The Religion of the Tempasuk Dusuns of North Borneo; The Na-khi Naga Cult and Related Ceremonies, Parts I and II; Le Concile de Lhasa

Extract

With the practically complete cessation of ethnological inquiries conducted in the field tinder the sponsorship of the French School of the Far East, monographs on South East Asia have become, since the end of the 1939-45 war, somewhat rare. Hence it is a pleasure to welcome the work of Mr. Evans on the religious life of the Dusuns of North Borneo. With its shortcomings and its merits, this book shows what can still be accomplished by the researcher who works alone, at a time when the fashion is team-research. Mr. Evans visited the Tempasuk Sub-District in 1910, as a Cadet of the Chartered Company. From 1912 to 1933, he was curator of the museum of Perak in Malaya, and after a period of retirement in England between 1933-1938, he returned to Borneo and began to gather up the materials of the present study. Interned by the Japanese during the war, he could not resume his work until he was sixty years old. In his previous books he had given some information on the peoples of Malaya which supplemented the thick and still classic volumes of Skeat and Blagden. The present work, which resumes and sometimes corrects the documentation furnished in his Studies in Religion, Folklore, and Custom in British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, is divided into three parts: I, General Beliefs; II, Ceremonies, i.e., agrarian rites (one of the parts of the book which will be most interesting to specialists) and communal rites for the village with, among others, some interesting data on head-hunting, which was formerly practiced and which, according to the author, may spring into activity again. This part also includes some individual and domestic ceremonies (for cases of illness, bad dreams, etc.). Many of the rites involve the exposure and the donation of a sacrificial animal to the evil spirits supposed to be gathered outside of the houses. Part III is ‘Folktales’, and contains sixty-five tales which are closely related to the other two parts of the book. In the appendix are texts in the sacred language used by the Priestesses, with attempts at translation, as well as detailed descriptions of these priestesses’ ordination rites, and the details of a fertility rite. The materials of the book are thus rich from a functional point of view. Having lived for the most part by himself and without access to a specialised library, Mr. Evans has not undertaken the comparative analysis of his material. To do so would have increased considerably the size of an already long book; but one cannot help thinking that a discussion of his manuscript with other specialists would have avoided a certain number of repetitions and curtailed some minute descriptions. The author is always careful to tell us what he did not see as well as what he did see, and must be praised for this procedure. We have here, in fact, a truly descriptive work: the reader does not find reference to odier works on Borneo in the European languages, besides those of the author. Within these limits, however, the book justifies its publishers’ claims: it constitutes one of the most detailed descriptions we have of the religious life of a Borneo people.