A note on some North Borneo kinship terminologies
This is a short note by Rodney Needham supplementing his earlier 1953 article on North Borneo kinship terminologies, presenting kinship terms from the Lun Daya (upper Sesayap) and discussing their implications for the classification of Bornean peoples.
Summary
Needham presents a set of kinship terms recorded before World War II by Mr Presswood of the Christian Missionary Alliance at Long Berang, upper Sesayap, and transmitted through Dr L. Onvlee of the Netherlands Bible Society. The terms belong to the Lun Daya (“people of the interior”), also called Putuk. The data confirm the absence of distinctions between parallel and cross-cousins and between parent’s siblings, and the absence of a reciprocal term between parent’s sibling and sibling’s child — features previously reported for “Murut” of the Semambu district (p. 159).
Needham uses these terms to support an ethnic delimitation placing the Murut as the northernmost members of the middle-Borneo group (Leach’s “Kenyah-Kayan-Kajang,” Kennedy’s “Bahau”), distinct from the North Borneo “Murut” (Tagal) who belong to Adriani’s Philippine language group. He concludes that the term “Murut” has been used for 150 years without adequate precision and suggests it would be best to abandon it altogether (p. 161).