Animals and Pənali'

Malayan animals belong to what zoogeographers call the "Malaysian subregion." This area includes Borneo, Malaya, and Indonesia west of Bali. It is what remains of Sundaland, a land mass most of which was submerged beneath about 120 feet of water by the melting of the polar icecaps around the end of the Pleistocene. Several features characterize those parts of Sundaland still above sea level. First, the fauna is varied. There are, for example, at least 129 species of snakes and over 70 species of bats in Malaya. Second, there tend to be relatively few individuals in any species. Mammals especially tend to be solitary or to move about in small groups. The Semai say, for example, that there is never more than one pair of tigers on one hill. Finally, there tends to be a sharp difference between the faunas of the lowlands and those living at altitudes above 3000 feet. Lowland Semai, for example, rarely have a chance to see a serow (the "goat antelope," Capricornis sumatrensis) and several informants confused serow with tapir.

The largest Malayan animal is the elephant, which is still common enough in the East to pose a threat to crops. Tapirs are also fairly common, but so shy that the Semai rarely see them. The two almost extinct species of rhinoceros are usually classified by the Semai with tapirs, presumably because the footprints are similar and the live animals rarely seen. Barking deer and wild pigs are important field pests in the east, although they probably do less damage than the numerous species of rats and mice. Tigers, leopards, and a few rather rare other large wild cats are, again in the east, a danger to both the people and their livestock. The bearcat, a civet which weighs 20 to 25 pounds and looks like a wolverine, is said sometimes to attack people. There are several species of smaller civets that often raid Semai chicken roosts. The different kinds of primates include three species of gibbon, three of leaf monkey, two of macaque, and the unique slow loris. Among the odder Malayan mammals are the panggolin or "scaly anteater," the tiny mouse-deer and the "flying lemur," which is not a lemur.

Bird life is also very varied. Among the larger and more impressive birds are the argus pheasant, the peacock, and the hornbill. The worst field pests are the munias, weaverfinches, and small birds called "rice-pulers." Birds usually do not make up a significant part of the Semai diet.

Reptiles abound. Malaya boasts the reticulated python, which may be the largest snake in the world. It grows to be 35 feet long and can weigh as much as an eighth of a ton. King cobras, which are up to 18 feet long, are not only by far the world's largest poisonous snakes but also among the most aggressive, sometimes attacking people with provocation. The bite has been known to kill an elephant. The other Malayan cobra is rarely more than 6 feet long, but it can "spit" a fine spray of venom from a range of about 3 feet, usually at the victim's eyes. In the eyes the venom causes great pain, temporary blindness and, if not quickly washed out, permanent damage. There are fifteen other species of poisonous snakes, but only the three kraits are usually deadly to adult human beings. Crocodiles rarely come far enough upstream to be a menace to the Semai. Monitor lizards and pythons form a rather important part of the east Semai diet, although the west Semai will not eat them.

Fish are for the east Semai at least as important a source of animal protein as terrestrial animals are, and in the west fish are usually more important.The most important food fish are carp, snakehead, and catfish, although the Semai eat almost any fish, including some types sold in Euro-American pet stores, like guppies and betas. The Semai say that the giant catfish found in the larger rivers sometimes grows to be 80 feet long and eats people, but this account may be embroidered.

There is a bewildering variety of other animal life. Some species are enormous. One spider, which has a leg spread like a soup plate, eats birds and mice. There is a black scorpion the size of a New England crab but less deadly than some of the much smaller house scorpions that crawl into one's clothes at night. One time I had my pants halfway on before realizing that a mother scorpion and her brood had moved in during the night. Getting the pants back off without disturbing the scorpions is an experience I would not care to repeat. There are several types of venomous centipede over a foot long, as well as small ones that glow in the dark. After a rain the bushes are swarming with small black land leeches that slip through the smallest fold of one's clothing. There are many sorts of insects that bite, but the most annoying insects are the flying ants and the tiny gnatlike agas agas, which sometimes swarm so densely around one's lamp in the evening that writing or typing is almost impossible.

The Response to Animals

Housing

An east Semai house shelters people against wild animals (especially elephants and tigers) as well as against sun and rain. In the east Semai settlement where we lived there were two kinds of houses. The smaller kind had walls of flattened bamboo and rested on posts that raised it 4 to 10 feet off the ground. It usuall yheld one or two nuclear families.¹ There were also three longhouses, each of which held several related nuclear families. The largest, about 40 feet long, was raised almost 20 feet off the ground. Longhouses are sturdier than the smaller houses. The floors are reinforced, and the walls are sometimes made of bamboo poles rather than flattened bamboo. The smaller houses shudder and sway in a high wind, but the longhouse is relatively steady. Along the walls of a longhouse, each nuclear family has its small sleeping compartment, set off from the others by walls a foot or two high. The central part of the floor, which is usually a foot or two higher than the floors of the sleeping compartments, is reserved for communal activities like cooking or dancing.

Man building a house

When dangerous wild animals like elephants or tigers are around, people from the smaller houses move into the longhouse for the night. For example, one day the women found tiger pug marks at their bathing place. That evening all our neighbors slept in the longhouses. Later that night the tiger came into the settlement and strolled slowly under the houses, probably attracted by the smell of the goats, which had all fled into the rain forest. My wife and I spend several rather tense minutes huddled together on the bed, watching and smelling the tiger, and thinking about how easy it would be for a large animal (tigers weigh up to 750 pounds) to crash through our thin walls or floor. Afterwards we were quite ready to follow the Semai custom of getting together in a group and maximizing the amount of space and solid material between oneself and a tiger.

Where tigers and elephants are relatively common, the longhouse is the basic living unit. About a quarter of the Semai settlements in the east consist of a single longhouse, a settlement pattern almost never found in the west. A typical west Semai house offers little protection against dangerous animals, which are much rarer in the west. Unless they have the money to buy planks for a Malay-style house, the west Semai usually wall their houses with atap and raise them only a couple of feet off the ground.

Raising the house off the ground also has the effect of keeping out some of the more unpleasant ground-dwelling animals. Moreover, a man can install his chicken roosts beneath the floor, so that he can peer through the slats at night to see whether snakes or civet cats are attacking his flock. Nevertheless, Semai houses are considerably less effective against small animals than against large ones. Anyone who opens a storage bag in a Semai house is immediately covered with the cockroaches that have infested it. The Semai are so used to this phenomenon that they do not bother to brush the roaches off. Similarly, at night one always hears the patter and squeaking of house rats. Other animals come into the house to prey on the roaches and rats. There are the house geckoes, small big-eyed lizards called chi'cha', after their rather plaintive call. yellow and brown spiders with a leg spread about the size of one's palm eat the roaches. Snakes sometimes get into the atap roof to search for rats. The Semai custom of dumping garbage through the slatted floors attracts bees and butterflies, which often then fly up into the house. Most of the time one is unaware of the numerous animals in one's house (the list above is not exhaustive), but after a few days' heavy rain, which soaks the atap roof, the ceiling begins to crawl with them.

Semai houses are to shelter people against wild animals and the elements, not against the inhabitants' friends and neighbors. The notion of privacy is alien to the east Semai and of little importance to the west Semai. To refuse someone admission to one's house would be an act of extreme hostility and is therefore "taboo" (punan). My wife and I had a good deal of trouble getting used to the idea that seeking privacy was aggressive. For example, the east Semai often go to sleep early in the evening. Our house was therefore relatively empty, and we used the evening to type up field notes. The problem was that around five o'clock in the morning some well rested Semai would decide to drop in for a vist. They would cough a few times to see if we were awake or ask in clear, pleasant voices, "You sleeping?" If we pretended to be asleep and they had nothing urgent to do, they would settle down to chat with each other. A person who dropped in by himself might just sit for a while, humming a little tune, or he might rummage through our belongings in hopes of turning up something interesting. At one point we tried tying our door shut. But our east Semai friends would have been shocked and hurt at the idea that there were times when we did not want to see them. Serene in their knowledge that we liked them and were therefore always glad to have them visit, they would reach over the top of the door and untie the fastening. For a while we kept making the binding more and more difficult to untie, but making the binding fantastically complicated delayed their entry by only a few more minutes. Eventually we had to give in to Semai notions of hospitality.

A brief digression on the apparent near absence of a Semai notion of privacy may prove interesting. I think that there are several factors that are conducive to this situation. First, insofar as people do have to band together in time of danger as described above, a strongly developed emphasis on privacy would be an impediment. Second, the construction of traditional Semai houses makes privacy difficult. Because the outside walls are usually thin and the whole house open to the breeze, people near a house can hear what is going on inside. They can also smell what food is being cooked, since the Semai seem to have an acute sense of smell. In the evening after the lights were out we would often chat through the walls for a quarter of an hour or so with any of our next door neighbors who were awake. Similarly, like the changes in the height of the floors, the interior walls in a Semai house serve to mark off areas for certain activities (for example, cooking, sleeping) rather than to shield someone from the curiosity of his housemates. Third, in Semai communities, especially in the east, everyone is at least in part dependent economically on most of the other people in his settlement. He is therefore naturally interested in what they are doing. The population is small enough so that he gets to know them fairly well. Besides, as in most small rural communities, there is very little "news" to talk about, aside from what one's neighbors are up to. Gossip is one of the few entertainments available. Finally, the lack of privacy serves an important social function. There are very few ways in which a Semai can be forced to conform to the standards of his community (see Chapter 7 for more details on this subject). But each person knows that his neighbors are watching him. If he does such a simple thing as start for the river to defecate or bathe, someone is going to ask him where he is going and what he intends to do there. It is quite possible that, after hearing the answer, the questioner will decide to come along too. If a man does something that offends one of his neighbors, the news will be all over the settlement by bedtime. For example, "Goiter says Flower took more than her fair share of the fish the women caught. Besides, said Goiter, Flower has bulgy eyes and a flat nose." In an hour or two, this news reaches Flower. Goiter then hears, "Flower says anything Goiter says about her will bounce back on Goiter. If Goiter says Flower has bulgy eyes, Goiter has bulgy eyes. If Goiter says Flower has a flat nose, Goiter has a flat nose." Rather than risk being caught up in an exchange of malicious gossip like this, people tend to be rather careful about conforming to their neighbors' notions of proper behavior. Privacy would render gossip less effective as a means of social control.

Hunting and Trapping

Men hunt with a blowpipe seven or eight feet long. The blowpipe consists of two tubes of bamboo, one inside the other so that the weapon will not bend of its own weight. Semai men treat their blowpipes as symbols of virility. They spend more time making a blowpipe than building a house. After it is made, they lavish yet more time polishing and ornamenting it. Young west Semai boys in villages where no one uses a blowpipe any longer will spend hours playing with a blowpipe brought in by a visitor.

The blowpipe shoots small, featherless darts, the tips of which are smeared with a sticky poison compounded from the Strychnos vine, the sap of the upas tree, and such other poisons as toadskin and snake venom. Dart poison, say the Semai, can be made of anything the eating of which makes one sick. Although this principle, derived from years of observation and experiment, is "unscientific," it works pretty well for the Semai, in part because they usually use a mixture of poisons. The dart is notched twice near the end so that if the animal succeeds in brushing the dard off, the point will break and stay imbedded in the wound. The poison does not affect the edibility of the meat except in a small area around the wound and is ineffective against animals much larger than a middle-sized pig.

Using the blowpipe (1930s). (Photograph courtesy of Louis Carrard)

No weapon can compete with the blowpipe on an emotional level. On the economic level, however, the blowpipe is less important than the shotgun. Long available in the west, shotguns first became widely available in the east during the abortive Communist rebellion in the 1950s when the government distributed them for use against the rebels. The Semai, as unwarlike a people as one could imagine, preferred to use them for hunting. Since the Semai are ignorant of game laws and impossible to supervise anyway, the Game Department is constantly embroiled with Semai "poachers." The government remains unwilling to withdraw the guns, however, for fear of losing the loyalty of the Semai.

Because of the difficulty of travel in the rain forest, a hunter has to be in top physical shape and usually is between twenty-five and forty years old. Older men tend to retire as it were, and become fishermen.

A hunting party usually consists of one to three men, often housemates or brothers, who decide early in the morning to go out hunting. They start out around 7:30 A.M. and try to get back before noon, that is, before the day gets too hot. During fruit season, the hunters may wait underneath a fruit tree for the prey to come to them. More typically, however, the party roves along the paths, occasionally beating the bush a little, until they hear some animal moving. The less experienced hunter then freezes, while his partner goes off to try to get to the other side of the animal. He moves in a crouch with knees slightly bent, very slowly, to avoid frightening the prey further. When he sees the animal, he inserts a dart in the lower end of his blowpipe, stuffs in a little tree cotton so that the dart will not fall out, stands on his toes and raises the blowpipe to his lips. Then he fires. If the animal flees past the waiting hunter, he firest, too. Both then trail the animal by ear until the poison takes effect or the hunters get another clear shot. The hunt generates so much excitement that, when concealment is unnecessary - as, for example, when the prey has taken refuge in the top of a forest giant above the main canopy of the rain forest, thus depriving itself of further refuge - the normally reserved Semai dance around whooping and laughing like children.

There are several minor kinds of hunting. In one, the hunter fans smoke into a hole until the animal comes out or suffocates. In another, a noose on the end of a pole is used to catch arboreal animals like monitor lizards. Occasionally, people go hunting pigs with spears, but the spear is primarily a defensive weapon kept in the house for potential use against wild animals, supernatural beings and what the west Semai call gengster (that is, gangsters).

Trapping provides more food than hunting does. The Semai make at least sixteen different kinds of traps, of which only the two most important types are discussed here.

The spring-spear consists of a thick sapling up to 20 feet long pegged back into the shape of a "U." One end is embedded in the ground and the other end is secured by a palm fiber trip string. A razor-sharp bamboo spear is tied on at a right angle to the free arm of the "U," with the tip pointing away from the "U." When an animal stumbles against the trip string, the bent sapling straightens out, snapping the spear into the prey. The Semai mark each trap by trimming a sapling and bending it towards the trap. The spring spear can kill large animals and, during the unsuccessful Communist insurrection, severely wounded both guerrilla and government troops. Although the trap is now outlawed, some east Semai continue to set it along rain forest paths, primarily to catch pigs and deer. The spring-spear more often maims than kills, and in the two to four days between inspections the prey may escape, either to become dangerous or to die unretrieved in some out-of-the-way place.

More efficient and productive are the various noose traps. The noose is either laid flat on the ground or, oftener, suspended from a rattan frame. Whenever possible, the noose is made of wire, but this material is scarce in the east, and the people usually have to settle for rattan or palm-fiber string. A man will set a string of five to ten noose traps along animal runs, near burrows or drinking places, preferably either near his house or along the path he takes to his field. Noose traps are also set in fruiting trees.

Fishing

The commonest methods of fishing, more or less in order or popularity, are as follows: trapping, basket fishing, line fishing, poisoning, spearing, netting, and catching by hand. The order varies from place to place, because there is considerable difference between techniques adapted to the small, swift highland brooks and those suited to the large, relatively sluggish lowland rivers.

Fish traps and weirs provide the bulk of the fish, especially in the lowlands. There are almost as many different types of fish traps as of land traps. The commonest type is ovate with a narrow spiked funnel of a mouth through which the fish enters and cannot return. A typical east Semai family has one to three basket traps, but along the Perak River in the west the number may run as high as forty. The smaller traps are set in small streams early in the afternoon and the catch collected next morning. Traps 6 to 10 feet long are set in rivers and inspected every couple of days or so.

A group of three to five men, usually housemates or kinsmen, will build a wall around an abatis of brush felled while clearing a field. They set basket traps at the entrance of the pen thus formed, then throw the trash ashore, scaring the fish into the traps. Similarly, they may pen a deep hole in a stream and then jump into the hole, again scaring the fish into the trap. Along the banks of major rivers, groups of up to a dozen men may construct "fish farms" - pens open at both ends, with fish traps at one end and a door at the other. When the pen is full, the door is closed and people frighten the fish into the traps. "Fish farms" are usually built when the fish are migrating downstream at the beginning of the dry season or upstream at the beginning of the wet season. After a heavy rain, a couple of men may erect a temporary weir across the delta of a tributary stream to trap deep-water fish that have gone into the temporarily deep waters of the tributary. A large party goes out with torches that night to spear the trapped fish. Finally, a man and his wife will dam a small stream with rocks, leaving an opening in which a fish trap is set. They then beat a restricted area of the stream above the dam, take their catch and move upstream to repeat the process. Such an expedition will take all morning.

It is usually the women who catch fish in baskets. The fisherwomen put the basket downstream from a pile of half-submerged jetsam and then scatter the pile downstream, catching in their basket the debris and fish hiding there. Basket fishing parties start out early in the morning and return late in the afternoon. The fish caught this way are small, including many of the species sold in American tropical-fish stores. After the catch has been divided equally among the members of a fishing party, there is rarely more than a couple of fish per person.

Line fishing is primarily a man's job and has some of the recreational quality of hunting. Fish poisoning is rather uncommon. Fishing with Malay chain-weighted circular throwing nets is becoming commoner, but most of the east Semai cannot afford to acquire such nets. Fishing by hand, sometimes combined with the use os mild fish poisons, is mostly a children's game. In the west, along the Perak River, most children over six are expert at catching fish by hand. Adult Semai sometimes catch fish for lunch by hand while defecating in small streams.

Keeping Animals

Traditionally, no Semai would kill an animal he had raised but would exchange it with a person in another village, knowing that that person would kill the animal. Even now the Semai rarely kill their animals but raise them for barter or sale. The buyers are usually Malay or Chinese traders.

The commonest domesticated animal is the chicken. Although the Semai have long had chickens, they still domesticate the chicks of the wild jungle fowl, either by clipping their tailfeathers and letting them run with the other chicks as semi-pets or by hatching out wild fowl eggs under their own chickens. Young chicks are kept indoors under an inverted backbasket until able to fend for themselves. Most chickens become prey to disease, snakes, or civet cats before reaching maturity. Because the population is inbred, there are a great many odd-looking chickens with crests instead of combs, bald heads and necks and/or dwarfish legs.

The next commonest domesticated animal is the dog. The aboriginal Semai dog is a small, inbred, orange animal which closely resembles the dogs found in Southeast Asian neolithic sites. This dimunitive animal is too small to be much help in hunting except to call attention to the presence of an animal by barking. (Actually the bark is more like a roar.) In the west this breed has been almost completely replaced by the larger Southeast Asian mongrels known as "pye dogs." Dogs are named and sometimes addressed as "child."

Cats, ducks, and goats are relatively recent introductions. Those west Semai who raise irrigated rice also have water buffalo.

Besides young domesticated animals, which they treat as pets, the Semai make pets of immature wild animals. Animals treated as pets include mice, monkeys, tigers, squirrels, pigs, otters, civet cats, rats, flying foxes, tortoises and, according to one man, monitor lizards. Birds kept as pets include doves, pigeons, game birds, and kingfishers. The Semai talk and whistle to tame birds and they fondle chicks. They behave yet more affectionately to four-footed pets. They adopt young animals as eagerly as they adopt children, fondle them as they fondle children, address them as "children," give them names, and even suckle them. They seem to lose their interest in pets as the animals mature, and most adult pets escape into the rain forest. Adult monkeys, however, are sometimes kept chained in or under the house. Pets are rarely sold and never eaten.

Semai Zoology

Taxonomy

Understanding the system of taboos called pənali' is impossible without understanding the logical basis of the way in which the Semai classify and conceptualize the organisms involved. Different conceptual systems "pay attention" to different attributes of their universe. For example, Euro-Americans classify whales as mammals, paying attention to such attributes as warm blood and suckling the young, but at one time many people classified whales as fish, paying attention to characteristics such as shape and habitat. Although the number of characteristics to which a conceptual system can pay attention is infinite, it is large enough to allow many different ways of classifying the same set of facts. The first step in understanding this Semai conceptual system is, therefore, to try to determine the characteristics on which its classification rests.

For the Semai, a "real meal" consists of meat, fish, fowl, or fungus, plus a starchy food like rice or tapioca. A man who has not had meat, fish, fowl, or fungus recently will say, with complete seriousness, "I haven't eaten for days." The words "meat," "fish," "fowl," and "fungus," however, are imprecise translations of the Semai words. My impression is that the Semai classification involves three main principles.

First, the Semai categories seem to be based on where the organism lives rather than on what it looks like. Cheb are air animals (that is, birds), and ka' are water animals (fish, and, in the east, turtles and water snails). Land organisms in this "real food" system are bətiis (fleshy fungi) or mənhar (meat). The Semai describe the taste of fungi as like meat, fowl, or fish rather than like other vegetables. It is therefore logical to put them in the meat-fowl-fish system. On the other hand, fungi are obviously different from animals (for example, they don't move around the way animals do). In fact, they seem to be too different to lump together with land animals as mənhar. The Semai distinguish three types of land animals, again on the basis of habitat: "those beneath the earth" (snakes and lizards), tree mənhar (such as squirrels and monkeys) and land mənhar (for example, deer and pig).

Animals that live in two habitats are arbitrarily assigned to one or the other. Thus bats are "tree mənhar," and for the east Semai frogs and toads are ka'. Land tortoises are also ka' for the east Semai, probably because they look like water turtles.

The problem with doing an analysis of this sort is that, like most peoples, the Semai find their own conceptual scheme so obvious that they have trouble explaining the defining characteristics of these categories to a non-Semai. Knowing that his informants may not be able to help him out, an anthropologist guides his analysis of conceptual schemes by the rule that the simplest explanation of the most facts is the best explanation. Now, the analysis just given is "two-dimensional." One demension is habitat, and the other, the one that distinguishes fungi from meat, seems to be something like mobility. But suppose that the real basis of the system is locomotion, that is cheb fly, ka' swim, bətiis do not move, and mənhar walk. Similarly, snakes and lizards wriggle, ground mənhar walk, and three mənhar climb. This one-dimensional explanation is simpler, more "parsimonious," as logicians say. Yet I am inclined to favor the more complicated one, because I think it ties in more closely with the way the Semai talk about the organisms in the various categories. Which analysis is right is a question that must go unanswered until someone can talk with an exceptionally intellectual and perceptive Semai.

The second principle in the way the Semai think about animals is still harder to discover. My impression is that the Semai think that some species are more "typical" of their categories than other species are. For example, naga' (snakelike dragons) seem to represent the quintessence of "they beneath the earth." Giant monitors, in turn, are the prime representative of "lizard," and regal python of "snake." There is also some evidence that the Semai have a feeling that animals in different habitats should have different sorts of skin: cheb, feathers; ka' rounded scales or moist skins; tree mənhar, fur like human head hair; land mənhar, hair like human body hair; and "they beneath the earth," scales that form a pattern of diamonds "like a backbasket." Animals which do not meet these expectations are apparently felt to be anomalous, odd, "unnatural."

Obviously, one has to be wary in dealing with things that do not fit neatly into the natural order. People say, for example, that one should be very careful about eating anomalous animals, especially in situations that are already dangerous enough (such as, during pregnancy). For example, the "flying lemur" is "tree mənhar," closely related to monkeys; but it "flies" like a cheb. Similarly, the panggolin is mənhar, but covered with large overlapping scales like a ka'. The meat of these two animals should not be mixed with any other meat, and there are several other rules about cooking and eating it. Snakes are another instance of animals that do not fit neatly into Semai taxonomy. Mənhar should be quadrupedal. The Semai say that a snake has "a bad body." Asked what hye meant by "a bad body," one Semai man explained, "It has no arms, it has no legs and it scares me." Among the east Semai there are many restrictions (la'na') on eating snakes, and the west Semai do not eat snakes at all. The rules and restrictions about eating such anomalous foods seem to be ways of handling the dangers inherent in eating "unnatural" things. This response holds not only for the broad categories already described but also for smaller subcategories. For example, the Semai idea of what a "snake" should look like resembles that of most Euro-American. The short python (Python curtus) has a very short tail and looks much stubbier than most other snakes. The east Semai, who cannot afford to pass up the meat of such a large animal (up to 9 feet long), observer many restrictions on eating short python and insist, wrongly, that the animal is very venomous. Similarly, the eyelessness of the blind snakes mentioned in Chapter 2 seems to violate the Semai notion of what snakes should look like. I once picked up one of these little snakes in the river and brought it home for identification. People jammed the doorway of our house to see the "headband of Thunder" (also called "spawn of the sun"). No one would come within a yard or two of the specimen, however, for fear of bringing on a disaster (tərlaid). In short, if an animal does not look the way the Semai say that animals in that category should look, then it makes the Semai uneasy and they treat it with great care.

The final principle in this system is that some foods are more dangerous to eat than others. The more dangerous the food, the more likely it is that people in an already dangerous situation like pregnancy will not eat it. Within any category of land animals, the larger an animal is, the more dangerous eating it is. I think that one can also arrange the major food categories in an order of decreasing dangerousness, although there are a good many exceptions: land mənhar, tree mənhar, birds, ka', and fungi. I feel that his hypothetical sequence may mirror an unconscious sense on the part of the Semai that, for example, land mənhar are much more like human beings than fungi are. If this guess is right, then it would follow that the Semai naturally take more precautions about killing and eating creatures like themselves than about doing the same to relatively inhuman creatures.

Pənali'

Like most peoples, the Semai do not regard the way in which they categorize the world as arbitrary. The four major categories of "real food" and the three sub-divisions of mənhar are taken to be part of the natural order. Logically, then, mixing together foods from different categories is mixing up the natural order, an impious violation of the nature of the world. Therefore eating or cooking foods from different categories is going to bring on some further reverberation in the natural order. Just how serious the disturbance in the natural order will be depends on how dangerous the animal is to eat. Mixing pork with other foods might bring on an epidemic of infectious hepatitis or a violent thundersquall, while mixing fungi and fish would probably lead only to baldness or pains in one's back. In order to avoid upsetting the natural order this way, the Semai observe a "taboo" (pənali') on eating or cooking foods from different categories at the same time. Eating steak smothered in mushrooms, for example, would be pənali'. People would say that a Semai who ate such a dish was "eating rawoid." The word rawoid seems to be cognate with the word roid, "to lose one's bearings, to get lost and wander around." Incoherent babbling that follows none of the rules of proper discourse is "talking rawoid." Eating rawoid thus seems to mean something like "eating without regard to the orderly processes of nature."

Not only should one not actually mix foods from different categories together, one should not even serve them at the same meal. Ideally, a Semai should have a separate set of dishes for each of the four major categories. Although the east Semai, who have few dishes, tend to ignore this refinement, most west Semai have at least two sets of dishes. If a person does not have enough dishes, serving mənhar on a banana-leaf plate is far safer than serving it in a dish that once held Ka', no matter how well the dish has been scrubbed. Furthermore, after the meal, the dishwater should be dumped in different areas, depending on what sort of food has been served.

The west Semai know that Chinese and Englishmen eat "mixed" (pənali') foods without any natural disaster following. They explain that non-Semai may "understand" (tageh) mixed dishes, having eaten then since childhood. Some young Semai are able to eat Chinese food, they say, because they also have been familiar with it since they were children. It remains dangerous, however, they conclude, since even the English and the Chinese are more likely to get bald than the Semai are, probably because they ignore the rules of pənali'.

Nicknames

The east Semai do not use the real "name" of an animal they are hunting or eating. Instead, they use a nickname (mɔl, "handle") that belongs to the ənroo' kərəndei, "language making-not-to-know." These nicknames have fallen into disuse in the west, with a few exceptions like the nicknames for elephant ("Mr. Big"), tiger ("Grandfather Stripes"), crocodile ("Mr. Cigarette"), giant monitor lizard ("Mr. Machete"), and bearcat ("Mr. Fire"). The ənroo' kərəndei is a typically Semai way of dealing with dangers posed by the non-Semai world. Instead of defying something that threatens them, the Semai try to deceive it. The basic purpose of the ənroo' kərəndei is to keep a Semai-speaking non-Semai from realizing that the Semai are talking about him.

The words in this secret language are formed in one of two ways. First, they may refer to some characteristic of the entity under discussion. For instance, the seductive female "bird spirits" become "They of the Long Hair," a gibbon "Mr.Long Hands," a quail "Rice-Counting Bird," a panggolin "That Thing with Fish Scales" and the circumcized Malays "Clipped People." Some of these nicknames are based on analogies rather obscure to non-Semai. For example, flying lemurs are "Mr. Carry-in-a-Sling" because, in resting position, the animal seems to be supported by its membraneous "wings" in the same way that a Semai child is supported by the sling in which its mother carries it (see photograph). The other way of forming nicknames is to use a word close in sound to the sound of the real name. For instance, a macaque (Macaca ivus, called rau in Semai and kara in Malay) becomes a kərenh, and a Bengali Indian becomes a Mənggalaint. Since the Semai delight in word play, this sort of nickname is often a pun. In the presence of a Tamil Indian, for example, the west Semai do not use the normal word for Tamil, Kəling, but instead use the word kəlag, "bird of prey." Building on this pun, they sometimes use the word "chicken grabbers" (a "handle" for birds of prey) to refer to
Tamils.

East Semai girl and her baby. The baby's hat cost a large part of the family's income (1962).

These nicknames reflect the tendency of the Semai language to use words slightly different in sound to refer to phenomena slightly different in nature, for example, chəngiis and chəngees refer to two slightly different odors. More important, they exemplify the Semai preference for dealing with non-Semai by obfuscation. Faced with a danger from the non-Semai world, one of the first Semai responses is to work out a way of confusing their potential enemies. For instance, when the west Semai heard that Indonesia had adopted a policy of confrontation with Malaysia and might declare war any day, one of the first actions they took was to think up nicknames for "Indonesian," for example, "Egg People" in reference to the bombs the Indonesians were expected to drop, "Tobacco People" in reference to the fact that one of the better tobaccos smoked in Malaysia comes from Java in Indonesia.

I think that the use of a secret language to refer to animals stems from the fact that the Semai fear the consequences of their own violence (see Chapter 6). In most of their dealings with the animal world they are the aggressors, killing and eating. From the Semai point of view, some sort of violent retaliation is to be expected. They therefore try to conceal what they are doing in a variety of ways. For example, the west Semai will not tease or kill a helpless wounded animal but will let it go free. The secret language seems also to be a way of evading the consequences of aggression by concealing the fact of aggression.

Just what might retaliate against the Semai - that is, just what the secret language is supposed to fool - remains obscure. The nickname should be used from the time hunters are on the trail of an animal until a day or two after the meat has been eaten. Some Semai say that using the real "name" will alert the quarry, but this danger seems slight after the animal has been eaten. Others say that using the "name" while eating the meat would cause cramps, and still others say that the animal's "soul" (ruai) or "essence" (kəloog) will respond to its name and wreak vengeance on its slayer. My impression is that the Semai do not make a sharp distinction behveen a verbal category and an individual in that category. For example, perhaps the reason that people are unsure whether Thunder is singular or plural is that, in a sense, all thunder is immanent in any given case of thunder. In other words, I think that on some unverbalized level the Semai may regard an individual as the embodiment of the linguistic category to which it belongs. The category in turn is not felt to be an arbitrary linguistic phenomenon but at least a faithful reflection and perhaps an actual part of the natural order. To take what may be an analogous example from Euro-American society, a murder is considered not just a crime against the victim but a crime against "mankind," the category to which the victim belongs. "Mankind" in turn is felt to be not just a word but in some sense a real entity. Similarly, I think that, without being able to express their feeling, the Semai may feel that killing a gibbon, say, is not just an act of violence against that gibbon but against "gibbonkind." Insofar as "gibbonkind" is part of the natural order, such an act is dangerous. To deal with this potential danger, people resort to the standard Semai tactic of obfuscation. In short, if this analysis is right, then the vaguely conceptualized thing the Semai try to dupe by using their secret language is the natural order as categorized by the Semai language.

¹. A "nuclear family" consists of a man, his wife, and his children. ↩