The Pig in Dayak History and Customary Tradition

For Dayak people, pigs embody culture, kinship, hospitality, and livelihood. Illustration: Special.

By Rangkara Bada

A personal essay on the Dayak pig as a cultural symbol, exploring history, religion, identity, public space, and the gray area between tradition and contemporary expression.

There are things that, the moment they enter the public sphere, become signs. They are no longer merely things. They carry history, memory, religion, identity, and even wounds we may not fully recognize. The pig is one of them.

The Pig in Dayak History and Customary Tradition

So when a pig appears at a demonstration, the first question should not simply be, Why was the pig brought there? The older, harder question is: What was the original intent? I am reminded of a term Mahfud MD once used: mens rea, the inner intention or state of mind behind an act. When an action involves a cultural symbol, intention matters. The same object can mean something entirely different depending on the context in which it appears.

A pig in a kitchen is not the same as a pig in the courtyard of a house of worship. A pig at a customary feast is not the same as a pig at a political demonstration. A pig as food is not necessarily a pig as a political statement. This is where the gray area begins. We are dealing with the same physical object, but its symbolic meaning can shift according to place, time, who carries it, whom it is meant for, and what message it is intended to convey.

Three Layers of Time

I have sometimes tried to read the history of the world's third-largest island through patterns of cultural change. Not as a final or absolute periodization, but as a kind of map for understanding how signs acquire and shed meanings. Three broad layers seem particularly useful. The first is the period of Hindu-Indian influence, roughly from the first century through the following thousand years. Within this horizon, the island we now call Borneo was once part of a wider cultural network, and some early sources associated it with the name Varuna-dvipa.

The second is the period of Islamic influence, beginning roughly around the second millennium. Over the centuries, Islam came to shape not only religious life but also systems of values, kingdoms, trade, law, and, importantly, certain boundaries concerning what was considered appropriate in public space. The third is the arrival and growth of Christianity, particularly Catholicism and later other Christian traditions, which became increasingly influential in many Dayak communities during the second millennium and continue to shape life there today.

These three layers never simply replaced one another, like pages in a book that can be read and then discarded. They overlap. Their remnants remain alive. At times they coexist peacefully; at other times they negotiate, collide, or compete. Cultural history, therefore, is not as simple as a calendar. The past does not really disappear. It survives in language, customary practice, food, symbols, ways of thinking, and even in the ways a society decides what is proper and improper in public.

The Pig and Dayak Memory

In many Dayak communities, the pig occupies a place very close to everyday life. It is not merely livestock. It can have social, economic, customary, and symbolic functions. In certain settings, pigs are connected with feasts, hospitality, marriage, mourning, and relationships among relatives. The animal exists within the fabric of community life, not outside it. That is why, when a pig appears as part of a public expression by Dayak people, we first need to understand the cultural world that gives the animal its meaning.

That is why I hesitate to rush to judgment when I see a pig being brought into the public sphere by Dayak people. I do not immediately want to say, “That is wrong.” Nor do I automatically say, “That is right because it is Dayak culture.” Both answers are too easy. Culture never exists in a vacuum. It is always in conversation with other cultures, with religion, with law, with public ethics, and with the long history of social change.

In Central Kalimantan, for example, the buffalo holds an important place in certain Dayak traditions. In many other Dayak communities, the pig is much more closely woven into customary life. We therefore cannot reduce everything to a single formula called “Dayak culture.” The Dayak are not one homogeneous culture. They are a vast constellation of communities, languages, histories, territories, and customary traditions. In particular contexts, the pig is part of that constellation.

But once a cultural symbol is taken out of its original setting, its meaning can change. Something that feels ordinary to one community may become deeply sensitive to another. This is where cultural questions become more complicated than questions about objects. The object itself has not changed; its field of meaning has. The pig remains a pig, but the people looking at it bring their own histories and convictions to what they see.

When Public Space Changes

Perhaps this is what our debates so often miss. We tend to look at the object without looking at the space. We see the pig, but we do not ask where the pig is. We see the act, but we fail to read the history of the space in which the act takes place. Yet public space has its own grammar. It is not the same as customary space, family space, religious space, or private space.

At one point in history, carrying a pig into an open public space may have caused no particular concern. In societies later shaped more deeply by Islamic values, the same act could come to be regarded as inappropriate. In contemporary Christian Dayak communities, the question becomes complicated once again: it may be accepted as part of cultural identity, yet still be debated because public space has become shared territory, inhabited by people of different faiths, values, and social norms.

This is why I call it a gray area. Gray does not mean that there are no values at stake. Quite the opposite. Gray means that several values are present at the same time. There is custom. There is religion. There is identity. There is ethics. There is politics. There is freedom of expression. And there are the feelings and sensitivities of other groups. All of them can enter the same moment and pull in different directions.

Reading the Demonstration, Not Judging It

That is why a demonstration involving a pig as a symbol cannot be understood from a photograph alone. A photograph captures only a fraction of a second. Hermeneutics goes further. It asks about context, background, history, the actors, the audience, the symbol, and the intention. What is the demonstrators' message? Who is it meant for? Why a pig rather than something else? Is it meant to express Dayak identity? Is it satire? Provocation? A customary expression? Or is it some mixture of all these meanings?

We should not fill the gaps with prejudice. An intellectual should be willing to postpone judgment a little longer than most people do. A historian must be prepared to step back several centuries to understand why an object carries a particular meaning. An observer of culture must enter, as far as possible, the symbolic world of the people being observed. Before declaring an act “proper” or “improper,” we need to understand how and why that act came into being.

Mens rea offers an intriguing point of entry: What was the original intent? That question matters because symbols do not speak for themselves. Human beings give them a voice. The same object can be a sign of respect in one circumstance and a provocation in another. It can be customary in one place and offensive in another. To read an act without reading its intention and context is perhaps the quickest way to misunderstand a culture.

An Object That Is Never Neutral

The pig, then, is not merely a pig. It can be food. It can be wealth. It can be a gift. It can be a customary symbol. It can signify identity. And under certain circumstances, it can become a political language. Once it enters the public sphere, it carries all of those possible meanings with it. That is why I am reluctant to settle the matter with a single word: right or wrong.

I am more interested in the longer questions. What exists in the world outside the actor when the pig is carried into that public space? And what exists inside the actor's mind? Between those two lies a long history: Varuna-dvipa, Hindu kingdoms, the spread of Islam across Borneo, Indigenous communities, the arrival of Christian missions, changing social structures, the modern state, and a public sphere that now brings many different identities into the same space.

A pig, in the end, can open a door into a history that long. Perhaps, then, we are not really dealing with a pig. We are dealing with memory. And memory, like culture itself, is never entirely black or white. It moves, changes, accumulates, and sometimes provokes debate precisely because something that seems ordinary to us may carry a meaning of extraordinary depth for someone else.*)