Article

Muruts

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Muruts

The Murut are a collective designation for a number of ethnically and linguistically distinct highland and interior peoples of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, whose populations have been documented through colonial censuses, linguistic surveys, and ethnographic fieldwork spanning more than a century. The term, an exonym applied by Brunei Malay and other coastal peoples to the inhabitants of the hills and interior, has long been criticised for its imprecision, encompassing groups that differ substantially in language, subsistence pattern, and cultural practice [1, p. 343]. The Murut Problem—the apparent demographic collapse recorded between the 1921 and 1951 censures—has been the subject of sustained scholarly debate, while the people’s material culture, kinship systems, healing ceremonies, and non-literal communication practices have attracted separate strands of ethnographic attention [2, pp. 109–111].

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “Murut” has been in use for approximately 150 years without adequate ethnographic grounding, a fact that Rodney Needham identified as early as 1955 when he concluded that the label should be abandoned altogether [3, p. 161]. The earliest systematic attempt to impose order on the diversity of interior highland peoples was made by G. C. Woolley in his 1922 introductory note to a Murut vocabulary compiled by N. B. Baboneau. Woolley proposed a working typology of four main tribal groupings: the Dabai and Timugun on the plains, and the Peluan and Semambu among the hills, while acknowledging that the number of petty subdivisions with small dialectal variations was very large [1, pp. 343–344]. He observed that under European government, raiding had died out and intercourse had become freer, causing tribal boundaries to become obscured and dialectical differences to become less accentuated; a Murut asked his race would typically identify by local river or settlement rather than by any of these broader groupings [1, p. 344].

The linguistic evidence reinforces the heterogeneity implied by Woolley’s typology. Dialectal variation is substantial: for example, “cold” is rendered mesimoh in the Keningau dialect but asimoh in Semambu; “afraid” is malah versus alah; “rain” is domassam in Keningau, rasam in Timugun and Peluan, and unguluh in Semambu; “pig” is bawih versus biag [1, pp. 344–345]. The Semambu dialect is considerably more distinct from the other three, which are fairly closely related to one another, though an untravelled Semambu man placed in Keningau could still gather roughly what was being said [1, p. 345].

Needham’s kinship studies sharpened the taxonomic problem. Using terms recorded before the Second World War by Mr Presswood of the Christian Missionary Alliance at Long Berang, upper Sesayap, Needham demonstrated that the Lun Daya (“people of the interior”), also called Putuk, showed no distinction between parallel and cross-cousins, no distinction between parent’s siblings, and no reciprocal term between parent’s sibling and sibling’s child—features previously reported for the “Murut” of the Semambu district [4, p. 159], [3, p. 160]. Needham used these data to support an ethnic delimitation placing the Sarawak Murut (Lun Bawang and Lun Daya) as the northernmost members of the middle-Borneo “Kenyah-Kayan-Kajang” group, distinct from the North Borneo “Murut” (Tagal), who belong to Adriani’s Philippine language group [3, p. 161]. This distinction was later confirmed by Jay B. Crain, who demonstrated that the Lun Dayeh of Sipitang District, a people with linguistic and cultural affinities to central and southern Borneo rather than to the northern Murut, had been enumerated as “Murut” in official tallies, thereby distorting population trends and obscuring the true dynamics of both groups [2, pp. 109–111].

Demographic History and the Murut Problem

The “Murut Problem” was first flagged by Evans (1922) and Rutter (1929), and subsequently investigated by a succession of medical specialists—Ride, Copeland, Shircore, Clarke, Regester, and Polunin—each proposing different causal mechanisms: malaria, gonorrhoea, malnutrition, inbreeding, acute infectious disease, and the psychological effects of culture contact [2, pp. 109–111]. Crain’s central critique is methodological: none of these investigators treated the “Murut” as a homogeneous breeding population, and none made systematic use of the well-known cultural, linguistic, and geographic differentiation among the groups lumped under that label. Clarke (1951) is cited as typical of the era’s dismissiveness toward such distinctions, noting that divisions among Murut groups were “convenient but of no great significance” [2, p. 111].

The census data reveal the scale of the apparent decline. The total Murut population of Sabah stood at 30,355 in 1921, fell to 24,444 in 1931, dropped further to 18,724 in 1951, and partially recovered to 22,138 by 1960, representing a cumulative decline of 38.3 per cent from the 1921 peak [2, p. 108]. The anomalous position of Sipitang District was first observed by Jones (1966), the Superintendent of Census for the 1951 and 1960 enumerations, who noted that Sipitang Murut fertility was the highest of any district—nearly matching that of the Bruneis, whose fertility was recorded as the highest in Asia—and that the Sipitang population had recovered far more sharply than the Murut population as a whole [2, pp. 113–114]. Jones attributed this to lower malarial exposure in coastal areas and to the infusion of “new blood” from other tribes. Crain accepted the directional finding but rejected the explanation: the Sipitang “Murut” were in fact predominantly Lun Dayeh, a group that Harrisson (1950) had noted was multiplying in Kalimantan even as Sarawak populations of the same stock were declining [2, pp. 113–114]. The Lun Dayeh’s numerical superiority over the Tagal (the true northern Murut of Sipitang) at a ratio of at least two to one, combined with ongoing in-migration from Kalimantan, accounts for the district’s unique demographic trajectory [2, p. 113].

Crain supplemented the census data with a four-village census of Lun Dayeh settlements (Kampongs Samin, Kawang, Ranau, and Mendulong) conducted in October–November 1968, yielding a sample of 811 individuals. The resulting age structure, fertility tables, and child-survival data confirmed a highly fertile, growing population whose demographic profile was markedly different from that of the total Murut aggregate. The 1968 census recorded an average of 4.4 live children per mother across all ages, compared with 3.6 for the total Murut in 1960 and 3.8 for Sipitang Murut specifically [2, pp. 116–117]. Sipitang Murut fertility, measured by child/woman ratio based on district of birth, was 130 per cent higher than that of Pensiangan, the district with the most homogeneous northern Murut population [2, p. 112]. The article thus reframes the Murut depopulation narrative not as a story of biological or cultural decline but as a cautionary case in the perils of applying census categories to ethnically heterogeneous populations [2, pp. 109–121].

Material Culture, Healing, and Communication

The material and ritual life of the Murut has been documented across several distinct domains. Woolley’s 1936 article records aspects of Murut hunting customs, drawing on his experience as a colonial administrator in British North Borneo [5]. The Baboneau vocabulary, compiled between 1911 and 1914 with the assistance of Keningau Murut speakers, covers the full range of everyday life—subsistence agriculture (hill and wet padi), hunting, warfare, kinship, domestic architecture, flora and fauna, and spiritual beliefs [1, p. 343]. The vocabulary records a five-fold typology of ghosts: kraganan (ghosts of the dead, invisible), tentolong (power to carry people up trees), ambiruoh (follow people in the jungle and annoy them), berioh (always cause death), and keragioh (haunt the jungle, supposed to eat people) [1, p. 356]. The Murut year is reckoned by the padi harvest cycle (bilod), from the clearing of jungle to the end of the panawongun (the two months after harvest before the new crop is planted), roughly 13 months [1, p. 375].

Marcus C. Clarke, a colonial medical officer in the Keningau district, published in 1954 a detailed account of the Kalatong ceremony, which he identified as the “greatest of all the Murut berubat ceremonies” and an “all-out attempt to regain health” for conditions such as chronic haemoptysis or generalised oedema [6, p. 68]. Clarke situates the Kalatong within a broader Murut cosmology of disease causation, in which chronic ailments are attributed to specific classes of spirits—Mangkakayau (tree-dwelling), Pamayabaya (swamp-dwelling), and the witchcraft practice of sampal (cirrhosis) [6, p. 68]. The ceremony unfolds over several nights: an initial gathering of up to twenty babalian (female healers) who recite prayers around the patient; a period of weeks during which the patient accumulates food stores and a pig is procured; a second, more intensive phase of three sleepless nights of recitation; and a climactic blood-sacrifice in which a special hereditary dagger is driven through a pig’s chest, the heart is divided, and the patient’s body is painted with a mixture of blood, rice tapai, and seven types of leaves [6, pp. 70–72]. Clarke notes that the ceremony is enormously expensive and that its frequency is directly governed by harvest yields: with a good harvest, as many as two kalatong may be held in an area within a year; with less rice available, there may be only one in three years [6, p. 72].

P. A. Burrough’s 1975 article documents the message-stick communication systems (locally called tatanda or tatanduk) used by forest-dwelling Murut and Dusun groups in Sabah, based on fieldwork conducted between 1970 and 1972 across southern and central Sabah [7, pp. 119–123]. The system, which earlier Borneo ethnographers had largely overlooked, conveys information about hunting successes (species, method of kill, size, sex, fat content), land claims and boundary rights, warnings of traps and disease, wedding announcements with detailed bride-price inventories, and communications to the spirit world at graves and altars [7, p. 120]. The support stick is a vertical pole one to three metres long, stuck in the ground beside forest tracks, with clefts cut to hold carved twigs, leaves, or bark symbols [7, p. 120]. The Baukan, Paluan, Timogun, and Rundum Murut each possess a personal family-name symbol placed near the base of the stick as a “signature”; the Labau Dusun do not use family signs [7, pp. 120–121]. The system’s geographic and social reach is sharply stratified: the forest-dwelling Baukan, Paluan, and Tagal Murut and Labau Dusun use it widely; the more settled Timogun and Nabai (Keningau) Murut use it only for hunting; the Lun Dayah people of Sipitang know of the signs but no longer use them; and the Ranau, Tambunan, and coastal Kadazan Dusun do not know of them at all [7, p. 122].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on the Murut spans more than five decades and reflects shifting priorities in Bornean ethnography. The earliest contributions are linguistic and administrative in character. Baboneau’s vocabulary, published posthumously in 1922 with Woolley’s introductory note, was compiled for practical administrative and communicative purposes in the interior districts, and Woolley’s note reflects the contemporary administrative framing of tribal classification as a tool for governance [1, pp. 343–344]. Keith’s 1936 note on Ulun-no-Bokan words from the Bokan District similarly addresses the practical difficulties of compiling a vocabulary, noting informants’ tendency to substitute Malay or “adapted Malay” words when they cannot recall a native term [8, p. 314]. Woolley’s 1936 article on hunting customs and the Headlys’ 1948 record of a Timogan flood and origin myth as narrated by the native chief Dualis represent the mid-period ethnographic contributions, the latter noting that “Timug” means water in the Timogan language and that the Tenom plain shows clear indications of having once been a lake, lending thematic resonance to the flood narrative [9, p. 148], [5].

The 1950s mark a turn toward analytical and comparative approaches. Needham’s two short notes on kinship terminologies (1953 and 1955) use linguistic data to argue for a fundamental reclassification of Bornean peoples, while Clarke’s 1954 account of the Kalatong ceremony represents the colonial medical officer’s attempt to document indigenous therapeutic practice from a clinical perspective [4], [3], [6]. Crain’s 1972 article represents the most sustained methodological intervention, reframing the Murut demographic narrative as a problem of census taxonomy rather than biological decline [2]. Burrough’s 1975 study of message sticks extends the ethnographic record into the domain of non-literal communication, correcting the near-total absence of systematic documentation of Sabahan message sticks in the colonial-era literature and providing the first comparative account spanning six distinct linguistic groups within a single region [7, pp. 119–123]. Harrisson’s 1967 ethnological notes on the Muruts of the Sapulut River, Sabah, contribute further regional detail, though the full scope of that article is not available in the present records [10].

The historiographical trajectory is thus from administrative linguistics through colonial medical ethnography to the critical demographic and comparative analyses of the 1960s and 1970s. The central debate that has persisted throughout is the question of what “Murut” denotes: a single people, a convenient administrative category, or an imprecise exonym that obscures more than it reveals. Needham’s 1955 conclusion that the term should be abandoned altogether [3, p. 161] and Crain’s 1972 demonstration that its use in census practice produced a false demographic narrative [2, pp. 109–121] represent the two most forceful statements of this position in the Society’s literature.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. N.B. Baboneau (1922). A Murut vocabulary. With an introductory note G.C. Woolley JSBRAS 86: 343–375.
  2. J.B. Crain (1972). Murut depopulation and the Sapitang Lun Dayeh JMBRAS 45(2): 109–121.
  3. R. Needham (1955). A note on some Murut kinship terms JMBRAS 28(1): 159–161.
  4. R. Needham (1953). A note on some North Borneo kinship terminologies JMBRAS 26(1): 221–223.
  5. G.C. Woolley (1936). Some Murut hunting customs JMBRAS 14(3): 307–313. Read on JSTOR
  6. M.C. Clark (1954). Kalatong: the Murut treatment of chronic disease JMBRAS 27(1): 68–72. Read on JSTOR
  7. P.A. Burrough (1975). Message sticks used by the Murut and Dusun people in Sabah JMBRAS 48(2): 119–123.
  8. H.G. Keith (1936). Some ulun-no-bokan (Murut) words from North Borneo JMBRAS 14(3): 314–322.
  9. D. Headly and J. Headly (1948). Timogan genesis. J. & D. Headly JMBRAS 21(1): 148–149.
  10. Tom Harrisson (1967). Ethnological notes on the Muruts of the Sapulut River, Sabah JMBRAS 40(1): 111–129.