Scharer's Ngaju Religion and the Cosmos It Set Out

Ngaju Dayak religion of southern Borneo is documented in unusual structural detail through one mid twentieth century missionary linguist's study. Hans Scharer, a Swiss Protestant missionary and later academic scholar of religion, worked among the Ngaju Dayak from the 1930s and published a German language study translated into English as Ngaju Religion: The Conception of God among a South Borneo People in 1963, describing Ranying Hatalla Langit, the sky deity, set against an upperworld and underworld cosmology reconciled through ritual, particularly the tiwah secondary funeral rite in which the bones of the dead are ceremonially returned to the upperworld.

Scharer's study became a standard reference point in the comparative study of Southeast Asian cosmological religion, cited well beyond Borneo specialists for its structural analysis of paired upperworld and underworld orders. Since the mid twentieth century, much of what Scharer described has continued under the name Kaharingan, the form of Ngaju and related Dayak indigenous religion that the Indonesian state came to recognise as a variant of Hinduism, a legal classification adopted so that Kaharingan practitioners could register their religion under Indonesia's constitutional requirement to belong to one of a limited set of officially recognised faiths, rather than a claim of Hindu origin for the tradition itself.