A Tambunan Dusun origin myth
Thomas Rhys Williams published this account of a Tambunan Dusun origin myth in 1960, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Sensuron, North Borneo, between September and December 1959. The article presents a full-cycle translated narrative that Williams argues encodes the ethical and behavioural norms governing adult conduct among the Tambunan Dusun, while simultaneously mapping the myth’s dispersal episode onto the group’s actual seven-sib social structure.
Summary
Williams frames the article as a corrective to the common ethnological practice of reducing native mythological data to brief illustrative fragments. His central argument is that the Tambunan Dusun creation and dispersal myth is not merely cosmological speculation but a functional repository of value statements—ethical commands that structure daily social life and are transmitted to children as guides for personal behaviour. The myth, as recorded, moves through a sequence of divine acts: creation of the world and man by Too/min/ar/uh; the granting of skin-shedding to the lizard and snake but not to man (who is “unlucky” and must die); a great flood foretold in dreams to the righteous Muh/gum/bul; a seven-day hunt for a wild pig that turns to stone; and a fatal encounter with Sar/oh, the devil who governs forest animals and birds.
The narrative’s final movement is its most structurally significant. After the death of Muh/gum/bul’s daughter by Sar/oh’s blow-pipe dart, and the brother’s retaliatory killing of the Sar/oh children, the survivors flee in panic. Each individual builds a shelter (sulap) in a distinct manner on the first night, and these shelters become the eponymous origins of the seven sib groups: Too/how/un, Tah/gas, Tiba/bah/bar, Bundu, Gun/ah, Pal/lu/puh, and Koh/hub (with Kureo as a later offshoot). Williams notes in a footnote that three of these groups were still identifiable in the Tambunan area prior to 1905, when they engaged in mutual head warfare, and that the Bundu group is the most geographically widespread, extending from the Klias River to the Labuk headwaters.
The methodology Williams describes is unusually rigorous for its time. Twenty-five informants were selected by age, sex, and community status and interviewed across three series. The third series employed a “full cycle” translation procedure: phonetic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet, English translation by one interpreter, back-translation into the Lewan dialect by a second interpreter, and phonetic matching to verify accuracy. Williams selected the account presented here from fourteen full-cycle translations as the most concise while retaining all data and continuity found in the others.
Key Findings
- The flood in the myth lasted seven months and seventy days; the wild pig hunt lasted seven days; the return journey to the sacred tree took seven days; and the post-flood drought lasted seventy days before the streams dried completely (pp. 98–101).
- The myth encodes a specific taboo: mixing chicken, cucumber (sang/gup), and cloth dye (mun/uh/suk) simultaneously makes the Sar/oh people sick, and this prohibition is presented as the reason for the daughter’s death (pp. 101–102).
- The seven sib groups named in the dispersal episode correspond to the Tambunan Dusun’s actual social structure; three (Tah/gas, Too/how/un, Tiba/bah/bar) were still resident in the Tambunan area prior to 1905 and engaged in mutual head warfare (p. 103, n. 4).
- The Kwijau people of the Keningau plain refer to themselves as Kureo and maintain a tradition of migration from the north to the Bingkor area; Williams suggests they may be the Koh/hub group or an offshoot (p. 103, n. 4).
- The myth prescribes that before hunting in the jungle, omens must be read and food offerings made to Sar/oh, who still hunts men with his blow-pipe to avenge the death of his children (p. 103).
- Fieldwork was conducted under US National Science Foundation Grant 5-018, with the broader study concerned with the cultural structuring of personal character among Dusun peoples (p. 95).
Conclusion
Williams’s definitive takeaway is that the Tambunan Dusun origin myth functions as a coherent system of social instruction: it establishes the hierarchy between creator and created, explains mortality as a consequence of human error, justifies specific taboos and ritual obligations (offerings to Sar/oh, omen-reading before hunts), and provides an etiological account for the seven-sib social structure that organizes kinship, warfare, and mutual aid. The myth is, in his framing, the “order to daily social life” made narratively explicit.
Context
- The article draws exclusively on oral data collected in the field at Sensuron; no archival or documentary sources are consulted. Its historiographical contribution lies in demonstrating the full-cycle translation method as a means of preserving the internal logic of a myth without filtering it through Western categorical assumptions.
- Williams was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Sacramento State College, California, and the article represents an early phase of a larger NSF-funded study of Dusun cultural structuring that would continue into a second year of residence (p. 95).