing with finance and government departments, civil and criminal cases, inquests, and so forth. Some of the most difficult and protracted cases were over land, whether surveyed or not. Land "belongs" to he who first cleared it and performed the rituals: if it lies fallow for ten years or so, one of the descendants may plant rubber on it without asking the others, or even get a survey done and title in his sole name--then there is a complex argument when someone else wants to use his rights and plant padi.

Much business was done while traveling. I was in Kapit itself for probably only half the time. I kept notes on tour, in a mixture of Iban and English, often written during rambling conversations in a poor light, late at night after official business was over. These notes were most useful, when unraveled, for the dictionary.

In 1953 I went back to the lower Rejang as D.O. Many of the Iban there [were] not accessible by boat and the present roads were not built, so more and more I took to traveling light, with only one or two companions and no more luggage than I could carry myself. The custom was for the people to carry luggage and guide an officer on duty from longhouse to longhouse without pay. We always stayed in the longhouse and heard cases there on tour--to do otherwise was regarded as rude, and so unheard of. By going light the people were saved the trouble of becoming porters and the expense of feeding a large party overnight--and it was more fun for all. A group often came along as company--to visit neighbors---or the girls in the next house.

After a brief spell in Simanggang in 1955, I was for two years Resident of the First Division, based at Kuching--a time of urban affairs and a lot of committee work, when it was often difficult to give the rest of the Division the attention it deserved. From 1957 to 1961 I was Resident of the Second Division, Simanggang--with four D.O.s of whom only one was English. Hermanus Assan was one--son of Jalin of the Sebauh whom 1 have already mentioned. (3) He had been a teacher, then a shaman during the Japanese Occupation, before joining the administration. I learned a lot from him, and from a conference we organized and jointly chaired in 1961. The conference was attended by chiefs, shamans, bards, and others, probably 100 all told, and lasted 4 days. The idea was to record local customary law and to exchange information on custom, ritual and practice between people from different rivers who otherwise hardly ever met.

The customary law was printed with related material but is not now available. It included notes made by A.B. Ward in 1914, and they have been separately printed--in the Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol. 10 [17-18 (N.S.)], pp. 81-102 (1961). Ward also wrote an account of the administration called Rajah's Servant which was published by Cornell University (1966). At Simanggang there were also old court records and letterbooks from about 1900 reporting on the Division, and an invaluable record of settled land disputes from about 1916-20. When the grandchildren renewed a dispute, reference to the old book was often enough to refresh their memories: they were satisfied and much trouble was saved for all concerned.

There was more recruiting for Malaya, changes in local government, rural development schemes, road building and land compensation, building new schools, agricultural extension schemes, and the embarrassing business of trying to explain the new political parties springing up in Kuching and deal with Iban requests for advice on them, from our own almost total ignorance of party politics and our grave doubts about any benefit there would be in them to the people at large.

From 1961 until I left Sarawak in 1964 (Independence in Malaysia was in 1963) I was given the duty of recording local ideas on land tenure to help a land reform committee of which I was the third member. We produced bills, draft legislation, but politics intervened. We were too late, and the bills have never become law. (4) I was also on the government examinations board, involved in customary law courts, and called in to help translate documents on constitutional changes in preparation for independence.

I traveled to every station in the country to explain the land proposals, and that gave some opportunities to further my own research. I remember quizzing Kayans on their system of bird omens, and visiting Banyang's sister (Gramong's mother) at Julau to record her version of the dirge--the poem sung to relate the journey of the dead to the next world--among a lot of other things.

At the end of 1961 the Brunei revolt broke out. It was followed by Confrontation with Indonesia when a lot of discontented young Chinese became terrorists (freedom fighters, communists) and found support and help from Indonesia. That trouble is only now being brought under control. The Iban equated this with the Malayan Emergency and helped the Government as much as they could. In some places old chiefs who remembered the troubles fifty years before organized their own unpaid patrols in support of the troops. At one time the Iban (Ulu Ai') wanted to search and destroy on their own across the border. They might have done a good job, but there were fears of a major international incident and possible disasters if untrained men with shotguns took on trained men with machine guns. Therefore I traveled along the border by helicopter, boat, and on foot to warn them to stay at home. Again, I picked up information: this time about game traps, stories about the orang utah, and more details of mythology.

In 1964 we came homer--"Now you really are an expatriate," my brother said, and got the job of Secretary Librarian to the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge. From that I retired in 1980.

Before I left Sarawak some of my colleagues had suggested my compiling a dictionary. They thought a year enough time! The two old dictionaries were inadequate: Howell and Bailey--the one an Anglican missionary and the other a 20-years Resident of Simanggang--is good in its way but it was published in 1900 and is much out of date as well as unobtainable; Scott (1956) was efficiently done and easier to use than the other, but limited because Scott relied on one informant in London and never went to Sarawak. He was a professor of phonetics and therefore, I suppose, less interested in the society and its use of language than in the words themselves.

I began by making a rough card index of words and general references to my notes (13 or 14 books) and some of the more likely books about Sarawak. I cut up two copies of Scott's dictionary and put one column on each of 400 odd large sheets: this gave space to add in from Howell & Bailey, other books, news sheets, my memory and so on; all arrows and "balloons." These were written out clearly and then typed on 5" x 3" cards (as it turned out, I might just as well have used A4 paper). The cards were xeroxed--6 or 8 to a sheet, and there were over 1200 sheets, perhaps 15,000 entries. This was to let me keep cards in one place and sheets in another as a safeguard. I found the sheets a handy working copy for further improvements.

In 1967 I went to India and Pakistan to collect material for the Centre and the Sarawak Government paid my fares from Calcutta to Kuching and back so that I could spend a month in Sarawak checking word lists and filling in gaps. Among others I visited was a bard who lives near the border--last seen performing at the re-opening of an Indonesian station near the Kapuas Lakes. I found that three years of comfort in England made longhouse life pretty rough, and I didn't have long enough to get used to it again.

Ever since then I have been working away in the evenings and on weekends--for the job at the Centre was full time--although I was able to find time to look things up in other libraries in Cambridge. They were a great help, because I soon found that I had to delve into zoology, botany, astronomy and other subjects of which I knew nothing.

I realized then that my speaking the language easily for so long was not all that much help in recording it accurately. I had "picked it up" and had never studied it before. I also had to learn accuracy and brevity in the use of English.

It became easier after a while. I stayed away from details of phonetics and formal linguistics because my purpose was social and practical rather than academic, and I had enough to cope with as it was. I had determined to set down what I knew and might be useful to others. Many of my colleagues had the knowledge I started with, but they have never tried to write it out.

Later, the work became really absorbing. I found more and more instances of relations with India in cosmology, myth, and ritual, so I had to read up on Hindu mythology and question Indians who came to the Centre. I haven't tried to assign dates or periods--that would be another major study.

I found there were more words having Minangkabau senses or origins than Javanese. Many words are also Malay, of course, but often with slightly different or special connotations. I have given Sanskrit, Arabic or other origins whenever I found one, relying mainly on Wilkinson's Malay Dictionary--but it is unlikely that the route by which they reached the Iban lay through the Peninsula. There is a fair scattering of Dutch, Chinese and English loan words--but I have found only one Japanese [word].

The next difficulty was to find a publisher. Not being attached to a University for the purpose of the work, I could not be considered--they were short of funds to publish work by their own people. The Sarawak Government by then declined even to give encouragement (dead set on the National Language). (5)

I ended up with the Oxford University Press who required a subsidy. Consequently I spent five or six years seeking grants, while continuing work on the dictionary, and succeeded well enough for the delegates to the Press to accept the work for publication. Only then did I receive advice and instruction from their dictionary experts on detailed preparation for the printer, Oxford spellings and punctuation, and so on.

It was found impossible to do this detailed work by correspondence so, after helping me revise letters A and B, the Press left me to carry on. The work was very slow, but I had got through about a third by the time I retired from the Centre in October 1980. Then I could go ahead. The whole thing was revised and many of the longer entries re-written. I began the fresh typing, but my wife did most of it. Nearly 1200 pages of A 4. Xerox copies were made for keeping and each completed letter (or section of around 100 pages) made into a handy volume and sent off to the typesetters.

Gallery proofs began to come in long before the last letter was done. They were corrected. I had a proofreader by then to help. Then page proofs came in; and there was a bit of bother with the map and the few diagrams--which I drew myself. The last page proofs went off early last August. The "blurb" on the jacket goes something like this:

"Iban is the language of a third of the people of Sarawak, and used by about a half, and closely related languages are used in Kalimantan. It has a rich oral tradition, which is likely to be lost, as society alters in the face of rapid economic and political change."

I have written much more than a lexical dictionary in the hope that others besides students of language will find a use for it. I had in mind anthropologists and people concerned with comparative studies of similar people; and, of course, the needs of my successors in the District Offices and other departments of government, for I was very conscious of things I wish I had known earlier than I did--and the needs of others, like missionaries, whose work takes them among the Iban. Even a little knowledge of an event, a story, custom, allusion, or proverb displays a real interest, admits a stranger to social contact, and provides an instant key to further information if it be sought. Besides covering daily life and occupations, I give a lot of information, much of it published for the first time, on such matters as ritual and belief, myth and poetry, augury and adat law, and customs at birth, marriage and death. There are stories (told in precis, of course), some history and famous names, colloquialisms and rudery not often recorded, snatches of poetry. There is a general introduction to the language and grammar, a short English-Iban index to important entries, to guide those who wish to use the dictionary otherwise than to look up words heard or seen written. And there is a large bibliography of works consulted.

(1) Editor's note: To a remarkable extent, European officers, particularly while traveling, appear to have lived off tinned food. This was observed by the late Benedict Sandin, who noted with some surprise that my family and I, who were then living in his mother's bilik in the Kerangan Pinggai longhouse, are more or less the same food as everyone else, indeed we often exchanged dishes at dinner time with neighboring families. During the rubber boom period of affluence mentioned by Richards, many Saribas Iban families, including some in Kerangan Pinggai, adopted for a time what they saw as the European habit of eating tinned food. By the 1970s, this had long ceased, together with the affluence that it had once symbolized.

(2) Editor: My own experience entirely bears Richards out on this point, which is valid not only for the invocatory chants, but also for those sung by the Iban manang or shamans.

(3) See also "Remembering Anthony Richards" by Temonggong Linang and Dato Tra Zehnder.

(4) Editor: This work, however, has played a major role in the recent High Court recognition of native land rights in Sarawak, a fact that would certainly have pleased Richards.

(5) See John Postill's Research Note in this issue of the BRB.

REFERENCES

Freeman, Derek

1981 Some Reflections on the Nature of Iban Society. Occasional Papers, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies. Canberra: Australian National University.

Heppell, Michael

1975 Iban Social Control: the infant and the adult. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. The Australian National University.

Howell, William and D.J.S. Bailey

1900 A Sea-Dyak Dictionary. Singapore: American Mission Press.

Richards, Anthony

1981 An Iban-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rousseau, Jerome

1980 Iban Inequality. Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde 136: 52-63.

Scott, N.C.

1956 A Dictionary of Sea Dayak. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Ward, A.B.

1966 Rajah's Servant. Southeast Asian Studies, Data Paper, No. 61. Ithaca: Cornell University.