Kayan Religion

Kayan Religion
Author: J. Rousseau
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2022-07-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004454314

Kayan Religion is an ethnographic account of the rituals and beliefs of Central Borneo swidden agriculturists, written at the request of the Baluy Kayan of Sarawak to preserve their religion for future generations. With its extensive agricultural rituals, Kayan religion is organized around the agricultural cycle. Both priests and shamans are present; the latter limit themselves to curing rituals, while priests manage the annual cycle, life-cycle rituals, and familial rituals. Like other groups in Southeast Asia, the Kayan have elaborate death rituals. The traditional Kayan religion (adat Dipuy) was characterized by ritual head-hunting, animal omens, and a multiplicity of taboos. In the 1940s, a prophet revealed a new religion (adat Bungan) in Central Borneo, with particular success in the Baluy area. In its initial stage, adat Bungan was a radical rejection of the old religion. However, in just a few years, a kind of counter-reformation occurred, led by aristocrats and priests, who reinstated most of the old rituals in a simplified and less onerous form.

Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture

Borneo Studies in History, Society and Culture
Author: Victor T. King
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 619
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811006725

This edited book is the first major review of what has been achieved in Borneo Studies to date. Chapters in this book situate research on Borneo within the general disciplinary fields of the social sciences, with the weight of attention devoted to anthropological research and related fields such as development studies, gender studies, environmental studies, social policy studies and cultural studies. Some of the chapters in this book are extended versions of presentations at the Borneo Research Council’s international conference hosted by Universiti Brunei Darussalam in June 2012 and a Borneo Studies workshop organised in Brunei in 2012. The volume examines some of the major debates and controversies in Borneo Studies, including those which have served to connect post-war research on Borneo to wider scholarship. It also assesses some of the more recent contributions and interests of locally based researchers in universities and other institutions in Borneo itself. The major strength of the book is the inclusion of a substantial amount of research undertaken by scholars working and teaching within the Southeast Asian region. In particular there is an examination of research materials published in the vernacular, notably the outpouring of work published in Indonesian by the Institut Dayakologi in Pontianak. In doing so, the book also addresses the urgent matters which have not received the attention they deserve, specifically subjects, themes and issues that have already been covered but require further contemplation, elaboration and research, and the scope for disciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration in Borneo Studies. The book is a valuable resource and reference work for students and researchers interested in social science scholarship on Borneo, and for those with wider interests in Indonesia and Malaysia, and in the Southeast Asian region.

New Literacies

New Literacies
Author: Debbita Tan Ai Lin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2014-10-16
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1443869562

The notion of change is central to this book. Across the globe, there exists a pressing need for transformation in the way teachers teach, in the manner by which learners learn, and in our approach towards defining literacy in the 21st century. Historically, the term ‘literacy’ has been used to primarily denote reading and writing abilities, a designation which is today largely considered both quintessential and overly simplistic. The field of literacy, like many others within the realm of education, has a tendency to evolve and shift from one paradigm to another, vacillating between the demands of globalisation and the implications brought forth by the advent of new technologies. Reading and writing – communication, in essence – is happening in very different ways and via varied avenues; blogs, podcasts, online news, and tablets coupled with countless applications. Such changes are increasingly borderless and rapidly accelerating, and are bound to influence the nature of literacy itself as well as how it is perceived in diverse contexts in different parts of the world. This calls for a reorientation with regard to how researchers, educators and stakeholders view literacy in today’s terms.

Hierarchies of Power

Hierarchies of Power
Author: Imam Ardhianto
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9811901716

This book focuses on a Pentecostal-Evangelical Kenyah community in central Borneo, a region that crosses the border between Malaysia and Indonesia. The book argues that the Pentecostal-Evangelical (P/e) mode of religious authority and organization has the capacity to adapt to both the pre-existing hierarchical traditional institution such as Adat and modern egalitarian social forms. It has been necessary within the context of Kenyah’s experience of religious change as it enabled many actors from various social classes to obtain and perceive religious authority in a specific local and regional political-religious situation while promoting their identity as egalitarian and autonomous modern subjects. In contrast with other studies on the P/e church that emphasize its egalitarian spirit as a factor that supports its impressive growth, the book contends that its adaptive structural characteristics have enabled the development of this specific Christian denomination to expand rapidly and play a dominant position in contemporary social life in various parts of the world. The book thus provides novel findings in the study of religious change in Southeast Asia by enriching the discussion of historical transformation in the region, and analyzing the articulation of global and regional Christian movements, with the socio-political characteristics of Bornean society.

Anthropos

Anthropos
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2000
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN:

Central Borneo

Central Borneo
Author: Jérôme Rousseau
Publisher: copyright reverted to author
Total Pages: 197
Release: 1989-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0198277164

This comparative study of the peoples of central Borneo offers an unusually detailed description of a pre-colonial society. Professor Rousseau analyses a region characterized by great ethnic diversity and unravels the relation between ethnicity, social organization, language, and cultureamong its peoples.Geographically, central Borneo is divided into several river basins, each of which forms part of a different country. Because of this, the area has traditionally been dealt with in a fragmented way by academics. Yet the records of scholars, missionaries, and administrators that have been keptsince the area came under colonial control at the beginning of the twentieth century provide ethnographic and historical data virtually unmatched in the rest of the insular South East Asia. Professor Rousseau's extensive survey of the available literature and archival material, backed up by manyyears of fieldwork in the region, challenges some long-held views and assumptions. First he shows that, while ethnic identity is normally expected to act as a divider between social groups, this area of great ethnic diversity actually forms a single society. Secondly, although it is thought thatsmall-scale, stateless societies tend to show little evidence of social inequality, he demonstrates that the communities of central Borneo have until recently had a clearly hierarchical structure.The uniquely detailed evidence presented in this study and its comparative approach shed an entirely new light not only on central Borneo, but also on the fundamental nature of societies.