HHH Column: Saililah’s Bargain: Medical knowledge exchange and the site-centered loyalties of a Ngaju-Dayak in the missionary network (1932-1945) by Sjoerd Kompier

The HHH column is a monthly blog in which History, Health & Healing members share their thoughts on research, current affairs, or anything to do with medical history. Each edition is written by a different member — in due time, we hope to offer everybody a chance to publish a contribution. This month, the floor is for Sjoerd Kompier, historian specialised in the practical and social history of field sciences within colonial contexts (with a special focus on indigenous engagements with fieldworkers). He currently works at the Regional Archive Mid-Holland (SAMH). In this blog, Sjoerd explores the coproduction of medical knowledge by the Ngaju-Dayak Johannes Saililah and the Basel Mission in the Central Kalimantan region during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Saililah’s Bargain: Medical knowledge exchange and the site-centered loyalties of a Ngaju-Dayak in the missionary network (1932-1945)

By Sjoerd Kompier

Within the collections of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, we find six handwritten notebooks from Central-Kalimantan. One of them reads: Given to Nurse [Zuster] Ruth. Over two hundred pages offer detailed information about Ngaju-Dayak thought on diseases and their treatment, and include sections on amulets, practices during childbirth (image 2), but also drawings of divination techniques using cracks in rice kernels (image 3). The author, the Ngaju-Dayak Johannes Saililah (1898-1985), was an indigenous student nurse at one of the first hospitals of the protestant Basel Mission in the region, Hanggulan Sinta. “Ruth” refers to Ruth Spiller, a German mission nurse who arrived there around 1934 and who asked Saililah to put his knowledge down in writing. Spiller’s scribbled notes indicate her thorough engagement with the manuscript, which resulted in at least two publications on Ngaju medicine in mission periodicals. 

Saililah’s story forms one of many of the indigenous people who engaged with visiting scholars in the Dutch East-Indies. Led by Fenneke Sysling at Leiden University, the pilot project Who-did all the work: The hidden labour of colonial science captured as many as possible within a Nodegoat-dataset. Its 500 dataset-entries spark as many questions. What did it mean for people like Saililah to share or (co)produce knowledge? Which verbiage is even appropriate for their role? Is “role” itself a limiting label? In this blog I delve into these questions for Saililah’s time at Hanggulan Sinta, during which he also interacted with the mission anthropologist Hans Schärer.

Knowledge exchange at Hanggulan Sinta

Saililah was born in 1892 in a small village in Central-Kalimantan as a son of a district damang, the head of customary law. His place within the local social elite allowed him to follow both a mission-education and multiple apprenticeships with the religious and ritualistic specialists of the Ngaju (basirs). It is likely during this time that he amassed the medical knowledge which he later shared with Ruth Spiller. While Saililah became an esteemed ritual specialist himself in the 1920s, the Basel Mission gained influence in Central Kalimantan, building its first hospital (Hanggulan Sinta) in 1931. From this base, their mobile flotilla-polyclinics navigated the river network to reach the secluded Dayak villages. Gradually, the lower river deltas of Saililah’s youth became medically pluralist.  

The story of Saililah’s re-entrance in the mission network is somewhat nebulous, as it is brought to us in the form of mission propaganda (the Zauberdoktor turned Christian). According to an article by nurse Maria Hörsch, Saililah first found his way to Hanggulan Sinta as a patient. After his recovery he decided to remain with the mission. After his conversion in 1933 (Johannes Saililah), he gradually worked his way up from being the hospital’s gardener to becoming a student in the hospital’s training programme. Interestingly, for this programme the staff normally only picked from the ranks of their indigenous teachers. It is noteworthy that Saililah never opted to become an indigenous mission teacher or evangelist, while he was familiar with wielding religious authority as a basir; He seemed to be especially interested in gaining medical knowledge.   

From mission periodicals we learn more about Saililah’s time at the hospital, as he stood out to the German nurses in a number of ways. Hörsch described how the presence of the “former magic priest” smoothed out frictions between the European staff and the other indigenous nurses. She also mentioned Saililah’s habit of volunteering his knowledge and explanations of the fears and conceptions of Dayak patients “when he thought it to be useful to the European personnel”. Whereas Hörsch merely saw this as a sign of loyalty; her colleague Spiller’s notebooks indicate that she took a keener interest in what Saililah had to say.

Saililah’s quest for medical knowledge was disrupted upon the arrival of the missionary anthropologist Hans Schärer (1904-1947). As a member of a new generation of missionaries, Schärer emphasized the vital importance of religious conversation, the establishing of rapport and careful posturing when approaching the Ngaju. In practice this meant not only learning the local language but getting a thorough understanding of the religion and culture of his possible converts as well. This approach led him to cross paths with Saililah at Hanggulan Sinta, where the latter was relieved from duty for three months. After a preliminary assession of the road ahead, Saililah would come to Schärer every day to chant or dictate religious texts, which were written down by a converted schoolteacher. Then, Saililah would check the transcribed texts once more, add explanations of his own and discuss them with Schärer. In addition to that, he provided a translation of the ritualistic language (bahasa sangiang), which diverged from normal Ngaju. Even as Schärer left for Europe on his study-leave Saililah sent him the last notebooks of transcribed texts.

The historians and heritage experts Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eijkhoff situate knowledge production in (post)colonial contexts within exchange relationships between Western scholars and their indigenous interlocutors. In order to understand Saililah’s interactions with Spiller and Schärer we cannot assess them separately, as they are connected by the hospital site and the missionary network. Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff describe how transactions and exchanges around sites served to ‘create new loyalties, gain status, or strengthen existing ties’. Participation in the network surrounding the missionary hospital provided Saililah with opportunities to gain new medical knowledge (self-centred motivation). In turn, the mission found in Saililah an agent of (medical) change who could further their cause in Central-Kalimantan. Of course, this interdependency should not take us to assume that the power levels within this network were equal. Saililah had to convert to even participate in this exchange and likely had to safeguard his presence within it. Social connectedness within the mission network came with expectations. This brings us to Saililah’s interaction with Schärer. The inherent power-imbalance present in the missionary network meant that it would strengthen his ties within it if he were to help Schärer. It would probably have been perceived as strange (in the least) were he to outright refuse to share his knowledge, given his position as a leading ritual authority before his conversion and his supposed separation with former beliefs. After all, Saililah was described by both nurses Spiller and Hörsch as a former magic priest. 

However, Saililah did more than the bare minimum to secure his place in the mission network. The daily meetings with Schärer did seem to have been a chore for him, as he kept sending information when Schärer had already left for Europe. We cannot dismiss a set of motivators tied to the cultural stigmatization of the Ngaju, which had existed before the advent of the colonial state. Schärer states explicitly that Saililah saw cooperation as an opportunity to correct misunderstandings about Ngaju culture (expressive needs), such as those surrounding headhunting. Negative stereotypes had material effects as well, as Dayaks were barred from many government positions due to biases (community-centred motivation).

Conclusion

For each of the 500 entries in the Who-did-all-the-work?-dataset, different constellations of interacting variables will have shaped their engagement within scholarly enterprises. A pitfall connected to words like coproduction and phrasings like “indigenous contributions to science” is that they carry implications which might fix our point of view. They imply a shared goal which might not exist. They might privilege the existence of one research process and exclude quests for knowledge on the part of indigenous participants. In this fixed perspective, indigenous people can be useful intermediaries for scholars from the Global North, but not the other way around. In my eyes, in most of the cases within the “Who did all the work” database, coproduction refers to cooperation of different groups whose different agendas might align (partly) at a given moment; a coproductive relationship. 

This is but the beginning of Saililah’s story. After political decolonisation he developed himself as a legal expert like his father and continued to battle Ngaju cultural marginalisation. At the end of his life, he had amassed so much knowledge on the Ngaju that interactions with visiting scholars were no longer accidental. When the American anthropologist Anne Schiller came knocking at his door a few weeks after her arrival in 1983 he was well into his eighties. Upon her arrival, he gleefully asked what had taken her so long, as he would not have been able to wait much longer. 

Sources:

Bloembergen M., and Eickhoff M., The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2020).

Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2015). Distinguishing Different Types of Coproduction:A Conceptual Analysis Based on the Classical Definitions. Public Administration Review 76(3), pp. 427- 435.

Van Eijk, C., & Steen, T. (2016). Why engage in co-production of public services? Mixing theory and empirical evidence. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 28-46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852314566007.

Hesselink, L., “Crossing colonial and medical boundaries: plural medicine in Java, 1850-1910”, in A. Digby, W. Ernst & P.B. Mukharji eds. Crossing Colonial Historiographies: Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective.

Hesselink, L., Healers on the colonial market; Native doctors and midwives in the Dutch East Indies (Leiden, 2011).

M. Hörsch, ‘Einiges über Zusammenarbeit mit inländischem Personal’, in ‘Die Tat der Barmherzigkeit, Berichte aus der Arbeit der Basler Aerztlichen Mission‘. Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Collectie Epple. D Or. 572-107.

Kalusa W.T., Missionaries, African Patients, and Negotiating Missionary Medicine at Kalene Hospital, Zambia, 1906– 1935, Journal of Southern African Studies Vol. 40, No. 2 (2014) 283-294.

Klokke A.H., Traditional medicine among the Ngaju Dayak in Central Kalimantan: The 1935 writings of a former Ngaju Dayak priest (Phillips, 1998).

Schärer H., Der Totenkult der Ngadju Dajak in Süd-Borneo (The Hague, 1966).

Schärer H., Ngaju Religion: The conception of God among a South Borneo people (The Hague, 1963).

Schiller A., Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia (New York, 1997).

Spiller, R. ‘Heidnisch dajakische Sitten und Gebräuche bei Schwangerschaft’ (Halbjahresbericht der Station Kuala Kapuas für das Jahr 1937) in: ‘Berichte vom Missionsfeld’. Januari 1939, nr 177, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Collectie Klokke, D Or. 729-18.

Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Collectie Arnoud Hendrik Klokke (KITLV), Stukken van Damang Yohanes Salilah over de behandeling van ziekten., 1935 D Or. 729-23.

Vellinga, H.J., Sysling, F.H., Kompier, S. & Niederer, T. (2024) Who did all the work?: The hidden labour of colonial science (data file and codebook). DANS: Data archiving and networked services. [dataset].