Trans-Cultural Encounters, Positionalities, and Socio-Historical Burdens: A Reflection from a Muslim Anthropologist on Studying Christianity in Central Borneo

This article explores lessons learned from studying an Indigenous Christian community, the Kenyah, by a young male Muslim anthropologist in two different countries which have differing Muslim-Christian relations, namely Malaysia and Indonesia, which border each other on the island of Borneo. In so doing, this approach elaborates on the implications of intersectionality of social class, ethnic identity, citizenship, and religious affiliation that in many ways shape the transcultural encounters between the author and many interlocutors in both the state of Sarawak in Malaysia and the Indonesian Province of North Kalimantan. I argue that an anthropologist who comes from a non-anglophone and Western institution, who is studying socially similar yet culturally foreign groups, needs to destabilize the notion of strict oppositional categories of “self” and “other” as a metaphor in doing and writing ethnography. Taking this into consideration, the task of non-western anthropologist is to reveal the problematics of how to navigates a more complex and shifting form of sociality when doing their data collection and present their ethnographical analysis. The task is to reveal the experience of crossing many layered of identities and situation encountered in many stages of ethnography. It is through this experience that ethnographic insights may appear in different forms, contrasting with a western scholar’s experience of doing ethnography. In explaining this argument, this paper will elaborate on two aspects. The first is the problematic of doing participant observation when rapport requires the researcher to forego their beliefs and dietary restrictions. The second is the author’s cultural and historical burden as a Muslim observing, elaborating, and understanding ethnohistorical accounts of how the Kenyah interpret and define the experience of becoming Christian within two different denominations.