Today, Long Mejawah is a small mixed
Kayan and Badeng Dayak community located
far up the Rajang River on its Balui tributary
just below the new Bakun Dam, which is in the
Belaga region of Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
Founded as a Kayan longhouse settlement
called Rumah Nyaving probably in the late nineteenth
or early twentieth century, the Badeng
inhabitants, who are a Kenyah subgroup, were
displaced by the construction of the dam around
2010 and now live there as a separate longhouse
community (Ball 2009: 69). Though Kayan and
Kenyah often tend to be lumped together in the
art world, they are culturally distinct and have
strong social stratifi cation in relation to one another.
In a sense, Long Mejawah represents a
microcosm of the shifting, transitory, and interactive
nature of traditional Dayak communities.
Tom Harnett Harrisson (fi g. 1), a British national
114
who had a remarkably varied career,
served as curator of the Sarawak Museum from
1947 until 1966. Writing in Artibus Asiae, he
reported that nearly sixty years ago now, in October
of 1961, his old friend Tama Bulan, who
was then headman of the Kayan longhouse of
“Umah Nyaving” (the above-mentioned Rumah
Nyaving), took the rigorous trip downriver to
Kuching, some 250 miles from his home, to pay a
visit (Harrisson 1964: 157). The precise identity
of this Tama Bulan has been the subject of some
confusion. Early anthropologists in Borneo, including
Charles Hose, A. C. Haddon, Hiram
Milliken Hiller, and William Henry Furness III,
refer to what they perceived to be an infl uential
Kenyah chief of that name of the Baram district
female name, and Tama Bulan being a title that
a man may take after having a daughter of that
name (Hose and Haddon 1912: 80).
Whatever the case, the Kayan headman
brought his friend a signifi cant artifact, a small
copper alloy fi gure (fi g. 2) that many Indonesianists
consider a signifi cant key to Borneo art
history. As Harrisson notes in his remarkably
detailed write-up of the sculpture (Harrisson
1964: ff), Dayak ritual objects were usually ceremonially
disposed of when there was no longer
an appropriate context in which to use them or
a shaman of suffi cient strength to wield them.
But Harrisson had become known as being interested
in preserving such objects since his early
fi eldwork in the Belaga district some thirty
years earlier, and they were occasionally given
FIG. 1 (left): Tom Harnett
Harrisson
by Howard Coster, 1938.
Half-plate fi lm negative.
National Portrait Gallery, London,
inv. 11712. Transferred from Central
Offi ce of Information, 1974.
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 2 (right): Imun Ajo’.
Possibly Kayan Dayak,
Sarawak or Kalimantan
(Borneo). Date uncertain.
Copper alloy. H: 14.5 cm.
From Harrisson 1964.
Image courtesy of Mark A. Johnson.
(Furness 1902, Hose and Haddon 1912), and artifacts
associated with him are now in the British
Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Hose’s portrait of this individual taken around
1896 shows a confi dent-looking man apparently
of forty or so years (fi g. 3), and sixty-fi ve years
later in 1961, if the same individual, he would
have been well past 100. This combined with the
fact that Harrisson describes his guest as Kayan
and from the Belaga district of the upper Rajang
River, rather than Kenyah of the upper Baram
(fi g. 4), makes it seem clear that these are two
different Dayak leaders. An explanation for the
overlap may lie in the Dayak tradition of individuals
having multiple and changing names. In
this case, Tama Bulan may mean “father of the
moon,” Bulan meaning Moon, a not uncommon
By Jonathan Fogel
OBJECT history
Imun Ajo’
A “Missing Link”