Paminggir District: Swamp Buffalo and Seven Villages

Paminggir District sits in the far west of Hulu Sungai Utara, in South Kalimantan, and it is one of the few districts in the regency where a herd of buffalo matters more to daily life than a rice field. The district covers 156.13 square kilometres of flooded peat lowland, holds seven villages and was home to 7,906 people at the last count on record. Its Ministry of Home Affairs code is 63.08.09. What follows is a plain account of where it lies, how the land behaves through the year, and what the people of its seven villages do for a living.

Where Paminggir District Lies

The district belongs to Hulu Sungai Utara, the regency whose trading town is Amuntai. The regency itself is described on the page for Hulu Sungai Utara and its trading towns, and Paminggir is its western edge. To the north lies Amuntai Selatan, to the east Sungai Pandan, to the south Babirik, and to the west the provincial boundary with Central Kalimantan. The two neighbours on the east and south each have their own pages here: Sungai Pandan District and Babirik District.

Paminggir is a young district. It was cut out of Danau Panggang by a regional regulation, and Danau Panggang kept sixteen villages after the split. That origin explains why the two places feel alike on the map and on the water: both are swamp districts first and land districts second. Readers who have seen photographs of houses standing on stilts over open water in Danau Panggang are looking at a landscape that Paminggir shares in its character, if not in every detail.

The district is given as a single point on the map, at roughly two degrees thirty-one minutes south and 114 degrees fifty-two minutes east. The seat of the regency is Amuntai, not a town inside Paminggir, so people here look east and north toward Amuntai when they need a larger market, an office or a hospital.

The Seven Villages of Paminggir

Seven villages make up the district. In alphabetical order they are Ambahai, Bararawa, Pal Batu, Paminggir, Paminggir Seberang, Sapala and Tampakang. The district name is shared with one village, and the name Paminggir Seberang means roughly the village on the far side, which hints at how the settlement is laid out around water rather than around a road.

The village list is short and the facts per village are uneven. Sapala is the best studied, because its buffalo trade has been described in a farm-economics paper. Bararawa is the best known for craft. Tampakang is the village where the buffalo pens above the swamp are most often photographed. For the rest, the honest statement is that the village exists, belongs to the district, and shares the same wetland livelihood.

A Landscape That Floods and Drains

Paminggir is peat swamp, which means the ground is soft organic soil that stays wet for most of the year. In the rainy months the water rises across the whole lowland and the swamp fills with floating weeds and grasses. In the drier months the water drops and the grasses, which grow wild without anyone planting them, become pasture. Both parts of the cycle matter, and the people of the district have built their working year around them.

Across Hulu Sungai Utara the peat swamp amounts to about 29,000 hectares. A large share of that is in the west, around Paminggir and Danau Panggang. Rice farming does happen in the regency’s swamps in the dry season, but in Paminggir the wetlands have not been turned into fields to any great degree. The flooded land is used as it is: as grazing, as fishing water and as a place where purun grows wild.

Because the land is floodwater for much of the year, the district is reached and crossed by boat. The engine-driven longboat known as a kelotok is the working craft, and a herder may pole or motor it through weed-choked channels to reach animals standing in the water. A visitor expecting a village street with a market at its end will find something different. The roads that exist stop short of many hamlets, and the last stretch is water.

Swamp Buffalo, the Animal Behind the District

The reason Paminggir is known beyond its borders is the swamp buffalo. In 2013 the district had about 300 families who kept buffalo and more than 10,000 animals between them. With a population of about eight thousand, that is more than one buffalo for every resident, which shows how central the herd is to the local economy. One herder in Bararawa kept 200 head by himself.

The animals are called kerbau kalang here, after the kalang, the pen where they are kept. A kalang is built from heavy logs and stands over the swamp, so the buffalo sleep above water rather than on land. In Tampakang the practice is easy to see. A tax notice for a kalang survives from 1965 for the tax year 1964, which tells us that these pens were treated as taxable property in the 1960s and that the practice is older than that. Herders in Bararawa say their family has kept buffalo for four generations, and the fifth is now taking over the herd.

The animal is built for the habitat. Swamp buffalo spend long periods in water to lower their body temperature, and in Tampakang they have been observed to swim about five kilometres in a day and to dive for one to two minutes at a time. Herders say the meat from kalang buffalo is thick, and that the legs of the animals are a little longer from all the swimming. Both are judgements from the people who raise them rather than laboratory findings, and they are offered here as such.

Feeding is simple in principle. The wild swamp vegetation, much of it grass, is the fodder, and the herd moves across the flooded range to eat it. Growth and weight depend more on the quality of that feed than on breeding, although inherited traits account for something like a fifth to a third of the difference between animals. For a district with no meadows in the usual sense, the swamp itself is the farm.

The village of Sapala has the largest herd in the district, and its buffalo marketing has been written up as a case of how animals leave the swamp and reach buyers. Its buffalo trade, from herder to buyer, has been studied as a marketing chain. In the Banjar world the buffalo also has a social role beyond meat. It is a sign of standing, and communities that use it in traditional ceremonies are regarded as holding a particular place in the social order.

Fishing in the Flooded Lowland

If buffalo are the visible wealth of Paminggir, fish are the larger workforce. In the early 2010s the district counted 4,215 fishers, more than were counted in Danau Panggang or Babirik, and the catch gave a modest daily income. The number is striking next to a population under eight thousand, because it implies that fishing is a part-time or household activity for a great many people, not only a profession of a few boats.

The fish are freshwater swamp species. The snakehead, locally called haruan or gabus, is the best known, and the page on haruan and the Banjar kitchen explains how it is cooked. Tilapia, known as nila, is also caught. Swamp birds share the water, and anyone watching a flooded channel at dawn will see them working the same weeds the fish hide in.

In Tampakang the catch is dried in the open, and photographs of the village show fish laid out on racks and mats in the sun. Drying keeps the fish for weeks, which matters in a place where a boat trip to a market can take hours. The swamp also serves as a spawning ground, and it feeds the wider Barito river basin. That is why the way Paminggir’s wetlands are used has consequences well beyond the district boundary.

Purun Weaving in Bararawa and Paminggir

Purun is a tall, reed-like swamp plant that grows wild in the peat. People cut it, clean it and dry it, and then weave it into mats, hats and bags. In Paminggir the work is done mostly by women as a household task, and it brings in income on top of buffalo and fishing. Bararawa is the village most often named for it. One weaver there makes mats, and a craft group in the district specialises in bags.

The finished goods are varied. Mats come in many patterns, including a fish motif, and are made in a size that suits a person to sit or kneel on. Hats have a wide brim. Bags are the newer product. Orders for woven chair seats have come from Java. The regency’s craft is introduced on the page about purun mat weaving, and sold in the Thursday market at Amuntai.

The plant also does useful work in the field. Stem borers prefer to lay eggs on purun rather than on rice, so purun acts as a trap plant beside a crop. Purun is also said to lower the iron in acid swamp soil, and farmers who cut and pile it, instead of burning it, collect the absorbed metal in one place. These are farming practices described by growers in the regency, and they show why the plant is valued for more than its fibre.

How People Live on Wet Ground

The Banjar are the majority in this part of the swamp, and the page on the Banjar people describes their language and river culture. Oral tradition in the swamp districts holds that Dayak people lived here before them, though no written record names the first settlers. The settlement history of Paminggir is therefore unclear, and it is better to say so than to invent a founding story.

What is clear is the adaptation. An anthropologist who has studied the swamp communities notes that long residence on wet ground lets people farm and fish there with skill, and that the same skill makes life and work on dry land harder for them. A herder who moves through a flooded channel without thought may feel out of place in a town. Houses in the neighbouring swamp district are built on stilts above the water, a style shown on the page about Banjar river houses.

Land tenure is a live matter. Much of the swamp is state land, and farmers and herders hold only letters from the village head. In the 2010s a plan to turn part of the peat swamp into a plantation was met with opposition from villages in the district, including Bararawa, Sapala, Tampakang, Paminggir and Ambahai. Herders argued that grazing land is the basis of their trade, and that if the swamp were converted they would be left as wage workers. A local legislator described Paminggir and Danau Panggang as areas where the swamp buffalo gene stock should be protected. The first permit lapsed without being carried out before the regent’s term ended, and the question of how the swamp is to be used has stayed open.

Practical Notes for Visitors

Paminggir is not a district with a set of marked attractions. There is no town centre to walk around, and the pleasures of the place are the boat journey, the sight of buffalo standing in water and the craft of the villages. A visit is best arranged through contacts in Amuntai, and it should be planned around the water level, since the same channel can be a deep boat route in one season and a weedy shallow in another.

Respect for the herders’ work is the main rule. The kalang and the animals are private property, and the swamp is a working landscape. Waste thrown into the water is a growing concern for the swamp communities, and it is the first thing a visitor can avoid doing. Anyone interested in the wider region can read on about the province.

Summary of Paminggir District

Paminggir District is a seven-village peat-swamp lowland of 156.13 square kilometres at the western edge of Hulu Sungai Utara. Its identity rests on swamp buffalo kept in log pens over water, on a large fishing population, and on purun weaving by women. Its neighbours are Amuntai Selatan, Sungai Pandan and Babirik, with Central Kalimantan beyond its western edge. The district was separated from Danau Panggang, and it still has more in common with that district than with the dry-land towns to the east. Anyone trying to understand how people make a living from ground that is under water half the year will find Paminggir an exact case.