Sound Environtmental Accounts About Borneo’s Land Dayaks and Their Echoes in Contemporary Performing Arts of The Bidayuh in Padawan.


 

THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL
VOL LXX NO.91 DECEMBER 2012
 
 
Title : 
Sound Environtmental Accounts About Borneo’s Land Dayaks and Their Echoes in Contemporary Performing Arts of The Bidayuh in Padawan.
Author : 
Gisa Jähnichen
Abstract:
In early literature about Borneo’s Land Dayaks, sound environtmental accounts surprisingly play a remarkable role as an illustration tool for landscapes, dispositions of the observed and the observers in various situations of daily life or at different places. This article aims to set these accounts into relation with cultural self-reflections presented in todays’ performing arts of the Bidayuh, the second biggest group of the Dayaks living in Sarawak. By comparing early accounts on sound environment with those about music, various degrees of differentiation can be detected. Experiences in the Bidayuh’s performance culture in the Village Annah Rais will serve as a case to be examined in detail. In current reality, environmental changes through logging, dam projects and the availability of electric power as well as information technology alienate the Bidayuh from a sound environmental setting such as described in early literature. Interestingly, the strangeness between the external traveller and the Borneo interior of the past seems to be not so different in terms of its perceptional impact from the strangeness between the modern Bidayuh themselves and their own sound history. Categories such as sound localness, acoustic adaptiveness and environmental isolation are grouped around the main research question, whether knowledge about sound environmental issues is influencing performing arts intellectually or not. Awareness promotion and political activism seems to shape artistic expressions, which draw on music and dance traditions in an abstract and rather undifferentiated way. Hence this process of re-interpreting traditions idealises a past that has never been real except as part of the Bidayuh’s contemporary performing arts.
DOI:
XXXX
How to cite:
Gisa Jähnichen. (2012). Sound Environtmental Accounts About Borneo’s Land Dayaks and Their Echoes in Contemporary Performing Arts of The Bidayuh in Padawan. The Sarawak Museum Journal, LXX (91): 1-20
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