Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 415The above Dutch map depicts Borneo in 1901, the year Haddon published
his study of Borneo and the Torres Straits, Head-Hunters: Black, White and
Brown. It bears a bit of scrutiny. Note that the island is divided into British and
Dutch territories (the dashed line). Before lines could be drawn on maps, Bru-
nei controlled much of the surrounding area from an ancient trade port that by
1901 had been reduced to the lines on the map (and is roughly the same area
today). Sarawak (which today is a province of Malaysia) was under the control
of a British adventurer who was called Raja Charles Brooke, the “White Raja,”
until it became a British protectorate in 1888. Today, Sarawak and north Bor-
neo (now Sabah) are part of Malaysia, which stretches across from the south-
ern part of the Thai Peninsula (except Singapore) with a capital at Kuala
Lumpur. The larger part of Borneo, south and east of the dashed line, was con-
trolled by Dutch Indonesia, and is now a part of Independent Indonesia. (See
also map 12.2.)
Charles Hose worked on the island of Borneo for Raja James Brooke, who
had helped the sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion and, in 1841, was made
governor of Sarawak in gratitude. The title governor wasn’t enough, and soon
he was being called raja, in a process not all that different from the early British
adventurers in India like “Clive of Bengal.” The dynasty of the Brooke family
reigned over Sarawak for over a century, squeezing Brunei into its present con-
figuration. For a thousand years prior to the period of the White Rajas, Brunei,
controlling a large inland area that fed tropical goods into the global market,
had been a major port city on the southern global trade route that began in
Arabia and stretched through Goa, Calicut, Madras, Malaka, Jahor (Singa-
pore), Brunei, Manila, and Canton. Both Arab and Chinese ship masters were
sure to stop in Brunei for the goods that Brunei merchants collected from the
interior tribes, “jungle produce,” much of which was crucial ingredients for
Chinese medicines. Brunei ended up as a tiny independent city-state on the
northwest coast of the island. (Not to worry: Today, the Sultan of Brunei, one
of the few remaining absolute monarchs, is said to be worth $20 billion and
was once the richest man in the world.)
Hose was an amateur ethnographer himself, having already established a
museum, and collected a library of more than 700 volumes. His offer to host
Haddon promised to connect his own amateur work with the foremost ethno-
logical endeavors of the day. Haddon had all the latest equipment and hoped to
move anthropology forward while bringing knowledge of the remote societies
of Southeast Asia and Melanesia to the West. He could make photographs in
stereoscope and in color. He could capture sound by wax cylinder. And he
could capture moving pictures by cinematograph (Chiarelli and Guntarik
2013). Photography, according to these early ethnographers using these mod-
ern recording devices, could capture the real world. Photography accurately
reproduced reality in a way never before possible, it was thought; because of
“its mechanical nature, and its automatism, [it] produced objective ‘visual evi-
dence’ of the ‘real thing,’ averting the danger of any subjectivity of interpreta-