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Updated: June 26, 2025
The foregoing description of the relations of a Kayan chief to his people applies in the main to the Kenyah chief. But among the Kenyahs the position of the chief is one of greater authority and consideration than among the Kayans.
Next morning we started shortly after six o'clock, and early in the afternoon reached the kampong Omamahak, which is inhabited by Busangs, with a sprinkling of Malays. Two hours later twenty-one prahus arrived from Apo Kayan with one hundred and seventy-nine Kenyahs on their way to Long Iram to carry provisions to the garrison.
The Kenyahs speak a number of dialects of the same language, and these differ so widely that Kenyahs of widely separated districts cannot converse freely with one another; but, as with all the peoples, except the Sea Dayaks, nearly every man has the command of several dialects as well as of the Kayan language. The Klemantans.
In all these fowls or pigs are now substituted as a rule, but we know of instances in which in recent years human beings were the victims. This was said to be the revival of an old and almost obsolete custom. In another recent case, when a mixed party of Kayans and Kenyahs returned from a successful war expedition, only the Kenyahs had secured heads.
My informant, who had travelled in the interior, said there was little difference in the languages of these subtribes. The Kenyahs, a few Kayans, and the Katingans mutilate the membrum virile by transpiercing the glans and the urethra, and a piece of brass wire is inserted. The kapala of the Penihing kampong Long Kai, on the Mahakam, told me that Kayan and Kenyah are the same people.
Just above this loop a small hole through the shell is usually made, and from this a small skein of beads depends. Similar ear ornaments are worn by Kenyahs and some of the Klemantans, but not by Muruts, and by few individuals only among Punans and Sea Dayaks. Many of the men wear also bracelets of shell or hard wood.
Neither men nor women are bashful or backward, but they are always busy, always on the move to the ladang, into the jungle, building a house, etc. Murder by one of the same tribe is unknown and a lonely stranger is quite safe in the kampong, where they do not like to kill anybody. Among the Kenyahs and Kayans and many other tribes are found distinct social strata, upper, middle, and low.
He is conceived as beneficent and, as his title LAKI implies, as a fatherly god who protects mankind. He is not a strictly tribal god, for the Kayan admits his identity with PA SILONG, and with BALI PENYLONG, the supreme gods of the Klemantans and Kenyahs respectively. In this, we think, the Kayan religion shows a catholicity which gives it a claim to rank very high among all religious systems.
In husking rice the Penyahbongs, Saputans, and Penihings have the same method of gathering the grains back again under the pestle with the hands instead of with the feet, as is the custom of the Kenyahs and Kayans. All day there were brought for sale objects of ethnography, also beetles, animals, and birds.
For the Sea Dayaks had been accustomed to adopt a somewhat swaggering and domineering attitude towards the Klemantan tribes, and could not easily learn to modify it when they came in contact with the prouder and less submissive Kayans and Kenyahs.
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