Lawangan Erotic

Lawangan is less a single tribe than a name that gathers a string of related river communities on the eastern side of the Barito basin in Indonesian Borneo. In Central Kalimantan the word is Lawangan; across the provincial line in East Kalimantan the same people are usually called Luangan, and anthropologists have used that spelling as an umbrella for a wider family that takes in the Benuaq, Bentian and Taboyan. The Dayak statesman and writer Tjilik Riwut counted twenty-one small tribes under the Lawangan heading, which gives a fair sense of how loose the label is. What holds it together is language, ritual and a shared map of rivers: the Karau and the Teweh, and the hill country running east toward West Kutai.

The Lawangan language belongs to the East Barito branch of Austronesian, a small branch with an outsized story: it includes neighboring Ma'anyan and, an ocean away, Malagasy, carried to Madagascar by seafarers from this corner of Borneo well over a thousand years ago. At home, Lawangan speakers live among Ma'anyan, Dusun, Bakumpai and Banjar neighbors, and most move easily between their own speech, Banjarese market talk and Indonesian.

Religion is where the Lawangan are most distinctive. Many still follow Kaharingan, the indigenous Dayak religion, which the Indonesian state agreed to recognize in 1980 only by filing it under Hinduism. Its working core is the belian, a curing ritual in which a specialist chants, dances and bargains with spirits through the night on behalf of a sick person. Death is handled in two stages. After burial, a family saves, sometimes for years, toward the wara, a secondary funeral of several days in which ritual experts escort the soul to its resting place on Mount Lumut, a real peak in the hills of North Barito. Larger versions call for the sacrifice of a water buffalo and feed a whole village. Protestant and Catholic churches have grown steadily since the mission era, and some families are Muslim, though conversion to Islam historically tended to pull people toward a Malay or Banjar identity.

Daily life still turns on swidden rice, rubber and rattan gardens, fishing and forest produce, but the forest is no longer a given. The Barito uplands sit on coal, and mining concessions, logging roads and oil palm estates have pressed hard on customary land over the past few decades. Younger Lawangan work in the mines, in district towns such as Muara Teweh, Ampah and Tamiang Layang, or farther off in Palangka Raya and Banjarmasin. The wara still draws them home.