Rethinking “Dead” Objects: Baya Pandang and the Cultural Lives of Iban Artifacts in Sarawak Museum Collections

Abstract

Museums are among the most important institutions safeguarding indigenous cultural heritage. However, their colonial institutional origins have often obscured the original uses, values, and meanings that cultural materials hold for the indigenous communities who created and continue to claim them. This study examines three Iban cultural objects held in the Sarawak Museum that are widely assumed, within a Western museological frame, to have lost their significance once removed from their original cultural and social context. Drawing on Iban epistemology, and specifically the concept of baya pandang, this paper questions that assumption. In Iban cosmology, baya pandang refers to material items associated with the dead that are displayed as symbols of mortality rather than carried into the afterlife; read as a broader interpretive lens, it suggests that material culture can retain memory, personality, and spiritual significance rather than simply “dying” once its original symbolic or functional role has ended. The study draws on Jan Assmann's theory of cultural memory, Linda Tuhiwai Smith's decolonizing Indigenous methodology, and Theodor Adorno's critique of the museum as tomb. The findings suggest that, within Iban cosmology, cultural objects retain much of their cultural meaning through their continuing connection to the community from which they came, so that meanings that have faded from everyday practice can still play an active role in the lives of those who engage with them. In doing so, the study contributes to museology from an indigenous standpoint, foregrounding indigenous cultural memory and voice in debates on decolonizing museums as sites for the reconstruction of ancestral culture. The study adopts a qualitative approach that combines literature review, museum collection analysis, fieldwork observation, and semi-structured interviews with Iban elders and cultural experts.