In my mother’s cupboard hangs a nyonya kebaya that belonged to my grandmother. It was handed down to my mother by her mother, and which my mother would eventually do the same for either of her daughters.
To my grandmother, the nyonya kebaya wasn’t just clothing, it was also part of her identity as a Kelantan Peranakan Chinese—the paired kebaya and batik sarong reflecting the cultural amalgamation of Malay, Chinese and Thai.
In this material world, we have items that we treasure. And in these items, they often carry a significant cultural meaning. Both form the two interrelated aspects of human culture: the physical objects of the culture and the ideas associated with these objects such as the ideas, beliefs, habits and values of a people.
Through objects (or the material culture), we can better understand the lives of the people who interacted with those objects, providing an insight and revealing stories about cultural identities, migration patterns, as well as a reminder of one’s origins.
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The Prized Possessions of the Orang Ulu Tribes
mado lawe, mula’ nuk keli
Far travelling increases one’s understanding
To the Kelabit, experiences gained through travelling are considered knowledge, and this is closely related to two fundamental Kelabit concepts: doo-ness and iyuk. 1.
According to Poline Bala, doo-ness embodies the qualities that make a good and successful person, such as knowledge, endurance and perseverance, self discipline, hospitality, generosity, and strength. Iyuk describes the notion of movement, specifically to status mobility. To attain iyuk and doo-ness, the Kelabits perform cultural activities of travelling far (me ngerang mado) and gaining ownership of prestige items, such as old dragon jars (belanai ma'un), beads (ba'o), machetes (tungul), and gongs.
Poline explained that these prestige items in the longhouses derive their meanings and values from the arduous me ngerang mado journey in transporting them to the Kelabit highlands, which took at least three to four weeks on foot or by boat. 2. These prestige items, traded from the ‘great outside’ against forest products and taken into the highlands, were then adapted to the way of life of the Kelabits. For example, the T'ang and Ming Chinese jars were used as storage jars for ceremonial rice wine (burak) as well as seen as status symbols for members of the aristocratic strata in Kelabit society.
Similarly the Kenyah and Kayan society also viewed beads, gongs, and jars as prized possessions, emblematic heirlooms, and symbols of high social or aristocratic status in their stratified society. 3.
In her paper, Eileen Paya Foong talks about her family’s heirloom, or pesaka / barang pu’un, beads: “In the olden days, beads played a very significant role amongst the Kayan and Kenyah tribes, more so then than now. Beads were not only used for barter trading purposes or for traditional costume decoration, but it was also used in religious ceremonies and also as status symbols of families in Kayan and Kenyah societies. Certain beads for example may only be owned by aristocratic families. Due to the dual tribal affiliation of my family, the beads which are in the family’s possession have been preserved as heirlooms.” 4.
Heirlooms are objects of memories and histories, which act as mnemonics to remind the living of their link to a distant, ancestral past...5.
They Have Travelled Far
…And a reminder that their ancestors have travelled and settled in a land far away from their original homes.
Northwest of Perak, Malaysia, and about half to an hour hike after the Sungai Piah hydroelectric dam, lies the village of Kampung Pen. During the Malayan Emergency, the Temiars were relocated downstream of Sungai Piah to where a majority of them live today in the various villages of Pos Piah. Only a handful returned to their original village of Kampung Pen after the emergency. It is only here in Kampung Pen that a plant sacred to the people can be planted—the sekoi (millet). Before rice arrived on the peninsula, sekoi was the staple food.
On my last visit, the Atok (grandpa) who still lives there told me that planting millet, hunting, catching fish, gathering, and following the ways of the forest are what makes him Temiar. It was what his ancestors practised, and it is what he will carry on doing.
If we looked back on the history of human migration to this part of the world, we could trace the origins of millet and therefore, the Temiar’s ancestors.
Peninsular Malaysia has received multiple migration waves, first the Semang (Negritos) who are believed to be the very first settlers of this region, are hunter-gatherers, and associated with the first of the ‘Out of Africa’ dispersal wave. Then came the Senoi (Austroasiatic speaking peoples) during the Neolithic era, who migrated south from mainland Southeast Asia to Malaya and possibly introduced the cultivation of rice and millet to this region. Finally, the Austronesians make up the final wave of the major human migration into the Island South East Asia (ISEA) region. 6.
It is generally accepted that millet originated from Neolithic China, 7. with possible routes of dispersion from northern China into ISEA region (Austroasiatic speaking people) and southern China into Taiwan and throughout Southeast Asia (Austronesian speaking people), 8. which potentially explain the presence of millet in Peninsular Malaysia, Taiwan, and Borneo.
However, the millet as a heirloom grain is slowly disappearing as the Orang Asli face the loss of land for swiddening, and as forests are increasingly logged and replaced by monoculture, and with that, the memories and histories of the people.
We Should Never Forget
With the world digitising so quickly, it’s highly important to safekeep physical objects or heirlooms that hold personal, spiritual, and historical meaning to us.
Whether it is learning about the stories attached to the object or reviving a tradition that keeps the object alive, we all play a role in preserving and protecting what our ancestors took great care of ensuring it is passed down from generation to generation. Although we may not have any use of these objects anymore, they are after all, objects of belonging.
Listen to the podcast here: Episode 1: Navigation to learn more about the Orang Ulu’s objects of belonging and what those items truly mean to them as a people.
Contributed by: Wendi Sia
Reference:
1. Bala, P. (2010). Social Shaping of Technologies for Community Development: Redeployment of Information Communication Technologies among the Kelabit in Bario of the Kelabit Highlands.
2. Poline, Bala (2015) From highlands to lowlands: Kelabit women and their migrant daughters. In: Village Mothers, City Daughters: Women and Urbanization in Sarawak. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, pp. 120-139.
3. Eghenter, Cristina. (2001). Towards a casual history of a trade scenario in the interior of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, 1900-1999. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania. 157. 10.1163/22134379-90003791.
4. Justin Dit, T. and Foong, E.P. 2010. The Importance of Preserving Memories-A Story of a Long Apu Family's Pesaka Beads. In Tenth Biennial Conference for the Borneo Research Council 2010, 5-8 Jul 2010, Curtin Malaysia.
5. Lillios, K. T. (1999). Objects of Memory: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Heirlooms. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 6(3), 235–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20177404
6. Norhalifah, H. K., Syaza, F. H., Chambers, G. K., & Edinur, H. A. (2016). The genetic history of Peninsular Malaysia. Gene, 586(1), 129–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2016.04.008
7. Lu, H., Zhang, J., Liu, K. B., Wu, N., Li, Y., Zhou, K., Ye, M., Zhang, T., Zhang, H., Yang, X., Shen, L., Xu, D., & Li, Q. (2009). Earliest domestication of common millet (Panicum miliaceum) in East Asia extended to 10,000 years ago. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(18), 7367–7372. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0900158106
8. Deng, Z., Hung, H., Fan, X., Huang, Y., & Lu, H. (2018). The ancient dispersal of millets in southern China: New archaeological evidence. The Holocene, 28(1), 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683617714603