Archive Note
Among the Iban, tattoos worked as a permanent biographical record tied to the bejalai (the journey of knowledge), headhunting raids, and other achievements that conferred standing, and they were understood as spiritual protection rather than decoration. The bunga terung, an eggplant-flower rosette placed on each shoulder where a pack strap rests, marked a young man before he set out on his first bejalai, its central spiral derived from the underside of a tadpole as a symbol of new life. Warriors who took heads earned tegulun, small finger tattoos visible to all. The technique uses a needle cluster lashed to a wooden staff (jarum), struck with a small hammer (pangut) while a second person stretches the body, with pigment historically of soot. Brooke-dynasty and later British suppression of headhunting from the 1840s onward, culminating in its post-war prohibition, broke the prestige logic for most of the twentieth century; the tegulun is the one major design not revived in its literal sense. From about 2000 a self-conscious urban revival, anchored by Ernesto Kalum's Borneo Headhunters studio in Kuching, restored Iban tattooing as a marker of Indigenous identity, with the headhunting register now treated as historical.
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