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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RUM AH: RICE GROUP AND COMMUNITY OF NEIGHBOURS

In the language of Gerai the word rumah is used to mean "dwelling”, but particularly "village dwelling". In this latter sense it contrasts with the term dengau, which generally refers to any dwelling away from the village.1 This difference between rumah and dengau bespeaks a distinction that is crucial within Gerai social relations: that between residence in and residence out of the village proper.

Gerai people are, much of the time, dispersed across a wide area of

countryside in order to cultivate rice. In addition, their patterns of dispersal change each year, as the previous year's ricefields are left to lie fallow while groups move on to make new swiddens elsewhere. For this far-flung and peripatetic community the village proper provides a fixed focus or "source" (hungkung). Affiliation to a Gerai ritual hearth involves not only

incorporation into the Gerai adat community, but also attachment to the village itself. In referring to themselves as reng Gerai (people of Gerai) the members of any rice group express an identification with both adat

community and village: of all places regularly traversed by Gerai people only the village itself is correctly called "Gerai".

The village constitutes a community focus in two senses. Firstly it is the point at which adat is centred, for ritual hearths must be located in the

village proper. While any ritual hearth is able to spread its protective power over both village dwelling and ricefield, it is seen as being lodged most essentially in the former. Thus having guardianship of a ritual hearth is usually spoken of as having guardianship over the rumah in which that hearth is lodged. Similarly, "dependents" (yeng numpang) on the ritual hearths of others are always said to be "dependents" on the rumah of those others. In other words Gerai people tend to think of ritual hearths in terms of the village dwellings in which they are found. Affiliation to a ritual hearth ensures that no matter how far from the village a rice group might journey in its quest for fertile farmland, it remains attached to the village proper.

Secondly the village is the point at which the Gerai community qua

community is physically located. Most rice groups have a dwelling in the village where most of their members live most of the time. In fact publicly- articulated values in Gerai stress that community members should reside in the village whenever possible. Two reasons are given for this. Firstly, the clustering together of the population in one place is believed by Gerai

people to be conducive to physical safety. While Gerai friends often told me how much safer the world outside the village had become since the Dutch put a stop to headhunting, the jungle and ricefields of their tales were still, in 1986, generously peopled with headhunters from enemy villages, spirits which feast on human flesh and Malays intent on murder and mayhem. In the more than seventy tales that I collected in Gerai - tales in which spirit attack is perhaps the most common theme - not once does such attack take place in the village proper. Instead it usually occurs in the jungle or the fallow ricefields, and more rarely in the farm hut. Although the latter is included within the protective cocoon of adat, it lacks the security provided by the presence of a bustling human community.

While ritual hearths protect the rice that people eat then, congregation in the village creates a place of safety from direct attack on human beings. In this context residence away from the village for long periods - especially if one is living in the isolated environment of a ricefield hut - can be seen as a courting of disaster. The vulnerability which many community members feel while outside the village proper - especially if they are alone or with only one or two fellows - was demonstrated to me during a visit to a young couple at their farm hut in 1986. While I was seated talking to the husband inside the hut where he was minding his two small children, he stiffened suddenly, lunged for his bushknife, and stood with it poised in his hand. Two strangers had come through the jungle at the edge of the ricefield where his wife was weeding, and were talking with her. Although they stayed only a moment (they were Malays, seeking the way to Gerai village) the husband remained standing, gripping his knife, long after they had gone. The wife, for her part, returned immediately to the hut, trembling with fear: "barangkali munsoh” ("they could have been enemies") she told me. In times of great danger - such as after a death, when spirits in their thousands are believed to flock to the area - community members move into the village itself in great numbers. They do this not simply in order to contribute to death rituals, (although this is certainly a consideration), but

also, so they themselves told me, because they are afraid to live in isolation at such a time.

Secondly, village residence is also claimed by many to foster the sociability - the easy flow back and forth of all kinds of resources - that almost all Gerai people believe should characterise relationships between different rice groups. Village residents often claimed that those living away from the village were reluctant to share with others in the community, and so preferred to live in isolation in order more easily to avoid this obligation.

The members of all Gerai rice groups then, must constantly grapple with a pair of conflicting demands: with the need to disperse and move across the countryside in order to cultivate rice on the one hand, and with the

community stress on permanent village residence on the other. While affiliation to a ritual hearth attaches all members of the community to the village as the adat "source”, it at the same time promotes physical dispersal by enabling people to retain that attachment regardless of how far they move from the village. It is the additional emphasis on the village as the fixed physical centre of the community that goes hand-in-hand with the stress on congregation there. Most Gerai rice groups respond to this tension by staying for lengthy periods at their ricefields during times of high labour requirement, and returning to live in the village once any particular phase of the rice-cultivation cycle has been completed. In this way the Gerai community as a whole effects a balance between the patterns of almost complete dispersal found in some societies of dry rice cultivators, and those of almost complete congregation found in others.1

Unless a ricefield is located so close to the village that those cultivating it can quickly walk back and forth, it requires a farm hut as a place where people can rest out of the sun, shelter from the rain, take care of small children, heat water, cook food and sleep overnight when necessary.

Building an d /o r maintenance of a dwelling in the village itself involves an extra expenditure over and above this basic requirement. In addition, residence in the village may greatly increase the travelling time involved in

lrThe Subanun, who live all year round in highly isolated households at their ricefields (see Frake op cit) provide an excellent example of the former, while the Iban, who move at times of high labour requirement to duster in large multi-household communities close to their ricefields (see Freeman 1970:161ff) provide an example of the latter. If there were to be competition to discover the society in which households could be most appropriately described as "sovereign countries", it would be to the Subanun rather than to the Iban that any prize would go.

ricefield work, and so decrease rice group efficiency in production.1 For these reasons, the members of those rice groups which do choose to maintain a village dwelling in which they spend most of their time, are generally described as panci (good) people: willing to temper their own self- interest in favour of a commitment to community safety and sociability. Those who elect to live permanently away from the village, on the other hand, are normally spoken of as jat (bad/wicked): these people it is to whom the derogatory epithet "ngei ken reng" ("not w anting/needing other

people") is most commonly applied. In all the Gerai tales that I collected, only those depicted as mad or antisocial did not have permanent village dwellings.

In 1986, 97 of the 112 rice groups in the community had rumah, or dwellings in the village.2 The members of 15 rice groups then, lived permanently outside the village. Fifty-five of the 97 village-based rice groups maintained not simply rumah but rumah rayo, that is, dwellings containing ritual hearths. Under adat a rumah rayo, in contrast to a mere rumah, must be of solid permanent construction. The condition and degree of permanence of each of the 107 rumah thus varied enormously: flimsy, ramshackle

structures reminiscent of farm huts stood side-by-side with substantial and carefully-maintained longhouse apartments. Maintenance of a rumah rayo expresses a permanent longterm commitment to membership in the village community: rumah rayo are built to last.

Up until some thirty years before I arrived in Gerai, under adat only rumah rayo were permitted in the village proper. Only in the last thirty-five years then, have dwellings that are not rumah rayo been erected there. In

addition, until perhaps twenty-two years before I arrived in Gerai all rumah rayo had to consist of seven-levelled longhouse apartments. In other

words, up until some thirty-five years ago only longhouse apartments were allowed in the village. With the first of these adat changes freestanding dwellings were able to be built in the village (starting around thirty-five years ago), while with the second these were able to contain ritual hearths and so to constitute rumah rayo. Building of longhouse apartments - a time-consuming and costly exercise - stopped around twenty-five years ago.

1It was not unusual for me to walk between two and a-half and four hours a day to get to and from a ricefield.

2Nine of these rice groups each consisted of two households, and an additional rice group, although comprising a single household, possessed and moved back and forthe between, two village dwellings. Thus the village contained 107 dwellings in all (see Figures 4 and 5).

In place of the apartments, free-standing dwellings have proliferated in the village in the last thirty years: of the 107 inhabited village dwellings in 1986, only 22 were longhouse apartments.

Yet longhouse apartments continued in that year to constitute 40% of the fifty-five rumah rayo found in the village. In addition, longhouse-dwellers and non-longhouse-dwellers alike continued to describe the longhouse apartment exclusively as the "true" or '’authentic" village dwelling (rumah bonar). Whenever reference was made to a "rumah" in myth, further examination always indicated that people assumed that "rumah" to be a longhouse apartment. If I asked any Gerai person to describe some aspect of the rumah to me, it was always a longhouse apartment that the account focused on. While this conceptual correlation between rumah and longhouse apartment can no doubt be explained in part by the long

historical linkage between the two, it is also related to the specific structure of an apartment. Immediately before I left Gerai at the end of my first

fieldwork spell (early 1986) two adat specialists, neither of them a longhouse resident, visited me and volunteered to explain the relationship between what it is to be a "Gerai person" (reng Gerai) and the layout of a "true" rumah. They told me that the balance that a Gerai rice group is expected to achieve between the apparently conflicting values of dispersal and

autonomy on the one hand and congregation and sociability on the other, is encoded in the structure of any apartment. Accordingly, the following discussion on the role of village residence in Gerai will focus most particularly on what the longhouse apartment has to tell us.

Rumah Rayo and Rice Group

A Gerai longhouse apartment is laid out upon seven separate named platforms or ruang (see Diagram 2). These are held between two and four metres off the ground by sixteen ironwood posts (tiang), which also

constitute the points at which the seven platforms come into contact with one another. The roof of an apartment soars to a height of ten to twelve metres above the ground, and the posts must be long enough to hold it up, yet substantial enough to take the weight of the entire construction and all that it contains. Older Gerai people told me that the locating, felling, fashioning, bringing back to the village, and erecting of these ironwood

GERAI LONGHOUSE - Apartment