Tribal Communities

in the Malay World

Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives

Edited by
Geoffrey Benjamin & Cynthia Chou

The International Institute for Asian Studies (lIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre
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 Pronunciation Guide IX

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE C Pronounced like the c in Malay cuci; unlike Malay, this consonant
commonly occurs word-finally, as in Temiar bJCUUC "sour".
J Pronounced like the j in Malay janji; this too can occur in positions
unknown in Malay: Batek haj "rain", Temiar bcjbJJj "lick" .
.Jl Pronounced like the ny in Malay nyanyi. The uppercase form is]V.
Ij Pronounced like the ng in Malay nganga or English singer (not as in
Words in Aslian and related languages are transcribed in this volume according
finger). The uppercase form is If.
to the orthography currently used in Mon-Khmer linguistic studies. The
? The glottal stop (hamzah), a consonantal phoneme, sounding like
symbols employed are pronounced approximately as indicated below:
the k in Peninsular Malay pronunciations of duduk or rakyat. The
uppercase form is P.
Vowels
k Always pronounced as a velar, like the k in Malay makan, and not as
i As in Malay tapis: Kensiw kJialjis "liver". a glottal stop, even word-finally.
e As in Malay leher. Jahai te? "earth".
c As the e in English get. Temiar lch "wife".
H As the u in Scottish hus ("house") or the ii in German Hiitte. Jah Hut
kJbHS "dead".
J The "neutral" schwa (pepet) vowel, like the e in Malay betul or
sumber. Jah Hut bJS "throwaway".
a As in Malay belah: Semai gJrpar "pigeon".
u As the first u in Malay pucuk: Temoq luk "dart quiver".
o As the 0 in Malay gol ("goal" in football): Lanoh doo? "father".
J As the au in English taut, but shorter: Jah Hut JJIj "foot".
Ul As the Vietnamese vowel It (or somewhat like the Russian vowel
usually romanized as y). Pronounced like u but with the lips
unrounded.
¥ As the Vietnamese vowel d. Pronounced like 0, but with the lips
unrounded.
1J As the 0 in (British) English hot.
Nasal vowels are written with a superscript tilde: Chewong ha?ut "rotten".
The phonemically long vowels of Central Aslian are written doubled: Temiar
tc? "earth", ta? "earlier today".

Consonants
These are mostly written and pronounced as in the modern romanized
spelling used for Bahasa Malaysia, but some of the symbols require further
explanation:
2 __________________________________

ON BEING TRIBAL IN
1
THE MALAY WORLD

Geoffrey Benjamin

The "Malay World" is here defined narrowly, and in an historically responsive

manner, to refer to the areas currently or formerly falling under kerajaan
Melayu, the rule of a Malay king (Milner 1982). It does not refer to insular
Southeast Asia at large, and certainly not to the Austronesian-speaking world
as a whole - both of which are usages of "Malay World" that have crept into
scholarly discourse in the last decade. 2 In this sense, the Malay World (Alam
Melayu) refers to the various Malay kingdoms and their attendant hinterlands
that have existed or still exist along the coasts of Borneo, the east coast of
Sumatra, and on the Malay Peninsula.
My title has three components: "being", "tribal", and "Malay World",
each of which needs further discussion.

BEING TRIBAL
With the word "being" I mean to indicate not the passive condition of a
whole group of people, but the active agency of individuals. Too often,
tribespeople - to use an amended version of Sahlins's term "tribesmen" (1968)
- have been characterized as total collectivities rather than as people. How
many of us, following the quaint English idiom reserved just for "tribes", still
refer to the Nuers as "the Nuer"? Why is it that "the Nuer are ... ", with its
8 Geoffrey Benjamin
missing plural marker -s, does not jar the ear, when the phrase "the American
are ... " certainly does?) Tribespeople, however, do not follow the dictates of
some collective inborn drive: they engage severally in a culturally mediated
social strategy, whether our of choice or under geographical or political
constraint. "Tribal" thus refers not to some sort of "ethnic" category, but to
particular socio-political circumstances of life, which (like all such
circumstances) demand to be understood in terms of their specific histories
and with constant acknowledgement of the people's own agency. "We need to
problematize the notion of community: we need to stop talking of the
community as a unitary subject and to analyse axes of contestation within it"
(Alexander & Alexander, in this volume).
The history of non-literate populations is of course difficult to get at, and
it often requires a higher proportion of conjecture than a professional historian
would feel comfortable with.4 Bur if such conjecture pays due attention to
questions of agency, it is less likely to go astray. In any case, documents do
exist, and several contributors to this volume make thorough use of them.
Contemporary anthropologists pay much attention to both choice and
constraint in discussing the tribal situation. Writers in other fields, however,
are more likely to emphasize the supposed effects of ignorance or isolation -
approaches that anthropologists would often ascribe to the ignorance of the
writers, rather than of the tribespeople. In any case, most of the tribal
populations discussed in this volume have not been especially isolated, and
the few isolated ones have still taken their neighbours into account in
formulating their way of life.
TRIBALI1Y AND THE STATE
Tribal circumstances have not existed from time immemorial,5 but came into
being with the emergence of centralized polities - states and the civilizational
culture that goes with them. These include the modern nation-state, with its
history of just a few centuries, but also the many kinds of pre-modern and
colonial state formations that preceded it.
The essence of civilization lies in the attempt to impose and maintain a
centralized state organization and a homogeneous cultural regime throughout
a region which had previously harboured autonomous local communities.
(''Autonomous'' does not mean that they did not have social relations with
each other, only that the degree of mutual interference and control was
relatively low.) The classical civilizing process engenders three basic types of
sociocultural situation, where in pre-state times there had been just one.
Those who place themselves in command belong to what we can loosely call
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 9
the ruler category, used here as a shorthand term for priests, tax collectors,
soldiers and so on, as well as kings. Those who allow their lives to be
controlled by agencies of the state, which they provision in exchange for a
little reflected glory but no counter-control, are peasants. 6 But those who
stand apart from the state and its rulers, holding themselves culturally aloof
in a "sub-nuclear" fashion (see below), are in the tribal category. The character
of tribal society - in Asia especially - is shaped nevertheless by the proximity
of civilization.
Two things must be emphasized about this Tribespeople-Peasants-Rulers
typology. First, it is not an evolutionary series. It is, rather, a single complex,
formed of alternative, mutually dissimilatory responses to the same
sociopolitical circumstance - the imposition of a hierarchically organized,
supralocal, state apparatus. On this view, all historically and ethnographically
reported tribal societies are secondary formations, characterized by the positive
steps they have taken to hold themselves apart from incorporation into the
state apparatus (or its more remote tentacles), while often attempting to
suppress the knowledge that their way of life has nevertheless been profoundly
shaped by the presence of the state, or whatever locally represents its
complexifYing effects.?
The structure and formation of tribal societies, especially in Southeast
Asia, is best understood as an adaptation to the broader state situations in
which they are found. Bur the tribespeople nevertheless talk as if they believed
themselves to be culturally autonomous - as Edmund Leach (1954) pointed
out decades ago in his study of the Kachins of northern Burma. Frequently,
they lack an institutionalized means of mounting a discourse about the
broader framework that subtends their social formation. Individual
tribespeople, however, can succeed in mounting such a discourse,
acknowledging perfectly well what their situation is.
TRIBAL TRADITIONS IN THE MALAy WORLD
The ethnology of the Malay World appears to support both of these claims -
first, that tribality has resulted largely from choice; and second, that the
presence of a state-based civilization (both modern and pre-modern) has
figured hugely in that choice. For example, the Peninsular Orang Asli have
long had the choice of becoming Malay peasants, even in pre-Islamic times.
Some did so, and in consequence much of the Malay peasantry has an origin
in the Orang Asli population. In some parts of the Peninsula, the proportion
appears to be high (cf. Noone 1936, pp. 54-56). But those who did not become
Malay peasants had to set up their own cultural and social institutions,
10 Geoffrey Benjamin
operated largely through "switches" in their kinship patterns, to block off that
option and to make alternative, tribal, ways of life seem more appropriate. In
so doing, they generated three institutionalized societal patterns - the
"Semang", "Senoi", and "Malayic" - as well as some less well-defined ones
(Benjamin 1985). These three patterns have been aimed at retaining the
people's social and cultural autonomy in the face of the state, while allowing
them nevertheless to sustain relations with each other and with the civilizational
centres downstream. 8
The Semang pattern is followed in northern parts of the Malay Peninsula
by an egalitarian, low-density population, maintained by marriage over large
distances. The people live by a generalized foraging off whatever is available
to them. Hunting and gathering in the immediate forest environment has
been a major component, but they have also "foraged" off the other polities
and economies in their vicinity. (See Benjamin 1973, and the commentary on
it by Rahmann 1975.)
The "Senoi" pattern is espoused primarily by Temiars and upland Semais
in the central parts of the Peninsula. They have lived mainly by swidden
farming combined with some trading and trapping. Maintaining a high
degree of autonomy from the state, they still continued to trade with it and
to have dealings with outsiders. This, of course, they could get away with
quite easily until very recently, living in the central mountain fastnesses. In so
doing, they developed cultural frameworks of a highly "dialectical" kind, as
exemplified in the chapters by Roseman and Dentan. The Senoi societal
pattern is characterized by an egalitarian, medium-density population, a
prohibition on marriage with traceable consanguines, and a preference for
marriage with affines. This led to the development of relatively autonomous
deme-like concentrations of population in each of the major river valleys
within their territory.
The "Malayic" pattern - which is found also in lowland Sumatra and the
neighbouring islands, includes the traditions often referred to as Aboriginal
Malay, Jakun,9 or Orang Laut, and by various other terms in mainland
Sumatra. Existing in many varieties, it is based on the fusion of farming- or
fishing-based subsistence with a livelihood based on the collecting of forest or
marine products for trade with outsiders (Dunn 1975). (For a detailed
contemporary account, see Gianno 1990.) The collecting component would
have intensified around 2000 years ago, when Chinese, Indian, and West
Asian interests had led to the exploitation by tribal "fetchers" of the region's
lac, wood-oil, camphor, and minerals (Wang 1958; Wheatley 1959; Dunn
1975). The various centralized states that have characterized the Malay World
since the seventh century CE or earlier emerged out of this matrix.
On Being Tribal in the Malay World II
Consequently, the Malayic tradition now exhibits two major facies: the state-
centred Melayu traditions, and the relatively autonomous tribal-Malay
traditions. These latter traditions are culturally Malay in many senses - but
on their own terms, and without assimilating completely to full Melayu-ness
(in which conversion to Islam now plays a large part). The Malayic tradition
(both Melayu and tribal-Malay) is characterized by hierarchical, medium- to
high-density populations, and a preference for consanguineal (cousin) marriage
that effectively down plays the structural importance of affinal relations. The
local populations have tended to orientate themselves more towards the non-
tribal outsiders with whom they have trade relations than towards their fellow
tribespeople in other settlements.
The underlying reason for this tripartite patterning appears to be the
long-established presence in the region of three main modes of environmental
appropriation: foraging (nomadic hunting-and-gathering), horticulture (semi-
sedentary swidden-farming), and collecting (the gathering of natural products
for trade with outsiders). These, separately or in combination, have been the
major factors in the evolution of the different patterns of social organization
in the Malay World. While the patterns were combined together to varying
degrees in the lifeways of some of the constituent populations, it seems that
most of the populations preferred to allow just one of the modes to dominate
their lives. This led to the instituting of a distinct societal pattern in each
population, aimed at "locking" them into the appropriate demographic and
ideational response to maintain the chosen mode. Thus arose the close
association of the Semang pattern with foraging, the Senoi pattern with
horticulture, and the Malayic pattern with collecting (fused with horticulture).
While examples of each of these appropriative modes are still to be found in
almost any part of the region, there is a discernible geographical pattern to
their distribution as the dominant modes in different areas. In the Peninsular
north, on both sides of the Thai border, foraging has been dominant until
very recently. Horticulture has been dominant in the mountains and hills of
the Peninsular centre. Collecting - almost always combined with horticulture
or fishing in a distinctive way - has been dominant in two main varieties,
which are themselves complementary with each other: the land-based and the
sea-based. Collecting of this sort is found mainly in the lowlands of the
Peninsular south and mainland Sumatra, as well as on the islands between
them. lO
Several other non-Malayic-speaking (but Austronesian) tribal communities
that do not fit these patterns are also discussed in this volume: the Lahanans
of Sarawak (Alexander & Alexander), the Bataks of North Sumatra (Ruiter,
Ginting), and the Mentawaians or Sakuddeis of Siberut Island off the west
12 Geoffrey Benjamin
coast of Sumatra. These populations all fall to varying degrees within the
ambit of kerajaan Melayu, and have been much influenced by it.
TERMINOLOGICAL ISSUES: WHY "TRIBAL"?
Tribality in the Malay World (as elsewhere) is thus a relational, not a primordial,
quality - even if the resulting degree of cultural distinctiveness often comes to
seem primordial. Its characteristics vary with the broader contemporary setting
within which the people live. (I comment below on some still-current
conceptions of tribal society as "primordial".) This much is surely acceptable
to most anthropologists. But is the term "tribal" analytically useful? Could it
and should it be replaced by some other term?1I
It is now recognized that "tribes", in the sense of discrete, total social
units, do not exist outside of the popular, administrative or sociological
imaginings. 12 Scholars have frequently criticized the idea of" the tribe" , regarding
it as a chimera induced by a misreading of segmentary social organization by
outsiders accustomed to more hierarchized and bounded circumstances. Most
commonly, this has arisen whenever attempts are made to bring the segmentary
populations under the umbrella of centralized state administration.
At base, then, tribality is an individual matter rather than a total societal
one: tribal individuals can coexist with peasants or proletarians even within
the same family. I know several Temiar families in which this situation
currently holds, and the same is now true for most of the other (formerly)
tribal populations in the Malay World. If one accepts that being tribal is a
matter of social action, rather than a passive condition of existence, this
should not prove difficult to understand. I)
To make my point clear, let me now distinguish explicitly between
tribality and the other conditions of social life with which it is frequently
confused. This will require discussion of some major macrosociological themes,
as well as the question of terminological political correctness.
"Tribal"
People sometimes find the word "tribal" offensive. Unfortunately, political
correctness, however justified it may be on occasion, constantly deprives us of
words that we need. Social labels are not usually inherently offensive; normally,
they simply become offensive when used by those who despise the people
referred to. The solution is not to constantly re-make our lexicon, but to
mend our attitudes. In Malaysia, for example, the perfectly good word
"aborigine" has been all but banished under the wrong impression that it is
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 13
insulting. 14 Presumably, some of those who wish to ban the word have less
than comfortable feelings about Australian Aborigines, for I have been told
firmly that the Orang Asli have no connection whatsoever with Australia and
the word "aborigine" must therefore be avoided in Malaysia!
On the other hand, the word "native", much avoided in "correct" circles
elsewhere, is employed openly in Sabah and Sarawak. Similarly, the word
"Sakai" has been reworked into a supposedly insulting word in Peninsular
Malaysia, where it has been used historically mainly to refer to non-Malay-
speaking tribal Aborigines. In modern spoken Malay it is also used more
casually to refer to "tribespeople" anywhere in the world (as Porath, in this
volume, also reports for Indonesia). Nevertheless, "Sakai" is still used as a
fairly neutral term in both South Thailand (where it refers to Mon-Khmer-
speaking populations related closely to the northernmost Malaysian Orang
Asli) and in Sumatra (where it refers to Malay-speaking tribal populations), as
Hamilton and Porath both demonstrate in this volume. In Brunei "Sakai"
even labels a stratum within the established hierarchy of Brunei-Malay society
(Brown 1970, p. 5).15
Given such vagaries of usage with terms that are sometimes seen as
disparaging, I see relatively little harm in using the word "tribal" as a term of
sociological analysis, but with the positive meanings I have proposed in the
last few pages. "Tribal" remains useful precisely because it refers to a
characteristic way of life and of social organization for which no other
unambiguous label exists. The current alternative terms, such as "segmentary"
or "indigenous", employed perhaps as politically correct euphemisms, do not
really address the central issue of tribality. "Tribal" overlaps with "segmentary"
or "indigenous", for example, but is not the same thing as either, for each of
these terms has its own sociology. Let me make this clear by briefly examining
these and other terms that are sometimes employed in place of "tribal".
"Segmentary"
Durkheim's term segmentary (or segmental) refers to social formations consisting
of local or regional segments (lineages, clans, villages, hordes, and so on) that
are not integrated into any higher-level unity. Each segment is organizationally
similar to the others, but no one segment has control over all the others. If
ranking is present - as it is among some southern Orang Asli, and in some of
the tribal populations of Sarawak and Sumatra - the pattern of ranking is
replicated separately in each segment, but no overall ruler is found. This
formulation corresponds to Durkheim's idea of "mechanical" solidarity.I6
At first glance, the term "segmentary" has its attractions. It sounds value-
14 Geoffrey Benjamin
neutral, since it obviates the problems caused by using words like "primitive"
or "simple". Moreover, it facilitates those styles of comparative social analysis
that are based on the idea of differentiation, some of which have been very
subtle indeed (for example, Gellner 1988). "Segmentary" is also very similar in
meaning to the older sense of "tribal", for etymologically the latter word
means not "belonging to a tribe", but "living in a social formation that is
divided into tribes".'? Despite these undoubted advantages, however, the term
"segmentary" is too concerned simply with questions of social morphology.
Just as Durkheim's Division of Labour study ignores politics and history (see
Barnes 1966), so also does the term "segmentary". "Segmentary" usually
implies that the people have not yet come across any alternative ways to
organize themselves. But, as the chapters in this volume illustrate, tribespeople
have frequently maintained their society in a segmentary formation out of
deliberate choice. "Segmentary" therefore does not capture the sheer work
that lies behind such an outcome. This is a drawback, for the tribal way of life
is usually based on the positive desire to retain segmentary organization -
which can be realized only through political action.
"Indigenous"
The term "indigenous" is the most usual epithet for the kinds oflifeway here
called "tribal". This usage was further reinforced by the United Nations
International Year of Indigenous Peoples (1993), which (despite its name)
clearly referred to the world's disadvantaged tribal populations, and not to the
many other populations in the world who can equally claim to be indigenous.
(See Waterson 1993 for a comprehensive summary of the situation that the
Yearwas trying to address.) "Indigenous" sounds value-neutral at first hearing,
but as anyone knows who has had to grapple with the complexities of
Malaysian Bumiputera-ness or Indonesian Pribumi-ness, the concept is utterly
value-filled - especially when it becomes an explicit political rallying-cry. IS It
is true, of course, that most tribal populations are indeed indigenous to the
areas they inhabit. But there is a much larger number of non-tribal people
who are also in various senses indigenous to where they live. Moreover, some
tribal groups (such as the Orang Kanaq mentioned later) are not indigenous
to their places, or even countries, of residence. The overlap between tribality
and indigeny is interesting, but it can be misleading. Both are of fundamental
sociological importance, but they are different issues, that need to be kept
separate if analysis is to proceed.
Elsewhere (Benjamin, ms), I have tried to sketch out what a sociology of
indigeny (and its reciprocal, exogeny) might look like, and to demonstrate
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 15
just how important it is. A key point is that indigeny has to do with family-
level connections to concrete places, and not with the connection of whole
ethnic groups (whatever they may be) to broad territories. The social situation
of indigenes - non-tribal as well as tribal- differs in profound ways from that
of exogenes. The difference cuts right through "societies", and not (as
commonly thought) just between them. The two main examples in my study
concerned the Welsh in Wales and the Malays of Singapore - largely
indigenous populations, but hardly tribal! In the latter case, I tried to show
that differences within the Malay community in relation to their degree of
familial indigeny were at least as significant sociologically as differences
between the Singapore Malays as a whole and the republic's other ethnic
"groups". (Most Malays in Singapore are, of course, descended from areas
outside the republic.)'9
In sum, then, the term "indigenous", though well-intentioned, does not
fully capture the social and political issues that attach to tribespeople, and it
removes a fundamental sociological concept from its proper context of
discourse. (See also footnote 28.)
"Sub-nuclear"
A term that comes much closer to the sense of "tribal" that I have in mind
here is "sub-nuclear society", proposed by Frederick K. Lehman in his book
on the Chins of Burma (1963). Building on Leach's ideas about the relations
between the Kachins of northern Burma with the neighbouring Shan states,
Lehman argues that in Southeast Asia the tribal populations are neither
"primitive" in the commonly understood sense of being completely distinct
from and autonomous of civilization, nor are they peasants, incorporated
culturally into the mainstream civilization. However, they share with peasants
a positive orientation to civilization. Everywhere, they have been brought (if
only minimally) into the national government's orbit, and supplied with
schools and health services. Money has been circulating in the tribal economy,
coupled with newer desires that necessarily tie them in to the larger society.
Sometimes, though not often, they have become the major source for a rare
product. (Examples in the Malay World would be jelutung latex, wood oils,
sea slug, and bird's nest, which are still primarily produced by tribal populations,
and then sent out into the world market.) Normally, the orientation is one-
way: the tribal population is orientated to the larger society, but the reverse is
not true. (The pre-modern Malay state is a partial exception to this
generalization: see below.) Thus they have a relationship to civilization that is
tenuous, one-sided, almost wholly economic and ideological in character, but
 Geoffrey Benjamin
stable over a considerable period of time. (Lehman was writing forty years
ago, and such stability can no longer be guaranteed, now that highly capitalized
commercial ventures have moved into the hinterlands.) This relationship
displays many of the same characteristics as that which holds between peasants
and industrial civilization, but unlike the case of peasants, it is accompanied
by the retention of distinct cultural styles, languages, and religions.
It is this neither-one-nor-the-other type of situation that led Lehman to
propose the label "sub-nuclear", to refer to a societal type distinct from both
peasant and ("primitive") tribal patterns, and characteristic of the special
hills/plains relation found in Southeast Asia from Assam to tribal southwest
China, and from Laos to Sumatra and eastwards. Its characteristics according
to Lehman are as follows. First, sub-nuclear societies abut on "nuclear"
civilization, but remain distinct: the sub-nuclear society's adaptation to the
relationship is complete, even if the people might not picture themselves that
way. Second, they lack their own supra-local political organization, and do
not participate in nation-wide politics. And third, they retain a marginal
dependence on the larger society, but not so great as to change their own
cultural traditions. (Although that was not part of Lehman's purpose, these
characterizations also provide a means of recognizing the degree to which
former tribespeople cease to be tribal, under conditions of social change.)
With due allowance for regional differences, most of Lehman's
characterization of "sub-nuclear" society would seem to fit the situation of the
various tribal populations discussed in this volume. Zawawi (1995) has reopened
discussion of these issues in his thoughtful analysis of the character of tribality
in southern Peninsular Malaysia. Most of what he has to say about the
neither-peasant-nor-"primitive" character of contemporary Orang Asli
life sounds very like what Lehman was driving at forty years ago. Today we
have available a more critical analytical apparatus - anthropology and
sociology have moved on a bit - for dealing with the economic and cultural
features of situations, as well as a wealth of comparative material to lean on.
These, Zawawi uses to the full. In other words, Lehman's idea of "sub-
nuclear" corresponds well to at least one recent sophisticated approach to
"tribality" .
My main objections to "sub-nuclear", as opposed to "tribal", are that it is
rather a mouthful and that its meaning would not always be self-evident.
Terasing and Orang Asli
In formal Indonesian usage the closest equivalent of "tribal" is suku (or
masyarakat) terasing. Suku signifies some kind of societal segment, including
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 17
especially segmentary tribal society.20 Masyarakat is the usual word for "(a)
society". Terasing, however, is more complicated: it is certainly not a simple
equivalent to "tribal", even though it refers mostly to populations that happen
to be tribal. The word is compounded of asing "apart, separate, distinct,
foreign, remote, isolated" and the "involuntary" agency-neutral prefix ter-. It
would therefore seem to mean something like "separated off and distinctive
through no fault of their own". In confirmation of this, the Indonesian
documents I consulted (see below) include some Melayu and Acehnese
villagers as terasing too. Clearly, here at least, the term is meant to denote
"geographically remote" populations rather than simply "tribal" ones.
Nevertheless, the term terasingstill has relevance to the tribal populations,
for it implies that tribality and other forms of apparent social backwardness
are simply a consequence of being left out of the mainstream for purely
logistical reasons. This could then be used as justification for the central or
provincial government to move in and "improve" the situation. All the more
reason, then, for us to remember that many tribal populations have been
living in geographically remote areas out of choice, as part of a strategy to
keep the state off their backs. 21
The Malaysian label Orang Asli "original people" was initially intended as
an etymologically responsible translation for "aborigine" (Latin, "from the
origin") during the anti-Communist "Emergency" in the late 1950S. This
Arabo-Malay phrase - which is increasingly used in Indonesia too - carries
connotations that are lacking from its English prototype. As already noted,
some Malaysians feel that "aborigine" is a derogatory term.22 "Asli" on the
other hand carries the opposite connotation, for it also means "genuine,
authentic, natural" (as in getah asli "natural rubber").
While one must applaud this attempt to improve the image of a formerly
little-respected population, one should also guard against the opposite tendency
_ to see the Orang Asli as noble savages who only require conservation. This
charge has already been made by Malaysian government spokesmen when
expressing annoyance at publications critical of official policies towards the
Orang Asli. They have repeatedly claimed that anthropologists and other
researchers are opposed to the modernization of Orang Asli facilities and
want only to preserve an outdated way of life. This assertion - which runs
counter to what is actually stated in all such publications that I have read -
must seem all the easier to accept for those who have never read the literature
in question, simply because of the "noble savage" connotations that attend
the label ''Asli''. (See Nicholas's chapter in this volume for further analysis of
the relation between ethnic labelling and the administration of Orang Asli
communities.)
 18 Geoffrey Benjamin
THE PEOPLE(S) OF THE MALAY WORLD
The action-based view I have been presenting is unfortunately often hard to
maintain, for a "race" -based chimera continues to stalk the field of Malay
World studies. I refer to the kuih lapis (layer cake) folk-scholarly ethnology
that stratifies the region's population into "Negritoids", "Veddoids", "Proto-
Malays", and "Deutero-Malays" (with "Australoids", "Melanesoids", and even
"Palaeo-Alpines", sometimes thrown in for good measure) - all, it seems,
originating in Yunnan, southwestern China! This has the cumulative effect of
characterizing the people themselves as the passive exponents of preformed,
evolutionarily-ranked "cultures". A version of this story currently (December
2000) appears on the "profile" page of the website of the JHEOA, the
Malaysian Department of Orang Asli Affairs «www.kempadu.gov.my/jheoa/
Engfile/orang%20asliEGH.htm» presented here unedited. (The final
paragraph is modified directly from a passage in Winstedt 19 61.)
According to historical researchers the Negritos are descendants of the pre-
historical man known as Australia-Melanesians that migrated to south east
from China 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. However, there are also ancient
historical records that suggest that they have been in this area much earlier.
The Senois and Proto-Malays are descendants from the pre-historical
man known as Austranesian (Malayo-Polynesian) which is believed to have
gradually migrated in small numbers from southern China and Taiwan to
South East Asia up to the east approximately 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Nevertheless there were evidence of intermarriage and assimilation between
these two groups of historical men.
Historian also concludes that the present Malays, Indonesian and
Filipinos are of Proto-Malays descent after intermarriage with the Chinese
during the Chao Dynasty, Indians from Bengal and Dacca together with
the Arabs and Thais.
KUIH lAPIS ETHNOLOGY
The kuih lapis view has not yet fallen out of favour in Malaysian, Indonesian,
and Singaporean academic circles. If this were just a matter of pure prehistoric
research, it would not require much discussion here. Unfortunately, this
ethnological framework still has consequences far beyond academe, long after
it was shown to be wrong. It still needs to be repeatedly and firmly rejected.23
Whether they realize it or not, those in Malaysia and Singapore who
persist in asserting the kuih lapis view derive their ideas from Winstedt's
decades-old analysis (1961, pp. 5-17) of Malay ethnology, or from the small
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 19
number of yet earlier writers from whom Winstedt took some of his ideas.
But even in Winstedt's time, several scholars (such as Wilkinson 1939) disagreed
with him. For Sumatra, the kuih lapis view probably derives more directly
from Loeb's classic account of that island's ethnology (Loeb 1932h972).
Heine-Geldern (1965) too, in a thought-provoking essay on the area's art
history, applied this approach to Borneo. However, over the last three decades
archaeologists, linguists and human biologists have shown that the processes
of socio-cultural and demographic differentiation took place in a quite different
manner from the simple layering of separate migrational waves, whether from
southwest China or elsewhere. 24
The issue is not simply a matter of antiquarian interest. The peoples
labelled "Negritos", "Veddoids" or "Proto-Malays" are contemporary human
beings whose ways of life are not mindless replications of ancestral cUltu.ral
forms established thousands of years ago. Their lives are lived now, and With
constant regard for how their neighbours live now as well. The racial ｡ｰｲｯｾｨＬ＠
if taken seriously, would preclude any serious sociological or historical appraisal
of the lifeways of the tribal (or any other) populations - just as it would
remove from discussion any consideration that they have strategies and
wishes of their own.
It is true that serious writers sometimes reiterate the kuih lapis scenario in
the opening pages of their essays only to move on to responsible ｡ｾ､＠ ･ｾｬｩｧｨｴｮ､＠
sociological analysis. One such is the Indonesian researcher ｄｊ｡ｴＮｾｬｫｯ＠ (19:)3)
in his useful survey of the social situation of the tribal communltles of Riau
province. Here, his race-based introduction seems to have served as little
more than a familiarizing device to help orientate the reader.25 All too often,
though, writers fall into the trap of presenting the tribal communities as if
they occupied different steps on a culture-evolutionary staircase - what
Keesing (1981) calls the "ladder" approach. This is notably true of the ｴ･ｸ｢ｯｫｾ＠
employed in Malaysian schools, including those attended by Orang Ash
children. One such book that I picked up in an Orang Asli school taught that
the Senoi are lebih berakal (cleverer, more capable) than the Negritos, and
that the Proto-Malays are in turn more berakal than the Senoi.
This approach also precludes considering the possibility of ｳ･ｾｯｮ､｡ｲｹ＠
tribality, a phenomenon of some importance in parts of Southeast ｾｳｬ｡Ｎ＠ The
Tasadays of Mindanao and the Phii Tong Luang of northern Thailand are
examples. More to the point, the Orang Suku Laut of Johor-Riau have
probably been more tribal in recent decades than they were in the heyday of
the Sultanate. (See Leonard Andaya 1975; Wee 1987,1988; Trocki 1979; Sather
1999; and the chapters by Chou & Wee and Lenhart in this volume.)
20 Geoffrey Benjamin
Ethnology as Ideology
The kuih lapis approach is not simply a matter of outdated scholarly fashion,
for the contrast between indigeny and exogeny that underpins it also serves
significant political and ideological ends - for both indigenes and exogenes.
The highly assimilatory character of Melayu culture means that it must be
constantly cultivated, as a means of supplanting whatever went before. In
Melayu imagery, as McKinley (1979) and Wee (1987, p. 162ff.) have shown,
one's cultural progress is monitored by regularly glancing back at what one
has left behind. There is no shame in having been a pagan, a "Hindu-
Buddhist" or a tribal indigene (asli) in a former era (zaman), so long as one
consciously moves forward into the era of proper religion (agama), purified
(murni) culture (Wee 1988, p. 212), and "modern" citizenship.
Consequently, the more self-conscious varieties ofMelayu culture display
a shifting content. At different times, the focus has fallen on proper language,
deportment, deference, dress, religion, food, and even music, as the sign that
one's manners indicate a successfully achieved and maintained Melayu-ness.
It is of course the ruling classes who define - and even invent - these criteria,
the initial introduction of which must seem like an invitation to adopt
foreign ways. In effect, this gives authoritative precedence to those who came
later into Melayu-ness. Those who continue to demonstrate dyed-in-the-
wool indigeny (asli) are seen as less fit to rule than those (the murni) who
have remade themselves culturally. The more recent the "arrival", the more
legitimate is the right to rule.
In the Malay World (as in many other regions), the ability to claim an
exogenous origin therefore lends legitimacy to the right to rule. Sultans,
nobles and prime ministers alike are not shy about their less-than-solely
Melayu origins. 26 Contrariwise, to be fully indigenous (asli) implies that one
is born to be ruled. The enthusiasm still engendered by the kuih lapis view of
ethnology and the search for Malay "origins" therefore reflects political ideology
writ large: "Proto-Malay" and "Deutero-Malay" are political rather than
ethnological categories. 27 In effect, Proto-Malays (and "Negritos", "Veddoids",
etc.) are those who do not need to be consulted whenever administrative
decisions are made (by "Deutero-Malays") that affect their livelihood. Nicholas's
chapter in this volume provides several explicit examples of this outlook,
culled from the speeches of Malaysian leaders. The passage quoted earlier
from the JHEOA's website provides another example - this time implying
that Deutero-Malays were formed by the intermarriage of Proto-Malays with
a variety of people from beyond the Malay World.
Kuih lapis ethnology also relates to an existing tendency in the Malay
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 21
World to look on tribal peoples - especially the nomadic ones who eat wild
animals - as being close to animals themselves. This connection of wilderness
with animalian wildness is discussed explicitly in this volume by Lye and
Persoon. Alternatively, as Schefold shows in his valuable survey, "autochthony"
has often been accommodated in pre-modern Southeast Asia by assimilating
it to a virtual affinal relationship set up between the tribal people and their
immigrant overlords through a mythic marriage between their leading families.
This serves to "domesticate" the wilderness inhabited by the tribal populations,
so that it can all the more easily be incorporated into the state's domain. The
tribal people too, have incorporated recognition of this relationship into their
still-"tribal" ritual and expressive culture. (Negeri Sembilan is another case,
mentioned by Nicholas.)
On the other hand, the claim to "indigeny" by tribal and formerly tribal
peoples themselves is an increasingly important device in the battle to gain
political recognition of their rights in the face of modern state actions. As
Gray (1995, p. 40) puts it: "Indigenousness is an assertion by people directed
against the power of outsiders." Contrariwise, the resistance to that claim by
the powers-that-be often takes the form of an attempt to dilute that sense of
indigeny. Nicholas (2000, p. 175) provides an example of this from Malaysia,
and several other examples are given elsewhere in this volume. 28
Just who, then, are the people of the Malay World? To answer this
question, let us first take a brief look at some of the cutrent population data,
and then at the evidence of linguistics. I leave questions of human biology
and regional archaeology for brief discussion later. I must reiterate that these
different criteria do not overlap in a solidary manner. The degree of correlation
between language, cultural tradition, conscious identity and population-
genetics within the Malay World is at best partial. The interflow of genes,
ideas and languages has often been so intensive and multidirectional as to
render futile any attempt to delineate the various "peoples" in terms of
completely distinct bundles of geographical, linguistic, biological, or culture-
historical features. The search for the remoter "origins" of any of the constituent
populations will therefore be misconceived - and with it the search for a
supposedly single "origin" for the Malays themselves.
DEMOGRAPHICS
It is uncertain how many tribespeople there are currently in the Malay World.
Reliable figures are more easily available for some areas than for others. Truly
detailed demographic profiles, such as that by Fix (1977) on the Semais, are
very few indeed. This is therefore not the place to explore the wider information
22 Geoffrey Benjamin On Being Tribal in the Malay World 23

that can be gleaned from demographic studies, such as questions of population
viability, age-distribution, health, reproduction or migration. 29 Instead, I shall
limit myself to presenting what is known of the total population figures for
the tribespeople in two of the three major sub-regions of the Malay World:
the Peninsula and the Malay-World parts of Sumatra. I shall also briefly
discuss the situation in Borneo.
The Peninsula
The most reliable figures available to me for the Peninsular Orang Asli are as
shown in Table 2.1, which I have retabulated from the ]HEOA website as of
December 2000. Unfortunately, no date is given, but I suspect that figures
relate to 1996. The ]HEOA ignores the linguistic divisions used here, preferring
instead to employ its own version of kuih lapis categories: "Negrito", "Senoi",
and "Proto-Malay". (The ]HEOA is the only source for Orang Asli population
figures, as the published Census ofMalaysia absorbs them into the Malay figures.)
I have given the ethnic categorization mainly in terms of the official
]HEOA labels, which absorb some smaller groups into neighbouring
populations. As Nicholas points out in his chapter, this procedure produces
a tidy list of just six "tribes" within each of the three major categories. The
Semelai figure probably includes that for the very small Temoq population
(cf. Gianno 1997). There are a few smaller groups, such as the Mintils (or
Batek Tanum), and the various populations (such as the Semnams and
Sabiims) lumped together under "Lanoh", whose distinctiveness has never
been recognized by the ]HEOA, probably because they are too small to make
any notable statistical difference. The Besisis are referred to as Mah Meri by
the ]HEOA, who also employ certain spellings that are not found in the
scholarly literature.
Table 2.1 indicates that (in 1996?) there were a total of 92,853 (rural-dwelling)
Orang Asli, if we include the guessed-at number for Thailand. However, the
current (2000) population is thought to be closer to II5,000 (Colin Nicholas,
personal communication). The "missing" figures are due in part to natural
increase, but also to the fact that the ]HEOA's own census enumerations cover
only the rural settlements that come under their administration. A significant
number of Orang Asli now live in urban areas, and their numbers can only be
guessed at, as they are not recorded separately from the Malays. This does not
mean, however, that they have assimilated into the Melayu community.
Sumatra
The figures for the tribal population of this large island are rather inconsistent,
both statistically and in terms of the ethnic classifications employed. My two
main sources are documents prepared by the Direktorat Bina Masyarakat
Terasing (1990, 1994/95), a division of the Republic's Social Department. lO
Additional sources for portions of Sumatra's tribal population are Djatmiko
1993 for Riau Province as a whole, and FKKS-Batam for the Orang Suku
Laut of Riau.l'
The variant figures for Riau province (Table 2.2) illustrate the
inconsistencies. Presumably, these are due in part to the fusion in 1993 and

TABLE 2.1
TABLE 2.2
Tribal Populations of Southern Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia, 2000
Tribal Populations of Riau Province, Sumatra
LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION
POPULATION
MON-KHMER AUSTRONESIAN
Suku or sub-suku DBMTI990 Djatmiko 1993
Northern Aslian Central Aslian Southern Aslian Malayic
Orang Laut 504 02 9,5 82 7,179
"Maniq" :hoo Lanoh 359 Semaq Beri 2,488 Temuan 16,020 Talang Mamak 6,983 6,983 5,3 II
Kensiu 224 Temiar 15,122 Semelai 4, 103 Jakun 16,637 Bonai 2,244 3,79 0 2, 26 9
Kentaq 359 Semai 26,049 Besisi 2, 18 5 Orang Kanaq 64 Hutan 5,334 8,682 5,27 0
Jahai 1,049 Jah Hut J,I93 Orang Seletar 801 Akit 3045 6 3,995 2,37 6
Mendriq 145 Duano 2,49 2 Sakai 50437 2,824 3,25 1
Batek 9 60 Kuala/Laut 3,87 2
Chewong 40 3 Bertam

SUB-TOTALS: 3,340 44,7 23 8,776 36 ,01 4 TOTAL:

24 Geoffrey Benjamin On Being Tribal in the Malay World 25

TABLE 2.3 One estimate given in 1996 for the number of tribal people in the whole
Tribal Populations of Sumatra (Other Selected Provinces) of Malaysia was "ninery-five tribal groups with a combined population of
over two million people". This statement was made by the Secretary-General
POPULATION
of the Ministry of Land and Co-operative Development at what was billed as
Province Suku or sub-suku DBMTI990 DBMT 1 994/95 "the first national conference of aborigines [at least they used the word there!]
Anak Dalam [Kubul 3,7 18 5,142 from Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah" (Straits Times, 3 September
Jambi
Masyarakat Talang 2,040 1996, p. 16). This figure of two million for the "tribal" population of Malaysia
Masyarakat Terasing [sic] 83 was heavily weighted towards the large, "Native" populations that constitute
Bajau/Suku Laut 2843 2,181 the majorities in Sabah and Sarawak, Malaysia's Borneo states.J3 Only a small
Talang Mamak 575 minoriry among these people are still tribal in any normal sociological sense
SUB-TOTAL: 9,359 7, 62 3 of the term. (The Lahanans, discussed in this volume by Jennifer and Paul
Sumatera Selatan Anak Dalam [Kubu] 7,188 1,086 Alexander, form one such population.) It is more probable that the official's
Laut 2,676 statement was yet another example of kuih lapis race-based thinking, in which
Ameng Sawang 45 1 tribaliry is seen as some kind of unchanging essence - "Proto" -Malayness
SUB-TOTAL: 9, 86 4 1,537 perhaps, as opposed to the "Deutero"-Malayness of the Orang Melayu.
no data
Today, the circumstances of these Bornean people are in almost all respects
Sumatera Utara Nias 1,877
different from those of the 100,000 or so Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia.
Bengkulu Serawai 8,5 12 8,152
Among other features, they possess legislation that (in principle, at least)
Rejang II,04° 9,9 15
1, 12 5
guarantees them land rights, while the Orang Asli do not.
Kaarubi, Kaano
Figures for the suku terasing population of Indonesian Borneo are given
SUB-TOTAL: 19,55 2 19,192
in the same publications from which I obtained the Sumatran figures, but
GRAND TOTAL: 4 0 ,652 28,35 2
they indicate only those who have been the recipients of government
resettlement and welfare programmes. Since I cannot tell what proportion of
1994 of the "Kuala Laut" figures (reported separately in 1990) with the the total tribal population is formed by these people, I have not cited the
"Orang Laut" figures. Unfortunately, it is not clear what ethnological import, figures. In any case, the ethnological and linguistic situation in most of
if any, these partly distinct labels carry.3 2 Borneo is more complex than in Sumatra, and the former Malay sultanates of
The same inconsistencies are apparent in the figures from the other Borneo are discontinuously distributed. This means that these outposts are
Sumatran provinces that also have a Malayic tribal population (Table 2·3)· sandwiched between large tracts that probably do not belong to the Malay
World as narrowly defined. Thus, great distances separate Brunei on the
north coast from Pontianak on the west coast and from Banjarmasin in the
Borneo south.
Tables 2.1 to 2.3 exclude Sarawak, Indonesian Borneo, and the remaining
provinces of Sumatra. Borneo is ethnologically too complicated to discuss LANGUAGES: AUSTRONESIAN AND MaN-KHMER
here in any detail, and the data are often gratuitously masked by the custom
of referring generically to the island's tribal populations as "Dayaks" (uplanders, The indigenous populations of the Malay World speak languages belonging
inlanders). Nevertheless, portions of Borneo's coastal areas are important to two different stocks: Austronesian and Austroasiatic. The former is
parts of the Malay World. In Brunei, Sarawak, and the Indonesian provinces represented primarily by Malayic, a relatively homogeneous low-level genetic
of West and South Kalimantan, for example, the Melayu population has long grouping that includes Malay (with its many dialects) as one of its members.
been added to by assimilatory Malayization-cum-Islamization of other The latter is represented by Aslian, a less homogeneous, higher-level grouping
Austronesian-speaking communities, as mentioned later. that falls within the major subdivision of Austroasiatic known (after two of its
 Geoffrey Benjamin
major members) as Mon-Khmer. (The other major Austroasiatic subdivision
consists of the Munda languages of India.)
The linkages of the two groups of languages lie in opposite directions:
Aslian with the Southeast Asian mainland lying to the north, and Malayic
with the insular areas (Borneo and Sumatra in particular) to the south.
Correlated with this to a certain degree are differences in the overall societal
patterns. Historically, the Aslian-speakers have constituted themselves into
egalitarian tribal formations, largely in abreaction from the various Malay
states that lay downstream. The Malayic-speaking tribes people, on the other
hand, have usually formed variably ranked societies that differ from Melayu
society mainly in the absence of a centralizing state formation and its attendant
religious institutions (formerly Mahayana Buddhism, now Islam). As already
noted, Melayu social organization is therefore best understood as a variant on
a more broadly shared "Malayic" theme. However, there are some Orang Asli
populations, such as the Semelais and Besisis, who are Malayic in social
formation but Aslian (Mon-Khmer) by language.
The Malayic Dialects
The Austronesian languages, originating in the eastern end of the archipelago
(probably Taiwan) some five or more millennia ago (Blust 1988), reached the
cutrent territory of the Malay World around two to three thousand years ago.
The many Malayic dialects (including Malay itself) count among the more
recent of these languages, having emerged initially in northwest Borneo and
moving therefrom to Sumatra and the southern part of the Peninsula, as well
as eastwards around the Bornean coast to Brunei and beyond. In Sumatra,
several substantial inscriptions in Old Malay attest to the importance of
Malay as an official state language as early as 683 CE, in what are the present-
day provinces of South Sumatra and Jambi (Coedes 1930; Nik Hassan Shuhaimi
199 2). The tribal populations of Sumatra, both current and former, live
mostly in those same areas today, and (with some important exceptions, such
as the Bataks of North Sumatra and the people of Siberut Island) they speak
Malay or other Malayic dialects as their own languages. Although current
Malaysian usage would not accord the label Orang Melayu to these Malay-
speaking tribal populations, they are sometimes called "Melayu" in Sumatra
(see the chapters by Tenas, Porath, and Chou & Wee), and there seems little
reason to doubt that they are indeed descendents of the same population
from which the majority of the Malays "proper" also descended.
Fifty years ago, Leach (1950, p. 53) was so impressed by evidence that
Malayness was not restricted to the Malays proper, that he coined the label
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 27
"para-Malay". Para-Malays share the same general background with the Orang
Melayu, but they lack one or more criteria (Islam, ethnic identity, language,
the centralized state) of full Melayu-ness. Leach was referring specifically to
northern Borneo and to populations speaking non-Malayic languages, but
para-Malay populations of this sort are widely found, elsewhere in Borneo, in
Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Vivienne Wee (1988) has researched these
issues in the Riau Archipelago of western Indonesia, an area which the Orang
Melayu themselves regard as one of their major centres of distribution.
Ethnologically, Riau has turned out to be quite heterogeneous despite the
obvious "Malayness" of all the various populations. Similar points are made
by Sandbukt (1982) with regard to Sumatra's Jambi province, and by Yam polsky
(1996) in his concentrated general account (1996) of the Melayu parts of
Sumatra. 34
This close interplay between the tribal and the non-tribal facies of
Malayness is still apparent today. In a detailed study, Kahler (1960)
demonstrated that the Malay dialects spoken by the Peninsular Jakuns continue
on through Singapore (the Orang Seletar), into the Riau Islands (the Orang
Suku Laut) and on to mainland Sumatra, albeit with some dialectal variation
between them. This gives substance to Skeat's decision a century ago to refer
to the Orang Laut as "Sea Jakun" (Skeat and Blagden 1906, vol. I, p. 87).
In the Lingga Islands south of Riau, the descendants of the old Malay
royal families even today speak a variety of Malay recognizably closer to that
spoken by the tribal Orang Laut of the area than to the Malay spoken by the
Bugis-descended Malays, who had replaced them on Pulau Penyengat in the
early 1700S (Vivienne Wee, personal communication). Moreover, the Lingga
royals use several forms of expression that the present-day Riau royals affect
to despise as sounding too "tribally" coarse. Since Standard Malaysian and
Standard Indonesian are both derived from the written version of this suppletive
Riau variety of Malay, this point is of great socio-linguistic interest, and
warrants further research. More generally, there are grounds for holding that
Malay has been standardized several times over out of the various local Malay
dialects (Teeuw 1959), most of which in earlier times would have been
essentially "tribal" ones. These standardized varieties presumably go back at
least as far as the Old Malay of the seventh-century Sumatran inscriptions.
Adelaar (1992b) has demonstrated how a knowledge of these tribal forms of
Malay and other Malayic dialects can help elucidate, and even revise, our
understanding of several obscure points in those inscriptions.
Further light is thrown on this question by a (probably) Malayic language
still spoken today in the very area where these early developments took place.
I refer to Duano, spoken by Orang Asli (the so-called Orang Kuala) on both
 Geoffrey Benjamin
sides of the Straits, in the Pontian area of Johar (Malaysia) and on Pulau
Rangsang and the Jambi coast of Sumatra (Indonesia). The brief grammatical
sketch of this language with accompanying texts provided by Kahler (1946-
49) affords a fascinating glimpse of the complicated linguistic mix out of
which Malay itself probably emerged some 2,000 years ago. Linguists have so
far paid little attention to this important material, the significance of which
I commented on in a recent study on Malay linguistics (Benjamin, forthcoming
a).35
In this regard, it is interesting to note that the Temuan language as
described by Abdullah Hassan (1969), spoken by a large Orang Asli population
in Negeri Sembilan, is much closer to "standard" Malay than is the famously
variant form spoken by the Malays of the area. Since the latter people are
descended from Minang migrants who moved across from West Sumatra
some centuries ago, bringing their own Malayic dialect with them, it is
Temuan, not Negeri Sembilan Malay, that should be considered as the
historically "authentic" Malay dialect of that part of the Peninsula (Asmah
Haji Omar, personal communication). This suggests that the Temuans at
some stage assimilated to an unselfconscious Malayness (probably from a
Central-Aslian-speaking tradition) at a time when language, but not yet
Islam, was the key criterion. If so, Malayness at that time did not preclude
tribality, even in the Peninsula.
To complete the picture, I should note that the Malay World also
contains populations who speak non-Malayic but still Austronesian languages
(such as Batak, Mentawaian, and Lahanan), just as it contains Malayic
speakers (such as the Ibans) who do not fall into the "Malayic" societal pattern.
The Aslian Languages
As already noted, some 65,000 of the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia and
southern Thailand speak languages belonging to the southern Mon-Khmer
division of the Austroasiatic stock. In the professional linguistic literature
these are known as the "Aslian" languages, and current opinion places them
closest to the Monic group within Mon-Khmer. The remaining 45,000
Orang Asli who currently speak Malay or other Malayic dialects contain
many individuals who descend from people who spoke Aslian languages as
recently as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Benjamin 1997, p.
lIO). Because the Aslian languages exhibit much greater variety than the
Malayic dialects spoken in the Peninsula, it must be assumed that they have
been present for a much longer period (Benjamin 1976; Diffloth 1975).
Current opinion seems to be agreed that the nearly twenty Aslian languages
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 29
have a history in the Peninsula of at least three millennia, while the Malayic
dialects have been present for less than two millennia in the Peninsula, and
for a little longer in Borneo and Sumatra.
The Mon-Khmer family in general has been less thoroughly researched
than the Austronesian languages, but thanks especially to the researches of
Gerard Diffloth, the picture is becoming clearer. Diffloth began his historical-
linguistic work on all branches of Mon-Khmer with a study of Semai and
other Aslian languages in the 1960s. Since then, a few other linguists have
researched these languages, and the information available has begun to expand
rapidly since the late 1990S. It turns out that, apart from their intrinsic
linguistic interest, the Aslian languages have much to tell us about the
broader culture-history of mainland Southeast Asia. They are phonologically,
morphologically and semantically very conservative, retaining features that
have largely been lost elsewhere - and lost especially from the family's largest
member, Vietnamese. Moreover, the Aslian languages reveal evidence of a
complex pattern of interaction within the subfamily and with other non-
Aslian languages. This has made it possible to suggest in some detail that the
early history of the Malay Peninsula was much more complicated than
normally assumed. Linguistic research has also demonstrated the intrusive
presence at various times of Austronesian languages other than Malayic, as
well as of Khmer, Mon and even Tai, spoken presumably by traders, miners,
and perhaps administrators. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of
the issue, which I have treated in a little detail elsewhere (Benjamin 1997,
2001a, forthcoming b). For now, let Diffloth's recent ideas (personal
communication) on the etymology of "Senoi" suffice to give a taste of what
can be learnt from this approach.
The word "Senoi" derives from the Temiar sm?J:J)' or Semai s:J!J?J:J)', both
of which mean "human being, people, person". But that is not the end of the
etymological story, for the word appears to be a Khmer loan that originally
meant something quite different. In the Khmer currently spoken in Surin
province, Thailand, s:J!J?vvy - clearly a cognate of the Aslian "Senoi" wards _
means "to be peevish, cry-baby; to be knowledgeable, but unwilling to boast
about it". The word has also been borrowed into Thai as sam?J:J)', with the
meaning "cry-baby". Related to this is the Surin-Khmer expressive tas?J:J)' s?J-J)'
"to act slowly, unsure, insecure; preferring not to finish something for fear of
doing it wrong". The reconstructible Khmer root must therefore be *s?J-J)',
with the basic meaning "insecure, shy". These words have not (as yet) been
found elsewhere, which suggests that in both Thai and Aslian, they are loans
from Khmer. In Khmer, an infixed nasal, like the -m- of sam?J-J)', indicates an
adversative, "disapproving" meaning, quite appropriate when calling someone
30 Geoffrey Benjamin
a cry-baby. The Khmers therefore presumably saw shyness as an undesirable
quality. Judging by the nasals nand 1) that are still infixed into the Temiar and
Semai words, the Orang Asli seem to have accepted the Khmers' description
of them as shy - though the Senoi people themselves presumably saw it as a
desirable quality.
This reconstruction fits well with what little we know of Temiar and
Semai history, in which flight deep into the forest has been their normal
response to slave-raiding and other depredations. However, the fact that they
now call themselves by an originally Khmer word demonstrates that the flight
response was balanced by the continued maintenance of relations with
outsiders, for trade and other pursuits. The dialectic of both having contact
with outsiders and shying away from such contact delineates the overall
trajectory of Senoi history.J6
THE MALAY WORLD AS
A SOCIOLOGICAL FIELD OF STUDY
At least five major issues attend the study of social process in the Malay
World. I would like to illustrate these with appropriate examples from the
ethnographic and historical literature. Some of these features have already
been mentioned briefly; others are introduced here for the first time.
First, there is the contrast between tribality and non-tribality - a contrast
that is found outside the Malay World as well. This is a process, not a fixed
primordial contrast. Just as detribalization is currently an increasingly frequent
happening, the tribalization or retribalization of formerly non-tribal people
has also occurred. In the Malay World, however, this contrast is frequently
established within populations (the "Malayics") that share the same basic
cultural and linguistic matrix. To that extent, Malay World tribality shares
something of the features that characterize tribality in parts of West Asia, such
as Afghanistan or the Arabian Peninsula.
Second, there is the generation of mutually dissimilatory difference, to
produce the various societal patterns mentioned earlier, as well as the
complementarity between the sea peoples and the land peoples among the
Malayic populations commented on by several authors in this volume.
Historically, these differences have been related most closely to different
alternative modes of livelihood, but reactions to political pressures have also
played a part.
Third, pre-modern Malay states - initially emerging from within the
(tribal-)Malayic societal tradition - evinced a peculiarly close relation between
the tribal populations and the ruling classes, such that the peasantry has often
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 31
been peripheral, or even non-existent. The pre-modern Malay state therefore
acted to reconstitute, and sometimes reinforce, tribality in various ways. This
involved such institutions as slavery and tribute relations.
Fourth, there is the process of assimilation to Melayu-ness or resistance to
it, with which all tribal populations in the Malay World must come to terms.
With the increased association of the Malay state with Islam especially, the
assimilation of difference is a positively held value in Melayu culture - a
feature that is not necessarily found in other parts of Southeast Asia, such as
the Thai realm. The different varieties of Malayness, therefore, constitute a
major sociological theme.
Fifth, the Malay World now extends over five different modern nation-
states, each of which has different views of both Malayness and tribality.
These modern states, too, have acted to reconstitute the character of tribality,
normally in a manner that leads to detribalization but sometimes, by abreaction,
to the further intensification of tribality.
TRIBALIN ON-TRIBAL
The boundary between tribality and non-tribality in the Malay World is a
porous one, with movement occurring in both directions. At one extreme are
the Chewongs (Howell) in the centre of the Peninsula, who have resolutely
reasserted their positive tribality at every opportunity by moving as far away
from mainstream society as they can. Much the same applies to some of the
Semang ("Sakai") groups of southern Thailand (Porath, Hamilton). Sandbukt
(19 84) has described an even more committedly tribal Malayic population
living in the forests of Jambi province, Sumatra. At the other extreme are
populations whose members have left tribality behind for good, even if they
and their neighbours retain a memory of their formerly tribal status. The
Bataks of North Sumatra (Ruiter, Ginting) are a clear example. Even where
they continue to live in their ancestral villages and houses (some of which
have been in continuous use for more than two centuries), the Bataks' life
circumstances now fall variously into the peasant, petty commodity-producer,
proletarian or bourgeois categories. The same finally became true of Singapore's
Orang Seletar and Orang Selat (Mariam) as recently as the late 1980s, when
they were faced with obligatory resettlement into government flats.
However, most of the populations discussed in this volume display a less
uniform profile, without necessarily losing their sense of sameness. Increasingly,
this expresses itself as an explicitly ethnic "identity", in the modern sense
(Nicholas, Kroes, Ruiter). In other cases, however, the feeling of sameness is
founded in a more implicit acknowledgement of cultural continuity, whether
 Geoffrey Benjamin
32
based on language, music (Roseman), religion or locality. The Lahanans of
Sarawak (Alexander & Alexander) demonstrate a strong attachment to an
explicit identity (not normally recognized by others) that is founded both on
cultural concerns and on the need to assert an "ethnicity" in the face of
massive disruptions caused by the state's development plans. In the long run,
ethnicity will presumably win out in all these populations. But just how long
is the long run? One factor that affects this outcome is the dialectical mode
of orientation that still characterizes many of these cultural traditions, which
seems capable of envisioning a considerable degree of difference as being
somehow the "same".
The Temiars have managed to absorb even consumerist capitalism into
their dialectically shaped cultural and musical framework (Roseman) without
necessarily pushing the people into peasantlike or proletarian circumstances
- at least for the moment. Nevertheless, a certain amount of overt consciousness
of their changed circumstances has begun to emerge, as in the development
of innovative syncretic cults, incorporating Malay, Chinese and Hindu
elements, within the broader framework of Temiar mediumistic religion.
Moreover, for a few years, the highly formalized Baha'i religion gained a
substantial number of converts among the Temiars (Benjamin I996). A
"commercial pop" (their description) CD record by the Temiar-Semai band
Jelmol ("Mountain"), with two of the tracks sung in Temiar, has had quite
some success in Kuala LumpurY Temiar tribality, therefore, is still in a state
of flux.
Semai communities have exhibited this kind of variation since at least the
late I920S, when a motor road was built from Tapah town right through
Semai country to the newly opened hill station of Cameron Highlands. This
greatly facilitated their access to the urban areas and the cash economy.
Nowadays, like the Bataks, Semais fall individually into many different socio-
economic categories. This differentiation is further reinforced by the long-
standing difference between the lowland Semais ("like Malays") and the hill-
dwelling Semais ("those Temiars", "those Semang") - the epithets as reported
in Dentan's well-known monograph (I979, p. I5). The hill Semais even now
retain some dialecticism, and still have at least one foot in the tribal camp,
despite the influx of cash, employment, schooling, and medical services.
Many Semais however - perhaps the majority -live as peasants, proletarians,
or petty commodity-producers; a growing number are tertiary graduates
following professional careers. The chapters in this volume by Dentan, Juli
(himself a Semai) and Kroes richly illustrate this diversity "on the ground",
while Nicholas mentions the activities of many Semais in the modern sector
of Malaysian life. Of course, this heterogeneity begs the question: in what
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 33
sense can we talk of the Semais? Gomes (I988) has shown that the people
themselves began to wear this homogenizing label only in the early twentieth
century, and that it still rests uneasily on top of the many socio-cultural
differences - now including the tribal/non-tribal distinction - that characterize
them.
On Siberut, the Mentawaians are currently experiencing strongly
differentiating forces emanating from the Sumatran mainland. This has
produced some "moderns", some "traditionalists", and a majority who fit
somewhere in between (Persoon). Schefold, looking at the more "traditional"
side of the same situation, demonstrates just how profoundly the people have
incorporated their awareness of these outside influences by integrating them
into their own expressive culture - much as Roseman describes for the
Temiars and Dentan hints at for very much more ancient times among the
Semais. Once again, as Persoon remarks, "it is hard to talk about the local
people."
The Orang Suku Laut (Lenhart, Chou & Wee) have long managed to
encompass the differences between their constituent communities. The
presence among them of an increasingly non-tribal membership (as marked
in part by conversion to Islam or Catholicism) is therefore not a completely
new element. In any case, some of these communities were less tribal in the
past than they became in later times. Such an intensification of tribality can
occur for several different reasons. In Riau (see below) this occurred because
the sultanate sought advantage in having a mobile segmentary population at
its beck and call. In some of the Malayic "collecting" regions, including the
maritime portions, tribality has sometimes intensified in step with the
increasing demand for forest or marine products: it is to the commercial
advantage of the collecting communities to retain their detailed knowledge of
the forests and seas, and their willingness to exploit it.
A somewhat ironic example is presented by the Bateks living in Malaysia's
National Park. Lye shows that the park's administrators have erected a
conceptual boundary around it, in order to emphasize their respectably
modern concern for the "Nature" it encapsulates. Everything inside the park,
including the Bateks - its Naturvolk- must remain "frozen in idealized time"
so as to sanctify the "development" that has been achieved outside the park.
Kuih lapis ethnology here meets and fuses with modernization. Unusual
though it is, this example illustrates how intolerant the modern world is of
the dialectical mindset (even if post-modernists have begun to favour a
version of it). Indeed, as Ruiter argues with regard to the nineteenth-century
Bataks, the most general form of detribalization is conversion into an
unambiguously non-dialectical "ethnic group" following the penetration of
34 Geoffrey Benjamin
state administration or capitalist enterprise. (On this theme, see also Kubitschek
1997; McCaskill 199 8 .)
DISSIMIlATION
The ethnology of the Malay World tells a story of continued complementarity
between the tribal communities themselves and between them and the
neighbouring non-tribal domain. As mentioned earlier, this interaction appears
to have led to a series of mutual assimilations and dissimilations that generated
three major patterns of societal organization: the Semang, Senoi, and Malayic.
The details of this argument, which involve a close examination of kinship
and other such institutions, are presented elsewhere (see especially Benjamin
1985, 1999). Here, I present brief accounts of some other culture-historical
features relating to dissimilatory processes that are relevant to the understanding
of broader Malay World issues. First, I shall discuss the population that, from
the Malay standpoint, is the most "different": the Semang negritos of southern
Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia. Then I shall make some suggestions as to
the long-term historical place of a population that is much more closely
related to the Orang Melayu "proper": the Malayic sea peoples.
Negrito Foraging and Semang Distinctiveness
The various populations who follow the Semang pattern are not simply
hunter-gatherers, for they actually forage off anything that comes their way,
including the Malay stateY (See, for example, Benjamin 1973.) They have
worked the fields for Malay farmers, served as porters for forest travellers, sold
or bartered forest products with outsiders, and even desultorily cultivated
their own swiddens. Of course, they will also forage by hunting and gathering
if the opportunity arises - as it frequently does - but their foraging is not
necessarily definable in terms of hunting and gathering. On the other hand,
what the Semang do not do is just as interesting. Even now, they avoid both
trapping and long-term integral swidden farming, for these activities would
require them to reside for long periods in the same place. This would clash
with their desire to retain complementarity with the more sedentary
populations around them - the Malays, Temiars, and (formerly) the Semais.
Thus, the Semang imperative has had three main components: the maintenance
of a widespread low-density population, a minimalist social organization that
allows them to break into conjugal-family groups at almost a moment's
notice, and an avoidance of a long-term commitment to sedentism. As I have
argued elsewhere, these ends were achieved by the instituting of a distinct
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 35
kinship pattern that (a) favoured patrifilial consociation, and (b) enjoined
avoidance between adult consanguines and in-laws of opposite sex. This had
several consequences, including a marriage pattern that required one to marry
at considerable distances, and a low rate of population growth. These
institutions may well be connected with the genesis and/or maintenance of
the physical distinctiveness of these populations.
Because of their unusual "negrito" somatotype it has often been assumed
that the Semang are the remnants of a formerly more widespread population,
related distantly to those of Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia. J9 On this
view, they became peripheralized early on by the arrival of Mongoloid
populations speaking Mon-Khmer and Austronesian languages. The main
proponent of this interpretation is the prehistorian Peter Bellwood (1993,
1997, pp. 71-74), whose detailed integrative analysis of the prehistory of
island Southeast Asia also links the Semang to some extent with the so-called
"negritos" of the Philippines and the Andaman Islands. The negrito phenotype,
with its dark skin and purportedly small body size - often more a myth than
a reality - is usually seen as adaptive to a nomadic deep-forest life. Bellwood
nevertheless acknowledges that the ancestry of the negritos is not "simple",
since they display a genetic variability that is partly due to a "reticulate"
pattern of interbreeding with neighbouring Mongoloid populations. This
interpretation is consistent with the view that Semang hunting and gathering
is primordial, not secondary, and that they are therefore the direct inheritors
(in pan, at least) of practices invented in the Hoabinhian period and earlier.
On this view, their presumed later adoption of Mon-Khmer (or in the
Philippines, Austronesian) speech is seen as a palaeo-sociolinguistic problem
needing explanation.
This approach has not gone unchallenged. An alternative view, proposed
most strongly by Rambo (1988), suggests that the negrito phenotype exhibited
by most of the Semang population has evolved comparatively recently in the
Malay Peninsula out of the basically Mongoloid population that was already
there. This could even have been recent enough to have occurred after the
emergence of farming, and hence consequent upon the complementary
dissimilation between the two lifeways commented on earlier. Such a view
would pose fewer (socio)linguistic problems, and it would allow for a relatively
large part of Semang hunting and gathering to be secondary in character -
though presumably still intensive enough to exert a strong selective effect on
bodily physique. (It would also imply that the three geographically distinct
"negrito" populations of Southeast Asia do not share a uniquely common
ancestry.) As yet, the genetic evidence is neither sufficient in quantity nor
sufficiently analysed to decide the issue. 40 Such a rapid rate of genetic evolution
 Geoffrey Benjamin
is not impossible, however, given the low-density "fission-fusion" breeding
patterns that have characterized populations with the kind of breeding pattern
followed by the Semang (cf Fix 1982, 1995).
The total Semang population has numbered around two or three thousand
since counts and estimates were first published about two hundred years ago
(Schebesta 1952, pp. 163-65). Because of epidemics, this figure has not remained
truly constant over the short term (Schebesta 1952, p. 167), but its long-term
constancy is striking. However, as Gomes (1982) has demonstrated, this very
low rate of population growth is associated specifically with nomadism.
When the people are made to settle down, their population growth-rate
rapidly increases. Nomadic foraging is associated with a low value of children:
until they reach their teen years children are net consumers rather than
producers, and as infants they encumber the nomadic way of life. This
suggests that the Semang probably had the means to keep their population
growth low by spacing their births far apart.
How has the Semang pattern managed to be so persistent? Two main
problems had to be solved. First, how to sustain an egalitarian low-density
population over such a large territory, and segmentary right down to conjugal-
family level? Second, how to retain their complementary distinctiveness from
the more settled, farming-based ways oflife espoused by their neighbours, the
Senoi peoples and the Malays? I shall limit myself here to a bare sketch of the
mechanisms they appear to have employed, which are founded on their
distinctive kinship pattern (Benjamin 1985, 200Ib).
As I have already suggested, the first problem - the maintenance of a low-
density non-increasing population - was solved in two main ways. First,
marriages usually had to be contracted over great distances. Second, they had
children as infrequently as possible, through two mutually reinforcing
mechanisms: (a) a ban on sexual intercourse for about two years after a
woman had given birth, and (b) a preference for delaying weaning for two
years. The latter practice suppresses ovulation through hormonal mechanisms,
especially in women with low body fat (Bongaarts 1980). Moreover, the
Semang pattern of sexual avoidance between traceable consanguines and
affines meant that the husband could not easily find a substitute sexual
partner at this time. The net result was a very slow, or perhaps flat, rate of
population growth so long as the people remained nomadic. On settling
down, however, the population growth rises spectacularly: the provision of
alternative food supplies allows the mothers to wean their children earlier
(onto grain-based porridge), and the people allow a concomitant relaxation of
the post-partum coital taboo. 41
Why should the Semang populations have bothered to organize their
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 37
lives in this way? I suggest that they did so in order to maintain a lifeway that
was distinctively complementary to that of their neighbours, the Senoi and
the Malays. By so doing, they were able to reduce any competition that may
have emerged between themselves and the other populations who shared
their environment. But to achieve this end they had to positively maintain a
commitment to nomadic foraging that was binding on a just-sufficient
number of people to maintain a viable self-reproducing population. Any
attraction to the long-term sedentism espoused by their neighbours would
have dissolved away this selective advantage. Differential kinship patterns had
a great deal to do with this: the distinctive Semang and Senoi kinship rules
generated the demographic structure appropriate to each of the lifeways, and
served to sustain an ideology that painted the other population's ways as
inappropriate. To give just one example: where the Semang forbade sexual
relations with both traceable consanguines and affines, the Senoi actually
favoured sexual and marital relations with close affines, even to the extent of
instituting sexually charged joking relations between siblings-in-Iaw of opposite
sex. This, as Semang individuals have remarked to several investigators
(including myself), is immoral behaviour that just should not be emulated.
The Malay pattern, on the other hand, favours an ideal of close consanguineal
marriage, something that followers of both the Semang or the Senoi pattern
find hard to accept.
Thus, it is possible that even some of the genetic features characteristic of
at least one of the constituent populations of the Malay World has its roots
in the kind of deliberate dissimilatory complementarity between populations
that is typical of the whole region. (For further discussion of this hypothesis,
see Fix 1995.)
Let me now turn to another instance in which such complementarity has
been of socio-historical importance.
THE VARIETIES OF MALAYNESS
As we have seen, the Malayic societal pattern exists in several different
varieties: tribal versus centralized, and maritime versus land-based. It has long
been noted that there is a close linguistic and cultural similarity between the
Melayu Malays "proper" and the tribal Malays. Logan (1847, p. 249), for
example, reported that numerous Malays possessed pagan cousins or even
brothers: the Jakuns differed from the Malays in physical appearance only
because their "air, manner and expression constituted the great distinction
between them". A little further south, Williams-Hunt (1952, pp. 13, 19, 44)
included the Orang Selat among the 1,000 "Aborigines" that he estimated to
 Geoffrey Benjamin
be living in the Colony of Singapore in the early 1950S. These people had been
(nominal) Muslims for several generations and were regarded by almost all
outsiders simply as Malays. They regarded themselves as Malays too, but as
Malays who had not yet forgotten their distinct tribal-group (suku) origins in
particular parts of the Riau archipelago. Likewise, Mariam Ali (this volume)
was told by some north-coast Singapore Malays that they were of Orang Laut
ancestry. Similar observations have been made with regard to several parts of
Sumatra: as Persoon remarks (this volume), "though the Orang Kubu are
hunters and gatherers wandering around in the remaining forests of central
and south Sumatra, it is evident from their language, magical spells, and folk
stories that there have been interactions between them and the Minangkabau
and Orang Melayu for a very long time, and even a common origin." Very
similar findings are reported by Sandbukt (1984) and Chou (1995), as well as
by Porath and Tenas in this volume.
Clearly, a significant number of observers have been convinced that the
Orang Melayu share a common background with most of the tribal peoples
living in the region. The label "Aboriginal Malay", first proposed by Williams-
Hunt, encapsulates this idea very well, and it has been adopted by the
JHEOA as the basis for their Malay-language term, Orang Melayu Asli, for
these populations. Needless to say, ordinary up-country and island Malays
have also long been aware of this close relationship. (See Chou 1995 for a
particularly explicit example, among the Melayu people and the neighbouring
Orang Suku Laut of the Riau Islands.)
It is not surprising then to discover that fears of reassimilation into
tribality are common in the Melayu community. As already noted, Melayu
cultural rhetoric takes much pride in what it has discarded, historically
speaking, in its quest for cultural self-improvement. Favre (1848, pp. 272-73)
noted the "extreme fear" that obtained between Orang Melayu and Jakuns in
Johor, in places where the Orang Melayu were themselves recently Malayized
Jakuns. This was probably because the Jakuns still knew the "secret" of the
local Malays' origins, while at the same time the latter were pressuring the
Jakuns through slave-raiding and land-expropriation. Logan (1847, p. 4) also
noted that such forest-spirits as pontianak and hantu were probably instituted
to socialize the neo-Melayu children into fear of entering the forest - where
they might disconcertingly meet up with their Jakun "cousins" and learn their
true origins. Porath (this volume) reports that the same fears of entrapment
magic are still expressed by Sumatran Malays with regard to the Sakais of the
area, as also does Lenhart for the Riau Islands. All these reports mention in
particular the fear that Orang Melayu will be enticed into marriage or sexual
intrigue with a tribal-Malay, leading to the dissolution of the civilizational
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 39
difference between them. In a fascinating reversal, Sandbukt (1984) reports
that at least one group of Kubus in Jambi regard the outside world as disease-
laden, which they associate with the supposedly life-destroying (layu "fade")
effects of too much contact with Malays (Me-layu). (It is interesting to note
that reports of such magical entanglement appear to be lacking for those parts
of the Peninsula where the Orang Asli speak Mon-Khmer languages, and are
therefore clearly not Malayic by language or cultural pattern.)
What then is the basis for this socio-cultural commonality between
populations who otherwise differ greatly along the tribal/non-tribal dimension?
To answer this question, we need to look more closely at the Malayic societal
tradition and its genesis. (The following sections summarize material that I
have published elsewhere in greater detail: see Benjamin 1985, 1999, 20orb.)
The Malayic Societal Pattern Revisited
One of the distinctive features of the Malayic societal pattern is that it brings
matrifilial and patrifilial organizational biases together with a tendency to
village-internal ranking. The centralized Melayu states that arose within this
same region did so primarily by adding a further level of organization to what
had already developed in these tribal-Malay circumstances.
I suggested earlier that the Malayic societal pattern was instituted as a
means of locking into place a productive regime composed of both swidden
farming and intensified collecting. These activities if carried out on a regular
basis, impose contrary organizational problems. Farming requires the joint
co-operation of the men and the women within the village sphere, but
collecting-for-trade requires the dispersal of the men away from the village for
considerable periods. I suggest that this organizational paradox was solved by
imaging the contrast between the two spheres of enterprise as being based on
the apposition of matrifilial and patrifilial modes of incorporation. Within-
village (and hence farming-related) core-group relations came to be thought
of as matrifilial relations, while the dispersed extra-village relations generated
in trading with outsiders were thought of as patrifilialY Yet, this matri-/patri-
filial image, if acted upon too literally, would generate an organizational
pattern increasingly incompatible with the requirements of the males'
collecting-for-trade. Sedentary farming carried out by a matrifiliated core of
villagers would lead, if intensified, to a network of matrifocal local groups
whose male members move in from elsewhere upon marriage. Closely related
males would therefore tend to become dispersed and lose effective co-operation
with each other, while the males within each local community would tend to
be unrelated to each other and less inclined to co-operate. The people seem
40 Geoffrey Benjamin
to have solved this problem by instituting a preference for marriage to take
place within their own community and/or between cousins - with their own
people, so to speak. 43 The males of each village could now think of themselves
as consanguineally related after all, so that they could continue without
hindrance to treat their co-operative collecting and trading activities as
patrifiliatively organized. At the same time, their links with males in other
villages could now be thought of as falling outside of the sphere of kinship,
preparing them ideologically for the competition that would have arisen
between residents of different villages for the goodwill of the traders
downstream.
Thus, I suggest, the Malayic local communities came to combine a sexual
division of labour with a preference for relatively closed consanguineal
settlements. They were linked through their male members with wealthy
outsider trading-partners, but displayed a matrifiliative bias with regard to
village residence. Such social formations tend to become ranked, primarily
because they bring together in the same settlement in-married males who are
otherwise unrelated to each other and who would get on badly unless organized
into an institutionalized hierarchy (c£ Murphy 1957). The Orang Melayu and
many of the southern Peninsular Orang Asli (such as the Temuans, Jakuns,
Semelais, Temoqs, and Besisis) do in fact display a formal political hierarchy
(pangkat, derajat, etc.) that probably pre-dates the development of centralized
states in the Peninsula.
I have less information of this kind on the Sumatran populations (but see
below on the maritime ones). However, in an unpublished field report on the
Kubus (Orang Rimba) , Sandbukt (1979, p. 7), mentions transmission of
unequal trading relations with Malay headmen as passing from wife's father
to daughter's husband. Residence also is uxorilocal. This is admittedly not a
patrifilial pattern, but it probably represents a yet further transformation-by-
fusion of the two filiative biases. In this regard, it sounds similar to the
situation among the Aslian-speaking, but societally otherwise "Malayic",
Temoqs of Pahang, Peninsular Malaysia, which I have analysed elsewhere
(Benjamin 1999).
How do the various maritime tribal-Malays fit into the picture? The
Orang Suku Laut have shown great complementarity with the non-tribal
landed people they have dealings with (as well as with some of the tribal
ones). This complementarity had two main components: trade, and (as
discussed below) the various degrees of political association with the Malay
state. This complementarity is well exemplified in several contributions to
this volume (Mariam, Lenhart, Chou & Wee). Sather (1999, pp. 3-12) in a
recent review of the literature has also highlighted it as a fundamental
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 41
characteristic of Orang Laut life. One consequence of this is that the Orang
Suku Laut are probably not primordially tribal. As I discuss further below,
they have waxed and waned historically as tribals, according to how strongly
incorporated they were into the political mechanisms of the Malay states
within which they lived.
Despite their obvious differences from the landed tribal-Malays, it seems
that the same Malayic pattern of social organization characterized at least
some of the Orang Suku Laut divisions. Sopher (1977, p. 99) provides
evidence that the men were regularly siphoned off among these people too. In
their case, he says, it was trade and "piracy" that had this effect, whereas
ordinary fishing (like land-based farming) involved whole families together.
(The latter pattern is still followed today. This family-based fishing is, in fact,
an important distinguishing mark between the tribal Orang Suku Laut and
the non-tribal Orang Melayu, among whom only the men go fishing (Wee
1988, pp. 203-4; Chou 1995> pp. 182-83).) Sopher suggests that trade (which
became "piracy" when colonial European powers entered the stage), led in
turn to a sexual division of labour, with matrifocal settled villages linked to
patrifocal raiding crews. This development exactly parallels, in its social-
structural consequences, the more "inland" Malayic evolutionary pattern just
described.
This complementarity between maritime and land-based Malayics is
undoubtedly ancient, and must go back to the time of the earliest movement
of Austronesian-speakers into the western end of the archipelago by sea. As
people moved from island to island, they maintained their long-distance links
by boat, and hence never lost their profound connection with the sea. 44 This
means that early on there would have been two basic expressions of the
Malayic population: sea- or boat-dwellers, and land-dwellers. A minor
adaptation would be represented by strand-foragers, a pattern continued to
the present day by the Orang Seletar. Those who lived along the major trade
routes passing through the narrow Straits between the mainland and Sumatra
came to share a common linguistic heritage, based on the Malayic speech that
had already spread out of northwest Borneo, where it first emerged. Thus,
Malayic-type societies evolved jointly and simultaneously in sea-dwelling and
land-dwelling populations. As already proposed, the initial evolution would
have involved such changes as trade, sexual differentiation, ranking, and the
sorts of linguistic changes that make the Malayic languages (including Iban,
Serawai, Minang, etc.) syntactically so different from the other, focus-based,
Austronesian languages. This linguistic discontinuity probably betokens an
early shift towards a more outward-looking "transcendental" mode of
consciousness (Benjamin 1993, forthcoming a). The later changes involved
42 Geoffrey Benjamin
the growth of states, with Srivijaya in what is now South Sumatra as one of
the earliest. In his classic studies of Srivijaya, Wolters (1967, 1979) also
emphasized the importance of the integrative role played by the mobile tribal
sea-peoples.
The Early Malay State
At the risk of caricaturizing what has been told in greater detail by those
better qualified to do so, let me now cut the story short. 45 The first people to
become chiefs, and then kings, were probably sea-people leaders who had
moved from individual trading to middlemanship, and settled as land-people
on some controlling estuarine site in villages formed around the womenfolk.
Several authors have suggested that the early capitals may well have been on
boats or in houses built on piles over the water, as at the archaeological site of
Kuala Selinsing on the Peninsular west coast, or still today in Brunei and in
most of the Riau Archipelago. (At one time this was the claimed reason why
Srivijaya had apparently left no archaeological remains; but the remains have
now been found, in Palembang (Bambang 1985), and they are as land-based
and monumental as the remains of early kingdoms elsewhere in Southeast
Asia.) Eventually, Indian-derived ideas of kingship and courtly religion
arrived, to be supplanted in turn centuries later by Muslim ideas of how to
run a state.
These emerging polities were not simply maritime in orientation. As
Barbara Andaya has shown (1997), the linkage between the island (kepulauan)
and inland (daratan) areas was important. In the Peninsula, Sumatra and
Borneo, gold was mined inland and traded out towards the coast. In later
periods tin too became important in many areas. Andaya (1997, p. 486) links
Melaka's expansion to the supply of gold from the Minangkabau highlands,
connected via the great Siak, Kampar and Indragiri rivers, all of which
became the sites of important Malay kingdoms. Srivijaya itself, situated at the
site of modern Palembang, was located far upstream, near to where the
mountains began to rise. The interstitial situation of these Malay states was
connected with the presence, and possible intensification, of tribal populations
at both ends - in the forest and on the seas. An important exception to this
was the Minangkabau highlands of West Sumatra, where the combination of
gold and volcanic soil allowed the early emergence of rather densely populated
state societies, with little room for tribal peoples. However, this did not harm
the prospects of the tribal populations living between the highlands and the
coast in what is now the mainland portion of Riau province.
It was during these latter changes, following the ascendancy and break up
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 43
of the Melakan state, that a self-conscious sense of Melayu-ness emerged. It
served as a political device, now making it possible for people from elsewhere
and from other linguistic groups to assimilate to - or even to appropriate to
themselves - the emerging Melayu ideal of a Malay-speaking Muslim subject
to a sultan. It was in this last stage that the Johor-Riau Malay "standard"
language was developed - primarily as a political force in extending the
courts' relations outwards to foreign traders, and inwards to the tribal
populations, mostly already speakers of Malay dialects, as a means of
peasantizing them.
This would argue for a distinction between two kinds of pre-modern
Malay state. First, there were the early states associated with the Sumatran
Old Malay inscriptions and monumental remains at Palembang (Srivijaya),
Muara Jambi (Malayu), and others. 46 These had indigenous rulers modelling
their kingship on Mahayanist or Tantric patterns, with an "immanentist"
court culture trying to attract the attention of a hinterland or maritime tribal
population all speaking varieties of Malay (Kulke 1986). These were states -
but not yet self-consciously Malay ones.
Second, there came the later (Melaka onwards), self-consciously "Malay"
states, with foreigner rulers (Bugis, Arab, Minang, etc.) who followed a
strongly interfering transcendental culture built of linguistic and Islamic
orthodoxy. As Virginia Matheson has shown (1979), these appropriated the
name Melayu as a means of associating their rule with descent from the kings
of the earliest state of the area, which had a seat on the Malayu(r) River at
Jambi. From then onwards the name Melayu came gradually to be attached
to all the populations under the purview of the Malay states (of which there
were now many, scattered around the coastal areas). These Orang Melayu also
included the Malay-speaking tribals who fell to varying degrees within the
ambit of the state, for everyone now had a name available to label what they
already recognized as a common culture.
Later, however, and partly under European influence, the meaning of
Melayu became in effect narrowed down to mean Islamic, Malay-speaking,
subjects of a sultan. This was especially the case in those parts of the Malay
World that fell under British influence. Although Islam, especially in its Sufic
varieties, had already formed an important element in the ideology and
practice of Malay kingship (Milner 1981), the addition ofIslam to the defining
features of Malayness (non-royal, and now non-tribal) in general seems to
have been most firmly institutionalized in the Treaty of Pangkor, drawn up
between the Sultan of Perak and the British in 1874. This rather one-sided
"agreement", which effectively stripped the Sultan of all his powers except
that of administering Malay matters and Islam in his state, led to the definition
44 Geoffrey Benjamin
of the Malays - the Sultan's primary subjects - as those people who followed
Malay custom, spoke the Malay language, and acknowledged themselves to
be Muslims. Other Peninsular state constitutions later took this definition of
"Malay" as a model, as eventually did the Malaysian Constitution. (For
further discussion, see Yegar 1979, pp. 26-37.) The new element was Islam.
Previously there would have been no legal necessity to define "Malay" at all,
and many of the non-Muslim populations of the time were as "Malay" as the
Muslims. The post-1874 notion of Malayness, however, had the effect of
converting those populations, virtually overnight, into the "aborigines" they
are considered to be today. These considerations do not apply, of course, to
the culturally and linguistically different Semang and Senoi of the north,
though they do apply to some extent to the Aslian-speaking but culturally
Malayic populations in the centre of the Peninsula.
My purpose in presenting this sketch of the long-term history of Melayu
state-based polities has been to reiterate the crucial role played by tribal-
Malay populations in that story. In many important respects, pre-modern
Malay states bore a segmentary character, in that the ruling classes often relied
more on the tribal populations than on a peasantry. This has had consequences
that are discernible right up to the present day.
THE KERAJAAN AS A SEGMENTARY STATE47
This chapter, in common with the rest of the volume, has so far concentrated
on tribal populations in the context of the Malay state or kerajaan. However,
we need also pay regard to the reverse feature: the question of state-formation
and state-maintenance in the context of tribality. The tribal populations, especially
those who were moving by sea, were crucial in keeping these Malay states
together. It is not clear to what extent this was true in the north of the
Peninsula (which appears to have had a very different, agriculture-based and
Mon-linked, early history), but it seems to have been true on the east coast of
Sumatra, in the southern Peninsular states, and coastal Borneo - the nuclear
Malayic area.
This feature differentiates the quality of being tribal in a Malay state from
the patterns of tribality found in other parts of Southeast Asia, and it provides
an important exception to Lehman's view, remarked on earlier, that the state
pays no attention to the "sub-nuclear" tribal peoples. Most of the literature
on the pre-modern state in Southeast Asia has been concerned with inland
states (such as those at Pagan, Angkor, Central Java, and perhaps Champa)
that had a very strong centre and were built up on a co-opted peasantry that
encircled and supplied that centre. The Malay state, on the other hand, often
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 45
floated like a raft on top of its tribal populations, especially in the already
Malayic areas of the region.
The parallel processes of state-formation and tribal (re)constitution went
hand in hand. In some cases, tribal populations were peasantized, especially in
the more land-based polities (such as Pahang), but in many other cases tribal
segmentarity was further reinforced. The Orang Laut in particular, served
very prominent communicative, tax-collecting and military functions. In
several areas, they were therefore much more critical to the maintenance of
the royals' power than the peasantry. The latter, busy feeding themselves and
paying taxes, would have been less important to the maintenance of a state
based on maritime communications and trade. (This trade included rice,
imported from outside the region.) The interstitial role of the Orang Laut
means that they played a key part in the configuration of centralized power
(Leonard Andaya 1975; Trocki 1979), but they waxed and waned in terms of
how they fitted in to the state. Those most central to the state's organization
were reorganized into a series of caste-like ranked segmentary groups, each
associated with some stereotypical service that they performed for the royals
(Sopher 1977, p. 93). Thus were created several of the Orang Laut "tribes"
(Orang Galang, Orang Akit, etc.) that still exist today, and the nature of
whose identity still provides material for ethnographers to puzzle over.
In eighteenth-century Riau, after the state was effectively taken over by
Bugis migrants and their descendants, these close personal relations between
the rulers and the Orang Laut, based on historical and mythological ties,
began to fall away. This led to decentralization and the emergence of centrifugal
forces among the Orang Laut, who thereby became more autonomously
tribal in their social characteristics than they had been previously. Mercenaries
were hired from the small island of Bawean, north of Java, to take their place.
Leonard Andaya (1975) writing on the history of Johor state and Trocki
(1979) in his work on the historical background to the emergence of modern
Singapore in the early 1800s have both revealed the same story: the tribal
populations were deeply involved in the processes of state-formation. Paul
Wheatley's map of ancient Singapore (1961, p. 81) suggests that, further back
in time, the people living closest to the ruler's palace on Bukit Larangan (now
Fort Canning Hill), were the Orang Laut population, and that the rakyat, the
Orang Melayu (if there were any), were living further away. More recent
analyses, such as those of Miksic (1985, pp. 1-35) and Kwa (1985, pp. 121-23)
have reaffirmed the importance of the Orang Laut in the earlier history of
Singapore.
What has all this to do with the topics discussed by the contributors to
this volume? After all, most of them are concerned with present-day issues or
 Geoffrey Benjamin
with modern history. Nevertheless - and without the authors having been
requested to do so - no fewer than eleven of the nineteen substantive chapters
in this volume make mention of direct relations between Malay royals and the
tribal people. Although some of these references are to a clearly mythical
content, most are historically documented. Needless to say, the rulers' motives
for entering into relations with the tribespeople were various, and not always
benign.
In Riau and Johor (Lenhart, Chou & Wee, Mariam) the rulers were
concerned primarily with a rational concern for the administrative advantages
that could be gained by having the Orang Laut on their side, as a still-mobile
semi-autonomous sector of the population. 48 In other cases the rulers, once
they had taken over the modern notion of a bounded territory, attempted to
incorporate the tribal populations as rakyat into their domain. This, as Ruiter
shows for North Sumatra, led to a quite rapid detribalizing and peasantization
of the hinterland population. In other such places, the rulers took the
opportunity to portray themselves in a noblesse oblige mode as concerned for
the welfare of the tribal populations living in their territory (Hamilton,
Porath, Juli, Tenas).
Closely related to this, but less benign, are relations with tribespeople
entered into with amusement or entertainment as the goal. Mariam mentions
how the Orang Seletar still remember that they used to accompany the Sultan
ofJohor on hunting expeditions. Others have recounted how the Orang Suku
Laut and some of the land-dwelling tribal-Malays have served as musicians
and dancers - a practice that still survives (and which can be listened to on
the recordings published by Yampolsky).49 One Orang Asli group actually
owes its very existence to the concern of a Johor royal to have a tribal group
as "his": I refer to the tiny population (just sixty-four) of Orang Kanaq,
currently living on the Sedili River, but moved there from Sekanak Island in
Riau by a member of the Johor royal family in the nineteenth century. A
similar motive seems to have been present in the Thai King's removal of a
Negrito from the south to the court in Bangkok in the late nineteenth
century, more or less as a conversation-piece (Hamilton, Porath).
The role of tribal peoples in the mythical charters of several Malay states
has frequently been noted. The idea of a dynastic marriage between an
immigrant ruler and an autochthonous tribal woman - a theme widespread
in Southeast Asia, as Schefold shows - is not uncommon in the Malay World.
(F?r Peninsular examples, see Lewis 1960; Dentan 1997, p. 108.) These days,
thiS mythology tends to be forgotten by those on the Melayu side of the
bargain, but the tribal peoples themselves often retell their own version of the
stories, and allow it to colour their approach to the problems they face with
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 47
the modern state. Lenhart remarks on this attitude among the older Orang
Suku Laut, and Juli's account of Semai dealings with the Malay state of Perak
is especially rich in this regard. Nicholas also remarks on the place of these
ideas in the more overtly political activism that some Peninsular Orang Asli
are currently involved in.
However, Schefold makes it plain that there is a dark side to all this. He
argues that what really motivated the rulers in entering into relations with the
tribespeople was the desire to demonstrate their power through the civilizing
subjugation of wildness. This theme too is widespread in Southeast Asia, but
it comes especially to the fore when the tribal people in question can be seen
as truly exotic, due to their isolation, their non-Malayic languages, their
different physical appearance, or their outlandish modes oflife. The Sakuddeis
of Siberut Island off the west coast of Sumatra fit into this pattern, as both
Persoon and Schefold discuss in detail. Dentan (1997, pp. 109-12) discusses
the closely parallel ideas that attached to Orang Asli "wildness" in the Peninsula.
Of course, there is a certain ambiguity here: if the civilizing goes too far, then
the desired "wildness" evaporates. We should expect then, that in modern
times wildness is still much valued by certain classes of outsider, as Porath
illustrates in his account of the exoticism that has been gratuitously applied to
both the negrito Sakais of South Thailand and the Malayic Sakais of Sumatra.
THE RECONSTITUTING OF TRIBALITY BY THE STATE
As we have seen, relations between the state and the tribal populations in the
Malay World were sometimes benign, but often much less than benign.
Among the less benign actions have been the frequent urgings by latter-
day state agencies - often the royals themselves - that the tribal people should
form permanent settlements. Juli shows that this was a constant theme in the
speeches made by visiting royals to the lowland Semai communities of Perak.
Tenas too reports that the different Orang Talang subgroups were given land-
rights by the Sultan of Pel alawan. All too often, though, the requirement that
the tribespeople settle down permanently - all the better to be administered
- has not been met with a parallel guarantee of land rights. The authorities
who urge them not to move around are usually the same authorities who
move them away when more prominent citizens desire the land they occupy
(Nicholas).
But that is not the end of the story, for these state-tribal relations were all
too often decidedly malign: I refer, of course, to the slave-raiding and the
people's responses to it that marked the lives of many of the tribal populations
until just within living memory. How did this come about?
 Geoffrey Benjamin
The state has always acted to reconstitute the tribal societies, even when
the latter were still allowed to retain their tribality.5 0 However, we need to
distinguish berween the actions of the modern state and the pre-colonial
state. The tribal populations may sometimes have held a respected status in
the pre-colonial state, but in many cases they were enslaved. At the present
time, both peasants and tribespeople are again being reconstituted, through
the coming of capitalist enterprise. "Peasant" and "tribal" are cutrently much
used as descriptive categories in the scholarly literature, but capital tends to
make petty commodity-producers or proletarians of both populations,
effectively dissolving the distinction away. With these themes in mind, let me
finish this chapter with a discussion of some of. the main problems that the
modern and immediately pre-modern or pre-colonial Malay state has posed
for the maintenance of tribal lifeways.
Enslavement and Tribute
The threat and memory of enslavement colour the history and outlook of
most of the tribal populations, even today. A stark example is given by
Dentan in this volume. The fear engendered by having one's child torn away
has left a lasting impression on the character of Semai Senoi religion and
personality. (As noted earlier, the word "Senoi" relates etymologically to
shyness - that is to the flight response that was the usual recourse of Semais in
the old days when slave-raiders entered their territory.) A more general
historical accounting of the effects of slave-raiding on the Peninsular Orang
Asli is given by Endicott (1983), in a volume that also contains an analysis by
Matheson & Hooker (1983) of the legal framework that helped shape the
views of those who raided, bought and kept slaves. Dentan too (1997) has
explored the conceptual framework that helped to rationalize slavery in the
Peninsula. As he pointed out, the history of slaving is regularly underplayed
by writers on the Orang Asli - just as, for other reasons, it has recently been
positively denied by a not disinterested government official (Ikram 1997).5'
Here, I shall not review the literature on enslavement, as it is easily available.
Instead, I would like to comment briefly on rwo aspects of tribal life in the
Malay World that are closely related to this history.
First, slavery must have been made all the easier for anyone who had
already come to think of the tribal populations as exotic, wild playthings. By
their own lights, slave owners in the Malay World probably did not see
themselves as cruel. And in any case, as Matheson & Hooker show, there was
no single category of "slave": according to Islamic law slaves came in several
varieties, which sometimes afforded them a degree of relatively benign
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 49
protection. However, the initial willingness to ･ｮｳｬ｡ｾ＠ ｡ｮｯｴｨｾｲ＠ ｨｵｾ｡ｮ＠ being
must have been helped by seeing the target population as wild. It IS a short
distance berween first subjugating a tribal-inhabited wilderness (Schefold)
and then enslaving the people who live there.
Second, flight was not the only response available to the tribal peoples.
Although some of them fought back on occasion (cf Noone 193 6 , p. 55), a
more institutionalized means of getting the slave-raiding chiefs and royals off
their backs was the giving of formal tribute. In many ways, this was like a
small-scale replica of the payments that used to pass berween the Malay states
and Thailand or China in earlier times, and even berween some Malay states
and other Malay states (Barbara Andaya 1997, p. 488), which served to
indicate that they were nested, mandala-fashion, within the domain of those
larger polities. Unlike what was expected from the non-tribal peasantry, the
tribal tributes usually involved unusual goods or foods (such as freshly
harvested green hill-rice) rather than ordinary staples, and they were exchanged
for other goods, rather than simply taken. There were obvious advantages to
the tribal people in maintaining a protected position vis-a-vis powerful
outsiders, but as the following passages imply, the outsiders' motivations were
not necessarily altruistic. The first passage relates to the Semais of Perak, and
the second to the Semang (probably Kensiws) of Kedah.
In those days we were bebas ["free"]. The Sultan feared us and appointed
these officials to organize our territories. He forbade anyone to enter them.
He ruled the Malays, and these four officials ruled us. He gave each a bafeey,
a palace to which the forest people brought rice, jungle produce and other
tribute whenever the Sultan visited. When he left after a week, he would
give money [to the officials]. In those ､｡ｹｾＬ＠ a?y Malay. who used ｴｾ＠ ｷｯｲＮｾ＠
"Sakai" was tied up for two weeks. They dldnt start uSlOg the term Sakal
again until the British came. . .
Ngah Hari (as told to Robert Dentan, personal communicatIOn)
The second occasion of meeting these people was at the head of the Baling
river, a branch of the Muda, near Patani, where I had the good fortune to
come across a tribe under the protection of the Raja of Kedah, by whose
orders they roamed unmolested through his country.
Anonymous 1878
Shuichi Nagata (1997, p. 90) reports that visits by royals, involving both
protection and the exchange of goods were still taking place in exactly the
same area in the early rwentieth century. In both these instances, it is clear
that the powerful outsiders were also interested in preventing anyone else
from claiming rights over the tribespeople. This is not slavery; but it is not
 Geoffrey Benjamin
unconnected with the frame of mind that allowed slavery to exist. Where the
outsider was the ruler of the state, as was sometimes the case (Juli) , this
exclusionary view is understandable. But the outsider was often much lower
on the state's hierarchy. (For a Sumatran example, see Sandbukt 1988.) In such
cases he usually lived in closer proximity to the tribal peoples, so as to set
himself up at the top of a local hierarchy consisting of supposedly ranked
tribal chiefs and headmen. Institutionalized arrangements of this sort emerged
in several parts of the Malay World, and displayed a surprising degree of
stability until the Japanese War. These include the offices of Mikong and To'
Pangku at the exit points from Temiar territory, as originally reported by
Noone (1936, pp. 23, 47-48). One of these officers was interviewed directly by
Leary (1995, pp. 22-23), and I have myself recorded something of the Temiars'
memories of the Mikong (Benjamin 1968, pp. 9-13). The institution involved
intermarriage with Temiar women, and the retaining of the local Temiars'
domestic services. My own Temiar respondents displayed some ambiguity
when talking about their lives in the Mikong's old village at Kuala Betis,
Kelantan. The Mikong was very kind / / the Mikong expected the Temiars to
clean up his babies' stools ("like dogs"). The Mikongs took Temiar wives for
three generations / / the Mikongs were Malay, not Temiar.
Assimilation to Melayu-ness
In the preceding sections I have been arguing that the Malay state has often
had an interest in maintaining the distinctiveness of the tribal populations.
However, there is another side to the picture. Over the last century or so the
Malay World has become increasingly concerned with its Islamicity, and this
has had the effect of reversing the celebration of difference that was typical of
earlier periods.
The majority of Malays see themselves or their ancestors as having once
been something else. Hardly anyone is a Malay pure and simple, but some
kind of Malay, defined as such by differential ancestry. Assimilation to Malayu-
ness is therefore not a once-and-for-all matter. One cannot simply be Melayu,
for Melayu-ness is an achievement - one must act Melayu. The threat of
losing one's Melayu-ness must therefore be taken into account. At least three
components are involved in this: language, Islam, and an acceptance of social
hierarchy. Today, these have largely fused together, but historically they were
distinct.
Thus, the process of entry into Melayu-ness (masuk Melayu) has differed
according to where the entrant was coming from. For an Indian or Arab
Muslim, it usually involved little more than marrying into a Malay family.
On Being Tribal in the Malay World
Contextually, the Arabness or Indianness could be retained without
compromising one's achieved Melayu-ness (cf. Judith Nagata 1974). For a
non-Muslim to became a Malay, however, other concerns were involved.
Adoption into a Malay family, as of Chinese baby girls or former African
slaves in Singapore, was a favoured process, with relatively unambiguous
results. But the conversion of individuals or whole communities did not in
itself lead to assimilation. In Malaysia, recent Chinese converts to Islam
become saudara baru "new kin", and they may be admired for thereby
validating the superiority of Islam. But they do not become Malays, since
they remain socially Chinese, outside the framework of Melayu society.
The tribal populations present different perspectives. As we have seen,
the Malayic-speakers already share a common culture-historical background
with the Orang Melayu, who can therefore easily see them as "incomplete"
Malays, requiring only Islam and an acceptance of social hierarchy to make
them "complete". Of course, the tribespeople themselves may have other
ideas on the matter (cf. Chou 1995). Those who speak languages unrelated to
Malay, such as the Aslian-speakers, are not quite so easily seen as incomplete
Malays, but the gap can be closed to a considerable extent by conversion to
Islam (and by regarding Aslian speech-varieties as mere "dialects", not
languages). Governmental agencies in Malaysia, both state and federal
(including for many years the JHEOA itself), have accordingly spent much
effort in converting the Orang Asli to Islam. (Paradoxically, the Islamist state
government of Kelantan seems, so far, to be an exception to this rule.)
The motivation for this is sometimes authentically religious, but it is
more usually seen primarily as the means of Malayization. As noted earlier,
the Orang Asli are included within the "Malay" figures in the published
versions of the national censuses. Governmental policy towards the Orang
Asli has long proposed that their "integration" into the broader Malaysian
community should be brought about by assimilating them specifically into
the Malay community, which by local custom and national law is Sunni
Muslim by religion. JHEOA officers have been heard to comment that the
Orang Asli "problem" - usually defined as that of poverty - would disappear
if they became Muslims, and hence Malays. In September 1996, for example,
the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Land and Co-operative Development
(Datuk Nik Mohamed Zain bin Nik Yusof) gave the following justification
for the Federal government's newly announced review of legislation relating
to Orang Asli land rights:
If these amendments are made, Orang Asli can be more easily integrated
into Malay society. It will help them to embrace Islam and follow Malay
customs too. (Straits Times, 3 September 1996, p. 16.)
52 Geoffrey Benjamin
In an even more forceful declaration (Ikram 1997), a former Director-
General of the JHEOA asserted (erroneously) that all the indigenes of Malaysia
spoke Austronesian languages and (also erroneously) that this therefore made
them all "Malays". This conceptual dissolution of the gap between pagan
Mon-Khmer-speakers and Muslim Malay-speakers was presumably aimed at
reassuring the Malay public that the Orang Asli posed only a trivial "problem"
that could easily be solved by assimilation to Melayu-ness.
Similar pressures affect the Sumatran populations, but there the
requirement seems to be primarily that the tribespeople should accept an
officially recognized religion (agama) - any religion - not necessarily Islam.
Thus, there are Catholic and Chinese-religionist members of the Orang Suku
Laur population, as well as Muslims. The policing of religiosity is less intensive
in Riau and Jambi than in many parts of Malaysia, and public conversion
ceremonies to Islam are rarely followed up by the mosque authorities.
Is it possible to detect a fear of retribalization, commented on earlier, as
lying behind this kind of attitude? Formerly, becoming a Muslim was primarily
a matter of making a public declaration of faith (as still seems to be the case
in Riau). In recent years, however, it has become a matter of increasingly self-
conscious and competing orthodoxies, coupled with much confusion as to
where the distinction between Islam and Malayu-ness lies. For rural Malays
especially, urged to see Islam as an intrinsic part of modernity, the image of
successfully modernizing, but unbelieving (kafir) or religiously ignorant (jahil)
Orang Asli is seen as a cognitive threat. I have personally witnessed Orang
Asli villagers being spoken to in exactly these terms by visiting Muslim clergy:
"You are modern now, and it is not respectable for you not to be Muslims."
My impression was that the Orang Asli were quite happy with their religious
situation, but that the nearby Malay villagers found their pagan ways
threatening. The same Melayu embarrassment over "modern" but pagan
tribespeople is reported for the Riau Islands (Lenhart).
Thus, a renewed concern for Islam, backed by state pressure, is currently
the major component in assimilation (or resistance) to Melayu-ness. In earlier
times, however, such assimilation emphasized other dimensions. Moreover, it
did not necessarily require the abolition of all differences between assimilators
and assimilees. Often the assimilation occurred spontaneously or in an
unselfconscious manner. It should be remembered too that Malayness itself
has had an historically shifting content, and that it existed before Islam
arrived on the scene. For example, as mentioned earlier, I suspect that at least
part of the Orang Asli population currently known as the Temuans are
descended from Aslian-speaking ancestors, by assimilating linguistically to
Malay at a time when neither Islam nor centralization had become significant
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 53
issues. Similarly, the Southern-Aslian-speaking populations, in following the
Malayic societal pattern, illustrate the possibility of a partial assimilation that
affected only the details of kinship and local-group organization, but not
their tribality or religious allegiance. Large sections of this population must
have added linguistic assimilation to the mix too, for some of today's upriver
Melayu communities in Johor were reported in the nineteenth century to be
pagan tribal communities, who spoke not Malay but a southern Aslian
language related, presumably, to Semelai (see, for example, Miklucho-Maclay
1878). Further south, in the Sedili valley, I discovered in the 1970S that villages
formerly reported by travellers to be "Jakun" are nowadays Melayu
communities.
There seems no doubt, then, that there has long been a process of
culture-change in which southern Aslian speakers became Jakuns, who in
turn became Orang Melayu. To regard this as "assimilation", of course,
requires that we look at it from the vantage-point oflater times. Many Orang
Asli, even in the south, are no longer prepared to take the final step of
becoming Muslims, involving as it does circumcision, the giving up of pork,
and a relative loss of freedom for the women (cf Carey 1976, pp. 326-27).
Nowadays, many Jakuns are developing special cultural mechanisms to
emphasize, and perhaps magnify, their differences from the upriver Malays,
which are, in truth, often slight.
Similar processes have been observed in other parts of the Malay World.
The Islamization-cum-Malayization of the Mirek people of Miri, Sarawak,
has been sensitively analysed by Tunku Zainah (1982). In Sarawak, "Malay"
effectively means Muslim, according to Harrisson (1970, pp. 154-60), who
discusses the very local but diverse origins of Sarawak Malays. Sometimes,
this separates sibling from sibling simply by religion, and hence ethnicity.
Ginting (this volume) shows that a similar process, occurring on a larger scale
in early nineteenth-century North Sumatra, was responsible for creating the
Muslim "Mandailing" Maiays/Bataks out of a population that had a common
origin with those who were to become the "Toba Bataks" after conversion to
Protestantism. Miles (1976) has shown how the Malays of South Kalimantan
continue to draw demographic strength from the Islamization of the large
Dayak population who inhabit the province. On the other hand, the Malayic
Duanos of Johor and Jambi steadfastly maintain their tribal separateness from
the Malays despite having converted to Islam several generations ago. Some
sections of the Kubus of Jambi and the Orang Suku Laut of Riau, who have
presumably always been linguistically Malay, persist nevertheless in resisting
religious conversion and incorporation into a hierarchical social framework. 52
A similar case of resistance is that of the egalitarian Gerai people in West
54 Geoffrey Benjamin
Kalimantan (Helliwell 1992) whose refusal to become Malay is founded
primarily on their sharp dislike of social hierarchy and of working in the mud
of irrigated rice fields. Although Helliwell does not say so, it is likely nevertheless
that many of the local Malays have a Gerai ancestry, as the degree of co-operation
between the two groups is quite high. Other Bornean populations have
become culturally completely Melayu-ized, but claim (or are pushed into) an
apparently distinct ethnicity. This is true of the Kedayans of Brunei (Maxwell
1997), whose assimilation is marked by an apparent acceptance of a subsidiary
position in a Melayu-dominated complex social hierarchy. (The collection
edited by Winzeler, 1997, contains many further examples illustrating the
different pathways that attend assimilation to Melayu-ness, or resistance to it.)
THE MALAy WORLD AND THE MODERN NATION-STATE
In whole or part, the historical Malay World is now partitioned between five
modern nation-states: Thailand, Malaysia (with its Peninsular and Bornean
wings), Singapore, Indonesia, and Brunei. The contributors to this volume
have demonstrated the profound degree to which the modern states have
reconstituted the lives of their tribal and formerly tribal populations. Modernity
and development are invasive processes that exhibit much greed for tribal
land (except perhaps in Brunei) and little tolerance for tribal autonomy. In
this respect, all five states have acted in a similar manner, and there is no need
for me to add to what others have said. Instead, let me end by suggesting
some of the ways in which these states differ from each other in their handling
of Melayu-ness and tribality.
Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore
Several commonalities exist between the three countries that formerly fell
under the British sphere of influence. Following the ostensibly indirect-rule
"protectorate" style of British colonialism - though not without some hiccups
on the way - Malaysia is now a remade virtual sultanate. Brunei simply is a
Malay sultanate that also happens to be a nation-state. Singapore, as a
republic, has no pretensions to being a sultanate, although it began two
centuries ago as a territory levered out of a Malay sultanate. In all three cases,
however, the connection between legitimacy, Islam and Melayu-ness (first
formalized on paper by the 1874 Treaty of Pangkor) still matters - overtly so
in Malaysia and Brunei, but more subtly in Singapore. In the first two
countries, the notion of fealty to a ruler, charged to protect Islam in his
terri tory, is still central.
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 55
In Brunei this has been institutionalized under the state ideology of
Melayu Islam Beraja "Malay Islamic Monarchy" (Bernstein 1997, pp. 171-73).
Note, however, that "Melayu" (as opposed to "Berunai") in this political sense
also includes the protected non-Muslim peoples, such as Ibans, Tutongs, and
Dusuns. Brunei, as a still-functioning sultanate - the people pay no taxes, in
return for no parliamentary representation - places Islamic institutions at the
centre of the state's interests. Yet, at the same time, it retains an elaborated
social hierarchy that cuts right through the rest of the community, including
the Muslims. Consequently, there are two kinds of Malayness in operation in
Brunei: the general Melayu cultural pattern to which most of the population
have by now assimilated, and the higher-ranking social position (labelled
"Berunai") which distinguishes some of those cultural-Malays from others
(cf. Bernstein 1997, p. 168). The other main community, the Kedayans, still
rank lower, despite being Muslims and living in a manner virtually identical
to that of the Orang Berunai: Thus, unlike what happens elsewhere,
assimilation to Melayu cultural patterns in Brunei does not necessarily eradicate
difference. Consequently, the Bruneian authorities have little tolerance for
reformist Islamic views of the sort that preach the fundamental equality of the
umma. In most respects the role of Islam in Brunei is similar to that outlined
by Milner (1981) for the pre-colonial Malay state: the maintenance of kingly
distinctiveness and courtly ceremonial. Thus the situation of Brunei's tribal
populations is in many ways more like that of the tribal peoples elsewhere in
the Malay World a century or more ago: a largely unforced cultural assimilation
that nevertheless does little to raise their relative socio-economic status. This
volume contains no contribution on Brunei, but Bernstein's account (1997) of
the Bruneian Dusuns, still partly tribal and pagan, and the essay by Maxwell
(1997) on the fully Islamic but non-Berunai Kedayans make excellent
companIon pIeces.
In Malaysia, Islam is the declared official religion, and (as the name of the
country indicates) the state itself is largely organized around the idea of
maintaining a special status for Malays as the first-among-equals of the
Bumiputera ("indigenous") communities. On the other hand, even in the
Peninsula, there is still a considerable degree of heterogeneity in the Malay
population. The rural/urban, "east-coast"/"west-coast", immigrant/native and
activist/traditionalist divides still count, and this presents an unclear choice as
to which variety of Melayu-ness the Orang Asli should "integrate" with.
Certainly, the Orang Asli themselves remain puzzled, and in any case most of
them would prefer modernization without Malayization - even when they
convert to Islam. Consequently, the development of a new ''Asli'' ethnicity
(Nicholas) which includes even Muslim OrangAsli has been a major innovation
 Geoffrey Benjamin
in Peninsular Malaysia. Several chapters in this volume explore the complicated
interaction that currently goes on between the Malaysian state and the Orang
Asli.
Until Kuala Lumpur took over that role in the 1970s, Singapore was the
main powerhouse of sophisticated Malay cultural production. Usually thought
of as an essentially Chinese city, Singapore was nevertheless the Malay city:
contrary to stereotype, the Malays were the most urbanized of the island's
three main "races", and there was no such concentration of urbanized Malays
anywhere else in the Malay World. Here were produced a high proportion of
the modernist Malay writings, including novels and newspapers, that generated
Malay nationalism, as well as the films of P. Ramlee and others. Singaporean
Malayness therefore had, and still has, a special character. Levered out of the
Johor-Riau sultanate by Raffles, with that cession legitimated by installing a
figurehead Malay royalty (initially with the help of the Orang Suku Laut),
Singapore was rapidly swamped by migration from elsewhere, especially Java.
These migrants were at least nominally Muslim, but they were mostly not
Orang Melayu and had no interest in, or even knowledge of, the purportedly
ruling Royal family (which survives, obscurely, even today). They had migrated
out of a "feudally" patterned hierarchy to a city with no other hierarchy than
that of personal wealth. The emergent Singapore-Malay community was
added to by intermarriage with Arabs, Indian Muslims and Peninsular Malays,
as well as by the adoption of Chinese babies. Linguistically, Malay (along with
Hokkien, which in Singapore absorbed a high proportion of Malay loanwords)
became the island's lingua franca. In other words, Singapore-Malayness was a
creolized culture, closer in character to the Pasisir coastal culture that had
developed elsewhere in the Archipelago than to the kind of Malayness that
characterized the Malay World proper. Singapore still forms a key focus in the
lives of both the Orang Suku Laut and Orang Melayu of the nearby Riau
Islands, as Chou & Wee spell out in this volume.
In Singapore itself, assimilation to Malayness was (and is) purely cultural,
with no guiding hand to police it. On the other hand, the "Malays" - all of
them, it seems - are defined in the Constitution as the indigenous people of
Singapore. Moreover, Islam still has a special official status in the secular
Republic, which has a Minister in Charge of Muslim Affairs overseeing the
work of a Muslim Religious Council. The existence of both features, I
suspect, is aimed at preventing any queries over the legitimacy of the succession
that took place from backwater in a Malay sultanate to independent, largely
Chinese republic. But the authorities, religious or governmental, are unable
to insist that Malays, as Malays, behave in any particular way. It is therefore
possible to be both Malay and non-religious, or even pagan, in Singapore,
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 57
and until the recent rehousing programme that has affected virtually the
whole population of Singapore, it was still possible to be both tribal and
Malay. In recent times, only the Orang Seletar retained the latter pathway,
but (as Mariam shows) the other truly indigenous sectors of the Singapore-
Malay community still retain their memory of a recent tribal past.
Indonesia
Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch, whose methods were very different
from those of the British. They made no pretence at indirect rule, and
destroyed the functioning (though not the memory) of the existing Malay
sultanates, mostly less than a century ago. Consequently, a major component
of Melayu-ness - fealty to a ruling sultan - was removed from the modern
republican ideology. Officially, therefore, Melayu-ness has no special position
in Indonesian state ideology, except as one of the constituent regional cultures
- which tend, in any case to be represented on a province-by-province basis.
If anything, Melayu-ness is actually somewhat down played in the national
culture of Indonesia, not out of any special prejudice, but because of the
special situation of the Malay language. The national language, Bahasa
Indonesia, is of course a special register of Malay (Bahasa Melayu) - special
because it is meant to be the equal, non-"ethnic" possession of all Indonesians,
the overwhelming majority of whom speak it as their second language. Two
communities stick out in this regard: those Chinese who speak no other
language but Indonesian, even at home, and the Orang Melayu of Sumatra
and Kalimantan whose own "ethnic" language is the source of the national
language. This has tended to colour people's attitudes to Malay. Instead of
being honoured as the source of the national language, "Bahasa Melayu" is
used to label speech that falls short in some way of the perfection ascribed to
Bahasa Indonesia. Several times in Indonesia, on being baselessly but politely
complimented on the quality of my spoken Bahasa Indonesia I have protested,
truthfully, that I was speaking Bahasa Melayu. This was instantly denied by
my interlocutors, on the grounds that Bahasa Melayu was too unrefined to be
worthy of any compliment!
Melayu-ness in Indonesia therefore lacks several of the key features that
characterize it in Malaysia. The Melayu ethnicity has no special status in
Indonesia's national ideology; Melayu-ness itself is seen as (linguistically)
embarrassing in the national context; and there is no way, apart from purely
neighbourhood pressures, to restrict Indonesian Malays to Islam. In other
words, there are no large-scale processes affecting the cultural trajectory of the
Malayic populations ofIndonesia, either tribal or Melayu, beyond the general
 Geoffrey Benjamin
Indonesian requirement to have a recognized religion. This, I feel, largely
explains the socially heterogeneous profile of the tribal and formerly-tribal
populations in the Indonesian sector of the Malay World, as the relevant
chapters in this volume make clear.
Thailand
Finally, there is little I can say about the situation in southern Thailand that
has not already been said by Hamilton and Porath in their chapters. The Thai
state shares a Southeast Asian context with the other countries that have
absorbed portions of the Malay World, but its ideological underpinnings are
very different. Despite the historically exogenous and suppletive character
of Thai cultural traditions - though not necessarily of the people - state
ideology has it that its rule is based on an overarching homogeneity
compounded of language, religion (Theravada Buddhism), and indigeny.
Unlike the encapsulation of autochthony (Schefold) that the Malay World
favours, the Thai domain seems unable to accommodate anything - like the
Semang - that suggests an alternative, exogenous, origin for Thai culture.
This places both the Malays and the Semang of southern Thailand into a
peculiar situation of flux, in which the nearness of northern Peninsular
Malaysia also plays a part. Both communities have been subjected to a high
degree of remaking by the state, in which their own view of themselves counts
for little.
NOTES
1. This chapter has benefited from comments made at the Singapore meeting by
Lim Chong Keat, Vivienne Wee, Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, Reimar Schefold, Tine
Ruiter, Ivan Polunin, Annette Hamilton, and James Collins. Kirk Endicott and
Cynthia Chou also suggested improvements. None of these scholars is responsible
for the faults that remain.
2. A current Malaysian academic fashion refers to almost everything in the Malayo-
Polynesian-speaking world as "Malay". This is as misleading as it would be to
refer to the Sinhalese as "Europeans" because they speak an Indo-European language,
or to the Vietnamese as "Mons" because they speak a Mon-Khmer language.
3. There are parallel "tribal-plural" constructions - avoiding a morphologically
pluralized subject before a plural verb - in other European languages. In French,
for example, "tribal" adjectives do not take the normal plural form when
qualifYing pluralized nouns: maisons franraises "French houses", but maisons
temiar (not *temiars) "Temiar houses". Such usages are not always consistently
employed, however: "Help is on the way for thousands of Penans and Orang Ulus
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 59
in the interior of Sarawak who have no proper birth certificates and identity
cards (ICs)" (Straits Times [Singapore], 20 March 1998, p. 40; emphasis added).
Here there is no fussing about "correct" English, or even euphony. The people
are being treated simply as Malaysian citizens, awarded a plural -s just like any
other Malaysians.
Sometimes, writers seem to employ or withhold the -s on semantic grounds,
depending on whether they are commenting on a supposedly whole culture or
on the individuality of the group's members. This is well exemplified in a
sentence from the Official Hopi Cultural Preservation Website, presumably written
by a Hopi: "The Hopi are a diverse group of people who vary in their attitudes
and beliefs. The information and views expressed within these pages may not be
uniformly held by all Hopis." (Emphasis added.)
In taped discussion at the Singapore meeting, Ivan Polunin remarked that
"great White hunters" never talked of "elephants" or "rhinoceroses" but of
"elephant" or "rhinoceros" - leading James Collins to suggest that the imagery
behind the equivalent human usage was that of "tribes as prey". In a recent
development (1998), the publishers of the Encyclopedia of Malaysia (Didier
Millet, Kuala Lumpur) agreed to drop the "tribal" collective singular in favour of
the plural -so In this regard, anthropologists and other scholars are falling behind
the emergent norm. The editors of the present volume have done their best to
alleviate this situation. The contributors (with one exception) have agreed to
employ the -s where appropriate in "tribal" plurals. For reasons of euphony,
however, we have refrained from adding -s to multi-word ethnonyms (such as
Semaq Beri). And for semantic reasons, we have also not added an -s to words
that label socio-cultural patterns rather than actual populations: "the Semang",
not "the Semangs".
4. Some tribal populations in Southeast Asia, including one or two living within
the Malay World, such as the Rejangs of South Sumatra Oaspan 1964), did
possess a degree of literacy in pre-modern times, employing their own Indic-
derived scripts.
5. As imaged in the phrase "Timeless Temiar", the title of a prizewinning colonial-
period Malayan Government film title, which commits two faults in two words!
6. This dependency is well put by Hockett (1973, p. 553): "We know what a city is:
an aggregate of the dwelling places of people who raise little or none of the food
they eat."
7. Even such apparent exceptions as "traditional" New Guinea or Aboriginal Australia
are precisely that - apparent (cf. Urry 1979; White 1971). On the wider issue of
tribal societies as consequences, not antecedents, of the state see Fried (1975) and
notably Wolf (1982).
8. The terms "Semang", "Senoi", and "Malayic" do not refer to so-called ethnic
groups, nor do they refer to any ideology of ethnicity as understood in the
modern world. Rather, they refer to recognizable but embedded cultural traditions,
not self-conscious identity. Ethnicity and identity are separate issues, discussed
 Geoffrey Benjamin
60
elsewhere in this volume by several contributors.
9. "Jakun" is a term that seems to be shifting in its political correctness. I avoided
the word for many years, using "Orang Hulu" instead (c( Gianno 1997, p. 56).
But I have been told that Jakuns themselves (all of them?) are happy to be called
"Jakuns", and I have accordingly reverted to this older established usage.
IO. In the Peninsula, there have also been ethnologically important, though less well
known, lake-fringe, coastal, and estuarine populations engaged traditionally in
fishing and strand-foraging, sometimes combined with desultory farming. At
the present time, lake-fringe fishing is practised by some of the Semelais on Lake
Bera, central Pahang. The Duanos ("Orang Kuala") of the west coast of Johor
and east coast of Sumatra are seafarers. The Orang Seletar of the mangrove inlets
of Johor and Singapore are strand foragers. The first two groups may in fact be
considered as falling within the "collector" category, and the third group as
"foragers". In general, their kinship systems and social organization appear to fit
into the Malayic pattern, as discussed later.
II. The usage of "tribal" as proposed here should not be confused with the occasional
use of the same word to refer to prehistoric societies. The active tribality of post-
Neolithic people is quite different from the passive "tribality" of Palaeolithic
times, because the latter people knew of no alternative way oflife from which to
dissimilate. The data on recent tribal peoples have come either from historical or
ethnographical research, and those data are always gathered in a state-based
context. Prehistoric archaeologists are dealing with something else.
This raises the question of how far we can project what we discover about
contemporary tribal populations back onto prehistoric populations, when there
were no states. The sociology of the two situations is vety different. "Tribal" as
used here, then, refers to a situation that we know about and in which the state
is always present in the data we employ.
12. See, for example, Fried 1975; Godelier 1977; Zawawi 1995. Other uses of the
word "tribe" are found. In West Asia and North Africa - characterized by "a
weak state and strong tribes" - "tribe" refers to (endogamous, maximal) patriclans
(Gellner 1995). In many African countries, on the other hand, "tribe" is regularly
used to refer to (urban) ethnic groups. (But then, do ethnic groups, as opposed
to ethnic categories, really exist?) In India, "tribes" are classified, sometimes
together with Dalit "scheduled castes", as Adivasi. None of these cases corresponds
to the situation of tribespeople in Southeast Asia.
13. There have been several collections in recent years devoted to the situation of the
tribal populations of Asia. One of the most geographically wide-ranging is the
volume edited by Barnes, Gray, and Kingsbury (1995). Covering a range very
close to that of the present volume is Winzeler (1997). The essays brought
together by Chou and Derks (1997) contain several dealing with tribal
communities in Riau, the central area within the Malay World. The present
volume is cross-national but intra-"cultural" in its focus on a single culture-
historical area and its transformations through time.
On Being Tribal in the Malay World 61
14· My own Australian Aboriginal students in Canberra in the 1970S did not find
the term "Aborigine" embarrassing. At that time, a short article appeared in
American Anthropologist urging anthropologists to replace the label "Aborigines"
with "Native Australian". The authors appeared to be Americans, not Australians
(Aboriginal or otherwise). Not only would this proposal make a perfectly good
usage unavailable, it would have us misrepresent reality. Several of my own
relatives, for example, are native Australians, having been born in that country,
although they are not Aborigines.
15· It has been suggested that Sakai derives from the Sanskritic word sakhi
"companion", with the implication that the people so labelled were once seen
primarily as trading partners (see, for example, Couillard 1984). This connection
is phonologically unlikely, however, unless perhaps the word had come via a
Chamic language - which is not impossible. In support of the other suggested
original meanings - such as "slave", "dependent" - the Temiars (Peninsular
Malaysia) still use sakey among themselves to refer to their own dependent
relatives as well as to a headman's followers. This usage appears to pre-date the
use of Sakai as an ethnonym, which the Temiars dislike, in common with the
other Orang Asli. In Brunei, the puak Sakai, though considered as Orang
Berunai, are ranked as "subjects or followers".
16. Gellner (1987, pp. 29-46), in an illuminating discussion, traces Durkheim's
usage of "segmentary" to an earlier writer, Emile Masqueray (1982) on the
societies of North Africa. As Gellner points out in his comments on Ibn
Khaldun (1987, p. 40), "tribal" as applied to West Asian and North African
society refers solely to the segmentary, state-rejecting stance, and not to any
cultural or linguistic divide between the tribal people and the mainstream sector
of the population. In Southeast Asia, on the other hand, tribality is usually
associated with linguistic and cultural distinctiveness. In the Malayic-speaking
portion of the region, however, tribality does indeed rest mainly in the maintenance
of a segmentary state-rejecting stance within an otherwise homogeneous
population that also contains a centralized and hierarchical variety, namely
Melayu society. I return to this feature below.
17· The source is the Latin tribu "a constituent segment of society", very close in
meaning to some of the usages of the Malay word suku, discussed later.
18. For a study of the political uses made of "indigeny" in Malaysia and Indonesia,
see Siddique and Suryadinata 1981/82. I suspect that, in Malaysia at least,
bumiputeraand asli, both of which translate as "indigenous", are in complementary
distribution - the former referring specifically to modern state-based discourse,
and the latter to ethnological and culture-historical issues. This does not help to
resolve the unsettled political status of the Orang Asli: are they or are they not
bumiputera? The answer depends on whom one asks.
19· The vast majority of Singapore's Malays are no longer tribal, but my study did
make brief mention too of the then still-tribal Orang Seletar, based on the work
of Mariam Ali. For more information, see her chapter in this volume.
 Geoffrey Benjamin
20. Note, for example, Mochtar Naim's use of suku even for the (non-tribal)
Minangkabaus in his book title, Merantau: Pola Migrasi Suku Minangkabau
["Merantau: Patterns of Migration among the Minangkabau Suku"] (Yogyakarta:
Gadjah Mada University Press, 1979). But note also Lenhart's discussion, in this
volume, of the difference drawn in the Riau Islands between orang laut "sea
people [of any kind]" and orang suku laut "tribal sea people".
21. For especially clear examples, see Helliwell (1992) on the Gerai people of West
Kalimantan, Sandbukt (1984) on the Kubus of Jambi, and the chapters by
Howell and Tenas in this volume.
22. See Dentan (1997) for an account of the various terms that have been used in a
derogatory manner to refer to Orang Asli, some now obsolete, and some still in
use.
23. At least one Malay-World scholar objected to this approach nearly forty years
ago, and for much the same reasons as presented here. I refer to the short critical
essay of Syed Hussein Alatas (1964) on what he (correctly) saw as scholars'
persistent misconstrual of the early history of Southeast Asia.
24. These statements, and the later ones on language, are based on recent literature
dealing with the linguistics, prehistoric archaeology and human biology of the
Malay World. See under the following names in the References: for linguistics,
Blust, Tryon, Diffioth; for pre- and proto-history, Bellwood, Solheim, Nik
Hassan Shuhaimi; for human biology, Baer, Fix, Bulbeck. All these authors,
despite some differences in detail, agreed (I) that any attempt to map genetic,
linguistic and archaeological data directly onto each other in a simple manner is
invalid, and (2) that most of the layer cake views of the region's ethnology still
repeated in textbooks and encyclopaedias are wtong. Views still differ, however,
as to relative parts played by local differentiation and the influx of new populations
in producing the array of populations currently inhabiting the Malay World.
Those who continue to assert the layer cake view often protest that this is
what the historians claim to have occurred. Winstedt was once Director of
Education for Malaya, and this may be why the habit arose of writing his views
into the first pages of the school history textbooks. But historians - even school-
textbook writers - are no less obligated to check the primary sources than any
other serious writer. Instead, they have, with a few notable exceptions (such as
Andaya and Andaya 1982), continued to quote each other, instead of finding out
what the primary researchers have to say on the topic.
25. Something similar to the race-based approach can be found in at least one of the
documents on the tribal populations produced by Indonesian government
agencies. For example, in the demographic profile published by the Direktorat
Bina Masyarakat Terasing (1990), the surveyed populations are each typologized
according to a seemingly scientific code relating to such characteristics as: F
Bodily characteristics (F, Generally athletic, tall, upstanding / F2 Generally
pyknic, slender, medium / F, Generally short, fat, small), and NNon-physical
characteristics (Temperament) (N; distrustful, shy, regressive / N, approachable,
On Being Tribal in the Malay World
friendly / N; brave, aggressive). This typology had disappeared from the revised
and expanded version put out a few years later by the same agency (1994/95).
26. See Brown (1974) and Maxwell (1997) for studies of the importance of ideological
exogeny in Brunei, the only remaining Malay sultanate functioning as an
independent state.
27. A valuable summary and critique of the literature on Malay "origins" can be
found in an extended footnote by Maxwell (1997, pp. 153-54). More empirically
based discussions of the same question can be found scattered through Bellwood
(1997). Bellwood draws no clear linkage between any particular archaeological
"tradition" and the origins of a "Malay people", but his summary of the linguistic
(Malayic) evidence on pp. II9-24 does, however, support the view that a somewhat
uniformatizing Malayic-speaking - not yet "Malay" - cultural tradition spread
out of northwest Borneo two or more millennia ago, into a region where other
"earlier" Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages were already spoken. This
view is based primarily on the work of Adelaar (1992a, pp. 206-7). For an
accessible account of the later, more narrowly Malay, stages of linguistic history,
see Collins (1998).
28. A note of caution is necessary. We should distinguish between unselfconscious
"true" indigeny as an embedded social dimension, and the self-conscious
"Indigenous" identity that is often involved in asserting some degree of autonomy
from the state. Sociologically, these are quite different phenomena. I propose
calling the former "indigeny" and the latter (after Gray) "indigenousness".
However, and pace Gray, indigenousness is also used by the state for its own
purposes, at least as much as it is by those who wish to get the state off their
backs. (Several instances are examined by the contributors to this volume with
reference to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.) Gray fails to recognize this
distinction primarily because he ignores the separate importance of tribality,
which he fuses with indigeny or indigenousness.
29. For some relevant work in this field, see (for Borneo) Wadley (1993) and (for the
Peninsula) Fix (1990), Gomes (1982, 1983), and the many relevant items in the
bibliography to Baer (1999).
30. I am grateful to Gerard Persoon for providing me with copies of these and other
hard-to-find documents relating to the tribal demography of Indonesia.
31. Another valuable source, which I came across too late to incorporate into this
account, is Melalatoa (1995). This two-volume encyclopaedia gives many
population figures, mostly estimates, for the constituent ethnic groups of
Indonesia, tribal and non-tribal alike. It is also useful for providing the currently
favoured names for these groups. Unfortunately, like so many such publications
in Indonesia, it is marked Tidak diperdagangkan, Not for commercial sale.
32 . There is a linguistically distinct group, known sometimes as Orang Kuala, who
live in both Indonesia and Malaysia (Sandbukt 1983). They call themselves
Duano or Desin Dolaq, and speak an Austronesian language that may well be
Malayic, but is not a Malay dialect (Kahler 1946-49). However, in Indonesia
 Geoffrey Benjamin
they live mainly in Jambi Province, not Riau, and the "Kuala/Laut" listed here
are probably a different group.
33. According to the Yearbook of Statistics, Sarawak I992, the Iban population in
Sarawak was 493,000 in 1990, with an average annual growth rate of about 2 per
cent, thereby doubling in less than 30 years. (Ibans in West Kalimantan, Indonesia,
number around 15,000.)
34. Yampolsky (1996, pp. 2-7), in the sleeve notes that accompany his field recordings
of Malay music (both Melayu and tribal-Malay) from Sumatra, presents some
valuable ideas about Malay tribality and the meaning of Melayu in Sumatra. (As
he acknowledges, many of his ideas derive from the work of Vivienne Wee.) His
discussion is all the more valuable for being uninfluenced by the historical
"distortions" that often creep into discussions in Malaysia or Singapore, where
ideas about the topic are greatly influenced by formulations first put on paper in
the Treaty of Pangkor, 1874, between the British and the Sultan of Perak, as
discussed later.
35. The linguist David Gil, who had been working in Riau on an aberrant speech
variety he labelled "Riau Indonesian", was astonished to discover when we
(Chou, Wee, Benjamin) brought him to Tanjung Berakit on the northeast tip of
Bentan Island, that the Orang Suku Laut there spoke something he found quite
different from the speech variety he had been studying. In fact, the tribes people
were conversing both with us and with each other in the normal Johor-Riau
Malay that had provided the original basis for the standardized Indonesian
language. The "Riau Indonesian" spoken in the ethnically highly mixed Tanjung
Pinang town was presumably a heavily creolized version of the language.
36. In general, the ethnonyms applied to the various populations in the Malay
World, and their folk-etymologies, retain a history of the attitudes that have
been current towards these peoples. In most cases, however, the linguistically
supportable etymologies suggest a much more prosaic semantic than the fantastic
popular accounts. There is no room here to pursue this issue. But see footnote
38.
One other use oflinguistic data is in ascertaining or suggesting the possibility
of social linkages that have left no trace in historical documents - an especially
important question when dealing with tribal societies. One such is the hint by
Adelaar (1995, pp. 87-91) that there may once have been direct contact between
the Aslian languages and certain languages of Sarawak, and even that Aslian may
once have been spoken in Sarawak. Although the linguistic evidence for this is
not very strong, it is worth reporting that intermarriages took place between
Ibans from Sarawak and Jakuns or Semelais in the Peninsula as long ago as the
nineteenth century, and possibly earlier.
37· Life Records HSP OI079-2 [compact disk); Life Records HSP OI079-4 [cassette).
38. Like the word "Senoi", the culture-type label "Semang" is not an ethnonym: no
Orang Asli population calls itself by this name, although the word has been
applied to some of them in the past by Malays. The word must have originated
On Being Tribal in the Malay World
as the Malayized version of a common Aslian word for "person, human being":
Lanoh (Sabiim) SJmaa?, Temiar senma? (in counting), Semaq Beri SJma?, or Besisi
hJma? (A phonologically regular cognate also appears in the northern Aslian
languages spoken by the Semang peoples themselves, in the shape hami?, which
means "non-Aboriginal person".) The form "Semang" probably comes from
Lanoh, a Central Aslian language spoken by "Negritos" in Perak, with the -ng
resulting from a Malay reanalysis - polite linguistic jargon for "mishearing"! - of
the nasalized vowels of the original Lanoh word. Additionally, Malays would
probably have assimilated it to an already existing Malay word, semang, which
has a variety of meanings that they could have considered appropriate for
application to a tribal population, namely "debt-slave", "someone taken into the
family", "adoptive". This is probably why the word "Semang" is sometimes
thought to be derogatory.
39· For some local folk-beliefs concerning negrito origins, see Porath's chapter in this
volume.
40. Recent biology-based analyses are presented in: Baer 1995, 2000; Fix 1995, 2000;
Bulbeck 1996, 2000.
It could also be argued that Semang nomadism has constituted just one
facies of a broader repertoire of adaptations that have been available for many
millennia. That would mean that its recent manifestations are, therefore, not as
"primordial" as they might appear. The people in question have inhabited areas
that are not in such deep and isolated forest as, say, central Borneo (which
appears never to have been inhabited in archaeological times). They were,
therefore, not all that distant from influences emanating from the east and west
coasts, and hence could gain access to other modes of livelihood as well as to
other populations. (For further discussion, see Endicott & Bellwood 1991.) Some
"low-country" negrito populations, known as the Bila or Wila, were still living
right on the west coast in the nineteenth century. Archaeological evidence
suggests that the possibility of being sedentary for long periods was already
present in the Peninsular Hoabinhian way oflife, with riverine fishing and so on,
combined with semi-sedentary hunting and gathering. (Benjamin 1985, 1997.)
41. These comments are based on Gomes's studies of Jahai demography (Gomes
1982,1983). Whatever the welfare agencies might think to the contrary, Gomes's
findings imply that (forced) settlement is sensed by the Jahais, his Semang study
group, as a less secure circumstance than being nomadic.
4 2 . If this sounds difficult to grasp, think how easy it is in practice to regard your
own brother or sister as (1) your mother's child (matrifilial), or (2) your fother's
child (patrifilial), or (3) your parents' child (cognatic), without necessarily implying
any shift in the genealogical "facts". Note that such arrangements need not
involve either corporateness or a concern for descent from an ancestor. At base,
the Malayic patterns of filiative bias would have referred primarily - as they still
do - to face-to-face relations, thought of in terms of the sex of the immediately
connecting kinspersons. In only a few instances did these biases lead to the
66 Geoffrey Benjamin
development, relatively recently, of unilineal ancestor-orientated descent-groups,
which are of very localized distribution in the Malay Peninsula.
43. This need not have been literally the case; it could mean merely that husband
and wife should think of each other as "cousins" (= "elder" and "younger sibling",
respectively), whether or not this was genealogically the case.
44. Adelaar (1989) has determined that the Malagasy languages on the other side of
the Indian Ocean contain many specifically Sumatran-Malay loans that arrived
in Madagascar up to a thousand years after the original movement of ancestral
Malagasy (an Austronesian language) out of southern Borneo. Malay-speaking
sailors were therefore continuing to cross the oceans, just as their Austronesian
ancestors and collaterals had been doing.
45. For a thorough review of the literature on early maritime states in Southeast
Asia, see Christie (1995). See also her suggestions as to how early trade in the
Peninsula may have been linked to social complexification (Christie 1990).
46. The early states of the northern part of the Peninsula (in present-day Kedah,
Kelantan and Isthmian Thailand) probably did not enter the Malay World until
around 1200 to 1400 CE, for there is good evidence that they were Mon-
speaking polities until that time (Benjamin 1987; Bauer 1992).
47. This section incorporates ideas from the taped comments of Vivienne Wee and
Wan Zawawi Ibrahim at the Singapore meeting on which this volume is based.
They are not responsible for the use I have made of their comments here.
48. According to a shadowy episode in the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) something
of the kind may even have happened deep inside early Pahang, with Batek
negritos serving some runaway royals as cross-Peninsular porters - a function
similar to that which the Semang further north, in the Isthmus, seem also to
have undertaken. (See Benjamin 1997, pp. 108-9·)
49. See, for example, Williams-Hunt's photograph (1952, Plate II) of a Jakun playing
a Jakun-built violin (biola), and which is now in the collection of the national
History Museum, Singapore.
50. This section derives largely from Wan Zawawi Ibrahim's taped comments at the
Singapore meeting. See also Zawawi (1995), where his ideas are presented at
greater length.
51. However, given that the slave raiders were often not local Malays, but
Minangkabaus, Bataks and Rawa Malays, all originating from Sumatra (cf.
Gianno 1997, p. 60), this denial may contain just a grain of partial truth. On the
other hand, the slave-raiders sometimes employed or pressured "tame" Orang
Asli to do the capturing for them.
52. Despite this, Sandbukt also reports (1979, p. 8) that among some Kubus (Orang
Rimba) of Jambi there is an outward flow of male bachelors (but not females)
who settle down as sedentary Malays - despite the strong ethnic boundary that
exists between Malays and Kubu. (This suggests that the people themselves
regard their differences as one of "phase", not "race" - just as Chou (1995)
documents for the parallel situation in island Riau.)
On Being Tribal in the Malay World
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