27 July 2022
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Liana Chua, who teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the UK, has studied the landscapes of Borneo, its ethnic politics and religious identities. Her research explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Christian conversion in Borneo, particularly among indigenous Bidayuh communities in Sarawak. Her book ‘The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo’ was published in 2012.
What brought you to study Borneo and its people?
I am a social anthropologist from Singapore although I’ve lived in the UK for over 20 years now. Just like many other anthropologists, I started life in a different discipline.
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I began with a degree in modern history. During that time I kept being drawn to topics that helped me understand encounters across different cultural, social, and political boundaries. What happens when radically different people come together? What happens in that sort of meeting space?
This interest in encounters drew me to eventually do a Ph.D. in social anthropology. I started looking around for a possible ethnographic focus. I wanted to understand the lives and the experiences of people and places that were portrayed as very different when I was growing up in Singapore. The life there was portrayed radically ‘other’, as strange, primitive, exotic, and just kind of weird, right?
However, my upbringing in Singapore hadn't equipped me very well to deal with this sort of otherness for various reasons. But I was interested in understanding the world that surrounds this crazy little island of Singapore. I was trying to find a better way of engaging with the difference than the way that I was brought up with.
I went off and did some reading and I came across various back issues of the Sarawak Museum Journal in the Cambridge libraries and read a number of articles and found myself being drawn to several studies on the Bidayuh, Sarawak’s second largest indigenous group. Sarawak is a state in Malaysian Borneo.
That helped me understand what was going on — how they were dealing with the effects of modernity, the decline of subsistence agriculture, with the shift to Christianity. It was basically another space of encounter that I wanted to understand.
I did more reading and made a preliminary trip to Sarawak and then eventually decided that this would be the focus of my study.
In one of these background trips, I visited a number of Bidayuh villages in a jeep with a Bidayuh man, a well-respected church leader whom I met through various connections.
In one place I found an interesting little private mini museum that was run by an old man, who was now Catholic but was a descendant of the village’s original ritual lineage. It was an interesting combination of both individual and ritual prestige and knowledge. For context: The concept of multiculturalism was a big thing in Malaysia. Having ‘a culture’ and performing your cultural identity was very much a way of participating in public life as a Malaysian citizen. And this old man was trying to do both of them at the same time.
We spoke and agreed to work together to document the various aspects of "Bidayuh culture," as he styled them. I hoped to understand how one particular community in the area was dealing with all these changes in their lives — modernization, urbanization, new infrastructure, and the sort of economic possibilities that these generate.
And that was how I ended up doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. in a village. It lasted about 14 to 15 months. That's the short story of how it came to be.
Dayak dancers participate in a Dayak festival in Jakarta on April 28, 2013. Dayaks are native people of Borneo or Kalimantan — the third largest island in the world. There are over 30 Dayak sub-ethnic groups living in Borneo making the population of this island one of the most varied human social groups. (Photo: AFP)
Can you give us a sense of the main Christian groups in western Borneo and their social-political context?
When we speak about Western Borneo, we are very broadly speaking about the southwestern part of Sarawak, which is in East Malaysia, and the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan just south of it.
Borneo is a giant island (with a land area of some 748,000 square kilometers). It is split between not only three countries, but also very different colonial histories and legacies. Kalimantan, like much of Indonesia, was ruled by the Dutch, Sarawak was ruled primarily by a private British dynasty called the Brooke Raj and then later (along with Brunei and the East Malaysian state of Sabah) by the British Crown. So there's a kind of split between British and Dutch colonial influence here.
Across western Borneo, there's huge variation in terms of its Christian populations. But broadly speaking, we can identify a few key trends. Most Christians in this part of Borneo are usually non-Muslim ethnic minorities, especially indigenous groups and Chinese.
Christianity also can be found in both urban and rural areas. In rural areas, Christians are very often linked with individuals, communities, and church networks. But in urban areas, they are linked to structures of large parish churches.
Christians here are also diverse as there are several different denominations around. Multi-denominational or even multi-church networks go all the way down to the village, the household, and the family level. It's not uncommon, for example, to find people of two different denominations living together within the same village or family. It's also not uncommon to find people moving between different church denominations for whatever reason. Marriage, for example, is quite a common reason.
When you think about the actual strains of Christianity and this region, generally, we tend to find two main categories.
The first is what we might call ‘old-school’ Christians. These are Catholics as well as various strains of Protestantism introduced during colonial periods. So in Sarawak, it would have been the British missionaries — both Anglican and Catholic — who introduced Christianity under the auspices of the Brooke Raj. In Kalimantan, this would have been done by the Dutch missionaries. You also have various smaller churches like the Methodists and Presbyterians turning up in the late colonial period; they’re kind of side players in this Christian landscape. Those are the older communities of Christians who have been around for quite a long time.
Then, we have late colonial and post-colonial waves of Pentecostal and independent churches that have sprung up in cities and villages across western Borneo. These include homegrown Borneo-based churches like the Sidang Injil Borneo (SIB or the Borneo Evangelical Church). There is also the West Kalimantan Christian Church. That's another sort of evangelical church, mainly active in Pontianak and West Kalimantan.
These churches became influential in the 80s and 90s, often as offshoots of mostly independent missionary activities. And they do present a bit of a contrast to the older churches, which are much more entrenched and more organizationally complex and bureaucratic. Converts to these newer churches often come from older Christian denominations.
When speaking about the Christian situation in West Borneo, we must know that for many indigenous groups in Borneo, Christianity is important as a religion and way of life. But it's also an important buffer for these indigenous adherents against Islamic proselytization and various forms of state intervention.
In both Malaysia and Indonesia, traditional indigenous animist rituals and beliefs are not officially recognized as religions. They are kind of downplayed by the state as not quite religious but just ‘traditions’ or ‘beliefs’. And indigenous rituals tend to be seen as inferior to what are seen as world religions like Christianity and Islam.
In Borneo, people who follow indigenous animist rituals were, up to quite recently, often viewed as backward or primitive by the majority and the state. As such, they were seen as fair game for conversion to a so-called ‘real’ (i.e. world) religion like Islam, the religion of the dominant majority.
In this context, Christianity has become a means for indigenous groups to push back against the condescension, and efforts to convert them to Islam. It helps them to assert their legitimacy as people who have a religion and who are as ‘modern’ as those who follow Islam. So Catholicism, and Christianity in general, plays a strong socio-political role here.
What was your main finding among Bidayuh Christians?
I did my Ph.D. fieldwork in one particular Bidayuh village from 2004 to 2005, with a repeat stint in 2006 and nearly yearly visits after that. The mid-2000s was an interesting phase in the village's history as it was coming to the end of quite a protracted, decades-long process of converting to various strains of Christianity, mainly Anglicanism and Catholicism.
By the time I arrived, the majority of the villagers were Christians. But there was a handful of about ten elderly and frail practitioners of the old rituals, adat gawai. These old people were still doing their rituals, often with support from their Christian relatives and friends.
It was an interesting time to be in this village because for many people the memory of conversion was fresh. The memories of growing up doing adat gawai rituals and then leaving them to accept Christianity midway in life were still fresh for them. People often talked about conversion and reflected on its effect on their village.
But there were still old gawai practitioners, and the spirits associated with these rituals were still around. So it was very much a kind of village in transition.
What is the focus of your book?
I think my book tried to do two main things.
The first thing it does is to present a history and contemporary account of Christian life in one particular Bidayuh village. That’s how it is now read by younger villagers. It was published as an account of what was happening when their older relatives were converting. It is an attempt to draw attention to the fact that Christianity here wasn't a kind of a singular thing. It was a whole bunch of Christianity. There are different denominations, different reasons for converting, and many different shapes that Christianity could take in Bidayuhs’ day-to-day lives. I wanted to try and capture them all just by telling the story of conversion.
Secondly, the book tries to figure out a puzzle that ran right through my fieldwork. This was the question of what we should make of the continued and the relatively unproblematic existence of the old gawai rituals in a village that was almost completely Christian.
What interested me was the way these gawai practitioners carried out these extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming rituals. They would have to go into the jungle, cut down bamboo, and create these big bamboo structures. They would be sacrificing animals, which were quite expensive. As part of the rituals, they had to observe certain prohibitions for eight days, such as locking themselves in their house, not working, and not doing certain things. Their Christian friends, family, and neighbors actively supported them in these rituals.
I was trying to understand what was going on. I wanted to know why these Christians felt obliged to support the rituals, and also how the old Gawai practitioners viewed their relationship with the Christians. I tried to elucidate all this within the context of a village in transition.
Everyone in the village said ‘We are all Christians here’ — this was a big refrain. But the villagers actually belonged to three different churches — Anglican, Catholic and the evangelical SIBs. These differences usually didn’t matter, but they became visible when Christians had to deal with the old gawai rituals. The two older denominations — Catholicism and Anglicanism—viewed the rituals differently from the newer Evangelical Church.
The Anglicans and the Catholics were keen on accommodating the old rituals. They explained it through the language of inculturation and did not see the rituals as being in competition with their religion. The rituals were part of what they described as ‘Bidayuh culture’. This perception was important in the initial days of conversion, when Christians were a minority in the village and most, almost all other villagers, followed gawai. At that time, it was important that the new converts didn't destroy their existing social and moral relations with their older relatives and the rest of the village. So there was a concerted effort to accommodate the old ways.
By contrast, the SIB followers, mainly converted from Anglicanism in the 1990s. It was a very small congregation, about 25 households at the time. They were keen on making a very clean break from the past and so they recast the gawai spirits and rituals as the work of Satan. There was a fear about what these spirits could do in village life. Some people were genuinely rattled by the possibility of the gawai spirits turning up at these rituals. So the SIBs often tried hard to stop or avoid gawai rituals in the village.
During my fieldwork, I witnessed an incident. Some elderly gawai women were walking around the village doing their annual blessing of village households. They kind of anointed people with protective substances and holy water and chanted various things. They walked from door to door, and everybody would just let these women in, sit down, and be blessed, because it was just a routine. Most people accommodated it, saying, “Well, it is meant to bless the village, it is meant to be a good thing. We can accept it. That's no problem.”
The only people who actively rejected it were those from the SIB church. Some of them just slammed the door in these women’s faces. There was a real hostility toward the ritual. That was quite striking.
So in my book, I argued that the Anglicans and Catholics had their own sort of theory of continuity, of connection, between gawai and Christianity. They talked about gawai as their culture rather than as an old religion competing with Christianity.
This picture taken on May 20, 2018, shows members of the Dayak tribe attending the Gawai Dayak Festival in Pontianak, West Kalimantan. The Gawai Dayak festival is a thanksgiving festival to celebrate their harvest. (Photo: AFP)
They also often talked about gawai as being the same as Christianity in the sense you're basically praying to the same God. This is interesting because the missionaries who brought Anglicanism and Catholicism used the indigenous word for the Supreme God, "Tǎpa" for the Christian God. The Supreme Beings of gawai and Christianity have the same name: Tǎpa.
So, they had the same God; and had the same aim to pray to powerful unseen beings. They all prayed to bring good things and blessings to the village to make sure that the community was happy and healthy and that everyone was taking care of each other.
The influence of Christianity really kicked in with the idea of ‘loving your neighbor’. It was a big theme in both Anglican and Catholic sermons and people's reflections on what Christianity was all about. The basic logic here was that God loves the world. One way for humans to manifest God's love for us was by loving our neighbors and taking care of each other. For the Anglicans and Catholics, taking care of the gawai practitioners was a manifestation of the idea of loving thy neighbor.
Essentially that was what my book was about. It was trying to tell the story, but also trying to understand what was going on at the interface between the old gawai rituals and the Christians who were supporting them.
How do you think the situation has evolved in the village since your last visit in 2006?
Things have changed quite a lot since 2006, and certainly since my book was published. So this is, you know, typical Murphy's Law: Just after my book, which was all about the coexistence of gawai and Christianity, was published in 2012, the village stopped doing gawai. Gawai just came to an end.
It surprised me a bit because I thought that the old practitioners would just carry on following gawai until their death. But they found it was just too difficult and physically demanding to keep going. So they ‘followed’, as they put it, their children. They joined their children's Christian denominations and became either Anglican or Catholic. Now there is no more gawai in the village.
Many of the big tensions and dilemmas about how to coexist with gawai spirits have disappeared. The big questions — such as whether to see Christianity as the continuity of gawai, or whether gawai is necessarily a good thing — have gone. That has removed a lot of tension and pressure from the Christians in the village.
The denominational landscape has also changed a little bit, as elsewhere in Borneo. I think in Malaysia more generally, evangelical churches like the SIB have increased their presence. More people in the village are converting to SIB from the older denominations now. There's also a Seventh-Day Adventist presence in the village, which mixes things up even further.
I have also noticed that a lot of the older churches have started to adopt more charismatic features in their services.
This is possibly a result of the influence of evangelical churches. There is an interesting strain of Indonesian YouTube sermons and music videos that many people in the Sarawak region are watching and listening to. Often these have an evangelical and charismatic element and seem to be seeping into younger Christians’ practice.
The biggest change in this village is that most people aged below 50 today were born Christian. When I was doing fieldwork, the memory of conversion was very much in people's minds. Today Christians in the village are much more secure in their identity as Christians.
The final big change is that people in the village, and Bidayuh communities in general, have become much more urbanized, More people are shuttling between their village homes and urban workplaces. There is much more integration of their religious life with parish churches in urban areas. In the past, the village churches were the center of the Christian life. But that has dissipated slightly because people themselves are much more dispersed.
Anyu Daik (right), 70, and Anat Ugom, 44, from a sub-tribe of the Bidayuhs indigenous group, are seen wearing traditional yellow copper rings around their necks, forearms and calves, in this picture taken in Padawan in the state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, on April 9, 2017. The women started wearing the rings, seen as a sign of beauty and prestige, when they were around 10. (Photo: AFP)
Along with this, we must consider increased internet access, which I already touched on when I talked about those YouTube videos. The popularity of social media has brought in a much stronger sense of being part of a global Christian community.
This sense of being part of a global Christian network has made people aware that Christianity is not something that can be confined to the village or even to Malaysia, but something that links them to other communities across the world. They were aware of it in the past but social media has made it much clearer in recent years.
Along with that has come a heightened awareness of the politics of religion in public life. For example, there is much greater sensitivity these days about how much stronger influence Islam has in Malaysian public life. Villagers have also become more concerned about the fate of Christians in Muslim majority countries, which they hear about via social media.
Generally, there's an increased sense of engagement with the wider global community now.
Could you tell us more about your methodological approach and about your way of conducting research?
The research was not limited to any particular denomination. My study covered all denominations of Christians. This sort of inter-linked study in the Bornean context offered me a lot of fluidity and mobility, and flexibility.
As I mentioned earlier, people don't tend to be very precious about their denominational identity. People always say that ‘we are all Christian.’ And that sense of an overarching Christian identity makes them much less fussed about exactly which Christian denomination they actually belong to. They are (generally) cool about the denominational difference.
This links into a much longer-running and much broader tendency across Borneo. By and large indigenous people in Borneo tend to be very flexible. They tend to be very adaptable to different circumstances. For them, it's perfectly normal to move between different denominations depending on the situation. If marriage demands a Catholic to move to Protestant Church, that’s fine and vice versa. No big deal because you're all Christian anyway, right?
We see similar things in the West even though we may not talk about it much, right?
Exactly. But I guess what we're looking at here is a combination of fixity and flexibility. The sort of really fixed bit is the sense of Christian identity. Bidayuhs are basically considered Christian. There are Bidayuhs who follow Islam or Buddhism, but most Bidayuhs’ ethnic identity is closely linked to their Christian identity. As a result of this fixity, you can get a huge amount of fluidity within the Christian identity.
This flexibility gets reflected in my own research methodology in the sense that when I was doing fieldwork, my interest was not, for example, theology. When you're studying Pentecostalism or working in the anthropology of Christianity, it can sometimes be very tempting to go in for a kind of theologically or linguistically centered study based more on literary sources of information.
Christians attend Christmas Eve Mass in Jakarta Cathedral in the Indonesian capital on Dec 24, 2021. (Photo: AFP)
I was interested in things that are unsaid and often unseen. I mean the kind of stuff that you can't necessarily see or hear about in scriptures, or in theological writing. It would be the kind of whispered conversations you might have in the back of the parish church. It might be a specific bodily experience of Christianity, where they talked about the way they felt when holy water was sprinkled on them, or how they knew that God was there with them. These were things that my interlocutors couldn't necessarily articulate in any clear way. That could necessarily be given a strong theological or linguistic shape.
You get access to those sorts of understandings and experiences only by being there, in person, constantly attending prayer services, and doing the sort of everyday things that the villagers do. It’s by paying attention to those everyday experiences that you find your way into the nooks and crannies of village Christianity. One may not have an access to this as a theologian or if one focuses only on one single denomination. The multi-denominational approach helps you get a view of the big cultural transformations that Christianity can enact in peoples’ lives.
It’s in those small moments that you see those everyday experiences and the kind of inter-denominational fluidity that exists in the village. It’s not dramatic. My focus was very much on the everyday stuff. That’s what I was interested in.
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