Plants and Agriculture

The soil of Semai-Iand is of low inherent fertility but supports a rich flora of the "Western Malaysian" type. That is, the flora has more in common with that of Sumatra or Borneo than with that of continental Asia. There are far more species of plants in this type of forest than in, say, American woodland. There are, for example, over 8000 species of flowering plants, of which at least 2500 are trees. Stands of a single species are rare. The tree trunks are usually tall (often up to 150 feet) and straight, supported by large buttresses. So great is the competition for living space that trees grow straight out from the banks of rivers parallel to the surface of the water for 10 or 15 feet, and seeds germinate as soon as they hit the ground. As some plants are growing and taking nutrients out of the soil, however, others are dying and returning nutrients to the soil in the form of rotting vegetable matter. The heat and humidity of the Malayan climate speed up this cycle of growth and decay.

When the Semai clear a field, the soil is exposed to the direct rays of the sun. The resulting increase in soil temperature greatly increases the rate at which the humus decomposes. The clearing of the forest cover means that, while Semai crops are taking nutrients out of the soil, no new humus is being laid down. Moreover, the Semai prefer to locate their fields by streams so that traveling to one's field is easy. Because Semai country tends to be hilly, this preference often leads to clearing fields on steep slopes. The result is that the heavy Malayan rains begin to wash away the topsoil, which is no longer protected by a thick forest cover. Consequently, using a field for more than a few years would almost totally destroy the fertility of the soil so that neither crops nor rain forest could grow on it.

The Semai recognize that the second year's crop from a given field is usually less abundant than the first year's. More important, however, is the fact that after a year or two the field is overgrown with weeds and brush. They therefore abandon their fields after a year or so and clear new fields elsewhere. The result is that a new forest cover grows up, the nutrient cycle is re-established, and after about a dozen years the soil has largely regained its fertility.

Agriculture

In deciding where to clear a field, the Semai take the wild plant cover into account. There are four major Semai categories of plant cover. These categories do not correspond exactly to any English categories so that it is necessary to use Semai terms to describe them. An "old field" (səlai manah) is a year or two old, still producing some crops. Pabəl is thick undergrowth, usually from two to seven years old. Bəlaki' is rain forest with a thick layer of undergrowth, typically from seven to twelve years old. Finally, jərəs is a rain forest of large trees and little undergrowth, typically over a dozen years old.

For a small field the Semai often clear pabəl, because the undergrowth can easily be cut down with a machete. For a large field, people prefer bəlaki' to jərəs. In jərəs the trees are so tall and the buttresses so thick that the men often have to build a scaffold 15 feet high to get to a portion of the trunk thin enough for them to chop through with their small axes (see photograph). Besides, the forest giants do not burn well, with the result that their huge charred trunks sometimes litter the field. Thus, the Semai can plant about 25 to 30 pounds of seed rice in an acre cleared of bəlaki'. but only about 20 pounds of seed in an acre cleared of jərəs. Nevertheless, because the closed cycle that produces humus is restored in jərəs, it is more fertile than bəlaki' and both are far more fertile than pabəl, facts the Semai recognize.

Because crops are so important, the Semai also use magic to help them determine whether or not a given plot of land will be fertile. Semai in different places use different types of magic, but a certain basic procedure underlies the differences. A man clears a very small patch of earth and cleanses it by sprinkling it with a decoction of magic leaves and a magic whisk. He then plants a small stick in the ground. He goes home and if he has a propitious dream, or if the stick has "grown" overnight, he knows that the land will be fertile. I imagine that he has probably unconsciously made up his mind already, and that his dream or the "growing" stick simply serve to make him less anxious about his decision.

The main difference between east and west Semai agriculture is that in the east people resettle every few years near their fields whenever the depletion of the soil has forced them to clear new fields, whereas in the west settlements tend to be more permanent, with people rotating their fields around the village every few years. There seem to be several reasons for this difference. First, some west Semai work for wages and therefore do not clear any fields at all. There is thus more land available near the settlement for people who do want to plant crops. The larger eastern fields use up the arable land around a village more quickly, forcing the people to clear new land elsewhere. Second, in some low-lying western areas the Semai grow irrigated rice, which gives a much higher yield per acre than the hill rice grown by most other Semai. They can therefore get the same amount of rice from smaller fields. Conversely, some of the highland Semai in the east still depend on foxtail millet, which has a much lower yield per acre than even hill rice, with the result that settlements there have to move almost every year. Third, west Semai sometimes plant rubber trees and orchards of fruit trees, which take several years to mature. Moreover, with the money they can earn they buy bulky things like clocks with visible pendulums (a favorite item) or planks to build permanent Malay-style houses. Owning trees and bulky durable goods and/or having jobs means that resettling would be a difficult task, necessitating serious economic losses. The east Semai do not plant trees, have few bulky material possessions, and erect houses so flimsy that they must be rebuilt every two or three years, whether or not the settlement is moved. They are thus much freer to move than the westerners. Fourth, while the east Semai are fairly isolated, many of the west Semai live near Chinese and Malays. The Chinese and Malays also grow crops, with the result that there is often no unused arable land for the Semai to move to. In the cast, there is far more unused land than the Semai need. Fifth, the west Semai are gradually becoming dependent on the luxuries of Chinese-Malay society, like hospitals, movies, and schools. One west Semai settlement has remained near a Chinese town for over a decade simply so that they and adjacent Semai settlements will have a convenient home base from which to send children to a local school. The east Semai still have little access to such amenities. Sixth, while the east Semai are so afraid of strangers that they sometimes flee from the sound of a motorboat coming upstream into their territory, the west Semai have become used to living near Chinese and Malays. The westerners still suspect that non-Semai have evil intentions, but they will not resettle simply to get away from them. Finally, the east Semai will abandon a settlement in which two or three people have died (see Chapter 9). The west Semai have given up this custom. In short, for a variety of reasons the west Semai site their fields near their settlements, while the east Semai site their settlements near their fields.

East Semai man felling a tree (1962).

There is no permanent ownership of fields among the Semai. A nuclear family "owns" land which they have cleared and from which they are still getting crops. The fields are usually marked off into nuclear family plots by fallen logs or lines-of-sight between two landmarks. If for some reason a man is unable to clear a plot, he asks for part of the field of a kinsman or housemate. As will be seen later, to refuse such a request would be punan, an extremely serious breach of proper behavior. If someone outside the nuclear family helps clear a family plot, the head of the family supplies him with tobacco and feeds him a meal when the work is finished or gives him some rice and tobacco to take home. Young men with no children usually help to work the fields of the nuclear family with whom they eat. Before a settlement moves, people clear fields near the site of the new settlement, which may be a couple of miles from the old one.

The east Semai clear their fields twice a year, the west Semai only once. The easterners clear "little fields" shortly after the harvest from the "big fields" is in, usually in January. Most of the time only a minority of families in an eastern settlement clear "little fields."

Because of climatic variation, the calendar dates for clearing "big fields" vary from place to place. The important thing is that it should be done by the end of the dry season so that the fallen bushes and trees will be dry enough to burn, but the new crops will then get the benefit of the monsoon rains The Semai figure that it is time to begin clearing fields when a certain kind of tree called pərah (Elaterio-spermum tapos) puts out new leaves. Clearing starts in April, May, or June and is finished two to three months later.

Women and children usually start the process of clearing, by slashing the undergrowth with machetes. After the first two days, the workers are supposed to take a day off. In jərəs, where there is little undergrowth, it takes about two weeks to clear a "big field'' of bush; in bəlaki', where undergrowth is thicker, it takes about a month. In pabəl, where there is nothing but undergrowth, a vigorous man can clear an acre in a week or so. Clearing the undergrowth usually results in the discovery of bush-dwelling rodents or bats, which go into the cooking pot. The heaps of fallen brushwood in the streams near the field serve as shelters for fish and are exploited in basket fishing (see Chapter 3).

When the undergrowth is cleared, the men fell the large trees with axes. Usually the trees at the top of the hill are felled first so that large trees will, in falling, carry down the smaller ones below them, which are often notched first. To fell five or six trees at once this way requires an expert and is considered great fun. Since felling a forest giant takes two men at least a whole morning, its fall is usually the sign to quit for the day, or, in the case of exceptionally energetic axemen, to take a break for lunch and a cooling dip in a nearby stream. Felling an acre of jərəs takes two to four weeks.

Depending on the rainfall, the felled brush and trees must be left to dry for a month or six weeks before it is burnable. Ideally, there should be a week without rain before the burning. Because of the constant danger that more rain will fall on nearly dry fields, however, people become anxious. Therefore, even if the fields are not thoroughly dry, when one man burns his field his covillagers usually follow suit. The sight of the smoke from burning fields is likely to start a chain reaction in settlements up and down the river.

As a result, the initial burning is often incomplete, leaving as much as a third of the field to be re-burnt. Before the second burning, people pile the smaller logs and scraps over and parallel to the larger unburnt logs. When the piles burn, they leave a rich deposit of ash on which certain minor crops—for example, hot peppers, chives, lemongrass, and tobacco—are planted. After the final burning, there is a mandatory cooling period, two to four days if it rains heavily, up to a week or more otherwise. If planting began while the fields were still hot, the heat of the soil would kill the plants as it does the weeds.

The organization of labor in planting crops is much like that for clearing, except that the work groups tend to be larger and the expense of paying them off with rice and tobacco that much greater. There is a preplanting ritual much like the predearing ritual, and the planters put in fragrant magical plants "to help the rice grow." The only tool used in planting is a pointed staff which anthropologists call a "dibble" or "dibbling stick." The men and boys usually do the actual dibbling, making holes with the dibble into which the women and girls drop half-a-dozen rice seeds or a stem-cutting of tapioca or a half-grown tobacco plant, and so on. In the case of minor crops, however, a man or woman may do both the dibbling and the planting.

Since a Semai usually does not devote any part of his field exclusively to a single crop, several different kinds of crops are planted in each section of the field. During the early days of the Communist uprising in Malaya, before the rebels realized what was happening and began to follow the Semai pattern, Semai intercropping allowed the pilots of British reconnaissance planes to distinguish Semai fields from the neatly arranged fields of the guerrillas. In some cases, however, the Semai tend to plant rice or maize in the center of their fields, with tapioca around the edges.

Rice is usually planted first. The planter holds the seeds in his or her left fist and lets just the right number drop into the right palm, which flicks them into the hole made by the dibble. The next crop to be planted is maize. Tapioca and the other crops are last. No fertilizers are used. The Semai describe the use of fecal material on fields as revolting. In fact, common slang terms for Chinese are "Excrement People" and "Urine People," because the Chinese do use excrement to fertilize their fields.

Since most of the fields of the east Semai are cleared in bəlaki' or jərəs, there is usually enough fuel to generate enough heat to sterilize the topsoil and thus inhabit weed growth. Besides, the Semai think weeding is grubby and boring. The east Semai therefore do little to prevent weeds from growing among their crops. Since the maturing crops attract animals from the surrounding rain forest, the fields are at this time a favored location for traps and for grasshopper hunts. The Semai, however, regard these traps and hunts as ways of getting food rather than as ways to protect crops. Even when a man stands guard with a shotgun at night to kill raiding deer or wild pigs, thoughts of meat are uppermost in his mind. The Semai say that sometimes they build huge deadfalls to kill marauding elephants, but the only response we saw was their retirement to the sturdiest houses in the settlement until the elephants moved on.

Among the west Semai, land pressure from surrounding Malays and Chinese often forces people to clear fields in pabəl. As a result, there is often not enough fuel to kill the weeds when the fields are burnt. The Semai say that weeding is the hardest agricultural task. Given the extraordinary reproductive powers of Malayan plants, a man and his wife can keep no more than an acre fairly free of weeds. In larger fields, weeds tend to grow faster than they can be pulled up. The result is that a nuclear family clears only an acre or two. Moreover, field pests firmly established in the permanent Malay and Chinese fields come to attack west Semai crops in greater numbers than they do in the east. To protect their crops without moving their villages, the west Semai erect temporary houses in the fields, from which they operate bird-scaring devices. A couple of women or children may sleep two or three nights in a row in the field house around harvest time, when the crops are especially attractive to field pests. Rather than sleep alone, however, an individual will make a daily trek to his or her field, returning at night to the permanent settlement to sleep. Since the west Semai buy a good deal of food and have adopted some of the Malay attitudes toward food animals, they tend not to eat field pests. When the rice is "pregnant," that is, beginning to bear, the west Semai traditionally sprinkle it with the acidic juice squeezed from the fruit of a stemless palm (Zalacca conferta) because, they say, "pregnant people like acidic foods "

West Semai woman preparing to pound rice. The mat is to catch any grains that fall from the mortar (1963).

The first crop to become ripe is amaranth, whose leaves the Semai boil to make a kind of spinach eaten with rice or tapioca. Next come maize, squash, and rice, in that order. The rice harvest is by far the most organized part of the harvest. After performing a brief ritual, the women harvest the rice with machetes or with special Malay-style "rice knives," which can be hidden in the hand. Use of the latter, according to a Malay belief to which some Semai subscribe, keeps the "soul of the rice" from being frightened. A hard worker can harvest 18 to 20 pounds of hill rice an hour. Wet-rice harvesters can get three or four times as much in the same amount of time from their more densely crowded crop. The severed rice ears are dried on mats in the village or by the field house.

The harvested ears of grain are put on mats near the field or in the settlement. Young men and occasionally women tread the ears, repeatedly turning them over with their bare feet. The resulting friction frees the grain from the ear. The women pound the freed grain in wooden mortars to remove the husk from the grain. They then winnow away the chaff by tossing the mixture of broken husks and grain up and down in a winnowing basket.

After the rice harvest, each west Semai nuclear family throws a party for a score of relatives and neighbors. All Semai settlements, both east and west, have a village-wide harvest feast from which strangers are in theory excluded, although no one would refuse to give a visitor food. At these feasts people get almost ten pounds of rice apiece in the course of visiting from house to house. The west Semai have also taken over a rice harvest ceremony from the Malays.

A Conjectural History of Semai Agriculture

In the distant past the Semai probably exploited the rain forest the way the Semang still do, by collecting wild vegetables, roots, and fruits. Even now, if a woman notices a patch of edible mushrooms or ferns, she will collect them, wrap them in a moist leaf to keep them fresh, and take them home to stew for the next meal. Present-day Semai rarely dig up wild roots except in emergencies. Should the crops fail, however, they know where to find patches of yams, especially the giant takuub yam (Dioscorea orbiculata, D. pyrifolia) whose tuber is often over 6 feet long. It may take all day for a group of men using machetes and dibbles to dig up a single takuub tuber and carry it home. Fruits are today the most important wild plant food that the Semai gather. The favorite fruits are the oily pərah (Elaterio-spermum tapos), the foul-smelling but delicious durian, and the wild breadfruit. In collecting fruits the Semai use either their hands or a fruit crook, which knocks the fruit loose or pulls down the branches to within plucking distance. If the fruit is highly prized and the tree too hard to climb (for example, durian), people will clear a small area under the tree during fruit season and settle down in a temporary lean-to. When the ripe fruit falls, the waiting Semai rush out to collect it before rats, squirrels, or tigers eat it.

It is easy to see how agriculture could grow out of these activities. Like the Semang, the Semai tend wild yam patches. Furthermore, they eat fruits seed and all, so that automatically fertilized undigested seeds sprout up in the area around a Semai settlement. Naturally, on returning to the area, people tend to settle near these "encouraged" plants. Presumably they followed these patterns in their preagricultural past.

The next step may have been actually to plant seeds and tubers before roving off in the constant search for food, a step taken in the last few decades by several groups of Semang. The first crops were probably the indigenous yams, taro (another large tuber), and bananas. The first cereal crop seems to have been Job's tears, which the east Semai call the "mother of foxtail millet." Next came the foxtail millet itself. Some time after the Portuguese first contacted Malaya in the fifteenth century A.D., the Semai acquired four American crops: maize, tapioca, sweet potatoes, and tobacco. Maize has a much higher yield than foxtail millet and, unlike millet, can be harvested twice a year. Although the Semai find tapioca unappetizing and bland, this root crop has two advantages over yams and taro. First, tapioca roots do not rot if left in the ground so that there is no need to rush to get the harvest in at any specific time. Second, tapioca produces more food per acre than any other crop. The result, in the Semai case, was that maize and tapioca became staple foods, replacing millet and yams. No one is sure when rice first reached the west Semai, but the east Semai began planting it only about fifty years ago. It is now the major food in most of Semai country, with tapioca taking its place when the rice harvest is exhausted. Nevertheless, the Semai persist in growing their old crops and in growing as many varieties of each crop as they have available. The reason, they explain, is that if any set of crops fails, there will always be at least some type of crop that survives.