Most ethnographic observers of the Iban, the most populous ethno-linguistic group of West-Central Borneo, have characterized Iban society as “egalitarian”, “democratic” and “classless” (cf. Freeman 1970, 1981; Heppell 1975; Sather 1980; 1978). Thus Freeman (1970:129) asserts:
Under Iban adat all men are equals … Iban society is classless and egalitarian — its members, individualists, aggressive and proud in demeanour, lacking any taste for obeisance.
Characterized in this way, the Iban are frequently contrasted with neighbouring upland peoples of central Borneo, the majority of whom live in societies formed of ascribed social strata characterized by corvée labour and the monopolization of political authority by an upper stratum of chiefly families (Ave, King and DeWit 1983:16-28; King 1976, 1978:27-32, 1985; Morris 1978, 1980; Rousseau 1978, 1990). Since Edmund Leach’s (1950) pioneering account of indigenous structural variation in Borneo, most comparative observers have endorsed, in one form or another, the broad distinction that he drew in this account between “egalitarian” and “stratified societies” (1950:75-78), and, like Leach, have taken the Iban to be the prime paradigmatic example of the former — an “egalitarian society” in which “class stratification … is absent in a formally instituted sense” (1950:71).[2]
This characterization of Iban society and, indeed, the more general distinction between “egalitarian” and “stratified” social systems has not gone unchallenged. Thus, for example, Alexander (1992:207) notes that Leach’s original characterization of Bornean societies “was based neither on wide empirical knowledge nor sophisticated theoretical analysis” and that it, and most subsequent “attempts to rank whole societies and cultures on a continuum from egalitarian to stratified have focused attention on relatively narrow questions of political authority and power”. Thus, while ascribed rank may be a salient feature in the political structures of many central Bornean communities (1992:207),
productive surpluses are small and the means of production are freely available to most households, while ideologies of hierarchy are underdeveloped with expressions of deference limited to specific contexts. In some of these societies … local communities have considerable economic and political autonomy and the tenor of daily life is more appropriately described as egalitarian rather than hierarchical.
As Alexander (1992:208) goes on to observe, the fact that some political relationships “are grounded in inequality does not entail that equally important economic and gender relationships are similarly constituted”, nor should “notions of hierarchy … be privileged over explicit values of personal and household autonomy”, which appear as at least as important in shaping social relationships (see also Nicolaisen 1986). Moreover, as she shows, ascriptive categories — where they exist — are not necessarily ranked lineally, but in many contexts are “constituted by reciprocal rather than subordinate relations”, with the result that “hierarchy and equality are not necessarily incompatible”, but may and, indeed, regularly co-occur (1992:207). From these observations, Alexander (1992:207-208) suggests that to reify ascribed status as a “system” may constitute “premature conceptualization”. The same may be said of “egality” and “egalitarian”. In both cases, it is not the presence of a “system”, but rather the combination of egalitarian and hierarchical values with structures of equality/inequality that raises the more pertinent questions concerning the processes by which “egality” and “hierarchy” are socially realized and reproduce themselves through time (see Alexander 1992:208).
In an inverse way, others have also questioned the appropriateness of the term “egalitarian” when applied to the Iban. Thus, Rousseau (1980:54) has argued that, in the case of the Iban, “an egalitarian ideology”, in actuality, “hid a structure of inequality” and that traditional Iban society was, in fact, composed of three “largely hereditary status levels” (1980:59-60). Freeman (1981), in response, has cogently laid out the distinctively “egalitarian” — and in particular non-ascriptive — features of Iban social and political life. He seriously weakens his argument, however, by downplaying the presence of objective inequalities. In this regard, Murray (1981), in a less sweeping critique, points up the seemingly contradictory association of an egalitarian ideology with overt social and material inequalities. Unlike Rousseau, she argues, however, for the critical importance of ideology, seeing it as a major factor that prevents these inequalities from assuming a permanently institutionalized form. Later, I will return to these and other arguments, but here, in addressing the larger issues involved, it is important to locate the problematic of the debate where it rightly belongs, within Iban society itself, and so to approach the question of “egalitarianism” by seeing it — not only as a question of analytical concepts — but as an actor’s problem as well.
At the level of everyday cultural values, the Iban are an assertively egalitarian people. Thus they guide their daily life by an adat order that inscribes equality of condition as a fundamental social premise. According to Iban adat, every individual is equal by potential, sharing identical rights and obligations, without inherited distinction or privilege. Like the white cotton threads referred to in the saying by which I preface this paper — and from which Iban women begin the complex process of dyeing and weaving ikat-textiles — all persons are thought to begin life equal, equivalent and undifferentiated. But Iban society is also intensely competitive. Through competition individuals gain distinction and earn a place for themselves in the social order. Thus the Iban compete not only to assert their equality — to prove themselves equal to others — but they also seek, if possible, to excel and so exceed others in material wealth, power and reputation.
What is significant to note, however, is that equality of potential is, for the Iban, a precondition for the attainment of achieved inequality. The two, in other words, are not in opposition, but are dialectically related (Sather 1989). Through competition persons are both individuated — gaining for themselves “name” (nama) and “reputation” (berita) — in short, “making themselves seen” (mandang ka diri’) — and, at the same time, they are also socially differentiated, attaining in the process of competition social position and assuming roles and community statuses on the basis of their achieved inequalities of reputation, experience, skills, wealth and power. The resulting outcome is, by intention, unequal. Thus it can be argued that the nature of Iban cultural premises is such that they make cognitive sense of both equality and inequality — of sameness as well as of difference.
Like the coloured cotton threads which, following dyeing, Iban women weave on their looms to create textile designs, each individual is, at once, differentiated as a result of competition, becoming figurative as the saying says, “red, yellow, green, and blue”, and, at the same time, he or she is incorporated into the social fabric by his or her achievements, thereby assuming a unique place within its overall design. The textile metaphor thus maps a cognitive image of society that is by nature both equal and unequal, its members, as social actors, alike in potential, yet differentiated and unequal by outcome.
Beginning with this metaphor, and returning to it once again at the end, I will try in this paper to show how, for the Iban, cultural understandings serve as one of the means by which Iban actors attempt to make sense of the social, political and material inequalities that are present in a society that is otherwise dominated by egalitarian values. Drawing on my fieldwork with the Saribas Iban, I will attempt to show how, in part, inequality of outcome is conceptualized as a kind of “proportional equality” (Lakoff 1964), that is to say, inequality is seen as largely proportional to merit. Thus those who achieve more are expected to win greater honour in relative proportion to their greater achievement. Inequality is also “historicized” and linked to the past achievements of ancestral founders whose accomplishments to some degree “freeze” merit, making its rewards available to successive generations of future descendants.
Finally, while principles of egality structure major areas of Iban social life, they are balanced, particularly in the ritual domain, by principles of precedence and hierarchy. This conjunction of “egality” and “hierarchy”, I argue, forms another way in which the Iban come to terms with inequality. The resulting articulation is made possible by the fact that personal success is won largely outside the adat community, through actions undertaken in an external world beyond the immediate boundaries of each individual’s longhouse. Success, moreover, is valorized by public rituals in which the participants, drawn from a wider regional society, enact a social order modelled, not on the everyday world of immediate experience, but on an unseen, idealized world of the gods, spiritheroes and ancestral dead. Hierarchy is thus constituted within a ritual context, distinct from the largely egalitarian relations of everyday longhouse life, and its constitution projects an image of inequality that is, while non-egalitarian, yet distinctively individuated and non-ascriptive, and so congruent with the essentially egalitarian ethos asserted in other social domains. Each individual, rather than being aggregated into a socially-defined stratum, is expected to gain for himself and to ritually validate a fluid personal ranking, which is fixed and rendered inalterable only by death. At death, a summation is made of each individual’s accomplishments. On this basis are determined the details of death and mourning ritual. In Iban belief this final aggregate ranking, together with any other intangible marks of achievement that were won in life, are carried by the soul of the dead on its journey to the Otherworld. Status inequality is thus returned, as we shall see, to the unseen world from which it derives. Paradoxically, while the Otherworld is conceptually hierarchized, achieved inequalities are thereby removed from the living world and so made uninheritable. As a consequence, the members of each new generation must start afresh — like undyed cotton threads — attaining distinction and a place for themselves in the social fabric by their own initiative and effort.