The Dayak of Kwallan, Borneo, used this carved, wooden block for healing purposes. However, there is no record of how it was used in a healing ceremony. Most likely, the 'pawang', or shaman would have used it to drive away evil spirits or illness from the sick.During 19th-20th centuries, it was typical for ethnographic collectors to collect a wide range of objects. They believed that a collected specimen should add new knowledge to the field so that scholars could have a more ‘complete’ picture of the culture they were studying. William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), the American naturalist, renowned for his prodigious collections from the Malay Archipelago collected a wide range of objects to represent every aspect of material culture in the places he visited. He wanted his collection to show the Dayak people in the development of human society.
