Tuked Rini, Cosmic Traveller: Life and Legend in the Heart of Borneo by Monica Janowski (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tuked Rini, Cosmic Traveller: Life and Legend in the Heart of Borneo by Monica Janowski Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme (bio) Tuked Rini, Cosmic Traveller: Life and Legend in the Heart of Borneo. By Monica Janowski. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2014. viii+ 174 pp. Monika Janowski has carried out fieldwork among the Kelabit of the highlands straddling the border between Sarawak and Kalimantan since the mid-1980s. Early in her initial fieldwork she recorded a recitation of the legend of the Kelabit culture hero Tuked Rini and his battle against powerful spirits. The legend relates the hunting expedition of Tuked Rini, a longhouse leader of extraordinary powers, for the spirit-stone animal called the Spirit Tiger Rock in the company of his male relatives and followers. They manage to capture their quarry and inside it they find another longhouse, against whose inhabitants they do battle. Tuked Rini’s side is about to lose when the Great Spirit Mother, the source of all life and power, intervenes and ends the battle, thus allowing Tuked Rini to return home with his crew. At home, Tuked Rini’s wife welcomes him, serves him rice wine and they hold a feast to celebrate the harvest. In this book, Janowski uses the legend of Tuked Rini as a springboard to explore a range of aspects of Kelabit social life, cosmology, longhouse architecture and organization, gender relations, hunting and agricultural practices, rituals and feasting. Although the legend is situated in a mythical time when the current differentiations [End Page 325] among animals, humans and spirits were less distinct, Janowski underlines that it continues to serve as a model for being human and that Tuked Rini and his wife live as humans should. They display, that is, the proper gender values of male courage in war and hunting, and female care and skill in rice cultivation. Furthermore, Janowski demonstrates the ways in which the legend continues to shape life today, when many Kelabit venture, as did Tuked Rini, into unknown territory in leaving their longhouse communities. The book is in many ways unusual. It is very generously embellished with pictures and illustrations. The pictures offer a welcoming visual introduction to the Kelabit rainforest world, and the combination of contemporary and historical pictures, along with some very evocative abstract paintings by the Kelabit artist Stephen Baya, make the book a pleasant read. However, the vast number of pictures may at times swamp the really good ones. A slightly more frugal approach in choosing which pictures to include would probably have enhanced the already high aesthetic appeal of the book. That the text is refreshingly devoid of academic jargon makes it highly accessible and thus in line with its aim of making sense and appeal also to non-scholars. Janowski does provide just about enough analysis to appeal to scholars and thus balances delicately between two different readerships. In this respect, the book stands out from many other contributions on myths, legends and social life on Borneo and in Southeast Asia. Another unusual feature of the book is that it is not written as a singular linear story. The central narrative is interspersed with a series of insets that provide contextualization and allow elaborations and explanations of concepts. These insets are helpful to reading the legend, but, when Janowski takes up some of the same issues later in the book, she repeats parts of these insets almost verbatim. The author could have avoided this, either by referring readers back to the insets or by rephrasing the repetitions. The centrality of the legend of Tuked Rini for the Kelabit seems to be underlined by the ways in which its values suffuse the group’s social life. However, it is also evident that Kelabit very rarely recite it today and that many do not actually know it. Kelabit have now [End Page 326] adopted Christianity. Janowski argues briefly that the access that Christianity provided to high levels of lalud, a form of power or life force previously associated with mythical characters like Tuked Rini and now with Jesus Christ, drove this conversion. Janowski could explain somewhat more the implications for Kelabit ideas regarding cosmology, the spirit world, feasting, relations with the...