2002 Bernard Sellato, Innermost Borneo. Studies in Dayak Cultures, 223 p., 27 maps and ill., 32 BW photo plates PDF

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Bernard SELLATO INNERMOST BORNEO STUDIES IN DAYAK CULTURES SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY PRESS INNERMOST BORNEO STUDIES IN DAYAK CULTURES OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR Nomades et sédentarisation à Bornéo. Histoire économique et sociale, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales (“Etudes i...

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2002 Bernard Sellato, Innermost Borneo. Studies in Dayak Cultures, 223 p., 27 maps and ill., 32 BW photo plates Pierre Le Roux Paris : SevenOrients (“Human Nature”, book series directed by P. Le Roux) & Singapore : Singapore University Press (“Southeast Asia”), 223 p., 27 maps and ill., 32 BW photo pl.

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Bernard SELLATO

INNERMOST BORNEO STUDIES IN DAYAK CULTURES

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY PRESS

INNERMOST BORNEO STUDIES IN DAYAK CULTURES

OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR Nomades et sédentarisation à Bornéo. Histoire économique et sociale, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales (“Etudes insulindiennes/Archipel”, 9), 293 p., 1989 (JeanneCuisinier Award). Hornbill and Dragon (Naga dan burung enggang). Kalimantan, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei, Jakarta: Elf Aquitaine (English and Indonesian/Malay), 272 p., 176 color photo plates, 1989; 2nd Ed.: Hornbill and Dragon. Arts and Culture of Borneo, Singapore: Sun Tree Publishing (English), 1992. Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest. The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, translated from the French by Stephanie H. Morgan, preface by Georges Condominas, 272 p., 1994. Borneo. People of the Rainforest (a CD-Rom), Singapore: Daiichi Media, 1998. Forest, Resources and People in Bulungan. Elements for a History of Settlement, Trade and Social Dynamics in Borneo. 1880-2000, Bogor: Center for International Forestry Research, 2001, 183 p. with Cristina EGENTHER (Eds): Kebudayaan dan Pelestarian Alam. Penelitian Interdisipliner di Pedalaman Kalimantan, Jakarta: World Wide Fund for Nature/PHPA/The Ford Foundation, 573 p., 1999. with Cristina EGENTHER (Eds): Culture and Conservation in Borneo. Interdisciplinary Studies in Traditional Cultures in Kayan Mentarang National Park, Bogor: Center for International Forestry Research, forthcoming. with Pierre LE ROUX et al. (Eds): De Poids et de mesures en Asie du Sud-Est/Weights and Measures in Southeast Asia, Marseilles: IRSEA & Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, forthcoming. with Peter G. SERCOMBE (Eds): The Nomads of Borneo Today. Resilience and Change Among Forest Hunter-Gatherers, forthcoming.

To the Aoheng people of Tïong Ohang and Long Bagun, with gratitude.

Bernard SELLATO

INNERMOST BORNEO STUDIES IN DAYAK CULTURES

Maps and photographs by the author

76 avenue de Saint-Mandé 75012 Paris

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© 2002 SevenOrients (Paris) & Singapore University Press (Singapore) Maps and photographs are by the author unless otherwise specified (sauf mention particulière, les cartes et photographies sont de l’auteur) ISBN: 2-914936-02-8 SEVENORIENTS Ltd (SARL) Film - Music - Books 58 avenue de Wagram, 75017 Paris, France E-mail (courriel ): [email protected] Website (Site Internet) : www.7orients.com

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HUMAN NATURE Series ETHNOLOGY, LITERATURE AND NATURAL HISTORIES (SEVENORIENTS) Series Editor: Pierre Le Roux

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY PRESS Level 7, University Hall, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 E-mail (courriel ) : [email protected] SOUTHEAST ASIA Series (SUP) Series Editor: Paul Kratoska Printed in France. All rights reserved for all countries (imprimé en France. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays) No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publishers (toute reproduction, intégrale ou partielle, de cet ouvrage, par quelque procédé que ce soit, est strictement interdite, sauf autorisation écrite des éditeurs)

Cover: Diri’ and Ajang at their rice field near Tïong Ohang (photograph by B. Sellato, 1980).

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter I. From West to East: The First Written Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Chapter II. The Upper Kapuas Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Chapter III. The Upper Mahakam Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Chapter IV. Forest Economics: The Dayak and their Natural Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Chapter V. Social Organization in Borneo: A General Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Chapter VI. The Special Sibling-in-Law: Kinship in the Müller Mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Chapter VII. Reconstructing Borneo’s Culture History: The Relevance of the Forest Nomads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Chapter VIII. History and Myth among Borneo People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Chapter IX. How “Tribes” Come into Being: Ethnogenesis of the Aoheng. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Chapter X. The Aoheng, the Gods, the Spirits, and Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Chapter XI. An Aoheng Purification Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Chapter XII. Aoheng Oral Literature: A Typology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Chapter XIII. Stone and the Aoheng: Investigation in Traditional Taxonomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Political map of Borneo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2. River systems and location of ethnic groups studied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 3. Nieuwenhuis’ route. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 4. The upper Kapuas river system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 5. Administrative divisions in the upper Kapuas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 6. Ethnic map of the upper Kapuas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 7. The upper Mahakam area. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 8. Location of ethnic groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 9. Siblings-in-law in selected languages in Borneo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 10. Types of affinal relations in Ego’s generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 11. Post-marital residence and affinal relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 12. Residence and nomadism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 13. Three-gender third singular personal pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 14. Sketch map of the site of Nanga Balang by Sawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 15. The Bukat setting and nineteenth-century movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 16. Regional situation around 1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 17. Statements in the legend and Sawing’s comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 18. Trees and cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 19. The tree-cultures in the legend and Sawing’s comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 20. Ethnic conglomeration, 1800-1840 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 21. The Aoheng: general historical chart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 22. The central longhouses, Tïong Ohang, ca 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 23. Redistribution and expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 24. Ritual interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 25. Aoheng taxonomy of sedimentary rocks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 26. Petrographic composition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 27. Mineralogical composition and the technological cut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Fig. 1. Political map of Borneo

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

he author wishes to express his gratitude to and acknowledge the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and Dr. Paul H. Kratoska; the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient and Professor JeanPierre Drège; the Borneo Research Council and Professor Vinson H. Sutlive, Jr., and the Borneo Research Bulletin and Professor Clifford Sather; and CNRS Editions, Ms. Danielle Saffar, and Ms. Liliane Bruneau, for permission to reproduce or translate articles previously published. He also extends his heartfelt thanks to Dr. Pierre Le Roux, for his enthusiastic support and technical expertise, and Ms. Sabine Partouche, for her much appreciated technical assistance; to Mr. Peter Livermore of SevenOrients, and Dr. Paul Kratoska and Mr. Peter Schoppert of Singapore University Press for their kind interest in his work and their editorial daring; and to Karin Johnson, for her careful proofreading and her moral support. Marseilles, May 2002

Fig. 2. River systems and location of ethnic groups studied

INTRODUCTION

B

orneo used to conjure up images of lush tropical forest and bloodthirsty headhunters. During the last two decades, however, the island’s claims to fame have been linked to pervasive environmental concerns: Sarawak’s nomadic Penan groups set up road blockades to try to prevent timber companies from occupying and damaging their territories; and catastrophic forest fires, particularly in East Kalimantan, destroyed millions of hectares. More recently, with the lush forest already half gone and the ecological fad on the wane, the eruption of inter-ethnic violence in West and Central Kalimantan has brought back images, broadcast worldwide this time, of bloodthirsty headhunters. This volume traverses almost thirty years of acquaintance with and work on the great island of Borneo and its peoples. Curiously, this period spans the last true bouts of tribal headhunting, then still a ritual necessity, through to the recent massacres—“neo-headhunting”—that were both statements of ethnic identity and claims for more political power and the control of the region’s economic wealth. The essays collected here focus on small tribal minorities living in the most remote nook of the Borneo hinterland, the Müller mountain range. Among these groups, the Aoheng, with whom I spent a number of years, feature prominently. When I first went to live with the Aoheng, I found everything interesting. All aspects of their individual and collective life, day after day, taught me something new. I learnt their ways, their behavior, their language. As a full, ritually-sanctioned member of the community, I got involved first in menial daily chores and agricultural tasks, then in ritual activities, until—with age and fatherhood—I, the adopted son of a prominent ritual leader, became, too, a respected village council elder. While my commitment to the group grew apace with my knowledge

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about it, I also came to realize that my fellow villagers, individually and as a social group, were just regular people, in no way different from the average French person or village community. With this book, I attempt to provide the reader with a few keys to a better understanding of traditional life in one of our planet’s last isolated spots. But, at the same time, I wish to make the Aoheng and their neighbors appear less foreign, less “exotic”, and more familiar, more “normal”, to a Western reader. In the 1970s, life among the Aoheng was slow, peaceful, uneventful— singom (“cool”), as they liked to say. Much has changed in thirty years. With the birdnest business, Tïong Ohang has now become just as hectic as Samarinda, the province’s capital. Thus, the following pages sometimes have the flavor of times bygone, and the present tense might read like the ethnographic present, as if it described the way things used to be in a timeless past. As everything was interesting, I investigated everything, using only the means and methods I knew of, but with an open, curious, and inquisitive mind and no theoretical constraints. I worked on language, ritual, history, social organization, oral literature, and more. Later on, I focused on the modalities of interaction between society and the environment, and the customary institutions controlling the access to and management of land and natural resources. Through time, I became increasingly involved in investigations in ethnohistory and comparative linguistics, in an attempt to reconstruct Borneo’s culture history. In the long term, the outcome of this investigation, as it appears through this book, may look like a mosaic of strokes of diverse hues. Many various facets of the lives and cultures of the Aoheng and some of their neighbors are examined, from their history, language, economic system, and relation to their natural environment to their social organization, beliefs, rituals, and world views. Indeed, one may ask, what connections might there be between kinship terminology and a cleansing ritual, or between minor commercial forest products and the oral literature? The approach here is definitely multi-disciplinary and, hopefully, the essays in this book succeed in conveying my conviction that no single aspect of a social group’s life can or should be studied independently from all other aspects, that ritual cannot be understood without reference to history, or social organization without reference to the economic system, or kinship without reference to settlement patterns—and vice versa. Moreover, now that economic development projects, whether governmental or non-governmental, are becoming the major employers of social scientists, it is important to stress that short, shallow social and

INTRODUCTION

15

economic surveys, such as those routinely carried out prior to starting a program, are a sure recipe for failure. Instead, in-depth, multi-disciplinary studies of the target communities are truly useful preliminaries, the expense of which projects cannot afford to spare themselves. Only then would such projects stand a fair chance of reaching their goals. Although each chapter of this book is, taken on its own, but a loose piece of a puzzle—and the puzzle is necessarily incomplete—they have been organized to form a logical sequence to more easily bring the reader from short introductory pieces through to more substantial ones and, finally, to rather “light”, sketchy additional presentations. As an hors-d’œuvre, Chapter 1 retells the first traverse of Borneo through the Müller Mountains, one of the first great scientific expeditions, in the last years of the 19th century. This is set against the general backdrop of the colonial exploration policies of that century, aimed at pacifying warlike interior tribes, establishing military and, later, administrative control and ultimately bringing to them the benefits of civilization. Nieuwenhuis’s work had a lasting impact on the ideas of his time and on administrative policies and constitutes the first important corpus of scientific information on the island’s interior tribes. The ethnic and cultural setting of the hinterland region straddling the Müller Mountains is then succinctly described: to the west (Chapter 2), the region of the uppermost course of the mighty Kapuas River, Borneo’s longest waterway; and to the east (Chapter 3), the upper Mahakam River region, safely closed off from the lower plains by dangerous waterfalls. These chapters list the local ethnic groups—powerful farming tribes and tiny nomadic bands—sparsely populating this immense tract of climax forest. Forest economics, or, the ways in which forest people earn a living off their natural environment—the tropical rain forest, and the resources it provides—is the focus of Chapter 4, which examines the conflicts between these people and the State’s social and economic policies. The latter, whether genuinely intended for the people’s welfare or geared toward ulterior strategies of systematic extraction of forest resources, interfere with the local people’s wishes to carry on with their own traditional ways of life and economic activities. After describing the various forms of social organization found among the ethnic groups of Borneo, Chapter 5 proposes a typology: the hunting-gathering nomadic band; the socially stratified farming group, displaying feudal features; the non-stratified, but fiercely competitive, farming group; and the coastal, trade-based polity, influenced by exogenous social forms. Examining patterns of integration of households

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to higher social groupings, it discusses Lévi-Strauss’ concept of “society of the house”, and considers different levels of “houses”. Chapter 6 investigates, among former hunting-gathering groups, a correlation between the way of life and economy, and post-matrimonial residence practices, through a study of the terminology used for in-laws. It suggests that the pattern of taboos and avoidance in a person’s interaction with opposite-sex in-laws changed when the nomadic band settled down and took up farming, inducing the emergence of a particular set of terms referring to siblings-in-law. The origins of hunter-gatherer groups, a problem of theoretical importance, is the focus of Chapter 7. An alternative reconstruction of Borneo’s culture history is proposed, correlating ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and linguistic data—a method seldom put into practice. It argues for a Neolithic colonization of the island’s interior by Austronesian-speaking hunter-gatherers and horticulturists, before metals allowed for a substantial opening of tropical forest to swidden rice cultivation. The complex relationship between history and myth is analyzed in Chapter 8, such as it appears through a text written by a leader of the Bukat, a former nomadic group. This study shows how ethnic and cultural identity is constructed based on the group’s oral historical tradition and some more recent social or religious notions, and how history is politically manipulated to adjust and refine the image that the group wants to give of itself to the modern outside world. Moving further on into the fields of politics and religion, Chapter 9, through a study of the role of a major religious festival in shaping social organization, tries to shed light on the connection of ritual with politics and ethnic identity. Focusing on the history of the Aoheng—now a cohesive ethnic entity, emerged from several very distinct groups in a complex cultural setting over a long period of t...