Why Is the Cassowary Sacrificed? 241

NOTES

1. Later fieldwork prompted Ralph to modify some of his statements in the cassowary paper (see Majnep and Bulmer 1977), but the essentials of the analysis remain unchanged.

2. Based on a total of 18 months’ fieldwork in 1972, 1973-74, 1978 and 1985 in the Jimi Valley, Western Highlands Province. At various times I received financial support from the University of Papua New Guinea, the PNG Department of Natural Resources, the Myer Foundation, the New York Zoological Society and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I thank these institutions for their support, the provincial and national governments for permission to undertake research and my Maring hosts for their patience and generosity. A longer version of this paper was delivered to a conference on Sacrifice in Melanesia at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, in 1987, and I thank participants for discussion of the paper. Dr Don Gardener and Professor Jan Pouwer also commented helpfully on earlier drafts.

3. Majnep (in Majnep and Bulmer 1977:150) qualifies this assertion.4. This seclusion is not as onerous as it might seem, for after a period of residence in a bush-house, where he is

brought provisions by male kin, he may resume residence in his homestead. Nonetheless he should be circumspect in his movements, avoiding public gatherings, especially those attended by outsiders, and move from his home to gardens by well-screened minor paths. Even this period of partial re-integration into the community is spoken of as seclusion.

5. Nowadays the dead are buried in graves marked by ornamental shrubs and flowers and stoudy fenced against pigs.6. For the Kalam, the crop singled out for opposition to cassowaries is taro (Bulmer 1967). My Kundagai

informants were aware of this, but denied any need to keep cassowaries and taro segregated.

REFERENCES

BUCHBINDER, Georgeda, and Roy A. RAPPAPORT, 1976. Fertility and Death Among the Maring, in P. Brown and G. Buchbinder (eds), Man and Woman in the New Guinea Highlands. American Anthropological Association Special Publication 8. Washington, pp. 13-35.

BULMER, R.N.H., 1960. Political Aspects of the Moka Ceremonial Exchange System Among the Kyaka People of the Western Highlands of New Guinea. Oceania 31:1-13.

-----------, 1967. Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy Among the Karam of theNew Guinea Highlands. Man 2:5-25.

HEALEY, Christopher, 1985. Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: a Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology. Ethnology 24:153-65.

-----------, 1988. Culture as Transformed Disorder Cosmological Evocations Among the Maring. Oceania, 59:106-22.HUBERT, Henri, and Marcel MAUSS, 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. London, Cohen and WestKEESING, Roger, 1982. Kwaio Religion: the Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New York, Columbia

University Press.LIPUMA, Edward, 1988. The Gift of Kinship: Structure and Practice in Maring Social Organization. Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press.MAJNEP, Ian Saem, and Ralph BULMER, 1977. Birds of my Kalam Country. Auckland, Auckland University

Press/Oxford University Press.RAPPAPORT, Roy A., 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven,

Yale University Press.-----------, 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA, North Atlantic Books.SCHIEFFELIN, Edward L., 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. St Lucia, University of

Queensland Press; New York, St Martin’s Press.STRATHERN, Marilyn, 1979. The Self in Self-decoration. Oceania, 49:241-57.

MANY VOICES: RHETORIC AND ETHNOGRAPHIC UNDERSTANDING IN A BORNEO DAYAK COMMUNITY

Christine Helliwell Macquarie University

In 1977 Ian Saem Majnep and Ralph Bulmer published a remarkable ethnography: Birds o f M y Kalam Country. The significance of this book for anthropology lies less in the wealth of information about Kalam ornithology which it contains than in the relationship between its joint authors as articulated in the text. In what was, for the time, an extraordinary departure from convention, it is Majnep (anthropological subject)

242 Christine Helliwell

rather than Bulmer (anthropologist) who ‘speaks for’ the Kalam in the book. He does so in large chunks of verbatim text, each juxtaposed with, but clearly distinct from, Bulmer’s accompanying commentary. Since the voice of the informant does not become lost in that of the anthropologist, as is the case in most conventional ethnography, the reader has access to two sets of explicitly differing understandings.1 The result is an ethnography that moves towards dialogue: an account of extraordinary richness and insight.

Yet in setting out the separate voices of Majnep and Bulmer side by side, the book inevitably invites the drawing of parallels between them. And just as we know that Bulmer, in his capacity as expert Western (scientific) informant on birds, cannot be said to be voicing the understandings of all English speakers (perhaps less than 1% of whom might be able to discuss the differences between bird species in the terms used by Bulmer), so is the possibility bom that Majnep, in his role as expert Kalam informant on birds, is outlining for us a body of knowledge that is far removed from the day-to-day understandings of most Kalam. In addition, the unusual presence in the book of a Kalam as personalised subject rather than that of The Kalam as generalised other, means that the reader begins to grasp the understandings discussed as informed and mediated directly by biographical experience. For all the factual descriptive nature of most of the discussion, the idiosyncrasy of the detail creates such a powerful sense of a unique individual, that it becomes difficult to sustain the impression of Majnep as speaking at all times for all Kalam. The ghosts of other Kalam voices, linked to different biographies, haunt the pages.2 Much has been written over the last 20 years on the many confusions involved in reducing the conceptions held by members of another society to a neat set of anthropologically-constructed understandings.3 In so elegantly avoiding these problems, Birds o f My Kalam Country forces us to ask the vital question as to whether depiction of a society as univocal becomes any more valid simply because the onus of representation is shifted from the anthropologist to the informant.

In the decade or so that has passed since publication of Birds o f M y Kalam Country, there has been a growing literature within anthropology in support of the notion that any one society at any one time contains a range of conflicting and even contradictory opinions, ideas, meanings and understandings, no one of which may be privileged as the ‘authentic’ (cultural) voice.4 It is the ethnographic text itself which flattens out the contradictions and ambiguities that exist in any set of human relationships, and so creates an artificial unanimity far removed from the daily experience of those who engage in such relationships. Those rare texts which have allowed us to hear the voices of ethnographic subjects themselves, have contributed enormously to our awareness of the limitations of the univocal approach, in granting us access to conceptual worlds that are as transparently contingent and therefore as potentially disordered as our own.

But while the fictional character of univocality has been pointed up, and its ethical and political dimensions elaborated, its practical implications for the ethnographic enterprise have been less discussed. While most ethnographers would accept in theory the need to canvass a wide range of opinion on any subject as a fundamental requirement of doing fieldwork, in practice it is all too easy, as I found myself, to overlook the differences that do exist in another society, in favour of identifying sameness. In addition, even if differing modes of understanding are located, their portrayal is itself problematic: contradiction does not sit easily within the confines of an orthodox ethnographic text. Alternative voices may thus conveniently be classified as irrelevant, although the criteria according to which this is done, like the voices themselves, generally remain unacknowledged in the text. Yet the assumption that an entire community of thought is reducible to the one ‘essential’ shared voice, implicit in such standard ethnographic statements as ‘the X believe.. . ’, may subvert understanding of the workings of any society. In privileging one voice as somehow ‘authentic’, and in raising it to the status of a ‘cultural belief’, the ethnographer is removing that voice from the very political and rhetorical context within which it can be seen to make sense.

This paper takes up the question of univocality in the context of a Borneo Dayak community. Within the ethnography of Borneo the village dwelling has long been described as the basis of Dayak social organisation, and the group that lives in that dwelling - the household - as the most fundamental entity.5 Among the Dayaks of Gerai too,6 this view not only exists but is accorded legitimacy in certain contexts. Yet, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, this can in no way be taken as evidence of its authentic ‘cultural’ status. To focus on this one interpretation as exhaustive of Gerai opinion on the matter would be to profoundly misunderstand the nature of Gerai domestic relations.

IIThe population of Gerai is divided spatially into those who live permanently in the village proper, and those

who do not. While the former may spend long periods living at their ricefields in order to minimise travelling time,7 they own permanent dwellings in the village which they return to once any particular ricefield task has been completed. The latter, on the other hand, do not own dwellings in the village, and live permanendy either in small ramshackle communities close to the ricefields, or in flimsy farm huts located at the ricefields themselves.

Many Voices . . . in a Borneo Dayak Community 243

This spatial division admits of a broad social one. Up until perhaps 30 years before I arrived in Gerai, under customary law only dwellings containing consecrated hearths were permitted in the village. Since consecrated hearths might be lodged only in longhouse apartments - each containing seven separate floor levels, 16 ironwood beams holding the entire structure together, and a roof peaking at 10.5 metres above the ground - the construction of a village dwelling involved an enormous investment of resources. Thus, on the whole, those households which possessed village dwellings at that time8 were among the wealthiest in the community. In addition, since guardianship of a consecrated hearth carries with it higher social status and increased authority, it would seem that 30 or so years ago the spatial distinction between village and non­village residents bespoke a division of the community along social, economic and political lines.

Nowadays the social boundaries of Gerai are less clearly defined, the result, primarily, of a decision made some 30 years ago to allow dwellings lacking consecrated hearths to be built in the village proper. Whereas in the past only wealthy households were able to live in the village, today a large number of less than substantial structures provide village residence for poorer households.9 For the very poorest households of the community, ownership of even this class of dwelling remains beyond them, requiring an additional expenditure beyond subsistence needs that they simply cannot afford.10 A second change in customary law made some time after the first, which allowed consecrated hearths to be lodged in dwellings other than seven- levelled longhouse apartments, resulted in the further blurring of residential patterns. However, since such dwellings must still be of solid permanent construction, guardianship of consecrated hearths remains the sole prerogative of wealthier households. In addition, consecrated hearths must still be lodged only in village dwellings, and so the spiritual and political power which they confer is still associated exclusively with the village proper. As a result, while the distinction between village and non-village residents may have blurred somewhat in the last 30 years, the village proper remained, in 1985-86, the place in which the publicly authoritative voices of the community - those voices that others would listen to and take heed of on public occasions - were to be found.

IllFor the entire period of my fieldwork in Gerai I lived within the village proper, in an apartment in one of

the two remaining longhouses. This meant not only that my day-to-day interaction was confined almost exclusively to those who had chosen for whatever reasons to live in the village itself, but that my immediate neighbours - those with whom my relationships were most intimate and intense - were all members of households having guardianship of consecrated hearths. These were people who, more than any others, taught me the language and schooled me in the right and wrong ways of doing things. Starting from my first day in the village, they were simply ‘The Gerai’; what they were teaching me was ‘Gerai culture’.

From my village neighbours I learned that all Gerai Dayaks should live in the village proper. As I understand it at this point, the only people who might legitimately live away from the village were the very poor, who were ashamed of putting their poverty on public display. But even they, according to this view, should be taking the opportunity, while living close to their ricefields and to the jungle, to accumulate the resources needed to erect a village dwelling.11 My neighbours generally talked of such people with pity and compassion. ‘Rasowe. . .jera-e’ (‘They’re ashamed.. .poor things’) they would murmur, as they discussed why such people appeared so rarely in the village. Yet at the same time there was a hostility mixed in with the sympathy, which evidenced itself in muted conversations about such people’s deficiencies. Poverty in Gerai is often accounted for, especially by the wealthy, as the product of a spiritual or moral imbalance in the domestic group in question,12 and the ambivalence could no doubt in part be explained in these terms. Yet the same degree of hostility was not directed towards poor households living in the village.

On several occasions during my stay in Gerai this anger became explicit. One of these occurred late in 1986 when an elderly man and his heavily pregnant daughter were carried into the village from the farm hut where they had been living with the woman’s husband and her two children. They had both eaten a meal of poisoned mushrooms, and the man was dead on arrival in the village. As his daughter lay dying in the village house of her sister, people gathered to berate her in fury and grief:

Ha! This is how it is if you want to live at the farm hut.. . Why did you want to live there? Why did you want to live alone? Far from the village? We already told you. But you didn’t want to listen.

In my experience this kind of anger was unprecedented in the treatment of the desperately ill. It focused directly on the woman’s ‘choice’ to live away from the village, even though her household was, by common consensus, one of the poorest in the community and therefore able to live outside the village with some legitimacy.

There was, on the whole, no ambivalence in the way my village friends talked about those households which lived away from the village without having the excuse of great poverty. Wherever people gathered in

244 Christine Helliwell

the village to chat, such households were a favourite topic of conversation: ja t (‘bad/wicked’) was the term that would be used repeatedly in describing them. When I asked why such people were ‘bad’, I was told ‘Ngei ken betor-e. Nak diam bediret, diam d ’umo’ (‘They don’t want/need their companions. They want to live alone at their ricefields’). Such households, in other words, were viewed as selfish: as putting their independent interests above their obligations to the broader community. In not needing others they refused to share with others, preferring to live alone, it was said, in order more easily to put this refusal into practice. But in addition, their wish to remove themselves from the eyes and ears of village neighbours suggested an engagement in more illicit activities. My village informants, when discussing such households, repeatedly asked the question ‘N gopai nak diam d ’umo? SunyiV (‘Why do they want to live at the ricefield? It’s lonely!’) Behind it lurked the dreadful possibility that such households were engaging in sorcery and consorting with evil spirits.

During my first year in Gerai this view that all households should live in the village proper, thus placing themselves both within networks of day-to-day sociability and under the jurisdiction of the broader village community, was the one that I heard repeatedly from all my friends and informants. In addition, it was asserted unopposed in a number of different public contexts, in a rhetorical style that suggested it to be a position shared by all people of Gerai. At this point I did not yet recognise that those whose voices are accorded legitimacy on public occasions - those whose articulateness is admired and whose knowledge of customary law is respected - are invariably village dwellers as the only people who may have guardianship of consecrated hearths. What I did understand was that this view was treated as authoritative within the Gerai community at large. Obediently, I wrote in my notebook for December 1985: ‘Gerai people place great moral value on living in the village itself. Clearly connected to conceptual distinctions between village and ricefield/jungle. Latter seen as place of spirits, animals - nonhumans?’

IVI first met Sendi when we both contributed labour to a ricefield planting during my second fieldtrip to Gerai

in 1986.13 Over copious quantities of rice wine he told me that he had spent his entire life far from the village, and that he now lived in a tiny satellite hamlet with his daughter and son-in-law. He urged me to come and visit him: ‘Nyaman di nun’ (‘It’s good there’). So I began to visit his household, and then, over time, to visit other households nearby, both in the same hamlet and further afield in farm huts.

When I broached with Sendi the question of why he did not live in the village, he chuckled.

Why should I want to live in the village? Here it is good. The water is clean. We’re close to our rice.We’re close to the jungle so we obtain lots of meat, lots of vegetables, everything. . . Rattan, straws for weaving baskets. I don’t want to live in the village!

Yet others, including Sendi’s daughter, talked of how they were working to accumulate the resources to build village houses. Some of these, when I asked, admitted that they preferred to live away from the village because they felt ashamed of their poverty. But many more vigorously refuted this suggestion. Sendi’s daughter herself told me:

No, we don’t feel ashamed. Why should we feel ashamed? Certainly we don’t have a lot of possessions.But we always produce rice, always enough rice. Our children - look at them! - are healthy. We don’t feel ashamed. We live here, at the farm hut, because it’s close to the ricefield. My father is already old.He can’t work any more. We live here because if we lived in the village it would be difficult for me to work in the ricefields.14 But our children must go to school. . . I very much want my children to go to school. So we must move to the village. That’s how it is.

A large number of the people who had in recent years built village houses also explained their moving to the village as primarily motivated by their wish to have their children attend school. Many fewer spoke of moving to the village out of any desire per se to be part of the village community.

While my informants in the village tended to discuss extra-village residence as a negative category - that is, to explain it as the product of not wanting to live in the village (because of shame, or unwillingness to share, or whatever) - those who lived away from the village generally gave positive reasons for doing so. Some, it is true, talked of simply wanting to be free of the interference or disapproval of neighbouring village households, but most pointed to the advantages of being close to ricefields and jungle. In addition, many took pains to demonstrate to me that they were neither antisocial nor poor: pointing to their wealth in rice and other goods, their readiness to share with kin and friends both inside and outside the village, and the networks of sociability existing between themselves and households nearby. In doing so they were implicitly contradicting the view of themselves (as extra-village residents) which they otherwise paid lipservice to on public occasions. In further seeking to ascribe legitimacy to their own positions, almost all reminded me of the fact that in the past

Many Voices . . . in a Borneo Dayak Community 245

many more people had lived away from the village than now did so. Looking back in my field diary to the time when I was visiting frequently with Sendi and his neighbours, I find this, heavily underlined: Who are ‘The Gerai*?

VIn order to live permanently in the village a household requires a village dwelling of its own. Differing

ideas within the community about the value of village residence, then, are reflected in conceptions of the domestic group itself, and particularly in the degree to which that group is felt to be definable by its ownership of a village dwelling.

In the language of Gerai the word rumah is used to mean ‘dwelling’, but particularly ‘village dwelling’. In this latter sense it contrasts with the term dengau, whose most basic meaning is ‘farm hut’, but which is used generally to refer to any dwelling away from the village.15 With these basic meanings, all Gerai people would agree. It is with the way the word rumah is used in certain contexts, the way this basic meaning is extended, that differences in understanding occur, and that particular patterns take on a broader significance. The term that I heard most generally applied to the household throughout my fieldwork was seberumah (those who share one rumah). Significantly, such a domestic group was normally spoken of as being serumah (of one rumah), regardless of whether or not it actually owned a rumah (a village dwelling). I never once heard any household which lived away from the village referred to as sebedengau (those who share one dengau), although theoretically this was a more accurate description.

In my early language-learning days in Gerai I pointed out a number of times to my informants (who all lived in the village) that very often those whom I heard referred to as members of the same seberumah lived apart.16 In other words, a number of seberumah consisted of more than one household (using that word in its standard sociological sense). My friends explained that in such cases the one village rumah constituted the ‘source’ (bungkung), and therefore the focal point for the group as a whole. Later, when my knowledge of the community had increased, I asked why those domestic groups which did not own rumah but lived instead outside the village proper in dengau, were also referred to as seberumah. I was told that while such a group might not yet own a dwelling in the village, its members were jointly committed to the future building of one. If they had no such intentions, then they were in some sense not legitimate seberumah: ‘ja tV (‘bad/wicked!’). Village people often went on to explain that any normal Gerai seberumah wishes to own a village dwelling, because such a dwelling comprises tangible expression of its identity as an independent group: as a group which ‘stands’ (diri), and so takes full ritual and legal responsibility for itself. In this view, the unity of the domestic group focuses most essentially on its ownership - either actual or potential - of a village rumah.

It’s the way of life here. If you are one rumah, if you grow rice together, share rice, what is important is that you own a rumah, that you build a dwelling in the village. Only then can you stand, if you don’t yet have a permanent dwelling, you don’t yet stand: you don’t yet take responsibility for yourself. If you’re like that it doesn’t feel good. So if you don’t yet own such a dwelling you are certainly wanting to build one.

On my own filing-card wordlist I entered under rumah the term seberumah, with its meaning as ‘household?, those who share a village dwelling (but may live apart)’.

Only during my second fieldtrip to Gerai, after I had begun talking to Sendi and his neighbours, did it occur to me that what I had so diligently recorded and rehearsed as ‘The Gerai’ notion of the domestic unit, and ‘The Gerai’ meaning of seberumah, were each only one among differing interpretations. Sendi himself told me, in a tone of sturdy independence:

Although we don’t own a rumah in the village, still we are one rumah. My daughter here, it is she who has stayed on with me, she belongs to me (iyo ha' aku). We make ricefields together. So even though it’s true that we don’t have a rumah in the village, we take care of one another, and we work together. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to already have a rumah to do those things... We feel the same as if we already had one.

This was a view that I heard articulated often amongst those who did not own dwellings in the village: that what was important in determining the unity of a domestic group and in providing evidence of its identity, was the quality of relationships between its members, and not its possession of a village rumah. I pointed out to those who held such a view that there were domestic groups in the community whose members were known to loathe one another, but which were nonetheless referred to as seberumah. They, too, explained away such exceptions by arguing that they were not legitimate seberumah: *jat!* (‘bad/wicked!’). At this point I amended the entry on my filing-card wordlist to read: ’a group of people, normally living together?, who stand in a particular type of relationship to one another’. I noted beneath it that seberumah appeared to have many of the

246 Christine Helliwell

same connotations as the English word ‘household’, which is used to denote a group of people who live together, also in a particular type of relationship,17 even if they live in a caravan or tent rather than in a ‘house’.

VIWithin the ethnography of Dayak societies, the ‘household’ has generally been identified as the most basic

social structural unit. While the precise meaning of the term ‘household’ has rarely been elaborated on in these texts, it is clear from the available descriptive material that such a grouping is often defined in terms of putative rather than actual residencce. In other words, different members of the ‘household’ may, for a range of reasons, choose to live apart; but they hold joint rights to a permanent village dwelling. In the prevailing model of Borneo societies it is these permanent (village) dwellings which comprise an enduring social structure in the absence of clearly-defined descent groups.

Given this orthodoxy, I felt little need to question my early view of the Gerai domestic group, as defined through its shared rights to a single village dwelling which the group either lived in or was committed to building for itself. In my notebooks, too, the seberumah became a ‘household’. Not only did this undertaking accord with the position that I had heard articulated repeatedly during my first year in the community, but the actual term used to refer to the group - seberumah - indicated a conceptual attachment between group and village dwelling (rumah). Since the use of the same term to denote both the village dwelling and those who inhabit that dwelling is a characteristic of Borneo societies, in this respect also, my Gerai material appeared to fit the Borneo pattern.

My many conversations with Sendi and his neighbours finally forced me to acknowledge the existence of differences in the way the seberumah may be conceived of and talked about in Gerai. In this paper I have focused on two conflicting definitions. The fact that each of these two versions sought to defend a particular lifestyle, suggests that both were rhetorical in character. It is the ownership of rumah which, more than anything else, legitimates traditional authority within the community, and it is the congregation of people into a village that enables that authority, and the forms of social control that it involves, to be more effectively exercised.18 Thus it comes as no surprise that those who most strongly advocated the view of seberumah as defined by its attachment to a village dwelling, and who spoke of those who lived away from the village as ja t (‘bad/wicked’), were all residents of the village proper who either had, or aspired to have, guardianship of consecrated hearths. In contrast, many of those who lived outside the village sought to stress the ties between seberumah members as constitutive of the group itself. In addition, these latter, aware that their residential style conflicted with what was publicly described as legitimate behaviour, often felt a need during conversation with me to legitimate their own lifestyles. Thus they would point both to the abundance of their harvests and to the health of their children, as evidence of the spiritual balance of their own seberumah.

Each of these versions, then, is embedded in a political and rhetorical context which includes the other. The elevation of either to the position of ‘authentic’ (cultural) voice would necessitate its removal from that context, and would thus involve a distortion of its varying meanings within the community at large. In addition, it is difficult to locate non-arbitrary criteria on the basis of which one voice might be chosen to succeed to this position over the other. Given the rhetorical nature of each it seems absurd to suggest that either has some kind of ontological priority.

Yet the fact remains that on public occasions Gerai people in general - whether resident inside or outside the village - accord a legitimacy to only one of these views, and so create a strong impression of unanimity of belief. The fact that the term by which the group is denoted is the same as that used to refer to the village dwelling, reinforces this impression. So it was initially this ‘authoritative’ conception of the seberumah which found its way into my notebooks as the one essential view held by all Gerai people. Yet the according of legitimacy to a view in certain public contexts does not necessarily imply that this view is either adhered to in private, or deemed to be the only possible view, by those who accord it such legitimacy. Rather such accordance suggests the capacity of some to impose their views on others in public contexts, and thus points up disparities of power and authority within the community.

My own willingness to accord for so long some kind of authenticity to the view of seberumah as defined by a permanent (village) dwelling, can no doubt be attributed in part to my preconceptions concerning the social organisation of Borneo societies, and indeed to the resonances of those conceptions with the Western notion of ‘household’. But the point of this paper has been to demonstrate the much greater degree to which such willingness stemmed from my felt need to locate ‘The One’ essential set of understandings in Gerai, in preparation for future textual description of something called ‘Gerai belief’ or ‘Gerai culture’. From the beginnings of my fieldwork I had some vague awareness that alternative views of the seberumah existed in the community. But until I met Sendi I was happy to ignore or overlook those views: designating them as insignificant in terms of the numbers of people who voiced them, and in terms of an unexamined assumption that they could most likely be analytically reduced to the publicly authoritative view. In retrospect it seems to me inevitable that the presumption of univocality results in the ethnographer becoming allied with one among a

Many Voices . . . in a Borneo Dayak Community 247

number of differing positions found within the community under study. Most commonly, and for the reasons outlined in this paper, it is the views advanced by the more powerful in the community which are elevated to the status of ‘cultural belief’ and thus made the focus of anthropological interest.

This is not merely questionable politics; it is also poor anthropology. In my own case, definition of the seberumah in terms of its attachment to a village dwelling entailed a serious distortion of the nature of Gerai social organisation. The term ‘household’ is entirely inappropriate for denoting that group of people who act together in certain domestic, economic and political contexts in Gerai: as I have shown, such a group does not necessarily live together, nor do its members necessarily share rights to a single village dwelling. My research indicates a fluidity of the seberum ah in both space and time that is entirely at odds with any attempt to circumscribe it conceptually within enduring arrangements of bark and wooden walls.

VIIPoor anthropology is not a feature of Birds o f M y Kalam Country. For while Majnep and Bulmer might in

places imply that the material in the book represents the understandings of ‘The Kalam’, ultimately Majnep speaks about himself, as himself. As a result, questions about the ‘cultural’ status of what Majnep has to say can in no way detract from the richness and the explanatory power of his account. What we encounter in this book is one authentic Kalam voice - a far cry from the usual ethnographic fare of fragments of unspecified voices which together (we are told) constitute a ‘culture’. It is because of this individuality of tone in Birds o f My Kalam Country that we sense the existence of other Kalam voices: because Majnep does speak for himself, it is difficult to imagine that he can be speaking for all Kalam.

NOTES

1. It is this that distinguishes Birds of My Kalam Country from more orthodox ethnographies containing lengthy sections of verbatim native text which is discussed in an accompanying anthropological commentary. In these latter ethnographies it is the anthropologist who ‘speaks for’ the people under study - thus the native text is itself taken as the primary subject of elaboration and explanation and the commentary normally provides an exegesis of that text. In Birds of My Kalam Country, on the other hand, something external to the text is taken as the subject of analysis (Kalam birdlife), and both Majnep and Bulmer offer descriptions and explanations of it. That Bulmer’s role is not that of providing simple exegesis is shown by the fact that he explicitly disagrees with Majnep’s account on numerous occasions.

2. Bulmer himself does not believe Majnep’s bird classifications to be necessarily shared by all Kalam. Thus he makes careful note of differences between Majnep and other Kalam in this respect (e.g. p.65, p.98). However all the statements made in the book about the significance of certain bird species in conceptual or symbolic terms, are presented as the beliefs of ‘the Kalam’.

3. Most of the earliest of this literature focused on Levi-Strauss’s structuralist model. Bulmer’s well-known paper of 1967 was itself a contribution to this critique.

4. See especially Asad (1979), Keesing (1985), and several of the essays in Clifford and Marcus (1986)..5. cf. King (1978:13):

Households. . .are generally one of the most important social, economic and ritual groups in Bornean societies.. .in the absence of an overall descent group structure the hallmark of studies on Bornean peoples has been the detailed analysis of the composition, characteristics, functions and developmental cycle of these units.

6. Gerai is a Dayak community of some 700 people located in the north-east of the kabupaten (sub-province) Ketapang in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat (West Borneo). Following Hudson (1970) I would classify Gerai Dayaks (who distinguish themselves by no ethnic name, nor affiliate themselves with any broad Dayak ethnic grouping) as a ‘Malayic Dayak’ people. This categorises them linguistically with the Iban and other Ibanic-speaking peoples, although many aspects of Gerai life are more strongly reminiscent of the ‘anarchist’ and diffident Land Dayak traditionally thought to have inhabited this entire region (see e.g. Avê (1972:186), also Lebar’s (1972) unpaginated map of the ethnic groups of Borneo). By far the most important economic activity in Gerai is the cultivation of rice in swiddens on the northern sunny slopes of hills.

Up until about 30 years ago the village proper of Gerai consisted of four longhouses clustered together on the banks of a tiny stream. But of these only two now remain. In the places where the other two once stood and beyond, a plethora of free-standing dwellings have sprung up. In 1986 just under 80% of the population of Gerai lived permanently in free-standing dwellings.

Fieldwork in Kalimantan Barat was carried out between March 1985 and February 1986, and between June 1986 and January 1987. It was funded by an Australian National University PhD Scholarship.

7. Especially during times of high labour requirements. It was not unusual for me to walk between two and a half and four hours a day in total, to get to and from a ricefield.

8. Elderly informants told me (and my collection of life histories confirms) that up until perhaps 20 years ago many more people lived permanently away from the village than now do so. This is significant in the context of what follows, since it indicates that the present situation, in which large numbers of people live permanently

248 Christine Helliwell

away from the village proper, is not the result of changes in recent years. Recent changes have caused people to more in to the village rather than out of it.

9. Of the total 121 Gerai permanently inhabited dwellings in 1986, 106 were found in the village proper. Of these 55 contained consecrated hearths.

However it should be noted that as an indication of the numbers of people living permanently away from the village, the figure of 15 households out of 121 is highly misleading. It is not uncommon for domestic groups sharing rights to a permanent village dwelling to separate, so that part of such a group lives semi-permanently at its farm hut, returning to live in the village for perhaps two or three months a year. For a number of reasons, I categorised these people as permanent village residents when I carried out my village census (see Helliwell 1990).

10. Unless a ricefield is located so close to the village that those cultivating it can quickly walk back and forth, it requires a farm hut as a place where people can rest out of the sun, shelter from the rain, take care of small children, heat water, cook food and sleep overnight when necessary. Very poor households are unable to afford the labour and resources required to build a second dwelling in the village. So the farm hut itself becomes their place of residence.

11. All Gerai people readily acknowledge the economic advantages of living at or close to their ricefields. Those advantages arise from, firstly, the savings made in time spent travelling to and from their ricefields, and secondly the fact that ricefields tend to be much closer to the jungle than the village is, providing those who live at the farm huts with ready access to firewood, game and wild vegetables.

12. This applies especially to poverty in rice, and is one of the reasons why households that are chronically short of rice may feel ashamed. Inability to produce children or to raise them beyond childhood is often described as resulting from the same cause. For this reason Gerai would boast in the one breath to me of their wealth in rice and of their healthy children (see Helliwell 1990:43-4).

13. Sendi is not his real name.14. This is because she was breastfeeding at the time, and so needed to have her youngest child continually at hand.15. Although dengau may also be used colloquially to refer to dwellings in the village.16. As already pointed out, it is common for some members of a seberumah to live permanently at the ricefields,

while the rest of the group live in the village.17. Thus Yanagisako (1979) points out that for English speakers the characterisation of a particular kind of domestic

group as a ‘household’ depends not only on shared residence, but also on the nature of the relationship between its members. A boarding school, for instance, would not be seen as constituting a ‘household’.

18. The building of schools in the village proper has thus helped to consolidate these traditional forms of authority, since it is their presence there which, more than anything else, has been responsible for the movement of many households into the village over the last 30 years.

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ASAD, Talal, 1979. Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology. Man (n.s.), 12:278-92.AVÊ, J.B., 1972. Kalimantan Dayaks - Introductory Statement, in Lebar (ed.), pp. 185-7.BULMER, Ralph, 1967. Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird?. Man (n.s.), 2:5-25.CLIFFORD, James, and George MARCUS (eds), 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley, University of California Press.HELLIWELL, Christine, 1990. The Ricefield and the Hearth: Social Relations in a Borneo Dayak Community. PhD

thesis, The Australian National University.HUDSON, A.B., 1970. A Note on Selako: Malayic Dayak and Land Dayak Languages in Western Borneo. Sarawak

Museum Journal, 28:301-18.KEESING, Roger, 1985. Kwaio Women Speak: the Micropolitics of Autobiography in a Solomon Islands Society.

American Anthropologist, 87:27-39.KING, Victor T., 1978. Introduction, in Victor T. King (ed.), Essays on Borneo Societies. Oxford, Oxford University

Press [for the University of Hull].LEBAR, Frank M. (ed.), 1972. Ethnic Groups of Insular Southeast Asia, vol.l. New Haven, Human Relations Area

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