Malaysia's Original People

Malaysia's Original People
Author: Kirk Endicott
Publisher: NUS Press
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2015-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9971698617

The Malay-language term for the indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, “Orang Asli”, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. This volume is a comprehensive survey of current understandings of Malaysia’s Orang Asli communities (including contributions from scholars within the Orang Asli community), looking at language, archaeology, history, religion and issues of education, health and social change, as well as questions of land rights and control of resources. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by various combinations of hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and trading forest products. By the end of the century, logging, economic development projects such as oil palm plantations, and resettlement programmes have displaced many Orang Asli communities and disrupted long-established social and cultural practices. The chapters in the present volume show Orang Asli responses to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing world. The authors also highlight the importance of Orang Asli studies for the anthropological understanding of small-scale indigenous societies in general.

Orang Asli Now

Orang Asli Now
Author: Roy Davis Linville Jumper
Publisher: Upa
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1999
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Orang Asli Now provides a comprehensive, intimate internal perspective of the Orang Asli Political movement in Malaysia. Roy Davis Linville Jumper rectifies the deficiency of documentation on this minority group with regard to the Malaysian policy shift designed to enhance ethnic pluralism and foster greater political stabilization among the primary ethnic groups: the Malay, the Chinese, and the Indians. This policy has also allowed the Orang Asli to establish a new vibrancy in Malaysia. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with Orang Asli leaders, Malaysian government officials, media, and other sources, Roy Jumper examines the Orang Asli participation in the political process, including its interaction with other groups, and identifies factions within the movement. He provides a clear, thorough history of the Orang Asli movement and the events that led to its establishment as a political factor in Malaysia. This book, with an unusual degree of political sophistication, places this little-known 400 year-old polity in the context of contemporary Malaysian politics.

Living on the Periphery

Living on the Periphery
Author: Toshihiro Nobuta
Publisher: Trans Pacific Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN:

Revision of author's doctoral thesis, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 2002.

Temiar Religion, 1964-2012

Temiar Religion, 1964-2012
Author: Geoffrey Benjamin
Publisher: NUS Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9971697068

The Temiars, a Mon-Khmer-speaking Orang Asli society living in the uplands of northern Peninsular Malaysia, have long attracted popular attention in the West for reports that ascribed to them the special psychotherapeutic technique known as ‘Senoi Dreamwork’. However, the reality of Temiar religion and society, as studied and recorded by Geoffrey Benjamin, is even more fascinating than that popular portrayal—which he shows to be based on a serious misrepresentation of Temiar practice. When Benjamin first lived in the isolated villages of the Temiars between 1964 and 1965, he encountered a people who lived by swidden farming supplemented by hunting and fishing. They practised their own localised animistic religion in an area where the main religion was once Mahayana Buddhism and is now Islam. Half a century later, the Temiars have become much more deeply embedded in broader Malaysian society, while retaining their distinctive way of life and maintaining their complex animistic religious beliefs. Benjamin’s ongoing fieldwork in the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s followed the Temiars through processes of religious disenchantment and re-enchantment, as they reacted in various ways to the advent of Baha’i, Islam and Christianity. Some Temiars even developed a new religion of their own. In addition to its rich ethnographic reportage, the book proposes a novel theory of religion, and in the process develops a deeply insightful account of the changing intellectual framework of anthropology over the past half-century.

Violence and the Dream People

Violence and the Dream People
Author: John Leary
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counterviolence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.

Malaysia

Malaysia
Author: Heidi Munan
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2012-01-15
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1608707857

This book provides comprehensive information on the geography, history, wildlife, governmental structure, economy, cultural diversity, peoples, religion, and culture of Malaysia. All books of the critically-acclaimed Cultures of the World� series ensure an immersive experience by offering vibrant photographs with descriptive nonfiction narratives, and interactive activities such as creating an authentic traditional dish from an easy-to-follow recipe. Copious maps and detailed timelines present the past and present of the country, while exploration of the art and architecture help your readers to understand why diversity is the spice of Life.

Lonely Vectors

Lonely Vectors
Author: Kenneth Tay
Publisher: Singapore Art Museum
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-11-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9811895732

Lonely Vectors takes its cue from Singapore Art Museum’s new space at the Tanjong Pagar Distripark as a site of the global economy and its choreography of movements. However, its interests in global flows extend beyond the circulation of goods and commodities to consider the bodies and histories unmoored and set adrift by this world in motion. From the construction of special economic zones to patterns of migration, from seed distribution to peasant solidarity against mega-plantations, from the uneven flow of land and water to the cosmologies and worlds lost to us over time, Lonely Vectors points to the different ways we desire to connect with one another.

Civilizing the Margins

Civilizing the Margins
Author: Christopher R. Duncan
Publisher: NUS Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2008
Genre: Assimilation (Sociology)
ISBN: 9789971694180

Discusses the programs, policies, and laws that affect ethnic minorities in eight countries: Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Once targeted for intervention, people such as the Orang Asli of Malaysia and the "hill tribes" of Thailand often become the subject of programs aimed at radically changing their lifestyles, which the government views as backward or primitive. Several chapters highlight the tragic consequences of forced resettlement, a common result of these programs.