Iban Cultural Heritage: An Overview of Iban Traditional Cultural Values and Social Norms, and Their Implications for Contemporary Sarawak.
|
THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
|
Title :
Iban Cultural Heritage: An Overview of Iban Traditional Cultural Values and Social Norms, and Their Implications for Contemporary Sarawak. |
|
Author :
Peter M. Kedit |
|
Abstract:
This paper attempts firstly, to make an overview of Iban cultural heritage focussing on their traditional cultural values and social norms that underline Iban traditional adaptation to their environment. It attempts to provide an understanding of the traditional principles of the way of life of the Iban in an historical context. Secondly, it discusses both the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ implications of Iban core traditional values and norms with in the context of contemporary needs of Sarawak society within Malaysia. The Iban of Sarawak form the single most populous indigenous group in Malaysia aside from the Malays. They inherited their own belief, cultures, tradition, and above all a complex of customary laws called adat. They still practise these adats, and identity. By virtue of this continued vitality of their culture, as well as, by their numbers, the Iban must be counted among the most important component of today’s Malaysian multi-cultural society. Hill rice cultivation is the Iban’s cultural core and life-style. Therefore they need a large tract of land for cultivating rice. This made the Iban wasteful of jungle tract. Iban life style demands an exploitative and aggressive attitude towards land and non-Iban. In their insatiable drive for land, they evolved martial values and a mobile social structure.
|
| DOI: XXXX |
|
How to cite:
Kedit, P. M. (1989). Iban Cultural Heritage: An Overview of Iban Traditional Cultural Values and Social Norms, and Their Implications for Contemporary Sarawak. The Sarawak Museum Journal, XL (61): 1-14 |
|
References
|
