摘要：The paper comprises an intellectual journey through Borneo. But rather thansummarising the results of his and others research on Borneo’s societies, culturesand histories and demonstrating their contribution to knowledge within certainfields of scholarship and theoretical tradition the author dwells on a particularstyle of research which he refers to as ‘jobbing’. Popular reactions to the use ofsuch a concept usually turn on the images which it conjures of an unprofessionaland unscholarly approach to what are serious matters of academic endeavour.However, in arguing that much of his own research can be characterised as‘jobbing’, that it falls somewhere in the middle of a continuum from theory topractice drawing on concepts in an eclectic and pragmatic way in order toanalyse and present materials gathered from a diverse range of sources in alogical and meaningful explanatory narrative, the author proposes that muchof the research undertaken in Borneo over the last half century can also becategorised in the same fashion. The paper ranges over ‘jobbing concepts’, therelations between area studies and a jobbing lifestyle, the apprenticeship of ajobbing researcher, the ways in which research both on the ‘Maloh’ of interiorKalimantan and on Borneo more generally can be appreciated from thisperspective, and the problems posed by globalisation approaches for thosewhose work is rooted in the understanding of ‘on-the-ground’ structures andprocesses
