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A marvelous example of a broad array of issues and realizations, and of the dimensional complexity that pervades languages and lexicons everywhere (and of course everywhen as well).
I first encountered the word/concept adat in materials I gathered for my [notably inglorious] undergraduate honors thesis, and I parsed it as 'customary law' (which is indeed one facet of adat, having to do with dispute resolution, and with Brooke-era understandings and policies for administrating the affairs of Districts and ethnicities as defined by the Raj)
It was after I arrived in Sarawak (September 1965) that I came to realize that there was more to it than that government-level definition of adat, not just 'law', but much more widely to be found in how Iban people live and interact, the spoken and unspoken about how people should be, how we do things that are important to us, what shared lore binds people into bansa Iban: 'Iban ethnicity/identity', summed up by outside observers in a body of 'custom' (another of those totally inadequate words for cultural complexity and nuance), most inadequately written by (mostly English) Brooke-era civil servants... but before that translation into administrativese, adat was oral, not written. How the oral form was kept alive and transmitted was via sung texts (of which I was insufficiently curious and so woefully ignorant).
I have a pretty good clutch of print resources to put into order and read, so it's a whole Project in itself, begun at oook.info/Sarawak
Which is all to say that I realize how incurious and ill-informed I was 60 years ago, how much I missed and was cavalier about. Some of that is surely reparable, though the 'repair' butters nobody's parsnips but my own, and that's a matter of pride...