Chapter 11 Insular Southeast Asia 417The people of Sarawak, and the dominant population of Borneo, are the
Dayak, a term that now refers to all non-Muslim indigenous groups (Postill
2006). However, over a mere two centuries, the terminology and the group(s)
indicated by it have undergone confusing shifts. In Raja James Brooke’s time, a
distinction was made between Land Dayaks, who were timid, peaceful hill farm-
ers, and Sea Dayaks, who were headhunters and pirates. More recently the Land
Dayaks were known as Bidayuh and the former Sea Dayaks were known as
Iban, a label popularized by Hose and reinforced by anthropologist Derek Free-
man in the 1950s. The people themselves opted for “Dayak” in an effort to build
political unity among all Sarawak peoples against Malays and Chinese at a time
when Malaya was seeking independence from Britain (and then became Malay-
sia after Singapore seceded). This brief history should illustrate the difficulties of
identifying discrete “ethnic groups,” much less “races” in this part of the world.
However, despite the tremendous diversity linguistically and ethnically,
there are certain cultural commonalities across much of Borneo. These include
residence in distinctive longhouses, bilateral kinship, and a history of head-
hunting. Here is Derek Freeman on Iban (Dayak) longhouses:
Anyone who has travelled in the interior of Borneo is familiar with the con-
spicuous shape of a long-house: an attenuated structure supported on innu-
merable hard-wood posts, it stretches for a hundred yards or more along the
terraced bank of a river, its roof—of thatch, or wooden shingles—forming
an unbroken expanse. Superficially viewed the Iban long-house has the
appearance of being a single structural unit, and many casual observers
have made the facile inference that the long-house is therefore the outcome
of some sort of communal or group organization and ownership... but the
Iban long-house is primarily an aggregation of independently owned family
apartments.... Indeed the unbroken expanse of roof tends to conceal the
fact that the Iban long-house is fundamentally a series of discrete entities—
the independent family units of a competitive and egalitarian society. (Free-
man 1992:1)
These longhouses and their populations could be enormous. There were
longhouses with 40, 50, or 60 “doors” (i.e., apartments), and one was known
to be half a mile in length with 100 doors (Metcalf 2010). These were essen-
tially villages; apart from temporary huts out in the fields, no one lived in pri-
vate single-family dwellings. The long verandah along the river side of the
longhouse was a boulevard for sociable interaction; at night “the line of lan-
terns, twinkling off into the distance, gave the house the feeling... of being
enchanted” (Metcalf 2010:41). Voices could always be heard above the parti-
tions; little was private. If a door was closed, the next person to come along
would open it, perhaps to ask why it had been closed in the first place. Strang-
ers coming upriver or downriver could count on hospitality, with trays of
food—fish, game, and mountains of rice—being offered.
Of course there were practical reasons for the extravagant work of building
these enormous longhouses. They were fortresses in times of warfare, which