Article

Hunting and trapping

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Hunting and trapping

Hunting and trapping in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo encompassed a range of practices that combined material technology, spiritual ritual, and ecological knowledge, serving both subsistence and economic purposes across diverse communities. The archival record preserved in the Society’s journals reveals that these practices were documented by colonial administrators, ethnographers, and naturalists working in the Straits Settlements, the Malay States, and British North Borneo between the early twentieth century and the mid-1950s. The evidence spans the spiritual dimensions of Malay deer-hunting, the mechanical ingenuity of bird-trapping devices, and the broader ethnographic context of Murut hunting customs in Borneo, together illustrating a subject that resisted simple categorisation as either purely economic or purely cultural in nature.

Spiritual Dimensions of Malay Hunting

The most detailed account of the spiritual apparatus surrounding hunting in the Malay Peninsula appears in a short note by R. N. Bland, who recorded a Malay Elmu Pawang Buru Rusa (deer-hunting invocation) from a pawang (shaman or ritual specialist) in Kuala Pilah, Negri Sembilan, in 1905 [1, p. 19]. Bland presented the text as a comparative supplement to George Maxwell’s account of a Perak deer-hunt published in Blackwood’s Magazine in October 1904, observing that while his own version was less ornate than Maxwell’s, the two shared a “family likeness” in structure and purpose [1, p. 19].

The invocation addressed forest spirits by name—Che’ Lanang, Che’ Redup, Che’ Bendang, Che’ Merah—and established a division of spoils between the pawang and the spirits, a transactional arrangement that positioned the ritual specialist as intermediary between the human hunting party and the supernatural inhabitants of the forest [1, pp. 20–22]. A second section of the text, termed Badi, commanded a spirit to depart and offered atonement for the pawang’s hunting dogs, suggesting that the animals themselves were considered to require spiritual protection or compensation in the context of the hunt [1, pp. 20–22].

Bland drew attention to the confidentiality surrounding such material, noting that his pawang had admitted him to the craft only under a promise of secrecy and a customary payment in cloth, knife, coconuts, and wang bharu (new money) [1, p. 19]. This detail is significant: it indicates that the transmission of hunting invocations was governed by social protocols of reciprocity and exclusivity, and that the knowledge was not freely available to outsiders. The fact that Bland was able to record the text at all suggests a degree of accommodation between colonial administrative curiosity and indigenous epistemological boundaries.

Trapping Technology and Terminology

The mechanical and terminological dimensions of hunting and trapping are documented in a concise note by C. A. Gibson-Hill, who described the jerat tempurong, a Malay ground trap for catching ground-feeding birds, observed in use by Chinese settlers on Pulau Tioman in September 1954 [2, p. 172]. The device consisted of a half coconut shell sunk into the ground as a bait receptacle, with short nooses of nylon fishing gut laid radially around it and anchored by a wooden peg [2, p. 172]. Gibson-Hill identified the arrangement as the jerat tempurong and noted that it had not previously been described in the literature, including Winstedt’s Malay Industries (1911), indicating that the device was either a recent innovation or had simply escaped earlier documentation [2, p. 172].

Gibson-Hill clarified an important terminological distinction within the Malay trapping vocabulary: jerat referred to nooses laid on the ground, whereas rachek denoted nooses suspended from pegs; the addition of the term denak indicated that a tethered decoy bird was employed in conjunction with the trap [2, p. 173]. This precision in nomenclature reflects a broader ethnographic concern with distinguishing between technically distinct devices that might otherwise be conflated under a single generic label.

The note also records a 1941 collection of galliformes and pittas in north Kedah by a collector working for Colonel Meinertzhagen and the British Museum of Natural History, whose records were lost in the war [2, p. 173]. This brief mention situates the trapping practice within a wider context of ornithological collection in the region, where local trapping knowledge was harnessed for the purposes of scientific specimen-gathering, and where the disruption of war could erase the documentary trail linking a particular technique to its ecological and geographic context.

Murut Hunting Customs in Borneo

The Bornean dimension of hunting and trapping is represented in the Society’s literature by an article by G. C. Woolley, who documented aspects of Murut hunting customs drawing on his experience as a colonial administrator in British North Borneo [3]. Woolley’s contribution, published in 1936, spans seven pages and falls within the journal’s regular ethnographic and anthropological contributions of the period [3]. The piece is consistent with Woolley’s broader body of work on Murut social life, which he produced during his service in the North Borneo Chartered Company administration [3].

The specific ethnographic details of Murut hunting practices as recorded by Woolley are not reproduced in the archival summary available here, but the article’s existence and its placement within the journal’s ethnographic series confirm that Murut hunting was considered a subject of sufficient anthropological interest to warrant a dedicated contribution. Woolley’s position as an administrator rather than a specialist anthropologist is itself noteworthy: it reflects the common pattern in colonial-era ethnography, in which officials with sustained contact with local populations produced the primary descriptive records, often without the methodological apparatus that a professional anthropologist might have employed.

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on hunting and trapping reveals a subject that was approached from multiple disciplinary angles over a period of roughly fifty years, with no single comprehensive treatment emerging. Bland’s 1905 note represents the earliest contribution and is distinctive in its focus on the spiritual and ritual dimension of hunting, treating the invocation as a text worthy of philological attention and comparative analysis. The note is brief—four pages—and its value lies in the rarity of the material rather than in systematic analysis; Bland’s primary concern was to preserve a text that might otherwise have remained confined to the oral and confidential domain of the pawang.

Gibson-Hill’s 1955 note shifts the emphasis entirely to material technology and terminology, and is characterised by the precision of a naturalist rather than the interpretive ambition of a cultural historian. The observation of the jerat tempurong on Pulau Tioman, and the clarification of the jerat–rachek–denak distinction, represent the kind of small but cumulative contributions that built up the technical vocabulary of Malay trapping over time. The absence of the device from Winstedt’s 1911 Malay Industries raises the question of whether the trap was a post-war innovation incorporating nylon fishing gut—a material that would not have been available in 1911—or whether it simply went unrecorded. Gibson-Hill does not resolve this ambiguity.

Woolley’s 1936 article on Murut hunting customs occupies a middle position between the two: it is ethnographic in orientation and longer in scope, but the archival summary available does not permit assessment of its specific content or analytical depth. The three contributions together illustrate a pattern in which hunting and trapping was treated as a subsidiary topic within broader studies of Malay or Bornean culture, rather than as a subject warranting sustained, dedicated investigation. No comparative study linking the Malay, Murut, and Chinese trapping and hunting practices documented in these sources appears in the record, and no discussion of the ecological impact of these practices on local fauna is attested. The literature remains, in this respect, a collection of discrete observations rather than a coherent body of scholarship.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R.N. Bland (1905). Hunting invocations JSBRAS 42: 19–22.
  2. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1955). Jerat tempurong JMBRAS 28(1): 172–173. Read on JSTOR
  3. G.C. Woolley (1936). Some Murut hunting customs JMBRAS 14(3): 307–313. Read on JSTOR