While relations of inequality are apparent within the longhouse and beyond, the dominant principle of everyday social relationships, as represented, for example, by community adat and the deliberations of the aum, labour-exchange, and intra-generational relations between kindred and affines, is clearly one of egality. But equally clearly, Iban egalitarianism belongs to the variety that Woodburn (1982:446-447) has called “competitive egalitarianism”. Here, in contrast to the “non-competitive egalitarianism” of, for example, the !Kung and Hadza, in which “equality does not have to be earned or displayed …, but is intrinsically present as an entitlement of all men”, equality is, characteristically, “only a starting point, a qualification to compete in a strenuous competition for wealth, power and prestige” (1982:446), the outcome of which may, of course, be highly unequal.

But for the Iban, a further point of significance is that competition, particularly between males, centres largely on activities that are engaged in outside the local community. Hence, as we shall see, it is largely through deeds performed beyond the boundaries of the longhouse that unequal status within it was, and continues to be, measured.

Thomas Gibson (1990:125), in an insightful essay on warfare in insular Southeast Asia, has argued that the interior shifting agriculturalists of Indonesia, Borneo and the Philippines were historically involved in “a loosely integrated regional political economy” dominated, through coastal markets and trading states, by institutions of “raiding and coerced trade”. While this economy allowed individual interior groups “a significant degree of autonomy over their internal political and ideological systems”, the specific location of each group in terms of regional trade and raiding relations importantly shaped, Gibson (1990:125-126) argues, its members’ attitudes not only towards war and aggression, but also, more importantly, with regard to hierarchy and social ranking. While some groups were victims of raiding and expropriative trade, others, like the Iban, dominated these relations at the expense of their regional neighbours.

Historically, down through the beginning of the twentieth century, the Iban flourished as the most expansionistic and successful of all inland shifting agriculturalists in western Borneo (Pringle 1970). Today the Iban number nearly 500,000 and form the largest single indigenous group in Sarawak. Iban longhouses are typically located along the banks of relatively large, navigable rivers and their tributaries, facilitating communication and making possible an often intense involvement in inter-regional trade. At the same time, the existence of rivers has allowed the Iban to mobilize in much larger numbers than other, more remotely located shifting agricultural groups. In the past, their settlement along major rivers also meant that, in order to survive, the Iban had, very early on, “to adopt more aggressive tactics in their own defense” (Gibson 1990:138). Aggression became an integral part of Iban relations with the outside world, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Iban had emerged as a warring, highly expansive population, sweeping, as they moved north and eastward through central Sarawak, virtually all others before them, including a number of stratified communities. Following their pacification, which continued into the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Iban became widely travelled traders and migrant labourers (see Sandin 1994:235ff.; Sather 1994:21-24).

Within this regional setting, the Iban saw themselves, in relation to the external world, largely in predatory terms — as predators on neighbouring tribes, whom they raided for heads, captives and land; on the environment whose forests they felled for farms; and on the regional economy, where they traded rice and forest products and earned wages, or where they gained prestige wealth, as surplus producers, migrant workers and traders (cf. Gibson 1990:140). It was from this predatory engagement with the outside world that prestige, power and wealth were, and, to a large degree continue to be won.

The political economy of the Iban was to a significant degree historically geared to this externally-located quest for achieved status. As we have seen, each household directed its surplus rice production primarily to trade. In addition, traditional methods of swidden cultivation were such that the labour of younger, more able-bodied men was required for less than half of each farming year. Returning to the longhouse for threshing in early April, and staying on through the gawai season that follows, men were generally free to leave again after the completion of the felling and clearing of new farms, between late June and August. Most households contain enough women and older men to free them during the rest of the year for such activities as bejalai, trading, labour migration, and, in the past, warfare and raiding. Historically, it was primarily through these activities, engaged in outside the longhouse, and also through the partial appropriation of the labour of women and the elderly within it, that Iban males won power, wealth and reputation.

For young men reputation was ordinarily gained initially through bejalai — by accomplishing successful journeys abroad (Freeman 1970:223). Later, after a man had married and began a family, prestige and reputation were gained chiefly by successful farming; the acquisition of prestige wealth, mainly through trade and the sale of rice; and, above all, in middle and later life, by success in warfare and headhunting. Greatest honour attached to those who led major migrations, or who, as tau’ kayau and tau’ serang, commanded warring expeditions and major raids. Besides taking heads, the Iban also took their enemies captive, chiefly for sale or ransom, although captives were also enslaved in the past. However, as Freeman (1981:43-48) rightly insists, slaves (ulun) never formed a permanent, hereditary stratum in Iban society, but, instead, were eventually either ransomed or adopted into an Iban household, usually that of their captor. Manumission by adoption (betembang) was marked by a declaration by the head of the adopting bilik that its members would kill anyone who persisted in referring to or treating the former captive as a slave (Sandin 1980:81-83). Thus captives were enfranchised and socially incorporated into the community and even bilik of their captors.^[17] A man who successfully killed in war (dengah) was entitled to the use, particularly on public occasions, of an ensumbar or “praise-name”. In all these competitive undertakings, it was, and continues to be, not only skill, daring and personal prowess that was, and continues to be honoured, but, more importantly, the ability, as a leader and initiator of projects, to inspire and organize collective action, and to attract a following and to lead them, as a tuai, in the realization of a collectively shared purpose. Thus achievement was never entirely directed toward individualistic ends (Sather 1994:10).

Although Freeman is right that prestige and reputation are not strictly hereditary, and can be won only by individual effort, the outcome of this quest for honour and prestige was, as we have already noted, markedly unequal. Equality was only an initial precondition, the underlying social state from which individual men and women were expected, in varying degrees, to distinguish themselves. As Gibson (1990:140) observes,

The over-all ethos is one of achieved ranking. Every individual is expected to prove himself, but there is a finely graded ladder of achievement, with the ranking of individuals according to merit the ultimate goal.

At the bottom of this ladder were families who suffered chronic shortfalls in rice production, who were often unable to feed themselves, and who lacked the prestige wealth needed to fall back on in times of scarcity. Such persons lived in chronic debt to others, and, as a result, were obliged to repay their debts in part, or in whole, with family labour. In relation to their creditors, such families therefore existed in a state of long-term debt-liability (cf. Freeman 1981:49). Such persons were known as jaum or pengurang.^[18] As a rule, only those in extreme need assumed such debts, becoming, in effect, unequal suppliers of labour to their creditors, and although they otherwise enjoyed, unlike captive slaves (ulun), the same basic rights as other longhouse members, until they repaid their debts, they lacked the necessary means to compete with others for social position within the community and were generally unable to participate in the major Gawai rituals held in their longhouse and so were precluded from seeking public recognition for their deeds. Hence pengurang families were effectively debarred from asserting their equality and from competing with others in the prestige system. At the other end of the achievement ladder were the raja berani, the “rich and brave”. The raja berani were, to begin with, men whose bilik produced surplus rice crops year after year; who were successful in amassing prestige wealth, and whose lives gave evidence of supernatural favour and inspiration. Those who received dream authorization and excelled as war leaders were additionally recognized as tau’ serang. Very often those who attained prominence were said to possess, besides spiritual inspiration, seregah, meaning “personal forcefulness”, the power to cause others to take notice, to inspire respect or possibly even fear. Thus, it is said that a timid man is “without seregah” (nadai seregah); a diffident man has only a little (seregah mit); while a successful leader characteristically possesses an abundance (seregah besai). Significantly, seregah is not something that a leader is born with, but is acquired and cultivated in the course of life.

For an ambitious man, acknowledgement as a man of substance was only the beginning of a life-long quest for renown (benama). There existed an ascending sequence of ritual festivals, known in the Saribas region as the Gawai Burong, by which if he so chooses, a man might seek to gain public recognition of his achievements, particularly in warfare and other male domains, including today politics and business (Sandin 1977). “Such rituals, the more complex of which (lasting for four or five days)”, were arranged in a sequential scale, with the sponsor “taking the invocation a stage further each occasion until, over a span of forty or more years, the sequence was completed” (Freeman 1981:40). Achievement was thus validated through ritual sponsorship and participation in a graded scale of gawai rituals, with the pursuit of the full sequence absorbing, for most Iban leaders and men of wealth, their entire adult lifetimes.