Customer Reviews

Malaysia and the "Original People": A Case Study of the Impact of Development on Indigenous Peoples (Part of the Cultural Survival Studies in Ethnicity and Change Series)

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This book is on the political struggle of the Malaysian Aboriginal group, or 'Orang Asli', written by a group of scholars who have been conducting research on the group since 25 years ago. But the explanation on the struggle has been constructed as simply between the politically dominant Malays and the Orang Asli minority, without explaining the critical role of the Chinese in the economic life of the Orang Asli. For such a group of excellent and experienced scholars to ignore this phenomenon is rather surprising, to say the least. What is even more surprising is the fact that it took one of the more illustrious editors, ie. Robert Dentan, 25 years after his first book on an Orang Asli group "Semai, the non-violent people", to be able to say this. It is quite obvious that they have also failed to acknowledge the fact that many Malaysian scholars have said all this a decade or so ago. There is an obvious failure on the part of the editors to productively and creatively use local sources written in the vernacular for the present book. This becomes a great handicap to the authors in constructing a more in-depth analysis. Finally, where is the voice of the suffering Orang Asli themselves? In the present post-modern theorizing exercise, dominant in anthropology (the editor is are anthropologists, except one), the absence of the real social actors' voice is unacceptable!