The Night Safari is one of the top tourist destinations in Singapore. From its opening in 1994 to today, more than 11 million visitors have visited this „night zoo‟70
, which takes advantage of the nocturnal habits of its creatures, most of which roam the park freely. As part of the entertainment provided, the park puts on two regular shows for visitors. The Creatures of the Night show is presented several times nightly (which is included in the price of the entry ticket). In this show, zookeepers handle certain animals in close proximity to the audience, thereby further breaking down the (metal and concrete) barriers that usually separate caged animals from distanced gawking visitors. When I saw this performance a few years back, the open-air venue was so packed that the zookeeper had to hush the crowd several times as the noise level was distracting the serval, which is a type of African wild cat.
The other free show is known simply as Cultural Performances at Night Safari. One would expect that such a show would comprise of performances from the different ethnic cultures of Singapore or feature the cultures from which lands some of the animals come from. However, at present, the performers in this show are Bornean Tribal Performers. Quoting from the website71, “[h]ailing from the rainforests of Borneo, the Thumbuakar Tribe will perform tribal dances, blowpipe demonstrations and fire-eating displays”.
70 See http://www.nightsafari.com.sg/ 71
190 Figure 5.1 Untitled
(from http://www.nightsafari.com.sg/visitor/borneantribal.htm)
Judging by the clothing and material culture in the photograph of the “Thumbuakar Tribe” in Figure 5.1, it is clear that the performers are displaying stereotypical symbols that
connect them to one or more Dayak groups from Borneo. However, the mix of old and new material culture spread across a few Dayak groups, it was hard for me to pinpoint where the “Thumbuakar Tribe” is from in Borneo. A further confusion as to their real ethnic identity arises when one watches their performance. The major attraction of their show (see Figure 5.2) is a fire dance, where male dancers in loincloths brandish lit sticks and spit fire, all choreographed to music that sounds more electronic-disco than Dayak percussion.
191 Figure 5.2 Untitled
(from https://www.stbpassport.com/archives/45.htm)
A part of this fire performance has been posted online in youtube, a popular video-sharing website72. The person who posted the videos had titled them “Ibanese Fire Dance”, to confirm my assertion that the performers are exhibiting the appropriate stereotypical symbols for one or more Dayak groups. However, I have never experienced or read about any Dayak groups using fire during dances in my research, and was truly surprised by this act. One of my Iban informants saw this video and said tongue-in-cheek “I did not know we had that dance”. If anything, the fire performance is akin to those performed in Polynesia73, and not anything remotely related to any of the Dayak cultures.
To further investigate, I emailed the Night Safari for more information in October 2008, only to receive a curt reply that they do not divulge details of the performers in the interest of not tipping off her competitors. Even though I have my suspicions that this
72 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yMFbRoWTZ8 and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0k8WPpzMI.
73
192 “Thumbuakar Tribe” is really a fictitious tribe consisting of “ethnic intruders74” (Timothy
and Boyd 2003: 215) – i.e. non-Iban performing as Iban – decked out in a mish-mash of Dayak symbols, there was no way to confirm this through an official statement from the park. However, suffice it to say that for a night safari that does not dedicate its space to a particular display of Bornean animals, such an improbable „Dayak-esque‟ performance masquerading as „authentic‟ Dayak culture firmly confirms that the stereotype of the Dayak (and of the Iban) as some primal-tribal-primitive human has well and truly become
embedded as part of popular culture. According to Hall (1995: 472),
…popular culture always has its base in experiences, the pleasures, the memories, the traditions of the people. It has connections with local hopes and local aspirations, local tragedies and local scenarios that are everyday practices and everyday
experiences of ordinary folk.
Concerning this thesis, I investigate in this chapter the avenues and conditions through which such visual representations of Iban people (who are sometimes subsumed under the general 'Dayak' label) have entered the “everyday practices and everyday experiences of ordinary folk” (Hall 1995: 472) to become aspects of popular culture (which Hall [1995] describes as something opposed to „high culture‟). While I would obviously be discussing at length how the non-Iban are producing visual representations of the Iban people for the consumption of non-Iban, I would also take a more „reflexive‟ approach in examining how the Iban themselves contribute to the visual stereotypes for the consumption of other Iban consumers. This production of the Self for the consumption of the Self is akin to the situation described by Peleggi (2002) in Thailand during the late 19th century where he argues that much of the public spectacles associated with then King Chulalongkorn was as much for outsiders as they were intended for Thais themselves. My intention here is provide evidence not only that non-Iban people stereotype the Iban but also that the Iban people
74 A term used by Timothy and Boyd (2003) to denote someone of one ethnic group performing the ethnicity