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Social and symbolic features of the Iban longhouse have been extensively described (see Freeman 1960, 1970). These descriptions, however, have consistently given priority to the longhouse as a built form. In this paper I begin by taking a very different approach, viewing the Iban longhouse, in the first instance, as a ritually constituted structure.
Ritual is described by the Iban in what are largely dramaturgical terms. Ritual is thus ‘enacted’ (nunda) or ‘played’ (main) upon a stage; it is performed, that is to say, within a symbolically ordered setting. For the Iban, the longhouse is the pre-eminent setting in which the great majority of rituals are performed. In the course of these performances, architectural and spatial features of the longhouse are assigned signification as elements constituting a dramatic idiom that reflects on aspects of both the visible world and alternative, unseen realities. This process not only makes explicit the basic social and cosmological categories that structure Iban experience, but also evokes the interconnections that exist between them.
In this paper, I briefly consider two major forms of ritual. The first of these consists of rites that centre on the longhouse itself. Included here are rites that accompany house construction and those that establish and preserve the longhouse as a ritual community. The second form of rituals marks major transitions in the human life trajectory. Here, I look specifically at rites of birth and death, showing how each is enacted as a ‘journey’ (jalai) through the longhouse, its itinerary mapping the major contours of the Iban social and cosmological world.
Two points emerge from looking at the longhouse through a ritual lens. The first is that the longhouse represents a plurality of symbolic orders, not simply a single order ‘fixed’ in the physical structure of the house itself. These orders are not only multiple, but are also alterable, even at times reversible, and are constantly created and re-created in the course of rituals. Second, the representation of the longhouse that emerges from ritual is very different from that which is conveyed by the existing ethnographic literature. In the latter, the longhouse and its constituent bilik-families are generally represented as independent, essentially autonomous entities. By contrast, ritual locates these groups, as do the Iban themselves, in an ordered series of part— whole relationships. Here, by focusing on ritual, I hope to reveal a more indigenously based perception of the longhouse and correct the pervasive bias favouring physicality that has tended, in the Bornean ethnography, to colour our understanding of longhouse sociality and symbolism.
The Iban are a vigorous, outwardly expansive people of West-Central Borneo who number some 400000 in the east Malaysian State of Sarawak. Despite increasing urban migration, the great majority live in longhouse settlements along the main rivers and smaller streams of the interior and subcoastal districts. Here most subsist by shifting hill-rice agriculture, supplemented by the cultivation of perennial cash crops, most notably rubber. All speak closely related dialects of a single Ibanic language, part of a larger complex of Bornean Malayic languages (see Adelaar 1985:1–5; Hudson 1970, 1977).[1] The Iban are divided internally into a number of major riverine groupings. Referred to as ‘tribes’ in the nineteenth century literature, each of these groupings comprises a loose territorial unit made up of longhouse communities arrayed along the same river or tributary system. The organization of Iban society is bilateral. Descent groups are lacking and marriage is preferentially endogamous within widely ramifying kindred networks. These networks characteristically extend throughout the river region and provide the organizational basis for a variety of individually organized, task-oriented groups (see Freeman 1960, 1961).
The present paper specifically deals with the Saribas Iban population that lives along the Paku River and its tributaries, between the Rimbas and upper Layar rivers, in the lower Second Division of Sarawak (Figure 1). Today, of a total Iban population of some 35000 in the Saribas, the Paku Iban number nearly 4000 and are divided between thirty-three longhouses, ranging in size from six to thirty-nine bilik-families, the mean number being 16.5 (see Sather 1978, 1985, 1988).
The longhouse (rumah) forms the principal local community (see Figure 2). In the Paku all longhouses are located along the banks of the main Paku River and its chief tributaries: the Bangkit, Anyut and Serudit streams. Structurally, each house consists of a series of family apartments arranged side by side. The same term bilik refers to both the longhouse apartment and the family group that occupies it. The bilik-family typically consists of three generations — grandparents, a son or daughter, his or her spouse and their children — with membership acquired by birth, marriage, incorporation or adoption (Freeman 1957). Fronting the biliks is a covered, unpartitioned gallery called the ruai. This runs the entire length of the house and, while divided into family sections (each built and maintained by an individual bilik family) the whole is available for communal use. The wall that separates the biliks from the ruai thus bisects the structure into two equal halves (Figure 3).
On one side of this wall, the bilik apartments represent each family’s domestic space, symbolizing its existence as a discrete corporate group, while the unpartitioned gallery on the other side is a public space, symbolizing the longhouse as a whole and its membership in the larger riverine society that encompasses it.