The home-life of Borneo head-hunters

by William Henry Furness

PERSONAL EMBELLISHMENT

Early in the morning of the third day of our journey up the Baram, to visit Tama Bulan, far in the interior of Borneo, we stopped at a long-house, and as I saw the women descend on their errand to the river for water I was utterly amazed at their costume, and rubbed my eyes to make sure I was not dreaming. I looked and rubbed, and rubbed and looked! It was no illusion! The women who were descending the long notched logs to the river’s edge wore on their thighs and legs beautiful blue silk tricots or ‘tights,’ of an elaborate open-work pattern! and on their hands and forearms delicate black silk mits! I was not prepared for this elegant toilette in the Jungle, and my bewildering amazement continued until, on nearer inspection, I found that the airy tracery which I had mistaken for silken tights was tattooing.

I will not enter on any discussion of the origin or purpose of tattooing:—whether or not it began in the mark which God set on Cain after the killing of Abel, or as to its religious, or tribal, or social purposes, but will simply set forth the customs in regard to it as I observed them among the Kayans and Kenyahs, the patterns, and the mode of performing it. Inasmuch as the details will be dry and extremely uninteresting, and, in reference to the patterns, given with minuteness, because these patterns are in their general features almost immutable and are supposed to be symbolic, I would advise my readers to skip the following pages, and examine only the photographs, merely premising that, since Nature has inscribed at the entrance to the Torrid Zone, ‘All clothes abandon, ye who enter here,’ I fancy no one will dispute that, as a substitution for clothes, pervasive tattooing provides a device both attractive and modest.

BATU—YOUNGEST SON OF THE KAYAN CHIEF OYONG LUHAT.

HIS TATTOOING IS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE KAYANS OF THE BARAM DISTRICT, EXCEPT THAT HIS HANDS DO NOT BEAR THE MARKS DENOTING A SUCCESSFUL HEAD-HUNTER; THE TIGER-CAT’S TEETH IN HIS EARS SHOW, HOWEVER, THAT HE HAS BEEN ON HEAD-HUNTING EXPEDITIONS AND HAS ATTAINED THE RANK OF A WARRIOR. AFTER THE EAR HAS BEEN STRETCHED TO THE DESIRED LENGTH, ONE SMALL COPPER RING IS USUALLY ALL THAT IS WORN, MERELY TO KEEP THE LOBE FROM CONTRACTING. THE BANDS BELOW HIS KNEES ARE OF FINELY BRAIDED FERN-ROOT, AND ARE KNOWN AS ‘UNUS’; OCCASIONALLY THEY ARE OF STRIPS OF RATTAN BOUND WITH BRASS WIRE. UNUS ARE UNIVERSALLY WORN BY THE MEN, AND THEY THINK THAT WITHOUT THEM A MAN LOOKS EXCEEDINGLY NAKED.

The tattoo-marks on the Kayan men are small in size, and confined to certain portions of the body. There are only four or five, and they are placed on the thighs either in front, below the groin, or on the outer surface, just below the hip-joint, and on the flexor surface of the forearm. The designs consist of extremely conventionalised representations of ‘dogs,’ ‘scorpions,’ and the ‘head of a prawn;’ these are the native names given to the different patterns; in none of them is it possible to recognise the animal after which it is named.

Professor Alfred C. Haddon, whose opinion commands all respect, has expressed to me the extremely ingenious explanation, that, notwithstanding the native names, all these patterns represent the head of a dog. To this I modestly and most humbly demur, and incline to the belief that it is rather the head of that animal which enters so largely into all their ceremonials, namely, the pig. Dogs, on the other hand, are treated by all Borneans uniformly with great contempt. It may be noted, furthermore, that this same pattern, whatever be its origin, enters into all Kayan decoration, whether of doors, of beams, of implements, of bead-work, or of graves.

The patterns are selected purely according to fancy, and, as far as I could ascertain, serve solely as personal embellishment. The only mark which is really a male distinction is placed on the back of the hands and fingers after a man has taken a head. The designs on the hands of these men are always very indistinct, owing to the constant exposure and rough treatment to which the tattooing is necessarily subjected before it is thoroughly healed; hence the lines become faint and merge into one another, so that the appearance of a head-hunter’s hands reminds one forcibly of Edward Lear’s nonsensical Jumblies, whose ‘heads were green and their hands were blue, and they went to sea in a sieve.’ I never saw a head-hunter’s hands that were freshly tattooed, nor did I ever see the stamps wherewith these designs are marked out. I am, therefore, unable to give a description of these important marks further than that the backs of the hands appear to be covered with narrow parallel lines running transversely, and the knuckles and their interspaces are covered with triangles with base and apex alternating; on the joints of the fingers are oblong patches of solid black.

The tattooing on the men, except, of course, the badge of a head-hunter, is done at about the age of puberty. It is not at all a ceremony; the youth himself decides when it shall be done and selects the pattern. In many tribes allied to the Kayans, in the Dutch possessions in South Borneo, some of the men are far more elaborately tattooed than the Kayans and Kenyahs of Sarawak, and extend the tattooing to the chest and back, and even to the cheeks and neck; but these elaborately tattooed men are the exceptions and not the rule in their tribe, and the marks are by no means as characteristic as are the ‘dog,’ ‘scorpion,’ and ‘prawn’ of the Baram Kayans. The Dayaks, or, properly speaking, the Ibans (the name Dayak is a mere Malay name, meaning ‘up-river people,’ and never used by the natives themselves to whom it is applied) tattoo on the wrists, forearms, chest, neck, and thighs, but never in large designs. On the chest, and on the point of the shoulder, they bear many-pointed stars, with a spiral sometimes double and interlocking in the centre. On the throat I have often observed narrow zig-zag lines connecting two designs like the escapement wheel of a watch. The zig-zag lines, they said, represent chains, but why a chain should be appropriate for the neck they did not say. The stars on the chest and shoulder, some maintained, represent flowers; others said they were silver dollars. With the exception of the few links of chain on the front of the throat, they do not seem to aim at the representation of ornaments, such as necklaces, bracelets, anklets, etc. In addition to these marks on the chest, arms, and neck, a very common position for a small design is directly on the prominent end of the ulna at the wrist; almost every Iban has over this prominence a small star, or a wheel-like design, with radii extending beyond the circumference.