Remembering National Independence at the Margin of the State : A Case from Sarawak, East Malaysia

抄録

This paper is concerned with the historical points of articulation as well as disjuncture between quotidian life of hinterland villagers in western Borneo and the Southeast Asian politics in the 1960s, taking the borderlands between Sarawak and West Kalimantan as a case in point. From the early 1960s onward, the presence of another nation-state across the international boundary affected the life of Sarawakian peasants on the border with physical force. The independence of Sarawak from British colonialism and subsequent outbreak of military confrontation (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia led to a series of misfortunes including casualties, burnt homes, and evacuation, clearly and violently inscribing a national boundary on the minds of borderland residents. The following ethnography looks into the everyday location work of the villagers at the margin of the state, who encountered larger political processes originating in the outer realm of their lifeworld - the emergence of newly independent nation-states in opposition and the spread of communism in the Malay maritime world. By looking into their local experience and the series of incidents they endured, I examine the multi-layered relations between local everyday life and political turmoil. Particular attention is given to the villagers' recollection of a high-ranking political figure, who fled Sarawak just before the day of independence and sought refuge at a village house on his way to Indonesia. I shall look at the chain of historical causalities as well as ruptures surrounding his sojourn in the borderland village, which in the memory of the residents, is inexorably linked to the series of incidents that followed - the arrest of a villager by the authorities, the death of others, and the evacuation of the village. In carefully reconstructing these moments in history from the local point of view, I look into how villagers' interpretation of international political dynamics found common ground with their understanding of everyday life in the process of accepting, rationalizing, remembering, and consigning memory to oblivion.