Modernity and Malaysia

Settling the Menraq Forest Nomads

Alberto Gomes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134100767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together over thirty years of detailed ethnographic research on the Menraq of Malaysia, this fascinating book analyzes and documents the experience of development and modernization in tribal communities.

Descendents of hunter-gatherers who have inhabited Southeast Asia for about 40, 000 years, the Menraq (also known as Semang or Negritos) were nomadic foragers until they were resettled in a Malaysian government-mandated settlement in 1972. Modernity and Malaysia begins with the 'Jeli Incident' in which several Menraq were alleged to have killed three Malays, members of the dominant ethnic group in the country. Alberto Gomes links this uncharacteristic violence to Menraq experiences of Malaysian-style modernity that have left them displaced, depressed, discontented, and disillusioned. Tracing the transformation of the lives of Menraq resulting from resettlement, development, and various 'civilizing projects', this book examines how the encounter with modernity has led the subsistence-oriented, relatively autonomous Menraq into a life of dependence on the state and the market.

Challenging conventional social scientific understanding of concepts such as modernity and marginalization, and providing empirical material for comparison with the experience of modernity for indigenous peoples around the world, Modernity and Malaysia is a valuable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, development studies and indigenous studies, as well as those with a more general interest in asian studies.

1 Introduction

The Jeli incident

3 killed, 2 hurt in fight with Orang Asli By Shamsul Akmar KOTA BARU, Mon – Three men were killed and two others were injured in a fight, believed to be over land matters, with a group of Orang Asli men in Sungai Rual, Jeli, about 100km from here. Police have detained 11 Orang Asli men in connection with the killings.

(New Straits Times, 27/04/1993)

It is very seldom that Orang Asli, the aboriginal people of Malaysia, are the object of media attention. They become newsworthy only when there are reports, usually based on misconceptions or myths, about their cultural practices, deemed bizarre or exotic by the public at large, or when dignitaries visit one of their villages or when something sensational involving Orang Asli happens. In April 1993, the event of a homicide in an Orang Asli settlement achieved media prominence by making it to the front page of most of the national newspapers in the country. As in the above extract from one of the national dailies, we are told that three people were killed allegedly by a group of Orang Asli near the town of Jeli in Kelantan, close to the Malaysian- Thai border. The homicide victims were Malays, members of Malaysia’s dominant ethnic group. This event, which has come to been known as ‘the Jeli incident’, was of more than special interest to me because the Orang Asli men came from the village, Sungai Rual (shortened to Rual hereafter), where I have carried out anthropological research since 1976 and because homicidal conflict is virtually unheard of in the community I studied. The Orang Asli of Rual belong to an ethnolinguistic group called the Semang or Negritos. I prefer calling them Menraq, a word meaning human or people in most of the languages spoken in the Rual settlement and it is a term that Rual people use to refer to themselves.¹

The precise details of the Jeli incident are unclear as people are reluctant to elaborate what actually happened. Several months after the event I visited Rual and talked about the incident to a number of people, including the eleven men accused of killing. From these conversations and from court trial reports, I was able to piece together what had occurred. I was told that a Malay man showed up at a hamlet at Rual, demanding the people move out by the next day. He insisted that he had bought the land from the State land office and he now had legal title to it. The Menraq had just returned from a temporary settlement as their hamlet had been quarantined after a cholera outbreak that killed six villagers. The next day the man turned up with five other Malay men, reportedly brandishing machetes and speaking belligerently, to chase the Menraq away. The Menraq headman told the Malays that his people had decided not to leave their hamlet, indicating that they were residing on their ancestral land. An altercation ensued, tempers flared and the situation turned tense. The Malays abused the Menraq and physically threatened the people with their machetes. The tense situation escalated, and after a Malay man assaulted the village headman, a scuffle broke out which ended in fatalities. One Malay man succumbed to injuries purportedly inflicted by the Menraq, and two Malay men were found dead a kilometre or so away in the van they had travelled in, allegedly killed by blowpipe-propelled poisoned darts. Three Malays who bolted from the scene escaped unhurt. The incident was reported to the authorities and eleven Menraq were arrested. Subsequently nine men were charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The court trial went on for months and eventually the accused were acquitted. To a question by the defence lawyers as to which one of the accused was the owner of the blowpipe believed to be the murder weapon, the police officer in court replied that he was uncertain because ‘they all look alike’. With such an element of doubt, the presiding judge requested that the charges against the accused be dropped and the case was dismissed.

Anyone who is unfamiliar with the Orang Asli may think of such acts of violence as commonplace among people who are often labelled as ‘savages’ or ‘primitives’. After all, stories of headhunting, ‘tribal warfare’, the use of poisoned darts, and cannibalism among tribal peoples have captured the imagination of the general public for a long time, yet rarely, except in the writings of anthropologists, are these images or portrayals ever challenged or rejected. When I was first told about what took place at Rual, I received the news with scepticism and trepidation. I was sceptical because such a display of violence was out of character for the Orang Asli. Many anthropologists have characterized Orang Asli as non-violent and non-intimidating in personal demeanour. Dentan (1979), who has written extensively on the Semai, another Orang Asli subgroup, was prompted by his observation of non-violence to title his book, The Semai: A Non-Violent People of Malaya. As for the Menraq, Carey (1976: 17) observes:

The Negritos are a friendly and a peaceful people but, as might be expected, they are very shy. Being unused to outside contacts, they are suspicious of strangers and at times, a casual approach, based on curiosity and general interest, may be interpreted by them as a threat. Their invariable response to such a threat, real or imaginary, is not one of hostility but flight.

Not once during my field research with the Menraq have I ever witnessed aggressive behaviour by the people. How then can we explain this uncharacteristic act of violence? To understand this deviant behaviour, it is necessary to follow the remarkable path of social, economic and cultural change among the Menraq. Like almost all other tribal² communities around the world, Rual has experienced, and is still experiencing, tremendous change. Malaysian authorities consider the Menraq traditional lifestyle of nomadic foraging to be inimical to modernity. For Malaysia to become an advanced industrialized nation, it is envisioned that all its citizens will need to be modernized. For the Menraq, modernity has in a large measure taken the form of government-directed development projects implemented to settle the nomadic forest peoples into permanent settlements and to draw them into market economies. It is believed that this will settle the perceived problem of the existence of a people considered ‘out-of-place’ in modern, industrialized, high-tech Malaysia. In the course of three decades of modernization, present-day life in Rual has almost nothing in common with what it used to be. But beneath this veneer of a progressive transformation of Rual lies a story of hardship. The clue to the Jeli tragedy lies in this transformation. As this book will show, these development projects have created more problems for the Menraq than they were ostensibly intended to resolve. A detailed discussion of the implications of some of these projects will demonstrate how development has operated to lead a contented group of people to misery and vulnerability, to dependence on, and exploitation by, outsiders and external forces. I hope to show how the violence of the Jeli incident is linked to the growing despair and discontentment among the Menraq, which emanates from their experiences of displacement, dispossession, and deprivation. From anthropological studies, such as Bodley (1990), Maybury-Lewis (2002), and Duncan (2004) on the experiences of modernity among tribal communities, it is possible to conclude that the Menraq situation is by no means unique. What, then, is the general picture of tribal communities in the modern world?

Tribal communities in the modern world

Tribal communities, whether referred to as aborigines, hunters and gatherers, or indigenous minorities have been drawn into the modern world in many different ways, some through violence and conquest, others more gradually and benignly. In some of the better known cases, such as the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines, tribal communities have been forcibly annexed in the course of European colonial expansion and settlement to become outliers in territory dominated by others acting in the name of ‘the Western world’. They have consequently paid a high price in displacement from their land or territory which for many of them is the spiritual basis of their social and cultural system, not to mention their source of livelihood. Some tribal communities have been enticed into the modern world through the operations of the market economy, often guided by state intervention. Social scientists, like development agencies, regard the market as central to development and modernization.

This book will, it is hoped, illustrate the experiences of modernity in tribal communities through a detailed case study of the Rual Menraq. The ethnographic evidence presented in this case study might appear familiar to readers in light of the many anthropological studies of the consequences of modernization and development for such peoples as the Rual Menraq. Anthropologists studying small-scale communities around the world have observed peoples located in what Tsing (1993) calls ‘out-of-the way’ places and consider them ‘the victims of progress’ (Bodley 1990), forgotten minorities, or marginalized peoples. This book, however, challenges several of the propositions made in some of these studies. First, it is against the assumptions of an earlier generation of anthropologists who treated such communities as isolated and largely self-contained, having minimal or no contact with the outside world, a misconception effectively challenged and demolished in the early 1980s by anthropologists such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and June Nash. The Orang Asli have usually been portrayed as living in remote habitats, and nomadic forest dwelling Orang Asli are considered to be people with no ties to land. These are of course myths which have been dispelled in various recent studies on the Orang Asli (see, for example, Dentan et al. 1997, Gomes 2004, Nicholas 2000). This book finds that Menraq are not really isolated for they live within a variety of local, national, regional and global political, economic and social contexts, and always have done so in varying degrees. They are certainly not, to use Eric Wolf ’s well-known phrase, ‘people without history’ (Wolf 1982). Furthermore, as will be outlined later, they maintain a strong sense of territorial connection and adhere to a system of land tenure. Second, contrary to popular assumptions and conventional wisdom, the marginalization of an isolated group, as the ethnographic evidence presented in this book reveals, is an outcome of their recent experience of modernity and not because they inhabit an ‘outof- the-way’ place. It is a common argument that marginalization is an effect of living in areas far from economic and political centres. Hence, to draw people into the mainstream of economies and societies, governments and development agencies have advocated, implemented, and justified policies and programmes to settle or resettle people closer to the centres or in areas deemed more accessible. Paradoxically, as contended in this book, the growing marginalization of the Menraq and people like them is closely linked to their increasing involvement or entanglement with ‘mainstream’ Malaysian and international society. It is their immersion into the culture of global capitalism and international economics and their entrapment by the tentacles of state hegemony which have brought about their disadvantages and increased their economic and social woes. Third, while studies on tribal communities as ‘victims of progress’ fruitfully devoted attention to the distress such peoples have faced, and are facing, the active responses of tribal peoples to their plight have been obscured or neglected. It is my contention, as it is of many anthropologists, that people like the Menraq are not simply passive subjects in this encounter. Unlike the assumptions made in ‘impact studies’ of people as helpless and hapless victims, in this book the Menraq are treated as active agents who are struggling to maintain their autonomy and control of their own destiny. Their strategies, actions, and philosophies in coping with and explaining the changes which have been foisted on them are given due attention in understanding their experiences of modernity.

The violence of modernity

At a time when violent conflict, civil strife, and terrorism are making the world increasingly unsafe and insecure, it is vital to understand why people turn to violence in response to conflict or disagreements with other people or with nation-states. This book will shed light on how changing social and economic conditions emanating from modernization projects can lead to violent conflict. It has been inspired by several other studies, but two deserve mention here.

In one study, in a book provocatively titled The Violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva has linked the communal violence between the Sikhs and the Hindus in the Punjab, which left about 15,000 people dead between 1986 and 1991, to the adverse effects of agricultural developmental programmes, known as the ‘Green Revolution’, implemented by the Indian government with financial and scientific support from international agencies. Contrary to expectations and the official rhetoric proclaiming the successes of such development programmes, Shiva contends that the social, economic, and ecological changes associated with the Green Revolution have left the Punjab with ‘diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers’ (Shiva 1991: 12). This legacy, according to her, has led to a high level of frustration, anger, and discontentment among the people. Unable to contain or resolve such feelings of despair, people began to direct their anger and frustration towards members of other communities, escalating into communal strife and violence. As I discuss in greater detail later, the Green Revolution, despite success for some, has also adversely affected many farmers in Malaysia.³ It is highly likely that the Malays who sought to evict the Rual Menraq were farmers in a similar state of economic impoverishment to their Punjabi counterparts. Rather than directing their frustration towards their neighbours in random acts of violence, these Malays’ attempts to usurp land from the Menraq could be seen as their means of solving their predicament arising from the Green Revolution implemented in the rural areas of Kelantan.

Another celebrated case of conflict in rural areas is the Zapatistas’ rebellion in the Chiapas region in Mexico. In her ethnography Mayan Visions, Nash (2001) connects the mobilization of Mayan indigenous forces into the Zapatista movement to the impoverishing effects of globalization and free trade. In 1994, peaceful demonstrations turned violent after the Mexican government attempted to crush the movement by force. In the course of armed conflict, hundreds of people have lost their lives and their property and livelihoods. Such cases underline the violence of modernity.

Modernizing Rual

Kampung Rual is a small Menraq settlement in Kelantan, a northeastern state of Peninsular Malaysia. In 2006 the settlement had 475 residents. Rual did not yet exist as a village in 1970; it was only established in 1972 as a result of a government-sponsored resettlement programme. Menraq living in the vicinity were enticed to leave their home territories and settle at the site as part of the government’s modernization programme for the Orang Asli. The once nomadic hunting-and-gathering people in the area have become sedentary cultivators of cash crops and occasional wage workers. In due course they have even officially converted to Islam, although they are yet to become devout Muslims. The Menraq community, in many aspects, has become almost indistinguishable from a Malay village.

Rual itself is located in the district of Jeli (see Map 4.1). Jeli is also the name of the rural town where commercial and government services are located. With a population of about 20,000 people, it is encircled by several mainly agricultural, mainly Malay,⁴ communities (kampung) dependent primarily on cultivation of rice and cash crops such as rubber and oil palm. In recent years, Jeli town has experienced considerable economic and population growth with the opening of the East–West Highway linking the more developed northern urban areas on the west coast of the peninsula to the less developed areas in Kelantan.

In a way then this is a book about the experience of modernity of a smallscale community – the Rual Menraq – nestled between the dwindling tropical forests they have depended upon for generations and the expanding Malay farming settlements. The primary question is, how might one describe Menraq modernity? This book will tell about the concept of modernity often and commonly associated one-dimensionally with the West but now increasingly conceptualized as pluralized and indirect. It will explore the question of how modernity in the form of capitalism and nation-state interventions has ‘come to alter some of the most intimate and personal features’ (Giddens 1990: 4) of the everyday lives of the Menraq in a spatially remote corner of today’s Malaysia. Transcending the tendency to discuss such experiences in an abstract manner as in sociological theories of modernity, I present a more finely textured analysis.

Field research

This book is based on ethnographic data I have collected during my several field visits to Rual since 1975. I have had the privilege of meeting and living with the Orang Asli during a period spanning thirty years (1975 to 2006) but also the agony of observing in that time the dire consequences of modernity for these people. I first visited Rual Resettlement in August 1975 as an undergraduate student to fulfil an ethnographic course requirement. Together with six other students and a then university lecturer at the University of Malaya, Terry Rambo, I stayed at the resettlement for one week. My assignment was to present a photographic essay on the resettlement and the people. Imbued with a deeply romanticized perspective of the Menraq, I focused my camera lens mostly on ‘exotic’ aspects such as their hunting and gathering and traditional dwellings and material culture and not on what I then saw as the less exciting facets, such as the newly implemented development projects. My first encounter with a Menraq is still vivid in my mind. After walking for hours through the forest from Jeli town, our guide, a Department of Aboriginal Affairs (Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli, hereafter JHEOA) field officer, called out at the bushes on the side of the track and, suddenly, a Menraq man emerged. At the time the experience of meeting my first Menraq was almost as if one of the people described in Schebesta’s book Among the Forest Dwarfs (first published in 1928 and the pre-fieldwork prescribed reading) had come alive.

In 1976 I visited Rual again with Terry Rambo and two other students. Each one of us focused on a topic although we collaborated in our research efforts. My topic was social demography and as part of my research tasks I carried out a detailed census and interviewed people about their attitudes and practices related to fertility, mortality, and migration. We spent a total of four weeks from April–May in the Rual Resettlement. We stayed in a house built by the JHEOA for its visiting officers. On the basis of the data I collected, I wrote a short thesis entitled ‘A social demography of Jahai Negritos at Rual Post, Kelantan’.⁵

I returned to Rual in April 1978 for a two-week stay and again in April 1979 for another fortnight stay. These field visits were undertaken to update my demographic data and to conduct an economic and ecological survey. Drawing from the data collected thus far at Rual and fieldwork that I carried out in another Orang Asli community, the Temuan, I wrote a master’s thesis titled ‘Ecological adaptation and population change: a comparative study of Semang foragers and Temuan horticulturalists’ (Gomes 1979) which formed the basis of several publications (Gomes 1982, 1983). As implied in the title, the thesis focused on the demographic implications of ecological changes resulting from resettlement. In 1988, I made a short visit to Rual to check and update demographic information that a research assistant, Rokeman Abdul Jalil (1988), had collected and used in his honours thesis. A comparative analysis of findings from 1978 and 1988 was presented in an article published in 1990 (Gomes 1990). Between 1999 and 2006, I made four short visits of a few days to a week to Rual; my last visit was in September 2006. The time depth in my field research allows for a longitudinal or diachronic analysis but the short field visits may imply a lack of ethnographic depth, as the time spent on the key anthropological research tool of participant observation is relatively short. However, for almost three decades I have carried out research among the Orang Asli at large, visiting about 100 or so villages. From 1982–84, I conducted my doctoral study on economic change among the Semai (another Orang Asli group), for which I lived for a period of fourteen months in a village as a participant observer (Gomes 2004). This book draws from my research backgrounds combined with the wealth of knowledge and information contained in several excellent studies on Menraq groups by Kirk and Karen Endicott, Razha Rashid, Shuichi Nagata, Lye Tuck Po, Csilla Dallos, and Corry van der Sluys and the numerous studies on the experiences of mo...