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

Arts in Borneo Traditional Life

The Bornean taste for decoration pervades all artifacts. Although I have never noted in these people much admiration for their surroundings - be it a landscape or a butterfly's wings - I have often been struck by their propensity to create decoration. When halting to cook rice during long forest walks, a man might take a few extra moments to carve a rice spoon with motifs, only to discard it an hour later.

What lies behind this propensity? For the traditional inland peoples. the natural environment consists of tangible objects and spiritual entities, both categories being equally natural equally real. The spirits, volatile or dwelling intangibles, are more powerful than humans and may he harmful. The people avoid them or try to neutralize them with appropriate rituals. Designs in wood, plait work, beadwork, and textile are powerful protective devices against the dangerous spirits. A man who carves a dragon in wood at once invokes the great dragon goddess and creates a new dragon spirit and its dwelling.

He benefits from this spirit's power as he places himself under its protection. The spirit is all the more active and beneficent if blood has been ritually offered, or magic words recited, but it may be irritated if not properly propitiated. Man surrounds himself and his village with such images to protect the human sphere from the potentially hostile natural world. By so doing man opposes culture to nature, the village to the wilderness.

Many artifacts have shapes, designs. or patterns - from the most easily recognizable to the smallest carved scroll, to the apparently meaningless geometric design - that ultimately represent protective spirits. Of course, utilitarian artifacts may also be left undecorated, meaning that their owners did not care to place them under spiritual protection. In that respect, they are really secular artifacts. Other decorated objects have no obvious practical use and no avowed ritual meaning and therefore may have been manufactured in a l'art pour l'art state of mind by an idle, inspired woodcarver; but this is uncommon.

Whether the artifact has practical or religious use, the artist is often not a professional. Working for a neighbor or for the community, and especially when handling a powerful design, he usually receives a ritual salary, from a bead to a jar, corresponding to an offering to the spirit of the design. This offering protects him from that spirit's possible wrath, as the use of an inappropriate material, design, or offering would cause the spirit to devour him. Because of the risk incurred, the creation and use of the most powerful designs are generally restricted to persons with strong souls: aristocrats, experienced elders, or ritual specialists - shamans or priests. Thus, what we call artistic objects play an essential role in traditional societies: as status or rank markers, they act as a visual code in maintaining the current social order; as religious implements, they are indispensable to household rituals and village festivals; as specific stylistic productions of a given ethnic group, they enhance identity and cohesion.

In the last fifty years, traditional art production in Borneo has considerably decreased in variety. Pottery and iron-smelting have disappeared; bamboo and deer antler carving, mat-work, monumental hardwood carving, and long-house architecture are almost extinct. Weaving survives mainly among the Iban. In Sarawak and East Kalimantan, tourism has helped maintain traditional hat, basket, and beadwork production and has even revived dying arts, like Benua' weaving. However the quality of artifacts for sale is often inferior. Handicraft cooperatives have created new forms, using new techniques to satisfy tourist needs, and antique shops are full of fake "Dayak" carvings, basketry, and jewelry, some of which is manufactured outside Borneo.

Government initiatives in the last few years to promote regional cultures through nationwide television programs and stage shows of music and dance have quickened cultural change. With mainly educated urban youth setting up folk dance companies, new provincial and synthetic forms of performing arts have emerged blending cultural traits of various local ethnic groups. New choreographies and musical arrangements have appeared. along with newly designed costumes. This results in bizarre scenes like the young Javanese woman recently seen wearing a suede costume with Kenyah beadwork and performing an allegedly Benua' ritual dance to the beat of an electric organ. The peoples of Borneo are now part of a wider culture, and this scene should not seem weirder than the Nigerian woman seen performing flamenco in a Hong Kong cabaret.

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.