Abstract
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate an aspect of rural-urban migration of the Iban in Sarawak, Malaysia and to suggest three approaches to understand their mobility. These approaches are: 1) setting a broad study area that includes a local town and its hinterlands; 2) focusing on people who continuously move between rural and urban areas and obscure the rural/urban distinction; and 3) reconsidering “sedentarism” bias, which has forced us to regard rural communities as stable and unmoving. These approaches enable comprehending the entire lives of the Iban in a contemporary context. These points of view are indispensable to rethinking rural-urban migration of peoples in Southeast Asia and give us a clue to bridge geography and anthropology in terms of the study of a particular ethnic group in a developing country.
