Most local communities reside within a single longhouse (rumah). The latter consists of a series of laterally-joined family apartments (bilik), a passageway (tempuan), and open galleries (ruai), each section of the structure being owned and maintained by a separate family. The household or bilik-family normally contains three generations — parents, a son or daughter, and his or her spouse and their dependent children. The Iban household is ideally a persisting group. It is characteristically perpetuated in each generation by one child, real or adopted, who remains in the natal apartment after marriage and so acts as the principal heir to the household’s estate, including its bilik. This heir may be equally a son or daughter (cf. Freeman 1957). As we have noted, most longhouses in the Saribas region contain a set of core families whose members are related to one another by close cognatic ties and who claim descent, characteristically by known genealogical ties, through an unbroken line of pun bilik, from the settlement’s original founders. Such households tend to occupy the central apartments within the longhouse and generally control a larger share of cultivation plots than others. Other households are related more distantly, typically tracing their connections to the community’s founders through the genealogies of one or more of its core bilik.

A longhouse is typically founded by an accomplished leader, who, once it is established, becomes the community’s “house source” (pun rumah) and usually also its headman or “house elder” (tuai rumah). The positions of “house source” and “house elder” are separable, however, and, subsequent to its founding, they may be held by different individuals. In fact, in the lower Saribas, this is generally preferred, mainly because it is felt that the ritual sacra which the pun rumah cares for should not be exposed to the “heat” (angat) associated with the trouble cases and litigation which the tuai rumah hears at his family’s section of the gallery. While the headman typically deals with mundane matters and acts as a local intermediary between the community and the state, the pun rumah, as the living embodiment of the community’s founding ancestors, performs mainly a ritual office. At its founding, and subsequently each time a longhouse is rebuilt, the pun rumah erects the first support pillar (tiang pemun). The erection (ngentak) of this pillar ritually initiates the main phase of longhouse-construction (cf. Sather 1993:74-75). Ideally this principal source post is erected at the centre of the longhouse structure and as soon as it is raised, the main support posts of each of the other bilik-families comprising the house are erected in order, one at a time, moving outward from the pun rumah’s central post, first upriver and then downriver (see Sather 1993:76-77). The pun rumah’s post can thus be said to centre and establish the principal orientation for the community as an internally structured-whole. The erection of the first source pillar is accompanied by a major sacrifice and invocations which together establish the pillar’s status as the principal tiang pemun for the community as a whole and its custodian, the pun rumah, as the owner of the adat genselan, the adat by which the longhouse is preserved in a “cool” or ritually benign state (Sather 1993:73). Longhouses are continually threatened with the intrusion of spirits and other malevolent forces, by social disharmony, and the breach of ritual prohibitions (pemali), all of which may cause the community to become “hot” (angat). When this occurs, the pun rumah is normally called upon to perform the rites by which it may be restored to a “cool” or ritually benign state (penyelap), including the blood lustration (genselan) of the central tiang pemun and the application of special cooling charms (ubat penyelap) generally kept attached to the top of this post.

What is significant for our purposes here is that the offices of “source” (pun) and “elder” (tuai) act to hierarchize the chief structural units comprising the longhouse community in the Dumontian sense of “encompassment” (1970). Thus, as we have noted, there are both family and longhouse pun and tuai. Within the longhouse, each tuai bilik, in matters of adat, comes under the authority (kuasa) of the tuai rumah. The incorporation of the bilik within the larger adat community — and the corresponding relationship between the bilik elder and the longhouse headman — are symbolized most explicitly in the rules that regulate the use of the family hearths (adat dapur), including their initial installation in the longhouse at the time of house-construction (Sather 1993:73).^[14] These rules symbolize the household’s jural presence within the community and the bounds that incorporate it in the longhouse as a whole. The rupture of these bounds, as, for example, when a family departs to take up residence in another longhouse, must be preceded by a ritual “throwing away of the hearth” (muai dapur) and the payment of ritual reparation to those who remain. Similarly, the relationship between the pun bilik and the pun rumah is expressed in the ritual priority of the central source post over the secondary source posts belonging to each of the other bilik-families in the longhouse. Not only is the central tiang pemun the first to be erected (ngentak ke-dulu), but it takes ritual precedence over the others in the rites that are believed to safeguard the community’s ritual well-being (cf. Sather 1993:75).

Beyond this level of internal encompassment and order represented by the bilik and longhouse, their respective “sources” and “elders”, and symbolized by the hearths and posts, Iban social organization, as it transcends and knits together these groups, is also “based”, as Freeman (1981:50) notes, “on the kindred”. Thus, “in the classless society of the pagan Iban, kindred relationships were [and remain] pervasive” (1981:63).

Indeed, for the Iban, these relationships are not only pervasive but they are also highly inclusive. Thus the term kaban, which Freeman (1960, 1961) glosses as “kindred”, refers, in fact, not only to an individual’s cognates, but, in its most inclusive sense, to friends, neighbours, affines and acquaintances — to everyone, in short, who is not a “stranger”, that is to say, not an orang bukai, literally “other people”. Within this highly inclusive social field, the Iban distinguish more narrowly between kaban mandal, close personal cognates whose relationships are generally traceable, and kaban tampil, affines or, loosely, kin by marriage. At one level, all Iban feel themselves to be kaban. But more effectively, interlocking kindred networks, reinforced by endogamous marriage, provide the basis on which a multitude of groupings are typically formed, extending maximally, as we have said, over the entire river region in which each individual lives. In the past such ties were employed by regional leaders and men of ambition to organize war parties, mount bejalai expeditions or migrations, and to help keep the peace and arbitrate inter-longhouse conflict. They were also called into play on major ceremonial occasions and when new longhouses were built.

Another feature of Iban kaban relations is their strong generational emphasis. This is expressed in both intra-generational unity and inter-generational asymmetry. Thus a strong bond of solidarity characteristically exists between siblings which extends intra-generationally, across each generational level. Thus cousins and close friends, for example, tend to couch their relationship in a sibling idiom, regularly addressing each other as menyadi, or siblings. On the other hand, relations between generations are characteristically asymmetrical and generally marked by authority and respect. Consistent with the highly inclusive nature of Iban kaban ties, respect relations are generalized outward from the three-generation household and are extended to embrace the entire social field of cognates, affines, friends and longhouse neighbours — to everyone, in other words, who is not considered “other people”. This generalization of respect relations is achieved in part by the use of teknonyms. Thus everyone who engages in frequent social relations is addressed, depending on sex and parental status, as “grandfather (aki’)”, “grandmother (ini’)”, “father (apai)”, or “mother (indai) of so-and-so”, using the name of a particular child or grandchild, or by personal name in the case of individuals who have not yet married and attained parental [or grandparental] status. This pervasive use of teknonyms produces a sociocentric categorization of society into three generational levels. Every person is located according to generation, as a child, parent, or grandparent, ensuring the observance, within the longhouse and among kindred, of appropriate degrees of respect. While inter-generational ties are thus unequal, it is, nonetheless, an inequality that is consistent with the egalitarian premises of Iban adat, in that all persons pass through these categories in time, regardless of their birth or achieved status, provided that they marry and bear children.^[15] Moreover, while dividing the society into horizontal levels, these levels do not form a lineal order in that political and economic power tend to be concentrated in the parental generation at the middle. Although the young are generally unequal to the old, everyone, it is important to note, has the same opportunity to marry, bear children, and to grow old, hence even for those who otherwise enjoy little success in life, they can usually look forward in time, should they live long enough, to an honoured status in the community as categorical “parents” or “grandparents”.

Finally, for the Iban, kindred relations are significantly structured by marriage. Iban marriage is very largely endogamous, both preferentially and in actuality. Iban marriage rules thus act to consolidate kindred ties and, secondly, to incorporate non-cognates and those in danger of becoming non-cognates back into the field of one’s close kin. For the Iban, sexual relations (and hence marriage) are prohibited between all cognates of the same household, between siblings (full and half), and all cognates of different generational levels (Freeman 1960:73-74). The first of these prohibitions effectively embeds the household in the wider field of kaban relations. Marriage forges bonds of affinity between households, which, with the birth of children and the passage of generations, are converted into cognatic ties. Beyond the prohibited range of siblings, endogamous marriage is strictly intra-generational. Thus,

The intermarriage of cousins constantly reinforces the network of cognatic ties linking individual Iban, and kin that might otherwise have become dispersed are brought together again (Freeman 1960:76).

The marriage of cousins thus incorporates affines (kaban tampil) and prevents the dissolution of existing cognatic networks. Such consolidation is a continuous process, as without intermarriage, cognates are likely eventually to become “strangers”.

The emphasis in marital relations is on intra-generational solidarity. Following marriage, affinal ties tend to be reinterpreted as homologous cognatic relations, with the dominant emphasis on the solidarity of affines of the same generation. This is expressed not only at the level of marital alliance — for example, in the absence in most Iban communities of bridewealth and other forms of marriage payment potentially expressive of status differentiation — but it may also be seen in the interpersonal relationships that exist between affines themselves, notably between husbands and wives, their respective parents (isan), and co-siblings-in-law (ipar). Ideally, and very largely in practice, each of these relationships is complementary and reciprocal. The explicit aim in marriage negotiations is to maintain status equality between marriage partners and their kaban, and, following marriage, husbands and wives (laki-bini) tend to be treated as a single entity, for example, when they are called upon to perform parallel or complementary ritual functions during public gatherings.^[16]