CHAPTER 4

Material Conditions of the Pagan Tribes of Borneo

With few exceptions, the main features of the dress, adornment,
and weapons of all the peoples are similar, showing only minor
differences from tribe to tribe and from place to place. The essential
and universal article of male attire is the waist-cloth, a strip of
cloth about one yard wide and four to eight yards in length (see
Frontispiece). Formerly this was made of bark-cloth; but now the
cotton-cloth obtained from the Chinese and Malay traders has largely
superseded the native bark-cloth, except in the remoter regions; and
here and there a well-to-do man may be seen wearing a cloth of more
expensive stuff, sometimes even of silk. One end of such a cloth is
passed between the legs from behind forwards, about eighteen inches
being left dependent; the rest of it is then passed several times round
the waist, over the end brought up on to the belly, and the other end
is tucked in at the back. The man wears in addition when out of doors
a coat of bark-cloth or white cotton stuff,[30] and a wide sun-hat
of palm leaves, in shape like a mushroom-top or an inverted and very
shallow basin, which shelters him from both sun and rain; many wear
also a small oblong mat plaited of rattan-strips hanging behind from
a cord passed round the waist, and serving as a seat when the wearer
sits down. At home the man wears nothing more than the waist-cloth,
save some narrow plaited bands of palm fibre below the knee, and, in
most cases, some adornment in the ears or about the neck and on the
arms.[31] The man's hair is allowed to grow long on the crown of the
scalp, and to hang freely over the back of the neck, in some cases
reaching as far as the middle of the back. This long hair is never