ABSTRACT
The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo thus both contributes to and unconsciously enacts a critique of ethnography as 'a rising curve of cumulative findings'. It also suggests how the simple accumulation of ethnographic 'facts' can be seen as a kind of imperialist loot. In the 20th century, Clifford Geertz argued that the 'claim to attention' of the ethnographic account is not this capturing of 'primitive facts in faraway places', but rather the attempt to 'clarify what goes on in such places' and 'to bring us in touch with the lives of strangers'. Henry Ling Roth explains: 'a thorough knowledge of the native races' can teach what methods of government and forms of taxation are most suited to particular tribes or to the stage of civilisation in which we find them'. This takes us back to the motives of Marsden and Raffles. It is very far from Tylor's scientific concern with laws and the 'general principles of human action'.
