Batek
Orang Asli Religions and Cultures Challenged
The New Straits Times recently reported that the Orang Asli (original peoples) of Malaysia are increasingly being converted to Islam, Christianity, and Bahai, a trend which threatens to destroy their culture. This story supplements a recent scholarly article on the same subject by Kirk Endicott and Robert Knox Dentan which was reviewed here last year. […]
Batek Commitment to Forest Stewardship [journal article review]
“They kill the world the way they live,” a Batek shaman says about the modern, industrializing, high-tech society of the Malays that surrounds their forest homeland in Malaysia. The attitudes of peaceful societies toward their natural environments are often important facets of their overall approaches to life. A recent journal article explores the values and […]
Batek Practice Gender Equality
Some anthropologists argue that men dominate all human societies, but Karen Lampell Endicott describes gender equality among the Batek and some other nomadic hunter/gather societies in an article she wrote in 1981. It has been scanned and added as a PDF to the Archive of this website this week. One anthropologist maintained that sexual asymmetry […]
Orang Asli Rarely Have Headaches
According to the Malaysia Star on July 10th, the Orang Asli don’t suffer from headaches as much as modern city dwellers do. Prof. Dr. Raymond Azaman Ali, a neurologist at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, indicated at an annual neurosciences conference in Petaling Jaya that 60 percent of the patients in neuro clinics in Malaysian city […]
Summer Vacation Reading, Part 2: Articles on the Batek and the Ju/’hoansi
Two fine articles by noted scholars have been added to the Archive of Articles about Peaceful Societies this week, and both are worth taking on vacation to read along with some good books. Kirk Endicott’s piece “Property, Power, and Ideology among the Batek of Malaysia” describes how the concepts of property ownership among a forest-dwelling […]
Malaysian Discrimination against the Orang Asli
The New Straits Times of Malaysia has taken a much more balanced approach to the Malaysian government’s treatment of the Orang Asli than it did earlier this year. Their story on February 24 clearly sympathized with the government’s official position, which is that it was necessary for the Batek to accept government resettlement schemes. Two […]
Cultural Assimilation and Change among the Batek
Among the Batek, “man and woman are equals … there is no men’s or women’s work,” declared Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist who sees many advantages for that Malaysian Orang Asli society in retaining its traditional culture. Endicott and Robert Welsch, both professors from the anthropology department at Dartmouth, discussed the issues confronting indigenous societies that […]
Religious Basis for Malaysian Discrimination against Orang Asli [anthology chapter review]
“When all Orang Asli have become Malays, then Malays will become Orang Asli,” one Semai man explained, getting right to the heart of a major problem for his society. In a recent article, Kirk Endicott and Robert Knox Dentan review many facets of the continuing Malaysian commitment to assimilating the Orang Asli societies—the Semai, the […]
Batek Persuaded to Abandon Nomadic Lifestyle
Enticed by the pleasures of permanent homes and modern gadgets, some Batek people no longer live in the forests of the Malay Peninsula. While many older people are still illiterate, they are encouraging the young Batek to become educated. An article on February 16th in the New Straits Times, which has already been moved to […]
“Our Souls Live upon the Trees,” Declares Batek Shaman [book review]
Arresting metaphors enrich a Batek shaman’s views of nature: “Our Souls Live upon the Trees. The forest is the veins and tendons of our lives.” Lye Tuck-Po, in her new book Changing Pathways: Forest Degradation and the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia, describes a lengthy discourse one evening by a Batek shaman whom she calls “Tebu.” […]
