The Life of the Longhouse
An Archaeology of Ethnicity

The remarkable longhouses of Borneo remain mysterious. This book describes life within them, and puts them in their historical and ethnographic context.

Peter Metcalf (Author)

9781107407565, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 September 2012

358 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

For two centuries, travellers were amazed at the massive buildings found along the rivers that flow from the mountainous interior of Borneo. They concentrated hundreds of people under one roof, in the middle of empty rainforests. There was no practical necessity for this arrangement, and it remains a mystery. In this book Peter Metcalf provides an answer by showing the historical context, using both oral histories and colonial records. The key factor was a pre-modern trading system that funneled rare and exotic jungle products to China via the ancient coastal city of Brunei. Meanwhile the elite manufactured goods traded upriver shaped the political and religious institutions of longhouse society. However, the apparent permanence of longhouses was an illusion. In historical terms, longhouse communities were both mobile and labile, and the patterns of ethnicity they created more closely resemble the contemporary world than any stereotype of 'tribal' societies.

Introduction: the problem: ethnicity and community
Part I. Longhouses: 1. Longhouses
2. Longhouse communities
3. The coming of the Brooke Raj
Part II. Longhouses and Leaders: 4. Aban Jau's career
5. Aban Jau's successors
Part III. Longhouses and Trade: 6. The sultan's fence
7. Pre-modern upriver trade
Part IV. Longhouse Populations: 8. The linguistic data
9. Disease, slavery, assimilation, annihilation
Part V. Longhouses and Ritual: 10. The ritual consensus
11. The ritual operator
12. The impresarios of the ancestors
Part VI. Longhouses and the State: 13. Longhouses during the Raj
14. Longhouses after the Raj
Conclusion: the general and the particular.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Archaeology [HD]