413
s we noted in the introduction to part V, “Southeast Asia” is a geopo-
litical concept invented during World War II to denote a theatre of
war. It never had a civilizational center such as South and East Asia
have had, although it had a pattern of nagaras, small state centers or sacred cit-
ies with a god-king and a ruling ideology based on Hindu-Buddhist notions of
legitimacy. These were to be found both in insular and mainland Southeast
Asia. Chapter 10 focused on some of the better-known examples, particularly
Bali (in Indonesia), Angkor (in Cambodia), and Thailand. Chapter 12 will
return to this region as we conclude with a discussion of colonialism and the
creation of the modern nation-state across the region.
In this chapter, we take a somewhat different approach to several cultural
traditions distributed across much of mainland and insular Southeast Asia out-
side the nagara-style systems, among peoples who resisted the reach of these
labor-hungry states. Standard histories tend to overlook these peoples and their
customs, as we discussed in chapter 4, because they are determined outsiders to
the “civilizing mission” of ever-growing states. Their lifestyles, religious prac-
tices, life-cycle rites, and kinship systems have often been viewed as baffling and
barbarous. In turning to insular Southeast Asia, with its thousands of islands
and loosely incorporated ethnic groups, we have selected a few classic studies
by anthropologists to illustrate some of these traditions (mortuary rites, head-
hunting, child rearing, and cockfighting) beyond state centers. They take us to
groups in Borneo (especially the Dayak and Berawan), the largest island in
Indonesia and briefly to the Alor on a tiny island in Indonesia. To understand
the lingering culture of head-hunting (without actual head-hunting) we turn to
a group in Luzon (the Ilongot), the largest island in the Philippines. And finally
we turn to villagers in Bali, the most studied place in insular Southeast Asia, for
a famous study on character formation and another one on cockfighting.Borneo
Haddon in Borneo
At the end of the nineteenth century, a British administrator working in Bor-
neo named Charles Hose learned that a respected anthropologist he had met in
London was on a scientific expedition to the Torres Straits, a string of islands
stretching between New Guinea and Australia. Why not come to Borneo? The
two had met in London several years earlier, and Hose understood that Alfred Cort
Haddon was pioneering a new approach to scientific research, the “intensive studyA
Chapter opener photo: Children playing on bamboo raft at Kuching on the Sarawak River.