Robert Knox Dentan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587615 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Knox Dentan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert Knox |
| FAMILY NAME | Dentan |
| SIGNATURE | DENTAN R K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Buffalo, State University of New York |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 321 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Carol Laderman (1932-2010)
Surrender’, peacekeeping and internal colonialism. A Malaysian instance
A neglected episode in West Malaysia’s subaltern history illustrates how simplistic Western notions of peace—and consequently, of surrender and resistance—can be. In the case of Semai in the Semai heartland, what seems like submission to external pressures turns out to be an ambiguous and ambivalent way of keeping the peace between Malays and Semai in the guise of adding new tools to traditional Semai internal peacekeeping praxis. Semai “double c…
Schooling vs. Education, Hidden vs. Overt Curricula: Ways of Thinking about Schools, Economic Development, and Putting the Children of the Poor to Work—a West Malaysian Example
In advanced capitalist countries education prepares children to live in a complex world. Schooling teaches them subordination and the skills they will need for menial jobs. Education is for the children of the rich, schooling for the children of the poor. Malaysian schooling has other “covert curricula,” e.g., Islamicization. Semai children, despite their love of education, have difficulty with schooling because their home experience involves fre…
Overwhelming Terror: Love, Fear, Peace, and Violence among Semai of Malaysia
Introduction: Writing Someone Else's Life Chapter 1: Spotted Doves at War: The Praak Sangkiil Chapter 2: Regrettable Undertakings: A Dirty Joke, a War, a Vacancy Chapter 3: Responding to Terror: Intellectually, Emotionally, Spiritually Chapter 4: Transforming Demons by Love and Surrender Chapter 5: Ceremonies of Innocence and Positive Peace Chapter 6: Freedom: Just Say No Chapter 7: For Fear of Finding Something Worse: Raising Kids Chapter 8: Jun…
Recent Studies on Violence: What's In and What's Out
Focusing on four recent books about violence gives a reader an idea of what current anthropological wisdom is and what it tends to omit (peace, domestic violence). Since most studies deal not with direct observation of violence but with representations of it, questions of representation loom large in terms of how anthropologists represent violence in these books and elsewhere in the literature, and what possibilities of representation might round…
Against the Kingdom of the Beast: Semai Theology, Pre-Aryan Religion, and the Dynamics of Abjection
Hawks, Doves, and Birds in the Bush: A Response to Keith Otterbein, Neil Whitehead, and Leslie Sponsel
"Disreputable Magicians," the Dark Destroyer, and the Trickster Lord: Reflections on Semai Religion and a Possible Common Religious Base in South and Southeast Asia
Recent studies of globalization tend to stress its novelties, especially new patterns of consumption and mediated communication (e.g., Appadurai 1996). But the view from the margins and from the lowest social strata of globalizing states seems less novel. This paper explores the ways in which the impact of anciently emergent slaveholding despotisms and their colonies seems refracted in the cosmology of southeast Asian peoples as a stupid terroris…
A Vision of Modernization: An Article on a Drawing by Bah Rmpent, a Child of the Sengoi Semai, a Traditionally Nonviolent Indigenous People of the Malaysian Peninsula
The core of this article is a pastiche, consisting of a sketch of the life of Bah Rmpent, a nine‐year‐old Sengoi Semai boy, in 1992; a stone‐cold poem about the finality of genocide, by Robert Frost; and a newspaper account of building a dam on the last Whitewater river of peninsular Malaysia. The whole is sandwiched between an introductory interpretation and explanatory endnotes
This is Passion, and Where it Goes: Despair and Suicide among Semai, A Nonviolent People of West Malaysia
This paper, the only one about despair and suicide among Orang Asli (indigenous) groups of peninsular Malaysia, focuses on Sen(g)oi Semai, a Mon-Khmer-speaking group of about 30,000, famous for avoiding violence. The paper examines two empirical correlations, firstly, between suicide and “learned helplessness” and, secondly, between suicide and “modernization,” especially in terms of increasing gender disjunction and familial patriarchy. Issues …
Ceremonies of innocence and the lineaments of ungratified desire; An analysis of a syncretic Southeast Asian taboo complex
We see them only as eccentrics or as survivors ... locked into a religiose fantasy-world'; they are quaint historical fóssils'...But where social or political assumptions or enquiries intovalue are at issue, then the answer must be very much more complex
"Spotted Doves at War the "Praak Sangkill
Senoi Semai of Malaysia have a reputation as one of the most peaceable peoples in the world. But their nonviolence seems not to stem from cultural tradition but from a realistic accommodation to a violent political ecology. Epic accounts of the Praak Sangkiil (non-religious war) like the two texts presented by the A. illuminate the people's violent past. Although able to resist organized mass invasion, the people remained subject to sporadic vici…
Telling the Truth in Difficult Times: Malaysian Anthropologists and Orang Asli
Tradisi lisan masyarakat semai. Juli Edo. Monograf Fakulti Sains Kemasyarakatan dan Kemanusiaan, 16. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. 1990. 136 pp. Indigenous Minorities of Peninsular Malaysia: Selected Issues and Ethnographies. Razha Rashid. ed. Kuala Lumpur: Intersocietal and Scientific Sdn. Bhd. (INAS), 1995. 183 pp. Pathway to Dependence: Commodity Relations and the Dissolution of Semai Society. Colin Nicholas. Monash Papers on Southeas…
Theatre, Ritual and Transformation: The Senoi Temiars. Sue Jennings
Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia . Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and Helen Hardacre, eds
Whose Rights
Bad Day at Bukit Pekan
The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have acquired a reputation as one of the most nonviolent peoples known to anthropology. This essay explores the question of Semai violence through interviews with men who have committed homicide while in a state of possession, and with a participant in a 1949 massacre of Chinese villagers that was carried out in retaliation for a raid on a Semai village by Chinese Communist insurgents. In Semai storytelling violence is…
The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence
At a time when war and other forms of violence seem to be ubiquitous and increasing, this refreshing book provides some hope by looking at the brighter side of human nature. Though not ignoring violence and war, the authors focus on nonviolence and peace by analyzing a broad sample of indigenous societies. Included are the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Zapotec of Mexico, the Inuit of the Canadian Northwest Territories, the Semai of Malaysia, and the Ki…
Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology, and the Power of Ritual. Vishvajit Pandya
On Prejudice: A Global Perspective. Daniela Gioseffi
Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]
Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution [and Comments and Replies]
Potential food sources for foragers in Malaysian rainforest; Sago, yams and lots of little things
It may be that enough starchy food simply does not exist in most rain forests to supply even small human groups on a reliable, long-term basis.In that case, prehistoric hunter-gatherers could not have lived in the deep forest but must have been oriented toward its edges, where they could collect food from several different habitats.The archaeological evidence is too fragmentary at present to prove this notion, but the fact that the Hoabinhnians s…
Central Borneo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a Stratified Society. Jérôme Rousseau
Reply to Paul
Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]
Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution [and Comments and Replies]
Blood Drunkenness and the Bloodthirsty Semai: Unmaking Another Anthropological Myth
The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have frequently been cited as examples in the debates over the wellsprings of human violence. Numerous writers have employed selected Semai ethnographic material to support assertions that, their apparent peacefulness notwithstanding, Semai are in reality bloodthirsty killers. This assertion has in turn been used as evidence in support of a variety of approaches whose common thread is a view of aggressiveness and viole…
On Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies
Potential food sources for foragers in Malaysian rainforest; Sago, yams and lots of little things
It may be that enough starchy food simply does not exist in most rain forests to supply even small human groups on a reliable, long-term basis.In that case, prehistoric hunter-gatherers could not have lived in the deep forest but must have been oriented toward its edges, where they could collect food from several different habitats.The archaeological evidence is too fragmentary at present to prove this notion, but the fact that the Hoabinhnians s…
Bad Day at Bukit Pekan
The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have acquired a reputation as one of the most nonviolent peoples known to anthropology. This essay explores the question of Semai violence through interviews with men who have committed homicide while in a state of possession, and with a participant in a 1949 massacre of Chinese villagers that was carried out in retaliation for a raid on a Semai village by Chinese Communist insurgents. In Semai storytelling violence is…
Ceremonies of innocence and the lineaments of ungratified desire; An analysis of a syncretic Southeast Asian taboo complex
We see them only as eccentrics or as survivors ... locked into a religiose fantasy-world'; they are quaint historical fóssils'...But where social or political assumptions or enquiries intovalue are at issue, then the answer must be very much more complex
Responses to Feld and Roseman
main things I learned from our panel on qualitative comparison of music classless societies were (1) the truth of Diamond's assertion that in primitive societies the superstructure is not reducible to the economic base; that reductive process begins with the exploitative economic relations of civilization (1974:140-41); and (2) Feld's statements that For any given society, everything that is socially salient will not necessarily be musically mark…
Semai response to mental aberration
Recent Studies on Violence: What's In and What's Out
Focusing on four recent books about violence gives a reader an idea of what current anthropological wisdom is and what it tends to omit (peace, domestic violence). Since most studies deal not with direct observation of violence but with representations of it, questions of representation loom large in terms of how anthropologists represent violence in these books and elsewhere in the literature, and what possibilities of representation might round…
"Disreputable Magicians," the Dark Destroyer, and the Trickster Lord: Reflections on Semai Religion and a Possible Common Religious Base in South and Southeast Asia
Recent studies of globalization tend to stress its novelties, especially new patterns of consumption and mediated communication (e.g., Appadurai 1996). But the view from the margins and from the lowest social strata of globalizing states seems less novel. This paper explores the ways in which the impact of anciently emergent slaveholding despotisms and their colonies seems refracted in the cosmology of southeast Asian peoples as a stupid terroris…
Ambiguity, synecdoche and affect in semai medicine
Band-Level Eden: A Mystifying Chimera
Labels and Rituals in Semai Classification
Some senoi semai planting techniques
Hawks, Doves, and Birds in the Bush: A Response to Keith Otterbein, Neil Whitehead, and Leslie Sponsel
Hocus Pocus and Extensionism in Central Malaya: Notes on Semai Kinship Terminology
This paper presents componential definitions of two sets of Semai kinship terminology gathered in two Semai settlements. A comparison of these definitions with each other and with Semai rules about proper terminology usage brings several inconsistencies to light. These inconsistencies seem to suggest that a modified componential analysis conforms to the cognitive categories of the Semai if the extensionist hypothesis that terms have both primary …
Carol Laderman (1932-2010)
Surrender’, peacekeeping and internal colonialism. A Malaysian instance
A neglected episode in West Malaysia’s subaltern history illustrates how simplistic Western notions of peace—and consequently, of surrender and resistance—can be. In the case of Semai in the Semai heartland, what seems like submission to external pressures turns out to be an ambiguous and ambivalent way of keeping the peace between Malays and Semai in the guise of adding new tools to traditional Semai internal peacekeeping praxis. Semai “double c…
"Spotted Doves at War the "Praak Sangkill
Senoi Semai of Malaysia have a reputation as one of the most peaceable peoples in the world. But their nonviolence seems not to stem from cultural tradition but from a realistic accommodation to a violent political ecology. Epic accounts of the Praak Sangkiil (non-religious war) like the two texts presented by the A. illuminate the people's violent past. Although able to resist organized mass invasion, the people remained subject to sporadic vici…
Reply to Paul
Rejoinder to Nanda
Rejoinder to Brown
Semai response to mental aberration
Hocus Pocus and Extensionism in Central Malaya: Notes on Semai Kinship Terminology
This paper presents componential definitions of two sets of Semai kinship terminology gathered in two Semai settlements. A comparison of these definitions with each other and with Semai rules about proper terminology usage brings several inconsistencies to light. These inconsistencies seem to suggest that a modified componential analysis conforms to the cognitive categories of the Semai if the extensionist hypothesis that terms have both primary …
Labels and Rituals in Semai Classification
Other: The Lonely Furrow: Farming in the United States, Japan, and India. Kusum Nair
Some senoi semai planting techniques
Ethnology: Orang Asli: The Aboriginal Tribes of Peninsular Malaysia, Iskandar Carey
Ethnology: Une Société Simple: Parenté et Résidence chez les Palawan (Philippines). Charles Macdonald
Problems and Tactics in the Transcultural Study of Intelligence: An Archival Report
We deal here with conceptualizing mental retardation transculturally and with its problems—with the way a modest transcultural library study of mental retardation might be done within a limited geographical area. Finally, because finding useful references is difficult and time-consuming, an archival appendix gives a data base that might serve as a starting point for future, more ambitious studies. While readers may not agree with the conclusions …
Responses to Feld and Roseman
main things I learned from our panel on qualitative comparison of music classless societies were (1) the truth of Diamond's assertion that in primitive societies the superstructure is not reducible to the economic base; that reductive process begins with the exploitative economic relations of civilization (1974:140-41); and (2) Feld's statements that For any given society, everything that is socially salient will not necessarily be musically mark…
Blood Drunkenness and the Bloodthirsty Semai: Unmaking Another Anthropological Myth
The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have frequently been cited as examples in the debates over the wellsprings of human violence. Numerous writers have employed selected Semai ethnographic material to support assertions that, their apparent peacefulness notwithstanding, Semai are in reality bloodthirsty killers. This assertion has in turn been used as evidence in support of a variety of approaches whose common thread is a view of aggressiveness and viole…
Reply to Paul
Ambiguity, synecdoche and affect in semai medicine
Band-Level Eden: A Mystifying Chimera
Rejoinder to Nanda
Rejoinder to Brown
On Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies
Violence and Sociality in Human Evolution [and Comments and Replies]
Potential food sources for foragers in Malaysian rainforest; Sago, yams and lots of little things
It may be that enough starchy food simply does not exist in most rain forests to supply even small human groups on a reliable, long-term basis.In that case, prehistoric hunter-gatherers could not have lived in the deep forest but must have been oriented toward its edges, where they could collect food from several different habitats.The archaeological evidence is too fragmentary at present to prove this notion, but the fact that the Hoabinhnians s…
Central Borneo: Ethnic Identity and Social Life in a Stratified Society. Jérôme Rousseau
Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]
The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence
At a time when war and other forms of violence seem to be ubiquitous and increasing, this refreshing book provides some hope by looking at the brighter side of human nature. Though not ignoring violence and war, the authors focus on nonviolence and peace by analyzing a broad sample of indigenous societies. Included are the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Zapotec of Mexico, the Inuit of the Canadian Northwest Territories, the Semai of Malaysia, and the Ki…
Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology, and the Power of Ritual. Vishvajit Pandya
On Prejudice: A Global Perspective. Daniela Gioseffi
Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia . Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall, and Helen Hardacre, eds
Whose Rights
Sociology (26 works) · History (22 works) · History (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Citation (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Library science (14 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · State (computer science (12 works)