Peter Metcalf provides an account of how specific historical circumstances influenced the construction of ethnicity for Borneo's Orang Ulu, or Upriver People, located in Sarawak's Baram watershed. He argues that a culmination of historical processes created and sustained the circumstances that allowed longhouses to become centralized communities in interior Borneo. The Life of the Longhouse, based primarily on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s supplemented with archival materials, is a cultural anthropological account that on a macro-scale advocates the idea of “rehabilitating” ethnology by “de-essentializing” ethnicity while examining a complex microcosm of Bornean society.
Focusing on the 1860s to the 1970s, Metcalf hones in on the roles that leadership, trade, and rituals played in the formation and sustenance of a longhouse. Local leaders guided migrations and established strategic sites where distinct populations merged into communities. To illustrate, Metcalf introduces the story of one powerful individual. In the late nineteenth century, Aban Jau convinced people from diverse groups speaking mutually unintelligible languages to settle in a “new” community. This longhouse lasted for decades until Rajah Brooke framed Aban Jau for a crime that he did not commit and essentially destroyed him in a power play designed to justify Britain seizing portions of Brunei's hinterlands. Aban Jau's conflict with the Rajah is representative of events that may have occurred across Borneo as precolonial kingdoms and colonial powers affected life at the longhouses. The example not only reiterates the intended point but also contributes to a lesser-known part of regional history.
Trade goods and routes historically supported the longhouse lifestyle. Metcalf's chapters on trade, especially those on precolonial systems, do indeed show how it regulated the development of longhouse communities and the role they had in sustaining Brunei's economy. Brunei's primary exports for several centuries consisted of jungle goods. Once transported from the almost impassable hinterlands to the city, these goods became an integral part of Brunei's pre-petroleum economy. In return, manufactured goods traded to Brunei slowly trickled down to upriver communities, often becoming symbols of social status. These two-way flows of trade, while meticulously described, would have greater impact if they explicitly elucidated how trade shaped local peoples' conceptualization of ethnicity. However, the narrative continues uninterrupted to explain how the growing colonial infrastructure impacted the entire system, enabling the transport of goods in quantity to the coasts. Metcalf's assertion that trade contributed to sustaining longhouse communities appears well grounded. Despite his claim that he is not a historian, Metcalf reconstructs a more significant amount of history, previously unexplored history at that, than is typical of an archeological record, as referenced in his subtitle.
In his discussion on rituals, Metcalf appropriates Claude Lévi-Strauss's totemic operator and renames it a ritual operator to conform to Bornean religious practices.Footnote 23 He argues that the most important aspect of the model is that it depicts how the “individual and the collectivity are simultaneously produced by the same process” (p. 232), meaning that rituals define and redefine the relationship that persons and groups have within, toward, and against the norms of the overarching community. Metcalf points out that rituals can be tools of control or subversion that influence longhouse communities. They are constantly shaped and being shaped by the people and their environment.
A strength of this book is that it successfully shows how ethnicity—at least in the Sarawakian context—can be viewed as a construct embedded within culture, even though culture is purposely left undefined. Further, it shows that culture itself is shaped by internal (e.g., leadership and rituals) and external (e.g., trade and colonialism) processes. The longhouse concept centered on a dynamic concept of culture that was always in motion, being created, reproduced, and altered by diverse actors and events. This message is powerful, especially as it encourages anthropology as a discipline to move further away from its older penchant of inadvertently examining societies in “static” snapshots. Metcalf's ability to capture the fluidity of Borneo's local ethnicity is laudable.
One goal that Metcalf almost reaches is his quest to revitalize ethnology, though in reality his analysis blends ethnology and ethnography. The final product is essentially an enhanced ethnography. While Metcalf includes multiple sections comparing the Orang Ulu with Edmund Leach's depiction of the Kachin, these comparisons are overtures.Footnote 24 The actual, and more interesting, comparison is how he and Leach conducted their ethnographies. Despite similarities in their subjects, their analyses demonstrate more about how fieldwork uniquely informed their practice of anthropology and less about how to reframe an ethnological analytical approach.
True to his word at the outset, Metcalf presents the longhouse in a way that is not generalizable outside of Borneo, and perhaps only partially valid outside of Sarawak. A true ethnology would seek to interpret the longhouse more universally as a communal dwelling. However, Metcalf's innovative combination of ethnography, historical analysis, and limited comparative anthropology demonstrates that ethnicity does not need to be a restrictive unit of analysis, but rather that combining multiple sources while maintaining the perspective of the peoples under observation can unveil it. This method suggests a deeper, richer understanding of ethnicity as a concept and its relationship to culture. In and of itself, the method may have ethnological applications for anthropological researchers in Borneo and beyond.
