Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads--Weaving, Sculpture, Tattooing and Other Arts of the Iban of Borneo.

Wadley, Reed L.

Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads--Weaving, Sculpture, Tattooing and Other Arts of the Iban of Borneo, by Michael Heppell, Limbang anak Melaka, and Enyan anak Usen (2005). Leiden/Amsterdam: C. Zwartenkot-Art Books/KIT Publishers, pp. 180, 55.00 [euro].

In this wonderfully illustrated and colorful book, Heppell brings together disparate strands of thought on art, war, and sexual competition and choice to create a general argument of why art, primarily weaving, became so elaborate in Iban society. The chapters run through Iban culture and history, cosmology, weaving, carving, and tattooing. Given the weight placed on weaving, the book might well have been titled Iban Weaving and Sexual Selection, and it is unfortunate that the cover photo is of a tattooed "warrior" wearing a clouded leopard-skin jacket. A better cover might have showcased one of the beautiful pua' kumbu' woven by co-author Enyan anak Usen, but the press editors may have wanted something more visually romantic for their largely European audience than a "mere" blanket.

The purposes behind those blankets and other weavings are many, and illustrate the central role in Iban life that such items might have played: (1) "captur[ing] spirits, [and thus] protecting people from a teeming world of malevolence and misanthropy" (p. 37); serving as a protective barrier against malevolent spirits and as a medium for men seeking dreams from the spirit world (p. 46); "to reinforce curses" (p. 48); "to remove disturbing natural phenomena such as an eclipse" (p. 49); and for "mundane purposes" (p. 50). "Inciting" men to brave and risky deeds was, according to Heppell, the "most profound" of these (p. 50), and this forms part of his general thesis regarding the link between art and sexual competition and choice.

Heppell has obviously put a great deal of thought and energy into this effort (based in no small part on his field experience), from collecting the many color photos of art that greatly enhance the text to the writing of this wide-ranging narrative, which covers description, theory, and personal account. (I was pleased to learn that Heppell's first view of Sarawak was similar to my own, and at about the same time, from the deck of a ship in the early 1970s--he, on his way to conduct doctoral research in the Batang Ai, and I, a 10-year old boy, eyes wide from tales of White Rajahs and headhunters.) That being said, it is hard to decide if the book is meant principally as a serious scholarly treatise or something visually pleasing for the coffee table. It is perhaps best described as some combination of the two, but a scholarly thesis must hold up to much higher standards than a coffee-table book, and I must confess being not a little frustrated as I read through it. Heppell's technical and ritual renderings are largely consistent with what I know of Iban weaving and the like acquired secondarily in the field, though his reliance on South Kalimantan cosmological models (e.g., pp. 25-26) to interpret design among the Iban does not ring particularly true. I would, however, defer to others to evaluate his descriptions and analyses of these things specifically as there are a number of issues that go beyond the art itself.

Despite having been published in the Netherlands, there are no references to primary or secondary Dutch sources in the various historical strands Heppell traces. He relies on such scholars as King (1993) and Pringle (1970) for references to Indonesian Borneo in history, though their work with Dutch archival materials was limited. This remains a severe limitation of English language scholarship on Borneo, and a particular weakness of those working in East Malaysia and Brunei. Although I know of no Dutch study of (what has unfortunately come to be known as) "Ibanic" art (largely because I have never looked), colonial officials were keen to create collections and often wrote about them. Even a cursory survey of the library at the KITLV in Leiden or the National Library in the Hague might have turned up some gems. In addition, I myself viewed a collection of material culture at the Museum Nusantara, Delft--Iban knock-offs from 1920s Nanga Badau in West Kalimantan. This might only have added to Heppell's burden of having so much stuff to work through, but it points to the possibilities across the border.

This general ignorance of what lies over the border is not just limited to historical issues; for example, Heppell refers to women who came from "across the Sarawak/Kalimantan border on the Emperan River" (p. 63). From his nearby location in the upper Batang Ai (where mere tens of kilometers separate cross-border communities), it is likely that Heppell dutifully recorded in his fieldnotes that the women were from ai' emperan, which he then translated literally as 'Emperan River.' But there is no such river, and never was. As I have been describing for 16 years in these pages and elsewhere, "the Emperan" refers to the relatively flat country between the uplands of the Empanang and Kantu' rivers on the west, the Embaioh River on the east, the Kedang Hills to the north along the border, and the wide expanse of the Kapuas Lakes to the south. Thus, ai' emperan refers to the waters or region of the Emperan, not a particular stream, just as ai' belanda and ai" sarawak referred historically to Dutch West Borneo and the Brooke territory, respectively.

I have numerous quibbles on various issues of Iban history, but will only touch on two points here in illustration: First, Heppell states that the Saribas and Skrang Iban had "virtually annihilated" the Undup Iban before the Brookes arrived. In fact, in the early 1800s, the Undup had fled their homeland, along with their Kantu' allies, to seek protection from the sultan of Selimbau on the Kapuas River, only to return after James Brooke had pacified the Saribas and Skrang. Second, Heppell implies that the principal motivation for heads drove Iban to attack other Iban (p. 37), though an exploration of oral history shows that inter-Iban headhunting stemmed overwhelmingly from disputes gone awry. Even the Iban-Kantu' wars, according to my sources in the Nanga Badau area of West Kalimantan, originated in adultery and the inevitable revenge. Benedict Sandin's (1968) work also shows this quite clearly.

Along another vein, Heppell's seemingly post-modern sensibility in including his chief informants and friends as co-authors is countered by his truly unfortunate reliance on the ethnographic present in describing the Iban over the period between the 1850s to the 1950s. It is not just that the use of the present tense may misrepresent the Iban today, the usual post-modern concern that may lead an unsophisticated reader to assume that is the way the Iban are now and always have been. It is more a matter of properly historicizing the themes Heppell deals with: What advantage does the present tense offer that is not better met by providing a proper historical context and not implying, even inadvertently, that the 100--year period was somehow uniform throughout the Iban population? Certainly, he is limited by the collections at his disposal (which, like the one in Delft, were established during that long period), but the use of past tense to describe events of the past serves to highlight change and continuity to the present. It is not a trivial matter and only underscores Heppell's statement that "[h]istory ... [has] served the Iban poorly" (p. 165).

This is particularly telling as Heppell applies his present tense inconsistently. For example, "the Iban kept extensive genealogies. Though much has now been forgotten ..." (p. 25, my emphases); or it is missing entirely: For instance, "[s]urvival was an important concern of each Iban group" (p. 36); they "had no means of magnification" (p. 60); [b]y the end of the Second World War, sungkit threads were usually purchased rather than dyed" (p. 84); and "[m]ost women enjoyed a good romp, but some were choosy" (p. 113). He shifts entirely to past tense in describing events of the 1960s (p. 81) and in disparate paragraphs referring to his selected period (p. 85, 91, 99, 103). Furthermore, although he is really in his element in Chapter 5 as he describes cloth designs, their meaning, and how meaning and design names change as women copy and transport designs across river systems (pp. 73, 77), Heppell's rounding on Traude Gavin's work on contemporary Iban weaving (e.g., 2003) is a bit disconcerting, especially given the temporal differences that lie between their research. Has his reliance on the present tense for a long historical period led him to conflate his fictive present for Gavin's literal present (i.e., late 20th century)? He seems, at the outset, to be comparing apples and oranges as the reasons for weaving, not to mention materials and designs have changed so much since the 1950s. (Women throughout the Emperan today, for instance, routinely copy designs from pua' acquired by their traveling husbands, and don't necessarily know or care about the design names. "Oh, it's a design from the Batang Rejang. I don't know what it's actually called," some have told me.)

Heppell's main scholarly thesis, and perhaps weakest part of the book, concerns the application of Darwinian sexual selection to Iban weaving and warfare. This was reflected in the "cyclical trinity" (p. 32)--headhunting, rice cultivation, and human fertility, with women being central to each. Indeed, according to Heppell, it was women's selection of lifelong mates that was critical as the burden fell on them "to choose men who are more likely to ensure their and their offspring's survival and will reinvigorate the family gene pool" (p. 32). As the nurturing, creative force in Iban society, it was women who were central to rice farming and, through their weaving, incited men to war.

For men, "heads enhanced survival" and served as "fitness indicators" (p. 36). Fitness refers to the biological condition of possessing qualities that have proved reproductively successful in the past and thus have been naturally selected. (The term "fitness" is occasionally used inconsistently, however; for example, "heads were required to demonstrate a man's fitness to marry" [p. 18], in this sense a synonym for "suitability" [also p. 95].) Men's incentives for successful headhunting were to enhance their status, both with young women for courtship and marriage and with other men for influence and authority (p. 41). But it was women's woven cloths that demanded that the men go to war (p. 43), while at the same time displaying the skill and intelligence of the women, qualities men would have looked for in mates (p. 92, 121, 166). As he states in a simple equation, "beautiful cloths = heads = primacy for sexual selection" (p. 167).

Heppell routinely asserts a link between weaving/headhunting and sexual selection; for example, regarding war jackets, an enemy would know the identity of the man's guardian spirit, and the quality of his genes as only great weavers could invoke powerful motifs, and his ancestors' success in headhunting as "great weavers marry successful headhunters" (p. 87). But this merely repeats the supposition with no real evidence presented. Surely the thesis is logical intuitively, but intuition is not proof, and this is coming from one who is sympathetic to such arguments. What would he have to show? For starters, that great weavers consistently married and reproduced with successful headhunters; second, that those skills were consistently transmitted culturally to their children; and third, that all that meant more children of higher quality regarding intelligence, etc. Much of this, however, goes far beyond the information available to any of us working in Borneo, especially for historical periods. The fact that the Iban expanded their territory rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries indirectly supports this notion, but only circumstantially. (The same applies to his assertion that tattooing "fast tracks a man to a girl's lofty boudoir" [p. 115]. Do or did tattooed men enjoy more mating success? This may well be, but the claim is merely asserted, not supported with even indirect evidence.) Given these evidentiary problems, a good deal more caution in making such arguments should have been in order; otherwise, they become merely sociobiological "just-so stories," of which we have plenty already.

Likewise, his more proximally connected statement that "[a]rtistic flair makes both males and females desirable" (p. 95) is equally asserted. "Flair" would have been one thing for the youth who were in the process of mate selection, but who made the more powerful cloths? If the great weavers were older and married, their weaving could not have signaled any sort of sexual selection. It was not the young, unmarried indo' dara who produced the most powerful cloths or who had "their hands tattooed after the ngar ritual," as such work was supernaturally dangerous and required considerable experience. Indeed, a woman's weaving became, as she aged, paradoxically more simple in design (due to fading eyesight) and more powerful spiritually (p. 60). Contrary to Heppell's claim, such weavers "were [not] the very women who [would] shine in the 'sexual selection stakes'" (p. 109); they had made their choices years before. Obviously much more than sexual selection is going on.

That things of art are meant to attract our attention should not imply that they are all meant to attract mates; art is a form of communication, and as with language, we use art in multiple ways. That Iban weaving was costly and communicative should not be in doubt, but was sexual selection the primary force behind it? The only reference to evolutionary forces and art that Heppell cites is Geoffrey Miller's (2000) book, The Mating Mind, in which he argues that virtually all art originated in and is replicated for mate competition and choice. This reliance on single sources is unfortunate as not only are there substantive criticisms of Miller's general thesis, but also alternative hypotheses on the evolution of art that are thereby left unconsidered (e.g., Coe 2003). Likewise, though less seriously, he argues exclusively from Zahavi's (1997) "handicap principle" concerning the energetically costly traits that nonetheless enhance mating success (e.g., the peacock's tail or the bower bird's elaborate bower). This ignores a growing strand of research in evolutionary anthropology on what is now termed "costly signaling," stemming from Zahavi's insight, which has been applied to such disparate things as hunting and religion (e.g., Bliege Bird et al. 2001; Hawkes and Bliege Bird 2002). (Curiously, Heppell does not cite Darwin's seminal work [1989] on sexual selection, though he does reference, for other purposes, The Origin of Species [1909].)

Finally, the design of the text itself makes hard what should be smooth reading, having neither indentation to mark paragraphs nor section breaks to identify sometimes abrupt shifts in topic (e.g., pp. 83, 85, 86, 91, 99). Generally, Dutch graphic art is unparalleled in its creativity, but the press editors appear to have opted for form over function in the text layout. In addition, the glossary is excessively short and does not include a large number of the terms used in the text (e.g., engkudu and lemba, p. 91; anak umbong, p. 93), rendering it less than useful for scholarly work. In other places in the text, Iban equivalents are not given (e.g., the Parishia tree, p. 131). This leaves one wondering further as to the scholarly versus coffee-table status of the book. Nonetheless and with all the heavy caveats above, this is a truly beautiful volume, its chief attraction being both the full color pictures that such a book cannot do without and the author's extensive personal insight into the Iban world (Reed L. Wadley, Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA).

Response to Reed Wadley's Review of Iban Art

There are two major themes in the book. First is the link between art, headhunting and sexual selection, the evidence for which is provided by the texts. The second theme relates to the decorating of flat surfaces and carving figures. Women are restricted to the former due to their "unpredictable nature." The evidence for the second theme is also provided by texts. As Limbang said about identifying powerful cloths: "Refer to the text! (julok)". Given that the texts are central, it is a pity that Professor Wadley totally ignores them in his review. They have a lot to say about weaving, warfare and sexual selection. Instead, Professor Wadley asserts that I rely on a single source, in this case Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind, which is entirely peripheral to my argument. I reference Miller just over one page from the end of the book, stating: "In this regard, the Iban strongly illustrate Geoffrey Miller's thesis in his book The Mating Mind that the basic mechanism for the evolution of art was sexual selection." No more.

Professor Wadley asserts that I rely on South Kalimantan cosmological models to interpret Iban design. In fact, I refer to them only to suggest that the Iban appear to have traces of these creation myths, which leads to an understated theme of the book, that women, through their cloths, might have driven a major shift in Iban religious beliefs to one in which Singalang Burong took center stage. Iban cloth design is inspired from Panggau, which has little to do with South Kalimantan myths. (As a matter of interest, Batang Ai myths have the Iban starting their journey northwards from Ketapang in the south).

This is a book about Iban art with a touch about religion. Much of Professor Wadley's review skirts around the margins of the book.

He does, however, take to task the evolutionary approach of the book, which was always likely to be controversial, citing it as "perhaps the weakest part of the book." Essentially, he states that there is no evidence presented to support the thesis that weaving and headhunting have a function of sexual selection and gives his view of the kind of evidence required.

The evidence presented in the book is the texts, which Professor Wadley makes no mention of in his review. The texts present an ideal situation, but one which was followed by high ranking Iban. I had intended to pursue the idea in a paper, as the book was intended for a wider audience than the narrowly academic. But there is evidence available which would not require the kind of historical census that Professor Wadley indicates is necessary. The tusut, for example, are evidence--particularly in the Saribas where warriors constantly were married to great weavers. The anak umbong, after all, withdrew to her attic to weave and there to await her warrior hero to come and claim her. Another piece of evidence would be an inventory of bilek in any longhouse from the center to the ulu end. That would reveal that where there were heads, there were boxes full of weaving. In ili bilek, there were usually no heads and many households with no weaving. The ulu bilek were generally the most successful households, paying testimony to the basic argument of the book.

I talked of fitness indicators. I did so in a cultural sense. With the Iban, there are unfitness indicators which I would argue, indirectly support my case. They refer both to intelligence and physique. There are Iban who are very unlikely to marry due to intellectual or physical defects and, in the past, I would speculate, unlikely to mate. In the longhouse in which I did my fieldwork, there were a number (and at that time this was a longhouse very much in my anthropological present). There was an otherwise very attractive woman with a club foot living in an ulu bilek. She was openly called agu '. Her family ensured that no man visited her at night and she remained a virgin in her late thirties. There was an intellectually disadvantaged but physically strong male who certainly did want to visit indu' dara'. They rejected him, but he persisted. He was put away by the longhouse for his troubles. There was a blind woman and an intellectually disadvantaged woman, both of whom never married. The former remained a virgin, though the latter was visited by military personnel from time to time and had three illegitimate children. There was a man in his early twenties with a genetically damaged hip who was also never able to ngayap. Interestingly, apart from the first mentioned woman, all the others came from ill bilek.

While the texts call for powerful cloths, you don't have to have woven one to demonstrate talent (and therefore intelligence). Mozart's talent was well-known by his teens, though his great works did not materialize until later. The bachelors, especially those from other longhouses, would examine the kain a young woman was wearing and would find it very easy to establish whether or not it had been woven by her.

I think that the Iban do present a good case for the exponents of the idea that the early function of art was as a marker of intelligence. The Iban have ritualized the requirement for cloths, which is the usual cultural response to something deemed very important, just as they had done with the requirements for heads. It is part of their genius.

Finally, one aspect about knowledge and scholarship, especially in the case of Dayak art, given how few people have written about it, is that it advances through people sharing information and through challenging what has been written if a person has evidence to the contrary. Professor Wadley, for example, finds that my technical and ritual renderings are largely consistent with what he knows of Iban weaving without mentioning the instances where they were not consistent so that we could all learn about inaccuracies or differentiation in the Emperan and elsewhere. At the end, after earlier "quibbles" have become "heavy caveats" he surprisingly finds some value in the author's "extensive personal insight into the Iban world." It is a pity that some indication of what that might be was not given in the review so that the less informed reader might be guided by someone who also has extensive insights into much the same Iban world as me (Michael Heppell).

Some Further Comments by Your Editor

Leaving aside the debate that Reed and Michael have joined here, I would like to take a somewhat different tack.

Reading Michael's book (and I had the pleasure to read several parts of it in draft some years ago, as well as the final published version more recently) raised in my mind, very vividly, the question of how does it come about that some communities produce impressive works of art? Why is it that at certain times and places a peoples' creative energies seem to overflow, materializing themselves, perhaps, in music or poetry, weaving, architecture, or metalwork? Or, possibly, in many forms at once?

As museum collections testify, Iban society, down through the early decades of the twentieth century, was remarkably creative, most especially, perhaps, in ikat weaving, but also in other art forms as well, including, not the least, although less accessible to non-Iban audiences, epics, ritual liturgy, and other oral poetic arts. How did this come about?

Historically, we know that the Iban, for a span of some three hundred years, were phenomenally successful, rapidly expanding in numbers and territorial extent across a large swath of west-central Borneo. There would seem to have been, as Heppell suggests, an aesthetic dimension to this success. Where Michael Heppell's book succeeds, I think, is in depicting a plausible connection between a once vigorously expansive society and the remarkable works of art its members produced. As he tells us, "before 1950, a close scrutiny of any longhouse, especially on a festive occasion, would be rewarded with decoration and many objects of great beauty. Arrive as an eligible bachelor or spinster and private museums would be yours to enjoy as you went from apartment to apartment enjoying the bidding of the occupants to come inside and eat" (p. 165).

The key to this connection, Heppell asserts, was that, at some point in the past, "the Iban ritualized their expansionist tendencies" (p. 21). This they did by making headhunting the focus of a ritual cult, hence the "severed heads" of the book's subtitle. The taking of enemy heads was linked by means of ritual to agricultural and human fertility in what Heppell calls a "cyclical trinity," involving, as its interconnected parts, head taking, rice growing, and life renewal. Art was an integral part of ritual and hence "inseparable from the religious ideas inspiring it" (p. 25). At the culmination of this cult were "great festivals celebrating a warrior's achievement" in which the gods were invoked and became temporarily present. During these festivals, woven cloth, in particular, played a vital role. Pieces of cloth were hung from the gallery walls, covered offerings, and enveloped the shrines at which the gods were received. "Textiles [thus] link[ed] the Iban to their gods. Like a mirror catching the sun, textiles inform the Celestial Deities of some mortal activity that requires their involvement" (p. 41). Hence, they "were made to dazzle divine and human eyes" (p. 44). Their designs were "invested with meaning and energy" and were intended to capture the "power" of whatever they represented (p. 45). But, above all, Heppell argues, their effect was to incite men to acts of daring. At the same time, they exalted those who succeeded. "In the competitive world of the Iban, [art] was a sign of accomplishment" (p. 166).

Art also, Heppell maintains, brought talented men and women together. Every ambitious man sought a talented woman in marriage. Here, Heppell is certainly right that, even now, competence is highly regarded, however it is achieved and in whatever the field of endeavor. Inversely, except for the sake of humor, ineptitude is scorned. In the Saribas where I did my own fieldwork, lengthy genealogies are preserved, and these certainly suggest that competence, whether as a weaver, expert farmer, public speaker, or whatever, conferred marital advantages, and that these advantages generally accrued to entire family lines and became matters of utmost concern whenever marriages were contemplated. There were, of course, exceptions, for example, famous bards who were blind and so remained unmarried. Otherwise, certainly, families remembered and took pride in the talents and accomplishments of their genealogical forebears. Here, weaving, again, was closely linked to achieved status. As Heppell notes, once a woman completed a prestigious cloth, it became an heirloom and so an object of family wealth and spiritual power. Henceforth it was displayed on ritual occasions and its powerful designs testified not only to the skill of the woman who created it but to the past sponsorship by family members of important status-confirming rituals.

The Iban, as Heppell stresses, admire multitalented people. During my own fieldwork, my young son became a great admirer of the Tuai Rumah's three sons, who were from 3 to 10 years older than he was and were all seemingly capable of doing everything a young boy might wish to do, such as capturing and making pets of wild animals. Once over several weeks, the Tuai Rumah, who was himself an exemplar of multi-competence, taught his three sons, with my own son looking on, how to build a canoe. He began with a lesson in how to select and prepare the best possible wood. This was followed by a series in how to carefully measure, fashion, and fit together each piece of the canoe so that the resulting perau was light in the water, but stable, a pleasure to handle as well as to look at. The basic message was that should you turn your hand to something, you should do it well, never indifferently, and strive to make the object something to be proud of, that others will admire. Artistic genius clearly lived on in the 1970s and 80s in the upper Paku.

The coming of white colonists and missionaries, Heppell writes, "heralded the death of Iban art." Headhunting and territorial expansion were stopped and Iban were set against Iban. "Western-style education and wealth were to be more important than hard work, courage and self-made art" (p. 167). Paid labor had no time for artistic talent. "The memory bank was quickly stripped bare by dealers buying for collectors and museums in the west seeking only the old" (p. 168). Young artists had no incentive to invest time in works of art, while, in any event, with religious conversion, "the inspiration for such works was slowly extinguished" (p. 168).

Today, the arts that Heppell describes in his book are fast disappearing (1) as is the former cultural setting that once sustained them. Several days before writing these comments, I received a poignant reminder of this in an email message from a very dear Iban friend. In his letter, the writer, Jantan Umbat, described a journey that he and his wife had just made to Tarum Longhouse, in the Saratok District, to pay their last respects, and that of my wife and myself, to a great Iban bard (lemambang) and master woodcarver, Renang anak Jabing, the son, too, of a renowned shaman, who, many years earlier, had been, for me, a major informant. The old riverside Tarum longhouse, of which I have still a faint memory, was years ago replaced by a severely barren concrete structure erected immediately alongside the main road. Jantan writes in his letter:

 I entered the longhouse and was very, very surprised to see the
 coffin of our hero laid down on the ruai without a sapat. Nobody
 wept around him, not to say to chant the sabak. Only his poor wife
 who could not recognize anybody after her minor stroke sat quietly
 beside the middle post. I came in, shook hands with her, said a
 prayer ... Then I went to the bilik where many friends of his sat
 ... I was welcomed by the son ... and expressed our sadness, my
 family's and yours, over the passing away of the man.

 I think there was no harm to have the sapat ... It looked weird
 without [it]! Well, things change with modernization.

Indeed, they do. Until recently, grieving for the dead without a sapat, an enclosure made of ikat textiles to surround the deceased's body, would have been unthinkable. Today, the Tarum Longhouse is Christian, as are virtually all other Iban longhouses in the Betong and Saratok Districts, and, indeed, Renang's own son is a Protestant minister. Formerly, death was an occasion on which families brought out and displayed their beautifully woven heirloom cloths (pua' kumbu') in the construction of the sapat. During the nightlong vigil of rabat, a dirge singer, or tukang sabak, sat within this cloth enclosure and sang the sabak, the lament for the dead in which she described the journey of the dead person's soul as it travels from the longhouse to the Afterworld. Mourners and family members sat all around the enclosure, some, because of grief, as close as possible, weeping, talking quietly among themselves, and listening to the dirge singer's song. For many, the beauty of her words, and of the cloth through which her voice passed, was a source of profound comfort. As in other spheres of Iban life, art was once an integral part of grieving.

While Heppell has chosen to couch his arguments in terms of "sexual selection," history, to my mind, might well have offered a more appropriate framework. The flowering of Iban art was, after all, extremely short-lived in biological terms and depended upon a number of historically-circumscribed processes. Moreover, the question of why some communities foster creativity has long interested historians. To return to my original question, from the perspective of European history, a superb example of this interest may be found in Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, particularly its brilliant Part One, "The State as a Work of Art." Here Burckhardt persuasively argues that the Italian city-states not only created conditions for a rebirth and outpouring of artistic creativity, but that the political order itself was objectified, made the object of reflection, both in the writings of its political theorists (such as Machiavelli), but, equally, in its art and architecture. The times, institutions, and art that Burckhardt deals with are, of course, very different than those that concern Heppell. In addition, as a European, Burckhardt is also interested in those elements of Renaissance innovation and creativity that still persist. For this latter perspective, we must wait, very probably, for some future Iban historian (Clifford Sather).

References Cited

Bliege Bird, R., E. A Smith, and D. W. Bird 2001 The Hunting Handicap: Costly Signaling in Human Foraging Strategies. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 50:9-19.

Coe, Kathryn 2003 The Ancestress Hypothesis: Visual Arts as Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Darwin, Charles 1909 The Origin of Species. New York: P. F. Collier.

1989 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: New York University Press.

Gavin, Traude 2003 Iban Ritual Textiles. Leiden: KITLV Press.

Hawkes, K. and R. Bliege Bird 2002 Showing Off, Handicap Signaling and the Evolution of Men's Work. Evolutionary Anthropology 11:58-67.

King, Victor T. 1993 The Peoples of Borneo. Oxford: Blackwell.

Miller, Geoffrey 2000 The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. London: Heinemann.

Pringle, Robert 1970 Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke Rule, 1841-1941. London: Macmillan.

Sandin, Benedict 1968 The Sea Dayaks of Borneo before White Rajah Rule. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Zahavi, Amotz, and Arishag Zahavi 1997 The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(1) See Vinson Sutlive's Memorial to Datin Amar Margaret Linggi, a woman who devoted her considerable energies to reviving an interest in ikat weaving among Iban women in Sarawak.