Through Central Borneo; an Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters Between the Years 1913 and 1917Lumholtz, Carl
History
Through Central Borneo; an Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters Between the Years 1913 and 1917
Lumholtz, Carl
Borneo -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Borneo; Natural history -- Borneo
The two men wore short sarongs around their loins, the women's dress,
though somewhat shorter; otherwise they were nude except for bands, to
which numerous small metal rattles were attached, running over either
shoulder and diagonally across chest and back. After a preliminary trial,
during which one of them danced with much élan, he said: "I felt a spirit
come down in my body. This will go well." The music was provided by two
men who sat upon long drums and beat them with fervour and abandon. The
dance was a spirited movement forward and backward with peculiar steps
accompanied by the swaying of the body. The evolutions of the two dancers
were slightly different.
In October a patrouille of seventeen native soldiers and nine native
convicts, under command of a lieutenant, passed through the kampong. In
the same month in 1907 a patrouille had been killed here by the Murungs.
It must be admitted that the Dayaks had reason to be aggrieved against the
lieutenant, who had sent two Malays from Tumbang Topu to bring to him the
kapala's attractive wife--an order which was obeyed with a tragic
sequence. The following night, which the military contingent passed at the
kampong of the outraged kapala, the lieutenant and thirteen soldiers were
killed. Of course the Dayaks had to be punished; the government, however,
took the provocation into account.
The kapala's wife and a female companion demanded two florins each for
telling folklore, whereupon I expressed a wish first to hear what they
were able to tell. The companion insisted on the money first, but the
kapala's wife, who was a very nice woman, began to sing, her friend
frequently joining in the song. This was the initial prayer, without which
there could be no story-telling. She was a blian, and her way of relating
legends was to delineate stories in song form, she informed me. As there
was nobody to interpret I was reluctantly compelled to dispense with her
demonstration, although I had found it interesting to watch the strange
expression of her eyes as she sang and the trance-like appearance she
maintained. Another noticeable fact was the intense attachment of her
dogs, which centred their eyes constantly upon her and accompanied her
movements with strange guttural sounds.
With the Murungs, six teeth in the upper front jaw and six in the under
one are filed off, and there is no pain associated with the operation. The
kapala had had his teeth cut three times, first as a boy, then when he had
one child, and again when he had four children. The teeth of one of the
blians had been filed twice, once when he was a boy and again when he had
two children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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