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This article examines dependency on cross-border labor and marriage along the international frontier in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia (Borneo) and some local efforts to restrict outsiders. The international border in this remote region of Borneo is highly permeable, and border-crossing activities, including seasonal migrant wage labor and cross-border marriage, are crucial both to the local political economy and to the reproduction of the Kelabit family and farm. This article explores the unique position of the Kelabit as they attempt to appropriate aspects of state power or use the rhetoric of state power in their efforts to maintain a status quo with regard to neighboring, and closely related, migrant workers from across the border. Key Words: borders, state power, Kelabit, Sarawak, Borneo

Introduction In 1953, Alastair Morrison, then acting District Officer for the Baram, traveled to the Kelabit Highlands along with his wife, photographer Hedda Morrison, and an ever-changing entourage of 'coolie' [...]

Monica Janowski. The Forest, Source of Life: the Kelabit of Sarawak. London: British Museum Occasional Paper No 143, November 2003; hbk; 154pp; 25.00 £. The Forest, Source of Life is [...]

Poline Bala. Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia: Dayak Studies Contemporary Society Series, No. 1, The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Malaysia Sarawak, 2002, 142 pp., RM25.00, USD8.00, AUD13.00, paper. [...]

2005, Frontiers, Sovereignty, and Marital Tactics: Comparisons from the Borneo Highlands and the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle. 6(1), April:1-17 This article considers transnational relationships between men and women from two Southeast [...]

The aim of this article is to show, through a detailed ethnographic case, how social space can be viewed as consisting of superimposed layers. Building on theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Foucault in terms of their approaches to space, power, and visibility, the article looks at the Kelabit people, a small, indigenous group whose homelands lie in the interior highlands of Borneo along an international frontier. Examining various facets of the Kelabit social life, and focusing on different forms of social optics that can be identified in Kelabit social spaces, the article shows how concerns about visibility, surveillance, privacy, and control are intimately linked in this community, both with regard to life in the rural borderlands--where transnational movement and migrants pose new dilemmas in terms of community belonging--and in terms of the relationships within and between rural and urban Kelabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores changing perceptions of the natural environment among the Kelabit, an indigenous people of the Borneo interior. It considers both traditional and post-Christian conversion understandings about forest spaces. The former animistic ritual practices of the Kelabit centered on a spiritual dialogue with the natural world and this dialogue was often marked by active efforts to avoid or mitigate danger through ritual practice. One key example presented here is the former ceremony of 'calling the eagle' (nawar keniu), a ritual employed in times of crisis that exemplifies the dialogical and entwined relationship Kelabit had to the natural world. Such former animistic beliefs are contrasted with contemporary Christian practices, including a local mountain retreat on Mount Murud and present-day political and economic anxieties over logging in the Kelabit Highlands, as a means to consider relationships between religion and attitudes toward the environment among the Kelabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]