FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO DIAGNOSIS AND CURE
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Effectively a man is concerned only with this world and its inhabitants, and under the adat the relations between men and other beings are subject to careful regulation. Every being has its own proper place, its home, if you like; and any other creature who trespasses on his territory commits an offence against the proper order of things, the adat; and trouble follows. The proper place of a man, as I said earlier, is his village, which, when it was a longhouse fortress, was a purely human and manufactured artefact. But in order to live at all a man has to go out of it and cultivate rice and sago. These areas of cultivation are, as it were, partly domesticated and are a semi-human domain. But men share that cultivated territory with other beings - animals, and plants and spirits - and a man is in greater danger there than he is in his village of trespassing on the rights of other creatures, thus bringing about trouble - especially accidents and sickness to himself.
Beyond the semi-human, cultivated zone is the high forest into which men must go to hunt, to fish, and to gather fruit, resins, and other things necessary to life. But a man goes into the forest at his own risk. He shares its use with other beings who probably have greater rights to be there than he has, and he must exercise great caution while he is in it. He often comes back suffering from accidents and illness. To be safe in a tropical swamp jungle needs knowledge, vigilance, and immense luck.
Before one can understand the trouble which comes from breaking the adat and what that means to a Melanau, we need to know a little about the way in which he thinks a human being is put together. All humans, the Melanau say, are made up of four separate elements: (i) the body; (ii) the soul, which is thought to be a vaporous replica of the body, and which eventually goes to the land of the dead; (iii) the emotions; and (iv) a principle of life that distinguishes animate from inanimate things. For a man to be alive and healthy these four elements must be joined and undisturbed. But the body, in particular, is subject to accidents and illness; and a proper balance of its elements depends partly on a proper balance of hot and cold. The body can easily be disturbed by excessive eating, by exposure to rain and storms, and by an imbalance of hot and cold things. After childbirth, for instance, a woman is particularly subject to cold; and for forty-four days after the birth she must lie by a fire kept alight day and night and eat and drink hot and spicy food. Most illness, however, is attributed to a breach of the adat or an attack by a spirit or even witchcraft. At the onset of an attack by a spirit, or when something else upsets the