Bawo Erotic

The Bawo are a Dayak people of Central Kalimantan, the Indonesian province that covers a large share of southern Borneo. Their identity works on two levels. To outsiders they are Dayak, the umbrella name for the Indigenous inland peoples of Borneo, as distinct from the coastal Malay and Banjar populations. Closer to home, the name that counts is Bawo. It marks a particular speech community, with its own villages and kin networks in the Barito river country. Not much has been written about the Bawo. Most of what gets published about the province is about bigger neighbors such as the Ngaju, so the Bawo are easy to miss.

Bawo speech belongs to the Barito languages, a branch of the Austronesian family that also includes Ma'anyan, Lawangan and Ngaju. The branch has one famous relative far away: Malagasy, the national language of Madagascar, comes from a Barito language that was carried across the Indian Ocean more than a thousand years ago. Indonesian is the language of school, government and most writing, so the local language lives mainly in homes and villages.

Religion follows the pattern of the wider region. Kaharingan is the Indigenous faith of the Dayak of Central Kalimantan. It centers on ancestors, on the spirits of land and river, and on funeral cycles that can run for years after a death. Since 1980 the Indonesian state has registered it under Hinduism, which suits the paperwork better than the theology. Christianity came with European missions in the nineteenth century, and Islam came through Banjar trade and marriage. In the Barito country, one extended family can easily include followers of all three.

The history that shaped the Bawo is the history of the Barito. The Dutch pushed up the river during and after the Banjarmasin War, which began in 1859, and colonial rule followed. In 1894, Dayak leaders from across the interior met at Tumbang Anoi and agreed to end headhunting and long running feuds. That meeting is still remembered as a founding moment of modern Dayak identity. In 1957, Dayak political pressure led to the creation of Central Kalimantan as a province separate from South Kalimantan. Since the 1970s, logging, coal mining and oil palm plantations have changed the forests that Barito communities depend on, and land rights remain a live issue in village politics today.