Cursory thoughts on Wallace

I am not sure what to make of Wallace’s exposition of the Dyaks, though it seems quite revealing that nowhere in that chapter can one gather a sense of Wallace’s study of the Dyaks could be for him also equally relevant a study of his own character. It reads like a patronizing chapter that exudes pretentions of objectivity while excusing its condescension towards the object of its study: what really is the point of Wallace bringing up the head-hunting attribute of the Dyaks’ culture, for example, saying it is merely a custom “which no more implies a bad moral character than did the custom of the slave-trade a hundred years ago imply want of general morality in all who participated in it,” and then to describe such an “excusable” custom as a “stain on their character”? Even before one reaches the end of this claim, the comparison that Wallace adopts between head-hunting as custom and the slave-trade (of Western imperialism, I presume) already poses something quite problematic: so what exactly does the supposed normalcy of the slave-trade, even if it was one that belonged to antiquity, imply within the framework of ethics and morality? And if indeed Wallace did not think of this comparison as problematic, what were his reasons or what was the nature of his circumstances at the time of writing this chapter that made him think the way he did? It appears to me that if these questions remain, for myself, unresolved, it would be difficult to read subsequent exposition of the Dyaks – in which Wallace recommends certain measures for their betterment, and in which he praises the noble spirit of Sir James Brooke as their reformer, ruler and protector – not as propagandistic (putting the Dyaks in their place, as it were) gibberish supported through the misguided validity of scholarship.