The Dayak: Close To the Eyes, Far from The Heart

DOI

10.2991/icsse-17.2018.53How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Dayak, student, misperception, popular-culture

Abstract

This article aims to discuss multicultural transformation problems of Dayak Tribe. As we know, Borneo or Kalimantan is one of the big islands in the world and owned by three nations named Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam. Of these three countries, Dayak and Malay are dominant ethnic-groups living on this island. Though Dayak is so well-known in Kalimantan, it does not mean that all people in the island are familiar with this ethnic group. This article is to explore my experience as a university lecturer where Society and Culture in Kalimantan is one of my teaching materials that I taught. This article is also based on my students' responses, knowledge, experience, and perception about Dayak itself. I found so much more misperception about Dayak which tends to bring a negative stigma on it. In this case-study, therefore, I used an autoethnography approach in anthropology which I relate to my experience in teaching the theme about Dayak and also to my students' responses that they made in middle test and final test. The purposes of this article are (1) to show the interaction of Dayak with other people in multicultural society through my subject matter in class, and (2) to know misperception or misunderstanding about Dayak by the others. Though the result relating to both objectives is not final, I found misperception or misunderstanding about Dayak was far from the fact; for example, Dayak is uncivilized, it tends to gather food by hunting and the like. Consequently, we are stigmatized with unpleasant images about Dayak. In addition, this is supported by stereotype factors such as negative stigma from western literature and discourse in society as well. Finally, I suggest for the multicultural transformation of knowledge about Dayak that we have to read more books or to write more essays about Dayak in a popular culture.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mr Nasrullah
PY  - 2017/11
DA  - 2017/11
TI  - The Dayak: Close To the Eyes, Far from The Heart
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Social Sciences Education - "Multicultural Transformation in Education, Social Sciences and Wetland Environment" (ICSSE 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 229
EP  - 233
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsse-17.2018.53
DO  - 10.2991/icsse-17.2018.53
ID  - Nasrullah2017/11
ER  -