Article

Tagals

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Tagals

The Tagals are an indigenous people of Sarawak, North Borneo, whose customs, cosmogonic narratives, and material culture were documented in the early twentieth century by the ethnographer E. V. Andreini. Their distinctive social practices — including a spring-board dance, elaborate door ornamentation, and funerary rites involving beads and snake-guardians — mark them as a culturally distinct group within the broader Bornean landscape. Andreini’s account, published in 1922, remains the principal ethnographic record of Tagal life, while later linguistic work by Rodney Needham in 1953 clarified the Tagals’ position within Bornean ethnic classification, distinguishing them from the peoples of the middle-Borneo group with whom they had long been conflated under the imprecise label “Murut” [1], [2].

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “Tagal” designates a specific people of Sarawak whose identity was, for much of the colonial period, obscured by the indiscriminate application of the label “Murut” to a wide range of Bornean groups. Rodney Needham, writing in 1953, argued that the term “Murut” had been used for 150 years without adequate precision and suggested it would be best to abandon it altogether [2, p. 161]. In his analysis, Needham drew a clear ethnic delimitation: the “Murut” of the middle-Borneo group — what Leach termed “Kenyah-Kayan-Kajang” and Kennedy called “Bahau” — were distinct from the North Borneo “Murut,” who in fact belonged to Adriani’s Philippine language group and were properly identified as Tagals [2, p. 161]. This distinction is of considerable importance, as it separates the Tagals from the larger middle-Borneo cluster and places them within a different linguistic and cultural sphere.

Andreini’s 1922 note, though brief, provides the most substantial ethnographic description of Tagal society available in the Society’s literature. He records their cosmogonic narratives, funerary practices, artistic traditions, and social customs, painting a picture of a people with a rich and internally coherent cultural system [1, pp. 216–217].

Cosmogony and Belief

Andreini recorded two Tagal cosmogonic narratives that illuminate their understanding of origins and the natural world. In the first, the Sun laid three eggs, from which emerged a Murut, a Tagal, and a third people — a narrative that encodes a sense of genealogical relationship between neighbouring groups while asserting the Tagals’ distinct identity [1, p. 217]. In the second, the first man dug holes that became rivers, and his youngest child was drowned in the Runi, a narrative that etymologises the landscape and embeds a tragic origin within the geography of the region [1, p. 217].

Among their beliefs, Andreini noted a practice of tattooing understood as a means of providing light when the eyes close in death — a funerary concept that links bodily modification to the needs of the deceased in the afterlife [1, p. 217]. Their funerary practice also included placing beads in the mouth of the dead to deceive a snake-guardian at the entrance to the dead man’s country, a rite that reveals a cosmology in which the passage to the afterlife is guarded and must be navigated through cunning [1, p. 217].

Andreini further recorded that the Tagals attributed the origin of head-hunting to women, and that certain women refused to eat deer’s flesh on the grounds that it represented the reincarnation of the dead [1, p. 217]. Their belief in bird omens was limited to the first two days of a journey, a temporal restriction that suggests a pragmatic rather than all-encompassing system of divination [1, p. 217].

Material Culture and Social Life

Andreini documented the Tagals’ artistic inclinations in several domains: door ornamentation, bamboo pipes, and combs, all of which indicate a developed aesthetic tradition [1, p. 217]. He also recorded their fine chorus singing, a practice that points to a collective musical culture [1, p. 217].

Their most distinctive social amusement, according to Andreini, was a practice called Ungakang, in which young men jumped on spring boards in the long house verandah while women in their best dress lock-stepped around them on the swaying boards. Andreini identified this as a survival of a head dance, linking the practice to a broader regional tradition of competitive or ceremonial bodily display [1, p. 217].

In terms of domestic architecture, Andreini observed that Tagal houses were of more robust construction than those of the surrounding Murut dwellings, a detail that suggests either greater material resources, different building traditions, or a deliberate assertion of distinction from neighbouring groups [1, p. 217].

Kinship and Linguistic Classification

Rodney Needham’s 1953 note, though focused on the Lun Daya (also called Putuk) of the upper Sesayap, carries direct implications for the classification of the Tagals. Needham presented kinship terms recorded before the Second World War by Mr Presswood of the Christian Missionary Alliance at Long Berang, and transmitted through Dr L. Onvlee of the Netherlands Bible Society [2, pp. 221–223]. The data confirmed the absence of distinctions between parallel and cross-cousins and between parent’s siblings, as well as the absence of a reciprocal term between parent’s sibling and sibling’s child — features previously reported for the “Murut” of the Semambu district [2, p. 159].

Needham used these kinship patterns to support his ethnic delimitation, placing the middle-Borneo “Murut” as the northernmost members of that group, distinct from the North Borneo “Murut” (Tagal), who belonged to Adriani’s Philippine language group [2, p. 161]. This linguistic affiliation — to the Philippine rather than the middle-Borneo language family — is a critical marker that separates the Tagals from the Kenyah-Kayan-Kajang cluster and underscores the historical imprecision of the colonial label “Murut” as applied to them.

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on the Tagals is limited in volume but significant in its contributions to Bornean ethnography and classification. Andreini’s 1922 note, published in the JSBRAS, represents the earliest and most detailed ethnographic account, covering cosmogony, funerary practice, material culture, and social custom in a compact but substantive form [1]. Its brevity — a single two-page note — reflects the conventions of the period, in which short ethnographic communications were a standard form of publication, yet it captures a range of cultural practices that may now be lost or transformed.

Needham’s 1953 note, published in the JMBRAS, shifted the focus from ethnographic description to linguistic and classificatory precision. His argument that the term “Murut” should be abandoned in favour of more specific ethnonyms represents a methodological advance in Bornean studies, moving away from the broad colonial categories that had obscured the diversity of the region’s peoples [2]. By placing the Tagals within Adriani’s Philippine language group, Needham provided a linguistic basis for their distinction from the middle-Borneo peoples, a classification that has since become standard in the literature.

Together, these two contributions illustrate the evolution of the Society’s engagement with Bornean ethnography: from the descriptive recording of customs and beliefs in the early twentieth century to the analytical refinement of ethnic boundaries in the mid-century. The gap between them — over thirty years — also reflects the limited attention the Tagals received in the intervening period, a silence that underscores the need for further fieldwork and documentation of this distinct Bornean people.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. E.V. Andreini (1922). A note on the Tagals of Sarawak JSBRAS 85: 216–217. Read on JSTOR
  2. R. Needham (1953). A note on some North Borneo kinship terminologies JMBRAS 26(1): 221–223.