Conclusion

By the late 1990s Rual seemed endowed with all the trappings of modernity. Cash-oriented agriculture, national-type education, bureaucratic administration, and new religious ideas now dominated. The Rual case study contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the anthropology of modernity, much of which centres on theoretical and conceptual discussion, a key question being ‘What does it mean to be or to resist being modern in world areas and locales that have different cultural histories?’ (Knauft 2002a: 1). In this concluding chapter, I outline the main ethnographic findings of this study and return to the question posed at the beginning of the book: why did Menraq respond violently to a group of alleged Malay encroachers into their ‘territory’ in the so-called ‘Jeli incident’ of 1993?