Paper short abstract:

(see abstract)

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how a collection of objects in a village museum in Borneo mediates and destabilises the concept of 'culture' for different people. Kampung Benuk, a Bidayuh village in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, has been a small-scale tourist destination since the 1960s. A key attraction within the village is Paka's 'mini-museum', a private collection of old ritual paraphernalia, local crafts, family heirlooms, and more intriguingly, gifts and other items that the late owner (Paka) received from his visitors. Most of these were acquired in the 1960s, when visitors (often British, Australian and American servicemen) came specifically to visit Paka and his family, rather than a prototypical 'Bidayuh village'. The objects which they left behind - ranging from British naval plaques to an Australian boomerang - now remain in the mini-museum alongside the other more obviously 'traditional' items on display.

My paper will assess the significance of these objects in the present-day context of Paka's mini-museum, which many visitors now see as a repository of traditional 'Bidayuh culture'. Contemporary (Euro-American) tourists often find their expectations of 'cultural authenticity' confounded by the presence of these distinctly 'foreign' additions: lingering material traces of others like themselves who arrived decades before. Such objects, I argue, disrupt the cultural essentialism that commonly underlies tourist discourses by historicising the mini-museum. At the same time, it is precisely these items - both proof and substance of the family's privileged relationship with foreign visitors - which alienates the mini-museum from other villagers, who feel very little affinity for its collection. Through a focus on such objects, my paper thus depicts a mini-museum which, far from being a 'straightforward' cultural attraction, has - partly through its history of interaction with tourists - become a contested space for different parties' conceptions of 'culture' and 'communal identity'.