the Living Kelabit Landscape: Cultural Sites and Landscape Modifications in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
the Living Kelabit Landscape: Cultural Sites and Landscape Modifications in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia. |
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Author :
Sarah Hitchner |
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Abstract:
Although the area of the Kelabit Highlands is relatively small in size (~2500 km2) and the population of the Kelabit people living in the Kelabit Highlands is also relatively small (~1500), this landscape is highly anthropogenic and contains a substantial number of megaliths, landscape modifications, and other cultural sites. In the mid-1950s, Tom Harrisson (1954: 107) said that “no other Bornean people (as far as we know) have such an active megalithic life todayor in the recent past. In- deed the whole area is rich with a vigorous mythology of culture heroes and monsters and with complicated social competition and material exchange, centered on the inheritance priorities of those who pay for the monuments, which are superficiallyno more than ‘loving reminders’ of the late great.” He was the first Westerner to systematically study (and often excavate) these cultural sites, and he published widely on his findings in The Sarawak Museum Journal. Many Kelabit living today know which sites he visited (as is sometimes visually obvious when visiting the sites today by the excavation pitsnear burials, under erected stones, or within rock piles), and often, with a tinge of resentment, they know which artefacts he took from them. Since then, Kelabit have had a wary approach to foreign researchers, quite a number of whom have expressed interest in studying various aspects of the culture and ecology of the Kelabit Highlands (see Bala, 2002: 2-7). The community has had mixed experiences with them since Tom Harrisson, and although the Kelabit are well-known throughout Sarawak for being hospitable and accommodating toward visitors, they also want more control over the types of research carried out in the Kelabit Highlandsas well as possession of data produced as a result of such studies.
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| DOI: https://doi.org/10.61507/smj22-2008-VAX4-01 |
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How to cite:
Sarah Hitchner. (2009). the Living Kelabit Landscape: Cultural Sites and Landscape Modifications in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia. The Sarawak Museum Journal, LXVI (87): 1-79 |
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References
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