Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
I several times saw a most ingenious invention for frightening away the birds and monkeys from the large fruit trees which surrounded every Dayak village. At one end of a large rattan cord was a sort of wooden rattle, fixed on the top of one of the largest fruit trees.
The sound inspires the Dayak with courage and fire. When he takes the young out of the nest, later to serve him as food, the parent bird darts at the intruder. The hornbill is an embodiment of force that may be either beneficent or harmful, and has been appropriated by the Dayaks to serve various purposes.
This is not strictly correct because the racial problems of the island are much more complicated. Doctor A.C. Haddon recognises five principal groups of people in Sarawak, Punan, Kenyah-Kayan, Iban or Sea Dayak, Malay, and the remaining tribes he comprehends under the noncommittal name Klemantan.
He was kind enough to send me a present of a young fowl, which was very acceptable. Long Pangian is a small settlement where ten native soldiers are kept, under the command of a so-called posthouder, in this case a civilized Dayak from the South, who met us at the landing in an immaculate white suit and new tan shoes.
R. Schreuder, I went to call on the Sultan. He was a man of about thirty-five years, rather prepossessing in appearance, and proud of his ancestry, although time has so effaced his Dayak characteristics that he looks like a Malay.
A still simpler trap consists merely of a long slender cone of bamboo strips. The fish entering the mouth and passing up to the confined space of the other end become wedged fast in it. A Sea Dayak trap found in the south-west of Borneo is a cylindrical cage of bamboo attached to a pole driven vertically into the bed of the river. At one side of the cage is a circular aperture.
There are both men and women who have married many times; a tenth husband or wife is not unknown; and a marriage may be dissolved within a week of its consummation. The Sea Dayak, like all the other peoples, regards incest very seriously, and the forbidden degrees of kinship are well understood and very similar to those of Kayans.
The account given above of the reception and entertainment of guests would apply with but little modification to the houses of the Kenyahs and Klemantans. In the Sea Dayak house the reception and entertainment of guests is less ceremonious, and is carried out by the unorganised efforts of individuals, rather than by the household as a whole with the chief at its head.
Besides the small knife for splitting rattan, which is the special implement of the Dayak woman, the fair sex of the Penyahbongs has a parang, a spear, an axe, a bone implement used in working rattan mats, and a rattan bag which is carried on the back. The women in several Dayak tribes also possess such feminine accessories.
As is well known, the Dayak women all wear rings of brass around their waists. They are called "gronong," and they are made of pliable rattan inside, with small brass rings fastened around the rattan. In the centre of each ring there are generally two or three small red and black rings of coloured rattan between the brass ones.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking