Maloh

The Maloh are an interior Dayak people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Kapuas river in Indonesian West Kalimantan, numbering approximately 11,000 and scattered across the region of Putus Sibau, the administrative centre of Kapuas Hulu [1, pp. 101–102]. They comprise three principal sub-divisions: the Embaloh, located along the Leboyan, Embaloh, Palin, Nyabau and Peniung (Mandai) rivers; the Kalis, on the river of that name; and the Taman, situated on the main Kapuas and in the Mendalem and Sibau rivers [1, p. 101]. Though culturally distinguishable from neighbouring Dayak groups such as the Iban, Kantu’, Kayan, Suruk/Mentebah, Punan and Bukat, the three sub-divisions also recognise differences among themselves [1, p. 101]. The Maloh have been widely known in Sarawak and West Kalimantan as silver- and gold-smiths, historically travelling across the border to Iban long-houses to produce adornments for Iban women, a craft that has declined considerably in recent decades owing to reduced demand and competition from Chinese jewellers [1, p. 101].

Social Organisation and Livelihood

The Maloh are traditionally long-house dwellers, residing in high, strongly built houses (sau) resembling those of the Kayan and Kenyah, though these are gradually giving way to more modest Iban-style long-houses or individual one-family houses [1, p. 101]. They are swidden-cultivators, farming rice on the flat alluvial areas along the banks of the upper Kapuas and its tributaries [1, p. 101]. Many traditional practices are slowly disappearing under the influence of school education and Islamic and Christian culture in the Kapuas region, yet many Maloh still retain much of their old adat (customary law), and traditional legends, myths, songs, and rites associated with marriage, death, sickness and farming continue to be performed in certain areas [1, p. 101].

Stone, Spirit, and Ritual

Victor T. King’s ethnographic study, based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Sarawak and West Kalimantan, demonstrates that stone functions in Maloh cosmology as a dual substance: simultaneously a receptacle for active spiritual forces deployed in curing, warfare and agriculture, and a life-negating medium through which petrifaction narratives explain landscape features and sanction moral transgression [1, pp. 104–105].

In the curing context, the village medical expert (balian), usually female, possesses stones of different sizes, shapes and colours (batu balian) that serve as temporary receptacles for spirits summoned through chant and ritual action [1, pp. 105–106]. These stones function as magnets, attracting sickness from the patient’s body, and as neutralisers of invisible harmful forces [1, pp. 107–108]. The balian acquires stones through six distinct channels: inheritance from a deceased practitioner, dream deposition, jungle encounter with spirits, extraction from a sick patient’s body, conjuring during the manyarung (initiation) ceremony, and the capture of a deceased person’s soul, which cools and hardens into stone in the practitioner’s hand [1, pp. 105–106].

In agricultural ritual, batu karue (guardian stones) protect the rice and its spirit (antu ase) from outside evil influences and prevent the rice-spirits from straying [1, p. 109]. Some are said to originate from the “sleep” in the eyes of Piang Ambong, a Maloh female ancestress invoked in rice rituals, which when wiped away falls to the ground and becomes stone [1, p. 109]. A single example of a communal stone cult is the batu mata’aso (sun-stone) in the Embaloh river, a small red oval stone containing the spiritual essence of the sun-god, which served as the focus of village rituals for successful harvests and favourable weather [1, pp. 109–110].

The life-negating dimension is expressed through petrifaction narratives. In the Maloh creation myth, the creator Sampulo attempted to fashion man from wood (unsuitable) and then from stone (the figure could not move, speak or breathe, and a sword-cut would not heal), before succeeding with a mixture of earth, fire, water and air [1, p. 113]. Petrifaction stories, such as that of the headman Tendek, who was turned to stone after using a watersnake as a basket-cord, and his wife Banang, who embraced him and was likewise petrified, are precipitated specifically by transgressions in man-animal relations rather than by ridicule, as among the Kelabit [1, pp. 114–118]. These narratives stand as supernatural explanations of landscape features and sanctions against behaviour that violates accepted categories of relation between humans and animals [1, pp. 117–118].

Research and Documentation

The Maloh entered the Society’s literature primarily through the lens of Bornean megalithic studies. Tom Harrisson published extensive ethnological notes on the Maloh in the Sarawak Museum Journal (1965) and contributed two articles on megalithic evidence in East Malaysia to the JMBRAS in 1973, establishing the framework within which King’s 1975 study was situated [1, pp. 99–100]. King explicitly positioned his work as an examination of what Harrisson termed the “marginal relics” of megalithic cultures, shifting analytical attention from large-scale megalithic construction toward smaller-scale ritual uses and underlying beliefs [1, pp. 100–101]. King concluded that megalithic activity, while partly distinguishable as a complex surrounding memorialisation and death, is nonetheless “part and parcel of the syndrome of stone beliefs” and serves to connect the human world with the spiritual otherworld [1, pp. 111–112]. His fieldwork was financed by the Social Science Research Council and the Evans Fund, University of Cambridge [1, p. 119].

MBRAS Sources

• V.T. King (1975). Stones and the Maloh of Indonesian West Borneo. JMBRAS 48: 104–119

References

1. V.T. King (1975). Stones and the Maloh of Indonesian West Borneo JMBRAS 48(1): 104–119.