Some notes on Murut basket work and patterns
G.C. Woolley, writing in 1929, documents the basketry, mat-making, and hat-weaving traditions of the Murut peoples across the Tenom, Keningau, and Pensiangan districts of British North Borneo. The article functions as an ethnographic survey of material culture, arguing that Murut weaving represents the most developed of their indigenous “Arts and Crafts” and that its patterns carry encoded narratives and social meanings.
Summary
The article surveys the principal types of woven articles—mats, baskets, hats, and miscellaneous items—produced by Murut communities across several districts. Woolley addresses the methodological difficulty of attributing patterns to a single ethnic group, noting the fluid boundaries between Murut, Dusun, and Dyak traditions and the likelihood of mutual borrowing. He identifies the principal materials (rotan, bamboo, bemban, kajang) and the dye palette (black, red, yellow, purple), explaining how the interplay of natural fibre colour and dyed strands produces the visual effects of the patterns, including the damask-like quality of plain white work visible only under oblique light.
A central concern is the transmission and meaning of pattern names. Woolley observes that weaving is a women’s occupation, that men typically defer to women for explanations, and that in many cases the original meaning of a design has been lost, surviving only as a named convention handed down with instructions for execution. He records several etiological narratives attached to specific patterns—Negimpong (“Quarrel”), Namboyunan (“mad”), Nagulalan (“The Raider’s”), Nantuapan (“The Meeting”), and Pinangulun (“man”)—which encode stories of betrothal refusal, madness, head-hunting, and social interaction. These narratives reveal a symbolic system in which geometric forms represent human figures, landscapes, and social relationships, though Woolley cautions that variants of the same story circulate in different villages and that some attributions may be unreliable.
The article also documents technical details of construction: right-angled plaiting as the universal rule, the maximum strand “jump” of six, the use of inner linings in hats, the adaptation of patterns to fit given spaces by curving lines at edges rather than cutting them abruptly, and the frequent combination of multiple patterns on a single article. Border patterns are catalogued separately, with local names recorded for each variant across the different districts, illustrating both the shared vocabulary and the local divergence in nomenclature.
Key Findings
- The hexagonal hat is called Peluan; the conical hat with an all-over red-and-white pattern and 8 ribs is Timogan (Tenom); the all-over black-and-white with 4 or 8 ribs is from Keningau (p. 289).
- In Pensiangan District, small mats measuring 1′ × 2′ or less are used as decorative hangings on house posts and walls, typically displayed on the occasion of a feast and left up afterwards (p. 289).
- No strand crosses more than six opposing strands without an intervening “one under” to secure it in place (p. 290).
- The ‘tabir’ sitting mat, made by men from all-black rotan with a superimposed white strand, commands a price four or five times that of a small basket, the premium attributed to the fact that it is a man’s work (p. 290).
- The ‘Negimpong’ pattern is interpreted as two back-to-back hooks (a man and a woman who cannot face each other), a connecting line, and a terminal section broken into small patches representing the articles of ‘brian’ (dowry) to be returned (p. 291).
- Only two patterns in the corpus represent human beings: ‘Nantuapan’ (four figures around a central circle) and ‘Pinangulun’ (a single male figure, which when inverted becomes a fruit bat) (p. 293).
Conclusion
Woolley’s definitive takeaway is that Murut weaving constitutes the most sophisticated of their indigenous crafts, and that the pattern system functions as a semi-literate medium of communication—encoding social narratives, personal relationships, and moral lessons within geometric forms. The progressive loss of original meanings, the fluidity of pattern attribution across ethnic boundaries, and the increasing difficulty of drawing clear lines between Murut, Dusun, and Dyak traditions as intercourse grows all underscore the urgency of recording these traditions before further erosion.
Context
- Woolley was serving in the British North Borneo administration; the article reflects the contemporary colonial ethnographic practice of cataloguing indigenous material culture as a form of administrative documentation.
- The piece draws on direct field observation and oral testimony from informants in the Tenom, Keningau, Pensiangan, and Sipitang districts, supplemented by specimens in the Raffles Museum collection.