Indigenous relations: craft, vernacular materials and cultural assets in Borneo

Abstract

This article explores Indigenous relations to craft, vernacular materials and cultural assets in Borneo to raise awareness around the complexities, entanglements and precarity surrounding natural resources and craft practice(s) located within Indigenous communities. The authors present two case studies based in Sabah and Sarawak, Malaysia from the Cultural-Assets and Vernacular Materials project and in so doing highlight the role ancestral wisdom and embodied knowledge play in the cultivation, conservation and crafting of natural materials towards situating craft as a living, ecological and regenerative practice. We locate an expanded notion of craft whereby the intimate relations to materials – growing, harvesting, preparing – are integral to materialities of place as site-specific, place-based and communal bodies of knowledges that reside within Indigenous communities. We position an ontological framing of design research as a set of practices that broaden the ways craft can advance new ways of understanding, becoming and doing. In such a reframing design-led innovation approaches are cognisant of and informed by the plurality of contexts that reside within and emerge from Indigenous communities as sites of situated knowledges.

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