Victor T. King and Stephen C. Druce
Rationale for the volume
This is the first book to acknowledge, celebrate and evaluate Professor Donald E. Brownâs pioneering studies on the Brunei sultanate. It is just over 50 years since Professor Brown undertook anthropological research in Brunei (1967â1968) for his Cornell University doctorate, which led to his seminal volume Brunei: The Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate published by The Brunei Museum as a special monograph in 1970 (see Prologue); it too celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. He also wrote more than 20 related papers on the history and social organisation of Brunei. These have become standard references for our understanding and appreciation of the society, culture and history of the Brunei sultanate. In any scholarly historical and social-science-based research on Brunei, and on historically and culturally related territories in Borneo and on Malay states more generally, Brownâs work is frequently cited. Though other studies were undertaken after the publication of Brownâs monograph, without his crucial scholarly contribution we would have had no major points of reference before the declaration of the full independence of Negara Brunei Darussalam from the British Crown on 1 January 1984. It so happened that Brown was also in Brunei in 1967 when His Majesty Sultan Haji Sir Hassanal Bolkiah Muâizzadin Waddaulah succeeded his father, Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Sir Omar âAli Saifuddien Sa-adul Khairi Waddien, the Seri Begawan, so it is a happy coincidence to mark and evaluate Brownâs achievements at the time when Brunei celebrated the 50th jubilee of their Sultanâs reign in 2017. The present Sultanâs official coronation was held in August 1968 just after Brown had completed his fieldwork and departed from Brunei. Brownâs research comprised a six-month period in the London archives from July up to December 1966 and then for one month in May 1968, and field research in Brunei from early January 1967 through to April 1968, funded by the London-Cornell project.
It is important to add to this celebration that this volume, as part of a two-volume project, is also dedicated to Pengiran Dato Paduka Haji Shariffuddin bin Pengiran Metali, who left us in April 2018. He was an inspiration in the early development of the Brunei Museum (Muzium Brunei). Prior to the establishment of Universiti Brunei Darussalam, there was no advanced research institution to which foreign researchers could be attached. Therefore, Professor Brown was sponsored, supported and advised by Pengiran Shariffuddin at the Brunei Museum; the only other potential sponsor was the Language and Literature Bureau (Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka). The Director had an expansive view of Brunei culture and its multiculturalism and demonstrated it in the wonderful collections that he assembled in the Museum, initially with the assistance of Tom Harrisson, who had been the Curator and Government Ethnologist at the Sarawak Museum (1947â1966).
This proposed volume and its companion volume are designed to celebrate and evaluate Donald E. Brownâs achievements, to bring together scholars from within Brunei and beyond and to address various themes that Professor Brown covered in his wide-ranging monograph. This first volume comprises chapters on the early history and historiography of Brunei, the origins of the sultanate, its genealogical foundations and the structure and administration of Brunei society. The second volume addresses key issues in colonial and post-colonial history; the relationships between minority populations and the Brunei Malay sultanate; transformations in Kampong Ayer (the âWater Villageâ) and what was then (in the 1960s) Brunei Town (now Bandar Seri Begawan), especially the processes and effects of the resettlement of residents from Kampong Ayer to land-based sites and the character of âwater villagesâ; and the wider importance of âwater villagesâ in Borneo.
Donald E. Brown has also written a Prologue to this first volume which comprises reflections on his research and connections with Brunei; the Prologue provides a context for the evaluation of his work. His main concerns expressed in the Prologue also provide the structure for the book and its sequel. However, scholarly publications on Brunei occupy a small segment of the wider scholarly world and Brownâs reputation has been by no means dependent on it. His international recognition in anthropology is based much more on his general works on the principles of social structure and historical consciousness and human universals. His brief Epilogue in the second volume provides his mature reflections on Brunei Studies.
Some attention is therefore paid in our introductory material to Brownâs important contribution to anthropological theory in his later work on Principles of Social Structure: Southeast Asia (1976; see Chapter 3 by King) in which he considers the value of corporate-structural analysis and the principles on which corporations are based, concluding with a case-study of Brunei. In this study he examines, in comparative mode, the principles underlying incorporation and the generation of corporate forms: sex (gender), age, ethnicity, locality, descent, ritual and belief, common property interests, common occupation, rank, and voluntary association. Subsequently, his general comparative study Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness (1988; see Chapters 3 by King and 4 by Druce) took inspiration from his attempts to address certain issues in Brunei historiography in investigating the nature of what is recorded, remembered or reproduced in Brunei history. Finally, his most widely cited anthropological work Human Universals (1991; see Chapter 3 by King) is an exercise in evolutionary psychology, with its importance assigned to the role of the evolved nature of the human mind. Brown identifies the features of culture, society, language, and mind that have been recorded among all peoples known to ethnography and history. He also explains how human universals relate to human nature and culture. Although Brown moved on from his Brunei research interests, he has indicated that his formative initial doctoral research (and see Brown, 1969; see Prologue) continued to have an influence on his more general thinking about society, culture, history and human nature, and that his early interest in Brunei social stratification led him to ponder what it is to be human.
Brown has not been alone in his scholarly journey from Borneo to the wider world. The movement from a traditionally constructed ethnography of a particular community, place and time in Borneo to the definition and interpretation of the universal characteristics of what it is to be human and the bases of human nature and culture, in other words, a science of humanity, was also travelled by Professors Derek Freeman and Rodney Needham. Freeman moved from what he perceived to be the life of an âordinaryâ anthropologist among the Iban of Sarawak (now Malaysian Borneo) from the late 1940s through to the 1960s to one which was directed passionately, perhaps obsessively to the development of a new socio-cultural-biological âinteractionist paradigmâ. For Freeman the days of British-influenced social structuralist analysis (an approach in which Brown was also trained in his early career with Professors M. G. Smith and Hilda Kuper in California, and then Victor Turner in Cornell), and the overriding importance of the social conditioning of human behaviour were over from the mid-1960s when he experienced his âcognitive abreactionâ in Kuching in 1961. Similarly, from remote Penan hunting-gathering communities in Sarawak in the 1950s and 1960s Needham progressively turned his attention to the study of the universal principles of classification, the unconscious selection of certain symbolic vehicles, the radical features of human experience and emotion, and the fundamental structures of the human mind and logic. Brown reaches a conclusion that Needham and Freeman also reached, that âhuman nature is essential to human cultureâ (2004: 8; see Prologue). The importance of Human Universals is confirmed by the inclusion of Brownâs long list of universals in the Appendix to Steven Pinkerâs book The Blank Slate (2002: 435â439; see Chapter 3 by King).
Though frequently cited in anthropology, sociology and history and more general books on Brunei, Brownâs Brunei monograph, for obvious reasons, does not have the resonance in general anthropology that his later work on history, human nature and human culture holds. Needhamâs identification of primordial characters and primary factors in the human experience and Freemanâs exploration of the fundamental features of human nature and culture were extended by Brown to an impressive list of human universals, though the three authors had different emphases and interests in the field of socio-cultural biology.
The project from which the celebratory volumes on Donald E. Brownâs Brunei research has emerged has been sponsored under the joint auspices of the Institute of Asian Studies and the Academy of Brunei Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. All the contributors have connections with the university there, either as former or retired staff, currently serving staff, visiting researchers and teachers, and those who have taken an interest in and been supportive of the work of the university.
This volume also contains reprinted material (Horton and Kimball) and one translation from French (de Vienne). The editors decided that these reprinted chapters are essential in the appreciation of Professor Brownâs work. A. V. M. Horton has a long and well-established reputation as a scholar of Brunei history, and he presented a brief article on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Brownâs monograph in the Borneo Research Bulletin (BRB) (the paper, published in 2013, is reprinted as Chapter 2 with the kind permission of Professor Clifford A. Sather, the Editor of the BRB); Linda Amy Kimball was one of two other major American anthropologists (the other was Allen Maxwell) who followed the pathway that Brown had opened and undertook early anthropological research in Brunei. Professor Kimball retired from Western Washington University over a decade ago and has not been active in Brunei research since then (her fascinating and informed Chapter 8 on an important expression of Brunei Malay culture, the shaâer/syair, has been reprinted with the kind permission of the then Director of the former Centre for South-East Asian Studies at the University of Hull which was originally published in a celebratory volume to mark Father Robert Nichollâs 85th birthday [1995], edited by Victor T. King and A. V. M. Horton). Professor Marie-Sybille de Vienne has presented an English translation of her article, originally published in 2015 as âRites de Couronnement et Mythe de Fondation au Brunei, Sakai, Sjair & Silsilahâ (the article has been translated from French; Professor de Vienne, who is Director of PĂ©ninsule, etudes interdisciplinaires sur lâAsie du Sud-Est pĂ©ninsulaire, in which her work was originally published, has kindly consented to and organised its translation and additional revisions into English as Chapter 7 in this volume. The original French version contains numerous photographs of royal regalia and other ritual and ceremonial items. They can be consulted there. (This English version was unable to include those illustrations.)
Summary of contents
We have already provided a context and rationale for the volume, but a brief summary of what we have set out to do is required.
In the introductory chapters we start with Professor Brown himself who kindly agreed to provide his reflections on his field research and publications. This is an extraordinary and rare moment in Brunei Studies in that a scholar who put Brunei on the anthropological map, then presents his thoughts over 50 years later on his work and his subsequent evaluation of it. He stated that the aim in his Prologue was to examine the background and conditions of his social-anthropological research in Brunei, to summarise and comment on the publications that emerged from that research, and finally to give us an ethnographic anecdote from his initial experiences in Brunei with its wider implications for our understanding of human cultures.
A. V. M. Horton, in his celebration of Brownâs volume, 40 years after its publication, gives us a commendation which is difficult to gainsay. âForty years on, Brownâs monograph has never been challenged, let alone superseded. Brunei: The Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate was, and remains, quite simply the peerless masterpiece of Brunei historiographyâ. In Victor T. Kingâs introductory appreciation of Donald E. Brownâs work, there is celebration and criticism (as well as in the references to Frank Fanselowâs extended paper on anthropology in Brunei [2014]). Unfortunately, due to other pressures on his time, it was not possible to include a chapter by Fanselow in this volume, though King covers some of Fanselowâs observations in Chapter 3. King also affirms that âDonald Brownâs monograph provides us with such a wide-ranging study that we are given the opportunity to cover several important themes in the history and social organisation of the sultanate of Bruneiâ. But he then questions Brownâs concentration on the ethnic Brunei Malays (the Barunays) in understanding Brunei society as a whole. Nevertheless, he suggests that Brownâs international reputation as an anthropologist far surpassed his work on Brunei when he ventured into an investigation of historical consciousness and human universals.
In the chapters on pre-colonial origins and history, which was not something that Brown dwelt on in detail, though he made some important observations and contributions to these matters, Stephen C. Druce presents a significant re-evaluation in Chapter 4. He addresses Brownâs argument concerning the closed Brunei ranking system and ethnic homogeneity ...
