Outlines for an ethnography of Miaows and Whisker twitches: Concepts and approaches to the unspoken and the cynical in Malaysian Borneo

While post-colonial and decolonial scholarship has made significant advances in accounting for the sophistication of non-western traditions of knowledge but have in that process preserved an emphasis on written and discursive forms of knowing. This talk outlines my ongoing attempt to account for unarticulated insights and political attitudes among Urban Borneans and understand their connection Bornean history. Drawing on PhD fieldwork in Kuching, Malaysia, over the course of 2018-2019 I depict the political attitudes of young civil society organizers and artists and their interactions with local elected officials. Operating under the political risk of deregistration and punishment within the intimate politics of Kuching’s political scene my interlocutors pursued sophisticated tactics, but did not supply explanations or rationales for their behaviors. In lieu of stated rationales, I analyze their efforts through their practices and public expressions. Paying attention to their many cat metaphors I suggest that not only do they share tacit assumptions about politics but that these attitudes and approaches relate to Borneo’s longer historical trajectories and raise fundamental problems about how to account for unspoken insights and practices methodologically and conceptually. I therefore outline historical reasons for thinking in these ways and suggest modifications of theoretical language that can help open up these issues systematically.