Klemantan people

Two native Borneans designated as "Klemantans" by Charles Hose. Original caption in his 1912 book: Klemantans making fire in the jungle by sawing one piece of bamboo across another.

The Klemantan people were a purported ethnic group indigenous to the island of Borneo. The term was established in Western literature by British scientist and colonial administrator Charles Hose in the early 20th century, but has since been rejected as an invented term of convenience that does not properly represent the people it claims to describe.[1] Since then, the term has fallen largely out of use.[2]

  1. ^ Rousseau, Jérôme (1990). Central Borneo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a stratified Society. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 43. ISBN 0198277164.
  2. ^ Metcalf, Peter (2010). The Life of the Longhouse: An Archaeology of Ethnicity. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657467. "The term [Hose] invented to cover these peoples [i.e. the non-Kenyah, non-Kayan peoples of the Baram area] was "Klemantan", and the term still circulates in the anthropological literature [...] for instance in Raymond Kennedy's Bibliography of Indonesian Peoples and Cultures, published [...] in 1945. There are however no communities that describe themselves as "Klemantan"... (p.77).