Walker, Anthony R., ed., 2009, Pika-Pika: The Flashing Firefly. Essays to Honour and Celebrate the Life of Pauline Hetland Walker (1938-2005).

Walker, Anthony R., ed., 2009, Pika-Pika: The Flashing Firefly. Essays to Honour and Celebrate the Life of Pauline Hetland Walker (1938-2005). Walker, Anthony R., ed., 2009, Pika-Pika: The Flashing Firefly.Essays to Honour and Celebrate the Life of Pauline Hetland Walker(1938-2005). New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, xv+489 pp.ISBN 81-7075-087-3. The title of this volume, Pika-Pika, is a Japanese onomatopoeticexpression for the flashing of fireflies, an image, the editor tells us,that uniquely captures the special quality of the life that the bookhonors. This life was that of the editor's wife, Pauline, who diedin Brunei Darussalam in March 2005, after a long battle with cancer. In addition to the editor's Introduction, the book comprisestwenty essays written by academic colleagues and friends of the Walkers,most of them anthropologists. Individual essays are topically diverse,ranging from an exploration of the biographical roots of an Americanjazz quartet to a quest for the origins of the El Dorado myth among thepriest-healers of an Amerindian society of northeastern Colombia. Asia,however, looms large, especially Southeast Asia. This is understandable,as, for more than :20 years, the Walkers made Southeast Asia their home.Here, Anthony taught anthropology, first in Penang at the UniversitiSains Malaysia (1972-78), then at the National University of Singapore(1979-86), and, finally, from 1999 to the present, at the UniversitiBrunei Darussalam. In addition, Anthony carried out fieldwork innorthern Thailand and Yunnan and, among fellow anthropologists, is bestknown for his meticulous ethnography of the ritual life of the Lahu, aTibeto-Burman-speaking people of the mountainous borderlands of mainlandSoutheast Asia and southwestern China. Three essays in the collection concern this same general region,one deals with Singapore and two with Indonesia. Of more directrelevance, two essays concern Borneo. In the first, "Skilledcraftsmanship from Interior Borneo: Badeng traditional crafts and theirfuture" (pp. 219-237), Tan Chee-Beng, a former student of Anthony,now Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,examines the material culture of a Kenyah Badeng community that formerlylived at Long Geng in the Belaga District of Sarawak. Disclaiming anyspecial artistic girls himself, Tan focuses, instead, on thecomparatively humble artifacts of everyday life--for example, mats,sunhats, baskets, and baby-carriers--and the technical skills andknowledge that go into fashioning them. This he does in an illuminatingway by describing how these handcrafted objects are made and put to useby longhouse people in the course of an average day. Among the morenotable of these objects are so-called 'dog horns' (cong asu),simple but functionally-ingenious wooden collars place around the necksof longhouse dogs to prevent them from causing mischief by insertingtheir heads into small openings. He also describes musical instrumentsand toys. In the early 1990s, the Long Geng community, Tan tells us, wasdivided between Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant (SIB)longhouses. With the Keluan River flowing between them, these twocongregations occupied opposite river banks. Both congregationsintroduced guitar bands in their church services and by the 1990s, theubiquitous guitar has largely replaced more traditional Kenyah musicalinstruments. As a favorite toy, Badeng children made at the time smallblowpipes of bamboo which they used to shoot paper "bullets"at one another. Teams of boys from the two rival Christian groups, usingthese blowpipes, waged frequent warfare on one another in what Tandescribes as "a relatively benign display of sectarianconflict" (p. 233). When he began fieldwork in 1992, the Long Geng community, despiteits sectarian divide, was firmly united in protest against the growingencroachment of logging and the government-proposed construction of thenow infamous Bakun Hydroelectric Dam. Protests, however, proved to be ofno avail and in November 1998, the former Long Geng community wasremoved and its members resettled by the state government near the KoyanRiver in the present-day Bintulu District. Here, living on logged-overland directly accessible by road to the coastal city of Bintulu, thecommunity was suddenly, Tan writes, "exposed to the lull force ofthe market economy." With few remaining forest resources andfarmland scarce and difficult to reach, community members were no longerable to satisfy their own material needs. Local skills and knowledgewere lost, as people, now relying on government monetary compensationand remitted wages, found it easier to purchase household necessities intown, rather than produce them for themselves at home in the ways theyhad been accustomed to in the past. In the second essay, "The interpretation of sickness and theconduct of healing in traditional Brunei Dusun society" (pp.335-65), Pudarno Binchin, himself a Brunei Dusun and currently Curatorof Ethnography with the Brunei Museums Department, describes what hecalls "traditional Dusun ideas about sickness and itsalleviation" that, by and large, he tells us, are now known only to"Dusun old folk" (p. 338). He begins his account with adiscussion of linguh, which he glosses as 'soul' or'metaphysical essence,' describing the various forms this'essence' takes and how it relates more generally to Dusunideas of sickness and well-being. He then goes on to describe the roleof 'spirits' (limatai) and 'deities' (derato) andthe various categories of illness that are distinguished andexplanations of their causes, ending with an account of traditionalhealers. A subtext of both these essays is a story of rapid cultural loss.For the Brunei Dusun, Pudarno illustrates this, near the end of hisessay, with the example of Kilat bin Kilah, the key informant of Voeksand Samban's study of Brunei Dusun medicinal plants ("Healingflora of the Brunei Dusun," BRB 32 (2001): 178-95), who, since thestudy's publication, has passed away, thus taking with him, as oneof the last Dusun herbalists, much of his knowledge of plants and theirpreparation for healing use (p. 363). While Pauline frequently joined Anthony in the field and helpededit all of his published writings, it was in Singapore that she foundher own voice as a writer, particularly as a dance and theater critic.Later, she returned to writing in the late 90s, but, unfortunately, bythe time the couple moved to Brunei, failing health prevented her frompursuing once again an active freelance writing career. She did,however, continue to edit and, in addition to Anthony'spublications, served as literary editor for B.A. Hussainmiya's TheBrunei Constitution of 1959: An Inside History. For some readers of the BRB, Anthony is likely to be best known asthe editor of Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography, anoccasional publication which, over the course of its 12 issues,published a considerable number of papers on Borneo. Pika-Pika followsthe same format as Contributions. Hence, each individual essay isabundantly illustrated with maps, drawings and photographs. This reviewer was a teaching colleague of Anthony in the 1970s and80s, both in Malaysia and Singapore, and is privileged to have been afriend of the Walkers ever since. Between them, Pauline and Anthonyformed a remarkable partnership. Pauline, ever optimistic and generousof spirit, helped create and sustain, wherever the Walkers made theirhome, a lively, eclectic fellowship of friends, students, and fellowscholars to which this wide-ranging, highly readable volume bearsfitting witness. (Clifford Sather, University of Helsinki)