This book is a major contribution to the ethnography of the Semai, an indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia, and to the literature on non-violent and egalitarian societies. It is very unusual in its style of presentation. The author attempts – with considerable success – to get beyond the bland generalisations that anthropologists normally use to describe the ‘culture’ of a people. His goal is to convey how the Semai feel about the world and their lives and to show how their emotions affect their behaviour. The experimental style makes the book more vivid and engaging than most anthropological monographs, but it also makes it somewhat disjointed.
The main focus of the book is the question of why Semai social life is non-violent, a question the author has been pondering since his initial fieldwork with the Semai in the 1960s. Due in large part to his writings, the Semai are known in anthropological circles as one of the world's most peaceful societies. This book is not a comprehensive overview of Semai culture. (Robert Dentan writes that much background material is on the publisher's website, but only one article could be found there.) However, it does provide extensive information on Semai history, relations with outsiders, worldview and religious rituals, dispute management practices, and methods of childrearing. In some areas, such as Semai religious beliefs and rituals, it goes well beyond what Dentan and others have written before.
I found Dentan's fictionalised accounts of typical events very effective. He tries to imagine the thoughts and feelings of the characters in the stories, both human and spiritual. The story of a slave raid is especially gripping. It brings to life what slave raids must have felt like to their victims, and it even helps explain the cruelty of the slave raiders themselves, attributing their callousness to a social system in which they too were subject to the arbitrary and absolute power of rulers over their subjects. His fictionalised account of a shamanic séance helps explain how Semai shamans can both love and fear their demonic spirit guides, and it also imagines what attracts spirit guides to the ceremonies and their human partners. Although Dentan admits that these accounts are products of imagination and interpretation, they are solidly grounded in his impressive knowledge of Semai language and culture.
Dentan makes a strong case that the non-violence/peacefulness so emphasised by the Semai is due to their experience of sudden, unexpected, violent attacks by outsiders, and that fear of such attacks has caused them to turn to each other for security. The Semai have preserved the memory of nineteenth-century slave raiding in their oral traditions, and the danger from communist guerrillas and British soldiers during the Emergency was fresh in their minds in the 1960s. Dentan argues that the Semai see the recent interference by government agents and developers as a continuation of the generally threatening and unpredictable nature of outsiders. Teaching children to fear outsiders and even thunderstorms makes sense in this context. Maintaining peaceful relations with fellow Semai, then, is a rational way to maintain a base of social support against possibly dangerous outsiders.
Dentan also connects Semai non-violence with the danger of outsiders through certain psychological mechanisms, such as surrendering to and identifying with oppressors and learned helplessness. However, these mechanisms are not very fully explained or analysed. For example, the psychological process of identifying with a person holding the power of life and death over oneself (the ‘Stockholm syndrome’) does not fully fit the Semai response to oppressive outsiders, such as Malay slave raiders. If Semai identified with such violent people, we would expect them to be violent too, not peaceful.
Although I found some aspects of Dentan's ‘experimental’ style of presentation successful, others, such as the numerous epigraphs, seem confusing and disruptive. Quotations from Semai individuals on topics that had already been introduced sometimes enhance the discussion. However, quotations without context from American, European, Arab, Chinese and Indian writers, poets, philosophers, etc are often confusing.
The last chapter, in which Dentan discusses how his thinking about Semai non-violence evolved and the relevance of the Semai case for understanding non-hierarchical societies in general, is very good. Many readers will welcome the way he brings them into his thought process, even sharing his doubts and uncertainties. The comparisons with modern, complex societies and the connection he draws between social equality and lack of violence are especially thought provoking.
On the whole, this book is an impressive summary of a lifetime of research and thinking by one of the leading experts on indigenous Malaysians. Not everyone will agree with everything in the book, but they will certainly take it seriously.
