Bark Cloth association with death among Dayak of Borneo

Vanishing Tattoo website by Lars Krutak.

Bark-cloth is described as an item that the dead and their mourners wear.  On other occasions, it is an item for warriors also for ceremony.

"Although the apotropaic aspect of Dayak tattoo has been discussed, specifically as a remedy against supernatural possession resulting in disease, tattooing was also an initiation rite involving the entire community longhouse.  Tattoo operations were not carried out in the longhouse itself, rather they took place in a specially built hut among some groups.  During the entire ritual, the male members of the family dressed  in bark-cloth.  Bark-cloth was normally placed on the corpses of village leaders at their funerals or worn by widowers.  At other times, headhunters used bark-cloth during ceremonial occasions.  Therefore, it seems that the association between tatto and bark-cloth indicates that tattooed individuals pass through a communally recognized symbolic death in order to pass into a new stage of life.  Not surprisingly, each Dayak community is comprised of individuals both living
and dead, since those members who left this world forever now dwell in the community of the ancestors - the village of the dead.  It is here, [...] that each Dayak individual yearns to be in the afterlife. "

Shaman, Sickness, Land of the Dead; http://www.vanishingtattoo.com/borneo_tattoos_1.htm

Turkish rug, pinterest

Lawig motif.
Ram's horns motif.

Inca, Tinukib

A Listing: Papers of H. Otley Beyer; Nat'l Library of Australia

Page link:  http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms4877

Copied and pasted directly from website:

• Papers: 1850 - 1934
• Quantity: 16 metres (100 boxes) + 185 volumes
• Access conditions: Available for reference

Papers of H. Otley Beyer including correspondence, programs, photographs, maps, notebooks, articles, drafts of books, printed materials, theses, undergraduate students' work, conference papers, newspaper cuttings, charts, genealogies and other papers. Also includes bound volumes containing original source material on archaeology, ethnography, languages, history, culture and religion of ethnic groups in the Philippines including the Ifugao, Bantok, Igorot, Moro and Iloko. Most, but not all volumes were written or compiled by Beyer.

The Beyer collection was purchased by the Library in 1972. Additions to the collection were received between 1978 and 1995.

A photographic record of Beyer's collection of Chinese ceramics and local history and other photographs are held in the Pictorial section of the National Library at Q40, 41 and 42. Maps from the Beyer Collection are held in the Map Section.

The Beyer Papers and volumes are available on microfiche at McG 1255.

Review of Book, GoodReads- Ibalong: The Bikol Folk Epic-Fragment...

Ibalong: The Bikol Folk Epic-Fragment: English and Bikol Translation, Views and Comments, author Merito B. Espinas.

Title recommended by Diyan, a Bikolana, in 2016.

Review:

Probably the most complete study about the Bikol epic fragment--as of now.

That comment, since the book suffers from a lot of defects which readers should really look out for. The author quotes from obsolete sources such as H. Otley Beyer's claim that a friar (who?) burned ancient scrolls (when did pre-Hispanic non-Muslim Filipinos use scrolls?) and defunct ideas such as the Lemuria hypothesis. And with shoddy research, the analysis and conclusions logically suffer as well; I was particularly incensed with the author's specious attempt at equivocating the commonly agreed occurrence of the Stone Age in prehistory by quoting a not so PC opinion in an old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to argue that the Ifugaos had a "more recent" Stone Age than the Bicolanos, and ergo, the Alim (the Ifugao folk epic) is younger than the Ibalong (and insert here the assertion that the precolonial Bicolanos are more advanced because they have writing and a more complex civilization--again from a single biased source). I couldn't care less about ethnic vaunting, but why do it in quasi-scholarly, quasi-jingoist hocus pocus whose pretenses quickly fall into shambles anyway? Moreover, the author believes that the Ibalong is older (which we observed is one iota less than "greater") than the Iliad (5000 years old compared to the Greek epic's 3000) and that it was written during Noah's Flood (perhaps a forced connection to Christianity?). And that is just in one seating! Despite the author's own caveat--which is somehow written on the middle of the book already--of separating fact from legend, it is ironic that the author himself fails this basic test
of academic skepticism.

On the good side, I really learned a lot about the folkloric background of the epic fragment, but I guess I could easily do that by doing my own research and consulting other sources. The author simply compressed all that information in a measly book.

Future scholars should take note of the errors committed by the work to finally give justice to this oft-unexplored gem of Bicolandia through rigorous, stringent scholarship--and yes please, since this book is really, really bad for a first try. (less)

References on Folklore and Oral Traditions; Bikol

1.  Story Posted, website.  The Creation of the World; Rosario Bonto, "Bikol Folklore, in H. Otley Beyer, Ethnography of the Bicol People, Vol. II, Paper No. 65, pp. 1-3.; found on Library Link, a website link: http://www.librarylink.org.ph/featarticle.asp?articleid=67#bikol

2.  Philippine Folk Literature: An Anthology - Damiana Eugenio

3.