Perema: Digital Museum of Penan Culture

People walking towards land after disembarking from a boat

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Two Eastern Penan people standing on an elevated wooden stand, ngerajang keleput (making a hole for a blowpipe

Four people in the act of Tamu, or bartering

About this collection

This collection contains approximately 250 digitized photographs that were made available online as part of a collaborative project with the Penan community in Long Lamai (Sarawak, Malaysia), the Global Citizenship and Sustainability program, Cornell University Library, and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. The goal of the project is to bring cultural knowledge about the Penan to a broad audience and accord the Penan community agency over these images as cultural and historical artifacts that contribute to education and learning. Cornell University Library recognizes the Penan people as the traditional owners and custodians of their land and traditional knowledge, and we give respect to the Elders, past and present. The items in this digital collection represent the voices of the Penan people and their desire for the world to learn about the nomadic life and what it means to be Penan. The collection contains a range of indigenous cultural material, including images and artifacts of people who may have passed away and other objects which may be culturally sensitive. The work was guided by Penan cultural protocols. More information about the Penan community and the project’s research methodology can be found on the accompanying exhibit, Perema: Digital Museum of Penan Culture.

The photographs from this collection come from the Hedda Morrison photographs collection, which contains more than 30,000 photographs, prints, and negatives donated to Cornell University by her husband after Morrison passed away in 1991. Approximately 750 items have been digitized from this collection, and a subset of those digitized are published online in this digital collection.

Historical context

Hedda Morrison (née Hammer) was born in Germany in 1908 and from 1960-66 was employed by the Sarawak government to work in the photographic section of the Information Office in Kuching. Morrison wrote two major books on Sarawak, Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962). More background information about Morrison can be found on the finding aid for the collection and in other materials in Cornell University Library’s collections.

Using the collection

For more information about the archival collection, contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward
Jeffrey W. Petersen, Southeast Asia Librarian; Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books
Metadata creation
Annotations of photographs taken by Hedda Morrison were provided by the Long Lamai community elders and members during interviews conducted over 2017-2019 as part of the Global Citizenship and Sustainability Program (Cornell with Borneo) and prepared by Cornell University Library.
Funding
Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, awarded to Shorna Allred (Natural Resources) and Kaja McGowan (History of Art) at Cornell University, in 2018.
Credits
This collection overview was prepared by Cornell University Library and Shorna Allred, Susan R. Wolf Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Dept. of Geography and Environment, College of Arts and Sciences; Adjunct Professor at Cornell University in the Center for Conservation Social Sciences, Dept. of Natural Resources and the Environment, and the Department of Global Development.
Collection sources
Exhibits featuring items from this collection