Following the Rice Year: Adat Gawai, Past and Present

Abstract

As the last chapter revealed, multiculturalist discourses depict Sarawak’s indigenous groups as existing in a timeless space of “tradition” not quite removed from, yet not quite commensurate with, modernity. What these portrayals often gloss over, however, is a topic of central importance to their very subjects: religion. While the omission of Christianity from official portraits of Bidayuh-ness is not surprising, it is striking that its predecessor, adat gawai., has not received much attention beyond its highly aestheticized “cultural” incarnations. This chapter attempts to fill in those blanks through an exploration of adat gawai as a ritual complex, both as it functioned in the pre-Christian past and as it has evolved in an increasingly urbanized, Christian present. As the next few chapters will reveal, it would be fallacious to describe adat gawai—and indeed adat in general—as an unchanging, bounded entity. This is particularly true in Bidayuh communities where Christians live side by side with the few remaining practitioners of the old ways. Although I devote separate chapters of this book to adat gawai and Christianity, then, it will become obvious that there is a constant, sometimes problematic, overlap between the two in reality; as contemporary phenomena, neither can be discussed without reference to the other. To begin, I recount one such scene of overlap—an entire saga, in fact—that unfolded over several months in 2005.