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The Peaceful Semai
| Article
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14212 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1988 |
5,320 Words |
| Author
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Clay Robarchek
Clay Robarchek is assistant professor of anthropology at
Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. He and his wife,
Carole, also an anthropologist, are interested in peaceful and
violent orientations as aspects of complex cultural systems.
They have recently returned from the upper Amazon, where they
lived with and studied the Waorani (better known as Auca), a
society where, until very recently, more than 60 percent of
adult deaths were the result of homicide, making them perhaps
the most violent people known to anthropology. |
The Semai people, who live in the densely forested mountains of the central Malay Peninsula, are known among anthropologists for their nonaggressiveness and aversion to interpersonal violence of any kind: Husbands do not beat their wives, nor parents their children; children do not fight; physical assault and murder are virtually unknown.
The Semai represent the remnants of a population of hunting, gathering, and gardening peoples who once occupied most of Southeast Asia. Over the past several thousand years, however, these original inhabitants have been gradually displaced from the lowlands by more technologically advanced peoples--Thai and Burmese descending from the north and Malays sailing from the Indonesian islands to the south--who brought with them complex social systems and intensive padi-rice agriculture.
Today, the descendants of this original population and way of life remain only in scattered enclaves in the remote mountains of Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. These areas, because they were malarial and unsuited to wet rice farming, were of little interest to the people of the lowlands until recently. But the situation is changing rapidly. In order to consolidate the political hegemony of their states, and to exploit the land, timber and other riches of the rain forests, national governments throughout the region are now making a concerted effort to bring these mountain peoples under state control. Consequently, the traditional mountain cultures and ways of life are rapidly disappearing as bands are "resettled," "civilized," and otherwise drawn or forced into the national political and economic systems. Bands living near the lowlands have modernized rapidly, taking up wage labor, buying motorcycles and automobiles, sending their children to school and even to college.
The rugged terrain of the Semai's territory
Despite the intense external pressures to modernize, groups living in the remote mountain and deep forests still pursue their traditional ways of life. One such was the band of Semai, among whom my wife Carole and I lived and worked in 1973-74 and again in 1980. They have continued hunting, trapping, making fields, and summoning their spirit kin to help in time of trouble, although they recognize full well that they too will eventually be swept into the modern world.
The Semai occupy both sides of the mountain range forming the spine of the central Malay Peninsula, and a large lowland area
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