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MELANAU 509
in the area so the Melanau trade sago and forest products—rattan, gums and
resins, beeswax, camphor, birds' feathers and timber—for the things they need
in such cities as Brunei and Pantianak on the coast of Borneo, in Johore in
Malaya and in markets in Indonesia, Indo-China and China. Trade is indispensable
to their lives.
The traditional Melanau village once consisted of two or three longhouses,
massive wooden fortresses built on piles, often 30 feet high, usually situated at
the confluence of a strategically important stream with the main river. In front
of each was a long veranda, much like a street. Each village was politically
independent within its own territory and often on terms of active hostility with
its neighbors. When peaceful conditions were established in the latter part of
the nineteenth century, the houses were gradually abandoned and the villagers
built separate family dwellings along the banks of the rivers.
Although physically a single structure, a longhouse was made up of separate
apartments, each ideally owned and inhabited by one married couple and perhaps
one married child, often the youngest. A large part of village life took place on
the veranda, and when small separate houses came to replace the longhouses
much of the culture, especially the performance of communal ceremonies, fell
into disuse.
Political control of the villages was in the hands of aristocratic elders whose
families usually owned the central longhouse apartments and who were the
descendants of the villages' founders. On each side of this core were apartments
owned by freemen, and at each end were the apartments of freed slaves or field
slaves, in contrast to household slaves, who lived in the apartments of their
owners. An elaborate set of customary rules (adat) regulated the behavior of the
ranks to one another and most other aspects of social life. The adat, one of the
community's most valued possessions, was in the custody of the self-appointed
aristocratic elders. No single elder was superior to the others, although one might
have special knowledge that fitted him for particular tasks. For example, a man
with unusual abilities in war might be put in charge of defense and raids, and
another with knowledge of rituals might assume leadership on ceremonial occasions.
A man with charismatic qualities might rise to preeminence during his
lifetime and maintain a loose alliance of villages. Such local leaders, however,
were never able to establish kingdoms, and their rule invariably broke up at their
deaths, if not before.
Melanau society made use of three distinct criteria in organizing social life.
The first was that of local grouping; the second was that of kinship; and the third
was that of hereditary rank. An individual thought of himself in each of these
social dimensions. He was closely identified with a particular locality, especially
a village whose inhabitants were thought to be, and often were, unique in matters
of dialect and custom. As an individual, a person was the focal point of kin with
whom he or she shared a wide range of social and economic interests, regulated
by principles of bilateral descent. Lastly he had, by virtue of birth, a rank status.
At birth a Melanau was placed in the theoretically unalterable and named rank