[ { "id": 209121, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 24, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO: DIAGNOSIS AND CURE\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS*\n\nIntroduction\n\nDespite the rather grandiloquent title of this paper, its aim is less pretentious than it sounds; it is concerned with the ideas held by the Melanau people of Sarawak on illness and what to do about it. How far anything in the Melanau vocabulary corresponds with European notions of medicine, diagnosis or cure is in a sense incidental. The main purpose of the paper is to make clear the Melanau notions.\n\nThe Melanau\n\nThe Melanau are a people who live on the northwest coast of Borneo. They speak a language that is distantly related to Malay, and today there are about 50,000 of them. They live in a rather specialised environment on the banks of slow, meandering rivers that wind through dense and swampy tropical jungles and flow into the South China Sea. The swamp land is often a little below sea level, and when the raised banks are breached by floods (as happens quite often), the terrain becomes very difficult to cope with. It is also unhealthy — fevers, mosquitoes, snakes, crocodiles, bears, and all kinds of creatures are common and are not really on the side of human beings.\n\nThe environment also imposes a number of limits on the economic and social life of the people who inhabit it; this is not the place or the time to discuss those limits, but a little does need to be said about the social system because it is so closely bound up in Melanau thought with their view of the environment and the beings who inhabit it. Correct relations with the environment and all other creatures in it are essential, the Melanau say, if men are to prosper and be healthy.2\n\nA hundred years ago a Melanau village (usually separated from its neighbours by two or three miles along the river) consisted of one or\n\n* Dr. Morris spent many years studying the Melanau people of Sarawak, and has just retired from a Readership in Anthropology at the London School of Economics.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209122, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO DIAGNOSIS AND CURE\n\n11\n\ntwo longhouses. They were massively built wooden fortresses standing on piles, usually about 30 feet above ground level. Each village was politically independent in its own territory, and was frequently on terms of active hostility with its neighbours. The investment of labour and capital in a longhouse was so great that it was rarely moved or completely re-built. The district was conquered by the Rajah of Sarawak, James Brooke, in 1861; and over the next twenty years a measure of law and order was imposed on the villages. In time, too, the longhouses became so overcrowded that the people simply abandoned them and built small, separate houses along the banks of the river in ribbon development.\n\nThe political control of a village was in the hands of a small group of aristocratic elders who were said to be the descendants of the village's founders. The society was rigidly ranked: about 10 percent of a village's population were what one can call aristocrats; 80 percent were middle rankers of varying degrees; and another 10 percent were slaves. An elaborate set of customary rules (adet) regulated the behaviour of the members of the different ranks to one another and most other aspects of life as well. The adet was one of the community's most valued possessions and was in the custody of the aristocratic elders. No single elder was superior to the others, though he might have special knowledge that fitted him for particular tasks. A man with unusual abilities in war was put in charge of raids, and another with knowledge of rituals might assume leadership on appropriate occasions. It is interesting, though, that in general the aristocrats did not handle matters of the adet that dealt with ritual, with illness, and with dealings with other beings than humans. They were primarily concerned with power over people in this world. But leadership among the ruling committee of elders was not formalised into permanent offices, and there was no single political chief who ruled a village as of personal right. This is, of course, a possible and workable political arrangement in an independent village of five to eight hundred inhabitants.3\n\nLet me summarise the situation. A Melanau thought of himself as a citizen of a particular village whose inhabitants were thought to be, and often were, peculiar in matters of dialect and custom. As an individual, a man or woman was also the focal point of a circle of kinsmen with whom he shared a wide range of social and economic interests; and, lastly, he had by virtue of birth a position of rank. In any context the behaviour of one individual to another was largely", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209123, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 26, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "12\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS\n\ndetermined by the fact that the two people were neighbours or strangers, kinsmen or not, of equal or unequal rank. And in addition they were, of course, either male or female, and young or old. Within the social order an individual's behaviour was regulated by the elders acting under the adet, which was thought to be changeless. In the symbolic order an individual's behaviour was also regulated by the adet administered by the elders who, in this field, were helped by other experts thought to know more about the rest of the natural order of the universe than was fitting to a dignified aristocrat.\n\nIndeed, the main premise underlying Melanau thought was that the universe is held together in a system of natural order, and that if that order was disturbed, whether inadvertently or by deliberate foolishness, trouble would follow; and, until the cause of the disorder was diagnosed and steps were taken to restore proper order once again, the trouble would remain. The rules governing the behaviour of the members of the different ranks to one another in the human social order was as much an aspect of the universal adet as the behaviour of a man to animals or spirits; and improper behaviour anywhere brought disorder, often in the form of illness.\n\nTo finish this brief sketch of the Melanau view of the world, of which men shared only a part with a variety of other beings, I do need to say a little more. For a Melanau his village lay at the centre of his social and symbolic worlds. Beyond the village were the forests, the hills, the sea, and other rivers whose inhabitants, human, animal, vegetable, and supernatural were, or were believed to be, at best indifferent to humans and at worst really dangerous. Above this world is the overworld and below the underworld. These worlds were thought of as countries, as rivers, like the river on which a man's own village was situated. The over- and the under-worlds were more elaborate than I have described and consisted of seven separate worlds above and seven below this our middle world; but the essential point is that each one was by and large a replica of this one, and like it was inhabited by humans, animals, plants and spirits. Since mythical times there have been barriers between these different worlds; and though spirits can still travel freely from one to another, humans, except for special ones like shamans, cannot. One of the underworlds is the Land of the Dead (likou matai); it is also fenced off and once a soul has passed its guardian the soul cannot leave the land of the dead. Ghosts are those unhappy souls who for one reason or another have not been allowed in and wander unhappily and dangerously between two worlds.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209124, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 27, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO DIAGNOSIS AND CURE\n\n13\n\nEffectively a man is concerned only with this world and its inhabitants, and under the adat the relations between men and other beings are subject to careful regulation. Every being has its own proper place, its home, if you like; and any other creature who trespasses on his territory commits an offence against the proper order of things, the adat; and trouble follows. The proper place of a man, as I said earlier, is his village, which, when it was a longhouse fortress, was a purely human and manufactured artefact. But in order to live at all a man has to go out of it and cultivate rice and sago. These areas of cultivation are, as it were, partly domesticated and are a semi-human domain. But men share that cultivated territory with other beings - animals, and plants and spirits - and a man is in greater danger there than he is in his village of trespassing on the rights of other creatures, thus bringing about trouble - especially accidents and sickness to himself.\n\nBeyond the semi-human, cultivated zone is the high forest into which men must go to hunt, to fish, and to gather fruit, resins, and other things necessary to life. But a man goes into the forest at his own risk. He shares its use with other beings who probably have greater rights to be there than he has, and he must exercise great caution while he is in it. He often comes back suffering from accidents and illness. To be safe in a tropical swamp jungle needs knowledge, vigilance, and immense luck.\n\nBefore one can understand the trouble which comes from breaking the adat and what that means to a Melanau, we need to know a little about the way in which he thinks a human being is put together. All humans, the Melanau say, are made up of four separate elements: (i) the body; (ii) the soul, which is thought to be a vaporous replica of the body, and which eventually goes to the land of the dead; (iii) the emotions; and (iv) a principle of life that distinguishes animate from inanimate things. For a man to be alive and healthy these four elements must be joined and undisturbed. But the body, in particular, is subject to accidents and illness; and a proper balance of its elements depends partly on a proper balance of hot and cold. The body can easily be disturbed by excessive eating, by exposure to rain and storms, and by an imbalance of hot and cold things. After childbirth, for instance, a woman is particularly subject to cold; and for forty-four days after the birth she must lie by a fire kept alight day and night and eat and drink hot and spicy food. Most illness, however, is attributed to a breach of the adat or an attack by a spirit or even witchcraft. At the onset of an attack by a spirit, or when something else upsets the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209125, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 28, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "14\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS\n\nbalance of the human person, the first thing to be upset is the feelings or the emotions. This shows itself by paleness, trembling, or nervousness, and the soul begins its journey to the land of the dead, leaving behind it only the body, which is still animated by the principle of life. If the soul does not return, death is inevitable.\n\nThe world, as I said a little earlier, also contains other beings than humans. No Melanau doubts the existence of spirits, though if you ask him about them, he is likely to say: \"They are things which cannot be seen; how can we be sure what they are like?\" Even so everybody knows what quite a large number of them do look like; I have the detailed descriptions of about 150 spirits. Many people who are not experts have sufficient knowledge of the appearance and attributes of several spirits and the afflictions they are thought to cause. They are also able to carve spirit images for use in curing illness.\n\nThe most general classification of spirits is by the region they inhabit; for like men, they all have their proper homes and settings. In this middle world are found air or sky spirits, and forest, and river, and sea spirits. The upper and the under worlds have the same types; and all can move from one world to another in a way that a man cannot. Spirits are male and female, and most are anthropomorphic. Some people think that like the Melanau they are hierarchically ranked within their categories, each of which has its own leader with authority over all his kind, whatever world he may inhabit.\n\nAlthough people tell myths and stories of marriages between humans and spirits and of men becoming spirits, others deny that any of this is possible. At the same time all agree that animals, plants, humans, and spirits are distinct and separate orders of being who happen to share the same environment - a fact that entails ordered rules of behaviour. Contact between these various orders is inevitable, but it carries considerable risk with it; the likelihood of over-stepping the bounds of proper behaviour and so causing trouble is very great indeed.\n\n―\n\nThe Melanau's technical equipment gave them little control over the natural forces of their environment; but they did have an extensive and detailed knowledge of its variations and dangers. By personifying those forces and placing them in a system of moral relationships, stated in much the same terms as they used in handling the social order and backed by the same kinds of sanctions, they were helped", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209127, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 30, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "STEPHEN MORRIS \n\nliving space of the man he has attacked; and it is the task of the elders, the guardians of the adat, to exact material compensation for the attack and expiation in the form of symbolic gifts, usually of gold and iron, graded according to the rank of the injured party. So also spirits, with the help of human intermediaries who have special knowledge can be made to see the offence they have committed in attacking a human and made to understand that they must co-operate in putting matters right, thus restoring proper order.\n\nHere I have to confess a difficulty that faces me; my knowledge of illnesses and the western medical classification of them is exceedingly poor. The Melanau themselves used a limited number of terms to describe the symptoms of being ill. My notes are full of words which I translated as wounds, sores, pains in the belly sharp or small, pains in the head, in the chest, in the eyes, and so on. People were feverish, hot, cold, confused, ‘felt bad', had a ‘dark face', a leg or an abdomen was swollen, and so on. Children cried incessantly and dribbled, people sweated beyond reason. To bring some order into the subject I once set a student, who was a state registered nurse, to try and classify the long list of symptoms I had collected in a way that perhaps made sense to her and that might correlate with illnesses as we understand them. She ended in very confused condition and I put her on to another project.\n\nIn 1950 one of the Medical Officers in Sarawak came to the village I was then working in, and with my help took a hundred blood samples for analysis. At my request he made a quick medical diagnosis of twenty-five of the people he saw. For what it is worth his results showed 6 people to have had syphilis or gonorrhea, 6 more, mostly women, were suffering from anemia; 6 were suffering severely from tuberculosis; 3 showed active signs of malaria; 2 had glaucoma; 1 had epilepsy; 1 had rheumatoid arthritis; and 1 showed signs of beri-beri. In other words, the doctor's classification and that of the Melanau were rather different; and though both the doctor and the villagers were agreed that in most of the cases all was far from well, their ways of arriving at that conclusion and their views on what to do about it were rather different. Both looked at a syndrome of symptoms and diagnosed a cause for the imbalance in the bodily economy; and on the basis of a theory about that economy both prescribed a course of action to set things right. For certain kinds of illness the doctor was, on the whole, more successful than the Melanau.\n\nBoth the Melanau and westerners have techniques for avoiding\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209128, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 31, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO. DIAGNOSIS AND CURE\n\n17\n\nthe danger of illness; and both have techniques for diagnosing and for setting things right when they go wrong. For the Melanau the most important way of avoiding danger is to follow the adet; but if he fails to do so and gets into trouble, then there are experts who will guide and help him. If, in spite of the guidance of the adet and commonsense, combined warnings from omens and dreams, he does get into trouble and does not immediately die, then he can resort to mediators who are expert in diagnosing or guessing the cause of the trouble, and in prescribing the correct expiation and remedy for restoring the balance of nature and right relations among the different orders of being. On the whole the Melanau, unlike the western doctor, does not look for the cause of an upset in the economy of the body itself, though their first course of action may be to do just that. A man who feels unwell probably goes in the first place to a herbalist who can supply medicines that will, he says, cool or heat the body. He may attribute the illness to what we would call natural causes, and point out that the patient has eaten unwisely, or he may tell an anaemic woman after childbirth that she has lost her blood to the child and that the birth has therefore left her subject to 'coldness'. On the other hand, he may attribute the trouble to 'wind' which is always present in the air, and which through human folly or some accident weakens the proper relationship between the body, the soul, the emotions, and life.\n\nA visit to the herbal doctor is only the first step, and if he cures the condition, well and good. The most general cause of misfortune and illness is thought to be disrespect or disregard of proper behaviour in one or other of its many forms. To mock the natural order in any way, as, for example, by laughing at or by teasing animals, puts everybody in grave danger; for the angered spirits who act as guardians of order will certainly send down thunder, lightning, and hail and maybe even turn a whole village into stone. Or again, a man who unnecessarily spears a frog while his wife is pregnant puts his unborn child in danger of being born with deformed features and no control over its orifices. But punishment for disrespect in the form of misfortune or illness is more usually linked to a particular act of disrespect to another being rather than to the order of things as a whole. A man who goes into the forest and puts his foot into a hole may well have disturbed the home of a spirit; and he will not be surprised if some days later he develops sores on his leg. Or if he cuts down a tree without offering an apology to the spirit who may dwell in it, or if he ignores", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209129, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 32, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "18\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS\n\nomens warning him against some action, he has only himself to blame if he becomes ill or meets an accident.\n\n+\n\nOn most occasions it is the human being who is the offender; but it does sometimes happen that a spirit gratuitously attacks a man, or it may even be that a spirit takes a liking to some human, and in order to make him aware of the fact will cause him to fall ill; so that he is obliged to call in a shaman, who through his own friendly spirits can get in touch with the one who is causing the trouble and make the situation known to the patient. Sometimes the spirit will tell the sick man why he is ill and what he has to do in order to be cured. Sometimes the disrespect; the breach of proper boundaries between the different classes of being is the work of an animal. Crocodiles, for example, have the power to entice the soul of a human and keep it, knowing that unless something is done the body will follow, looking for the soul, and provide a meal for the crocodile. The symptoms of this kind of theft, paleness, lethargy, fatigue, are usually indistinguishable from those of an attack by a spirit or any other cause for the soul's departure from the body. Only a shaman, with the help of his spirit friends and guides, can diagnose with any certainty what has happened.\n\nFinally there are some illnesses caused by witchcraft or sorcery. Witchcraft, in the sense of malice projected symbolically without the use of material means, by a living member of the victim's society is rare among the Melanau; and it occurs only when a shaman's moral character is not sufficiently strong to control the potentially nasty habits of his spirit friends. They persuade him to send his head out at night to suck the blood of victims, and so feed the spirits. A weak or a bad shaman is not strong enough to prevent that kind of thing. The result is what I suppose we should call anaemia; and it is eventually followed by death, if the shaman is not stopped in time - usually in former days by killing him. Illness can also be caused by sorcery (though not often I think) by carving images of particular spirits, bringing the carvings to life, and then ordering the spirits to disregard the rules of the ader and hunt down the sorcerer's enemy.\n\nTo summarise what I have been saying: the principal causes of illness in a Melanau diagnosis on the basis of symptoms are\n\n(i) Improper relation of hot and cold elements in the body.\n\n(ii) An act of disrespect that flouts the proper order of things, usually an action by the sufferer but sometimes by another being - a spirit, an animal, or even another human.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209133, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "22\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS\n\nship. He may resist for a time and continue to be ill, or the spirit, in order to make his point doubly clear, may not reveal his intentions at a simple domestic caring for the sick ceremony; and so the patient goes on being ill. But sooner or later he has to undertake the next curing ceremony called escorting the spirits.\n\nThis ceremony lasts three nights, and is a considerably more elaborate and expensive affair than a simple caring for the sick; and a household is unwilling to go to the expense unless it is very necessary. In its essentials, however, the procedures are the same as in the caring for the sick, except that in three nights a great many more spirits can be summoned to advise and help than can be done in one night, especially if more than one shaman is employed. In most cases the curing of an illness stops at an escorting of the spirits ceremony. If, however, the condition is serious or persistent, or if the attacking spirit really means to establish a permanent relationship of friendship with the patient and so turn him into a shaman, then the sick person has to go on to the third and the last ceremony, the cradling ceremony. But before doing that, a man will do everything else he can to cure himself because the ritual is expensive, and, as the Melanau say, 'it is the end of our medicine'. If it fails there is no more to do but die. Indeed in the two previous ceremonies spirits may well have advised him to try more Malay herbal medicine, to see what a Chinese doctor can do, or even go to one of the European dressing stations, which are not unlike the barefoot doctors of the Republic of China, and which in Malaya and Sarawak have existed for seventy or eighty years,\n\nBut to return to the cradling ceremony. It lasts five days and nights and can go on for seven or nine. Except for the annual cleansing of the village itself, a cradling ceremony is the most festive occasion on which humans and spirits meet. It is called 'cradling' because the patient is placed on a swing made of rattan rope hung from the rafters of the house, and is swung backwards and forwards to be possessed by the spirit who is attacking him and who wants him for a friend. If this is the cause of the illness the fact that the patient is willing to sit on the swing is a sign that he has surrendered and is willing to accept the friendship, and even to become a practising shaman if that is what the spirit wants. Whether the spirit will insist on the patient's becoming a practitioner is an open question; for even spirits are not wholly unreasonable, and will not often insist on an aristocrat's undergoing the indignity and loss of all good manners involved in frequent possession and trance in public. Besides, to be really effective,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209134, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 37, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "TOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO- DIAGNOSIS AND CURE\n\n23\n\na shaman has to have a large number of spirit friends; and human aristocrats, whose social relationships with other villagers are mostly those of clients and followers, do not readily admit others to their friendship. On the whole shamans are middle-ranking people. Their personal histories often show that at some stage in their lives they suffered from psychological disturbances; and that once they accepted the role of shaman they usually calmed down. Some of them, especially men who appear ambitious, and who were blocked in their political or economic careers, were very intelligent, and used their position as a shaman to gain advantages. On the other hand, some of the shamans were not intelligent; but were also not very well thought of as shamans. One man, who was particularly ambitious, had had his career blocked by aristocrats, it was said, on several occasions; and it was whispered that he was a witch, a very venomous shaman who could only just control his more dangerous spirit friends. Some people, indeed, said that his moral character was not strong enough to keep them in order, and that he did allow them to feed on neighbours' blood. A hundred years earlier the aristocrats would undoubtedly have speared him to death.\n\n―\n\nAt this point I realise, with some dismay, that I have given only the roughest idea of the Melanau's ideas on human illness and its causes and cures. What I hope I may have done is to give some indication of the complexity and sophistication of the system of thought that lies behind their ideas on illness. The universe they live in, which, if used incorrectly, almost automatically produces the ills that the human condition is subject to, is as complex and as aesthetically and imaginatively satisfying as the universe inhabited by Dante and the men of the European middle ages. Clearly the way in which the Melanau empirically handled many of the illnesses that afflicted them was less effective than the practice of western medicine in 1950. The terrifying number of newly born babies who died during my first visit to their villages and the fact that the owner of the house next to the one I lodged in died of tuberculosis six months after my arrival was sufficient evidence that many of their cures failed. But most of the disorders they suffered would in any event have cured themselves, as they do almost everywhere else in the world. The fact that the Melanau had little control over their environment, though they did have a detailed and extensive knowledge of its possibilities and dangers, meant that the way in which they organised that knowledge into an extension of the ordinary moral system gave them the assurance they needed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209135, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 38, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "24\n\nSTEPHEN MORRIS\n\nto face the very real perils of their lives. Moreover, the facts of daily life, as they understood and used them, did not contradict the more important elements of that organised system of knowledge. It is a pity, they said, that so many people do die in spite of all that men can do to cure them of illness; but that, after all, is the way things are; and in the end all men do have to die.\n\nNOTES\n\n1See Morris, H. S. \"The Coastal Melanau” in Essays on Borneo Societies, ed. V. T. King (O.U.P. 1978).\n\n2See Morris, H. S. \"Shamanism among the Oya Melanau” in Social Organisation: Essays Presented to Raymond Firth, ed. Maurice Needham (London 1967).\n\n3See Morris, H.S. \"The Decline of an Aristocracy” in Politics in Leadership, eds. W. A. Shack and P. S. Cohen (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979), Morris, H. S. “Slaves, Aristocrats and Export of Sago in Sarawak” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. J. L. Watson. (Blackwell, Oxford, 1980),", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 } ]