Notes from the editor.

In This Issue

We begin this issue with a memorial section dedicated to two extraordinarily gifted scholars, Reed Wadley and Robert Barrett. Both died, tragically, at the peak of their intellectual powers.

Of the two, Reed was the youngest. I first met Reed in 1994 at the BRC meetings in Pontianak. He had just come down from the Emperan, the low-lying border region of West Kalimantan, where he was then doing fieldwork. As others who knew him will attest, his vitality was palpable. It was impossible, too, to miss the seriousness with which he approached his work, his intellectual generosity, and, for me, his devotion and shared enthusiasm for all things Iban, including, in his case, ukir tanah bau (Iban, 'shoulder tattoos'). From then on, we corresponded regularly right up to the last weeks of his life. As evidence of his strong sense of professional duty, among the last work he completed was a review of Rob Cramb's book, Land and Longhouse, which he, like your Editor, greatly admired. As a tribute to his memory, Reed's review appears in the Book Review section later in his volume.

Reed, in addition to being a BRC Fellow, was also a member of the Borneo Research Council's Executive Board and his untimely death was a particularly grievous loss for the BRC, as many of us saw him as playing a pivotal role in the Council's transition to a younger generation of active members. He was also, of course, much more. To the many of us who had the pleasure of knowing and working with him, Reed was a wonderful friend and an exemplary colleague. Even while undergoing painful medical treatment, he devoted precious time to putting in order his unpublished research notes and arranged for their deposit in archival collections in the United States, the Netherlands, and Sarawak (see "Brief Communications" in this issue), in order that this material would be available for the use of future scholars. In one of his very last email messages, he wrote that he was preparing letters of introduction and notes to be conveyed to his Iban "family" on behalf of a graduate student who was about to depart for West Kalimantan. That's the sort of person he was. As some of you may know, in the months before his death, a colleague and friend, the historian Eric Tagliacozzo, invited those who knew Reed to record their experiences and thoughts in a memory book, which was then printed and bound in Japan and presented to Reed's wife, Dr. Oona Paredes, as a remembrance for both her and their young son, Lucas. Following his death, Dr. George N. Appell, on behalf of the Borneo Research Council, established a special fund in Reed Wadley's memory, the Reed L. Wadley Memorial Fund, to provide supplemental grants to graduate students in anthropology who are planning to do research in Borneo. More information on this fund can be found in Dr. Appell's memorial for Reed that immediately follows these Notes and on the BRC website (www.borneoresearchcouncil.org).

Finally, as a further tribute, the BRB is planning, with the help of Dr. Carol Colfer and others, to put together a future special issue, or a section of a future issue, in honor of Reed which will deal with the Danau Sentarum project, to which he was deeply committed (see BRB, 2000, Vol. 31).

Dr. Appell opens our memorial section with a personal tribute to Reed, a shorter version of which appeared in the American Anthropologist Newsletter. This is followed by a bibliography of Reed's published writings. Next, Dr. Carol Colfer gives us a vivid account of her experiences of working with Reed as a professional colleague and of knowing him over the years as a friend. Finally, we are grateful to Christina Pomianek, who, writing as a graduate student, offers a moving appreciation of Reed as a teacher and mentor.

Rob Barrett I knew for a somewhat longer time. We first met in 1988 at an Iban cultural symposium in Kapit, Sarawak. Over the next year I saw much more of Rob in the Saribas. At the time, he had begun fieldwork at Ulu Bayor. The beautiful old Ulu Bayor longhouse was then, before the construction of an access road, most easily reached by traveling up the Ulu Paku road, beyond the longhouse where I was working, to Danau longhouse on the Paku River, and from there hiking across the watershed separating the upper Paku from the Bayor stream. Shortly after he had settled in, the people of the Ulu Bayor longhouse decided to organize a Gawai Antu celebration to , honor their recently deceased ancestors. The celebration was one of the grandest in living memory. Over a thousand people attended, including three groups of performing bards. Rob was appointed to the entertainment committee and I joined him in arranging for the printing of Gawai programs and invitations to be sent to guests. We also purchased and had engraved trophies for the Kumang and Keling beauty contests which are now an essential part of major longhouse ceremonies in the Saribas. Rob had a great sense of humor and took a special delight in this conjunction of modern novelties with what continues to be an elaborate and venerable ritual occasion. But beneath his sense of fun, Rob was also acutely sensitive to the feelings of others, and much of his humor took a self-deprecating turn.

Rob was a remarkably insightful fieldworker. He was keenly observant of interpersonal relations, social contexts, and subtle nuances of speech. Partly, this reflected, no doubt, his extensive clinical training as a psychiatrist, but it was also part, I think, of his personality. News of his death brought sadness to many people in Sarawak, where he had a large circle of friends, including many longhouse elders, whose knowledge and understanding of human affairs he greatly admired. Rob and I shared many interests in common, among them Iban shamanism, poetic language, verbal arts and humor; and a number of binary metaphors, like hot/cold, seen/unseen, that function for the Iban, not so much as oppositional, but more as complementary or mediating categories. I, for one, profited enormously from our conversations and correspondence.

During the early 1990s, when I was a senior fellow at the Australian National University, t saw a good deal of Rob and we corresponded regularly. Later, our correspondence became more intermittent. This was due, I think, to the fact that Rob's primary career was in psychiatry, and in becoming Director of the discipline at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, he assumed a great deal of administrative responsibility. He also taught, had an active clinical practice, and was involved in a major cross-cultural research project concerned with schizophrenia. It was in this latter connection that my wife and I, later on, enjoyed a number of memorable dinners with Rob in Kuching. In his study of schizophrenia, he had become particularly interested in auditory hallucination and the cross-cultural problems of identifying it and other diagnostic symptoms in an Iban cultural context. He was also interested in the genetic dimensions of schizophrenia. For pursuing this latter interest, the Saribas region was an ideal setting. The Saribas Iban have historically preserved lengthy genealogies (tusut), which, from independent evidence, appear to be remarkably reliable for at least the last 8 to 10 generations. As a consequence, by using family tusut, it is possible to trace remembered instances of sakit gila (mental illness) back through family lines over a number of generations. To affirm these links, Rob, as part of his study, also collected blood samples for DNA analysis. In this connection, Louise and I generally met him for dinner after he had made an evening run, driving blood samples down from Sri Aman, so that they could be sent aboard an early morning flight to Australia.

Rob, like his wife, Dr. Mitra Guha, was born into a medical family. His father was a biological anthropologist and professor of dentistry, who published pioneering work on Australian Aborigine dentition. While Dr. Anna Chur-Hansen, in her memorial to Rob, provides an excellent account of his work in psychiatry, and as a public citizen, I knew Rob mainly as an anthropologist. Rob studied social anthropology with Bruce Kapferer during what can only be described as the "Golden Age" of Adelaide anthropology. His Adelaide dissertation resulted in a book, The Psychiatric Team and the Social Definition of Schizophrenia (Cambridge U.P, 1996), a brilliant ethnographic account of the culture of a psychiatric hospital. Later, as Dr. Chur-Hansen notes, Rob studied medical anthropology with Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman at Harvard University.

At the University of Adelaide, Rob was able to combine his interests in psychiatry and anthropology in teaching, as well as in research. As Dr. Chur-Hansen notes, Rob designed two popular courses at the university, "Person, Culture and Medicine" and "Emotion, Culture and Medicine." First offered in 2000, both courses remain popular with medical, psychology, social science, and health science students. Following Rob's death, in recognition of his many contributions, the University of Adelaide established the Robert Barrett Memorial Prize to be awarded each year to a pair of students whose achievements in "Person, Culture and Medicine" and in "Emotion, Culture and Medicine" are deemed outstanding. Beginning in 2007, four awards have been made.

Dr. Anna Chur-Hansen contributes to our memorial section an extended tribute to Rob. This originally appeared in the Monash Bioethics Review. Here, we thank both Dr. Chur-Hansen and the Review editor for permission to republish it.

Finally, Dr. A.V.M. Horton concludes our memorial section with an extended account of persons associated with Negara Brunei Darussalam whose deaths occurred during the past year.

In the first Research Note of this issue, Professor Danny Wong describes an early champion of Dusun rights in colonial North Borneo, a local village leader from the Papar area known simply as Simon in the official Chartered Company documents of the time. The question Professor Wong poses is "Who was Simon?" and what propelled him to initiate legal action against the Company government for selling Dusun land to the railroad and private commercial interests?

Sadly, as the author notes, the story of Simon is virtually forgotten in Sabah today. But, a little less than a century ago, the legal action he championed resulted in a major court case, the "Papar Land Case of 1910," that ended in a judicial decision that found sufficient justice in the suit to withhold full exoneration of the Company, and earned Simon a reputation in the official records of the time, and, by extension, in subsequent colonial history, as a "notorious trouble-maker." The decision brought little redress, however. Litigation continued inconclusively for another ten years, by which time Simon had returned to private life, and his story, as the years passed, was gradually forgotten, even by those whose land rights he had once championed.

Wong places the character of Simon at the center of his study, presenting his essay as an attempt "to explore the role of individuals in defending community rights in early North Borneo." In doing so, he draws on three types of sources, what he describes as: 1) "official" documents, 2) "quasi-official" sources, and 3) more informal, personal documents, in the latter case, letters and church records. As he shows, each source views Simon from a different perspective. While the three perspectives taken together provide an interesting contrast, it is obvious that informal sources offer, in this case, the more detailed and rounded picture of Simon's character. Thus, Professor Wong's paper is also, he tells us, a study in historical method, demonstrating "the importance of nonconventional sources in reconstructing ... local history."

As background to the Papar Land Case, Wong notes that the Papar region was at the turn of the twentieth century the principal "rice bowl" of Sabah and that its local Kadazan/Dusun inhabitants were well-known at the time as industrious padi planters. Papar was also, for the same reason, an initial center of Company rule. From the beginning, the Chartered Company and its shareholders scrambled to secure sources of revenue, and railway construction seemed to offer an ideal solution, making it possible to open the colony's West Coast to commercial plantation development. As a preliminary, the Company government promulgated a series of land ordinances, the provisions of which took little account of indigenous land tenure practices. Conflict was inevitable and, given the intensive nature of local Dusun fanning, it first arose, not surprisingly, in the Papar District.

In petitioning against encroachments on community land and mobilizing discontent, Simon came to be portrayed by the Company government in highly negative terms, as a trouble-maker and even as a potential instigator of rebellion. His connection with the Roman Catholic Church was also noted and the invisible hand of the Church was suspected to be operating behind the scenes, using Simon as its cover. Ironically, as Wong observes, it is from this negative portrayal by the government that a picture of Simon most clearly emerged as a dedicated leader championing a cause capable of arousing the consciousness of the entire Papar Dusun community. Indeed, the Papar Land Case was soon followed by others initiated by other Kadazan/Dusun groups, revealing both the wide extent of grievances and the spreading influence of Simon himself as an early catalyst of ethnic awareness.

The principal quasi-official source that Professor Wong makes use of is the unpublished diary of G.C. Woolley. This is a somewhat surprising source given the fact that Woolley, as a Company officer, Commissioner of Lands and Collector of Land Revenue, was a major principal in the Papar Land Case. He was also the principal drafter of Company land ordinances. However, Woolley, as a traveling officer, also had a firsthand knowledge of local land use practices and in the course of adjudicating land disputes had, in fact, had occasion to consult with Simon himself. The picture he reveals in the privacy of his diary is therefore more complex and sympathetic.

Finally, the author takes up less conventional, more personal sources. These consist mainly of the letters of Father Bernard Kurz, a pioneer Roman Catholic missionary in Papar, and the records of the local church at Limbahau and of St. Joseph Church in Papar town. From these sources, something of the everyday man emerges. Thus, we learn, for example, that Simon's full Kadazan name is Sindurang Bulakang and that he was a prosperous landowner and family man. He was also the headman of a Papar Dusun village known today as Kampong Kopimpinan. Simon was one of the first Church converts and following his baptism, he became Father Kurz's assistant and an active lay catechist who, in turn, baptized many others. He was also one of the first converts to be married in the Limbahau church and he and his wife became the principal lay leaders of the local Catholic community. Certainly, therefore, the official view was correct on one point. Simon had close ties to the Roman Catholic Church and its European priests and, as Wong suggests, the fact that Simon adopted the notably Western means of legal action to seek redress against the government suggests that these ties may well have influenced his actions. Yet the picture that emerges, particularly from Father Kurz's letters, is far more interesting and reveals Simon to be a man deeply committed to serving others and, it seems, one keenly sensitive to the Church's teachings on justice.

In his conclusion, Professor Wong tells us that his purpose in writing about this early champion of Dusun rights was not to "rediscover" Simon. Yet, I think, the character he presents is too compelling a figure to merit his current anonymity. Rather, he seems to deserve a more enduring place in the collective historical memory of Sabah and one hopes that Professor Wong will again take up his story in the future.

In the next paper, Andrew Smith, a frequent contributor to the BRB, returns to a topic he has touched on, or explored, in a series of earlier papers, namely, the lives and trading activities of early nineteenth-century sea captains and country traders in what is now West Kalimantan. The present paper deals, as its title indicates, with the last seven years (1808-1815) in the life of Captain Daniel Smith (no known relation, the author informs me!), a country trader based in Penang whose voyages made him a frequent visitor to Pontianak. Here, as the author relates, he became a close trading associate of Sultan Kassim, a relationship obviously fraught with complications. The essay illustrates the precarious lives led by these ship captains. It also shows us that, for a brief time at the beginning of the nineteenth century, British maritime traders operating in Asian waters had to cope not only with local pirates, but also, for a time, with French and American privateers as well.

The next paper by Professor Bob Reece, "An Interview with Dr. Hj. Zaini Ahmad, Kuala Lumpur, 1985," deals with the life story of a more recent historical figure. Zaini Ahmad was, from the 1950s, a founding member of Partai Ra'ayat Brunei (PRB), one of the first formally constituted political parties in northern Borneo, and was its executive secretary in 1962 at the time of the Brunei Rebellion. His story thus sheds light on what Professor Reece aptly describes as "the origins of formal political life in the region." The interview concentrates on Zaini's family history and his early life experiences as these influenced his political thinking. As Reece observes, these matters are important, as there is a dearth of biographic information on the significant political figures of twentieth century Borneo. The interview also sheds light on the origins of the Brunei Rebellion, a watershed event in modern political history, in Sabah and Sarawak, the Rebellion effectively ended local opposition to Malaysia, while in Brunei it had, paradoxically, the opposite effect, sealing Brunei's separation. In this connection, Zaini's account of his family's links to the Brunei Malay aristocracy and his relationship with Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin are particularly interesting. The irony, as Reece notes, is that Brunei went, as a result of the Rebellion and its aftermath, from being a center of early political activism to one of almost complete political stultification. However, beneath the Indonesian-inspired nationalism of Sheikh Azahari, there were clearly conservative undercurrents at work, and that a popular rebellion should end in the creation of a "neotraditional" monarchy is perhaps not so surprising.

The next three papers, all of them by anthropologists, describe aspects of contemporary social life in three small ethnic communities in Sarawak--the Lahanan of the Balui region, the Penan of the upper Tutoh, and the Punan Vuhang of the upper Balui headwaters.

In the first of these papers, Jennifer Alexander describes the socio-cultural changes that have transformed Lahanan society from the time of Malaysian independence to the present. Dr. Alexander began fieldwork among the Lahanan in 1987-88 and since then has made repeated visits to the community, most recently in 2006. At the time of her original study, the Lahanan longhouse in which she worked, at Long Pangai, then on the main Balui River, was one of fifteen longhouses, the others of different ethnic groups that had been singled out by the Sarawak government for relocation in order to make way for the construction of the Bakun Dam. Dr. Alexander returned to the community in 1999, shortly after its relocation to the Sungai Asap resettlement area, and again in 2001, 2002, and 2006. As a result, her paper also documents the consequences of relocation over a span of nearly a decade.

As Dr. Alexander makes clear, the Lahanan and their Balui neighbors were already experiencing rapid socio-economic change well before their forced resettlement. These changes involved, among other things, improved river transport, the introduction of schools and health clinics, cash crops, and participation in elections and party politics. Another dramatic change she describes was the religious conversion of the Lahanan from Adat Bungan to Roman Catholicism. By the 1990s, the Lahanan were already actively involved in a modern market economy, and this involvement, as she notes, strongly influenced the way in which they sought to deal with government resettlement plans. Since their relocation, it is now obvious that little prior planning had gone into the question of how the settlers would make a living once they were moved. In place of extensive ancestral lands, each family at Sungai Atap has been allotted a small three-acre plot, insufficient to cultivate effectively as a source of household livelihood. As a consequence, Dr. Alexander tells us that "the possibilities [present before] of acquiring wealth through diligence and knowledge of farming have drastically declined." To secure an income, most persons must now leave the community to find work elsewhere.

Those most able to do so have been mainly men, with the result that women, who were once the mainstay of the subsistence economy, have been largely left behind by recent developments. Despite these adversities, some community members have made a remarkable accommodation, and, in general, despite their growing dispersal and forced resettlement among other ethnic groups, or, perhaps, because of these things, the Lahanan have recently formed their own community association, based in Miri town, and are in the process today of actively reasserting their cultural uniqueness.

In the next paper, Jayl Langub reports on the findings of a study, originally commissioned by the International Tropical Timber Organization, that examines the present socio-economic conditions of seven Penan communities living in the vicinity of a newly created National Park, Pulong Tan, in the far northeastern interior of Sarawak. Langub describes four of these communities as "settled" and three as "semi-settled." The settled groups practice hill-rice cultivation, supplemented by crops of cassava, while the semi-settled groups, although also planting cassava, and, in some cases, small amounts of rice, continue to subsist primarily by hunting and gathering. Rice cultivation, he tells us, began in the early 1960s and, interestingly, three of the four settled groups have grown sufficient rice in recent years to meet their entire annual food needs. Having close contacts with the Kelabit, some even express an interest in adopting Kelabit methods of irrigated wet-rice cultivation. Yet, in all seven communities, wild sago continues to be collected and is still favored over rice by those 50 years of age or older. Government proposals to regroup these seven Penan communities in a single large settlement were regarded as impractical and met with little, or no, support. On the other hand, the creation of the Pulong Tau ('Our Forest' in Penan) National Park was strongly favored. The local Penan have experienced at first-hand the destruction caused by logging, and they look upon the creation of the park as a way of preserving some remnants of a forested environment. As Langub nicely shows, park planning accords well with traditional Penan ideals regarding the use of their ancestral tana' pengurip, or community foraging areas.

The Penan communities described by Langub adopted an evangelical form of Christianity in the 1950s, as a result of contacts with nearby Kelabit, Kenyah, and Kayan communities. Today, Christianity, Langub tells us, functions not only as a community institution, but has also broadened the Penan world, strengthening their ties with surrounding non-Penan groups.

In the paper that follows, Henry Chan describes another small community of former hunter-gatherers, the Punan Vuhang (also known as "Punan Busang" in the ethnographic literature), who live today in a single longhouse at Long Lidem in the upper headwaters of the Balui river system. Like the Penan described by Langub, the Punan Vuhang, too, have embraced evangelical Christianity. In this connection, Dr. Chan begins his paper with an interesting incident. In 1994, several decades after their conversion, a former shaman had a dream in which he met two female otu dokget spirits who, now bereft of human contact and offerings, were, they revealed, suffering from famine. In the shaman's dream, the spirits, who had formerly aided human beings, appealed for sympathy. Next morning, three of the former shaman's nephews went to the forest to hunt and each returned successfully with a wild boar. Seeing this as a sign, the former shaman used a small amount of meat to make offerings to the spirits, while at the same time he appealed directly to the Christian God to show them compassion.

As Dr. Chart observes, from a Punan Vuhang perspective, these and other spirits continue to inhabit the surrounding universe, even though people no longer have much to do with them. From the accounts of elderly informants, he reconstructs a picture of the complex Punan Vuhang cosmos and describes the ways in which people, including shamans, formerly dealt with its various kinds of spirit inhabitants. The present paper is the first in a two-part series. The second part, to appear in the next BRB, will examine Punan Vuhang death rituals and notions relating to the spirits of the dead. Finally, in his conclusions, Dr. Chan raises a more general question concerning Borneo hunter-gatherers. As he notes, these people have sometimes been described in the literature as being essentially secular or nonreligious. Drawing on his reconstruction of the traditional Punan Vuhang world view, he argues that this conceptual world can only be described as "nonreligious" if one adopts an exceedingly narrow definition of what constitutes "religion."

In the next Research Note, Mika Okushima follows up on a paper that appeared two years ago in the BRB, presenting here the concluding part of a two-part essay describing the historical migrations and cultural contacts of Kayanic-speaking peoples in central and northeastern Borneo. Her concern here is primarily with Kayanic movements from north to northeastern Borneo and the subsequent involvement of Kayanic groups, from the seventeenth century onward, with the coastal states of what is now East Kalimantan and, by extension, to the Sulu Archipelago and beyond. Okushima notes that in the past, regional groups identified themselves by means of shared genealogies, mytho-historical narratives or epics, and, in some instances, by claims to places of common origin. Using this material, much of it preserved as oral tradition, as well as ritual chant texts, she reconstructs the past movements of a number of these groups. Some, as she shows, later returned from East Kalimantan to the Baram-Balui region from which they had originally migrated generations earlier, while others, continuing onward, eventually reached the lower rivers of the east coast of Kalimantan. Here she connects their arrival and later turbulent history with the genealogies of the local Kutai and Bulungan sultanates.

Dr. George N. Appell, in the essay that follows, takes as his starting point an observation made by G.C. Woolley in a brief account of Timogun adat published originally in the 1930s, that the Timogun village holds rights to land such that only village members may open hill rice farms in "the watershed of their own village stream." Curiously, as Appell notes, Woolley, in all of his other compilations of indigenous adat in Sabah, makes no further reference to village land rights. The question, Appell asks, is why should this be so?

Drawing on his own work and that of others, Dr. Appell argues that the village holds residual rights over land in all of the indigenous societies of Borneo for which there is adequate information. Exactly how land rights are defined varies, of course, over time and from one ethnic group to another, as does the precise nature of these residual village rights. Woolley, however, with the exception of the Timogun, is otherwise completely silent with regard to village land rights. Drawing on Professor Wong's Research Note that opens this volume, Appell observes that Woolley was directly involved in the Papar Land Case of 1910. He would therefore have had to be familiar enough with Dusun land tenure to be aware, at the very least, of village grazing land and community cemeteries, categories of land that were among those at issue in the dispute. The question, then, is why he chose to otherwise ignore these rights in his compilations of native adat? Dr. Appell suggests a number of possible explanations, among them ideological blinders and a possible conflict of interest with his role as Commissioner of Lands and drafter of Company land ordinances.

In the final Research Note in this issue, "Matrix to Mosaic: Habitat Fragmentation from 1982-1999 in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo," Dawn Tanner and Ryan Kirk report on the rapid loss and fragmentation of tropical forest cover in Borneo. They open their essay with a cogent discussion of the effects on biodiversity caused by habitat loss, forest conversion, and fragmentation. As they note, the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, including Borneo, are major biodiversity "hotspots," that is to say, world regions of greatest biological diversity. However, the current rate of forest loss is higher in Southeast Asia than anywhere else in the world, and in Borneo the rate is twice the Southeast Asian average and three times the world average. In Sabah, 48 percent of the state is gazetted as permanent forest reserves, state or federal parks, yet forest cover continues to be lost at twice the Southeast Asian average. To quantify the process of land-cover change, the authors analyze satellite imagery for the period 1982 to 1999, focusing on a specific area of Sabah that includes the Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve near Sandakan Bay on the east coast. Their data show that forest cover decreased 30 percent during this period. From this, the authors persuasively conclude: "The conservation status of the forests of Sabah is at a critical juncture."

Our Brief Communications open, as they have since 2003, with a "Letter from Lundu," written by our resident classicist and Borneo man of letters, Otto Steinmayer. In this letter, Otto muses on the history, art, and rationale of grass cutting in Borneo. This is likely to be Otto's last letter to come to us directly from Sarawak. Otto returns to the United States in February 2009. His wife, Nusi, and their family will, however, retain their connection to Lundu and their house in Stunggang. For the record, Otto's new address is 362 Farmholme Road, Stonington, CN 06378, and, for his many friends, he may still be reached at: [e-mail].

As mentioned earlier in these Notes, the late Reed Wadley, shortly before his death, presented copies of his unpublished notes and other research materials to several libraries, and in the Brief Communication that follows your Editor reports on those he presented to the Tun Jugah Foundation archives in Kuching. Next, Dr. Chur-Hansen similarly reports on the late Robert Barrett's unpublished materials that have been deposited in the University of Adelaide Library.

In 2007, the University of the Philippines held its annual Anthropology Field School for the first time outside the Republic of the Philippines, in the Kota Belud District of Sabah. During the 2008 BRC Biennial Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Professor Castro of the Department of Anthropology presented a report describing the work undertaken by the students and faculty of the UP field research team. Professor Castro has kindly allowed us to publish here a short summary of this report. A notable feature of the project is that several of the ethnic groups studied by the team are also present in the Philippines and that the Field School was followed by a public exhibition in the Philippines attended by guests from Sabah.

In the next Brief Communication, Cristina Eghenter and Jayl Langub describe a recently established trans-border forum, FORMADAT, created in connection with the Heart of Borneo Project and involving related highland communities in Sabah, Sarawak, and Kalimantan. Finally, in our last Brief Communication, Matthew Minarchek describes an Iban community on the periphery of the Danau Sentarum National Park, in West Kalimantan, and the small-scale, community hydro-electric project in which he was involved.

A Bit of History and Some Editorial Changes in the BRB

As I observed in my Notes from the Editor last year (BRB, 2007, 38: I-2), the year just past, 2008, marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Borneo Research Council.

The first issue of the Borneo Research Bulletin (Vol. 1, no. I) appeared the following year, in March 1969. It took the form of a slender 5-page mimeographed newsletter. Since then, the BRB has grown considerably, and today, as the annual journal of the Borneo Research Council, it serves a much larger and more diverse audience. Most of us who took part in the original founding of the Council happened to be anthropologists by training. However, the intent of the founders was, from the beginning, that the Bulletin should serve as a forum for the dissemination of information concerning research in all areas of study pertaining to Borneo, not only anthropology, but also history, prehistory, languages, politics, the social sciences generally, medicine, and the physical and biological sciences. Some of these areas, of course, have been better served than others. Nonetheless, the intent of the BRB remains the same.

Today, of course, the volume of research is so immense that no single person can possibly hope to keep abreast of more than a small fraction of it. Indeed, even within one's own discipline, keeping up is an ever-increasing challenge. Therefore to assist your Editor, a decision was made to create a series of sub-editorships, each covering a major topical area of research. As a beginning, two sub-editorships have been created, one in history, the other in ecology and environmental studies. Our history editor is Dr. Bob Reece, Professor in History at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. Bob is also a member of the Borneo Research Council's editorial board and is well-known to many of you as a frequent contributor to the BRB. Our editor for ecology and environmental studies is Dr. Amity i)oolittle of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Both have agreed to assist your Editor by soliciting and reviewing papers and, from time to time, of preparing, possibly with others, review essays summarizing current developments in their general area of interest.

Again, as I have stressed in past Notes, your suggestions and comments are greatly welcomed. The BRB was founded, and continues to operate, without outside institutional support, and all of us who work to produce each issue do so as unpaid volunteers. The breadth and quality of the Bulletin depend entirely upon the participation of its individual contributors and, in that connection, I would urge all of you to contact me with suggestions, news items, reviews, or essays.

The Tenth Biennial International Conference of the Borneo Research Council, Curtin University of Technology Campus, Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia, 19-21 July 2010

The Tenth Biennial International Conference of the Borneo Research Council will be held in Miri, Sarawak, under the sponsorship of the Curtin University of Technology Sarawak. The venue will be the Curtin University campus. The program, at we go to press, is still in the early stages of planning, but a formal announcement, program and registration details, as well as an official call for papers, will appear in the next issue of the BRB. The conference theme is "Borneo: Continuity, Change, and Preservation." Bibi Aminah binti Abdul Ghani, Senior Lecturer, School of Foundation and Continuing Studies, Curtin University of Technology Sarawak, CDT 250, 98009 Miri, is coordinating arrangements and may be contacted by mail or at: bibi.aminah@ curtin.edu.my. See also the announcement section in this issue.

Email Discussion List and Online Bibliography of Borneo Dissertations

Once again, I would like to remind readers that there is an active email discussion list that anyone with an interest in Borneo is welcome to join (see Notes from the Editor, Vol. 36, 2005). The list is managed by Dr. Otto Steinmayer and anyone may become a member by going to "Borneo List"[e-mail] or by writing to Otto directly at <[e-mail]>.

There is also a BRC online bibliography of dissertations relating to Borneo (see Notes from the Editor, 2002, Vol. 33: 7). The bibliography website is maintained and updated by Professor Robert Winzeler and is hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno. The website address is: http://www.knowledgecenter.unr.edu/dataworks/borneo/borneoedit.aspx. At the time of writing, 561 dissertation titles and abstracts were listed. In some cases it is possible to access the dissertations themselves online. Where this is possible, web addresses have been noted.

Anyone with suggestions or titles to add to the bibliography is encouraged to write directly to Professor Winzeler at [e-mail]. We take this occasion to thank Bob, once again, for providing and keeping current this valuable service.

Thanks and Acknowledgements

Finally, I take this opportunity to thank all of those who assisted me during the year with article reviews, editorial or technical assistance, or who contributed news items, announcements, comments, suggestions, or bibliographic items. The list is a long one, but here I would like to thank in particular Jenny Alexander, George Appell, Ann Appleton, Martin Baier, Dee Baer, Anna Chur-Hansen, Carol Colfer, Traude Gavin, Mike Heppell, A.V.M. Horton, Roger Kershaw, Jayl Langub, Datuk Amar Leonard Linggi Jugah, Matthew Minarchek, Mika Okushima, Vic Porritt, Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, Bob Reece, Bernard Sellato, Kenneth Sillander, Andrew Smith, Otto Steinmayer, Vinson Sutlive, Dawn Tanner, and the late Reed Wadley. I am grateful too to Mr. Alan Morse for the work he did in preparing the present volume for publication and to the other members of the BRC staff in Phillips, Maine, for overseeing its printing, distribution, and mailing. Alan also provided invaluable help with layout and the reproduction of photographs, maps, and tables. In his role as Book Review Editor and compiler of our annual abstracts and bibliography sections, I am especially indebted to A.V.M. Horton. As always, Dr. Horton has also been a regular correspondent and a frequent source of news items, references, memorials, and information about recent publications. Finally, a special thanks goes, once again, to my wife, Louise Klemperer Sather, who, as our Assistant Editor, carefully read through all of the papers, reviews, announcements, and brief communications that appear in this volume. Her editorial skills, patience, and close attention to detail have been an invaluable help to me and to us all.

Member Support

Here we wish to express our thanks to the following individuals for their contribution over the last year to the BRC endowment and general funds.

ENDOWMENT FUND: Dr. Jennifer Alexander, Dr. Clare Boulanger, Dr. Carol J.P. Colfer, Dr. Jay B. Crain, Dr. Michael R. Dove, Professor Virginia Hooker, Professor H. Arlo Nimmo, Professor Robert Reece, Professor F. Andrew Smith, Dr. and Mrs. Otto Steinmayer, Dr. and Dr. H.L. Whittier, Dr. W. D. Wilder, and Dr. Robert L. Winzeler.

GENERAL FUND: Dr. Laura P. Appell-Warren, Dr. Adela Baer, Dr. Martin Baier, Dr. Clare Boulanger, Dr. Carol J.P. Colfer, Dr. Jay B. Crain, Professor Ian Douglas, Dr. & Mrs. Allen Drake, Ms. Katherine Edwards, Dr. Richard Fidler, Ms. Judith Heimann, Mr. John W. McCarthy, Dr. Peter Metcalf, Mr. John D. Pearson, Dato Seri John Pike, Dr. Robert Pringle, Dr. & Mrs. Clifford Sather, Dr. and Mrs. Otto Steinmayer, Dr. Jack Stuster, Mr. Nathaniel Tarn, FR Brian Taylor, Dr. Phillip Thomas, Dr. and Dr. H.L. Whittier, Mr. James Wickes, Dr. W. D. Wilder, Mr. William Wilkinson, Dr. Robert L. Winzeler, and Dr. Leigh Wright.

We thank each of these individuals for their generous support.

About the Authors in this Issue

Jennifer Alexander did a BA (Hons. 1) in Indonesian and Malay Studies (1979) and a Ph.D. in anthropology (1984), both at the University of Sydney. She has published numerous papers based on fieldwork in Central Java and Sarawak, a number of them in association with the late Paul Alexander. Trade, Trader, and Trading, published by Oxford University Press (1987), was based on research on rural commodity markets, while "Douglas Miles and Borneo" in the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2008, vol. 9, no. 3) is her most recent publication. Dr. Alexander is currently Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.

George N. Appell, A.B., M.B.A, A.M. (Harvard), Ph.D. (Australian National University) is a social anthropologist whose major ethnographic work has been among the Rungus of Sabah and the Bulusu' of East Kalimantan. He is a Senior Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University. He is one of the founders of the Borneo Research Council; founding sponsor of the Anthropologists' Fund for Anthropological Research; and Co-Director of the Sabah Oral Literature Project. He is currently finishing a monograph on how to determine land tenure rights and other property interests and is also preparing a book containing his and his wife's publications on Rungus society. For more information visit www.george-n-appell.com.

Henry Chan holds a Ph.D. in anthropology (magna cum laude approbatur) from the University of Helsinki and a M.Phil. in human development studies from the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Malaya. Since 2003, he has headed the Department of Social and Community Studies in the Sarawak Forestry Corporation with responsibility for developing community participation programs and conflict resolution guidelines for sustainable forest management. He was socio-economic advisor for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in a Malaysian-German pilot project on sustainable forest management (1998-2001). In 2001, he was awarded an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship from the Nippon Foundation, which allowed him to study forestry conflicts in Thailand and Indonesia. His published works include Survival in the Rainforest: Change and Resilience among the Punan Vuhang of Eastern Sarawak, Malaysia (2007), "History and the Punan Vuhang: Response to Economic and Resource Tenure Change," In: Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo's Hunter-Gatherers in the 21st Century, edited by Peter G. Sercombe and Bernard Sellato (2007); "The Crisis of the Commons: Three Case Studies in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand," In: Commonplaces and Comparisons: Remaking Eco-political spaces in Southeast Asia, edited by Peter Cuasay and Chayan Vaddhanaphuti (2005), and "Moral conflict and the contest of forest resources in Thailand and Indonesia," In: Proceedings of the workshop, The Asian Face of Globalization: Reconstructing identities, institutions, and resources (2004).

Roger Kershaw is a graduate of Oxford University in Modern History, with a Ph.D. in Political Science from London University (SOAS). He has lectured on Southeast Asian Studies at the Universities of Hull and Kent. Owing to the decline in interest in the subject in UK, he joined the Brunei Education Service between 1984 and 1994. Among a variety of published work, the broadest in scope is Monarchy in South-East Asia (London, Routledge, 200 i). Dr. Kershaw is a frequent contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin, his most recent publication being (with Eva Maria Kershaw) "Messengers or tipsters? Some cautious though concluding thoughts on Brunei-Dusun Augury" (BRB, 38, 2007). He and his wife, Eva Maria, also published an earlier Review Essay, "Protagonist of Paradise," dealing with the life and legacy of the late Bruno Manser (BRB, 35, 2004).

Ryan Kirk recently received his Ph.D. in Natural Resources Science and Management from the University of Minnesota. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography Environmental Studies Program at Elon University in North Carolina. His dissertation research focused on the study of land use change and carbon cycling in North Carolina from the antebellum period to the present using satellite imagery, aerial photography, historic maps, and spatial models. He was awarded the Cartography and Geographic Information Science Award by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. His continuing research focuses on exurban and suburban development, changes in forest area and structure, and agricultural history.

Jayl Langub is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS). A retired civil servant, Jayl Langub did a BA in anthropology at McGill University and a MA in Community Development at the University of Alberta. He has published numerous papers on the Penan and Orang Ulu, including entries in The Encyclopedia of Malaysia, "Penan community and traditions," "Adat and longhouse community," "Kajang and other Orang Ulu groups" (Peoples and Traditions, vol. 12). Recently he co-edited with James Chin Reminiscences: Recollections of Sarawak Administrative Services Officers (Pelanduk Publications, 2007). He is also a frequent contributor to the BRB, his most recent publication being (with Jerome Rousseau) "Ten Kenyah paintings given to the Sarawak Museum" (Vol. 37). He is currently preparing a study of the Seping, a small minority group comprising a single longhouse on the Belaga River.

Mika Okushima is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Intercultural Communication Institute, Kanda University of International Studies, Japan. She is the author of "'Wet rice cultivation and the Kayanic peoples of East Kalimantan" (BRB, 30, 1999), "Ethnic background of the Tidung," Journal of Sophia Asian ,Studies (20, 2003), "'Churches and Indonesian migrants in Japan" (Intercultural Communication Studies, 18, 2006), and "Ethnohistory of the Kayanic Peoples in Northeast Borneo" (Part I) (BRB, 37, 2006). Most recently, she edited Nihon no Indonesia-fin Shakai (Indonesian Society in Japan) (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2008).

Bob Reeee is Professor in History at Murdocb University in Western Australia. His major publications in Borneo history are The Name of Brooke: The End of White Rajah Rule in Sarawak (Kuala Lumpur: OUP, 1982), Datu Bandar; Abang Hj. Mustapha of Sarawak: Some reflections of his life and times (Kuching: Sarawak Literary Society, 1991), Masa Jeptm : Sarawak under the Japanese 1941-1945 (Kuching: Sarawak Literary Society, 1998) and, most recently, The White Rajahs of Sarawak: A Borneo Dynasty (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2004). He also wrote introductions for the Oxford University Press reprints of Low (1848), Keppel (1846), Brooke (1866), McDougall (1882), and St. John (1879) and was a major contributor to The Encyclopaedia oflban Studies (2001) and the Encyclopedia of Malaysia (2001; 2006). Professor Reece's most recent contributions to the BRB include "Some Sarawak Curiosities in the British Library," "Joseph Burn and Raffles's Plan for a British Borneo" (with F. Andrew Smith), both of which appeared in Volume 37 (2006), and "The Kitingan Case, the Borneo states, and the Malaysian constitution," Volume 38 (2007). His current project is a biography of Charles Brooke, which is the basis of his most recent article, "'My Dear Treasurer': Rajah Charles Brooke's Correspondence with F.H. Dallas, 1902-1917," Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 81, Pt. 2 (2008), pp. 37-62.

F. Andrew Smith, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, the University of Adelaide, South Australia. Originally trained as a plant biologist, his research interests since the mid-1990s have centered significantly on the history and ecology of Borneo, especially of West Kalimantan. He is a Fellow of the Borneo Research Council and a frequent contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin. His most recent BRB publication was "An "Arch-Villain" to be Rehabilitated? Mixed Perceptions of Pangeran Anom of Sambas in the early Nineteenth Century" which appeared last year in Volume 38 (2007).

Dawn Tanner is a Ph.D. candidate in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota. She has published work on island-ecosystem management and population impacts on island species in the Journal of Environmental Management and the Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society. Her global review of crossing structures to ensure safe wildlife road-crossings was published in Natural Resources: Economics, Management and Policy. She received a FLAS fellowship to study Indonesian. She is particularly interested in issues of habitat loss, landscape fragmentation, and effects on endemic species, with long-term interests in Borneo.

Danny Wong Tze Ken, Ph.D. (Malaya) is currently Associate Professor at the History Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya. He specializes in Vietnamese history and the history of Sabah. He is the author of The Transformation of an Immigrant Society: A Study of the Chinese of Sabah (London: Asean Academic Press, 1998) and Historical Sabah: Community and Society (Kota Kinabalu: Natural History Publications, 2004).