“Watch Out, the Dayaks Are Coming!” — How an Ancient Misunderstanding Became a Lasting Stigma

The Dayaks: Keepers of the Forest, Branded as “Headhunters”.

By Masri Sareb Putra

(as told through the long memory of Borneo)

🌍 PONTIANAK | BORNEOTRAVEL : The child was wailing, inconsolable. His mother leaned down and whispered into his ear, “Hush, or the Dayaks will come for you.”
The sobbing stopped. Just like that.

Fear, inherited like a family heirloom —polished by generations, passed down without question.

Somewhere in this archipelago of a thousand cultures and contradictions, the name "Dayak" doesn’t summon images of lush forests or intricate tattoos. It conjures something darker. A threat. A boogeyman.

What’s in a Stereotype?

A stereotype is a shortcut—an assumption frozen in time. It flattens complexity, replaces curiosity with caricature, and often reveals more about the one who stereotypes than the one being stereotyped. In Indonesia, as in much of the world, stereotypes are often born of misunderstanding, nurtured by distance, and cemented by repetition.

Sometimes, they’re passed along in whispers to crying children.

How Stereotypes Take Root

Ethnic stereotypes arise from a particular cocktail: limited exposure, old colonial narratives, a dash of fear, and a long history of not asking enough questions.

It doesn’t take much.

A book.
A movie.
A passing remark from someone who’s never met the people they’re describing.

And once they’re out there, these impressions stick. Especially when they come wrapped in adventure and soaked in the ink of exoticism.

The Dayaks: Keepers of the Forest, Branded as “Headhunters”

Let’s get this out of the way: once, a long time ago, the Dayak people of Borneo practiced ngayau—a ritualized form of headhunting.

But it wasn’t random.
It wasn’t senseless.
It wasn’t even what you think it was.

Ngayau belonged to a highly structured, spiritual, and symbolic system of justice, war, and community balance. It was embedded in context, in cosmology, in the old codes of survival and honor. It ended long ago.

But the world didn’t forget. Or rather—it refused to learn the rest of the story.

The Carl Bock Problem

In 1881, a Norwegian explorer named Carl Bock published a book with a title that would come to haunt a people: The Headhunters of Borneo.

It was the kind of title that sold well in European drawing rooms—promising danger, savagery, and the thrill of a world untouched by civilization. Bock’s portrayal of the Dayaks was romanticized, dramatized, and ultimately dehumanized.

He was not an anthropologist.
He was not a Dayak.
He was a traveler telling stories for foreign readers hungry for tales of the “exotic.”

But his book—like many others of its era—cast a long shadow.

A myth was born.
And the myth stuck.

Fear, by Way of Folklore

Today, in parts of Indonesia, when children cry too loudly, some parents still whisper: “Be quiet, or the Dayaks will come.”

It’s meant to be harmless.
But it’s not.

Because beneath the joke lies something more corrosive: the quiet inheritance of fear. A fear of the “other”—not as they are, but as they’ve been imagined for centuries. A fear so casually internalized that it shapes childhoods, defines social interactions, and justifies exclusion.

Ironically, the Dayaks never raise their children to fear outsiders. They teach them belarasa—empathy, solidarity, the wisdom of the forest, and the weight of responsibility.

Who’s the Real Threat?

In modern Borneo, the Dayaks no longer carry shields or spears.
They carry lawsuits.
Environmental reports.
Microfinance ledgers.
Books.

Their adversaries are no longer rival tribes but corporations, bulldozers, and land grabs. Their ancestral forests are under siege—not from headhunters, but from palm oil, mining, and unchecked development.

So, who’s the real threat now?

The Dayak have moved on.
It’s the stereotype that lingers.

Reclaiming the Narrative

Across Borneo, a quiet revolution is underway.
Dayak researchers, writers, and filmmakers are telling their own stories.
They are documenting rituals, publishing books, digitizing oral traditions, forming research centers.

No longer characters in someone else’s tale, they are now the authors of their own.

They are not “headhunting savages.”
They are custodians of ancient wisdom.
They are stewards of the forest.
They are your neighbors.

“Maybe,” one Dayak elder once said to me with a gentle laugh, “the next time a child cries, the parent should whisper: ‘Don’t worry. The Dayaks are coming—to protect the trees, to sing the old songs, to remind us how to live in balance.’”

Now that’s a story worth passing down. *)