Stones and the Maloh of Indonesian West Borneo
Victor T. King’s 1975 article examines the ritual and symbolic uses of stone among the Maloh, an interior Dayak people of the upper Kapuas river in Indonesian West Borneo, shifting analytical attention away from large-scale megalithic construction toward what Tom Harrisson termed the “marginal relics” of megalithic cultures. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork in Sarawak and West Kalimantan, King argues 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 (pp. 104–105, 119).
Summary
King identifies eight interrelated properties of stone that structure Maloh belief: hardness and endurance, colour and texture (particularly smooth, river-worn black or deep red stones), shape, size, landscape occurrence, tangibility as a potential spirit receptacle, contrast with living matter, and ubiquity (pp. 102–103). These properties underpin three principal ritual contexts. In curing, the balian (medical expert, usually female) possesses batu balian—stones that serve as temporary fixing agents for named spirits, which are summoned by chant and rubbed over the patient’s body to extract sickness-causing agents; the stones function as magnets, neutralisers, and loci for spiritual combat in the invisible otherworld (pp. 105–108). In warfare, batu rani (“stones of courage”) carried by warriors operate as tangible signs of protection whose spirits invisibly fight the spirits in opponents’ stones (p. 108). In agriculture, batu karue (“guardian stones”) placed in rice bins protect the rice-soul (antu ase) from straying and are invoked during harvesting to gather padi spirits into storage (p. 109).
Beyond individual possession, King documents a communal cult centred on batu mata’aso, a small red oval stone in the Embaloh river said to contain a fragment of the sun-god’s power, which served as the focus of village-level rituals for successful harvests and favourable weather, with strict prohibitions governing approach and conduct (pp. 109–111). In the marriage ceremony, a whetstone (batu pansa’an) placed under the feet of the bride and groom symbolises long life and durability, alongside gongs, swords, and beads, all hard and enduring objects invoked to fortify the couple’s souls (pp. 112–113). Finally, King turns to petrifaction narratives—stories of individuals or entire long-houses turned to stone through transgressions involving unnatural man-animal relations (using a snake as a basket-cord, copulating with a dog, using a mouse’s liver for augury instead of a pig’s)—which are invariably accompanied by storms and serve as supernatural sanctions against moral disorder (pp. 113–119).
Key Findings
- The balian acquires curing stones through six distinct channels: inheritance from a deceased balian, 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 balian’s hand) (pp. 105–106).
- The batu mata’aso sun-stone was twice captured by raiding Iban from Sarawak; on the first occasion the entire Iban village died of a mysterious sickness, and on the second the stone was recovered by Bangan, the maternal grandfather of King’s informant Imas (p. 110).
- Petrifaction in Maloh narratives is precipitated specifically by transgressions in man-animal relations rather than by ridicule (as among the Kelabit), reflecting a belief in the inherent transformability of matter and spirit and the possibility that animals are reincarnations of ancestral spirits (pp. 117–118).
- The Maloh creation myth holds that the creator Sampulo first attempted to make 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—establishing the fundamental ontological distinction between stone and living flesh (p. 113).
- Batu karue are said to originate from the “sleep” or dirt in the eyes of Piang Ambong, a Maloh female ancestress invoked in padi rituals, which when wiped away falls to the ground and becomes stone (p. 109).
- King explicitly aligns with Harrisson’s distinction between the “marginal relics” he examines and large-scale megalithic erection, while arguing that megaliths are nonetheless “part and parcel of the syndrome of stone beliefs” and serve to connect the human world with the spiritual otherworld (pp. 111–112, 119).
Conclusion
King’s definitive takeaway is that Maloh stone belief operates along two fundamentally opposed axes: stone as an active, positive ritual medium through which spirits are located, controlled, and deployed for human benefit, and stone as a life-negating substance that embodies the negation of organic existence. These two poles are not contradictory but complementary aspects of a single “stone syndrome” in which the hardness, endurance, and tangibility of stone make it uniquely suited to bridge the visible and invisible worlds—whether by channelling spiritual power into functional action or by fixing the consequences of moral transgression into permanent, landscape-embedded form (p. 119).
Context
- The article is situated within a broader MBRAS publication series on Bornean megaliths, including Harrisson’s 1973 articles in JMBRAS Vol. 46 and Chandran’s study of the Pengkalan Kempas megaliths, and builds directly on Harrisson’s extensive monographic work on Kelabit and Maloh stone cultures (pp. 99–100).
- King’s fieldwork was financed by the Social Science Research Council and the Evans Fund (University of Cambridge), and the Maloh material complements his earlier publications on Embaloh-Iban relations in the Sarawak Gazette (1973) and a forthcoming piece on Dutch ethnography of the Maloh in the Sarawak Museum Journal (1972) (pp. 101, 119).