To the north the terrain is mountainous and the rivers difficult to navigate. Here are found many small groups, each at most only a few thousand strong. The ethnic diversity is of immediate consequence for religions, because the religions are rooted in the local community and contribute to much of its identity.
The General Concept of Religion
Many of the cultures of interior Borneo lack the concept of a separate domain of religion. Instead, ritual observance is incorporated into a spectrum of prescribed behaviors that includes legal forms, marriage practices, etiquette, and much else. All of these are matters of collective representations shared by autonomous communities. Such communities often consist of a longhouse with a few hundred inhabitants and are separated from neighboring villages by tracts of jungle. There is no notion of conversion to another religion; if an individual moves to another community—for instance, as the result of a marriage—he or she simply adheres to the ritual forms of that place. Significantly, members of a community often exaggerate their ritual peculiarity. An outside observer readily identifies items shared with neighboring groups, but the patterns of distribution are complex, reflecting migration and borrowing over many centuries.
The religions of interior Borneo are rich in both ritual and cosmology.
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