Vinson H. Sutlive was born on October 29, 1932 in Alabama, USA. He was educated at Asbury College (B.A. Psychology, 1953), and Vanderbilt University (B.D., School of Religion, 1956). He and his wife, Joanne Sutlive, a teacher, went to Hartford Seminary for a year.

In 1955 he was ordained as a deacon and two years later, he was promoted as elder. Although his dream was to go to China or Japan, he accepted his posting by the Board of Global Ministry of the Methodist Church in America to come to Sarawak, then an unknown land, with his wife and their two young children. His mission was to work as the acting principal of the Methodist Theological School (MTS) in Sibu and his task was to set up the Iban Department.

After nine months of learning the Malay language, Rev Sutlive encountered another language barrier when facing the Iban students at the seminary. They could only converse in their mother tongue and he realised that the two languages - Malay and Iban - were totally different! But being gifted in languages, he picked up Iban fast. 

In January 1959, Rev Sutlive set up the Iban Department, with the first intake of 11 students. One of the students was Joshua Bunsu who later became the president of the Methodist Sarawak Iban Annual Conference. The students were volunteer lay preachers who assisted in leading gatherings at their respective longhouses and needed formal theological training to enhance their ministry. During the training, they would go back to their longhouses each weekend and Rev Sutlive often accompanied them home to understand the lifestyle of the Ibans. Such understanding also helped in his teaching. In six years, he visited 150 longhouses along the Rejang River, which marked the beginning of his involvement in the literature and academic study of the Ibans.

While Rev Sutlive was away visiting the longhouses, his wife, Joanne, would stay back at the seminary to teach Sunday school. Life in Sibu in the 1960s was not bad. Given the availability of electricity and an electric fan at the parsonage (the present parsonage of Wesley Church), the couple and their children adjusted very well. Their children went back to the US to study and although they could not remember much about Sarawak, they had loved the simplicity of their childhood in the mission field.

During the 1950s-1960s, the Mission Board of the Methodist Church in America had described the Ibans as a nomadic group of people. The couple witnessed hundreds of Ibans accepting Jesus Christ, and helped set up many longhouse churches. With the assistance of foreign missionaries from America, Indonesia, India and England, the Ibans managed to build numerous churches, with the number of churches in Sibu alone growing from 18 in 1957 to 150 in 1972, the year that Rev and Mrs Sutlive left.

In 1959, Rev Sutlive was appointed superintendent of the Iban churches, taking charge of 54 churches. During his first four-year term of service, he developed a great interest in the culture and language of the Ibans. This led to the publication of Handy Reference Dictionary of Iban and English in 1994.

At various meetings, he shared the differences between the gospel of Christ and the traditional beliefs of Iban people. His messages were later compiled into a book titled Pebanding Pengarap Kitai (Comparison of Faiths).

On his first furlough in 1961, he continued his studies at Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville where he majored in foreign languages and earned a master’s degree. In 1966, during his second furlough, he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh and obtained a PhD in Anthropology, then a new course, in 1972.

From 1962, when he worked as the secretary of the United Churches Bible Translation Committee, he translated seven books from Hebrew into the Iban language and then completed the Iban Bible which was published in 1988.

From 1967 to 1972, Rev Sutlive was appointed principal of the MTS.

When he retired, he went back to America but his work with the Ibans did not end. He and his wife came back to visit almost every year and they even helped to compile an Iban-English/English-Iban Dictionary as well as the Iban Encyclopedia, a set of five books. This bilingual dictionary was completed in 1994. He spent 11 years completing the encyclopedia (1990-2001).

During his frequent travels to Sarawak, Rev Sutlive was saddened to see that many Ibans had moved to towns and become more materialistic. He encouraged Iban pastors and leaders to stand firm in their faith.

In 1972, he was appointed chairman of the Anthropology Department at the College of William & Mary and served in this capacity for 11 years. From 1993 to 1998, he was the chairman of the International Anthropology and Ethnology Association. During that time he was also the executive director of the Borneo Research Council founded in 1968. In addition, he was the chief editor of the Iban Encyclopedia.

In February 2004, Rev Sutlive, who was then more than 70 years old, and his wife were invited by The Tun Jugah Foundation to translate the burial songs of the Ibans (Tears of Sorrow, Words of Hope: An Ethnographic Study of Iban Death Chants, Vol 1 and 2, The Tun Jugah Foundation, 2012). Together, the couple also compiled the Comprehensive Iban Dictionary.

Rev Sutlive's published works mainly concerned the cultures of Malaysia and Borneo and he is recognised as an authority on the cultural studies of Borneo. He wrote Cultural Responses to Natural Disaster (1968), and Female and Male in Borneo: Contributions and Challenges to Gender Studies (1991). His love for the Ibans extended beyond seeing them as his field research objects, it was also an impetus for him to be involved in translating and publishing books about them.

Rev Sutlive passed away on October 4, 2023 at Kentucky, United States of America.^[1]