Continuity and Change in Brunei Darussalam

Victor T. King, Stephen C. Druce, Victor T. King, Stephen C. Druce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367615635
• eBook ISBN: 9780429664250
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the processes of social and economic change in Brunei Darussalam.

Drawing on recent studies undertaken by both locally based scholars and senior researchers from outside the state, the book explores the underlying strengths, characteristics, and uniqueness of Malay Islamic Monarchy in Brunei Darussalam in a historical context and examines these in an increasingly challenging regional and global environment. It considers events in Brunei's recent history and current socio-cultural transformations, which give expression to the traumatic years of decolonisation in Southeast Asia. A wide range of issues focus on foreign, non-Bruneian narratives of Brunei as against insider or domestic accounts of the sultanate, the status of minority ethnic groups in Brunei and the concept of 'Brunei society', as well as changes in the character and composition of the famous 'water village', Kampong Ayer, as the cultural heartland of Brunei Malay culture and the socio-cultural and economic effects of the resettlement of substantial segments of the population from a 'life on water' to a 'life on land'.

A timely and very important study on Brunei Darussalam, the book will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, and area studies specialists in Southeast Asian Studies and Asian Studies.

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Introduction

Donald Brown’s Brunei, society and recent transformations

Victor T. King and Stephen C. Druce

The first volume which celebrates Professor Donald Brown’s seminal studies on the Brunei sultanate and evaluates his volume Brunei: The Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate, published by the Brunei Museum as a special monograph in 1970, and his subsequent publications on Brunei’s history and social organisation is now followed by an expansion of this project. With the publication of the volume 50 years ago, we mark its jubilee anniversary. Brown’s publications are now standard references for our study of the society, culture and history of the Brunei sultanate. Indeed, his work was pioneering in two respects: it was the first major attempt to understand and analyse the historical development and the key structural principles which gave order to the Brunei sultanate from the mid-nineteenth century, and secondly, it brought to public attention some of the rich primary resources on Brunei housed in the London archives to which B. A. Hussainmiya refers in Chapter 3 in this volume. The two volumes celebrating his work give extended recognition to his achievements and the 50 years or so (the ‘jubilee’) since he undertook the research and published his monograph.

Though other studies were undertaken after the publication of Brown’s monograph, without his 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. Brown was also in Brunei in 1967 when His Majesty Sultan Haji Sir Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah succeeded his father, Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Sir Omar Ali Saifuddien Sa-adul Khairi Waddien, the Seri Begawan, so it is a happy coincidence to mark and evaluate Brown’s achievements at the time when Brunei celebrated the 50th jubilee of their Sultan’s reign in 2017. The present Sultan’s official coronation was held in August 1968 just after Brown had completed his fieldwork and departed from Brunei. Brown’s research comprised a six-month period in the London archives from July to December 1966 and then for one month in May 1968, and field research in Brunei from early January 1967 to April 1968, funded by the London-Cornell project.

Such interest has been generated in celebrating and evaluating Professor Brown’s work that we have had to devise a means to embrace this burgeoning scholarship. Therefore, this is a second volume, which connects us to more contemporary issues and brings us directly to Donald Brown’s study of the sultanate’s socio-political organisation, its nineteenth-century antecedents and the reconstruction of these, the transformations in Brunei, especially in Kampong Ayer as the epicentre of the polity’s social and cultural identity, and the sultanate’s relations with its surrounding populations.

The rationale for this volume is expressed and explained in our exploration of Brunei’s early history, origins and cultural development in the first volume. We have set the scene for the second volume which brings us to the nineteenth century, and then some of the issues and problems which Brunei Darussalam currently experiences. We begin with setting the scene in Ooi Keat Gin’s scene-setting chapter, which explores the underlying strengths, characteristics and uniqueness of Malay Islamic Monarchy in a historical context. These have sustained the Brunei sultanate over the past seven centuries and continue to direct developments and the future direction of Brunei in contemporary times. Issues raised by the national ideology are examined in relation to its relevance, strengths, weaknesses and sustainability; each is examined in the context of an increasingly challenging regional and global environment. He covers primarily the period that Donald Brown was concerned to understand in his socio-historical study.

Ooi Keat Gin, in his overview of Brunei history in Chapter 2, has provided the context for Brunei’s pathway to an uncertain, post-Second World War future. It is also captured in B. A. Hussainmiya’s Chapter 3 which examines an event, in Brunei’s recent history, as an expression of what was a relatively minor occurrence in the traumatic years of the decolonisation of Southeast Asia. How do populations, subject to the dominance and direction of European powers, prepare for a future which has to contend with the ‘Cold War’, political independence and nation-building? Hussainmiya, a historian of Brunei who, during his extended tenure at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, produced substantial historical work on the sultanate including a biography-history of Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien III, the Seri Begawan (1995) (for which Donald Brown was involved as an advisor), has written on a sensitive subject in Brunei in his Chapter 3 on the Brunei Rebellion of 1962. He argues that, although the rebellion was easily put down by British Gurkha forces from Singapore, it might have been successful had the event been planned with greater foresight and precision, especially given the nature of the fledgling monarchical power and the multiple pressures facing a declining colonial power. The leader of the Brunei People’s Party and the alleged promoter of the rebellion was Shaikh A. M. Azahari, who, despite his charisma and political acumen, had failed to grasp the reality of local and global power games that brought about his downfall and the failure of the people’s movement which he spearheaded. Another aim of the chapter is to re-evaluate Azahari’s role in the rebellion. Donald Brown’s plans for research in Brunei were presented with some difficulties in the aftermath of the rebellion in that it was impossible for him to investigate the then politics of Brunei and the socio-political contexts within which the rebellion occurred.

Dominik Müller in Chapter 4 gives us a thoughtful and informed chapter entitled, intriguingly, ‘Hybrid Pathways to Orthodoxy: Bureaucratised Exorcism, Scientisation and the Transcendental Powers of Japanese Water-crystal Photography in Brunei Darussalam’. To an outsider unfamiliar with Brunei, this title seems incomprehensible. It is not, and it investigates an arena of socio-religious and political processes that Donald Brown could not have anticipated in the late 1960s, though we assume that he might have suspected that Brunei would move in directions which approximate those which Müller proposes. Brown would also appreciate the ways in which Müller addresses the issue of foreign narratives of Brunei as against insider or domestic accounts of the sultanate and its recent socio-political transformations. Müller investigates the bureaucratisation of Islam in Brunei and its interlinkages with socio-cultural changes and explains in what ways the realisation of state-enforced Islamic orthodoxy produces locally generated meanings, while simultaneously reflecting broader characteristics of the contemporary global condition. The chapter first introduces a theoretical perspective on the bureaucratisation of Islam as a social phenomenon, intertwined with the state’s exercise of classificatory power and related popular processes of co-producing, and sometimes appropriating, symbolic state power. Second, it outlines the historical trajectory of empowering Brunei’s national ideology, Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB). It then explores social imaginaries and bureaucratic representations of ‘deviant’-declared practices, before illustrating how these practices have become reinvented within the parameters of state power as ‘Sharia-compliant’ services to the nation-state. Simultaneously, national-religious protectionism is expressed in globalised terms and shaped by forces the state cannot entirely control. In the main ethnographic example, bureaucratised exorcism, Japanese water-crystal photography and scientisation fuse behind the ‘firewall’ of MIB. It is argued that these hybrid pathways to orthodoxy complicate the narratives through which they are commonly framed.

In Chapter 5, Noor Azam and James McLellan explore, through their ethno-linguistic study, the status of minority ethnic groups in Brunei. The trigger for their chapter is Brown’s statement about the status of minority ethnic groups as ‘of lesser significance’ in Brunei. The initial focus of the chapter is on the distinction between those designated in the 1959 Constitution and the Nationality Act of 1961 as puak jati (indigenous groups), namely Brunei Malay, Kedayan, Tutong, Dusun, Bisaya, Belait and Murut (Lun Bawang), and those deemed non-indigenous, particularly the Iban and the Penan. It is proposed that the languages of all these groups may be considered as dialects of Malay for political purposes, whilst linguistically they demonstrate varying degrees of difference and distinction from core Brunei Malay language, termed ‘Pan-Bruneian Malay’ by Noor Azam. Whilst non-Bruneian ‘outsider’ researchers tend to view the minority languages as stigmatised and endangered in varying degrees, Bruneian ‘insiders’ focus more on the downplaying of differences for reasons of national unity and alignment with the national ideology.

Pudarno Binchin, as a prominent local Dusun scholar, serving a long career in the Brunei Museum, pursues the theme of social identity and incorporation in regard to Dusun social organisation in Chapter 6. Pudarno notes that Brown’s study of Brunei’s ranked society in the nineteenth century touched only briefly on the Dusun people, except in generalised passages related to the institutions of menteri darat (land chiefs) and ketua kampong (village headmen). Before the British took over Brunei public administration in 1906, the sultanate’s links with the Dusun people were conducted through the appointment of menteri darat, the ‘inland’ chiefs – as opposed to the ‘sea’ chiefs (menteri laut) of the Brunei ‘water villages’. These menteri darat were conferred with honorific titles such as dato and orang kaya.

Pudarno points out that historically, some Dusun elders were appointed as menteri darat, and as recognised ‘leaders’ of their people in relation to the sultanate, but these positions were controlled from above by the traditional Brunei sultanate’s Malay officials (kepala menteri darat). The representatives of ethnic minority groups could therefore not occupy the higher offices above the menteri darat. Brown uses the term ‘non-Bruneis’ (in contrast to ‘Bruneis’) to demarcate this exclusiveness. Pudarno also refers to Brown’s paper on Brunei super-ordinated positions in relation to other ethnic groups entitled ‘Inter-Hierarchical Commissions in a Bornean Plural Society’ (Brown 1973). In this paper, Brown explains the interactions between the Bruneis and other ethnic groups through the administrative link of ‘inter-hierarchical’ offices as ‘the points of interpenetration of socio-political systems’ of the Brunei sultanate in relation to non-Brunei communities. There were two types of inter-hierarchical offices: (a) inter-hierarchical positions occupied by ethnic Bruneis, and (b) inter-hierarchical positions occupied by subjects who were not ethnic Bruneis but who held positions in the Brunei sultanate’s administrative hierarchy. Pudarno examines in detail the second category which relates to the role of the Dusun menteri darat.

Allen Maxwell’s important Chapter 7 on the Kedayan/Kadayan argues that they have occupied a pivotal role in traditional Brunei society, but that, at the time that he published his paper in 1996 (reprinted here, with minor revisions), the position of the Kedayan, as a Malay-speaking people, closely integrated as agricultural-ists into the structure of the sultanate, remained obscure. He rectifies this lack of research on the Kedayan by providing a detailed account of their importance in the Brunei plural society and the complementarity that they offered to the water-based, seafaring ethnic Bruneis, who relied on the Kedayan for basic foodstuffs. In an important sense, the Brunei Malays could not function as a separate ethnic group; they needed the Kedayan.

In his consideration of the relations between the Bruneis and Kedayans within the context of a plural society, Brown draws our attention to a difficult conceptual issue. In his monograph he decided initially that they were not part of what might be termed ‘Brunei society’ (1970: 16). Nevertheless, he did accept that conceptually they might be seen in some sense as forming a part of a wider Brunei social formation. He concluded that this issue ‘will require further analysis before sound judgements may be made’, and that the Kedayans ‘pose a special problem in the distinction between Bruneis and non-Bruneis’ (1970: 16, 20).

Sadly, Professor Maxwell died in 2011, but his article on the place of Kedayan (rendered Kadayan by Maxwell) in traditional Brunei society seems to us to be such an important contribution to our understanding of the social and political organisation of the sultanate and its relationships with its ethnic minorities that it had to be included (it is reprinted from South East Asia Research [1996] by kind permission of the Taylor and Francis Group).

The final set of chapters examines ‘water villages’ in Borneo, including Kam-pong Ayer and its iconic status in the global imaging of the Brunei sultanate. It was the location which Donald Brown chose for his residence with his wife Carrie in 1967–1968 and where he conducted his research on the Brunei Malays and their historical development. Hans-Dieter Evers’s Chapter 8 on water villages in Borneo, based on his earlier paper (2015) places Kampong Ayer in a wider context; Evers identified 84 water villages in Borneo; he has added a brief introduction to his reprinted chapter to situate it in this volume and in the context of Brown’s residence there in the late 1960s (Chapter 8 is reprinted with the kind permission of the Editor of the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society).

In his survey of ‘water villages’ in Borneo, Evers demonstrates that these were and still are common features along the rivers and coasts of Borneo, but that the water settlements along the Brunei River are by far the largest in extent and in number of inhabitants throughout the Indonesian, Malaysian and Brunei districts and provinces. Using remote sensing data, Evers and his research team examined the extent of water villages and estimated their number of households and inhabitants which covered a total area of approximately 25 square kilometres and provided homes for 215,000 inhabitants. Sadly, Kampong Ayer has declined rapidly in numbers through resettlement and the development of the Kedayan and Brunei Rivers waterfront; recent estimates, though these are subject to modification, suggest that its population now totals less than 10,000, and a proportion of these are not long-settled residents but migrant workers from other parts of Asia. Kampong Ayer’s claim to distinction as the largest ‘water village’ in the world is possibly now in doubt.

Pursuing this theme, Haji Tassim Abu Bakar in Chapter 9 then examines the changes in Kampong Ayer from the early part of the twentieth century as Brunei began to modernise under the British Residential system from 1906, which moved the administrative centre of the country from water to land and began to develop Brunei Town (Bandar Seri Begawan) as a commercial area. British Residents also encouraged the inhabitants of Kampong Ayer to resettle on land. Interestingly they had little success in the early years, and it was only in the 1950s that a marked movement to land-based housing began with the implementation of several resettlement schemes. Over the years these schemes were expanded, which led to increasing numbers of people leaving Kampong Ayer; some of them were forced to move because their homes were lost to sudden outbreaks of fire. An important consequence of this movement, together with the social and economic development of Brunei, has been the loss of important handicraft skills once practised by Kampong Ayer’s residents and often linked to specific villages that no longer exist. In order to protect and sustain these disappearing craft skills, the government established the Brunei Arts and Handicraft Training Centre.

Kampong Ayer, therefore, now houses a very small percentage of the total...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• 1 Introduction: Donald Brown’s Brunei, society and recent transformations
• 2 Monarchy in Brunei: past, present and future
• 3 ‘So near yet so far’: Shaikh A. M. Azahari and 1962
• 4 Hybrid pathways to orthodoxy: bureaucratisation, Sharia-compliant exorcism and the powers of Japanese water-crystal photography in Brunei Darussalam
• 5 Inside or outside the mainstream? An ethnolinguistic study of the status of minority indigenous groups in Negara Brunei Darussalam
• 6 Menteri darat and incorporation: integration of Dusun society into the organisational structure of the Brunei sultanate
• 7 The place of the Kadayan in traditional Brunei society
• 8 Living on water: water settlements in Borneo
• 9 Development, change and modernisation in Kampong Ayer over the last fifty years
• 10 Prospects and challenges of heritage tourism at Kampong Ayer (water village) in Brunei Darussalam
• 11 Epilogue: Brunei studies: 50 years and more
• Index