Article

Dayaks

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Dayaks

The Dayaks constitute a diverse grouping of indigenous peoples inhabiting the interior highlands and river systems of Borneo, with the most extensively documented communities concentrated in Sarawak, west Kalimantan, and central Kalimantan. The term “Dayak” itself is contested: Staal, writing from the Sadong district in 1940, argued against the spelling “Dyak” and the derivation from Darat (land), insisting instead on “Dayah” or “Dajak” and etymologising the name Bidayoh as “from the highlands” (bi = from; dayoh = high ground) [1, pp. 56–57]. The Dayaks are not a single ethnic unit but a collection of linguistically and culturally distinct groups, broadly divided in the colonial-era literature into “Land Dayaks” (the Bidayoh and related highland peoples) and “Sea Dayaks” (the Iban and their cognates of the coastal river systems) [1, p. 56], [2, p. 123]. Their economic life has traditionally centred on wet-rice cultivation, supplemented by hunting, gathering, and, in the case of the Saribas Iban, the early adoption of commercial crops such as pepper, coffee, and rubber from the 1880s [3, pp. 3–4]. Culturally, the Dayaks are characterised by elaborate ritual systems governing agriculture, death, and social life, a rich tradition of ceremonial poetry, and a distinctive visual art in which protective demonic imagery occupies a central position [4, pp. 78–92].

Geographic Distribution and Sub-Groupings

The Land Dayaks, or Bidayoh, occupy the western highlands of Borneo, with the Sadong district of Sarawak forming a well-documented core area. Staal’s 1940 account, based on material collected from three headmen in the 1930s, presents a migration narrative in which a common ancestor, Padat, led a band of Bidayoh from the Netherlands India Territory into Sarawak, while his siblings dispersed to found neighbouring groups: Simingang to the Sibuyau, Radi’inpu to the Kalaka, Sibaka to the Semadang (Sennah Dayaks), Sijau to the Samarahan (Sirin Dayaks), and Temaga to the Bukar [1, p. 58]. Genealogical counts to Padat vary considerably—19 generations from a Taup at Pichin, 23 from Lobang Batoh, and 37 from Gahat—yielding an average of roughly 650 years, which Staal considers a minimum for Bidayoh settlement in Sarawak [1, p. 58]. The two principal Sadong sub-tribes, Taup and Semabang, claim a single patrilineal ancestor but diverge on the identity of the “true” first wife (Tunduni versus Ramui); by the time of Staal’s fieldwork, no village maintained a pure population of either [1, p. 57].

The Sea Dayaks, or Iban, are concentrated along the major coastal rivers of Sarawak, with the Saribas and Balau dialect areas forming the principal zones of early ethnographic documentation [2, p. 123]. The Saribas Iban, numbering approximately 35,000 persons (roughly 12 per cent of the total Iban population of Sarawak), were the first regional Iban group to adopt commercial crops, beginning with pepper and coffee in the early 1880s and rubber by the end of that decade [3, pp. 3–4]. The Land Dayak and Sea Dayak traditions, while distinct in their ritual architectures, share certain cosmological elements: both recognise a pantheon of spirit-birds and a supreme war-spirit, and both maintain elaborate systems of omen-reading that govern agricultural and martial activity [2, p. 124], [5, pp. 229–240].

Ritual Life and Ceremonial Practice

The ceremonial life of the Sea Dayaks is organised around a tripartite system of feasts: Gawe Batu or Gawe Benih (the Stone or Seed feast, connected with farming), Gawe Pala or Gawe Burong (the Head or Bird feast), and Gawe Antu (the Spirit feast for the dead) [2, p. 123]. The Mengap, the ceremonial song recited at the head-feast, is a fixed poetic register distinguished from colloquial Iban by its alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, and “most excessive verbosity,” and by its resistance to the linguistic change that affects everyday speech [2, p. 123]. Perham’s 1878 analysis demonstrates that the Mengap operates as an indirect invocation: rather than praying directly to Singalang Burong, the war-spirit, the performer recounts how the mythical hero Kling held a head-feast and fetched Singalang Burong from his dwelling atop the hill “Sandong Tenyalang,” so that the recitation itself causes the spirit to descend to the actual house where the feast is held [2, p. 124]. The full recitation lasts approximately sixteen hours, from 6 p.m. to 9 or 10 a.m., after which a pig is killed and its liver examined as the final act of the ceremony [2, pp. 134–135].

The funerary cycle is equally elaborate. Perham’s 1884 study documents a system in which the dead are antu—spirits capable of both harm and benefit—and the ritual architecture exists to manage this dual relationship [6, p. 287]. The professional wailer’s song takes approximately twelve hours to perform and narrates the spirit of the winds journeying to Hades to fetch the departed soul [6, pp. 289–290]. The Garei antu (Festival of Departed Spirits) is held at a variable interval of one to three or four years after death, with preparations lasting weeks or months and taxing the household’s resources severely enough to diminish the following year’s paddy crop [6, pp. 295]. The baiya (grave goods) includes personal necessaries buried with the body—rice, plates, betel-nut mixture, money—and surface deposits of spears, gongs, and jars; a burial without baiya is equated with “the burial of a dog” [6, p. 291]. The climactic moment of intercommunion between the living and the dead is the “drinking the bamboo,” in which an elderly guest of noted bravery or wealth consumes tuak reserved as the sacred portion of Hades [6, p. 298].

Among the Land Dayaks, Staal records two complete ritual prayers with interlinear translation. The first, recited during the swinging of a fowl at a guest-honouring ceremony (begawai), addresses Tampa as creator and preserver and invokes protection from omens—unlucky birds, twisted roots, fallen trees, and nocturnal animal calls [1, pp. 61–75]. The second, the “Tabur” prayer, is longer and more elaborate, performed on occasions such as the new year (Mari Sawa), illness (Nuri), or new house (Ramin Bau). It catalogues the material offerings—bamboo-cooked rice, pickled meat, sirih quids, tuak, coins, fowl’s blood—and their distribution among Tampa, evil spirits, and animals, before a long genealogical roll-call of ancestors from twenty-five kampongs (villages) [1, pp. 61–75]. The Dayak system of pantang (ritual prohibition) imposes rest periods of one to seven days following death, bad dreams of a headman, or other spiritual disturbances, with the persons of the room where a death occurred always observing four nights [1, pp. 64].

Pregnancy and child-birth among the Iban were governed by an extensive taboo system documented by Howell in 1906. The restrictions encompass at least twenty distinct prohibitions on the husband—cutting creepers, damming streams, plaiting rattan, driving nails, pouring oil, fixing a parang, breaking eggs, planting bananas, burning ficus wood, killing animals, scraping coconut shells, introducing turtles, dyeing black—and a comparable set on the wife [7, pp. 125–126]. Each prohibition carries a specific circumvention: a man who kills an animal may nullify the taboo by running away, returning minutes later, and aloud asking “I wonder who killed this animal?” [7, p. 126]. The house or village taboo during the puerperium required that no stranger enter until the umbilical cord had fallen, typically five to seven days; a trespasser was liable to a fine of a full-grown pig [7, p. 129]. The nganjong mandi ceremony, the first bathing of the infant, involves a fowl wing tied with red thread to a spear for a male child or to a leletan (weaving implement) for a female child; the infant’s lips are besmeared with bugs, it is made to suck the tail of a Kli fish, and sparrows’ eggs are dashed on its head [7, pp. 130–131].

Material Culture and Economic Livelihoods

Rice cultivation constitutes the economic and spiritual centre of Dayak life. Sather’s 1980 study of the Saribas Iban demonstrates that the rites marking the conclusion of the harvest season coalesce two fundamental Iban convictions about rice: its spiritual essence, embodied in the aggregate souls (semengat padi), and its material nature, expressed through the notion of inexhaustibility (jedian). Together these dual aspects make rice farming “a profoundly religious undertaking” in which technical and religious operations are inseparable [3, p. 95]. The storage rites, performed with extreme seriousness and restricted to the immediate bilek-family, involve feeding the bins, fumigating them with incense and dried flowers, applying coconut oil infused with family farming charms, and treating the grain with ubat jedian (inexhaustibility charms) to ensure it swells in volume and resists depletion [3, pp. 67–95]. The largest class of padi bin, the sengindang, holds approximately 110 pasu (bushels) [3, p. 16]. The 1978 harvest at Kerangan Pinggai yielded just over 150 pasu of grain, threshed and winnowed in six hours by an 18-person work party [3, pp. 14–15].

The Iban eschatology identifies rice with the human soul: following death, the soul is believed to turn to dew (ambun) that falls at dawn and is taken up by growing rice plants, making rice the physical embodiment of ancestral substance [3, pp. 67–95]. This conviction undergirds the reverence with which all stages of rice handling are conducted and explains why the storage rites, which reveal a family’s relative success or failure, are conducted in a highly guarded atmosphere [3, pp. 67–95].

In the visual arts, Dayak masks represent a distinctive tradition. Gill’s 1967 stylistic survey of masks held in Western museum collections identifies four broadly defined style areas—west Kalimantan, south Kalimantan, central Kalimantan, and Sarawak—and argues that the extraordinary formal assurance of the central Kalimantan and Sarawak traditions derives from a deeply rooted, ancient Southeast Asian protective demonic imagery that predates and is distinct from Indianising influence [4, pp. 78–92]. Of 43 documented masks from central Kalimantan and Sarawak examined for the study, 30 possessed demonic features, making the demonic image the dominant iconographical theme in these style areas [4, p. 87]. These masks—characterised by huge round eyes, fanged mouths, bulbous noses, and extravagant earpieces—functioned in agricultural rites as protective demonic images representing hantu spirits whose terrible countenances warded off evil and retrieved the rice-soul [4, pp. 87–92]. Gill traces parallels to the kala heads of Javanese architecture, the singa faces of Batak Sumatra, the Rangda of Balinese drama, and ultimately to a wooden figure from a fourth- to third-century B.C. funerary chamber at Ch’ang-sha in south China [4, pp. 87–92].

Research and Documentation

The ethnographic record of the Dayaks spans nearly a century of sustained scholarly attention, beginning with the colonial-era fieldwork of missionaries and administrators and extending into the modern period of participant-observation ethnography. Perham’s contributions, published in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society between 1878 and 1884, constitute the earliest systematic European documentation of Sea Dayak ceremonial poetry, religious practice, and funerary religion [2, p. 123], [6, p. 287], [5, p. 133]. His 1878 account of the Mengap preserves a fixed ritual register that, as he notes, remains “stationary” while the spoken language continues to evolve [2, p. 123]. His 1884 study of Sea Dayak religion, based on direct observation of burials, wailing ceremonies, and the Garei antu, is one of the earliest systematic ethnographic records of Sea Dayak funerary practice [6, p. 287]. His 1882 article on Petara (Sea Dayak gods) documents the omen system (beburong) in considerable detail, quoting at length the Sampi Umai invocation to the omen birds and narrating the founding legend of Siu and Seragunting [5, pp. 234–240].

Howell’s 1906 account of Iban pregnancy and child-birth ceremonies, drawn from direct observation at his mission station, provides a detailed record of the taboo system at a moment when such practices were still in active use [7, p. 125]. Stooke’s 1924 lexical list of Land Dayak words, collected at Tabekang in the Sadong district, offers a compact but valuable record of basic vocabulary including body parts, natural features, verbs, adjectives, numerals, kinship terms, and cultural items [8, pp. 78–83]. Staal’s 1940 article, based on material collected from three named headmen in the 1930s, represents one of the earliest complete transcriptions of Bidayoh ritual prayers and origin narratives from the Sadong specifically [1, p. 56]. Hill’s 1955 study of the Manggeng and Datu Merpati legends cross-references Dayak oral tradition with Javanese and Portuguese written sources to date and historicise Bornean origin legends, a method that prefigures later work on the historicity of Southeast Asian mythological narratives [9, pp. 148–158]. Gill’s 1967 stylistic survey of Dayak masks, drawing on collections in Leiden, Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, New York, Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Chicago, contributes to the field of comparative art history by proposing Borneo as a critical node through which ancient Southeast Asian demonic imagery may have influenced Oceanic traditions [4, pp. 78–92]. Sather’s 1980 study, based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork at Kerangan Pinggai longhouse on the Paku river, corrects significant gaps and errors in the Iban agricultural literature and provides the most detailed modern account of the symbolic dimensions of padi storage [3, pp. 67–95].

Land Dayaks

Sea Dayaks (Iban)

MBRAS Sources

Land Dayaks

Sea Dayaks (Iban)

References

  1. J. Staal (1940). Folklore of Sadong Dyaks JMBRAS 18(2): 55–82. Read on JSTOR
  2. J. Perham (1878). Mengap, the song of the Dyak head feast JSBRAS 2: 123–135.
  3. C. Sather (1980). Symbolic elements in Saribas Iban rites of padi storage JMBRAS 53(2): 67–95. Read on JSTOR
  4. S. Gill (1967). Style and the demonic image in Dayak masks JMBRAS 40(1): 78–92.
  5. J. Perham (1881). Petara, or Sea Dyak gods JSBRAS 8: 133–152.
  6. J. Perham (1884). Sea Dyak religion JSBRAS 14: 287–304.
  7. W. Howell (1906). Dyak ceremonies in pregnancy and child-birth JSBRAS 46: 125–131. Read on JSTOR
  8. G.B. Stooke (1924). Some Land-Dayak words JMBRAS 2(1): 78–83. Read on JSTOR
  9. A.H. Hill (1955). Manggeng and Datu Merpati JMBRAS 28(1): 148–158.