Of the Same Root, Of One Cluster

Why this work exists

Indigenous food knowledge is among the most fragile cultural inheritances on the planet. It lives in seasonal practice, in oral instruction, in the hands of elders, and in the relationships between communities and the forests that feed them. It cannot be reconstructed once it lapses. Serumpun was founded to interrupt that loss — not as outsider documentation, but as a sustained partnership between Sarawak’s peoples, its scientific and cultural institutions, and a culinary practice committed to treating heritage as live material.

How this work began

Serumpun Sarawak originated as a personal vision. Its arrival into the formal Sarawak State architecture proceeded through a sequence of introductions the project records here with gratitude.

Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz — Malaysia’s Minister of International Trade and Industry from 1987 to 2008, and Chairman of MATRADE from 1991 — made the introduction that brought James to the attention of Tun Pehin Sri Dr. Haji Wan Junaidi bin Tuanku Jaafar, the Yang di-Pertua Negeri (Governor) of Sarawak, who took office as the eighth Governor on 26 January 2024. The Governor recommended that the Chairman of the Sarawak Tourism Board, Dato Dennis Ngau, reach out to James for collaboration.

The first meeting with the Sarawak State leadership team, prior to project approval. Photograph by the State of Sarawak official photographer.

The project originated with James. Cuisine, mentee development, and engagement with governmental agencies and ministries are now a collective effort across the partner architecture. He remains the main voice and face.

Communities and trust

The work begins with consent and continues with reciprocity. Field engagement is led by the communities themselves. Knowledge is recorded with their permission and returned to them in usable form — recipes restored to households, ingredients mapped against forest plots, oral material archived in their own languages. The studio is an instrument; the communities remain the authors. That order is not symbolic. It governs every decision the project takes.

Listening before cooking — the discipline that lets the cuisine honour without flattening. Photograph by Atlas Collective.

The full record of the field work — photographs and films from the expeditions — lives on the Serumpun Archive.

The methodological framework

The work proceeds against a structured framework. Three lenses — culture, experience, culinary — read across each community’s life. Within each lens, eleven thematic facets are mapped: craft, economy, culture, festivals, legends, heroes, symbols, landmarks, literature, sound and music, nature.

Each community is anchored to its ecological setting — forest, highlands, river, sea, coast, city — and read through five perspectives the work holds itself to. How people live their daily lives. How they produce and create. How they interact with the natural world. How cultural elements adapt for contemporary use. And what the community itself considers beautiful and inspiring.

The framework is the discipline of listening before cooking. It is what allows the cuisine to honour without flattening, and what allows the foreign technique to land without colonising what it has been invited into.

The temporary custodian

A conservation movement that cannot outlive its founder has failed its purpose. From the outset, Serumpun Sarawak has understood that its ultimate measure of success is not international recognition or critical acclaim — it is the moment when James Won is no longer needed.

James’s role in this programme is, by design, temporary and transitional. He is a guide. An interim custodian, entrusted by the people of Borneo and their leadership to kindle a fire that others will tend with far greater right, far deeper knowledge, and far longer tenure than he ever could.

Serumpun Sarawak is not James Won’s movement. It never was. It belongs to the forest, to the elders who taught us its language, to the communities who shared their most intimate knowledge with patience and grace, and to the young chefs who will one day teach what they have learned to the generation that follows them.

The world stage and continuity

In August 2025, Serumpun Sarawak debuted internationally at Seaside Studio CASO in Osaka, in conjunction with Sarawak Week at World Expo Osaka. In March 2026, UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy — Kuching formally endorsed the movement for its contribution to the conservation of Sarawak’s indigenous gastronomy, food culture, and edible medicinal flora and seeds. Continuity is built through a four-stage architecture — build · train · transfer · assure continuity — that runs across the mentorship programme, the Sarawak Cultural Village institutional adoption, the national tour with the Sarawak Tourism Board, mentee media training, and Serumpun In Motion. The project is not an event. It is a generational commitment.

Serumpun Sarawak is now embedded in the oldest living institution of Sarawakian culture. It will not fade. It will not be archived. It will be cooked, tasted, shared, and passed forward — every day, by the people it was always meant to serve.

What carries forward

The Kuching Finale closes the founding-year arc. It does not close the movement. After April 2026, the Serumpun work enters its second year. The In Motion mentee programme continues. The institutional partnerships continue. The UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy — Kuching alignment continues. The cultural-diplomacy discipline that the founding year established remains the operating standard.

I learned, across the founding year, that the cuisine could move and could return. The years that follow will test what the founding year proved.

The work belongs to the forest. The forest belongs to the communities who taught us its language. Whatever endures will endure through them.