Borneo's Dayak handicraft, the beauty of ancient tribal arts and handmade crafts
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In Dayak houses and longhouses, architectural elements like rafters, pillars, roof friezes, and finials are frequently carved or painted with protective symbols and spirit images, such as dragons, hornbills, or buffalo horns.

Traditional Life: The Inside World, Borneo People at Home


The village, formally consecrated and undergoing periodic cleansing rituals, is the focus of social and religious life. Surrounded by protective images, it forms the human sphere where people are most safe from any evil.

Habitat

Traditional settlements were located in proximity to food resources or trade facilities, and most are now found along communication axes, such as rivers, coastlines, or roads. In olden days, prevailing defense strategies had fortified villages standing on remote hilltops. Settlements developed from a core of kin-related people, as either a cluster of single-family dwellings, like the Malay village, or a longhouse, the typical Dayak dwelling which is strikingly similar to Chinese bazaar dwellings. The longhouse, however, was not a pervasive feature among inland groups.

The Ngaju, Ma'anyan, and other groups of southwestern Borneo probably built but very few, as did some northeastern groups, and the nomadic Punan hunters frequently build a simple lean-to. The Kayan, Kenyah, Iban, Land Dayak, Ot Danum, Maloh, and Murut were famous for their longhouses and some still inhabit them. Longhouses, like most dwellings in rural Borneo, are built on piles. In the most elaborate Kayan longhouse, the whole beam work, pillars, roofing and floors, are cut from very resistant ironwood, without the thatched roofing, bamboo floors, tree-bark walls or softwood beam work other dwellings often display.

The longhouse ranges in size from a few single-family apartments to two parallel rows of apartments, locally stretching over 500m along a large gallery, all under the same roof. Partitions separate the apartments, and doors, sometimes beautifully carved or painted, open on the gallery, which serves for pounding rice, making handicrafts, storage, and as a meeting hall and dance floor.

Among stratified groups the wider central section of the gallery located in front of the chief's apartment is elaborately painted with noble designs such as tigers and trees of life in lime, soot, and red oxides. Each family owns the materials of its apartment and section of gallery. However, the whole community is responsible for the spiritual welfare of the longhouse and holds rituals focusing on the only collectively-owned element, its notched-log, often finely carved, stair. Single-family-house dwellers, such as the Ngaju, usually have a communal meeting house. The Land Dayak head-house, a round building on high piles, served to store skulls, and the Dusun head-hut had a similar function.

In Dayak houses and longhouses, architectural elements like rafters, pillars, roof friezes, and finials are frequently carved or painted with protective symbols and spirit images, such as dragons, hornbills, or buffalo horns. Malay houses feature a veranda with carved balus-trade, open-work wooden panels above doors and windows, and fine roof ornaments carved with plant motifs.

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.