Examining the Form and Function of the Iban War Canoe

Anthro 1218 8 April 2016 Examining the Form and Function of the Iban War Canoe Salient aspects of this boat’s construction are suggested by its name: war canoe. Indeed, features of a boat’s construction are highly correlated with its stated purpose, and this parallel certainly holds true in the case of the model of an Iban canoe. The unity of form and function is enhanced by an understanding of the landscape -cultural and geographic -of this boat’s use. The Iban people, also known as the Sea Dyak, are native to the island of Borneo, which is surrounded by the South China Sea to the north, the Sulu Sea to the northeast, the Celebes Sea and the Makassar Strait to the east, and the Java Sea and the Karimata Strait to the south (MacDonald: 1958, 3). However, this canoe was more likely used to navigate Borneo’s dense system of rivers, a network that has historically served a central role in the spiritual and practical life of the Iban (Gomes: 1911, 145). Given these contextual details about the Iban war canoe, what judgments can be made about its construction? According to the British colonial ethnographer Edwin H. Gomes (1911, 50), Iban war canoes were typically about ninety feet long, and would have been able to hold as many as one hundred men. As with all Iban boat types, war canoes were made from the trunk of a single tree; for larger canoes such as the one represented by the model, planks and gunwales were added to the boat’s sides and caulked so as to be rendered watertight (Gomes: 1911, 50). Depicted in Figure 1 is the model’s representation of the Iban’s fastening technique, which involved the use of fibrous cane or rattan to weave planks together (Gomes: 1911, 80). According to Gomes (1911, 80), this mode of fastening allowed the Iban to break down their canoes following a war