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128 most elaborately decorated and may feature sacred motifs more frequently than is immediately apparent. Geography and Society The island of Borneo is a huge land mass, covering some 750,000 square kilometers—three times the size of the United Kingdom, one and a half times the size of France, and significantly larger than Texas. Two-thirds of its territory forms the five Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan. Its northern third is divided between the states of Sabah and Sarawak, part of the Federation of Malaysia, and the small, hydrocarbon-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam. The island’s population remains relatively low—an estimated twenty million—and is unevenly distributed, with some highland areas showing a density of less than one person per square kilometer. The geography of the island is defined by a star-shaped system of ridges separating river basins, each of which provides water routes between the highland regions and the coast. Coastal areas, or pesisir, are populated by “Malay,” or Melayu, groups as well as by Chinese and Bugis settlers. Their towns are open to interisland and international trade. The hinterland regions are home to more isolated “tribal” groups, the multi-ethnic “Dayak,” who have long relied on subsistence agriculture, largely swidden rice farming. The subtleties of their ethnic and linguistic classifications have yet to be definitively established or agreed upon, though basic subgroups are conventionally referred to. Among the better known of these are the Iban, Kenyah, Kayan, Bahau, Ngaju, Ot Danum, and various subgroups of traditionally nomadic Punan/Penan. With the exception of the latter, traditionally these peoples tended to occupy relatively small village units, the central feature of which was the communal longhouse. Mats that were woven for utilitarian purposes were intended to cover the rough plank floors of these, sometimes strengthening the floor structure (Munan and Noel 2012) or used for drying rice. The more elaborate examples that concern us here were typically used for creating a more comfortable personal space. Unlike the Indianized, later Islamicized coastal population, these upriver peoples have long maintained their subsistence lifeways, organized into chiefdoms, some rather well integrated as river-based clusters and others with scattered, fluid affiliations. Some had a stratified social structure similar to feudalism in the West (Rousseau 1979, 1990); others had a rather egalitarian yet highly competitive social organization (Sutlive 1978); while still others had an “amorphous” organization in nomadic bands— now mostly settled in tiny hamlets (Sellato 1994; and Sel- FEATURE


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