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: Trade

On expedition through the primary forest, men forage scores of edible plants - from bamboo shoots, ferns and roots, to many wild fruit - whereas groups of women usually collect edibles in the secondary forest around the village. The forest also yields many trade items that the men gather in long collecting trips: rattan, resins, illipe nuts, wild honey, and beeswax.

Some products, like hornbill ivory and deer antler, are in demand by the coastal Chinese for medicinal purposes. Caves yield birdsnests - used in a soup by the Chinese - and the rivers are panned for gold. Building materials, such as ironwood beams and shingles, bamboo, and various plants for thatching, are also traded away.

From time immemorial, the inland peoples have had relations along the main rivers with the coastal markets, and with the interisland trade networks. Iron, brass, cloth, salt, and more recently kerosene and modern goods, are boated up to the remotest village. In the government-controlled markets of Sarawak and Sabah, the locals trade rice, coconuts, baskets, fowls, and buffaloes.

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.