A large mias in Singapore
Ivor H. N. Evans, a British ethnographer with decades of fieldwork experience in Borneo, published this concise note in 1951 documenting ancient shell beads in use among the Dusun people of North Borneo’s Tempasuk (Kota Belud) district. Drawing on observations spanning from 1910 to the late 1940s, Evans examines the physical characteristics, trade history, nomenclature, and mythological origins of these beads, arguing for their considerable antiquity and their significance as a form of currency and prestige object within Dusun material culture.
Summary
The article opens with a brief coda to a preceding discussion of house horns as protective or fertility talismans, before turning to its principal subject. Evans reports that he first encountered the shell beads during fieldwork in 1910–1911, when a modest trade existed: Dusun owners sold them to Chinese shopkeepers at Kota Belud, who in turn sold them to Iban traders from Sarawak seeking such antiquities. By the late 1940s, export had made the beads rarer and more expensive, and the Iban trade had ceased. Evans situates the beads within a broader Dusun economy in which goods—brassware, gongs, cattle, land—retained currency value alongside cash, and notes that bride-price and fine payments remained formally denominated in goods.
The core of the article is an ethnographic and linguistic analysis. Evans describes the beads physically (small polished cylinders, approximately 5 mm in diameter, bored from both ends with expanded holes, sometimes stained with indigo from contact with woven cloth) and confirms their molluscan shell composition through a microscopic section examined at the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, Cambridge. He then undertakes a detailed etymological investigation of the Dusun names for the beads—kinokogis at Kadamaian and kokogis elsewhere—linking them to words for sand (ogis/togis) and clam (kokogis), and arguing that the compound kinokogis most plausibly means “something derived from the sand” in past time. This linguistic analysis is reinforced by a creation legend, transmitted through three generations of a Dusun family, in which the deity Kinorohingan scatters sand from the sky during a rundukan seance and the beads fall from the women’s loosened hair.
Evans also distinguishes these ancient beads from more recent shell objects in Dusun use—bracelets made by Bajau men from Tridacna or Trochus niloticus shells, toggles on knife cords, and rings on rattan girdles—emphasizing that the Dusuns themselves were unaware that the old beads were made of shell, a fact that underscores their great age relative to the community’s living memory.
Key Findings
- The beads are small short cylinders approximately 5 mm in diameter, bored from both sides with holes expanded at the entrances, and often highly polished from long use (p. 169).
- In 1910, the price at Kota Belud was one dollar (local currency) for two loops, measured over the fork of the thumb to the elbow (p. 169).
- Molluscan shell composition was confirmed by microscopic examination of a bead section at the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, Cambridge (p. 170).
- The beads are found exclusively among the Dusuns of the interior and are absent from the coastal Bajau and Illanun populations, who are described as comparatively recent arrivals (p. 169).
- A related bead type, minorok-worok (black with white spots), is attributed a celestial origin from water rather than sand and is believed to protect a house against fire (p. 171).
- Tridacna shell bracelets, of recent Bajau manufacture, could be purchased for about $1 each before the Japanese occupation, while large Trochus bracelets commanded higher prices due to the difficulty of obtaining sufficiently large shells (p. 171).
Conclusion
Evans presents the shell beads as a material culture object of considerable antiquity whose continued use among the Dusuns—without the community’s awareness of their shell composition—testifies to a deep temporal layer of exchange and prestige that predates the arrival of the coastal Malayan populations. The convergence of linguistic evidence, the creation legend, and the physical properties of the beads together support the interpretation that they are among the oldest manufactured objects still in active circulation in the region.
Context
- The article is grounded in Evans’s personal fieldwork spanning 1910 to 1949, supplemented by laboratory analysis at Cambridge; it represents a classic example of early mid-twentieth-century British ethnographic reporting in Borneo, combining direct observation, informant testimony, and material analysis.
- The note contributes to the historiography of pre-colonial exchange networks in North Borneo by documenting a trade route (Dusun interior → Chinese intermediaries → Iban traders of Sarawak) and by providing one of the earliest physical descriptions and scientific identification of the beads.