Borneo-Dayak CRAFTS
indonesia exporter of dayak tribe's handmade crafts & tribal arts

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

Traditional Life: Primary Funerals

When someone dies, drums or gongs are beaten. The body is wasged, sometimes embalmed, and then dressed and laid in the state for several days for people to visit and weep over. The body may also be sat upright on a chair-like structure, or tied standing to a veranda post.

Burial procedures vary wildly in Borneo. Some groups dispose of the body soon after death: they bury it, wrapped in a mat or in bamboo; or they lay it in a monoxyle coffin; or fold it into a ceramic jar; or else they cremate it. The coffin or jar may then be buried in the ground, in a big earth mound, or in a wooden family chamber.

Some place it inside a huge upright carved post, at a cave entrance or in an individual or cloccetive carved mausoleum; or it is placed on a platform or a hilltop. Some leave the body to weather on an open platform, the bones later buried in a jar.

While some groups used to set the coffin upright like a tree, others placed the corpse standing in a hollowed living tree that they sealed with its own bark. Or the corpse could be mummied by heating the coffin with fire.

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.