Borneo studies: Perspectives from a jobbing social scientist

Abstract

The chapter comprises an intellectual journey through Borneo. It focuses on a particular style of research, referred to here as ‘jobbing’. Popular reactions to the use of such a concept usually turn on the images that it conjures of an unprofessional and unscholarly approach to what are serious matters of academic endeavour. Research that can be characterised as ‘jobbing’, it is argued, falls somewhere in the middle of a continuum from theory to practice, drawing on concepts in an eclectic and pragmatic way. In order to analyse and present materials gathered from a diverse range of sources in a logical and meaningful explanatory narrative, it is proposed that much of the research undertaken in Borneo over the last half century can also be categorised in the same fashion. The chapter ranges over ‘jobbing concepts’, the relations between area studies and a jobbing lifestyle, the apprenticeship of a jobbing researcher, the ways in which research both on the Maloh of interior Kalimantan and on Borneo more generally can be appreciated from this perspective and the problems posed by globalisation approaches for those whose work is rooted in the understanding of on-the-ground structures and processes.