The implication of the cultural context in its development plays a very important role in human life.It acts as a connector of the rule of law determined by the values or legal culture that is internally lived by the community.Likewise, in the entire cycle of farming, there are values of togetherness and the cooperation implied on it.Therefore, farming system is a system in the Dayak society to maintain their life instead of preserving their cultural custom, tradition, and art.The system is also a way of defending their territory by marking the area where they live by replanting various folk crops.The important point of this research is to spotlight the farming management of Dayak people community in maintaining and preserving natural ecosystem equal with the values of local wisdom from generation to generation.This research used a qualitative approach in which the techniques of data collection used direct observation.The observation process was carried out by seeing and observing directly the events occurred in the Dayak community.During the observation, researcher wrote and collected the data in the form of field notes.Also, the researcher recorded whole events related to the farming process occurred in the indigenous society.In addition to the direct observation process, the data collection process was also carried out by collecting secondary data.The secondary data used in this research were government reports which were reported periodically in public.Other secondary data used in this research were also in the form of field documentations such as photographs and field notes written directly by the researcher on location.Furthermore, all data collected were processed by data coding first.Then,nft hydroponic the data coding process was done by taking into account the available data categorization before the data was interpreted.
The interpretation process used Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s approach in relation to the culture cycle.The final stage was the process of data presentation.Kroeber and Kluckhohn stated that there are seven aspects of human culture which consist of language, knowledge system, social organization, living equipment and technology systems, livelihood and economic systems, religion, and art.Regarding the farming of Dayak people, it can be seen through the whole process, sequence, harvesting yield , and the peak of farming cultivation as the cultural system.Rice is the primary food of the Dayak people, which is the main source of life for generations.Farming is not merely a system of livelihood and economy, but also the form of knowledge system, social organization system, living equipment system, livelihood and economic system, religion, and the occurrence of art substance in it.Related to the culture, we also recognize the existence of stages in the development of the livelihood and economic systems from time to time.According to Alfin Toffler , there are three waves of human livelihood and economy from time to time, those are Nomad, Agriculture, and Industry/Information.To protect various important assets inherited from ancestors who have been accustomed to passing on the social order system and the assets of indigenous peoples from generation to generation, the process is always based on a system influenced by the cultural domain.The interrelation of cultural domains plays an important role in the process, the system and concept that develop in the social order of rural communities or indigenous society groups.We have passed the first stage when humans are no longer moving from one place to another, or nomads.In this first wave, the needs of human life and their social changes are not yet so complex.In such a way, it can be said that the livelihoods and economy of humankind in the nomadic era are still very simple.Then, entering the second wave where livelihoods and economy rely on agriculture humans have begun to settle in a certain area.It is believed that the agricultural system by burning the land has been started since this first wave, around 10,000 years BC.
As stated by Lubis , “Until today in our country there are still two-million people in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and other islands who have made their living with farming technology since around 10, 000 years before Christ”.Meanwhile, the third wave is the stage where humans enter a new civilization named a livelihood and economy based on industry or information technology which is marked by the emergence of factories, companies, information technology, and even now industry 4.0.If we take a look at these waves and stages, there is a phenomenon which is more or less the same where in every wave of the human livelihood and economic system there is a static system , but some is dynamic.The dynamic one is generally related to technology, speed, form and structure of society, social class and societal strata that we know as the social change.The practice of farming only occurs in certain communities whose large territory and are still not much reached by industries, such as in Kalimantan, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Maluku, and Papua.On the other hand, there is a growing awareness that the value of indigenous community’ forests is much higher than the temporary economic value, for example for mining, plantations, or for building housing and offices.”For the customary community,forests and sea as well as other natural resources in their customary territories have high economic values.Not only that, natural resources in their customary territories are the center of social cycle, cultural and spiritual activities.Essentially, this is related to the effort to preserve nature which does not only provide concrete consumption products such as food, but also ecosystem services which become the enabling factor for the sustainable production process”.Observing the sustainability of the environmental ecosystem in the forest areas of the customary society in Kalimantan, we may view from the perspectives of the natural resources where people live and exist for generations.In Masiun’s study, he calculated the economic value of customary forests owned by the indigenous community of Seberuang Riam Batu located in Tempunak District, Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan Province.Besides practicing subsistence economy, the people in Riam Batu have also followed an open economy system.
However, the people do not want to sell their customary forest for various momentary benefits because they realize that the value of forest is much higher than mining, plantation, housing, and others.The Dayak people also implement the loop back farming system that returns the plants back to their original cycle based on the natural law within 15 years.That all laws are created through some kind of social process; a conventional norm is the outcome of something resembling a deliberative convergence of behavior and attitude on the norm, while other social norms are manufactured through social processes like those set forth by a rule of recognition and imposed on non-members of the group.This only likely happens since the customary community manages their forests wisely and place their entire process and livelihood system as a sustainable system.Thus, the farming systems of the Dayak people are well-integrated with nature and its environment.The way of being and the way of life of Dayak people cannot be separated from the nature and the environment where they live, reside and exist.In the past, from various literatures and research conducted by foreign authors, many things have not been revealed to the surface related to the wisdom, insight, and values in the farming system of the Dayak people.Morrison , David Jenkins and Guy Sacerdoti , for instance, tend to view in general the cultivation of the Dayak people in Borneo merely to produce rice.Morrison acknowledges the importance of farming for the Dayaks while pointing out that rice is the staff of life for the people.Rice is so important to the Dayaks in Borneo, so that Morrison writes the title “Padi – The Staff of Life”.It describes how the Dayak people obtain rice, starting from clearing the land to getting feast together after harvesting.Meanwhile, David Jenkins and Guy Sacerdoti calculated that each family head of Dayak people who cultivates one hectare of land will yield roughly 900 kg of rice.This is, according to the Western’s perspective, considered unequal between the woods cut down and burned becoming charcoal, and the results gained from it.However, if we observe carefully that the farming of the Dayak people is not solely and only rice as a target to be yielded.Farming for the Dayaks is not just a rice cultivation.A lot of wisdom, values, customs, traditions, culture, arts, even economic and educational values are enclosed behind it.Researchers and authors from “inside”, known as the intellectuals of the Dayak people, have tried to describe the hidden dimensions and tacit knowledge that outside researchers have never seen, written,nft system and even published them.In such a way, what ‘insiders’ have studied and written seems to be considered correctly because there are no other research results and publications arguing or adding other elements of farming rather than rice as its novelty.
Yansen notes that the environment, forest, and farming cannot be separated from the activities and the life of customary or traditional communities.“For hundreds of years, the ancestors of the Dayak people have a forest area as their territory.They continue to develop and to build evolutionarily cultural and social characters in line with their interactions with their nature and environment.The environment and nature shape various social models and customary territorial boundaries of the Dayak people, such as hunting and farming activities.These two activities can determine and legitimize the right of their customary territorial.This cultural and customary model has been institutionalized, accepted, maintained, and conserved from generation to generation by individuals, customary communities, or customary institutions even by village bodies.Thus, it is implicitly explained that there is a social function of the forest.On the other hand, throughout the farming process there is a dimension or activity that includes or involves many people during the process.According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn the cycles or stages of farming of the Dayak people integrate the management of ecosystem and the traditional culture of Dayak community.In general, the stages of the farming found in this study are: inspecting the land, determining the land area, cleaning or purifying farming tools, slashing, cutting the trees, burning the land, planting, weeding, harvesting, and performing thanksgiving ceremony.Those ten stages of farming are applicable everywhere among the Dayaks and those are mandatory to get through.However, there are some practices or other activities in some places added by the clans or customary communities in the process.It is quite interesting to observe as a social exchange process where the stage becoming the crown or the peak of the farming system and cycle is the thanksgiving ceremony or Begawai.It is not only in a village that people festive the ceremony, but also it involves the nearby villages, or even likely villagers from other areas who have an interest or still have family relationship with the host of the event.The farming or cultivation is carried out once in a year and simultaneously in the season which is considered to be the right time to start the opening of farming activities.When farming is done in a group and together, pests and crop diseases will be avoidable.Or if pests and diseases attack crops in fields other than rice, their attacks are still within tolerance limits since there are many fields to be affected.Therefore, pests and diseases can spread over to the large areas so that they do not affect just one field which can cause mass destruction.In certain Dayak tribes, for example the Dayak Lundayeh in Krayan of North Kalimantan, there is a well-known tool to determine the right season to start the cultivation named “Batu Tabau”.It is a kind of traditional tool to see the direction of the sun rotation.Meanwhile, among the Dayaks in Kapuas Hulu of West Kalimantan they start cultivating on their fields by observing the astrological sign.They know the “three-star sign” which give them a sign to slash, to burn, to plant and so on.Among the Dayak people of West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, South Kalimantan, East Kalimantan and North Kalimantan there are similarities in determining to begin the farming cycle.That is, the starting point of the period is to inspect the land starting in May and ending by harvesting in March or April by the next coming year.