Ma'anyan Erotic

The Ma'anyan are a Barito Dayak people of southeastern Borneo, concentrated in the Barito Timur regency of Central Kalimantan around the town of Tamiang Layang, with older communities spilling east into the hill districts of South Kalimantan. Their country is not the dramatic interior highland of Borneo but the middle ground: low ridges, swamp forest, rubber holdings, dry rice cut into the slopes, and lately coal, which has pulled roads and outside money into districts that used to be reached mainly by river. What makes the Ma'anyan known outside Indonesia is a piece of evidence they had no particular reason to care about. Their language, in the East Barito branch of Austronesian, is the closest known living relative of Malagasy, spoken across the Indian Ocean in Madagascar. The correspondence is close enough that historians place the ancestors of the Malagasy, or a substantial part of them, on this stretch of river a little over a thousand years ago, probably carried west as crew and labor on Malay trading ships rather than sailing on their own account. The Ma'anyan are the ones who stayed.

Ma'anyan oral tradition keeps its own account of rupture. It remembers Nansarunai, a polity of the lower Barito broken by raids out of Java in the Majapahit period, and the phrase for it, Nansarunai usak Jawa, works as the hinge of their history: afterward the people moved upriver, away from the coast and away from a trade that was about to become Muslim and Banjar. That boundary still holds. Lowland Ma'anyan who took Islam were generally absorbed into Banjar identity over the following centuries, so the ethnic line and the religious line have run together for a long time. Those who remained Ma'anyan are Protestant Christian or followers of Kaharingan, the indigenous Dayak religion that Indonesian law recognizes only by filing it under Hinduism. Kaharingan practice here runs through ritual specialists called wadian, who chant and dance the passage of souls, and it comes to a head in the secondary funeral. The Ma'anyan version, ijambe, exhumes and cremates the bones of the dead some years after burial and gathers the ash into a single container, which sets them apart from their Ngaju neighbors, who clean the bones and house them in a raised ossuary. An ijambe is expensive enough that it takes years to arrange and is held for several families at once. Younger Ma'anyan increasingly work in the coal districts or in Banjarmasin and Palangka Raya, and the ceremonies are what they come home for.