Editors’ Note

In partnership with Associate Professor Dr Fadzilah Majid Cooke of the Universiti Malaysia Sabah and Dr Olivia Guntarik of RMIT University, SOJOURN has the privilege of publishing in this edition of the journal five articles addressing dimensions of the theme, “Representing Borneo: Contradiction, Continuity, and Change”. Its territory shared by three modern Southeast Asian nation-states, Borneo figures as one of the most dynamic — if least understood — arenas of social and cultural change in the region. An active interest in developments on Borneo has characterized SOJOURN for nearly three decades. This edition of the journal underlines its commitment both to continuing to publish significant scholarship on Borneo and to working closely with scholars at institutions in Southeast Asia and outside the region. The sixth contribution to this edition of SOJOURN, Robert Elson’s comparison of debates over the relationship of Islam to the Indonesian constitution in the late 1950s and late 1990s, also reflects a central concern of the journal: processes of religious change in Southeast Asia.

In their exploration of historical and contemporary enactments of relations of power and strategies of contestation, the five articles on Borneo bring together scholars from a range of disciplines, all engaged with the politics of representation. Collectively, the articles address some of the “big questions” in the study of Borneo on the basis of rigorous empirical research. Each article considers possibilities that shift representations beyond old binaries, proceeding from the notion that representations are politically grounded (Said 1978, p. 311) and that they serve when inscribed with power to create knowledge that offers solutions to societies’ problems (Li 2007, p. 26). These five articles capture the complex nature of different forms and practices of representation, and show that the study of representation requires a flexible interpretative approach.

The contribution of Chiarelli and Guntarik offers a chronicle of early anthropology through an analysis of the British explorer A.C. Haddon’s photographs, taken during the period of Brooke rule in Sarawak. It examines a time in which anthropology was evolving from a field that relied on second-hand materials towards one marked by a new empiricism. With their strong tensions between objective knowledge and subjective experience, Haddon’s photographs highlight his reservations about the classification of people into ethnically different “tribes”.

Other contributors examine a range of contemporary vehicles of representation, including the media (Barlocco), development agents (Bissonnette; Majid Cooke) and international conservation programmes such as that aimed at “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation”, or REDD (Niall, Godden, Tehan and Godden). These vehicles make clear the sheer diversity of means and subjects of representation on Borneo. Subjects of representation at the local/national interface include the Kadazandusun community, whose identity the media have promoted through an emphasis on a shared consumerism (Barlocco); smallholder farmers in Kalimantan, whose escape from poverty though participation in large oil palm schemes has been prescribed by agents of development (Bissonnette); and indigenous peoples in rural Sabah, whom such agents seek to “protect” from their own “weaknesses” as these weaknesses are made manifest in customary land transactions (Majid Cooke). At the international level, experts on climate change work to draw on appropriate traditional knowledge and practices to structure commercially viable projects that can operate in global carbon markets (Niall, Godden, Tehan and Godden).

The range of claims to knowledge examined in these articles reflects the complex mix of issues confronting the peoples and environments of Borneo. The five articles make no pretence to definitive coverage, of presenting an exhaustive analysis of the concerns that Borneo confronts. The articles neglect, for example, significant areas of Borneo, especially Brunei. But their geographical coverage aims to address representational politics as broadly conceived. They work from different theoretical perspectives and are thus able to submit such issues as poverty or environmental degradation or identity to interdisciplinary examination.

Bissonnette, for example, combines theoretical approaches from geography and anthropology, while Majid Cooke applies social movement theory, an approach developed in environmental sociology, human geography and the political-science sub-field of political ecology. Barlocco deploys the tools both of communications and media studies and of anthropology. Niall, Godden...