Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

The long house

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  • The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in permanent homes. She also has personal reasons for coming to Southeast Asia: raised in a household dominated by her mother's anger at a Filipino father who abandoned the family before she was born, Jennifer grew up half-Filipina but without any Filipino cultural influence, in a highly conservative religious community where stories were silenced. In Long Awan, Jennifer creates a comfortable space for herself, renting a home and even adopting an orphaned sun bear cub as a kind of surrogate child. Complications arise, however, once the bear becomes yet another threat to a community already endangered by exploitative logging, by political vulnerability, and by its own isolation. Jennifer is drawn into the questions of the fate of Long Awan, and discovers these are questions about her own fate as well. Ultimately she has to choose between her romantic fantasy of ideal community life and the hard reality of a pragmatic, troubled people. In this she is helped by her research in the extensive Punan system of death names, which express strong affection by invoking the even stronger ache of impermanence and inadequacy. In the end, the title The Long House refers to the nomad condition that the Punan call home--a wandering that makes of the journey itself a habitation.
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