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Days among the Meratus Dayak: Smoking Trees for Trinkets

T. L. Markey and Jean-Claude Muller

10.46469/mq.2012.53.2.1

Published: 2012/12/01

Abstract

This study provides a glimpse of the current cultural circumstances (beliefs, agriculture, shamanistic practices and chants, folk medicine, economy, and linguistic features) of a small Dayak community clustered around the summits of the Meratus Mountains of Southern Borneo (Indonesia). The community’s traditional culture, which is examined here, is threatened by ever increasing exposure to the “outside world,” which is primarily Muslim in orientation, and thus to eventual extinction.

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