Notes from the editor.

At the end of this last year, we received news of the passing of two persons whose life's work did much to further Borneo studies. Both, in addition, were warm personal friends.

Datin Amar Margaret Linggi, the wife of Datuk Amar Leonard Linggi Jugah, died on November 20th, 2006, in Singapore, after a long and courageous struggle with cancer. Datin Amar Margaret devoted much of the latter part of her life to the preservation, revitalization, and promotion of Sarawak's Iban cultural heritage. With her husband, she took an active part in the work of the Tun Jugah Foundation, personally helping to create its main exhibition hall, display areas, and spacious weaving gallery. Dear to her heart were both her family and Iban ikat weaving, where she leaves a lasting legacy. By providing financial support to contemporary women weavers, organizing textile exhibitions, competitions, and, in other ways promoting their work, she helped breathe new life into this extraordinary artistic tradition and reverse its declining attraction to younger Iban women. Unlike most private and museum collectors, who tend to purchase older works, thus removing them from local longhouse communities, Datin Amar Margaret supported and encouraged contemporary weavers, particularly those of exceptional ability. She made the Tun Jugah Foundation's weaving gallery an important center where women weavers might gather, demonstrate and refine their skills, and teach one another. Datin Amar Margaret also wrote insightfully on Iban weaving. Beginning as an exhibition catalogue, her book, Ties that Bind: Iban Ikat Weaving (2001), continues to provide a unique guide to Iban weaving. Reflecting her practical turn of mind and concern with the transmission of technical skills to future generations, the work serves as an invaluable manual, or source-book, not only for scholars, but also, equally, for aspiring weavers, describing in detail, as it does, the entire weaving process, from the initial preparation of cotton, through the making of dyes and mordants, to the final art of setting up the loom and weaving itself.

Datin Amar Margaret had a natural grace that allowed her to move comfortably through all levels of society. She made many friends in the course of her all-too-brief lifetime, and the affection in which she was held was clearly evident in the overflowing crowds that gathered for her funeral at St. Joseph's Cathedral in Kuching.

Vinson Sutlive, the former editor of the BRB and a close friend of the Linggi family, opens the Memorial section with a fitting tribute to Datin Amar Margaret. On a personal note, my wife and I will miss her warm and generous presence.

On December 4th, 2006, Professor Rodney Needham, while under hospice care, died in his Oxford flat, in England, at the age of 83. In addition to being one of the foremost social anthropologists of his generation, a renowned teacher, and a prolific translator of anthropological works from Dutch, German, and French, including several closely connected to Borneo, such as Robert Hertz's classic essay "On Death" and Hans Sharer's admirable Ngaju Religion, he was also the first academically-trained anthropologist to carry out fieldwork among Borneo hunter-gatherers. In 1951-1952, he undertook pioneering research in Sarawak among both the eastern and western Penan, resulting in his Oxford D. Phil. thesis.

Although he never completed a full-length monograph on the Penan, he published a number of ethnographic essays, including works on death- and friendship-names, as well as several comparative contributions to hunter-gatherer studies based on his Penan fieldwork. The Penan also made appearances in his lectures and more general writings. Although he soon moved on to eastern Indonesia, and to other topics, his interest in the Penan and Borneo never ceased, and, indeed, later in life, he returned to his D.Phil. thesis and began to write a book on the Penan. Sadly, he ceased writing it, he told my wife, Louise, and me, shortly after his wife's death, when he moved to his flat at 76 Holywell Street, so that, at the time of his death, the manuscript remained unfinished.

Although he was considered "difficult" by more than a few of his university colleagues, Professor Needham maintained an enormous circle of friends with whom he regularly corresponded. His gracious, witty, and meticulously composed and hand-typed letters were always a delight to receive. He supported the BRC until his death and was a regular contributor to the Council's funds. He was also a regular reader of the BRB and each year, by letter, he generally commented on papers that attracted his interest. These often had something to do with the Penan, as, for example, in Volume 33 (2002), Quentin Gausset's excellent essay on the management of birds' nest rights in the Niah Caves. For the last BRB, he commented on my own essay, calling my attention to the ways in which percussive sound, or verbal allusions to percussion, signal important transitions in the performances of the Iban manang I described. He could be flirtatious and was fond of writing separately to Louise. In one of his last letters, he mentioned how her descriptions of our Oregon garden, with its conifers and rhododendrons, recalled for him memories of Nepal.

Rodney, in the course of his scholarly career, trained an astonishing number of graduate students. In his inaugural lecture, delivered in May 1977 (published as Essential Perplexities, 1978, Clarendon Press, Oxford), on the occasion of his appointment to the Chair of Social Anthropology, he mentioned that, thanks to his predecessor, Professor Evans-Pritchard, 132 graduate students were then registered in social anthropology, making Oxford, "the largest centre of post-graduate social anthropology in this country [UK] and apparently the largest in any university anywhere." In a footnote, he added that these numbers also gave the department the worst staff-student ratio of any British department of anthropology and the worst for any department at Oxford. The result was both a burden and a legacy.

Rodney Needham was born into the generation who came of age during World War II. In his own case, the horrors of war, which he experienced firsthand while fighting as a British officer with Gurkha troops in Burma, left an indelible mark. He was wounded in the Battle of Kohima, and would certainly have died had it not been for the bravery of the Gurkha troops in whose company he was fighting. Once, in a conversation, he remarked to Louise and me that as a young man in Burma he had had to witness things which were beyond his years to bear, including, after one engagement, stacking the corpses of young Japanese soldiers, like cordwood, for mass burial. He developed an intense bond with his Gurkha comrades, and until his final days, he always remembered and spoke of them by their individual names. Again, in his inaugural lecture, which, of all his writings, comes closest, I think, to being autobiographical, he makes what, under the circumstances, was a remarkable acknowledgement to, as he put it,

   the immeasurable obligation under which we have been laid by those
   who preserved western civilization, ... in particular, the tens of
   thousands of men of the Brigade of Gurkhas who were killed or
   mutilated or crippled ... in the defence of the freedoms by which
   we live today. Oxford is theirs as it is ours, and in what we make
   of it, and of the priceless liberty of thought that is its life and
   justification, we are perpetually and unrequitably beholden to
   them.

He clearly never forgot that obligation, and there is no question that his wartime experiences and the bonds he formed with his Gurkha comrades left a profound mark. They seem to have carried over, too, to his relations with the Penan. In 1951-1952, the eastern Penan with whom he worked were then still fully nomadic and traveled for months at a time in the rainforest many days', or even weeks' walk, from the nearest government station or clinic. His was fieldwork under the most arduous of conditions. Jayl Langub tells me that, among a small and dwindling number of elderly Penan who were children at the time, his lone presence among them, as "Tuan Lidem," was a source of wonderment that is still remembered to this day. When I conveyed Jayl's words to him, in Oxford, that he was still warmly remembered in the Baram, he was greatly pleased.

Among the longtime friends that Rodney kept in touch with until his death is Mrs. Joella Werlin, who, although not an anthropologist, was one of Rodney's first B. Lit. students at Oxford. Mrs. Werlin now lives in Portland, Oregon, and I am grateful to her for allowing me to quote here from a copy of a letter which Rodney shared with her. This letter, which runs to five type-written pages, was sent by Rodney to Professor (now Emeritus) Lionel Caplan at SOAS in response to Caplan's Warrior Gentlemen, a book about relations between British and Gurkha soldiers. In his letter, Needham, significantly, wrote: "... allow me to say that only among Gurkhas ... and among eastern Penan have I experienced what it can be to live equally with other men, at the same level of life and with nothing hidden and in extreme dependence one upon another."

I shall certainly remember Rodney as a gracious host. Despite ill-health, he delightfully entertained Louise and me during several visits we made to Oxford during the last five years of his life. He frequently lunched and entertained guests, including ourselves, at a pub around the corner from his flat called "The Turf." Here, he was a much-admired presence and was given a special place of honor, near the window, with initials carved in the beam above it, "GDPN," "Good day, Professor Needham!"

Rodney expressly asked that his personal papers be destroyed upon his death and that no obituaries or memorials be presented for him. At the risk of his everlasting displeasure, we will nonetheless publish a memorial in his honor in the next issue of the BRB. One of Professor Needham's former students, whom he held in special regard, Professor Kirk Endicott, has agreed to write a memorial, sharing with us his memories of Rodney as a teacher. In addition, Mrs. Werlin tape-recorded an interview with Rodney in February 2000 in which he answered questions about his fieldwork with the Penan. With the kind permission of Mrs. Werlin and of Professor Tristan Needham, Rodney's son and literary executer, we will publish excerpts from this interview, together with Kirk Endicott's remembrances.

Finally, it should be said that Professor Needham's objections to obituaries had nothing to do with vanity. It reflected, instead, a profound sense of human impermanence. This sense was most clearly expressed in the final pages of the published version of Essential Perplexities (1978:28-29). Here, after reviewing various answers that have been given to the question of "What is Man?" and, in the process, tracing the origins of anthropological inquiry, which, not surprisingly to those familiar with his writing, he connects to the skeptic philosophers, he notes that man has now in his hands the power to obliterate civilization. Needham saw little reason to doubt that, before long, he will do just that, making "an end to everything, so that hereafter we shall be as though we had never been." Quoting from of The Wisdom of Solomon, he concluded, "Reason, the careful art by which we interpret the quandary of our existence ... will become extinct in the ultimate reduction to ashes:"

   And our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall remember
   our works; and our life shall pass away as the traces of a cloud,
   and shall be scattered as is a mist, when it is chased by the beams
   of the sun, and overcome by the heat thereof.

Sadly, just as this volume goes to press, we have learned of the death on 12 January 2007 of Professor Robert Barrett, a brilliant psychiatrist and anthropologist, and a good friend of your Editor and of many others in Sarawak and Australia. A memorial to Rob will also appear in the next issue of the BRB.

In This Issue

The Research Notes, Review Articles, and Brief Communications that follow range, as in previous issues, over most of the island of Borneo, and treat a wide variety of topics, from precolonial history, more recent politics and biography, to indigenous migrations, material culture, and local observations of wildlife. Often slighted in the past, West Kalimantan receives, once again, as in recent issues of the BRB, special attention here.

Included near the end of the present volume is a report on the Borneo Research Council's Eighth Biennial Conference, which was held on 31 July--1 August, 2006, in Kuching, Sarawak, under the joint auspices of the Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, and the Borneo Research Council. Our thanks go to Dr. James Chin, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, for organizing the conference and for helping to make it the notable success that it was.

Professor Sutlive, as noted, begins our Memorial section with a tribute to Datin Amar Margaret Linggi. In the two memorials that follow, I pay final respects to two dear friends of my own early years in Sarawak, Henry Gerijih anak Jabo and Dindu anak Saga. A. V. M. Horton concludes the Memorial section with an extended memorial essay for a number of persons associated with Brunei Darussalam whose deaths occurred during 2006.

Over the last seven years, a number of Research Notes have appeared in the BRB that have discussed the history of early states in what is now West Kalimantan. In Volume 30 (1999), Stephanus Djuweng, in a paper entitled "Dayak Kings among Malay Sultans," argued for the existence of a Dayak polity, which he called the Kerajaan Ulu Are (or Aik), 'Kingdom of the Headwaters,' and described as centered in the village of Sengkuang, in the Sandai District of Ketapang Regency, using mainly oral tradition and other contemporary sources as evidence. In a brief companion piece in the same issue, Bernard Sellato set Djuweng's material in a wider historical context and made a persuasive case for the existence of Indianized, pre-Islamic states in West Kalimantan, including an interior Dayak polity on the upper Pawan and Simpang Rivers, that, Sellato suggested, controlled an important overland trading route that formerly connected Sanggau on the Kapuas with Sukadana near the coast. With the coming of Islam and the beginning of European penetration, this polity lost its strategic significance, and remained "Dayak," while other local polities and more powerful coastal and riverine states took on, to varying degrees, the formal trappings of Muslim sultanates. Using Djuweng's essay as an example, Sellato stressed the potential value of oral tradition as a source of historical insight and concluded his paper by noting that, while a good deal is known of Borneo's larger kingdoms such as Banjarmasin and Brunei, "research in the history of petty kingdoms ... may be just as rewarding to the student of ... state formation ..., ethnicity and cultural and social change" (1999:111-12). Indeed, a number of subsequent papers have shown this to be the case and have followed up on Sellato's call for further archival and ethnohistorical research.

In Volume 32 (2001), Reed Wadley and Andrew Smith, for example, enlarged upon these issues, drawing in particular on Dutch colonial accounts and early maps of the West Kalimantan region. As they noted, later Dutch colonial rule had the paradoxical effect of rigidifying Malay/Dayak ethnic distinctions, which, in earlier times, had been far more permeable, enhancing in the process the authority of Malay elites, while disempowering local Dayak populations. In the following year, in Volume 33, Smith and Wadley returned more specifically to Stephanus Djuweng's original essay and suggested that the "Kingdom of the Headwaters" was more a symbolic than a political confederation. In a companion paper, "Reemergence of the Raja Hulu Aiq," John Bamba of the Institut Dayakologi in Pontianak described the current political situation in the Ketapang Regency. Here, elements of a "spiritual kingdom" persist, and Bamba described in his essay the present head and principal claimant of this "kingdom," the Raja Hulu Aiq, and the various symbols of spiritual authority he possesses. He also looked at recent attempts, during the current era of political decentralization, to reassert the Raja's claims to authority against a background of contending economic and political interests, pointing up, in his conclusion, how these paralleled efforts by local Malays to reassert the former ritual and political authority of past Malay sultanates in the region. As Bamba noted, these efforts, coming in a time of comparative freedom, while strengthening ethnic identities, also threaten to "further crystallize ethnic segregation" in a province already known for ethnic strife (2002:73).

In the same issue of the BRB (Volume 33, 2002), Andrew Smith opened a new avenue of research by drawing attention to the writings of a number of lesser-known early travelers to West Kalimantan. In the following year, he followed up this essay with another, "Captain Burn and Associates: British Intelligence-Gathering, Trade and Litigation in Borneo and Beyond During the Early Nineteenth Century" (Vol. 35, 2004). In this essay he described the life and times of a British country trader, Captain Joseph Burn, who wrote what is perhaps the most detailed English-language account of early nineteenth century West Kalimantan.

Burn's account took the form of a lengthy report, composed of letters, submitted in the early months of 1811 to Thomas Stamford Raffles in Malacca on the eve of the British invasion of Java. Although known to historians and occasionally cited in the past, the letters themselves have never before been published. Instead, their content, until now, has been best known in secondhand form through John Leyden's "Sketch of Borneo" [1811] from J. H. Moor, ed., Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries, 1837 (reprinted in 1968 by Frank Cass & Co, London).

As our first Research Note, Bob Reece and Andrew Smith present extended excerpts from this extremely valuable account. First, however, they establish the historical context of Burn's letters and their significance as historical documents. Drawing on Smith's previous Research Note, they also present what is known of Captain Burn himself, the circumstances of his writing the report, and the nature of the letters themselves, which are now preserved as part of the Raffles Collection in the British Library, London. Adding greatly to the value and accessibility of these excerpts, Reece and Smith provide extensive annotations and, with the aid of a map, plausible identification of the various locations described by Burn.

As far as the general history of Borneo is concerned, Burn's account, as Smith noted in his 2004 essay, was of special consequence in that it influenced Raffles and helped convince him of the commercial possibilities of the island. Following the return of Java to Dutch rule, Raffles continued throughout the remainder of his life to actively advocate British involvement in Borneo. After his death, this involvement finally materialized, of course, in the form of Sarawak and British North Borneo. But, for students of Borneo, Burn's account provides, as Reece and Smith note, our earliest description of the upper and middle Kapuas. It also gives a remarkably detailed picture of regional trade, local commodities of trade, centers of power, and political connections and alliances at the time of its writing. In addition, Captain Burn, like Raffles himself, had an observant eye for local peoples, customs, history, and the natural world.

As Smith observed in his earlier BRB paper, and again notes here, there are still other unpublished and, as yet, little-known reports dealing with nineteenth century West Kalimantan, particularly in Dutch and German, and it is hoped that the present Research Note will spark the future publication of still others.

Reed Wadley's Research Note that follows, "Abang in the Middle and Upper Kapuas," is closely linked to that of Reece and Smith and similarly deals with West Kalimantan history. Bob Reece, in a lengthy paper, a summary of which was presented at the 2006 BRC conference in Kuching, has argued that the honorific title Abang, used among the Sadong and Sarawak Malays of western Sarawak, had its origins in pre-Islamic West Kalimantan, deriving initially from a new class of leaders that arose from the union of Hindu-Javanese traders and local Dayak women. Using both Dutch archival and local oral sources, Wadley finds support for Reece's argument and clearly demonstrates the early and pervasive use of this honorific in the Kapuas. He also notes the apparent early importance and relative ease of north-south trade connections in western Borneo before the imposition of the modern political boundaries separating West Kalimantan from Sarawak.

The two brief Research Notes that follow both deal with personalities associated with later Brooke Sarawak. In the first of these, "Some Sarawak Curiosities in the British Library," Bob Reece tells us of some interesting discoveries he made during a recent visit to the British Library in London. Among these is an oratorio-like text written by Mrs. Harriette McDougall for musical accompaniment with hymns, called "The Sarawak Mission: A Service in Song." Of quite a different nature are a set of pamphlets denouncing the collusion of allegedly corrupt Borneo Company agents and the Second Rajah. In the next Research Note, A.V.M. Horton gives us a brief account of the long and remarkably industrious life of the co-author, with C. A. Bampfylde, of A History of Sarawak under its two White Rajahs, 1839-1908 (1909), the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, novelist, hagiographer, hymn-writer, and collector of folksongs.

The next Research Note deals with a more recent period of Sarawak's history. Here, Vernon Porritt writes of Tim Hardy and the Sarawak Special Branch during the period from 1961 to 1968 that bracketed the end of British colonial rule and the first years of Malaysian independence. Drawing not only on newspapers and other published sources, but most especially on Tim Hardy's own unpublished memoirs, Porritt gives us an unusually vivid, but also illuminating, account of undercover activities, police and military actions, and political maneuverings during a particularly tumultuous time marked by a communist insurgency, an armed uprising in nearby Brunei, Confrontation, the transition to independence, detention camps and forced resettlement.

In the next Research Note, Mika Okushima, following up on an earlier BRB paper, presents the first part of a two-part essay describing the historical migrations of Kayanic speaking peoples through much of northern and northeastern Borneo. The second part, which is scheduled to appear next year, will deal more directly with the Kayanic epics and oral historical narratives on which her present reconstruction is largely based. In this paper, Dr. Okushima also discusses dialect differences as evidence of past contacts and population movements.

In the Research Note that follows, "Baskets from the Forest," Valerie Mashman provides an illustrated inventory of the baskets produced over the last century by the Kelabit community of Long Peluan, located near the southern edge of the Kelabit Highlands, and discusses their varied uses and the materials from which they are made. She also describes the effects of recent change on local basket-making, including the construction of logging roads, the loss of forests and hence of basket-weaving materials, changes in farming practices, education and the resulting migration of the young to urban areas, increased access to cash income and conversion to Christianity. Some particularly interesting developments she notes are the emergence of baskets as symbols of ethnic authenticity for urban Kelabit, evangelical Christian revival and basket designs, growth, even in interior Sarawak, of a commercial market for baskets, and a long-term, but changing, basketry connection between the Long Peluan Kelabit and their Penan neighbors. Reflecting the increasingly iconographic, rather than functional role now played by baskets, a Long Peluan artist, Mashman tells us, now sells paintings of baskets in the Miri Heritage Center.

In a final Research Note, "Wildlife Diversity on the Peripheries of Danau Sentarum National Park, West Kalimantan," Reed Wadley presents data on faunal diversity collected in the course of a study of hunting carried out in 1993-1994 among a community of Iban living at the edge of the Danau Sentarum National Park. Danau Sentarum was the subject of an entire issue of the Borneo Research Bulletin (Vol. 31, 2000). The present paper provides important base-line data, particularly, as Wadley notes, in light of an increasing human population and the high level of illegal logging that has taken place in the area since the study was carried out. Of particular interest, the Iban community Wadley studied has managed to preserve most of its older-growth upland forest from logging, creating, at least for the time being, a refuge area for wildlife displaced from surrounding areas that are undergoing logging.

Concluding this volume of the BRB are two Review Articles. In the first of these, A.V.M. Horton assesses the contribution to Brunei historiography of the distinguished historian of Southeast Asia, Dr. D. K. Bassett, who until shortly before his death, in 1989, was Director of the Centre for South-East Asian Studies at the University of Hull. As Horton notes, Brunei was by no means the primary object of Dr. Bassett's scholarly interests. Nonetheless, or, perhaps, even because of this, his interpretations of Brunei history were particularly original and invited reassessment of some long-held positions, for example, Horton observes, notions of the former "glory" and "decline" of the Brunei Sultanate and the historical objectivity of Brooke accounts of Brunei.

In the second Review Article, Michael Heppell looks at three recent publications on Iban textiles. As he notes in his opening paragraph, the appearance of three books in as many years clearly establishes Iban weaving as a subject of significant interest. And rightly so, for Iban textiles have "a range," he tells us, "without equal in island Southeast Asia, [while] their beauty is undeniable." Here, Heppell explores recent interpretative debates and assesses our knowledge of Iban weaving as represented by these publications. An earlier version of Dr. Heppell's essay first appeared in Moussons (2005, Vol. 8:143-53). Here we are grateful to our colleague, Bernard Sellato, for permitting us to republish it in its present revised and expanded form.

Next, Otto Steinmayer, our resident classicist and man of letters, sends us, from Sarawak, another of his "Letters from Lundu." In this one he tells us of the passing of his father-in-law, "Grandfather-of-Sam" (Aki' Sam), who died earlier this year in Lundu at the age of 87. In doing so, he gives us a brief, but affectionate picture of an elderly man who was always happy to share his reminiscences with a fellow "praiser of times past."

Jayl Langub and Jerome Rousseau, in the Brief Communication that follows, describe ten historic paintings depicting scenes from the Kenyah mamat ceremony and their official presentation by Professor Rousseau to the Sarawak Museum in September 2006. The ten paintings were the work of Jalong Liban, an accomplished Kenyah artist of Long Nawang, East Kalimantan, and were originally commissioned by Tom Harrisson and painted in 1966. In 1974, Harrisson made a gift of the paintings to Professor Rousseau, who, in view of their historical and ethnographic significance, chose to present them to the Sarawak Orang Ulu community. Jayl Langub recently transported them from Canada to Sarawak. Here, representatives of the community decided that they should go to the Sarawak Museum. In a formal handover ceremony, they were received by the Museum's Director, Sanib Said, who promised members of the Orang Ulu community that they will be put on permanent exhibition in the Museum's new painting gallery.

In the next Brief Communication, Junita and Paolo Maiullari describe some Katingan Ngaju hats used in connection with curing rituals. Finally, Herwig Zahorka, another frequent contributor to the BRB, describes the chemical and toxic properties of Borneo blowpipe dart poison and the delicate process required to produce it. He also addresses some past misunderstandings about the nature of this poison and its botanical source, Antiaris toxicaria.

Finally, because of the length of this issue of the BRB, your Editor has reluctantly had to postpone the appearance of an excellent paper by Eva Marie and Roger Kershaw on Brunei Dusun augury entitled "Messengers or Tipsters? Some Cautious though Concluding Thoughts on Brunei-Dusun Augury." The paper, an important contribution to a topic of perennial anthropological interest in Borneo, will lead off the Research Notes section of Volume 38.

Thanks and Acknowledgments

Once again I take this opportunity to thank all of those who assisted me during the year with article reviews, provided editorial or technical assistance, or contributed news items, announcements, comments, suggestions, or bibliography. The list, as always, is a long one, but here I would like to acknowledge in particular Jenny Alexander, George Appell, Martin Baier, Dee Baer, Ian Chalmers, James Chin, Beatrice Clayre, Traude Gavin, Antonio Guerreiro, Christine Helliwell, Michael Heppell, A.V.M. Horton, Roger Kershaw, Han Knapen, Jayl Langub, Paolo Maiullari, Ooi Keat Gin, Vie Porritt, Bob Reece, Jerome Rousseau, Menno Schilthuizen, Bernard Sellato, Kenneth Sillander, Andrew Smith, Otto Steinmayer, Vinson Sutlive, Reed Wadley, and Herwig Zahorka. I am grateful, too, to Mrs. Joan Bubier, our Production Editor, for the work she did in preparing the present volume for publication and to the BRC staff in Phillips, Maine, for, once again, overseeing its printing, distribution, and mailing. In this connection, too, Alan Morse provided invaluable help with the reproduction of photographs. 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 throughout the year and a frequent source of news items, memorials, and information on recent publications. Finally, a special thanks goes to my wife, Louise Klemperer Sather, who, as our Assistant Editor, again 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 and have preserved us from innumerable errors and lapses of style.

The Ninth Biennial BRC Conference, "Borneo on the Move," Universiti Malaysia Sabah campus, Kota Kinabalu, 29-31 July, 2008

Initial planning has begun for the BRC's Ninth Biennial Conference to be held in 2008. As was announced during the keynote address at the Eighth Biennial Conference in Kuching, the Universiti Malaysia Sabah has generously offered to act as our conference host. Bilked "Borneo on the Move: Continuity and Change," the Ninth Biennial Conference will be jointly organized by the Kadazandusun Chair and the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, and will be held on the modern UMS campus in Kota Kinabalu. The proposed conference dates are 29-31 July, 2008. Further information and a call for papers will appear in the next volume of the BRB.

Some Useful Websites

Once again, readers are reminded of the Borneo Research Council's website at: www.borneoresearchcouncil.org. Here can be found news and information on the Council's various activities and publications. In addition, Otto Steinmayer oversees an internet Borneo Discussion list to which anyone with an interest in Borneo is welcome to participate (see Notes from the Editor, BRB, vol. 36). Information on the list can be found at http://mail.ikanlundu. com/mailman/listinfo/borneo-I_ikanlundu.com.

Recently, Professor Jay Crain, Department of Anthropology and Asian Studies, California State University at Sacramento, has written that he has posted the final draft of his Kemaloh Lundayeh-English dictionary on a webpage maintained by the CSUS department. The URL, he informs us, is: http://www.csus.edu/anth/Lundayeh%20Studies/lundayeh%20studies%20 index.html.

Finally, readers are reminded, too, of Professor Robert Winzeler's Borneo dissertation website (see Notes from the Editor, BRB, vol. 35). The site address is: http:/www.library.unr. edu.dataworks/Borneo.edu.

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:

Ms. E. Kim Adams, Antiquarian Booksellers "Gemilang," Ms. Charity Appell, Dr. Jay B. Crain, Dr. Michael R. Dove, Dr. Michael Heppell, Professor H. Arlo Nimmo, Dr. Anne Schiller, Dr. & Mrs. Otto Steinmayer, Dr. & Dr. H. L. Whittier, Dr. Robert L. Winzeler, and Dr. Patricia Yamaguchi-Matusky.

GENERAL FUND:

Dr. Jennifer Alexander, Antiquarian Booksellers "Gemilang," Dr. Adela Baer, Dr. Martin Baier, Dr. Jay B. Crain, Dr. Carol J. Colfer, Ms. Katherine Edwards, Dr. Richard Fidler, Ms. Judith Heimann, Mr. John W. McCarthy, Dr. Howard McKaughan, Mr. John D. Pearson, Dato Seri John Pike, Dr. & Mrs. Clifford Sather, Dr. Graham Saunders, Dr. Kenneth Sillander, Dr. & Mrs. Otto Steinmayer, Dr. Jack Stuster, FR Brian Taylor, Dr. Phillip Thomas, Dr. Reed Wadley, Mr. James Wickes, Dr. W. D. Wilder, Mr. William Wilkinson, Dr. Leigh Wright, Dr. Patricia Yamaguchi-Matusky, and Mr. Herwig Zahorka.

We thank each of these individuals for their generous support.

About the Authors in This Issue

Michael Heppell studied Iban social control, including the socialization of children, in the Batang Ai region of Sarawak (1972-1974), leading to a Ph.D. in anthropology (1975, ANU). Later, he spent one year (1981) doing an ethnographic study of the Jakug Bidayuh in West Kalimantan, three months with the Buket on the Balui in Sarawak, and many years doing various consultancies in the four Kalimantan provinces, from which stemmed an interest in Dayak art. Dr. Heppell is the author, most recently, of Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads (Amsterdam: KIT, 2005).

A.V.M. Horton has been a regular contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin since 1985; a Fellow of the Borneo Research Council since 1988; and Book Review Editor/Current Bibliographer, Borneo Research Council, since August 2003. He was a postgraduate student of the late Dr. D. K. Bassett from 1978 through 1986.

Valerie Mashman obtained a Masters in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury. Together with Lucas Chin, she edited Sarawak Cultural Legacy and has written widely on Sarawak indigenous material culture.

Mika Okushima, born in Tokyo in 1969, is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kanda University of International Studies, Japan, and 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), and "Struggles and Challenges of the Nobles under the Indonesian Policy of Tourism and Culture after Decentralization" (In: Jun Nishikawa et al., eds., Reconstructing Social Science (Akashi-shoten, 2007).

Vernon L. Porritt is a frequent contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin. He received his Ph.D. in history from Murdoch University, Western Australia, where he is now Honorary Research Associate. Dr. Porritt is the author of five books on Sarawak, including British Colonial Rule in Sarawak, 1946-1963 (Oxford University Press, 1997) and The Rise and Fall of Communism in Sarawak, 1940-1990 (Monash University Press, 2004). His most recent BRB publication was "From British Military Intelligence to Financial Secretary of Sarawak: John Pike 1945-1967," which appeared in Volume 36 (2005).

Bob Reece is Professor of History at Murdoch 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: Oxford University Press, 1982), Datu Bandar. Abang Hj. Mustapha of Sarawak: Some Reflections of His Life and Times (Kuching: Sarawak Literary Society, 1991), Masa Jepun: 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 of Iban Studies (2001) and the Encyclopedia of Malaysia (2001, 2006). He has recently completed a major article on the origins of the Abang of Sarawak which is to be published in 2007 in a collection of essays being edited by Dr. James Chin.

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 West Kalimantan. He is a member of the Borneo Research Council and a frequent contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin. His most recent BRB publication was "Anthony Richards and the Search for Lawai: Myths, Maps, and History" which appeared last year in Volume 36 (2005).

Reed L. Wadley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA; he is editor of Histories of the Borneo Environment: Economic, Political and Social Dimensions of Change and Continuity (KITLV Press, 2005) and co-editor with Alexander Horstmann of Centering the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands (Berghahn Press, 2006). Dr. Wadley is a member of the Borneo Research Council and a frequent contributor to the Borneo Research Bulletin. His most recent publication was "The 'Dayak Kingdom' in West Kalimantan: Earthly or Spiritual?" co-authored with F. Andew Smith (Vol. 33, 2002).