Inventing Tradition, Inventing Modernity: Dayak Identity in Urban Sarawak

Abstract

While a good deal of ethnographic work has been done on the Dayak groups of Sarawak, much of it refers to a hinterland life that is now rare. As Sarawak's urban areas burgeon under the impetus of industrialisation, its ethnic groups are coming to understand themselves, ethnic fellows and ethnic others in new ways. In this article, I draw upon a field project involving 112 interviews of Dayaks living in Kuching to locate such changes within the context of a changing Malaysia and a changing world. What is emerging from the research is that ethnicity, in Sarawak as elsewhere, is helpfully seen as a key element in the struggle to define what is traditional versus what is modern. Increasingly, Dayaks have vested interests in what their government promotes as modern, but there are indications that these same Dayaks want input into how modernity is constructed, and wield a concept of ethnicity as a means to exercise some control over the process. Such intrigues lead us far from the 'end of culture' that proponents of globalisation have touted, as people manipulate the modern in keeping with their own ends, though not without constraints on their capacity to act.