Heppell (1990:69-70) claims that the Bukar Bidayuh have a masked festival. ^ The Land Dayaks did not tattoo at all, nor did they elongate their ears or carry out any form of body mutilation which distinguished them. Their clothing was simple and used much that was obtained at the bazaars. The most
conspicuous items of adornment of Bidayuh women and girls were large sets of heavy brass bracelets and leglets which were so constricting that they actually deformed the muscles of the calf. [PLATE 84B, 86C]
In the Sadong areas of Sarawak and in West Kalimantan women had a distinctive form of beadwork hat which was worn on festive occasions, consisting of a tall truncated cone which was set with coloured beads in a vertical striped design. Sometimes these hats had a flat conical top, giving them the appearance of a tall mushroom. [PLATE 86B, C] Old beads in the form of necklaces were valued by these people and necklaces with old glass beads interspersed with large animal teeth arranged point upwards were worn by men. Such necklaces seem to have survived the 19th century only in museum collections and old photographs. [PLATE 85C, 87A, D] Early descriptions of Land Dayaks in both Sarawak and West Kalimantan mention the wearing of necklaces made from human teeth. [PLATE 87B] Bidayuh women from the upper Sarawak river wore a particularly awkward and restrictive corset made from a sheet of bark,
sometimes reinforced with vertical strips of metal.
The Kendayan peoples of West Kalimantan had many features of dress in common with the Bidayuh, some Malay items and a few unique artifacts.
[PLATE 85A, B] Groups such as the Menyuki of the Landak region had an unusual form of dancing costume for women, which included hats surrounded by hanging bead strings and set with unusual silver ornaments. These, and silver neck ornaments, were made by Chinese silversmiths, but were supposedly based on old Dayak designs. [PLATE 85B, 88]
The Bidayuh did not weave. They formerly wore barkcloth clothing or, in Sarawak, women wore skirts made by Iban weavers. [PLATE 81C, 89A] Some of the Kendayan people of West Kalimantan wove material from lemba fibre (Schadee 1896:62-64). Like most Dayak groups they could forge weapons and utensils but they did not smelt iron. They plaited baskets, mats and hats and seemed to have a particular talent for making very fine and tightly plaited
1. A Bidayuh mask, consisting of a simply depicted grinning face with fangs, is illustrated in AhBeng (1991:49).
Large Cultural Complexes
striped baskets in a range of sizes, from large ones for carrying baskets to tiny ones for sirih pouches. Large sunhats were plaited in fancy bicoloured designs, or made from flat sheets of leaf or bark and painted with elaborate foliate designs. [PLATE 89B, C] They carved bamboo containers and smoking pipes with fine foliate and floral designs. [PLATE 89D] Knotted figurative beadwork is rare, although not completely unknown. [PLATE 86A]
They lived in longhouses, but these were neither so long nor so regular in design as those of the neighbouring Iban. Their dwellings were relatively
unadorned. However, in most Land Dayak villages there was a structure, the
pangah, which identified the village inhabitants. This was called the head house by English writers as it contained the captured skulls belonging to the village, but it also served as a meeting house, guest house and sleeping quarters for unmarried men. It was a circular building with a conical roof, and a village could have one, several or sometimes none. [PLATE 90]
The head house was a type artifact of the Bidayuh of Sarawak and parts of West Kalimantan. Other type artifacts are the pandat, the unique form of ovoid shield, vertical striped beadwork hats, engraved bamboo smoking pipes and
necklaces strung with animal teeth point upwards or human teeth. The bracelets and leglets worn by the women are not really type artifacts in themselves as they were imported items and sometimes worn by other groups. It is the manner of their wearing which makes them typically Bidayuh. Motifs employed in basketry and on engraved bamboo containers include very common types of geometric ornament and floral and foliate designs.
The distinguishing aspects of the Land Dayak complex lie more in the existence of specific type artifacts than in the use of distinctive motifs or styles. This, and the lack of spectacular or monumental public art, makes the
presentation of the group somewhat unassertive.
The Sabah Complex
This very untidy classification covers a range of people living in the northern part of Borneo with different ethnic labels and languages. Much of their material culture is more closely related to that of some groups in the southern Philippines than to the material culture of other Borneo groups. The Dusuns were seen as people who had absorbed all sorts of ideas from outside Borneo, such as how to grow rice in irrigated fields prepared with an animal drawn plough or how to grow vegetables in Chinese style garden plots. Recent immigrants such as the Ilanun and Bajau brought in exotic concepts from Sulu and
Large Cultural Complexes
the Philippines. The Murut-Tagal people live in thinly populated remote interior areas, some groups in close proximity to Murut-Kelabit groups.
Neither the Dusuns nor the Muruts had a tradition of elaborate and distinctive funerary architecture. Simple structures such as posts, marking stones or grave shelters are described, although some coastal Dusun did build
elaborately painted grave houses. B. and T. Harrisson (1971:133-148) described what they perceived as the relics of a megalithic tradition among the Dusuns of the western region of Sabah, but it had become attenuated to a series of upright stones marking property boundaries. Their original function was largely
forgotten. There seems to be no tradition of elaborate carving.
The war kit of both Dusuns and Muruts had some characteristic features. They used round shields of wood or basketry and their own form of chopping sword called the gayung. This looked rather like a parang ilang but did not have the assymmetrical blade. Their war jackets were of barkcloth or coarse woven fibre, as were their hats, and were sometimes decorated with shells. [PLATE 91, 94D] Certain items found in northern Borneo were derived from the southern Philippines and used by immigrant groups like the Ilanun, such as shields with a curved outline and central boss, the heavy kampilan sword and leaf shaped Sulu knives. [PLATE 91D, 92]
There are no illustrations of tattoo designs from this region and no surviving tattoo stencils. However, St John (1863, Vol. 1:258) described Dusun men from the interior with simple bands tattooed from their shoulders down over their abdomens, or a band down each arm. If tattooing ever was common among them, it had all but died out by the time of colonial contact.
Traditional clothing and ornaments were diverse over the region. Formerly Dusun men and women adorned themselves in heavy coils of brass wire around their necks and bodies. The fashion survived as a local variant for women into this century. [PLATE 93A, 94A] For women, simple skirts adorned with a few rattan rings around the waist were elaborated in some areas into skirts, girdles of brass rings, coin belts and blouses festooned with silver buttons. [PLATE 93B, C] Some Murut men were singularly unadorned. [PLATE 94D] Dusun men from some lowland regions adopted a very extravagant form of festive dress, with decorative headcloths and jackets with slashed sleeves
covered in silver buttons, imitating some of the more elaborate styles of dress of the coastal immigrants from the Sulu islands or the Philippines. [PLATE 94B, C] Antique beads were favoured by some far interior Murut groups. [PLATE 95] The men mostly did not wear tiger cat’s teeth in their ears, although some
fine examples with carved horn tops have been collected from the Tinggalan in the far north of East Kalimantan. [PLATE 95A, C] This little known region, close to the Tidong area, may have produced some unique elaborations.
[PLATE 95D]
The peoples of Sabah seem to have used a very diverse assortment of musical instruments, some similar to those of other Borneo groups and some, particularly stringed instruments, related to those of the Philippines. [PLATE 96] Mixed orchestras were evidently a speciality. The only masks from the region were simple and unadorned coconut shells with eye and mouth holes cut into them.
In terms of craft skills, Dusun women were weavers and produced some very simple ikat designs for clothes as well as jackets with needle woven or weft inlaid decoration. [PLATE 97A] The Bajau had their own style of woven cloth in simple geometric designs (Alman 1959-60a). The Muruts of the remote hinterland produced barkcloth clothing. As with most Borneo people basketry mats, hats and baskets were produced with geometric and interlocking designs. Hats were a particular speciality, with a range of shapes and decorative designs.
[PLATE 94B, C, P7B] Some pottery making skills survived into this century as local village specialities among Bajau and Dusun communities. The hand modelled pottery was smoothed on the outside, with some carinated outlines and vessels of elaborate form. The style was similar among Dusun and Bajau (Alman 1959-60b, c). The decorative skills like carving, painting or beadwork do not appear to have been practised to any great degree. Beadwork has been adopted by the modern Rungus Dusun for the production of a new form of distinctive jewellery.
Those who lived closer to the coast lived in separate family dwellings, while the people of the hinterland were longhouse dwellers. Conspicuous forms of architectural decoration were not a feature.
With a coastal population greatly exposed to outside influences and marketplace economics and a very small interior population living in remote locations where there were no major territorial disputes, the peoples of Sabah do not seem to have developed a unifying identifying image. There was a diversity1 of presentation across the region and few large territorial markers. While they produced some distinctive artifacts, like the Land Dayaks, there is no distinctive tradition of motif or design.
Large Cultural Complexes
The People in Between
These broad areas do not neatly encompass all the peoples of Borneo, nor are the borders between different regions always starkly drawn. Some areas have not been well investigated ethnographically. Active processes occurring at ethnic boundaries have meant that the affiliations of some groups have changed. Certain sub-groups within the larger complexes have divergent features in their art and material culture.
The coastal Melanau in Sarawak have been described by Leach (1950) as a para-Malay group. A proportion are Muslim, and this was the situation at early colonial contact. They have some unique features in their art and material culture.
The pagan branches of this group formerly practised secondary disposal of the remains of their dead, redepositing the remains in carved poles like the mid-river people of the Rejang (Jamuh 1950a, Brodie 1954-5). Few of these survive. They were sea fishermen and used broad boats of unique design which could be beached in the wildest surf. The most distinctive pieces of their ritual art also relate to their relationship with boats.
To cure illness, they carved small images, called bilum, from soft wood and set them afloat in miniature boats. These images have a unique style of depiction, with long straight noses and narrow pointy mouths. They are often cut all over with notches. [PLATE 98A, B, 99A] The same style was deployed for somewhat larger figures of more substantial wood representing various deities. These were often covered in scales or entangled with creatures such as sea snakes. [PLATE 98C] Tiny figures of similar form were carved from bone to act as fishing charms. Such figures were also used in surrogate burial rites for individuals who had drowned at sea (Jamuh 1950b). Other carvings used for ritual purposes included dragons or crocodiles, or figures which looked like hybrids of the two. [PLATE 99B, C]
The Melanau were the only group in Borneo which practised head moulding on babies to flatten the forehead. This was done to a minimal degree, but there was a special apparatus employed for the purpose. [PLATE 100]
Many groups were absorbed into Malay or para-Malay identity as a result of the migratory movements of the 19th century. The material culture of many of these groups is little known. The few unique artifacts of the Melanau are a reminder of the constantly changing patterns.
The Maloh of West Kalimantan are a group whose geographical position left them enclosed between the Iban from Sarawak and the Kayan from central
Borneo. They had some features of material culture common to each, some unique features and an unusual position as skilled craftsmen who catered for the needs of societies other then their own.
They deposited their encoffined dead in raised mortuary huts, like the Kayan, but these varied in design. An open hut with a raised platform and crossed roof gables has been recorded, but there are other variants. [PLATE 101] These could be guarded by what one might call minimalist
anthropomorphic figures which were supposedly formerly set with the skulls of the victims of post-mortuary headhunting expeditions.
The traditional festive dress of the women consisted of folded
headcloths, with skirts and jackets decorated heavily with shells. [PLATE 102A] They became adept at knotted beadwork, using some of the motifs of the central Borneo people. Skirts and jackets with beadwork and shell designs became a signature of the group. [PLATE 103B] These were traded with the Iban, so that composite items of Iban that and Maloh beadwork were worn by members of both groups. *
There is little information about the fighting kit of the men. However, a photograph in Roth (1896:Vol.l:14), identified as a Maloh warrior, shows a man in the standard outfit of central Borneo, complete with shield covered in tufts of human hair and skin jacket. [PLATE 102B]
They had a couple of unique forms of musical instrument which
differentiated them from both their Iban and Kayan neighbours. The blikan was a form of guitar, hollowed from the front and equipped with a sound board, which was also used by some Iban although they claimed it was of Maloh origin (Shelford 1904:12-13). [PLATE 103C] They also had a rectangular wooden drum, used for sounding alarms, very different to the cylindrical drums of other groups.
The special craft skill of the Maloh, already noted, was their ability in fine metalwork in silver and brass.^ They made the distinctive brass and rattan corsets for Iban women, but these were not worn by Maloh women. They also
1. A rather fine example is illustrated in Chin (1980:53), identified as an Iban jacket from the