http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2006/12/24/lifefocus/16400383&sec=lifefocus
Sunday December 24, 2006
Forest feast
AT Bario, the deer will not be pulling Santa’s sleigh but will be on the dinner table! According to Maran Radu of Pa’ Lungan, the locals will hunt barking deer and wild boar in the surrounding forests.
PHOTO: Sylvester Kalang will hunt for wild boar or barking deer for his Christmas dinner that may also include wild ginger flowers (below, left) and the ultimate delicacy, kelatang - cicada larvae (below, right).
It’s more difficult to get monkeys and pythons, adds Sylvester Kalang, who is going out hunting from Pa’ Ukat, “but monkeys are not tasty anyway!”
The forest is like a huge vegetable warehouse. Some leaves, called tengayan and dure in Kelabit, are collected, as are fern and bamboo shoots.
At lunch, I initially thought they served mushroom stems only to be told I was eating rattan shoots! They tasted slightly bitter and smooth. Superb. Flowers? Stir-fried purple ginger flowers (called ubud sala) are fair enough since we eat bunga kantan in tomyam, too.
But how about thinly sliced stir-fried orchid stems? These, called ubud aram in Kelabit, are slightly bitter and supposedly good for blood pressure.
And for the ultimate delicacy, try kelatang – the larvae of a cicada – extracted from the barigulad tree and barbecued on a stick. It tastes like ginger flowers!
In short, there is a complete organic food larder from the forest. If logging comes to Bario, much of this will be lost and locals will have to fork out hard cash to buy meat and vegetables, which would probably be laden with growth hormones and pesticides.
As for Ba Kelalan, Martha Tagal says there’s always catfish, tilapia and biawan from the rice fields. And a village might slaughter a buffalo, cow or pig for Christmas. We tried the buffalo at her father’s Apple Lodge. It turned out to be on the tough side.
The Lunbawang also cook banana stems with wild boar and the famous bitterr – rice broth with vegetables such as cucumber or pumpkin leaves. At times, minced meat is thrown in.
There’s also penupis, a steamed roll of pulut flour with salt or sugar, the Lunbawang version of lepat pisang minus the banana. And its deep-fried version is called benak. In Bario, they have beraubek – the Kelabit version of Cantonese ham chin peng.
Above all, there is the famous highland rice of Bario and Ba Kelalan. With its soft texture, fine grains, pleasant mild aroma and exquisite taste, it is regarded as one of the world’s finest.
The quintessential festival dish for both the Kelabit and Lunbawang is nubalaya, rice wrapped in paddle leaves (daun itip), so called because the leaves look like paddles.
The rice is laboriously planted and harvested using traditional methods –without pesticides and chemical fertilisers (which are expensive to fly in anyway).
Bario rice is planted elsewhere, in the lowlands of Miri for example, but only in the highlands does one get the “real taste.” A crucial ingredient up here is the surrounding forests – which provides pollinating insects and pristine water (the same reason why Scotch whisky is so good – because it’s made with water from unpolluted Scottish streams).
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Monday, December 4, 2006
Noel joy in the mountains
http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2006/12/24/lifefocus/16400559&sec=lifefocus
Sunday December 24, 2006
Noel joy in the mountains
In the remote highlands of north-eastern Sarawak at an altitude of some 1,000m is a world of heartfelt community ties, vibrant Christian faith and miraculous signs, discovers ANDREW SIA.
LIKE many Malaysian Christians, Martha Tagal decided to go home for Christmas this year. Unlike most, however, hers was a journey of more than 24 hours of travelling to reach her remote hometown in the Ba Kelalan highlands in Sarawak.
Martha, a secretary-turned-housewife who lives in Kuala Lumpur, flew to Kota Kinabalu, then drove with her sister, Rangai, a Sarawak Education Department officer, to Lawas before catching another flight to Ba Kelalan.
Even then, Martha and Rangai, two of seven siblings to come home to celebrate Christmas with their retired missionary father, took the “easy” route.
The Tagal sisters are among the many well-educated Kelabit and Lunbawang adults – partly thanks to the staunch Christianity practised in their communities – who have left the highlands to work in Miri, Kuching and Kuala Lumpur. And like the women, many have made the long trek home this time of year.
Christmas for the Lunbawang who live in the mountainous Ba Kelalan area and the Kelabit in the Bario plateau is worlds apart from the way urban Malaysians celebrate the festival.
In this land, there are no large churches, shopping malls or traffic jams. Instead, water buffaloes still carry goods along forest trails to far-flung villages and deer refers not to Rudolf but to the main dish at the longhouse Yuletide dinner.
Long, long road
Whereas people in the Peninsula have highways, railway tracks and jetliners to “balik kampung”, the homeward journeys here are far more difficult.
There are regular flights on Twin Otter propeller-driven planes but with only 19 places onboard, getting a seat is far from guaranteed. Everything, including passengers, has to be weighed and if passengers or luggage are overweight - the number of seats may be reduced.
A senior pilot who has been flying to the area for the past 15 years explains that if there are strong winds, heavy rains or mist in the mountains, the flights are usually cancelled. Experienced pilots have to negotiate between mountains and land by eyesight on very short airstrips.
It’s almost like landing on an aircraft carrier – but with zero electronic guidance. And in the days when the Ba Kelalan airstrip was grassland (it has since been tarred over), upon a flight’s arrival, the grazing cows had to be chased off!
My trip to Ba Kelalan involved flying from KL to Miri, where I switched to a Twin Otter for Lawas. Then, it was a six-hour ride on a logging road which involved 10 of us packing into the standard highland workhorse – a Toyota Hilux 4WD pick-up – at RM60 per pax.
The Hilux roared through shin-deep mud and slipped dangerously sideways at times. Yes, this is what happens to road maintenance when the logging is finished.
Sang Sigar, an art teacher in his mid-40s serving at at the local school, said his “balik kampung” record was three days, set a few years ago!
“The truck became bogged down. We tried everything to get it out of the mud until we were exhausted. Then, we just slept in the truck with mud all over our bodies. Next day, we resumed the battle.”
To reach Bario, most Kelabit return by flight (now twice daily). Even then, folks like Maran Radu, 78, of outlying Pa Lungan village, still have to walk another four hours through narrow, muddy hill forest trails to get home. Ditto for his seven children who are working in KL, Miri, Bintulu and Brunei. And if they have lots of luggage, they will have to hire a four-leg-drive “lorry” – a water buffalo!
Those who can’t get a flight to Bario can opt for the 15-hour muddy 4WD experience from Miri. Just last October, logging (and its attendant road) reached Pa Berang and Ramudu, on the fringes of Bario. From there, it’s a short boat ride and another 4WD trip to central Bario.
Not so long ago, the land route to Bario involved a three-day boat ride from Marudi to the uppermost reaches of the Baram River and another few days of jungle trekking – making the Twin Otters the only practical (and crucial) link to the outside world.
Teething problems during FAX Airways' takeover from the MAS Rural Air Service caused a severe shortage of diesel and food supplies in Bario in August. It was alleviated only by emergency airlifts of rice, sugar, biscuits, cooking oil, flour and milk a week before Merdeka.
The new land-river supply route has eased things. But the travails of transport still push up prices drastically. According to Sang, a bag of cement costs RM17 in Lawas, RM40 in Ba Kelalan and a whopping RM150 in Bario! Similarly, a kilo of sugar goes for RM3 in Ba Kelalan and RM5 in Bario.
Need a new pick-up truck for Christmas? Vehicles used to be flown into Bario on a boxy cargo plane, aptly called a Skyvan, at RM6,000 per pop! The service had been stopped since the 30-sen petrol price hike, said eco-tourism operator Douglas Munney.
And how does anyone from the outside world call home if their flight is cancelled? Bario and Ba Kelalan have five public telephones (radio-operated) between them.
“We asked Telekom to reconfigure the phones so that people can call in,” said Sang. “When it rings, hopefully somebody is nearby and picks up. Then he has to walk to whoever’s house to convey the message.”
Dari mana?
Everywhere I went, people stopped to talk, starting with the question “Dari mana?” (Where are you from?)
“That’s the way it is here. From ‘Dari mana’, next thing you know, there is an invitation for tea, and then to come over for Christmas,” explained Neal Nirmal, our trip organiser from Taiping, Perak, who used to stay for weeks in Ba Kelalan in the early 1990s.
At Pa Ukat, housewife Rina Rahayu, mother of two young children, was weaving a mat from kabar pandan leaves which she had cut from the jungle and painstakingly removed the thorns stalk by stalk.
After interviewing her and taking many pictures, I thought it would be nice to contribute RM10 as a small Christmas ang pow to her family. Later, as my 4WD was about to leave, she suddenly presented me with the mat that she had been working on for the past two days.
“Christmas present,” she smiled, leaving me flabbergasted by her generosity.
Celebrating Natal
“Christmas is very good here,” attested Martha. “The Holy Spirit ministers to people and the people are touched. I really feel the sense of joy here.”
And it is very, very community oriented. Said Jaman Riboh, an eco-tour guide operator in Bario:
“People always look forward to come home for the celebration. They will pack gifts and Christmas goodies for relatives in the villages.”
“In churches, candles are placed in a small bamboo knot on the Christmas tree. They are lit when the congregation sings Silent Night. That’s the highlight of the service. After church, people will visit friends and relatives until late in the night.”
Bario Penghulu Henry Jala Temalai, 74, is expecting his son Idris Jala (Malaysia Airlines managing director) and other children from Australia and Kuching to make it home for Christmas.
But for Mubulun Selutan, 78, of Pa Ukat, none of his seven children in various towns are returning home this year. Instead, he will go to Miri, where four of his children are.
In Ba Kelalan, the gift-giving would have been in the form of a telematch yesterday. According to Rungu Aris, wife of the local village chief, the telematch would have offered gifts sponsored by those who are working in town, while old and young had fun gunnysack racing and running with eggs in spoons.
I had the opportunity to attend a pra-Natal or pre-Christmas service at Bario’s central church on Dec 17. Here, there was none of the traditional sape (a stringed instrument) and hornbill dances often shown to tourists but electric guitars and keyboards, lots of clapping and raised hands plus exuberant singing much like a modern, urban charismatic church.
And the sermon was titled Apa yang kamu akan buat selapas Natal? (What will you do after Christmas?) with a call to spread Amanat Agung, or the Great Message. Different choirs – from the kaum ibu, bapa dan belia (mothers, fathers and youths) performed. Silent Night was sung in Kelabit, while prayers – to bless the fellowship, the music and to bind the evil spirits – were in Malay.
Above the stage, a huge banner declared: Roh Kudus Penolongku - The Holy Spirit, My Helper.
I could not understand the words of many of the songs but somehow there was a certain energy in the air and I could not stop crying. As a Theravadan Buddhist who is open to the goodness in all religions, I believe something sacred was working on me that day.
Here's wishing Christians Do' Aco Krismas and everybody Do'Umak Lak Meberuh, which is Lunbawang for Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Sunday December 24, 2006
Noel joy in the mountains
In the remote highlands of north-eastern Sarawak at an altitude of some 1,000m is a world of heartfelt community ties, vibrant Christian faith and miraculous signs, discovers ANDREW SIA.
LIKE many Malaysian Christians, Martha Tagal decided to go home for Christmas this year. Unlike most, however, hers was a journey of more than 24 hours of travelling to reach her remote hometown in the Ba Kelalan highlands in Sarawak.
Martha, a secretary-turned-housewife who lives in Kuala Lumpur, flew to Kota Kinabalu, then drove with her sister, Rangai, a Sarawak Education Department officer, to Lawas before catching another flight to Ba Kelalan.
Even then, Martha and Rangai, two of seven siblings to come home to celebrate Christmas with their retired missionary father, took the “easy” route.
The Tagal sisters are among the many well-educated Kelabit and Lunbawang adults – partly thanks to the staunch Christianity practised in their communities – who have left the highlands to work in Miri, Kuching and Kuala Lumpur. And like the women, many have made the long trek home this time of year.
Christmas for the Lunbawang who live in the mountainous Ba Kelalan area and the Kelabit in the Bario plateau is worlds apart from the way urban Malaysians celebrate the festival.
In this land, there are no large churches, shopping malls or traffic jams. Instead, water buffaloes still carry goods along forest trails to far-flung villages and deer refers not to Rudolf but to the main dish at the longhouse Yuletide dinner.
Long, long road
Whereas people in the Peninsula have highways, railway tracks and jetliners to “balik kampung”, the homeward journeys here are far more difficult.
There are regular flights on Twin Otter propeller-driven planes but with only 19 places onboard, getting a seat is far from guaranteed. Everything, including passengers, has to be weighed and if passengers or luggage are overweight - the number of seats may be reduced.
A senior pilot who has been flying to the area for the past 15 years explains that if there are strong winds, heavy rains or mist in the mountains, the flights are usually cancelled. Experienced pilots have to negotiate between mountains and land by eyesight on very short airstrips.
It’s almost like landing on an aircraft carrier – but with zero electronic guidance. And in the days when the Ba Kelalan airstrip was grassland (it has since been tarred over), upon a flight’s arrival, the grazing cows had to be chased off!
My trip to Ba Kelalan involved flying from KL to Miri, where I switched to a Twin Otter for Lawas. Then, it was a six-hour ride on a logging road which involved 10 of us packing into the standard highland workhorse – a Toyota Hilux 4WD pick-up – at RM60 per pax.
The Hilux roared through shin-deep mud and slipped dangerously sideways at times. Yes, this is what happens to road maintenance when the logging is finished.
Sang Sigar, an art teacher in his mid-40s serving at at the local school, said his “balik kampung” record was three days, set a few years ago!
“The truck became bogged down. We tried everything to get it out of the mud until we were exhausted. Then, we just slept in the truck with mud all over our bodies. Next day, we resumed the battle.”
To reach Bario, most Kelabit return by flight (now twice daily). Even then, folks like Maran Radu, 78, of outlying Pa Lungan village, still have to walk another four hours through narrow, muddy hill forest trails to get home. Ditto for his seven children who are working in KL, Miri, Bintulu and Brunei. And if they have lots of luggage, they will have to hire a four-leg-drive “lorry” – a water buffalo!
Those who can’t get a flight to Bario can opt for the 15-hour muddy 4WD experience from Miri. Just last October, logging (and its attendant road) reached Pa Berang and Ramudu, on the fringes of Bario. From there, it’s a short boat ride and another 4WD trip to central Bario.
Not so long ago, the land route to Bario involved a three-day boat ride from Marudi to the uppermost reaches of the Baram River and another few days of jungle trekking – making the Twin Otters the only practical (and crucial) link to the outside world.
Teething problems during FAX Airways' takeover from the MAS Rural Air Service caused a severe shortage of diesel and food supplies in Bario in August. It was alleviated only by emergency airlifts of rice, sugar, biscuits, cooking oil, flour and milk a week before Merdeka.
The new land-river supply route has eased things. But the travails of transport still push up prices drastically. According to Sang, a bag of cement costs RM17 in Lawas, RM40 in Ba Kelalan and a whopping RM150 in Bario! Similarly, a kilo of sugar goes for RM3 in Ba Kelalan and RM5 in Bario.
Need a new pick-up truck for Christmas? Vehicles used to be flown into Bario on a boxy cargo plane, aptly called a Skyvan, at RM6,000 per pop! The service had been stopped since the 30-sen petrol price hike, said eco-tourism operator Douglas Munney.
And how does anyone from the outside world call home if their flight is cancelled? Bario and Ba Kelalan have five public telephones (radio-operated) between them.
“We asked Telekom to reconfigure the phones so that people can call in,” said Sang. “When it rings, hopefully somebody is nearby and picks up. Then he has to walk to whoever’s house to convey the message.”
Dari mana?
Everywhere I went, people stopped to talk, starting with the question “Dari mana?” (Where are you from?)
“That’s the way it is here. From ‘Dari mana’, next thing you know, there is an invitation for tea, and then to come over for Christmas,” explained Neal Nirmal, our trip organiser from Taiping, Perak, who used to stay for weeks in Ba Kelalan in the early 1990s.
At Pa Ukat, housewife Rina Rahayu, mother of two young children, was weaving a mat from kabar pandan leaves which she had cut from the jungle and painstakingly removed the thorns stalk by stalk.
After interviewing her and taking many pictures, I thought it would be nice to contribute RM10 as a small Christmas ang pow to her family. Later, as my 4WD was about to leave, she suddenly presented me with the mat that she had been working on for the past two days.
“Christmas present,” she smiled, leaving me flabbergasted by her generosity.
Celebrating Natal
“Christmas is very good here,” attested Martha. “The Holy Spirit ministers to people and the people are touched. I really feel the sense of joy here.”
And it is very, very community oriented. Said Jaman Riboh, an eco-tour guide operator in Bario:
“People always look forward to come home for the celebration. They will pack gifts and Christmas goodies for relatives in the villages.”
“In churches, candles are placed in a small bamboo knot on the Christmas tree. They are lit when the congregation sings Silent Night. That’s the highlight of the service. After church, people will visit friends and relatives until late in the night.”
Bario Penghulu Henry Jala Temalai, 74, is expecting his son Idris Jala (Malaysia Airlines managing director) and other children from Australia and Kuching to make it home for Christmas.
But for Mubulun Selutan, 78, of Pa Ukat, none of his seven children in various towns are returning home this year. Instead, he will go to Miri, where four of his children are.
In Ba Kelalan, the gift-giving would have been in the form of a telematch yesterday. According to Rungu Aris, wife of the local village chief, the telematch would have offered gifts sponsored by those who are working in town, while old and young had fun gunnysack racing and running with eggs in spoons.
I had the opportunity to attend a pra-Natal or pre-Christmas service at Bario’s central church on Dec 17. Here, there was none of the traditional sape (a stringed instrument) and hornbill dances often shown to tourists but electric guitars and keyboards, lots of clapping and raised hands plus exuberant singing much like a modern, urban charismatic church.
And the sermon was titled Apa yang kamu akan buat selapas Natal? (What will you do after Christmas?) with a call to spread Amanat Agung, or the Great Message. Different choirs – from the kaum ibu, bapa dan belia (mothers, fathers and youths) performed. Silent Night was sung in Kelabit, while prayers – to bless the fellowship, the music and to bind the evil spirits – were in Malay.
Above the stage, a huge banner declared: Roh Kudus Penolongku - The Holy Spirit, My Helper.
I could not understand the words of many of the songs but somehow there was a certain energy in the air and I could not stop crying. As a Theravadan Buddhist who is open to the goodness in all religions, I believe something sacred was working on me that day.
Here's wishing Christians Do' Aco Krismas and everybody Do'Umak Lak Meberuh, which is Lunbawang for Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Last of the Megaliths
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/82/last_of_the_megaliths.html
Last of the Megaliths
Within living memory, the Kelabit people of Borneo erected mysterious megaliths to commemorate hallowed ancestors, but modernity, Christianity and illegal logging have swept much of their culture away. Mike Jay headed into the jungle to try to find one long-lost megalith before the logging companies arrived…
Text: Mike Jay / Images: Mike Jay November 2006
In the jungle highlands of Borneo, close to the modern border between the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan, the Kelabit people have always lived remote from the rest of the world. Their isolated plateau is high above the headwaters of the river system which is home to the rest of Sarawak’s indigenous people, and accessible only by several days’ trek through hazardous mountain passes. Their natural resources – particularly the succulent rice for which they remain famous, and the iodine-rich salt wells scattered across the plateau – made them comfortably self-sufficient. The first they knew of the modern world was in 1944, when a US Liberator bomber roared low over their plateau, and a gung-ho British anthropologist named Tom Harrisson descended by parachute into a world of hanging mist and thick, boggy sedge.
Harrisson was on a top-secret mission of his own devising, which had taken months to sell to his superiors. His plan was to infiltrate the hill tribes of the Borneo highlands and co-opt them into the Allied resistance against the Japanese, who had seized control of the Sarawak coast. But he had also landed in an anthropologist’s paradise, a pristine culture whose intricate web of myth, ritual and belief stretched back unbroken to antiquity.
Like the better-known tribes in the rivers below, the Kelabits lived communally in longhouses built on stilts; they kept the bones of their ancestors in ancient ceramic jars that expressed their family’s status and identity; their young men would periodically hunt the heads of neighbouring tribes as trophies to win potential brides. But one aspect of their culture was conspicuous and unique: they erected megaliths. Their plateau was studded with artfully arranged standing stones, huge boulders carved with cryptic symbols, and ceremonial trenches dug across river valleys in commemoration of their ancestors. The Kelabits’ was a culture without writing but, like the tattoos across their bodies, each of these transformations of the landscape told a story. Through them the living kept company with the dead, as they went about their daily business through a land etched with their memories.
This was a practice from time immemorial, but it would only survive Harrisson’s visit by a couple of years. His mission brought the Kelabits into close contact with their previously distant neighbours, with whom they cooperated in disrupting Japanese troops and supply lines. It also introduced them to modernity, as represented by shoes, parachute cloth and – their particular favourite – sub-machine guns. With the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, the rest of the modern world arrived in the form of traders and missionaries, and the Kelabits’ traditional animist beliefs were rapidly supplanted by Anglican Christianity (see ‘Kelabit Christianity’).
Over the intervening 60 years, the megaliths have been largely forgotten, swallowed up by the jungle that claims all untended ground in a matter of weeks and by a Christian faith that regards the animist past as a ‘time of darkness’. But there are still members of the older generation who grew up during this time, and who have vivid recollections of the ceremonial and ritual world that the megaliths represent – and at least one who has very clear memories of participating in a megalith-building ceremony himself. Over a series of evenings in Pa Umor longhouse, its communal hall dimly firelit by the dozens of family hearths along its length, the village head man, Tama Pasang, is glad to tell his story.
Tama Pasang was aged somewhere between 15 and 20 when his father died; although the modern calendar was not yet in use among the Kelabits, the date must have been 1945, as his father died a couple of months after the end of the war and his megalith was one of the last to be erected in the traditional manner. The ceremony took place as part of an irau, the elaborate funeral feast held to commemorate his father’s death.
The irau was a central plank of pre-Christian Kelabit life, to which a network of extended families and in-laws would be invited from longhouses all across the plateau. It was one of the few occasions on which the wider Kelabit community would mingle, and the best chance for young men and women to meet potential marriage partners from far-flung villages. In-laws would be reunited, grievances aired and settled, gifts exchanged and the wheels of Kelabit society oiled. The host family would spend weeks preparing for the festivities, and the lavishness of the feast they supplied would reflect and determine their social status: it would include rice, buffalo and, crucially, borak, a freshly fermented rice wine prohibited by the Christian missionaries but still recalled with lip-smacking fondness by the older generation. The irau would last for several days and sleepless nights of prodigious eating and intoxication, borak topped up after every sip and rice flung at all the guests to symbolise abundance and conspicuous consumption. And sometimes, though by no means always, at some point in the proceedings a megalith expedition would be proposed.
Stone was, and remains, a magically charged substance for the Kelabits. Their plateau is alluvial, composed of mud and silt, and stones are rarely found except in the beds of rivers, where they are carried down from the mountains above. There are isolated boulders scattered across the plain, their locations well known and notoriously spirit-haunted. Many of these boulders have been carved with symbols whose meanings are now forgotten, but are believed to commemorate the dead of distant and forgotten times. Some feature stylised faces, often with a series of lines beneath them (according to some, the number of heads taken by the ancestor during his lifetime); others depict totem animals such as hornbills. Because these boulders are so conspicuous and so rare, they may have been claimed by powerful ‘big men’ or chiefs for their own funeral ceremonies while they were still alive. By the same token, any unmarked stone lying in the jungle, even far distant from human habitation, would have been noticed by many people over the years, and might be remembered around the time of an irau to commemorate a great chief.
When Tama Pasang’s father died, his family gathered together to choose the date for his irau. Once they had done so, they summoned a renowned spirit-caller, who mediated with the dead, from a longhouse some distance away. To determine whether the date was propitious, the spirit-caller in turn summoned an eagle, which flew high in the right direction: if it had flown low, or in an inauspicious direction, the date would have needed to be changed. Now, the long preparation began: Tama Pasang’s sister recalls pounding rice for weeks on end, enough to feed 200 people for the six days of the irau.
During these preparations, the family conceived the idea of erecting a megalith to commemorate their father, and recalled a suitable stone that had been seen in a far distant place many years before. Once the guests had arrived from villages far to the north and south, and the borak was flowing freely, the family proposed the idea of a megalith; the guests acknowledged the dead man’s right to such a monument and accepted the challenge. A group of men, including the young Tama Pasang, made the trek into the deep forest to find the stone. Lifting and carrying it was heavy work in the dripping heat: it took eight men at a time to support it between two poles carried on their shoulders, and even so they could only take the strain for a short distance. They hauled it in shifts, keeping their energy up with singing, and with more borak.
When the men struggled back to the longhouse with the megalith, they set it on end in a spot that had been agreed: on the trail between the old longhouse that had been recently abandoned and the new one, a trail the dead man had walked thousands of times and one where the stone would be passed by and remembered. The men rejoined the irau, and the party continued for several more days. When they left, each of the guests was given a bag of rice, a carved bamboo tube full of salt, and a specially made parang knife.
Return of the Megaliths
The site of Tama Pasang’s megalith may have been conspicuous in 1945, but today it is in a remote part of the forest only occasionally visited by hunters, the old trail crawling with leeches and overgrown with razor-sharp rattan cane. It leads past another striking funeral monument: a ditch, waist-deep, that runs across a dark, forested valley for several hundred yards. Tama Pasang and his wife both recall the digging of ditches like this, usually a full day’s work for the entire longhouse. Sometimes the landscape was altered in other ways, for example by straightening a swampy oxbow bend in a river. Such projects had no practical use: they were ceremonial and æsthetic, designed to be forever associated with the ancestor they honoured.
The trail leads on, over rivers spanned by fallen trunks and past the rotting remains of the old longhouse, the jutting remnants of its timbers blanketed in creepers and orchids. An hour or two further is a megalith of distinctive shape: a saddle-shaped stone perched on blocks in the form of a seat, and set in a jungle clearing beneath tall trees. The story behind this one is still remembered – it was erected a few years before Tama Pasang’s, by a neighbouring family. To this day, though, no one would tempt fate by sitting on it.
Beyond this point, the last hunter’s trail peters out, and the jungle falls silent, dank and gloomy. The ground becomes a morass of rotting tree-trunks and mud, criss-crossed by the prints of sambar, mouse deer and wild boar, and with ants’ nests dug open by bears. We find ourselves moving in circles, crossing our own path, scrambling up and down slopes that may be the eroded banks of forgotten ceremonial ditches. Eventually we stumble on Tama Pasang’s megalith. It stands exactly as he had recalled it, in a dip between two hillocks, a mute but eloquent confirmation of a story that will soon outlive its last human witnesses. Now, though, it also has a practical dimension, serving as a signpost back to the faint remnants of the old trail.
It has been a decade at least since anyone visited Tama Pasang’s megalith, but its rediscovery may be of more than sentimental value. The deep jungle in which it lies is now under threat: marked on government and logging companies’ maps, and targeted for ‘development’. The logging interests that have worked their way through much of Sarawak’s primary forest are moving ever closer towards the Kelabit highlands, which are not only rich in primary forest hardwoods but offer access to the lucrative illegal logging just across the Indonesian border in Kalimantan.
It seems that the Kelabits’ best legal defence against this incursion may lie in the megaliths and funerary earthworks with which they adorned their landscape over so many centuries. The destruction of religious sites is prohibited under Malaysian law; as more megaliths are remembered and unearthed, they may form a defensive ring around the plateau that will protect the Kelabits’ homeland from environmental destruction. These exuberantly strange structures, whose language is becoming tantalisingly lost to the past, may turn out to protect those who built them in ways they could never have foreseen.
Last of the Megaliths
Within living memory, the Kelabit people of Borneo erected mysterious megaliths to commemorate hallowed ancestors, but modernity, Christianity and illegal logging have swept much of their culture away. Mike Jay headed into the jungle to try to find one long-lost megalith before the logging companies arrived…
Text: Mike Jay / Images: Mike Jay November 2006
In the jungle highlands of Borneo, close to the modern border between the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan, the Kelabit people have always lived remote from the rest of the world. Their isolated plateau is high above the headwaters of the river system which is home to the rest of Sarawak’s indigenous people, and accessible only by several days’ trek through hazardous mountain passes. Their natural resources – particularly the succulent rice for which they remain famous, and the iodine-rich salt wells scattered across the plateau – made them comfortably self-sufficient. The first they knew of the modern world was in 1944, when a US Liberator bomber roared low over their plateau, and a gung-ho British anthropologist named Tom Harrisson descended by parachute into a world of hanging mist and thick, boggy sedge.
Harrisson was on a top-secret mission of his own devising, which had taken months to sell to his superiors. His plan was to infiltrate the hill tribes of the Borneo highlands and co-opt them into the Allied resistance against the Japanese, who had seized control of the Sarawak coast. But he had also landed in an anthropologist’s paradise, a pristine culture whose intricate web of myth, ritual and belief stretched back unbroken to antiquity.
Like the better-known tribes in the rivers below, the Kelabits lived communally in longhouses built on stilts; they kept the bones of their ancestors in ancient ceramic jars that expressed their family’s status and identity; their young men would periodically hunt the heads of neighbouring tribes as trophies to win potential brides. But one aspect of their culture was conspicuous and unique: they erected megaliths. Their plateau was studded with artfully arranged standing stones, huge boulders carved with cryptic symbols, and ceremonial trenches dug across river valleys in commemoration of their ancestors. The Kelabits’ was a culture without writing but, like the tattoos across their bodies, each of these transformations of the landscape told a story. Through them the living kept company with the dead, as they went about their daily business through a land etched with their memories.
This was a practice from time immemorial, but it would only survive Harrisson’s visit by a couple of years. His mission brought the Kelabits into close contact with their previously distant neighbours, with whom they cooperated in disrupting Japanese troops and supply lines. It also introduced them to modernity, as represented by shoes, parachute cloth and – their particular favourite – sub-machine guns. With the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, the rest of the modern world arrived in the form of traders and missionaries, and the Kelabits’ traditional animist beliefs were rapidly supplanted by Anglican Christianity (see ‘Kelabit Christianity’).
Over the intervening 60 years, the megaliths have been largely forgotten, swallowed up by the jungle that claims all untended ground in a matter of weeks and by a Christian faith that regards the animist past as a ‘time of darkness’. But there are still members of the older generation who grew up during this time, and who have vivid recollections of the ceremonial and ritual world that the megaliths represent – and at least one who has very clear memories of participating in a megalith-building ceremony himself. Over a series of evenings in Pa Umor longhouse, its communal hall dimly firelit by the dozens of family hearths along its length, the village head man, Tama Pasang, is glad to tell his story.
Tama Pasang was aged somewhere between 15 and 20 when his father died; although the modern calendar was not yet in use among the Kelabits, the date must have been 1945, as his father died a couple of months after the end of the war and his megalith was one of the last to be erected in the traditional manner. The ceremony took place as part of an irau, the elaborate funeral feast held to commemorate his father’s death.
The irau was a central plank of pre-Christian Kelabit life, to which a network of extended families and in-laws would be invited from longhouses all across the plateau. It was one of the few occasions on which the wider Kelabit community would mingle, and the best chance for young men and women to meet potential marriage partners from far-flung villages. In-laws would be reunited, grievances aired and settled, gifts exchanged and the wheels of Kelabit society oiled. The host family would spend weeks preparing for the festivities, and the lavishness of the feast they supplied would reflect and determine their social status: it would include rice, buffalo and, crucially, borak, a freshly fermented rice wine prohibited by the Christian missionaries but still recalled with lip-smacking fondness by the older generation. The irau would last for several days and sleepless nights of prodigious eating and intoxication, borak topped up after every sip and rice flung at all the guests to symbolise abundance and conspicuous consumption. And sometimes, though by no means always, at some point in the proceedings a megalith expedition would be proposed.
Stone was, and remains, a magically charged substance for the Kelabits. Their plateau is alluvial, composed of mud and silt, and stones are rarely found except in the beds of rivers, where they are carried down from the mountains above. There are isolated boulders scattered across the plain, their locations well known and notoriously spirit-haunted. Many of these boulders have been carved with symbols whose meanings are now forgotten, but are believed to commemorate the dead of distant and forgotten times. Some feature stylised faces, often with a series of lines beneath them (according to some, the number of heads taken by the ancestor during his lifetime); others depict totem animals such as hornbills. Because these boulders are so conspicuous and so rare, they may have been claimed by powerful ‘big men’ or chiefs for their own funeral ceremonies while they were still alive. By the same token, any unmarked stone lying in the jungle, even far distant from human habitation, would have been noticed by many people over the years, and might be remembered around the time of an irau to commemorate a great chief.
When Tama Pasang’s father died, his family gathered together to choose the date for his irau. Once they had done so, they summoned a renowned spirit-caller, who mediated with the dead, from a longhouse some distance away. To determine whether the date was propitious, the spirit-caller in turn summoned an eagle, which flew high in the right direction: if it had flown low, or in an inauspicious direction, the date would have needed to be changed. Now, the long preparation began: Tama Pasang’s sister recalls pounding rice for weeks on end, enough to feed 200 people for the six days of the irau.
During these preparations, the family conceived the idea of erecting a megalith to commemorate their father, and recalled a suitable stone that had been seen in a far distant place many years before. Once the guests had arrived from villages far to the north and south, and the borak was flowing freely, the family proposed the idea of a megalith; the guests acknowledged the dead man’s right to such a monument and accepted the challenge. A group of men, including the young Tama Pasang, made the trek into the deep forest to find the stone. Lifting and carrying it was heavy work in the dripping heat: it took eight men at a time to support it between two poles carried on their shoulders, and even so they could only take the strain for a short distance. They hauled it in shifts, keeping their energy up with singing, and with more borak.
When the men struggled back to the longhouse with the megalith, they set it on end in a spot that had been agreed: on the trail between the old longhouse that had been recently abandoned and the new one, a trail the dead man had walked thousands of times and one where the stone would be passed by and remembered. The men rejoined the irau, and the party continued for several more days. When they left, each of the guests was given a bag of rice, a carved bamboo tube full of salt, and a specially made parang knife.
Return of the Megaliths
The site of Tama Pasang’s megalith may have been conspicuous in 1945, but today it is in a remote part of the forest only occasionally visited by hunters, the old trail crawling with leeches and overgrown with razor-sharp rattan cane. It leads past another striking funeral monument: a ditch, waist-deep, that runs across a dark, forested valley for several hundred yards. Tama Pasang and his wife both recall the digging of ditches like this, usually a full day’s work for the entire longhouse. Sometimes the landscape was altered in other ways, for example by straightening a swampy oxbow bend in a river. Such projects had no practical use: they were ceremonial and æsthetic, designed to be forever associated with the ancestor they honoured.
The trail leads on, over rivers spanned by fallen trunks and past the rotting remains of the old longhouse, the jutting remnants of its timbers blanketed in creepers and orchids. An hour or two further is a megalith of distinctive shape: a saddle-shaped stone perched on blocks in the form of a seat, and set in a jungle clearing beneath tall trees. The story behind this one is still remembered – it was erected a few years before Tama Pasang’s, by a neighbouring family. To this day, though, no one would tempt fate by sitting on it.
Beyond this point, the last hunter’s trail peters out, and the jungle falls silent, dank and gloomy. The ground becomes a morass of rotting tree-trunks and mud, criss-crossed by the prints of sambar, mouse deer and wild boar, and with ants’ nests dug open by bears. We find ourselves moving in circles, crossing our own path, scrambling up and down slopes that may be the eroded banks of forgotten ceremonial ditches. Eventually we stumble on Tama Pasang’s megalith. It stands exactly as he had recalled it, in a dip between two hillocks, a mute but eloquent confirmation of a story that will soon outlive its last human witnesses. Now, though, it also has a practical dimension, serving as a signpost back to the faint remnants of the old trail.
It has been a decade at least since anyone visited Tama Pasang’s megalith, but its rediscovery may be of more than sentimental value. The deep jungle in which it lies is now under threat: marked on government and logging companies’ maps, and targeted for ‘development’. The logging interests that have worked their way through much of Sarawak’s primary forest are moving ever closer towards the Kelabit highlands, which are not only rich in primary forest hardwoods but offer access to the lucrative illegal logging just across the Indonesian border in Kalimantan.
It seems that the Kelabits’ best legal defence against this incursion may lie in the megaliths and funerary earthworks with which they adorned their landscape over so many centuries. The destruction of religious sites is prohibited under Malaysian law; as more megaliths are remembered and unearthed, they may form a defensive ring around the plateau that will protect the Kelabits’ homeland from environmental destruction. These exuberantly strange structures, whose language is becoming tantalisingly lost to the past, may turn out to protect those who built them in ways they could never have foreseen.
Monday, November 6, 2006
The sacred stones of Borneo
http://mikejay.net/articles/the-sacred-stones-of-borneo/
THE SACRED STONES OF BORNEO
© Mike Jay
In the jungle highlands of Borneo, close to the modern border between the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan, the Kelabit people have always lived remote from the rest of the world. Their isolated plateau is high above the headwaters of the river system which is home to the rest of Sarawak’s indigenous people, and accessible only by several days’ trek through hazardous mountain passes. Their natural resources – particularly the succulent rice for which they remain famous, and the iodine-rich salt wells scattered across the plateau – made them comfortably self-sufficient. The first they knew of the modern world was in 1944, when a US Liberator bomber roared low over their plateau, and a gung-ho British anthropologist named Tom Harrisson descended by parachute into a world of hanging mist and thick, boggy sedge.
Harrisson was on a top secret mission of his own devising, which had taken months to sell to his superiors. His plan was to infiltrate the hill tribes of the Borneo highlands and co-opt them into the Allied resistance against the Japanese who had seized control of the Sarawak coast. But he had also landed in an anthropologist’s paradise, a pristine culture whose intricate web of myth, ritual and belief stretched back unbroken to antiquity.
Like the better-known tribes in the rivers below, the Kelabits lived communally in longhouses, built on stilts; they kept the bones of their ancestors in ancient ceramic jars that expressed their family’s status and identity; their young men would periodically hunt the heads of neighbouring tribes as trophies to win potential brides. But one aspect of their culture was conspicuous and unique: they erected megaliths. Their plateau was studded with artfully arranged standing stones, huge boulders carved with cryptic symbols, and ceremonial trenches dug across river valleys in commemoration of their ancestors. The Kelabits’ was a culture without writing but, like the tattoos across their bodies, each of these transformations of the landscape told a story. Through them the living kept company with the dead, as they went about their daily life through a land etched with their memories.
This was a practice that dated back to time immemorial, but it would only survive Harrisson’s visit by a couple of years. His mission brought the Kelabits into close contact with their previously distant neighbours, with whom they co-operated in disrupting Japanese troop and supply lines. It also introduced them to modernity, represented by shoes, parachute cloth and – their particular favourite – sub-machine guns. With the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, the rest of the modern world arrived in the form of traders and missionaries, and the Kelabits’ traditional animist beliefs were rapidly supplanted by Anglican Christianity.
Over the intervening sixty years, the megaliths have been largely forgotten, swallowed up by the jungle that claims all untended ground in a matter of weeks and by a Christian faith that regards the animist past as a ‘time of darkness’. But there are still members of the older generation who grew up during this time, and who have vivid recollections of the ceremonial and ritual world that the megaliths represent – and at least one who has very clear memories of participating in a megalith-building ceremony himself. Over a series of evenings in Pa Umor longhouse, its communal hall dimly firelit by the dozens of family hearths along its length, the village head man, Tama Pasang, is glad to tell his story.
Tama Pasang was aged somewhere between fifteen and twenty when his father died; although the modern calendar was not yet in use among the Kelabits, the date must have been 1945, as his father died a couple of months after the end of the war and his megalith was one of the last to be erected in the traditional manner. The ceremony took place as part of an irau, the elaborate funeral feast held to commemorate his father’s death.
The irau was a central plank of pre-Christian Kelabit life, to which a network of extended families and in-laws would be invited from longhouses all across the plateau. It was one of the few occasions on which the wider Kelabit community would mingle, and the best chance for young men and girls to meet potential marriage partners from far-flung villages. In-laws would be reunited, grievances would be aired and settled, gifts would be exchanged and the wheels of Kelabit society would be oiled. The host family would spend weeks preparing for the festivities, and the lavishness of the feast they supplied would reflect and determine their social status: it would include rice, buffalo and, crucially, borak, a freshly fermented rice wine prohibited by the Christian missionaries but still recalled with lip-smacking fondness by the older generation. The irau would last for several days and sleepless nights of prodigious eating and intoxication, borak topped up after every sip and rice flung at all the guests to symbolise abundance and conspicuous consumption. And sometimes, though by no means always, at some point in the proceedings a megalith expedition would be proposed.
Stone was, and remains, a magically charged substance for the Kelabits. Their plateau is alluvial, composed of mud and silt, and stones are rarely found except in the beds of rivers, where they are carried down from the mountains above. There are isolated boulders scattered across the plain, their locations well known and notoriously spirit-haunted. Many of these boulders have been carved with symbols whose meanings are now forgotten, but are believed to commemorate the dead of distant and forgotten times. Some feature stylised faces, often with a series of lines beneath them (according to some, the number of heads taken by the ancestor during his lifetime); others depict totem animals such as hornbills. Because these boulders are so conspicuous and so rare, they may have been claimed by powerful ‘big men’ or chiefs for their own funeral ceremonies while they were still alive. By the same token, any unmarked stone lying in the jungle, even far distant from human habitation, would have been noticed by many people over the years, and might be remembered around the time of an irau to commemorate a great chief.
When Tama Pasang’s father died, his family gathered together to choose the date for his irau. Once they had done so, they summoned a renowned spirit-caller, who mediated with the dead, from a longhouse some distance away. To determine whether the date was propitious, the spirit-caller in turn summoned an eagle, which flew high in the right direction: if it had flown low, or in an inauspicious direction, the date would have needed to be changed. Now, the long preparation began: Tama Pasang’s sister recalls pounding rice for weeks on end, enough to feed two hundred people for the six days of the irau.
During these preparations, the family conceived the idea of erecting a megalith to commemorate their father, and recalled a suitable stone that had been seen in a far distant place many years before. Once the guests had arrived from villages far to the north and south, and the borak was flowing freely, the family proposed the idea of a megalith; the guests acknowledged the dead man’s right to such a monument and accepted the challenge. A group of men, including the young Tama Pasang, made the trek into the deep forest to find the stone. Lifting and carrying it was heavy work in the dripping heat: it took eight men at a time to support it between two poles carried on their shoulders, and even so they could only take the strain for a short distance. They hauled it in shifts, keeping their energy up with singing, and with more borak.
When the men struggled back to the longhouse with the megalith, they set it on its end in a spot that had been agreed: on the trail between the old longhouse that had been recently abandoned and the new one, a trail the dead man had walked thousands of times and one where the stone would be passed by and remembered. The men rejoined the irau, and the party continued for several more days. When they left, each of the guests was given a bag of rice, a carved bamboo tube full of salt, and a specially made parang knife.
The site of Tama Pasang’s megalith may have been conspicuous in 1945, but today it is in a remote part of the forest only occasionally visited by hunters, the old trail crawling with leeches and overgrown with razor-sharp rattan cane. It leads past another striking funeral monument: a ditch, waist-deep, that runs across a dark, forested valley for several hundred yards. Tama Pasang and his wife both recall the digging of ditches like this, usually a full day’s work for the entire longhouse. Sometimes the landscape was altered in other ways, for example by straightening a swampy oxbow bend in a river. Such projects had no practical use: they were ceremonial and aesthetic, designed to be forever associated with the ancestor they honoured.
The trail leads on, over rivers spanned by fallen trunks and past the rotting remains of the old longhouse, the jutting remnants of its timbers blanketed in creepers and orchids. An hour or two further is a megalith of distinctive shape: a saddle-shaped stone perched on blocks in the form of a seat, and set in a jungle clearing beneath tall trees. The story behind this one is still remembered – it was erected a few years before Tama Pasang’s, by a neighbouring family. To this day, though, no-one would tempt fate by sitting on it.
Beyond this point, the last hunter’s trail peters out, and the jungle falls silent, dank and gloomy. The ground becomes a morass of rotting tree-trunks and mud, criss-crossed by the prints of sambal, mouse deer and wild boar, and with ants’ nests dug open by bears. We find ourselves moving in circles, crossing our own path, scrambling up and down slopes that may be the eroded banks of forgotten ceremonial ditches. Eventually we stumble on Tama Pasang’s megalith. It stands exactly as he had recalled it, in a dip between two hillocks, a mute but eloquent confirmation of a story that will soon outlive its last human witnesses. Now, though, it also has a practical dimension, serving us as a signpost back to the faint remnants of the old trail.
It has been a decade at least since anyone visited Tama Pasang’s old megalith, but its rediscovery may be of more than sentimental value. The deep jungle in which it lies is now under threat: marked up on government and logging companies’ maps, and targeted for ‘development’. The logging interests that have worked their way through much of Sarawak’s primary forest are moving ever closer towards the Kelabit highlands, which is not only rich in primary forest hardwoods but offers access to the lucrative illegal logging just across the Indonesian border in Kalimantan.
It seems that the Kelabits’ best legal defence against this incursion may lie in the megaliths and funeral earthworks with which they adorned their landscape over so many centuries. The destruction of religious sites is prohibited under Malaysian law; as more megaliths are remembered and unearthed, they may form a defensive ring around the plateau that will protect the Kelabits’ homeland from environmental destruction. These exuberantly strange structures, whose language is becoming tantalisingly lost to the past, may turn out to protect those who built them in ways they could never have foreseen.
VISITING THE KELABIT HIGHLANDS
The Kelabits are glad to receive visitors and there is currently much interest in rediscovering lost megaliths to boost their campaign against the logging companies. Assistance is welcome, especially with hand-held GPS surveying devices that can be used to log the locations of megaliths accurately.
The Kelabit highlands can only be reached by air, but there are now regular Twin Otter propellor-plane flights to an airstrip at the Kelabit village of Bario from the cities on the Sarawak coast. Several lodges offer cheap and basic accomodation. A recommended guide and host is Jamen Riboh, whose lodge is on the edge of Pa Umor village (gems_lodge@yahoo.com, when the Bario satellite link is functioning). Jamen has excellent English, unbeatable local knowledge, and a keen interest in megaliths, jungle magic and folklore.
More information on the Kelabit people at kelabit.net
Black & white photos by Tom Harrisson, from his book The World Within (1959)
Colour photos by Mike Jay
THE SACRED STONES OF BORNEO
© Mike Jay
In the jungle highlands of Borneo, close to the modern border between the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan, the Kelabit people have always lived remote from the rest of the world. Their isolated plateau is high above the headwaters of the river system which is home to the rest of Sarawak’s indigenous people, and accessible only by several days’ trek through hazardous mountain passes. Their natural resources – particularly the succulent rice for which they remain famous, and the iodine-rich salt wells scattered across the plateau – made them comfortably self-sufficient. The first they knew of the modern world was in 1944, when a US Liberator bomber roared low over their plateau, and a gung-ho British anthropologist named Tom Harrisson descended by parachute into a world of hanging mist and thick, boggy sedge.
Harrisson was on a top secret mission of his own devising, which had taken months to sell to his superiors. His plan was to infiltrate the hill tribes of the Borneo highlands and co-opt them into the Allied resistance against the Japanese who had seized control of the Sarawak coast. But he had also landed in an anthropologist’s paradise, a pristine culture whose intricate web of myth, ritual and belief stretched back unbroken to antiquity.
Like the better-known tribes in the rivers below, the Kelabits lived communally in longhouses, built on stilts; they kept the bones of their ancestors in ancient ceramic jars that expressed their family’s status and identity; their young men would periodically hunt the heads of neighbouring tribes as trophies to win potential brides. But one aspect of their culture was conspicuous and unique: they erected megaliths. Their plateau was studded with artfully arranged standing stones, huge boulders carved with cryptic symbols, and ceremonial trenches dug across river valleys in commemoration of their ancestors. The Kelabits’ was a culture without writing but, like the tattoos across their bodies, each of these transformations of the landscape told a story. Through them the living kept company with the dead, as they went about their daily life through a land etched with their memories.
This was a practice that dated back to time immemorial, but it would only survive Harrisson’s visit by a couple of years. His mission brought the Kelabits into close contact with their previously distant neighbours, with whom they co-operated in disrupting Japanese troop and supply lines. It also introduced them to modernity, represented by shoes, parachute cloth and – their particular favourite – sub-machine guns. With the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, the rest of the modern world arrived in the form of traders and missionaries, and the Kelabits’ traditional animist beliefs were rapidly supplanted by Anglican Christianity.
Over the intervening sixty years, the megaliths have been largely forgotten, swallowed up by the jungle that claims all untended ground in a matter of weeks and by a Christian faith that regards the animist past as a ‘time of darkness’. But there are still members of the older generation who grew up during this time, and who have vivid recollections of the ceremonial and ritual world that the megaliths represent – and at least one who has very clear memories of participating in a megalith-building ceremony himself. Over a series of evenings in Pa Umor longhouse, its communal hall dimly firelit by the dozens of family hearths along its length, the village head man, Tama Pasang, is glad to tell his story.
Tama Pasang was aged somewhere between fifteen and twenty when his father died; although the modern calendar was not yet in use among the Kelabits, the date must have been 1945, as his father died a couple of months after the end of the war and his megalith was one of the last to be erected in the traditional manner. The ceremony took place as part of an irau, the elaborate funeral feast held to commemorate his father’s death.
The irau was a central plank of pre-Christian Kelabit life, to which a network of extended families and in-laws would be invited from longhouses all across the plateau. It was one of the few occasions on which the wider Kelabit community would mingle, and the best chance for young men and girls to meet potential marriage partners from far-flung villages. In-laws would be reunited, grievances would be aired and settled, gifts would be exchanged and the wheels of Kelabit society would be oiled. The host family would spend weeks preparing for the festivities, and the lavishness of the feast they supplied would reflect and determine their social status: it would include rice, buffalo and, crucially, borak, a freshly fermented rice wine prohibited by the Christian missionaries but still recalled with lip-smacking fondness by the older generation. The irau would last for several days and sleepless nights of prodigious eating and intoxication, borak topped up after every sip and rice flung at all the guests to symbolise abundance and conspicuous consumption. And sometimes, though by no means always, at some point in the proceedings a megalith expedition would be proposed.
Stone was, and remains, a magically charged substance for the Kelabits. Their plateau is alluvial, composed of mud and silt, and stones are rarely found except in the beds of rivers, where they are carried down from the mountains above. There are isolated boulders scattered across the plain, their locations well known and notoriously spirit-haunted. Many of these boulders have been carved with symbols whose meanings are now forgotten, but are believed to commemorate the dead of distant and forgotten times. Some feature stylised faces, often with a series of lines beneath them (according to some, the number of heads taken by the ancestor during his lifetime); others depict totem animals such as hornbills. Because these boulders are so conspicuous and so rare, they may have been claimed by powerful ‘big men’ or chiefs for their own funeral ceremonies while they were still alive. By the same token, any unmarked stone lying in the jungle, even far distant from human habitation, would have been noticed by many people over the years, and might be remembered around the time of an irau to commemorate a great chief.
When Tama Pasang’s father died, his family gathered together to choose the date for his irau. Once they had done so, they summoned a renowned spirit-caller, who mediated with the dead, from a longhouse some distance away. To determine whether the date was propitious, the spirit-caller in turn summoned an eagle, which flew high in the right direction: if it had flown low, or in an inauspicious direction, the date would have needed to be changed. Now, the long preparation began: Tama Pasang’s sister recalls pounding rice for weeks on end, enough to feed two hundred people for the six days of the irau.
During these preparations, the family conceived the idea of erecting a megalith to commemorate their father, and recalled a suitable stone that had been seen in a far distant place many years before. Once the guests had arrived from villages far to the north and south, and the borak was flowing freely, the family proposed the idea of a megalith; the guests acknowledged the dead man’s right to such a monument and accepted the challenge. A group of men, including the young Tama Pasang, made the trek into the deep forest to find the stone. Lifting and carrying it was heavy work in the dripping heat: it took eight men at a time to support it between two poles carried on their shoulders, and even so they could only take the strain for a short distance. They hauled it in shifts, keeping their energy up with singing, and with more borak.
When the men struggled back to the longhouse with the megalith, they set it on its end in a spot that had been agreed: on the trail between the old longhouse that had been recently abandoned and the new one, a trail the dead man had walked thousands of times and one where the stone would be passed by and remembered. The men rejoined the irau, and the party continued for several more days. When they left, each of the guests was given a bag of rice, a carved bamboo tube full of salt, and a specially made parang knife.
The site of Tama Pasang’s megalith may have been conspicuous in 1945, but today it is in a remote part of the forest only occasionally visited by hunters, the old trail crawling with leeches and overgrown with razor-sharp rattan cane. It leads past another striking funeral monument: a ditch, waist-deep, that runs across a dark, forested valley for several hundred yards. Tama Pasang and his wife both recall the digging of ditches like this, usually a full day’s work for the entire longhouse. Sometimes the landscape was altered in other ways, for example by straightening a swampy oxbow bend in a river. Such projects had no practical use: they were ceremonial and aesthetic, designed to be forever associated with the ancestor they honoured.
The trail leads on, over rivers spanned by fallen trunks and past the rotting remains of the old longhouse, the jutting remnants of its timbers blanketed in creepers and orchids. An hour or two further is a megalith of distinctive shape: a saddle-shaped stone perched on blocks in the form of a seat, and set in a jungle clearing beneath tall trees. The story behind this one is still remembered – it was erected a few years before Tama Pasang’s, by a neighbouring family. To this day, though, no-one would tempt fate by sitting on it.
Beyond this point, the last hunter’s trail peters out, and the jungle falls silent, dank and gloomy. The ground becomes a morass of rotting tree-trunks and mud, criss-crossed by the prints of sambal, mouse deer and wild boar, and with ants’ nests dug open by bears. We find ourselves moving in circles, crossing our own path, scrambling up and down slopes that may be the eroded banks of forgotten ceremonial ditches. Eventually we stumble on Tama Pasang’s megalith. It stands exactly as he had recalled it, in a dip between two hillocks, a mute but eloquent confirmation of a story that will soon outlive its last human witnesses. Now, though, it also has a practical dimension, serving us as a signpost back to the faint remnants of the old trail.
It has been a decade at least since anyone visited Tama Pasang’s old megalith, but its rediscovery may be of more than sentimental value. The deep jungle in which it lies is now under threat: marked up on government and logging companies’ maps, and targeted for ‘development’. The logging interests that have worked their way through much of Sarawak’s primary forest are moving ever closer towards the Kelabit highlands, which is not only rich in primary forest hardwoods but offers access to the lucrative illegal logging just across the Indonesian border in Kalimantan.
It seems that the Kelabits’ best legal defence against this incursion may lie in the megaliths and funeral earthworks with which they adorned their landscape over so many centuries. The destruction of religious sites is prohibited under Malaysian law; as more megaliths are remembered and unearthed, they may form a defensive ring around the plateau that will protect the Kelabits’ homeland from environmental destruction. These exuberantly strange structures, whose language is becoming tantalisingly lost to the past, may turn out to protect those who built them in ways they could never have foreseen.
VISITING THE KELABIT HIGHLANDS
The Kelabits are glad to receive visitors and there is currently much interest in rediscovering lost megaliths to boost their campaign against the logging companies. Assistance is welcome, especially with hand-held GPS surveying devices that can be used to log the locations of megaliths accurately.
The Kelabit highlands can only be reached by air, but there are now regular Twin Otter propellor-plane flights to an airstrip at the Kelabit village of Bario from the cities on the Sarawak coast. Several lodges offer cheap and basic accomodation. A recommended guide and host is Jamen Riboh, whose lodge is on the edge of Pa Umor village (gems_lodge@yahoo.com, when the Bario satellite link is functioning). Jamen has excellent English, unbeatable local knowledge, and a keen interest in megaliths, jungle magic and folklore.
More information on the Kelabit people at kelabit.net
Black & white photos by Tom Harrisson, from his book The World Within (1959)
Colour photos by Mike Jay
Thursday, March 2, 2006
Land of friendly Kelabits
http://thestaronline.com/news/story.asp?file=/2006/3/2/southneast/13472791&sec=southneast
Thursday March 2, 2006
Land of friendly Kelabits
By Harlina Samson
BARIO, which means “wind” in Kelabit, is a remote plateau in Sarawak's northeast that stands at about 1,150m above sea level. Almost entirely surrounded by densely forested highlands, some rising to as high as 2,400m above sea level including Sarawak's highest peak Mount Murud, the air over Bario is always cool.
The temperature ranges between 16°C and 25°C.
However on some occasions it can dip to as low as 11°C and it is advisable to wear some warm clothing as it can be very “unpleasant” as the evening approaches.
Bario is about 50 minutes by air from Miri or 40 minutes from Marudi.
Malaysia Airlines, via its Rural Air Service, operates nine flights a week to Bario from Miri and Marudi, using the 19-seater Twin Otter aircraft.
Another way to reach this valley of the highlands is a tortuous journey through leech and mosquito infested jungles from Marudi, Bario's closest town or Ba'Kelalan, which is about 60km away.
Bario is about 50 minutes by air from Miri or 40 minutes from Marudi.
The Bario plateau is the home of the highly industrious Kelabits and the source of the highly popular, sweet aroma and high fibre Bario rice apart from the area's “signature” sweet and sugary pineapples.
A brief stay in a longhouse in Pa' Bangar, owned by Mustapha Raja, will give you some insight into a Kelabit family's daily routine.
Mustapha's son Abdul Halim, 30, said despite Bario's remoteness and under development, the Kelabits are happy and contented with the valley's natural beauty and feel that it should not be disturbed.
“It may be a land of hardship as there are no proper roads ... we have an unsurfaced route which is only good enough for light motorised vehicles, enabling the people to reach the schools, shops and airstrip as well as areas as far as Pa' Umor and Pa' Ukat,” he said.
Basic amenities are available in this valley.
There are two schools, a clinic, an immigration office and a police station manned by skeleton staff as well as 12 shops, a wet market and food stalls.
There are three pay phones that can be used during emergencies – one at the airstrip and the other two at a shop and the secondary school. There is also a public phone that can only receive calls.
There is no public transport in Bario, pick-up trucks are used to transport goods while motorcycles are the preferred choice among locals.
Visitors can feel the warmth and friendliness exuding from the Kelabits the moment they land at the Bario airstrip.
The Kelabits are one of the state's 26 ethnic groups.
Some 1,500 of the 6,000 Kelabits in Sarawak are living in Bario.
Those living in Bario are from the older generation, easily recognisable as they bear the traditional Kelabit tattoos, elongated and pierced earlobes as well as heavy brass or hornbill ivory earrings.
The Kelabits live in individual houses or longhouses in 17 villages and most of them plant padi, pineapples, pumpkins, beans and other tropical fruits.
They are also good hunters and fishermen.
Bario's strongpoint, apart from its natural beauty, is the friendliness and hospitality of the Kelabits, making the valley a “must visit” place for tourists in Sarawak.
Thursday March 2, 2006
Land of friendly Kelabits
By Harlina Samson
BARIO, which means “wind” in Kelabit, is a remote plateau in Sarawak's northeast that stands at about 1,150m above sea level. Almost entirely surrounded by densely forested highlands, some rising to as high as 2,400m above sea level including Sarawak's highest peak Mount Murud, the air over Bario is always cool.
The temperature ranges between 16°C and 25°C.
However on some occasions it can dip to as low as 11°C and it is advisable to wear some warm clothing as it can be very “unpleasant” as the evening approaches.
Bario is about 50 minutes by air from Miri or 40 minutes from Marudi.
Malaysia Airlines, via its Rural Air Service, operates nine flights a week to Bario from Miri and Marudi, using the 19-seater Twin Otter aircraft.
Another way to reach this valley of the highlands is a tortuous journey through leech and mosquito infested jungles from Marudi, Bario's closest town or Ba'Kelalan, which is about 60km away.
Bario is about 50 minutes by air from Miri or 40 minutes from Marudi.
The Bario plateau is the home of the highly industrious Kelabits and the source of the highly popular, sweet aroma and high fibre Bario rice apart from the area's “signature” sweet and sugary pineapples.
A brief stay in a longhouse in Pa' Bangar, owned by Mustapha Raja, will give you some insight into a Kelabit family's daily routine.
Mustapha's son Abdul Halim, 30, said despite Bario's remoteness and under development, the Kelabits are happy and contented with the valley's natural beauty and feel that it should not be disturbed.
“It may be a land of hardship as there are no proper roads ... we have an unsurfaced route which is only good enough for light motorised vehicles, enabling the people to reach the schools, shops and airstrip as well as areas as far as Pa' Umor and Pa' Ukat,” he said.
Basic amenities are available in this valley.
There are two schools, a clinic, an immigration office and a police station manned by skeleton staff as well as 12 shops, a wet market and food stalls.
There are three pay phones that can be used during emergencies – one at the airstrip and the other two at a shop and the secondary school. There is also a public phone that can only receive calls.
There is no public transport in Bario, pick-up trucks are used to transport goods while motorcycles are the preferred choice among locals.
Visitors can feel the warmth and friendliness exuding from the Kelabits the moment they land at the Bario airstrip.
The Kelabits are one of the state's 26 ethnic groups.
Some 1,500 of the 6,000 Kelabits in Sarawak are living in Bario.
Those living in Bario are from the older generation, easily recognisable as they bear the traditional Kelabit tattoos, elongated and pierced earlobes as well as heavy brass or hornbill ivory earrings.
The Kelabits live in individual houses or longhouses in 17 villages and most of them plant padi, pineapples, pumpkins, beans and other tropical fruits.
They are also good hunters and fishermen.
Bario's strongpoint, apart from its natural beauty, is the friendliness and hospitality of the Kelabits, making the valley a “must visit” place for tourists in Sarawak.
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