ii6 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



the dayongs of the Kayans ; they are more strictly 

 professional in the sense that they do but little other 

 work, depending chiefly on what they can earn by 

 their treatment of disease and by other ways of 

 practising upon the superstitions of their fellows. 

 They generally work in groups of three or four, or 

 more in cases of serious illness, and, with the 

 imitativeness and disregard for tradition character- 

 istic of the Iban, they have developed a great variety 

 of procedures,^ into most of which the element of 

 deliberate fraud enters to a much greater extent than 

 into the practice of the Kayan dayongs. The Sea 

 Dayak manang is usually covered with skin disease 

 (tinea) and shirks all hard work with the other 

 members of the village. 



A peculiar and infrequent variety of Sea Dayak 

 manang are the manang ball. They are men who 

 adopt and continuously wear woman's dress and 

 behave in all ways like women, except that they 

 avoid as far as possible taking any part in the 

 domestic labour. They claim to have been told in 

 dreams to adopt this mode of life ; they are em- 

 ployed for the same purpose as the more ordinary 

 manangSy and they practise similar methods. 



Among the Ibans certain persons get a bad 

 reputation for working harm by magic. They are 

 said to be cunning in sorcery {tau tepang), and these 

 persons may properly be said to be sorcerers or 

 witches. They are believed to work harm in many 

 ill-defined ways, especially to health ; but their pro- 

 cedures are not generally known ; they probably 

 include poisoning, but, like the practices of our 

 European witches in recent times, they probably 

 have but little existence outside the timorous 

 imaginations of the people. Such persons are dis- 

 liked and shunned, though not killed as they would 



1 Sixteen different methods, most of which combine the notion of soul-catch- 

 ing with that of exorcism, are enumerated and described by Mr. E. H. Gomes 

 in his recent work, Seventeen Years amongst the Dayaks of Borneo. 



