Sarawak Museum

Inspired by world heritage sites all around the world, Sarawak is developing its showcase to the world. Borneo being the fourth largest island in the world, Sarawak is perceived as a provincial state and tourism is still seen as a growth area. This has implications for all its attractions and museums.
How can small museums without the large tourist crowd have the potential to contribute towards the growth of its society, towards innovation and sustainability? And how can communities participate in museums to signify the identity of the people?

Abstract
A chance survey of the original first acquisition book in the Sarawak Museum revealed the term “looted in an expedition” used to describe a set of six domestic objects from a longhouse, acquired in 1903, from a retiring Brooke administrator, C.A. Bampfylde. This prompted a year-long search for these objects, in the shelves of the storerooms of the Sarawak Museum and into the archives and stores of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Overlooked by curators and rarely displayed, these objects which came from the hearths of longhouses are domestic in nature, and are unlikely trophies from a war expedition. Thus, the presence of these objects in the Sarawak Museum gives rise to two questions: why should these domestic items be donated as looted objects, and why would an administrator have kept these and given them away on retirement. In order to suggest answers to these questions through investigating the provenance of these objects, this article traces the career of the donor-collector, analyses the meaning of the term “looted” and the implications for its use, .and the subsequent reconstruction of the war expedition during which these items were acquired. On the one hand, these objects represent a victory in warfare for the Brooke regime, and on the other, the presence of these five objects in the Sarawak Museum, provides an opportunity to analyse oral histories and colonial reports to set the context and to reconstruct what might have happened to their original owners, who were women fighting for survival, being subjected to the relentless violence of punitive war expeditions. These objects serve as a catalyst for the Badeng voice that comes through the oral histories which conveys agency, resistance and independence in the face of Brooke rule. At the same time, with the possible loan or return of the looted hat from the Pitt Rivers Museum, the exhibition of these objects becomes a complete set of six.

Keywords : looted objects -decolonizing discourses  -source community-Sarawak Museum -Kenyah Badeng