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Social Classification and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

D. E. Brown
D. E. Brown
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

This paper explores certain regularities between social-structural and historical particulars. The particulars are drawn from the society and history of Brunei, an ancient Malay state in northwest Borneo. Since the center of my attention is theory, I shall merely refer the reader to my more extensive summary of the particulars in question.

Information

Type
Status Systems Through Time
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 1973, pp. 437 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

1 Brown, D. E., Brunei: the Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate (Brunei: Monograph of the Brunei Museum, 1970).Google Scholar

2 ‘Non-Bruneis’ here refers only to native inhabitants, not to Chinese, Indians, Europeans or other immigrants.

3 Brown, D. E., ‘Interhierarchical Commissions in a Bornean Plural Society’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science (forthcoming, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 At present there is at least one Brunei who, exceptionally, holds office as a land chief The general rule is firm nonetheless.

5 It should also be noted that some documentary materials on Brunei mention officials or orders which cannot be dated or classified with sufficient confidence for use in the present context. See, for example, ‘List C in Brown, , Brunei: the Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate, pp. 188–91.Google Scholar

6 An alternate scale which could have been employed to inform the left-right axis of Figure 4 is power. It would not be easy to measure power differentials as finely as Bruneis distinguish rank differentials. But I think it is obvious to everyone in Brunei that certain high-ranking non-noble officials are more powerful than many low-ranking nobles. This reverses the usual correlation of rank and power. And, it is also apparent that some of the high-ranking nonnoble officials have longer histories than many of the low-ranking noble officials. Thus, to use a power scale on the left-right axis of Figure 4 might produce a slightly higher correlation of historical with social-structural facts. However, rank and power are sufficiently congruent in Brunei that it is difficult to choose between them here.

7 Smith, M. G., Government inZazzau 1800–1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 313 ff.Google Scholar

8 All generously financed by the London-Cornell Project, to whom I express my gratitude. Thanks also go to the Public Record Office, London, and to the Brunei Museum.

9 But note also that although proposition 4 entails propositions 1 and 2, it does not entail 3. It seems to me that the utility of this sort of framework is not destroyed by the less rigorous relationship exhibited between propositions 4 and 3.

10 The personal motivations of Malay political figures are not at all prominent in Malay historiography. See Bastin, John, ’Problems of Personality in the Reinterpretation of Modern Malayan History’, in Malayan and Indonesian Studies, Bastin, John and Roolvink, R. (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 141–53Google Scholar; Brown, D. E., ‘The Coronation of Sultan Muhammad Jamalul Alam, 1918’, Brunei Museum Journal, 2 (3) (1971), 78.Google Scholar

11 Smith, , op. cit., pp. 313–14 (his italics).Google Scholar