Thirty percent of Sarawak's population belong to various indigenous groups known collectively as 'Orang Asli' (meaning 'Upriver People'). Customs, traditions, spiritual beliefs, language and way of life vary from one group to the next, though there are common threads that connect some (or all) of them to each other in different ways. The people who have traditionally lived a nomadic existence in the vicinity of what is now Gunung Mulu National Park identify themselves as the Penan. Interestingly, while the Penan have words for every kind of animal or plant that occurs within the rainforest, they have no specific word for the forest itself: they refer to it simply as 'Tongtana', which roughly translates as 'the world in which we live'. This makes sense given that traditionally the Penan spent their entire lives here, finding everything
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