The Wehea Dayak have a lovely culture that I have come to skim the surface of learning about. They have lived in this region of Borneo for over three hundred years, and they use to span most of this region, but due to overpopulation in other Indonesian areas, the government has taken land and divided it out to transmigrant populations as well as for logging companies and palm plantations. What becomes the largest issue is the idea of landownership. Who owns this land, thus who gets the authority to decide what happens with it. The government has been making those decisions, dividing land and giving it up to the logging companies and palm oil plantation corporations as well as for transmigrant populations for years, and as a result the individuals in Nehas Liah Ding and other Wehean villages have lost vast quantities of land and have had little say in protecting it. Not only is their specific land where the grow medicinal and other plants for consumption that are intrinsically important and necessary for their traditional and cultural practices, but the Wehean forest is in danger as a result of the inability to get it classified as ‘protected land’ rather than ‘production land’. That is one of the reasons we are here. By showing the extreme biodiversity of the forest as well as the cultural importance to the Wehea Dayak and others, we can help facilitate the transfer of the Wehean forest and land to protected, and give them the land that has for centuries been their own.
The Wehea Dayak culture is extremely rich within society here. Historically, the Wehea Dayak are an animistic society, but relatively recent missionary influence has converted a majority of the population here in Nehas Liah Bing. About eighty percent of the people here are Christian and the other twenty are Muslim or Protestant. The result is like nothing I have witnessed anywhere else, but the religions tie together surprisingly well. While if you ask an individual what religion they have, they will respond Protestant or Christian, but then if you ask if they are monotheistic almost all will respond no and say animistic because of their religious beliefs within traditional Wehean society.
The cultural norms here are all socially constructed so individuals are all extremely polite and respectful. When you meet someone for the first time, you shake (well more hold hands) and slightly bow and touch your liver as a sign of respect (your liver is connoted as we think of our heart). Walking down the street, you tell everyone “selamat pagi (good morning), ciang (day), sorrey (afternoon) or malam (night)” and the typical response would simply be responding “pagi” or “malam”. While the main language spoken here is Bahasa Indonesia, a large amount of individuals here speak Wehea, which is the traditional language of their people, but is limited to this region. It is all beautiful. You eat with your hands, well hand really because it is socially rude to eat or touch anyone with your left (both for cultural reasons, as well as sanitary due to the fact that toilet paper isn’t used… if you catch my drift). Men smoke like chimneys, women do smoke but more regularly chew what’s called in English, Beetlenut. It is a nut found in a specific tree that you chew along with a leaf call sirih, and similar to chewing tobacco it gives you a nice body high and plasters your mouth with a deep red. You never really get quite use to the spitting, and there is no cool or polite way to spit except avoid drooling and spit in a trash can. The only real alcohol available in the village is what’s called Palm Wine or more regularly for foreignors is rum. It is an alcohol made by fermenting palm sugar or sap, just as rum is made from fermented molasses. It is damn tasty, but it is only consumed when offered, which has only been once thus far. We all sat on the floor of a family’s house last night and had pork (which if you were lucky you got to see them take the leg or torso, burn the skin and hair off before cooking) last night along with palm wine and beetlenut and cigarettes, which in combination can get you quite intoxicated, and is a damn good time stumbling in your Indonesian and enjoying everyone’s company. People are amazingly kind and happy, they want to share their lives with you, and I have been gladly accepting.
All the kids play soccer, the older ones play on a large field coupled by copious amounts of puddles and cowpies, as the younger ones stage smaller games on the sidelines barely big enough to dribble the ball and frequently tripping over its monstrosity. I managed to play yesterday, and in combination of lack of hydration, lack of fitness and lack of cleats played pretty lethargically, but it was a damn good time. Soccer being the cheapest sport in the world, it is popular and well played all around the world, and the remote village of Nehas Liah Bing is no exception.
Mic, a fellow ethnoecological student (well now after his renaming, Ding Siang), and I last night were laughing at this feeling that we weren’t only in a different country but a whole different world. We sat in a circle smoking cigarettes and sharing stories and listening to the elders speak about life before deforestation in the region, I petting the cats that walk in and out of the room, kids running around, singing echoing through the windows from a healing ceremony right next door, women with weighted ear piercings elongating their lobes to their collarbone, and on and on the multitude of cultural differences that you come to just absorb and breathe in.
I will keep writing as often as possible, but internet is something of a rarity here. We have a modem, but the connection is so poor, that rarely am I able to connect and post. I think that the work that anthropologist do is so important to the world, not just for helping communities of people advocate for themselves in this bureaucratic world, but help us learn how we all choose to live our lives. The study and practice of ethnography is reciprocal in nature, it lets us learn how societies and people live their lives and deal with the struggles of everyday. These practices can help us gleam ways to better the means in which we live our own lives. The Wehea Dayak continue to teach me, and I cannot wait to share more of our story together with you.
Love,
Your Pa(u)l
line of bulehs being welcomed to Nehas Liah Bing
a shaman and one of the chiefs of the village preparing to welcome us
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