Thinking through Adat Gawai: “Culture,” Transformation, and the Matter of Religiosity

Abstract

As we have seen, many Christians’ responses to the adat gawai question are tinged by ambivalence, with even the staunchest opponents and supporters of the old rituals occasionally finding themselves in moral, social, and religious quandaries. In many ways, this situation derives from the basic fact that adat gawai and its practitioners are still present and active within certain Bidayuh communities today. Even in villages where they no longer exist, the old rituals have not been reduced to caricatures of a distant past but remain fresh in collective memory and experience. Consequently, although most Christians lack detailed semantic and “doctrinal” knowledge of adat gawai, many of them will have at least some idea of its mechanisms, principles, and tutelary presences (see Chua 2009b). These ideas, I argue, continue to exert an agentive influence on villagers of all ages and must be taken seriously if we are to get to grips with contemporary manifestations of both adat gawai and “Bidayuh culture.”