The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya

by Robert Knox Dentan

Book Overview

Has tears on the spine of the book, but still is usable. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030453763
• ISBN13: 9780030453762
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 141 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The triumph of social anthropology

Robert Knox Dentan's book "The Semai" was first published in 1968. My edition is from 1979. The Semai are an aboriginal people living in Malaya, the western part of Malaysia. They are agricultural, and are divided into two somewhat different groups: West Semai (who sometimes mimic the dominant Malay culture) and East Semai (who are more "wild"). Both groups are related to Semang, a group of hunters and gatherers. This somewhat obscure people achieved notoriety during the 1970's, when sociobiologists and their opponents in the United States were debating whether or not humans are innately violent. The sociobiologists claimed that violence and aggression are universal traits, and therefore products of Darwinist natural selection. War is part of our human nature. The sociobiologists were, of course, wrong. The Semai are a non-violent people, and hence disprove sociobiology. Absurdely, the sociobiologists attempted to use Dentan's book to prove that the Semai actually were violent! From an extensive discussion of how the Semai avoid violence within their communities, the sociobiologist Edward Wilson chose to quote the following section: "Many people who knew the Semai insisted that such an unwarlike people could never make good soldiers. Interestingly enough, they were wrong. Communist terrorists had killed the kinsmen of some of the Semai counterinsurgency troops. Taken out of their nonviolent society and ordered to kill, they seem to have been swept up in a sort of insanity which they call `blood drunkenness'." From this Wilson drew the conclusion that the Semai had a gene for violence and aggression, and that all humans are naturally violent. But this is the only example in Dentan's book about the Semai actually killing people. The rest of the chapter deals with conflict resolution. Why didn't Wilson draw the opposite conclusion: that the Semai have peaceful genes? Or genes for both violence and pacifism? The answer is simple: political blinkers. Sociobiology, despite its "scientific" pretensions, is at bottom a pseudoscience the real purpose of which is to defend the status quo by claiming that peace, egalitarianism and gender equality are unnatural and maladaptive. Dentan (who seems to have felt somewhat uneasy about "his" people being used in a political brawl) points out that the Semai have had a non-violent reputation for a long time. Indeed, they were almost notorious for fleeing rather than fighting the more powerful Malays and Chinese. Nor does Dentan mention any armed Semai struggle against the slave raids on their communities by the Malay. Only during the Communist insurgency in Malaysia during the 1950's did the Semai finally choose to fight, probably because the war between the Communists and the British affected their areas in a very direct and permanent manner (in contrast to the slave raids). But even then, most Semai attempted a more cunning, pacifist strategy, described by Dentan in the book. Apparently, a secret Semai asso

Review of an Anthropological Ethnography

Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya is an Ethnography of the Semai (an indigenous people of South East Asia). The Semai are oart of the Orang Asli still living in Malaysia. Dentan bases the book on his own experiences with the Semai; describing their culture, technology and effect of the Western world on their way of life. The book is a little dated (as it was written in the 1970's). But documents a little known piece of humanity well. If native peoples, humanitarian causes and South East Asian culture are of interest to you, I recommend this book highly. There are other books on this topic on this site (just do a keyword search for Semai).