The Nonviolent Image and Punan
Chapter 5 Introduced the word punan, translating it as a sort of "taboo" that keeps people from breaking the rules of food distribution. The concept of punan, however, is more complex than the word "taboo" indicates, although the word in both English and Semai probably comes from a Malayo-Polynesian word like tapu. Since the concept of punan pervades Semai ideas about interpersonal relationships, a clear understanding of it is essential to understanding how the Semai get along together.
Implicit in Semai thinking about punan is the idea that to make someone unhappy, especially by frustrating his desires, will increase the probability of his having an accident that will injure him physically. The word punan refers to both the offending act and the resulting accident proneness. The Semai say that punan accidents result somehow from the fact that the punan victim's heart is "unhappy." A Semai who has had an accident, like barking his shin, will often blame the accident on punan, due, for example, to his wanting something he could not get.
The function of punan as a sanction that enforces "proper" behavior in social relationships depends on a translation of intangible offenses, like not providing food on request, into a kind of violence that may inflict physical harm on the victim, like a broken leg. The offense and the accident proneness are bracketed together by a single word punan. For this sanction to work, then, it must be postulated that the Semai are not the sort of people who would do each other physical harm. After all, a punishment that afflicts the victim rather than the offender is unlikely to deter the latter if he is unscrupulous.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the Semai attribute to themselves the characteristics necessary for punan to work as a sanction. The Semai conceive of themselves as nonviolent people, and each Semai tends to think of himself as a nonviolent person. For purposes of brevity I will refer to this collective self-image as the "nonviolent image." This image is not merely an ideal to strive for. The Semai do not say, "Anger is bad." They say, "We do not get angry," and an obviously angry man will flatly deny his anger. The Semai do not say, "It is forbidden to hit people." They say, "We do not hit people." The point here is not that sometimes individual Semai violate the nonviolent image, for they do, being human. It is, rather, that they continue to conceive of themselves as nonviolent. Without some such concept of "human nature" in its Semai form the effectiveness of punan as a sanction would be lost.
This nonviolent image is the face the Semai present to the outside world. They are famous in Malaya for their timidity. British observers who have spent little time with the Semai inevitably use adjectives like "timid" or "weak" to describe them. Those who have spent a few weeks with the Semai usually see them as "carefree" or "jolly." Almost never does one run across the words so common in European travelers' descriptions of "natives": surly, hostile, insolent.
The questions posed in this chapter, then, are these. How do the Semai manage to keep the nonviolent image plausible? And what are the repercussions of this crucial image in Semai life?
Expressing Hostility
Despite the claim that "we never get angry," Semai do, of course, sometimes quarrel and harbor ill will against each other. Say that one man refuses the legitimate request of another, thus putting him into punan. There are two courses of action immediately open to the victim. He may simply endure the punan, or he may go to the offender and ask compensation.
Enduring punan is commonest when a girl has refused the victim her sexual favors. The jilted man s "heart becomes sad." He loses his energy and his appetite. Much of the time he sleeps, dreaming of his lost love. In this state he is in fact very likely to injure himself "accidentally."
In most other instances the victim seeks compensation from the wrongdoer.The wronged person or a kinsman acting as his intermediary goes to the guilty party and explains the situation: he has made so-and-so unhappy, put him in punan. To reverse this situation, the offender must apologize and pay a fine so that the victim's heart will be happy again. In the east the matter must be settled on a purely personal level. The amount of compensation demanded is proportionate to the amount of emotional distress the offense has caused. For instance, if one person has embarrassed" another, the amount of compensation varies depending on just how "embarrassed" the victim was. No abstract concept of justice is involved. There are two main ways of collecting compensation. The first is for the victim to set a fine, often far beyond the offender's ability to pay. Then he or a kinsman acting for him discuss the amount of compensation with the offender. In the course of this discussion the two parties decide on the minimum gift that will make the victim happy again and repair the ties of amity between offender and victim. Frequently the gift of a fairly small item like a cooking pot is enough to restore harmony. The second way of getting compensation, say the Semai, is the "smarter" way. If the victim thinks the offender unlikely to pay compensation voluntarily, he may keep his grievance to himself and bide his time until the unwary offender presents him with an opportunity to pre-empt compensation. He might, for example, take the clothes the offender has left ashore while bathing. When the offender comes ashore, the victim explains that he has collected compensation for such-and-such an act. Knowing his own guilt, the offender is unlikely to put up much of an argument.
The west Semai have adopted the Malay system of a set schedule of fines for various offenses. Again, however, the parties negotiate, and the settlement is usually less than the official standard.
If both parties feel in the right, however, these negotiations may not lead to reconciliation. A possible next step is to appeal to respected elders in the community to adjudicate the dispute. In the east, however, there is no particular social pressure to seek such advice. Besides, east Semai settlements are often so small that all the elders are related to one or the other of the disputants and thus unable to give a disinterested judgment. If one of the quarrelers thinks the judgment is unjust, moreover, he is free to ignore it. Rejecting the elders' decision may embroil him in a quarrel with them as well, but they have no way to enforce their decision. Similarly, west Semai may refuse to ask the elders to resolve a dispute, in part because both parties can be fined for breach of the peace, a Malay-style concept unknown to the east Semai. If the elders are brought in, their decision is morally binding on the disputants. Nevertheless, there is no way of enforcing it, although public opinion will favor conforming to it. In short, most quarrels are conceived of as personal matters, and the social institutions for resolving quarrels are rather ineffective.
Perhaps for this reason, quarrelers rarely try to get disinterested parties to mediate a dispute. They try to involve other people, but as partisans rather than mediators. They usually spread unsavory rumors about each other, protesting at the same time that they themselves are not angry and would like nothing better than to settle the dispute by peaceful discussion. For example, a man will describe how he tried to talk to the person with whom he is quarreling. In such descriptions, the other party invariably refuses to talk things over, saying, "I'm not listening to you," and typically threatening the narrator with a weapon. It is hard to gauge the truth of these stories, all of which are embroidered to support the narrator's case. Besides spreading rumors behind each other s backs, they manifest their anger not in violence but in mutual avoidance. Should the disputants happen to meet, they pay no attention to each other. Each is too "embarrassed" to look directly at the other. Eventually, one or the other will move off to a new settlement.
Once in a while, when a quarrel is just beginning, people will call each other names and make threatening gestures at each other. The names are epithets like "you cockroach" rather than curses. Sometimes a very angry person will start throwing his property around without hurting anyone. The Semai say that such outbursts are "not good" because they "scare" people. They seem to be uncommon.
More direct expression of aggression is very rare For example, one might expect that a drunken Semai would show the startling transformation that sometimes occurs in Euro-American society when a normally meek person gets drunk and becomes violent. Although aboriginally the Semai had no alcoholic drinks, now west Semai men can buy beer or a kind of palm wine called toddy. Sometimes on a special occasion like the visit of a beloved but rarely seen relative, a man will drink enough to get noticeably drunk. Drunk, he becomes extremely talkative, noisier than usual, but apparently never violent.
Similarly, although the often heard statement that "we never hit our children" is primarily lip service to the nonviolent image, people do not often hit their children and almost never administer the kind of beating that is routing in some sectors of Euro-American society. A person should never hit a child because, people say, "How would you feel if it died?" Malays, say the Semai, "are always hitting, hitting, hitting their children." Semai almost never do. That is why, they conclude, Semai children are healthy and fat while Malay children are whining and scrawny, "like baby rats." Similarly, one adult should never hit another because, they say, "Suppose he hit you back?" Some idea of the horror that physical violence inspires in Semai is revealed by the fact that when east Semai are talking Malay they translate the Semai word for "hit" as "kill."
As noted in Chapter 3, the Semai are uneasy about killing animals, especially those they have raised themselves. If a person must kill a chicken, for example, he saws the head off rather than chop it off, because he "can't stand hearing that 'thunk.'" Murder, of course, is almost unthinkable. Informants said there were no penalties for murder because "it never happens, in the olden days or today." Since a census of the Semai was first taken in 1956, not one instance of murder, attempted murder, or maiming has come to the attention of either government or hospital authorities.
The Semai do, however, make an exception for one sort of nonviolent killing. In the old days during times of scarcity the Semai would reluctantly abandon very old or hopelessly sick people, who were completely unproductive, in a hut with a small supply of food and water to die. The only documented instance of such abandonment occurred in 1956 when the Communist uprising had reduced all the Semai to dire economic straits. The Semai are uneasy about such abandonment. They say that they never go near the spot where someone was abandoned. But they insist that abandonment is not really "killing" and that the abandoned person is usually in such misery that he or she wants to die. Some people, of course, deny that such an apparent contravention of the nonviolent image occurs.
It should be clear at this point that the Semai are not great warriors. As long as they have been known to the outside world, they have consistently fled rather than fight, or even than run the risk of fighting. They had never participated in a war or raid until the Communist insurgency of the early 1950s, when the British raised troops among the Semai, mainly in the west. Initially, most of the recruits were probably lured by wages, pretty clothes, shotguns, and so forth. Many did not realize that soldiers kill people. When I suggested to one east Semai recruit that killing was a soldier's job, he laughed at my ignorance and explained, "No, we don't kill people, brother, we just tend weeds and cut grass." Apparently, he had up to that point done nothing but grounds duty.
Many people who knew the Scinai insisted that such an unwarlike people could never make good soldiers. Interestingly enough, they were wrong. Communist terrorists had killed the kinsmen of some of the Semai countennsurgency troops. Taken out of their nonviolent society and ordered to kill, they seem to have been swept up in a sort of insanity which they call "blood drunkenness." A typical veteran's story runs like this. "We killed, killed, killed. The Malays would stop and go through people's pockets and take their watches and money. We did not think of watches or money. We thought only of killing. Wah, truly we were drunk with blood. One man even told how he had drunk the blood of a man he had killed.
Talking about these experiences, the Semai seem bemused, not displeased that they were such good soldiers, but unable to account for their behavior. It is almost as if they had shut the experience off in a separate compartment, away from the even routine of their lives. Back in Semai society they seem as gentle and afraid of violence as anyone else. To them their one burst of violence appears to be as remote as something that happened to someone else, in another country. The nonviolent image remains intact.
In brief, little violence occurs within Semai society. Violence, in fact, seems to terrify the Semai. A Semai does not meet force with force, but with passivity or flight. yet, he has no institutionalized way of preventing violence - no social controls, no police or courts. Somehow a Semai learns automatically always to keep tight rein over his aggressive impulses. Given the weakness of external controls, the Semai need internal ones. The learning process involved is the subject of the next section of this chapter.
Enculturation
Training Techniques
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