The ricefield and the hearth : social relations in a Borneo Dayak community

Abstract

Following Freeman's pioneering studies of Iban social organisation, a particular conception of Borneo Dayak social relations has become established in the anthropological literature. In contrast to the classic Radcliffe-Brownian model of social structure in which small-scale societies are presented as organised into systems of segmentary descent groups, the social structure of Dayak societies is seen as consisting in highly independent p residential units or households. This study of the Dayak community of Gerai disputes such an understanding of Dayak social organisation. Because of the overwhelming importance of rice in the lives of Gerai people, the thesis begins by focusing on the production of rice and the groupings that form around that activity. These basic groupings are termed "rice groups". While, as a matter of fact, most rice groups consist of the members of a single household, the notions of household and rice group are shown not to be equivalent. In addition, while many rice groups possess their own ritual hearths and thereby achieve ritual and legal autonomy, an examination of the relationships between different rice groups as these are linked through neighbourhood and ritual hearth affiliation, shows no Gerai group to be characterised by the extreme independence emphasised in the Borneo ethnography. The thesis argues that while a number of ethnographers of Dayak societies have denied the universality of the "Africanist" features of the Radcliffe- Brownian model of social structure, Borneo ethnography has nevertheless retained too strong a conception of social structure as existing independently of the activities of individuals. Dayak social relations may be more fruitfully explored if social groupings are conceived of as constituted in the first instance in the joint activities of their members, rather than as elements of an overarching structure into which those members "fit".