Abstract
This chapter discusses the historical formation and current features of society in the Kemena and Tatau river basins in Bintulu, central Sarawak, where various ethnic groups live close together in a small area as a result of the historical migration of each group. We refer to previous studies and to interviews we conducted, mainly in 2011. Historically, Vaie Segan and Penan lived in the Kemena basin, Tatau lived in the Tatau basin, and Melanau and Malays came from the inhabited coastal areas. The basins’ ethnoscape changed along with migrations of various ethnic groups—Kayan, Punan Bah, Bekatan, Chinese, Iban and Kenyah—from neighbouring basins. These groups migrated through various routes from the south (Bah River), southeast (Bukit Lumut), east (Belaga River), northeast (Tinjar River, Suai River and Brunei), west (various places including Mukah, Oya, Saribas and Sri Aman) and southwest (Pelagus and Merit rivers). Factors that triggered migration included disease, natural disasters, topography, hydrology, economic interests, political crises, trade, land shortages, access to natural resources and marital relationships. The current multiethnic society is shaped from these multiple migrations and intermarriage. People’s ethnic backgrounds are therefore diverse in any given village, creating a coexistence of religions, languages, family histories and ethnic identities within a single community. There is thus wide variation within each ethnic group depending on the diversity of its members and the interaction with neighbouring communities.
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Notes
- 1.
These rivers are still accessible beyond these rapids, but it requires great effort, skill and local navigational knowledge.
- 2.
See also Langub and Ishikawa (2017) on movements of peoples from the Rejang, Balui and Belaga rivers to Baram, Sebauh, Bintulu and Tatau districts and vice versa.
- 3.
An ethnic group generally considered the earliest known inhabitants of an area in Bornean ethnography.
- 4.
The name ‘Bintulu’ is assumed to come from the Vaie Segan words, ‘metu ulau’ which means ‘to smoke the head of the enemy’.
- 5.
Ethnologue: languages of the world reports the Bintulu (Vaie Segan) population as 4200 (Lewis 2005). However, it assumed their population would be twice that which was reported.
- 6.
These six Tatau groups are: Tatau Murung Data; Tatau Murung Tugang; Tatau Murung Legan; Tatau Murung Muput; Tatau Murung Kakus; and Tatau Murung Balio (Kedit and Chang 2005).
- 7.
According to an oral presentation by Motomitsu Uchibori at a seminar on biomass society and planted forest, Kyoto University, Japan, 2013.
- 8.
Ida Nicolaisen (1976) explains that when the Punan Bah began to settle in Pandan , they called the Penan people ‘Laveang’. Soon they started to use ‘Segaan’ for the Penan (Laveang) when many of them began to intermingle with Malays and Melanau and became Muslims.
- 9.
However, currently there are also many Malays who migrated from other regions in Malaysia.
- 10.
They refer to themselves as ‘a liko’ which means ‘the people of a river, a district or a village’ depending on the context.
- 11.
According to Rensch (2012), Kajang is composed of Lahanan, Kejaman, Sekapan and Tatau. For some time it has been thought that Kajang is related to Melanau in the Melanau-Kajang linguistic grouping. Well acquainted with the Melanau languages, Iain Clayre (1971) was of the opinion that the ‘links [of Sekapan] with the Melanaus are hard to dispute’. Jennifer Alexander (1989) states that ‘the Kajang, including the Lahanan, also claim to have close links to the Melanau’.
- 12.
These are the Uma Juman, Uma Awai, Uma Paku, Uma San and Uma Tevo.
- 13.
They are the Bekatan Malong, Bekatan Sut, Bekatan Kanyau and Bekatan Ngemah. The Bekatan along the Anap River are said to be the Bekatan Malong and Bekatan Sut, while those along the Kakus River are said to be the descendants of the Bekatan Malong. Once living in Kanowit , the Bekatan Ngemah assimilated into the existing Iban community, beginning in 1945 (Sandin 1968).
- 14.
According to GPS data obtained by Osamu Kozan.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted with the permission of the Sarawak Planning Unit. We thank the Institute of East Asian Studies at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak for supporting this research. Research funds were provided by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) 22221010 ‘Planted Forests in Equatorial Southeast Asia: Human-nature Interactions in High Biomass Society’ from the Japan Society for the Promotion of the Science. An earlier version of this paper was published in 2014 (Kato et al. 2014). We greatly appreciate the people in the villages we studied for their understanding and help with this research.
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Kato, Y. et al. (2020). Multiethnic Society of Central Sarawak: An Ethnographic Analysis. In: Ishikawa, N., Soda, R. (eds) Anthropogenic Tropical Forests. Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7513-2_5
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