Suchergebnisse

The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have acquired a reputation as one of the most nonviolent peoples known to anthropology. This essay explores the question of Semai violence through interviews with men who have committed homicide while in a state of possession, and with a participant in a 1949 massacre of Chinese villagers that was carried out in retaliation for a raid on a Semai village by Chinese Communist insurgents. In Semai storytelling violence is recounted with relish, while first‐person accounts of violent acts are descriptively revealing but emotionally neutral.

This paper presents componential definitions of two sets of Semai kinship terminology gathered in two Semai settlements. A comparison of these definitions with each other and with Semai rules about proper terminology usage brings several inconsistencies to light. These inconsistencies seem to suggest that a modified componential analysis conforms to the cognitive categories of the Semai if the extensionist hypothesis that terms have both primary and derived meanings is taken into account. [Semai, componential analysis, extensionist hypothesis, Malayan aborigines, Austroasiatic].

Tradisi lisan masyarakat semai. Juli Edo. Monograf Fakulti Sains Kemasyarakatan dan Kemanusiaan, 16. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. 1990. 136 pp.Indigenous Minorities of Peninsular Malaysia: Selected Issues and Ethnographies. Razha Rashid. ed. Kuala Lumpur: Intersocietal and Scientific Sdn. Bhd. (INAS), 1995. 183 pp.Pathway to Dependence: Commodity Relations and the Dissolution of Semai Society. Colin Nicholas. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, 33. Clayton, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1994. 130 pp.Regional Development in Rural Malaysia and the "Tribal Question." Zawawi Ibrahim. Hull, Canada: University of Hull Centre for South‐East Asian Studies, 1995. 60 pp.Kami bukan anti‐pembangunan! (Bicara Orang Asli menuju wawasan 2020). Zawawi Ibrahim. ed. Bangi: Jabatan Antropologi dan Sociology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1996. 145 pp.

The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have frequently been cited as examples in the debates over the wellsprings of human violence. Numerous writers have employed selected Semai ethnographic material to support assertions that, their apparent peacefulness notwithstanding, Semai are in reality bloodthirsty killers. This assertion has in turn been used as evidence in support of a variety of approaches whose common thread is a view of aggressiveness and violence as somehow innate in human beings. The authors of this article, whose publications form the basis of most anthropological knowledge of Semai life and culture, draw on their own published and unpublished work as well as on documentation from other sources to refute these interpretations. We hold that Semai life is, as first‐hand observers have described it, notably free of interpersonal violence, and we argue that misrepresentations rooted in particular theoretical or philosophical a priori assumptions are scientifically untenable and culturally slanderous.

Expanding American Anthropology, 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects takes an inside look at American anthropology's participation in the enormous expansion of the social sciences after World War II. During this time the discipline of anthropology itself came of age, expanding into diverse subfields, frequently on the initiative of individual practitioners. The Association of Senior Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) called upon a number of its leaders to give accounts of their particular innovations in the discipline. This volume is the result of the AAA venture-a set of primary documents on the history of American anthropology at a critical juncture. In preparing the volume, the editors endeavored to maintain the feeling of "oral history" within the chapters and to preserve the individual voices of the contributors. There are many books on the history of anthropology, but few that include personal essays from such a broad swath of different perspectives. The passing of time will make this volume increasingly valuable in understanding the development of American anthropology from a small discipline to the profession of over ten thousand practitioners.