The home-life of Borneo head-hunters

by William Henry Furness

VERANDA OF A NEWLY BUILT IBAN HOUSE ON THE BAKONG RIVER, A TRIBUTARY OF THE BARAM.

THE SKULLS ARE HANGING NEAR THE VERY END OF THE VERANDA IN A CLOSE CLUSTER, AND NOT SUSPENDED ALONG A BEAM. THE FLOORING IS OF STRIPS OF THE STALK OF THE NIBONG PALM, INTERLACED AND TIED TO THE BEAMS. THE LOW, SQUARE BOX IN THE FOREGROUND IS A HEARTH, LINED WITH CLAY AND FLAT STONES. BESIDE IT ON THE FLOOR, AND ALSO HANGING FROM A RAFTER IN THE UPPER LEFT-HAND CORNER, ARE WATER GOURDS. IN FRONT OF THE DOOR, LEADING INTO ONE OF THE FAMILY-ROOMS, A WOODEN RICE MORTAR IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. ON THE DOOR IS HUNG A FLAT BASKET, TO INDICATE THAT THE ROOM IS TABOOED ON ACCOUNT OF ILLNESS. BEYOND THE RANGE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH ON THE LEFT, AND EXTENDING OUT INTO THE OPEN AIR IS A WIDE PLATFORM OF SPLIT BAMBOO, WHEREON THE RICE BEFORE IT IS HUSKED IS SPREAD OUT ON MATS TO DRY.

Possibly, this description of Home-Life in a Borneo household would be incomplete without a detailed account of its ordinary daily routine, which, as I saw it during several weeks in Tama Bulan’s house, is somewhat as follows:—[2]

The crow of a cock breaks the silence of the night; then a dog rouses up, yawns and stretches, and shakes off the ashes of the fireplace where it has been sleeping, and begins the daily round of quarrels with its companions. Then daylight gradually creeps in and a door slams with a bang at the far end of the house, where the poorer and hard-working people live; a woman with a bundle of bamboo water-vessels slung on her back hurries along to the stairway down to the river. She looks just the same as when she went to sleep. Her dress is the same and her hair is in a disordered tangle, and as she walks her feet come down heavily on the warped planks and make them rattle, no doubt to wake the lazy men, who sleep on and let the women make the fire and get the water while they snooze. Soon she comes back, her hair dripping and glossy, and little drops of water still clinging to her skin. By this time there is quite a procession of women going down to bathe and get the cooking water from the river, and there is a slamming of doors and a few wails from the children. Then the men who have been sleeping on the raised platform along the open space below the eaves, unroll themselves from their shroud-like coverings of cotton cloth, once white, and a little hum of conversation springs up, possibly a comparison of dreams, the interpretation of which, as in all uneducated classes, has a great bearing on their daily life. The mother who comes out with her babies in her arms, or sitting astride of her hips, knows nothing of our custom of caressing with a kiss, but in her maternal bursts of affection she buries her face in the neck of the child and draws in a long breath through her nostrils; in fact, she smells it. In their language the verbs to smell and to kiss are the same. Then down she goes to the river and takes the morning bath with her child in her arms, sometimes holding it by the hands and letting it kick out its legs like a frog,—the first lessons in swimming. One by one the men straggle off to bathe in the river, and never missed the opportunity of telling us that they were going to bathe, and when they returned they were also most punctilious in telling us that they had bathed. With all this bathing, however, they are not a clean people. Soap is unknown to them, and they never use hot water, consequently their skins have not the soft, velvety appearance that constant bathing usually produces. (We once gave some of the girls cakes of Pears’ soap, but they ate them.)

After bathing there is a lull in the activity of the house, while the married women and young girls cook the morning meal of boiled rice and dried salted fish.

Breakfast over there are always parties of men and women setting out for the clearings where the rice is planted, and armed with a billiong (an adze-like axe, which they use) and their parang, and their spear, the men go down and get the boats ready, and the women follow after with the paddles, and hampers to bring back bananas or bunches of tender, young fern-fronds, which they make into a stew. Then the house settles down to the ordinary tasks of making large flat hats of palm leaves, drying and flattening banana leaves for cigarette wrappers, or of pounding the husks off the rice by the women, and sharpening spears or decorating parangs by the men industriously inclined; but the latter are rare. They usually spend their time in gossip with their companions or merely sit and blink, soothed by long draughts of smoke drawn deep into their lungs from the strong Java tobacco cigarettes, which they roll for themselves. Men, women, and children all smoke.

Morning wears into afternoon, and then the hours are given up to recreation by those who had not gone in the forenoon to the rice-fields. Occasionally, we sat on the river-bank and watched from a high bluff the young boys or the young girls playing in the water. Here let me say that we never saw the faintest conscious immodesty in either the one or the other. We used to sit lost in admiration at the skill of the girls in swimming. It was a sort of game of tag that they were always playing, only, instead of one chasing all, all chased one, and this one would get off some little distance from the rest and then suddenly disappear under water. Then the chase begins. All swim as fast as they can to the spot where she had vanished, some swimming with a rapid overhand stroke, while others swam entirely under the water. Then, possibly still in front of them, possibly far behind, up bobbed the girl who was ‘it,’ shaking the water from her eyes and giving a shout of derision at her pursuers. Down she went again and the chase was renewed, all under water, so long, sometimes, that the surface of the river became perfectly smooth, and no one would have imagined that in another moment it would be again bubbling up and dashed into spray by a crowd of laughing, shouting, black-haired, merry girls. Back and forth, up and down, they splashed from one side of the river to the other, until one of the men called to them from the house to stop their sport lest they rouse a sleeping crocodile. This put an end to the fun. Another thing, which was quite new to us, was the way in which they could play a sort of tune by splashing their hands in the water and flapping their arms to their sides. They stood in a group, and by sinking their hands, the back downward, in the water and then clapping them above the water and slapping their elbows to their sides, they produced a series of different sounds, like that of a large stone dropping into a deep pool, with a rhythm that was perfect and very pleasing.

Afternoon deepens into dusk, and the workers from the fields come home and trudge wearily up the bank and disappear through the little doorways. Small flickering lamps are lit here and there, and the fire on the hearth disseminates a cheery glow and warms up the row of human skulls hanging in front of the Chief’s door. The veranda gradually becomes deserted, even by the dogs, while the families are eating their evening meals in their private rooms. The noisy flapping of wings and cackling of chickens seeking their roosts for the night and the low, contented grunts of pigs beneath the house betoken that the day’s foraging is over.

After the evening meal the men once more lounge out in the veranda and, grouped about the low, smouldering fires, smoke their long cigarettes and gossip, or listen to the drone of the Kaluri played by one of the youths. By eight or nine o’clock they are all once more wrapped in their coverings of cotton cloth, and, stretched in a row beneath the eaves, lulled by ‘lisp of leaves or ripple of rain.’