The Pagan Tribes of Borneo / A Description of Their Physical Moral and Intellectual Condition, with Some Discussion of Their Ethnic Relations

by Charles Hose; William McDougall

Thus the peculiar Kayan custom of tatuing the thighs of women has a close parallel in the tatuing of the thighs of men among all Burmese and Shans; and the Kayans may well have adopted the practice from them. Among the Shans there obtains the custom of placing the coffin on upright timbers at some height above the ground (9). Among the Nagas, and especially the Kuki Nagas,[202] who are said to be most nearly allied to the Karens, beside a number of the culture elements which we have noticed above as common to Karens and Kayans, other noteworthy points of resemblance to the Kayans are the following: A system of tabu or GENNA which may affect individuals or whole villages, and is very similar to the MALAN of the Kayans; the practice of ornamenting houses with heads of enemies, the motive of taking the head being to provide a slave in Hades for a deceased chief; the use of human and other hair in decorating weapons.[203]

Their method of attacking a village is like that of the Kayans, namely, to surround it in the night and to rush it at dawn; they obstruct the approach of an enemy to their village by planting in the ground short pieces of bamboo sharpened and fire-hardened at both ends; they use an oblong wooden shield or a rounded shield of plaited cane; their blacksmiths use a bellows very like that of the Kayan smiths; they husk their PADI in a solid wooden mortar with a big pestle A LA Kayan; they floor their houses with similar massive planks; they catch fish in nets and traps, and by poisoning the water; men pierce the shell of the ear in various ways; omens are read from the viscera of pigs, and the cries of some birds are unlucky; they worship a Supreme Deity and a number of minor gods, E.G. gods of rain and of harvest; they often sacrifice pigs and fowls to the gods, and omens are always read from the slaughtered animals; those who die in battle and in childbirth are assigned to special regions of the other world; the women are tatued (on chest) to facilitate recognition in Hades; in felling the jungle preparatory to burning it to make a PADI farm, they always leave at least one tree standing for the accommodation of the spirits of the place.

Other of the instruments, arts, and customs of the Kayans are found widely spread in south-eastern Asia. Such are the small axe or adze with lashed head; the musical instrument of gourd and bamboo pipes with reeds; the bamboo guitar; the use of old beads and of hornbill feathers for personal adornment; the making of fire by friction of a strip of rattan across a block of wood.

II. Whether this people, of whom the Kayans, Karens, Chins, Kakhyens, and Nagas, seem to be the principal surviving branches, came into the Irrawadi basin and adjacent areas by migration from Central Asia by way of the Brahmaputra valley, as Cross and McMahon (accepting the tradition of the Karens) believe, or came, as Logan suggested, eastward from Bengal, it seems certain that it has been divided into fragments, driven away from the main rivers, and in the main pushed southwards by successive swarms of migration from the north. This pressure from the north seems to have driven some of the Karens down into the Malay Peninsula, where they are still found; and it may well be that, before the rise of the Malays as an aggressive people under Arab leadership, the ancestors of the Kayans occupied parts of the peninsula farther south than the Karens now extend, and possibly also parts of Sumatra. If this was the case, it was inevitable that, with the rise to dominance of the Mohammedan Malays in this region, the Kayans must have been either driven out, exterminated, or converted to Islam and absorbed. It seems probable that different communities of them suffered these three different fates.

The supposition that the Kayans represent a part of such a population, which was driven on by the pressure of Malays to seek a new country in which to practise its extravagant system of PADI culture, is in harmony with the probability as to the date of their immigration to the southern rivers of Borneo; for the rise and expansion of the Menangkabau Malays began in the middle of the twelfth century A.D.; and the Kayans may well have entered Borneo some 700 years ago.

III. We have now to summarise the evidence in favour of the view that the Kayans have imparted to the Kenyahs and many of the Klemantan tribes the principal elements of the peculiar culture which they now have in common.

We have shown that the culture of the Kenyah and Klemantan tribes is in the main very similar to that of the Kayans, and that it differs chiefly in lacking some of its more advanced features, in having less sharply defined outlines, in its greater variability from one community to another, and in the less strict observance of custom. Thus the Kayans in general live in larger communities, each of their villages generally consisting of several long houses; whereas a single long house generally constitutes the whole of a Kenyah or Klemantan village. The Kayans excel in iron-working, in PADI culture, in boat-making, and in house-building. Their customs and beliefs are more elaborated, more definite, more uniform, and more strictly observed. Their social grades are more clearly marked. They hang together more strongly, with a stronger tribal sentiment, and, while the distinction between them and other tribes is everywhere clearly marked and recognised both by themselves and others, the Klemantans and Kenyahs everywhere shade off into one another and into Punans.

The process of conversion of Punans into settled communities that assimilate more or less fully the Kayan culture is still going on. We are acquainted with settled communities which still admit their Punan origin; and these exhibit very various grades of assimilation of the Kayan culture. Some, which in the lives of the older men were still nomadic, still build very poor houses and boats, cultivate PADI very imperfectly, and generally exhibit the Kayan culture in a very imperfect state.

On the other hand, the Kenyahs have assimilated the Kayan culture more perfectly than any other of the aborigines, and in some respects, such as the building of houses, they perhaps equal the Kayans; but even they have not learnt to cultivate PADI in so thorough a manner as to keep themselves supplied with rice all through the year, as the Kayans do; and, like the various Klemantan tribes,[204] they suffer almost every year periods of scarcity during which they rely chiefly on cultivated and wild sago and on tapioca. The Kayans, on the other hand, grow sufficient PADI to last through the year, except in very bad seasons, and they never collect or cultivate sago. The view that this relative imperfection of the agriculture of the Kenyahs and Klemantans is due to the recency of their adoption of the practice, is confirmed by the fact that many of them still preserve the tradition of the time when they cultivated no PADI. It seems that most of the present Kenyahs first began to plant PADI not more than two, or at most three, centuries ago. Some of the Kenyahs also preserve the tradition of a time when they constructed their houses mainly of bamboo; this was probably their practice for some few generations after they began to acquire the Kayan culture. At the present day those Punans who have only recently taken to the settled mode of life generally make large use of the bamboo in building their small and relatively fragile houses.

The view that the Kayans have played this large civilising role is supported by the fact that Kayan is the language most widely understood in the interior, and that it is largely used for intercommunication, even between members of widely separated Kenyah communities whose dialects have diverged so widely that their own language no longer forms a medium of communication between them; whereas the Kayans themselves do not trouble to acquire familiarity with the Kenyah or Klemantan languages.