In a final critique, Tania Murray (1981) offers what she describes as a “qualification” of Freeman’s egalitarianism thesis. She challenges specifically his second point, namely that power, wealth and prestige are equally open to all. Basically Murray (1981:29) argues that “differential access to key means of production”, namely to land for swidden cultivation, capital and other resources for investment in cash crops, produce marked inequalities between Iban families and that these inequalities give some bilik an enduring advantage over others. Such advantage, however, is never fully institutionalized. This is because of the existence, Murray maintains, of a well-developed “egalitarian ideology” which prevents the crystallization of objective inequalities into a system of formal stratification. In terms of causality, Murray (1981:28) thus argues in her analysis for the relative autonomy of ideology.

In Murray’s view a central tenet of Iban ideology is the premise that material success rests chiefly with the individual and is more or less commensurate with effort (1981:29). Here, however, reality, she suggests, is at odds with ideology. Iban bilik differ notably in the amount and quality of farmland they possess, with the result that some are much better positioned to succeed than others. Moreover, such advantage is heritable.

In Borneo, in some swidden societies, including, according to Rousseau (1987), the “stratified” Kayan, farmland is said to revert to longhouse management after each cycle of agricultural use.^[7] Cultivation rights are thus recongnized for only a single cropping, after which fallow land reverts to the community at large for future reallocation. In contrast, the Iban recognize permanent household rights of cultivation. Once land is cleared of primary forest, rights to its future re-cultivation devolve on the clearer’s bilik-family and are inherited by successive generations of family members as part of the bilik’s estate. Thus, while equal rights prevail within the family, disparities in landholding are not only possible, but are the rule between bilik.

As long as stands of primary forest (kampong) remain within a longhouse domain (menoa rumah), individual families are able to enlarge their estate by annual forest felling (berimba). But once all land is felled, they must depend for future cultivation, from this point onward, on inherited plots of farmland cleared originally by previous generations of bilik members. It is at this point, when the community moves from a “pioneer” to an “established” system of swidden cultivation, that inherited inequalities in land-holding become permanent. Those who tend to be advantaged are most often core households whose members trace their ancestry back to the original pioneers and house-founders who first settled the longhouse domain and so initiated, and engaged over a greater number of generations, in the process of forest clearing. Such families have generally had a longer time in which to accumulate cultivation plots than those whose founders arrived later in the process. In this regard, economic advantage tends to reinforce the advantage which core families already enjoy in terms of their claims to local political and ritual leadership.

In the Saribas region inherited inequalities in land-holding are well documented. Except for the Rimbas, the principal tributaries of the main Saribas, including its upper reaches in the Layar, were first settled by Iban pioneers some 15 or 16 generations ago (Sandin 1967:16-23). The shift to an established pattern of swidden cultivation was completed, according to local genealogical traditions, some seven to eight generations ago, near the beginning of the nineteenth century, roughly one to two generations before the founding of the Brooke Raj (cf. Cramb 1987; Sather 1990). Since then, the Saribas Iban have farmed inherited land, recleared each year from earlier cultivation and farmed by means of a long-estalished system of forest-fallow rotation (Cramb 1987; Sather 1985, 1990). Today no primary forest exists in these rivers, except for small ritually-interdicted islets (pulau mali), located chiefly along hilltops.^[8] In a detailed study of longhouse tenure, Robert Cramb (1989:284-285) has shown that for a representative upper Layar longhouse the most favoured 20 per cent of all bilik-families control 33 per cent of the total hill-rice plots within the community; the least favoured 20 per cent, only three per cent; while around a third of all bilik have insufficient land to observe an adequate cycle of fallow rotation. While better favoured families may lend or rent land to those who are less favoured, the extent of inequality is pronounced and its consequences are plainly visible.

The felling of primary forest “closes”, Murray (1981:32) argues, “channels of social mobility”, thereby ensuring the future material advantage of some households over others. The question she poses is why these inequalities have not given rise to institutions of formal ranking such as those that exist among the Kayan, Kenyah, Lahanan and others. Part of the answer, Murray suggests (1981:30-31), lies in migration. “The right of mobility is a key element”, representing, she insists, “the crucial political difference” between the Iban and stratified communities like the Kayan, where chiefs strictly proscribe their subjects’ movement (Rousseau 1978:86).^[9] For the Iban, freedom of movement acted as a check in the past on the authority of longhouse and regional leaders and levelled existing inequalities by allowing those who were disadvantaged to improve their lot by moving to new areas where unfelled land was still abundant. Here new bilik estates could be established and ambitious men could gain renown among their contemporaries and prominence among their future descendants as regional pioneers and bilik-founders.

The role of mobility, however, is both more limited and more complex than Murray’s argument suggests. Although Iban adat, in principle, permits families to move “at will” (Freeman 1981:50), it imposes significant jural and ritual constraints on such movement (Sather 1993:73). In addition, migration was, and continues to be organized by groups, and, when it takes place, migration occurs under the guidance of recognized tuai pindah. Decisions to migrate are never made on a purely individual basis, but take place as part of a concerted enterprise involving other individuals and families, including, as we have already noted, an initiator (pun) and a migration leader (tuai pindah). Thus migration, as well as providing a means of social and economic mobility, was also bound up with competition for achieved status, and so was also an arena for future differentiation. Moreover, opportunities for migration were limited, even in the past. High levels of mobility characterized only frontier areas of recent territorial expansion, that in most areas of Iban settlement, disappeared early on in their pioneering history. By contrast, in long-settled areas like the Saribas, migration meant for those who chose to emigrate abandonment of inherited farmland, fruit trees and other assets representing generations of bilik investment. Here emigration has occurred chiefly as a counter to the division of bilik estates following upon household partition and its effects have been mainly to preserve the agricultural viability of those families that have remained behind. Thus migration has tended, in the Saribas region at least, to reduce land-holding inequalities in the home area, both by removing the most seriously disadvantaged and by the reallocation of land among the remaining bilik. But, at the same time, migration also laid the foundations for new inequalities within the areas being settled. Thus migrant families, in pioneering a new area, attempted to lay claim to as large a cultivation reserve as they could by forest felling. In this way they sought to “historicize” their achievement, assuring by this means the future advantage of their descendants over the members of other households.

Finally, it must be noted that by means of the longhouse aum temporary cultivation rights may be extended from one bilik-family to another, as, for example, through the lending of plots of land for a single farming season (nasih tanah), or by gift or rental arrangements (Sather 1980:xix). Such temporary transfers are common and occur primarily as a way of ensuring that all families within a longhouse have access to sufficient land to provide for at least their minimal subsistence needs (Cramb 1989:282). In extreme instances of land shortage this may involve even the pooling of separate bilik holdings and their reallocation annually by the community as a whole (cf. Cramb 1987, 1989). An important corollary to Iban notions of egality under adat is a strongly developed sense that no family should be shamed or denied the minimal means necessary to assert its self-worth — hence none should be denied the requirements of survival, nor what is minimally required, provided they apply themselves, to compete with others for some modicum of respect. Here clearly egalitarian values play a role in the way in which Iban communities manage their land resources. Thus, in administering cultivation rights, specific adat rules, through decisions arrived at by the aum, may be modified, set aside, or applied by community consensus in ways that serve the overriding goal of maintaining some minimal degree of equality between longhouse families. These provisions — while not eliminating inequality — work to reduce its consequences, hence assuring, as a matter of community interest, a measure of longhouse equality.

Murray argues, as her final point, that in order to understand why unequal access to land and capital resources have not resulted in institutionalized inequality, we must consider in addition the role of trade and labour relations in the traditional Iban economy.

The Iban have for centuries engaged in inter-regional trade, beginning well before European penetration of western Borneo. For the Iban, rice, the primary food staple, was also traditionally a major item of trade, at least until the introduction of cash crops and more recently labour migration. Thus surplus rice, rather than being redistributed within the community, shared out, or used in feasting or for ceremonial exchange, was externally traded, mainly to coastal Malay enclaves, largely through riverine trading channels. Thus families with surplus rice [and, to a lesser extent, forest products] annually traded these items for durable prestige wealth, principally imported jars and brassware. As an apparent consequence of this trade, intra-community sharing was minimized, and even among kin, rice tended to be traded or sold rather than being shared in the form of gifts or by means of ceremonial exchange. In transactions between kin, other items aside from rice were traditionally given, and indeed still are, notably vegetables, fruit and domestic fowl. Each bilik, in terms of its rice production, thus sought to accumulate its own trading surplus, even in the face of uncertain swiddening conditions,^[10] thereby reinforcing its relative autonomy vis-à-vis others. Owing to these characteristics, Sahlins (1972:224) singles the Iban out, and indeed other Bornean swidden agriculturalists as well, as being atypical of “tribal societies” in the extent to which they limit the sharing of staple food surpluses.

The prestige goods which a household received in return for the sale of its rice, among other functions, served traditionally as a buffer against poor harvests.^[11] As Freeman (1970:267) writes:

In good years when a surplus of padi has been gained, it is exchanged for gongs, which are then available in years of shortage. Each season some families succeed in producing a surplus, while others find themselves with a deficit; and so, year by year …, scores of different families exchange gongs for padi, or padi for gongs. Jars, though to a much lesser extent, are used in the same way. Again, money — obtained from the marketing of forest produce — is often used to purchase padi; and of recent years, cash crops — particularly rubber — have become increasingly important.

Today cash crops and outside wages have very largely taken over the role of rice in trade, but the same principles hold, and the significant point to be made is that each family directs its surplus production to the acquisition of money and durable prestige wealth, and that, while this wealth serves as an insurance against want, it is used, as a rule, neither to increase future household production nor to gain control over the labour of others. In short, it is not institutionally invested to reproduce permanent economic advantage.

This long-standing involvement in trade also shapes, Murray (1981:42) argues, the nature of labour relations, the latter forming, in turn, “a crucial factor in the self-definition of the Iban”. The chief norm, largely followed in practice, is that household land is worked by household labour. However, most families also engage, at least two or three times during the annual rice-farming cycle in inter-family labour exchange. This is called bedurok and involves primarily close kin, friends and longhouse neighbours, collectively kaban belayan. The fundamental characteristic of bedurok relations is that they operate on a principle of strict reciprocity. Thus each household gives a day’s labour to each of its bedurok partners in return for a day’s labour from each on its own farm. Labour is thus exchanged for labour on the basis of strict parity and no household gains additional labour from its bedurok partners. In this sense, the exchange is a perfect expression of the principle I have labelled “egality”. The advantage of bedurok is that farm-work is completed more quickly on each bilik’s farm and that this work takes place in a sociable atmosphere.^[12] Except for the infirm and very young, no one is normally exempt from farmwork, and each household, through its bedurok relations, keeps precise control over its labour credits and debts, exchanging labour with others only on the basis of strict equivalence. Thus, again, favoured households can not, as a rule, translate their material advantage into additional labour, nor can they gain through bedurok a share of the surplus production of other households. Rice, however, may be traded for labour, giving, as we shall see presently, an edge to those who are economically favoured.^[13]

Here Murray (1981:40) argues that these features of Iban society contributed to the formation, and are themselves a reflection, of a distinctive “self-understanding”, a collective “definition of self”, that constitutes, she maintains, the “generative principle” behind much of Iban social practice, including the absence of ascribed ranking. Thus, in an ideological sense, the Iban define themselves as autonomous, freely-mobile individuals; independent producers, each person separately able to trade his surplus production for a profit, disliking authority, and unhampered by hereditary relations of subordination. This self-definition acts both as a prerequisite to interpersonal competition and, at the same time, makes the Iban “unwilling to work for others and hence curtails the development of [permanent] political and economic inequalities” (1981:35).

While Murray’s essay sheds valuable light on the nature of Iban “egalitarianism”, pointing up, in particular, the significance of objective inequalities, her distinction between ideology and practice is often obscure and at times circular. Here, I think, rather than arguing for the causal autonomy of ideology, it is more useful to see Iban society, at the level of cultural understandings, as combining, in an internally coherent way, both “hierarchy” and “egality”, and it is primarily the implications of this argument that I pursue in the remainder of this paper.