The “palang”: its history and protohistory in West Borneo and the Philippines
Tom Harrisson’s 1964 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society surveys the history and protohistory of the palang—a cross-piece driven through the glans of the penis—across West Borneo and the Philippines, arguing that the device has far greater antiquity, geographical range, and cultural persistence than the sparse colonial literature has acknowledged. Drawing on early European eyewitness accounts, indigenous folklore, material culture, and a sixteenth-century Spanish codex illustration, Harrisson reconstructs a pre-Spanish cultural continuum linking Bornean and Visayan populations through shared sexual technology.
Summary
Harrisson’s central problem is one of evidential silence: the palang was either deliberately suppressed or simply overlooked by colonial administrators and ethnographers, leaving a literature that is “light” and often “misleading, presented as semi-erotic” (p. 164). He addresses this gap by triangulating three kinds of evidence—early European field observations (Burns 1847, St. John 1863, Pigafetta 1521, Loarca 1582, Povedano 1578, Pretty 1587, Morga 1609), indigenous oral traditions collected in Sarawak and the Philippines, and material culture including Iban ikat textiles and the Boxer Codex marginal drawing. The result is a layered account that distinguishes between the device’s protohistorical roots, its documented colonial-era distribution, and its more recent diffusion among groups that previously lacked it.
The article’s core argument is that the palang did not originate independently among the Kayans but represents a continuation of an older tradition carried by ancestral populations into the Bornean interior, with parallel and possibly connected usage among the Bisaya peoples of the southern Philippines. Harrisson supports this by noting that the Ibans, who became the most numerically prominent palang carriers in Sarawak during the twentieth century, uniformly deny any claim to invention and attribute the practice to Kayan and Kenyah influence following their north-westward expansion and the pacification of the highland groups (pp. 166–167). The Kelabit case is particularly instructive: the device was unknown to them until approximately 1925, when a visiting Kenyah youth’s palang caused a fatal haemorrhage in a Kelabit woman, an event that catalysed awareness and subsequent adoption among a small aristocratic minority by 1945 (p. 167).
Harrisson extends the argument further back by examining the Boxer Codex (c. 1590), whose gilt-inset marginal drawing depicts a “wheel or ring” type of palang with round spurs, made of lead, brass, or gold, and notes that over thirty varieties existed, each with a distinct sacred name (p. 171). He then speculates—cautiously and with explicit acknowledgment of the limits of his linguistic competence—on a possible terminological and symbolic connection between the Bornean palang and the Yuan-dynasty Tantric ritual term pa-lang (“eight males”) recorded in Chinese dynastic histories, a link that Dr. van Gulik himself could not resolve (pp. 172–173).
Key Findings
- Robert Burns’ 1847 field notes describe the Kayan utang as “a round pin (frequently two or three) of wood, bone, brass or gold, about an eighth of an inch in diameter passed horizontally through the gland,” adopted at puberty or before marriage, without which “marriage does not take place” (p. 164).
- Pigafetta’s 1521 account of Cebu records that males “have pierced their member near the head from one side to the other with a device of gold or of tin as large as a goose quill,” with star- or nail-head terminals, and that the women “want it this way” (p. 168).
- The Boxer Codex (c. 1590) describes a wheel-type palang with “more than 30 kinds, each with a different name,” made of lead, brass, or gold, and notes that the Spaniards punished wearers with beatings yet the practice continued (p. 171).
- Francis Pretty’s 1587 account from Capul records that the device was “driven through their privities when they be yong,” was removable, and was instituted at the women’s request as a remedy against sodomy; Pretty’s party physically removed one such nail from a ten-year-old boy (p. 169).
- Antonio de Morga (1609) records that the devices were called sagras and that “there are very few (left), because now that they are becoming Christians, care is taken to get rid of (such)” (p. 170).
- Medical reports from Sarawak doctors (1956–63) indicate that “quite a high proportion of elderly Iban males do have palang now” and that numerically the Ibans were the most frequent carriers in West Borneo in the preceding decade (p. 166).
Conclusion
Harrisson concludes that the palang is a device of genuine antiquity and wide distribution whose history has been obscured by a combination of colonial prudery, deliberate suppression, and what he terms a “conspiracy of silence.” The weight of the evidence points to a pre-Spanish cultural sphere linking the Bisaya coast-dwellers of the southern Philippines with the riverine and upland peoples of West Borneo, within which the palang functioned as a normal, if technically varied, element of male sexual practice. The possibility of a deeper symbolic or terminological connection to Yuan-dynasty Tantric ritual remains an open question that Harrisson flags for future investigation.
Context
- Primary sources examined include the Boxer Codex (via Professor Charles Boxer’s collection), the Haddon and Start Iban or Sea Dayak Fabrics and their Patterns (Cambridge, 1936) for textile evidence, and the reprinted Burns expedition notes in the Sarawak Museum Journal (1951).
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in its systematic recovery of scattered early European eyewitness testimony and its demonstration that the palang was a widespread, technically diverse practice across the Borneo–Philippines cultural zone long before the colonial period, challenging the Victorian-era tendency to treat it as an isolated “Kayan mutilation” curiosity.