Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
Polynesians and Indonesians are the product of an ancient blend of southern Mongols with a fair Caucasic stock. In both the Caucasic element predominates, but more so in the Polynesian than in the Indonesian. We imagine this blending to have been effected at a remote period in the south-eastern corner of Asia, probably before the date at which Borneo became separated from the mainland.
Kohlbrugge and I included the Bakatan or Beketan and the Ukit or Bukat in the Punan group, and also bracketed together the Kayans and Kenyahs. I also made it clear that I regarded the dolichocephalic element as of Indonesian stock and the brachycephalic of Proto-Malayan origin.
We believe that the Kayans migrated to Borneo from the basin of the Irrawadi by way of Tenasserim, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra; and that they represent a part of the Indonesian stock which had remained in the basin of the Irrawadi and adjacent rivers from the time of the separation of Borneo, there, through contact with the southward drift of peoples from China, receiving fresh infusions of Mongol blood; a part, therefore, of the Indonesians which is more Mongoloid in character than that part which at a remote period was shut up in Borneo by its separation from the mainland.
This theory fits in well with the native account of the distribution of the Malay race, which makes Menangkabau, in Southern Sumatra, the centre whence they spread over the Malayan islands and peninsula. The Professor further points out, that in prehistoric times the Malay and Indonesian stock spread westwards to Madagascar and eastwards to the Philippines and Formosa, Micronesia and Polynesia.
She contrasted the two and was fascinated by this attempt of Indonesian society to allow women to be modern as long as they stayed demure, and how an individual was dangled by the invisible gossamer strings of this great puppeteer, society. Maybe, she thought, when encountered anew most cultural traits were romantically virtuous.
And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs of life, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointing the way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther still to the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in size from a continent to a coral-atoll.
Dr. E. T. Hamy in 1877 recognised a primitive element in the Malay Archipelago, for which he adopted the term Indonesian, a name previously invented by Logan for the non-Malay population of the East Indian Archipelago. Various investigators have studied skulls obtained from this region which prove the wide extension of dolichocephaly.
Our suggestion is, then, that these two systems may have had a common root; that, while the Aryans carried the system westward into Europe, the Indonesians, or some Caucasic people which has been merged in the Indonesian stock, carried it eastward; and that the Kayans, with their strongly conservative tendencies, their serious religious temperament, and strong tribal organisation, have, of all the Indonesians, preserved most faithfully this ancient religious system and have imparted it in a more or less partial manner to the tribes to whom they have given so much else of culture, custom, and belief.
Nor should mention be omitted in this brief survey of Bahá’í victories and achievements in the course of the closing year of the second phase of the Ten-Year Plan of the establishment of a Bahá’í Publishing Trust in India; of the establishment of over thirty new centers and fifteen Assemblies in India, Pákistán and Burma; of the purchase of some of the holy sites blessed by the footsteps of Bahá’u’lláh in Adrianople, the Land of Mystery and the scene of the proclamation of His Message; of the holding of the first Bahá’í Summer School in Central Africa, in Kobuka, Uganda, attended by about one hundred African and white believers and representatives of no less than twenty-eight Bahá’í local Assemblies; of the convocation of the first historic All-France Teaching Conference, the first fruit of the combined labors of the believers of about thirty centers already established throughout the length and breadth of that country; of the setting apart of a plot to serve as a burial-ground for the members of the Bahá’í community in Tripoli, Libya and in the capital of Tanganyika; of the purchase of land for the establishment of a Bahá’í Summer School in ‘Iráq; of the extension to the Bahá’í women in Egypt of the right to be elected to the Egyptian Bahá’í National Spiritual Assembly as well as to participate as delegates in the National Bahá’í Convention; of the purchase, in an island near Muara Siberut, Mentawei Islands, of a plot supplementing the Bahá’í endowment established in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital; of the pushing of the northern outpost of the Faith in Alaska to Point Barrow beyond the Arctic Circle; of the initiation of auxiliary plans for the promotion of the Faith in the Seychelles Islands and in the Sudan; and of the arrival of a pioneer in Praslin Island forming a part of the Seychelles group.
He distinguishes two main races, a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic, terming the former Indonesian, the latter Proto-Malay. Doctor A.W. Nieuwenhuis, who about the end of the last century made important researches in the upper parts of the Kapuas and Mahakam Rivers and at Apo Kayan, found the Ot-Danum, Bahau-Kenyah, and Punan to be three distinct groups of that region.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking