The Mundane and the mystic: Constructions of human relations with the animal world in Brunei-Dusun and other Bornean folktales

The paper offers a broad six-part classification not only for the animal tales of the Brunei-Dusun (see E.M. Kershaw's 1994 collection) but also for a considerable amount of cognate material collected by British and Dutch scholars in Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan. The main categories proposed are: I. Anthropomorphic interaction among animals, and between animals and humans; II. Birds and animals as messengers and helpers; III. Mockery of animals incurs a curse; IV. Animals turned into (or restored as) miraculous humans upon a chance stimulus, or through beneficial treatment by a human of high virtue; V. Dusun and crocodiles showing reciprocal respect in modern times, or evincing transmutable identity in the past; VI. Wild-boars transformed into humans (en masse). In the Brunei-Dusun section each category is followed by one tale in English translation, for illustration. What emerges from ‘between the lines’ of this literature is an ideology which does not classify humans as a species so distant from other animals as western, let alone Muslim, thought would have it, nor that is set far above the jungle creatures in status and power.     

Land, Kinship Relations and the Rise of Enclosed Settlement in First Millenium B.C. Britain

Enclosed settlements are characteristic of the first millennium B.C. in Britain, contrasting with the predominantly open settlements of the fourth to second millennia. Settlement enclosures have recently been interpreted in symbolic terms, the enclosure marking social divisions between social groups. Anthropological studies indicate that divisions between groups may be more clearly marked in societies which use land intensively than in ones which use it extensively, because of the need to prevent valuable land from passing outside the group by out-marriage and inheritance. The earlier first millennium B.C. was a period of agricultural intensification in Britain. It is suggested that settlement enclosure became widespread at this time because agricultural intensification led to land becoming more valued as a form of property. This in turn led to changes in kinship relations, with the division between 'insiders' and 'outsiders' becoming more significant than before. Apparently 'special' deposits of material in enclosure ditches have been interpreted as a way of reinforcing such a division.