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Updated: May 21, 2025
In regard to the presence of spirits, number of souls, blians, disease, and its cure, restrictions for pregnant women, the child's cradle the ideas of the Bukats are identical with those of the Penihings, and possibly are derived from them. The Penihings get their supply of ipoh, the poison for the sumpitan darts, from Punans who live at the sources of the rivers of the Western Division.
The nests are sold to Chinese traders the black nests for about a hundred dollars a hundredweight, and the white nests for as much as thirty or forty shillings per pound. War The Kayans are perhaps less aggressive than any other of the interior peoples with the exception of the Punans.
Fighting between Punans, whether of the same or of different communities, is very rare; the only instances known to us are a few in which Punans have been incited by men of other tribes to join in an attack on their fellows. The members of the band are for the most part the near relatives of the leader, brothers and sons and nephews with their wives and children. Each man has usually one wife.
The Punans, having no houses and therefore no walls on which to draw pictures, have little opportunity to indulge any such tendency; but we have seen rude hunting scenes depicted by them on the walls of shallow caves; the technique consisted in scratching away the soft rotted surface of the limestone rock to produce outlines of the figures depicted.
The Punans are more uniform as regards their physical characters than the other peoples; there are no distinctions of upper and lower social strata as among the other tribes, and thus the mixture of blood, which in the Kayan and Kenyah communities results from the adoption of war captives into the lower class, does not occur with them; and they present none of the wide diversities of type such as are common in the other tribes, especially between the upper and lower social classes.
In fact, it is doubtful whether those that have mixed least with the other peoples pay any attention to the omen-birds; and it seems not unlikely that the cult of the omen-birds is in process of being adopted by them. With the exception of these birds there is probably no wild animal of the jungle that the Punans do not kill and eat.
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 the foregoing chapters it has been shown that the six groups which we have distinguished by the names Kayans, Kenyahs, Klemantans, Muruts, Nomads or Punans, and Ibans or Sea Dayaks, differ considerably from one another in respect of material and moral culture as well as of mental and physical characters.
Harmony and mutual help are the rule within the family circle, as well as throughout the larger community; the men generally treat their wives and children with all kindness, and the women perform their duties cheerfully and faithfully. The religious beliefs and practices of the Punans are similar to those of the Kayans, but are less elaborated.
They hang together more strongly, with a stronger tribal sentiment, and, while the distinction between them and other tribes is everywhere clearly marked and recognised both by themselves and others, the Klemantans and Kenyahs everywhere shade off into one another and into Punans.
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