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Updated: June 6, 2025
Like the Ibans, the Kenyahs make peace more readily than the Kayans, who nurse their grievances and seek redress after long intervals of time. The Ibans conduct their warfare less systematically, and with far less discipline than the Kayans and Kenyahs.
For he well knew that this procedure would render the spot hateful to the Ibans; for the scene of a disaster, especially one where they have been worsted in fight, becomes an object of superstitious dread.
Ling Roth's book and elsewhere, especially those of the Ibans. We have chosen for reproduction some representative specimens that have not hitherto appeared in well-known publications. A few stories that properly belong to this chapter are scattered in other parts of this book.
Of these we distinguish six principal groups: Sea Dayaks or Ibans, the Kayans, Kenyahs, Klemantans, Muruts, Punans. A census of the population has been made in most of the principal districts of Sarawak and of Dutch Borneo; but as no census of the whole country has hitherto been made, it is impossible to state with any pretence to accuracy the number of the inhabitants of the island.
In these piratical expeditions the Malays assigned the heads of their victims as the booty of their Iban allies, while they kept for themselves the forms of property of greater cash value. The Malays were thus interested in encouraging in the Ibans the passion for head-hunting which, since the suppression of piracy, has found vent in the irregular warfare and treacherous acts described above.
A special deity or spirit, Pulang Gana, presides over the rice-culture of the Ibans, but the crocodile also is intimately concerned with it. The following account was given us by an intelligent Iban from the Batang Lupar: On going to a new district Ibans always make a life-size image of a crocodile in clay on the land chosen for the PADI-farm.
But we do not think that this view is tenable in face of the fact that, while the conception is a living belief among the Madangs, a Kenyah tribe that inhabits a district in the remotest interior and has had no intercourse with Malays, the Ibans, who have had far more intercourse with the Malays than have the Kayans and Kenyahs, yet show least trace of this conception.
The deer are of some slight value to them as omen-givers. Horned cattle they will kill and eat, but they are not accustomed to their flesh, and few of them relish it. Ibans have numerous animal fables that remind one strongly of AEsop's fables and the Brer Rabbit stories of the Africans.
This he has done, and a few of his people have followed him; and on them he enforces a strict observance of his cult of the river-turtle. A still more interesting case is the following one: A community of Ibans were building a new house on the Dabai river some years ago, and one day, while they were at work, a porcupine ran out of a hole in the ground near by.
Besides the three great invasions of foreign blood and foreign culture, those borne by the Kayans, the Muruts, and the Ibans respectively, there have been numerous minor invasions on all sides. In the following paragraphs we make mention of those that seem to have been of most importance in modifying the population and the culture of Borneo.
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