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Author Harrisson, Tom, 1911-1976.

Title World within : a Borneo story / Tom Harrisson
Published London : Cresset, 1959

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 ADPML SPC  959.5400492 Har/Wwa  LIB USE ONLY
Description xii, 347 pages : illustrations, 1 map (folded), portraits ; 22 cm
Contents I Within and Without -- II Starting ex 'Z' -- III The Mountained Herat -- IV Outcome -- V Now -- End Note -- Index
Summary Tom Harrisson is now widely known as a Television peronality, notably for a recent series of six TV films, 'The Borneo Story' made with Hugh Gibb and shown all over Europe and America - one of them 'Birds' Nest Soup', won the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, 1958. To a somewhat small and very discerning public he has been known for years as an outstanding travller (for his few years among cannibals in the Pacific he won a Roayl Geographical Society Award, in 1935); as a pioneer in new methods of social and market research (with Charles Madge he founded Mass-Observation, the first realistic movement to study the people of Britain as objectively as if they were cannibals, in 1937); as a leading ornithologist, long-time raido critic (of the Observer) and author of Savage Civilization. During the war, Mr Harrisson did a series of important jobs in civilian and naval intelligence before performing with supreme unimportance the functions of an infantry private. Later, via Sandhurst and the Recce Corps he joined S.O.E., and ended up by jumping into Japanese-held Borneo - the first white man to do so. (For this feat he received the D.S.O. and other distinctions.) He landed, as he puts it, on his backside at the highest inhabited point in that great island, the Kelabit village of Bario - a whole community living inside on great 'long-house', without walls, without privact, but with an immense virility and variety of cultural and material wealth - and of human personality. Tom Harrison led the hill tribes of Borneo to war, then stayed on to lead the far interior back into the ways of peace. In fact, with a few breaks, he has been there ever since - latterly as Government Ethnologist and Curator of the famed Sarawak Museum. Today he lives happily in Sarawak, in an old wooden house with a German wife, assorted Dayak retainers, five tortoise-shell cats and three orang-utangs. But for much of the year he is travelling. And as often as possible he revisits his beloved hinterland. This book, the first he has written in sixteen years, tells the story of Borneo's remarkable interior as it was before the white man came, living remote, vivid and often violent; then of those strange and stirring events which followed upon the sudden rain of parachutists from out of the equatorial sky. Adventure, humour, tragedy and anthropology are intertwined in a book unlike any other known to us. World Within is a story exceptional in its kind. No one else has had so deep and wide an experience against which to savour, enjoy (and sometimes reject) the high evergreen, teeming, intricate world inside Borneo. No one else could have written it. (Inside cover)
Notes Includes index
Map on inside covers
Subject Ethnology -- Borneo.
Kelabit (Southeast Asian people) -- Social life and customs.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Campaigns -- Borneo.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, British.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Underground movements -- Borneo.
World War, 1939-1945 -- Borneo.
SUBJECT Borneo (Malaysia) -- Description and travel
Borneo http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85015863 -- Civilization. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005029
Borneo -- Description and travel. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2007102102
LC no. 59002520