Foreword
About the Series
About the Author
About the Book
The Senoi Semai are of special significance to anthropologists since they, together with the Semang, may represent remnants of a very widespread and ancient population of Southeast Asia that was pushed into the hinterland areas they now occupy by the coming of technologically more powerful people. Quite apart from this special status, the Semai are of interest to us because they are good examples of the semisedentary horticulturalists in forested areas who cut, burn, plant, harvest for a year or two and then move on. This type of subsistence technique has played a very important role in man's development and is still widely practiced in hinterland areas today. But most particularly, the Semai are of compelling and immediate interest because of their nonviolent orientation - a point of view which is projected into many different sectors of their culture.
Robert Dentan brings the Semai world view to the reader in simple, direct language. He describes how violence terrifies the Semai, how they meet force with flight, how interpersonal and marital relationships, sex, and aggression are influenced by the nonviolent image the Semai hold of themselves. But he takes us further, showing us how they conceive of life, death, pain, and the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and how differently these matters are arranged in the Semai system of perception and thought than in the Euro-American system.
Other features of this case study include a detailed look at the Semai subsistence procedures - the preparation of fields, planting, and harvesting; an analysis of the meaning of kinship in the sectors of social relationships, housing arrangements, perceptions of others, and socioeconomic obligations; and a continuing comparison of the east and west Semai, particularly useful because the more sedentary west Semai, in daily contact with the Malays and Chinese, serve as a prediction of the adjustment probably lying ahead for the hinterland east Semai.
But most notably this case study brings to the reader a Semai view of the world and some of the significant things within it. The author achieves this partly through the objectivity afforded by the intellectual discipline of his science. His analysis is sophisticated, and he uses appropriate anthropological concepts for the ordering of his observations. But his penetration of the Semai view is made possible because he and his wife lived with the Semai as much like Semai as the special circumstances of the Western anthropologist would permit. Participant observation of this kind, coupled with the objective methods of science, are in the best tradition of the methods of anthropology.