The Kinship of Kanayatn Dayak in Indonesian Borneo: Descent and Marriage-based Multi-Familial Relationship

This research explores the intricate kinship of the Kanayatn Dayak, the relationships that signify respect, generational hierarchy, and familial roles, and the objective is to describe descent and marriage-based relationships. This research is ethnographic qualitative, that is, an autoethnography connecting the personal experience of the researchers to the cultural and social meanings of kinship. The kinship identified is the descent that is used to greet parents, siblings, cousins, and ancestors, and the marriage-based covering in-laws and spouses. The descent kinships are the relationships of parene’an–the grandparents, samianakatn–the parents and their children, samadi’atn–the siblings in a family, and sakadiriatn–the children of a family with the children of their uncles or aunts. Moreover, the marriage-based are padatu’atn and patua’atn–the parents-in-law and sons/daughters-in-law, samilikatn–the spouses in a family, and parisanan–the sisters/brothers-in-law. The research implies the importance of kinship systems documentation as a reference for sociolinguistic and anthropological studies contributing to the preservation and understanding of the Kanayatn Dayak language and cultural heritage.