Article

Kelabits

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Kelabits

The Kelabits are an agricultural people inhabiting the large central tableland of Borneo, from which spring the Baram, Tutau, Limbang, Trusan and Padas Rivers on the west coast and the Bahau River on the east coast [1, p. 49]. They are scientifically of the Indonesian race and are closely related to the people known as Muruts in the Trusan and Padas Districts [1, p. 49]. At the time of the earliest European administrative contact in the early twentieth century, the Kelabits had only recently acknowledged allegiance to the Sarawak Government and were regarded by colonial observers as among the most isolated communities in the interior [1, p. 49]. Their settlement on a comparatively flat highland plateau, their practice of irrigation farming, and the presence of prehistoric megalithic remains on the Southern Kelabit Plateau together mark them as a people of considerable antiquity and distinctive cultural character within the broader Bornean landscape [1, p. 49], [2, p. 105].

Settlement, Agriculture and Physical Characteristics

The Kelabits are an agricultural people who farm by irrigation, a practice that distinguishes them from most other Bornean groups and enables them to obtain two crops of paddy in the year [1, p. 49]. Their settlements are situated on the central tableland, a region of considerable elevation; the ascent of Bukit Sigerun Sigop, which forms part of the Mulu Range bordering the plateau, reaches an altitude of at least 5,000 feet, and the view from its summit reveals the Kelabit country spread out below like a map, with the headwaters of the Baram, Trusan, Tutau and Limbang rivers visible in different directions [1, p. 50]. The plateau itself is described as comparatively flat, allowing visibility for miles in all directions [1, p. 50].

In physical build, the Kelabits are above the average height of Bornean peoples and are well made [1, p. 49]. They are noted as tremendous walkers, a fact reflected in the size of their feet, and Kayan informants reported that they were capable of covering in one day a distance that would take other people two days to accomplish [1, p. 49]. This hardiness was a natural consequence of a life in which all movement had to take place on foot [1, p. 49]. Conversely, they had absolutely no experience of paddling or using a boat; when first brought down to the Government station at Claudetown and shown the Baram River, they sat in the bottom of Kayan canoes and burst into tears, having never seen such an enormous volume of water before [1, p. 49].

Their dwellings were generally described by Douglas as veritable hovels, though the chief Ili Bawang, having observed the dimensions of long Kayan houses in the Baram River, constructed a building on a scale hitherto unattempted by the Kelabits [1, p. 51]. This house was divided lengthwise by a wall: the front half formed a wide verandah of about twenty feet, while the rear was partitioned into separate family rooms [1, pp. 51–52]. The dividing wall did not extend to the back wall, leaving a passage by which communication could be maintained from one end of the house to the other without entering the common verandah; this passage was used by the women, who did not appear in the verandah except on special occasions [1, p. 52]. In the centre of the middle wall stood an enormous fireplace, and on either side of it were sleeping areas for married couples, open on the side facing the fire so as to capture its warmth, though without a chimney the occupants also received the full measure of smoke and soot [1, p. 52]. Paddy was stored in a separate raised hut, elevated some six feet off the ground to prevent rats and other pests from climbing in, and divided internally into rooms for different owners [1, p. 53].

Social Life, Ritual and Administrative Contact

The social and ceremonial life of the Kelabits as documented by Douglas in 1907 was centred on communal feasting, drinking and song. On the occasion of his arrival, a grand feast was held at which five or six hundred Kelabits gathered from the surrounding villages; a buffalo and nine pigs were killed, and the meal continued from noon until evening, when only the horns and leg bones of the buffalo remained, the skin having been eaten with the hair still on [1, p. 52]. Following the meal, some twenty jars of borak (rice beer) were produced, and a drinking bout commenced that lasted until daylight [1, p. 52].

The most striking ceremonial feature was the women’s historical song. The women, attired in their best clothes, ranged themselves in a long line one behind the other, clasping the shoulders of the person in front, and marched round the house, up the verandah and down the passage at the back [1, p. 52]. The leader burst into song and the others joined in chorus, keeping time with their feet; the song was a historical recitation of the brave deeds of their forefathers from ancient times down to the present, when they first came into contact with Europeans and the Government [1, p. 52]. The rhythm gradually accelerated until the march became a quick-step and then a double, the soloist beating time with a stick on the floor [1, p. 52]. The men eventually joined the line behind the women, until a procession of over a hundred performers was careering round the house, shouting the choruses at the top of their voices while all kept tune and time [1, p. 52].

The administrative dimension of Douglas’s visit was explicit. On the fourth day he collected the poll tax, which, as dollars or coins of any sort were unknown in these regions, had to be paid in rubber at a rate of three katties per married man [1, p. 53]. A meeting was held at which the different chiefs proclaimed their loyalty to the Sarawak Government, and the Kenyah chief Dyau Blawing toasted the Kelabit chief Ili Bawang to the tune of the Kayan drinking song, an occasion during which the customs of civilised Government were communicated and the chief was reminded that his former life and conduct must now be reformed [1, p. 53]. The Kelabits themselves compared their life under the Government favourably with their former existence further in the interior, which had been marked by constant alarms of war and rumours of war [1, p. 53].

The practice of drinking among the Kelabits was governed by a distinctive social mechanism: when a drink was offered to any man, all those nearby caught hold of the arm of the giver, those further off catching the arms of those nearer, so that the drink appeared to come from all of them and was therefore harder to refuse; if a chief was being offered a drink, some thirty or forty persons would collect round him to assist in forcing the liquor down his throat [1, p. 53].

Megalithic Remains and Prehistoric Context

The Kelabit Highlands have also yielded evidence of considerable antiquity in the form of prehistoric stone urns. Dato Tom Harrisson documented approximately twenty-five such urns found in two localities on the Southern Kelabit Plateau in northern interior Sarawak, based on photographs taken in 1946 during his military service [2, p. 105]. The urns, carved from pale buff sandstone into long tubes up to nearly five feet high, were regarded by local Kelabit informants as the work of pre-Kelabit spirit ancestors [2, p. 105]. Harrisson recorded two sites: one near Pa Dali at 3,300 feet, associated with slab graves and later porcelain urns, and a second, more concentrated site about five hours’ walk downstream along a Baram headwater tributary, in a location now effectively lost to local knowledge [2, p. 105].

Small tubular orange glass beads of probable Middle Eastern origin, post-dating 800 A.D., were found inside one urn, though Harrisson cautioned that these may have been inserted long after the urn’s manufacture, as the re-use of ancient burial sites is a recognised Kelabit practice [2, p. 105]. He situated these urns within the broader Southeast Asian megalithic tradition, comparing them to finds in Sumba, central Celebes, Mindanao and the Plain of Jars in Central Laos, and argued that the sites were unlikely to have been unique, having been lost under equatorial forest conditions and rendered obsolete by the introduction of ceramic burial jars from the coast [2, pp. 108–109].

The Punan Neighbours and the Wider Interior

The Kelabit plateau was not inhabited in isolation. The Punans, who lived entirely on the produce of the jungle in the dense forests surrounding the highland, were encountered by Douglas during his journey [1, p. 50]. They lived a nomadic existence, encamping at clumps of wild sago until exhausted and then moving on in search of more; wild sago and fruit constituted the greater part of their food [1, p. 58]. Their chief weapon was the blowpipe, from which they shot poisoned darts capable of killing pig, deer and even rhinoceros [1, p. 58]. At the mouth of the Magoh River, Douglas arranged a meeting of approximately fifty Punans, who had been summoned for the occasion [1, p. 58]. The Kelabits and the Punans maintained a trading relationship, as evidenced by the method by which rubber was dispatched downstream: wound into a ball approximately nine feet in diameter on a fifty-yard rattan rope and released into the current, it would emerge at Long Iman, a practice that had been repeated hundreds of times [1, p. 61].

Research and Documentation

The archival record on the Kelabits is limited in volume but spans a significant chronological range. The foundational document is R. S. Douglas’s 1907 account in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, which serves simultaneously as a travel narrative, an ethnographic sketch and an administrative report on the extension of Sarawak Government authority into the interior [1]. Its ethnographic descriptions reflect the classificatory conventions of early twentieth-century colonial anthropology, with the Kelabits characterised as “quite one of the most uncivilized in Borneo” and the Punans as “wild people” [1, p. 49]. The article’s primary purpose was to document the practical mechanics of establishing administrative contact, and its ethnographic observations, while valuable, are necessarily brief and shaped by the perspective of a colonial administrator on a short expedition [1].

The second significant contribution is Dato Tom Harrisson’s 1974 note on the megalithic stone urns of the Southern Kelabit Plateau, published in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society [2]. This work shifts the focus from the living culture of the Kelabits to their prehistoric material heritage, drawing on photographs taken during Harrisson’s military service in 1946 [2, p. 105]. Harrisson’s analysis places the Kelabit megalithic tradition within a pan-Southeast Asian comparative framework and raises the question of how many further sites may have been lost under forest cover [2, pp. 108–109].

Between these two publications, the Society’s journals contain no further substantial contributions specifically on the Kelabits. The 1977 Centenary Volume, which selected thirty articles from the combined archives of the Straits and Malayan Branches, does not appear to include a dedicated Kelabit study [3]. The overall record thus presents a gap between the initial colonial-contact documentation of 1907 and the archaeological investigation of the 1940s and 1970s, a gap that likely reflects the continued inaccessibility of the highland plateau and the limited priority given to interior Bornean peoples in the Society’s publication programme during the intervening decades.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R.S. Douglas (1907). A journey into the interior of Borneo to visit the Kalabit tribes JSBRAS 49: 53–62.
  2. Tom Harrisson (1974). The megaliths in East Malaysia II: stone urns from the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak JMBRAS 47(1): 105–109.
  3. Anon (1977). A Centenary Volume: 30 Articles selected from JSBRAS and JMBRAS 1878 - 1976 : 358.