Borneo -- Social life and customs; Children -- Borneo
The posts in this public part of the Dyak village house are often
adorned with the horns of deer and the tusks of wild boar. The empty
sheaths of swords are hung from these horns or from wooden hooks, while
the naked blades are placed in racks overhead.
If you can imagine a long house built several feet above the ground on
posts, with walls and roof of palm leaf thatch, and this house divided
into two parts, one a large public hall common to all the inmates, and
the other divided into separate rooms each occupied by a different
family, then you have some idea of the kind of house in which the Dyaks
live.
The women are earlier risers than the men, and retire to bed earlier.
They generally go to the river as soon as they wake, carrying their
water-gourds with them. They have a bath, fill their gourds with water,
and return to the house to cook the morning meal.
The principal article of food is rice, which is cooked in brass or iron
pots. With their rice they eat either vegetables or fish. Sometimes they
have the flesh of wild pig or deer, but that is not usual. Nearly every
animal is eaten by the Dyaks; fish, venison and pork are eaten by all,
and many tribes eat monkeys, snakes and even crocodiles. A favourite
method of cooking is to put the proper quantity of fish or vegetables or
meat, with sufficient water and a little salt, into a newly-cut bamboo.
The mouth is then stopped up with leaves, and the bamboo is placed over
the fire, resting on a stone at an angle of forty-five degrees or more.
By the time the bamboo is thoroughly charred, the contents are
sufficiently cooked, and it is taken from the fire and emptied out into
a plate. Sometimes rice is cooked in bamboos, and when it is ready to be
eaten, the bamboo is split and torn off in strips, and the rice is found
well cooked inside--a stiff mass moulded in the form of the bamboo.
When the food is ready and put out in plates, the men are asked to come
into the room and eat. Sometimes the women eat with the men; but if
there are too many to eat comfortably at one sitting, the men have their
meal first, and the women eat with the children after the men have done.
The Dyaks all sit on the floor, which also serves as their table. They
have their rice on plates, or sometimes upon clean leaves. They eat with
their fingers, dipping the hand when necessary into the common stock of
salt or common dish of meat or vegetables. They eat with the right hand,
compressing the rice into portions of convenient size.
When the meal is over, they wash the crockery and put it away. The mats
are swept and taken up, and the refuse thrown through the open floor
for the pigs and poultry under the house to eat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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