Liana Chua, 2012, The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo.

Alexander, Jennifer

Liana Chua, 2012, The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Map, figures, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-230-12046-4.

Liana Chua's lively and engaging The Christianity of Culture illuminates a story of conversion from Adat Gawai to diverse forms of Christianity: Anglican, Catholic, and Sidang Injil Borneo (SIB, formerly Borneo Evangelical Mission) within a Bidayuh community. It is not only a story of conversion, but also an analysis of ethnicity and the politics of citizenship in the wider Malaysian polity, situated within an overarching framework of the anthropology of religion. Chua sees the current discourse as framed in terms of rupture and discontinuity, whereas she wants to revive the issue of continuity and contiguity. She sees this as crucial to her thesis, arguing that any account of conversion and Christianity must also incorporate continuity, in order to give a fully nuanced view of the culture of Christianity and the Christianity of culture.

Chua was initially introduced to Sarawak by a family connection in Singapore and, through the Catholic network, was incorporated into village life with her adoptive family in Kampung Benuk, a village in the Penrissen area south of Kuching. With a deft hand and a good dose of self-deprecating wit Chua enlivens what might otherwise be a rather dense introduction. This encompasses an account of her original intention to examine Bidayuh "culture" and how Bidayuhs constructed cultural identity through such sites as the local museum. Within a month her plans were torpedoed with the death of her major informant. Like all good fieldworkers, however, she soldiered on and tailored her efforts to something which, in my view, is far more sophisticated, and actually manages to revive the culture side of the equation by linking it with Christianity.

Part 1 is a detailed ethnography of the salient features of Kampung Benuk and presents a view from below. The village is still very much in a state of transition between the old way of life and the new, and her analysis is informed by the relevant literature. The year 1963 saw the incorporation of Sarawak within the modern Malaysian state and the former Land Dayak, an ethnic label imposed from outside, officially became the Bidayuh, the fourth largest ethnic group in the State. Chua locates the Bidayuh within current bumiputera (indigenous or 'sons of soil') politics. In official discourse Bidayuhs and other indigenes are bumiputera, but the core ethnic remains the Malay, and the Bidayuhs are well aware of their second class status within the bumiputera category despite the nationwide promotion of development for all in the Vision 2020 program. While the Bidayuhs still consider themselves marginal and alienated in regard to many aspects of modernity, they have successfully been incorporated into other aspects of modernity through multiculturalism and the promotion of Bidayuh culture through tourism, cultural performance, homestays and the revival of the classic Bidayuh head-house (baruk/pangah) and Adat Gawai rituals.

In the succeeding chapter, an account of Adat Gawai, the indigenous religion, the rituals of which were closely linked to the rice cycle, Chua traces the changes from the pre-Christian past to the Christian present. This chapter is crucial to her argument about continuity and contiguity. The numbers adhering to the old religion are few and elderly and reliant on members of the Christian community to help them carry out the rituals and associated festivities. The succeeding chapters formulate a compelling argument, revolving around the politics of religion and ethnicity, to explain why this has been the case.

Early missionary activity in Sarawak, was associated with health care, education and welfare, and three Christian denominations play a part in Kampung Benuk's gradual and piecemeal conversion to various forms of Christianity: Anglican, Roman Catholic and SIB. The Bidayuhs of Kampung Benuk were first exposed to Christianity with the opening of a primary school in 1953 by the Anglicans and consequently a health clinic in 1958. But it was not until the early 1970s that Christianity started to replace Adat Gawai, and that Catholicism started to attract converts also, the major reason for their conversion being the belief that life would be better and simpler under Christianity than under Adat Gawai. A single church service once a week was found infinitely preferable to the elaborate, time-consuming, and sometimes expensive rituals and prohibitions associated with Adat Gawai. In the post-independence period fewer and fewer people participated in swidden cultivation and people started turning to cash crops and employment in the urban workforce. In the 1990s some members of Kampung Benuk, many of them previously followers of the Anglican Church, were attracted to the evangelical SIB, and this can be clearly identified as rupture from the past. Adat Gawi continued to function but in a much reduced form. But by the 1990s also Adat Gawai was to some degree reinstated in Bidayuh life through a combination of multiculturalist discourses and Christian enculturation policies which led many Bidayuhs to give support to the dwindling practice of gawai. For many Christians gawai and Christianity are both adat, or "a guide to a way of life" (p. 62).

Chapter IV explores the themes of continuity and discontinuity, kicking off with the interface of Christian Bidayuhs with Malay Muslims and the politics of religion. Many young Bidayuhs regard Christianity as a way to tap into modern life as well as a means to resist Malay-Muslim domination. Bidayuhs see themselves as connected to a worldwide community of Christians and thus as remotely embroiled in worldwide conflict between Christians and Muslims. Chapters V and VI explore how Bidayuhs have made connections, or in her terms, a strong sense of continuity and contiguity, between Adat Gawai and Christianity. But Chua is careful to demonstrate that the conversion process involves both continuities and discontinuities, as the individual case studies of the Anglican, Roman Catholic and SIB churches illustrate. Chapter VII then goes on to explore how Adat Gawai has become transformed into Bidayuh culture through the eyes of her Bidayuh acquaintances themselves. This is intertwined with an argument that Borneo tropes such as adat, budaya and jadi in some ways correspond to the analytical concepts of religion, culture and conversion.

This is an excellent and challenging book. I would suggest that it is of greater interest to those with a scholarly interest in the anthropology of religion rather than in Borneo itself, but it does lay the ground for further studies of religion and conversion in Malaysian Borneo, including the Adat Bungan of the Orang Ulu. Several aspects of her thesis resonate with my own experience of conversion in one of the Orang Ulu communities; the continuities and contiguities are certainly more apparent than rupture and disjunction and again, there is a very real difference between those who have converted to Roman Catholicism and those who have converted to SIB. People continued to participate in Adat Bungan rituals long after they had converted to Roman Catholicism. This church also incorporated and modified many customs and rituals from the Adat Bungan calendar, unlike the SIB where there was a much stronger disjunction between the old and the new. As proclaimed by Chua, the retention of budaya, or 'culture,' has been a crucial part of the Kampung Benuk experience.

(Jennifer Alexander, Department of Anthropology, School of Culture, History and Language, The Australian National University)