The Klemantan people were a purported ethnic group indigenous to the island of

Borneo Borneo (; id, Kalimantan) is the third-largest island in the world and the largest in Asia. At the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, in relation to major Indonesian islands, it is located north of Java, west of Sulawesi, and ea ...

. The term was established in Western literature by

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

scientist and colonial administrator

Charles Hose Charles Hose FRGS. FLS (12 October 1863 – 14 November 1929) was a British colonial administrator, zoologist and ethnologist. Life and career He was born in Hertfordshire, England, and was educated at Felsted in Essex. Admitted to Clare Colleg ...

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. Since then, the term has fallen largely out of use.

Origin

Hose had decades-long experience as a colonial administrator of

Sarawak Sarawak (; ) is a state of Malaysia. The largest among the 13 states, with an area almost equal to that of Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak is located in northwest Borneo Island, and is bordered by the Malaysian state of Sabah to the northeast, ...

, at that time an independent kingdom ruled by the British Brooke dynasty on the northwestern coast of Borneo. When describing the native people of Sarawak, Hose categorized them into six different "principal groups":

Ibans The Ibans or Sea Dayaks are a branch of the Dayak peoples on the island of Borneo in South East Asia. Dayak is a title given by the westerners to the local people of Borneo island. It is believed that the term "Iban" was originally an exonym ...

, Kayans, Kenyahs, Muruts, Punans, and the "Klemantans". While the other five groupings are considered to be valid ethnic groups, "Klemantan" was basically a catch-all category that contained every native group that could not otherwise be fitted into the existing 5 categories. Thus, by his definition, a ''Klemantan'' was every native Bornean who was not an Iban, a Kayan, a Kenyah, a Murut or a Punan. This in Hose's eyes did not only include numerous smaller groups and communities within Sarawak, but also the native groups living in the Dutch part of Borneo at that time, about whom Charles Hose had no first-hand knowledge. Later scholars disclaimed the existence of the Klemantan people as a valid ethnic category, as the term merely represents a European view-point rather than the people's own and ultimately was made up for pure convenience. French cultural anthropologist Jérôme Rousseau, for example, forwarded the question why Hose "felt compelled to invent a concept which corresponds to no social, cultural, geographical, or historical reality."

Klemantan and Kalimantan

The modern-day Indonesian name for Borneo island, Kalimantan, is derived from the same root as ''Klemantan''.

References

{{Portal bar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Society Ethnic groups in Indonesia Ethnic groups in Sarawak Dayak people