Kayan Religion: Ritual Life and Religious Reform in Central Borneo. .
Wadley, Reed L.
Jerome Rousseau, Kayan Religion: Ritual Life and Religious Reform
in Central Borneo (1998) Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut
voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde No. 180. Leiden: KITLV Press.
In the 1940s a religious reform movement transformed life in
several Central Borneo societies, including that of the Kayan. Known as
adat Bungan, it eliminated many of the onerous taboos and practices
under the old religion, now called adat Dipuy. Within a decade, elements
of the old ways had crept back as both aristocrats and priests sought to
regain their control over Kayan society and religion.
In this encyclopaedic account of Kayan religion, anthropologist
Jerome Rousseau describes the early stages the Bungan revolution and its
subsequent transformation as a reform of the old religion. He devotes
separate chapters to the religious environment of everyday life,
religious beliefs, ritual specialists, the rituals of the annual
rice-farming cycle, the rituals of the domestic unit, curing and
protective rituals, and the rituals of the life cycle. In each he
provides a comparison of adat Bungan as practiced during his fieldwork in the i 970s and adat Dipuy as remembered by the Kayan.
Rousseau makes very clear throughout the book the great importance
of understanding Kayan stratification. This is seen, for example, in the
history of the new religion. Adat Bungan came at a critical time in
central Borneo. Dissatisfaction with the old religion among commoners
was high as a result of rapid social change brought by colonial
penetration. Subsequent epidemics, missionary activity, and the
deprivation during World War II lead many to question the efficacy of
the old ways. Beginning as the religion of commoners, Bungan did away
with many of the burdensome taboos and other practices in adat Dipuy
(such as time-consuming augury), but it also challenged the authority of
both chiefs and priests. Rather than opposing the newly-popular religion
and risk losing their authority entirely, most aristocrats and priests
chose to accede to the revolution while slowly reintroducing elements of
the old that had bolstered their positions in the past.
The author is mindful that his descriptions are not of a monolithic
Kayan religion, but rather are drawn from a particular set of Kayan at a
particular period of history. To reinforce the point of variation in
practice, he provides useful comparisons with other Kayan people
elsewhere in central Borneo. Rousseau is also aware of his own role as
ethnographer and provides valuable information about his fieldwork
techniques. He shows that the Kayan with whom he worked viewed him as
being interested in adat Bungan in order to convert Europeans and that
his priestly Kayan name made his work easier. However, throughout the
book, he keeps the focus on the Kayan view of things, rather than on
himself as has become the fashion in some recent anthropology.
There is a lot of detail in this book, detail about ritual that
will be fascinating to some, daunting to others, and perhaps
excruciatingly boring to still others. At times the prose becomes a bit
monotonous, but the description is sufficiently broken up by anecdotes,
excerpts from prayers, and commentaries to keep the interested reader
moving forward. Students of religion and of central Borneo societies
will find the book useful, but it is likely they will also have points
of disagreement with it. The parts I found the most interesting were the
history of the Bungan reform movement and the chapter on Kayan beliefs,
In the latter, Rousseau also deals with Kayan disbelief and scepticism,
important subjects that have been too often ignored in traditional
ethnography. In addition, as an anthropologist working in Borneo with
the Iban (a society very different from the Kayan), I found myself at
every turn comparing Rousseau's descriptions with my own
experience. There are even several prayers asking, for example, that
Kayan spears "be like lightning to the eyes of the Iban."
Despite the ending of hostile relations long ago, memories of the old
enmities are still preserved in ritual, as they are among the Iban.
KITLV Press and its editors are to be thanked and congratulated for
having published such a comprehensive ethnography. Nothing is perfect,
however, and the one thing I found most lacking was a table of contents
for the photographs scattered throughout the book. Photos might appear
several or tens of pages away from their references in the text, making
them especially troublesome to locate. But this minor matter should not
detract from the content of the book itself, which will surely come to
be widely used in studies of Southeast Asian religion. It will also
likely be of great interest to the Kayan themselves who might look to
Rousseau's work as a source for understanding their past as well as
for shaping their future. (Reed L. Wadley, Department of Anthropology,
University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri, 65211, USA; reprinted with
permission from the IIAS Newsletter, 20th November 1999)