Metom, Lilly (2013). Emotion concepts of the Ibans in Sarawak. Singapore: Trafford.
This book explains the emotion concepts of the Ibans, one of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Malaysia. It is an outcome of a research study that aims to analyse the Iban emotion concepts using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). NSM enables emotion terminologies in Iban to be explicated and further defined along the concrete/abstract cultural continuum framework. The respondents of this study were the village community of Sbangki Panjai, a longhouse located in Lubok Antu, Sarawak. The findings reveal the core cultural values that underlie the people’s behaviours in the ways they express their emotions. The complex rules of logic called adat and the rules of speaking in this speech community that explain the Ibans’ communicative behaviours are discussed in detail in this book. The semantic analysis of the emotion words is exhaustive and comprehensive, which is necessary to reveal the complete meaning of the emotions being examined without creating ethnocentric bias. Thus, this book essentially describes how the Ibans relate themselves to others in their interaction.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
