Borneo-Dayak CRAFTS
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Borneo's Dayak handicraft, the beauty of ancient tribal arts and handmade crafts

Traditional Life: Household Arts and Crafts

Household arts make use of various materials and technologies and are divided between the sexes: iron-working, carving, and painting are male activities, whereas the women weave, do beadwork, and make hats and mats. Physical aptitude is not the only criterion, and women were in charge of pottery, from collecting the clay to firing the pots. Basket-making is discriminated between the sexes on the basis of the shape and use: sturdy carrying-baskets are made by men, while fine smaller baskets are plaited by women.

A further discrimination between the sexes may be based on the designs created, the spiritually powerful ones exclusively handled by adult men. However, Maloh beadwork or Kenyah tattoo, both featuring powerful designs, are executed and worn by women of rank, although the Kayan tattoo designs are carved on wooden stencils by the men, and discrimination here is based rather on social rank.

Among the Iban, weaving is on a par with headhunting, both being the highest achievements for, respectively, women and men. A skilled weaver is as respected as a famous warrior. A similar structural parallel may have existed between male iron-working and female pottery, both involving the transformation of nature into culture using fire. Household arts are usually worked at on the veranda during leisure times, and elderly people spend a lot of time on them while watching the young children.

Carving

Routine household artifacts are elaborately carved, usually with only a small knife-blade that is driven outwards, with a long handle stuck in the armpit to push the blade. Kitchen implements are of hardwood decorated with dragon or foliage designs. Stools, beadwork tables, and back pieces of carrying-baskets are carved in cut-away dragons and spirit faces.

Wooden baby carriers display frightening faces to protect the baby. Kayan communal rice mortars are shaped as dragons, and the Melawi peoples use fine carved ponders. Tool handles are delicately carved in the round from hardwood, but the finest are of deer antler and, indeed, the sword hilts are among the most beautiful Bornean art pieces. Also elegantly carved in wood are jar lids and musical instruments.

The Malays carve fine friezes for the wedding chamber bed. Designs on bamboo containers are etched out of the natural shiny outer layer on a stained black or red background. Kayan and Kenyah containers display dragon and triangular tumpal motifs, while the Iban, Bidayuh, Murut, and Ngaju prefer sophisticated floral motifs. Other carved bamboo artifacts include flutes and the beautiful Bidayuh and Murut smoking pipes.

Plait Work and Basketry

Plait work and basketry vary immensely in form and use. Mat work includes the tikar lampit, made of parallel rattan strands, and other mats plaited of coarse rattan, tree-bark thongs, or pandanus strips. Sleeping mats of the very finely split, shiny outer skin of rattan are so tight that, as the upper Mahakam people say, bugs cannot get in. Motifs appear in black (a dye of boiled leaves) or red (with the dragon blood dye, from the fruit of a rattan vine). The Penan and Punan make very attractive sleeping mats with black designs, and in the Melawi area, interesting white on white motifs, visible only at a grazing angle, are plaited.

The Ot Danum and Ngaju create on ritual mats superb designs of human figures, houses, and the fantastic Tree of Life. Sago-bark thongs and maranta reed are also plaited in mats. To work in the fields, many groups wear a wide sunhat, often made of sewn isang palm leaf and decorated with appliqué cotton, beadwork squares, or embroidering. The Melanau sunhat has an outer layer of bamboo strips or maranta dyed bright red, and metallic threads. The long-forgotten Tebidah sunhat elaborately associates bright red palm leaves, motifs of finely plaited rattan, and painted designs, while the Ngaju and Ot Danum combined painted motifs, rattan plait work, shells, and tufts of human hair.

The Land Dayak used to ornament men's sunhats stunningly with copper or tin plates and foil, and plates of mica. The Kayan and Kenyah wear finely plaited skull-caps, some incorporating beadwork. Dusun and Ngaju shamans' hats feature a wooden structure to which feathers are attached. Rattan war and dance helmets are ornamented with headwork. tufts of hair, or hornbill feathers, and sometimes a brass forehead plate. Resembling sunhats in shape and decoration, large tudung dish-covers are found all over Borneo.

The famous Kayan, Kenyah, and Punan cylindrical rattan baskets with shoulder straps can be purchased as far as Singapore, Bali, and some. western capitals. Large hampers with a narrow square bottom on four feet are used almost everywhere to carry paddy. While most hampers are equipped with shoulder straps, the Kelabit carry in theirs one picul (133 lbs) of paddy with only a forehead strap. Kayan dousers, including a back piece of elaborately carved wood, have a back flap that allows for seemingly unlimited volume to be carried. A smaller Ngaju basket, worn by men as a knapsack. is unusually plaited with golden yellow orchid stalks. Murut plaited bamboo baskets, as well as the rattan or maranta baskets of the middle Rajang groups, display attractive geometric motifs.

Betel baskets come in many forms, those of East Kalimantan featuring plaited designs, shells, and beadwork. Small, decorated seed baskets are found all over Borneo. Ritual baskets in the west and southwest were decorated with cowries, nassa shells, and tufts of human hair. Some were probably receptacles for human skulls.

Beads and Beadwork

Beads play an important part in Borneo. Pre-historic bone, stone, or resin heads have been excavated, predating glass beads, which arrived here with the earliest iron and kept arriving through the centuries. Bornean peoples distinguish between the large decorated glass-paste beads and the tinier glass beads used for beadwork. The larger beads vary in shape and color, each design with its own name. Most are highly valued and preciously kept as heirlooms. They are used to pay off bride wealth or fines.

As currencies, probably replacing earlier cowries, they were symbols of rank and status, and aristocrats used them to buy slaves. They house powerful protective spirits and accompany man from birth, when a bead is tied to the baby's wrist, till death, when beads are part of the grave goods. Strings of valuable beads are attached to the shamans' tunics and necklaces. A tubular bead, remiang or lamiang, made of white agate or orange onyx, is associated with priests and religious beliefs in southwest Borneo.

The tiny beads, recently replaced by tinier glass and synthetic beads, are used in beadwork and do not bear any magical significance by themselves, although they are locally equated with rice grains in rituals enhancing agricultural fertility. Plaited on fibers of pineapple leaves, they create magical designs that deter evil. Such beadwork is sewn on Iban, Maloh, or Kenyah festive clothes, and on Kayan and Kenyah baby carriers, with some designs, like the tiger or the human figure, being restricted to aristocrats and indicative of rank.

Other protective items on the baby-carrier are shells, bronze bells, large beads. fangs, and amulets. Similar panels in nassa shells are sewn on a tree-bark square. The baby-carrier is a family's most treasured property, securing its perpetuation by protecting its babies.

Pottery

Pottery vessels among inland ethnic groups belong to a 3,000-year-old tradition. Simple hand molded clay pots are dried in the sun and baked in a low fire, their surface being either plain or decorated with impressions of a carved wooden paddle beaten on the pot, or sometimes glazed with hot resin. While bamboo was used by some groups for cooking rice, small utilitarian pottery was made by the Murut, Iban, Kelabit, Bahau, Kenyah, and Kayan, until the 1950s when metal pots replaced them. Traditional pottery has died out in Borneo, with the exception of the clay furnaces carried on board the Bajau Laut nomads' boats.

Art in traditional life: People at home, Household arts and crafts, Clothes and textiles, Personal adornment, The wider world, The fields, River and forest, Trade, War, headhunting, and sacrifice, Traditional religion, Of Gods and men, Life and ritual, Sickness and shamanism, Death and funeral art, Primary funerals, Secondary funerals, The living and the death.