Economic Strategies of an Orang Asli Village in Endau-Rompin National Park, Malaysia
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School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences Paris, France Master Degree Research in Social Sciences Mention Southern and Eastern Asia Fieldwork, Texts and Social Sciences Academic Year 2018-2019 Economic Strategies of an Orang Asli Village in Endau-Rompin National Park, Malaysia By Aude Vidal Under the direction of Pr. Bernard Sellato September 2019 Members of the Jury: Pr. Bernard Sellato and Dr. Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux Terima kasih I would like to thank the people of Kampung Peta who welcome me to their village, especially Sima Sangka and her family, whose help was very precious to me, as well as Rado Sangka and Ny Aina Raharinarivonirina who transcribed my most difficult interviews, and my classmates Luna Michel and Aina on whom I was able to rely for translations from Malay. Thanks to my friends from Malaysia, especially Shamila Ariffin, Theivanai Amarthalingam and Shervin Cheong who for more than five years have been trying to make me understand the mysteries of Malaysian politics. Thanks also to Auntie Ong Mui Ling and her husband for the stories of bomoh and cobras. Thanks to Pascale-Marie Milan and Franck Michel for their answers to my questions about anthropology of tourism. I would also like to thank para pengajar in Malaysian and Indonesian at Inalco who taught me the little Malay I know, as well as Paul Wormser and Mathieu Guérin who, after having taught me some rudiments of history, remained available during this master year to answer my questions. I am very grateful to Colin Nicholas of the Center for Orang Asli Concerns who made it possible for me to be welcome in Kampung Peta and gave me access to precious references and texts, to Dr Lye Tuck-Po of Univiversiti Sains Malaysia who kindly supported my request for a permit from the Malaysian authorities and offered very useful hints, and to Pr Dr Shanthi Thambiah of University of Malaya for her friendly availability to my questions in a free-wheeling conversation. Finally, I would like to thank the teachers of the Southern and Eastern Asia Master who offered me a field grant, as well as Irène Bellier and Emmanuelle Ricaud Oneto, Amandine Dabat and the students of the Asia seminar, Benoît de l'Estoile and the students of the Oikonomia seminar, Francis Zimmermann, Clotilde Luquiau who gave me her advice during the writing of this thesis, Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux for more than her teaching and Bernard Sellato for his supervision throughout this year. I hope that I have benefited to the best of my ability from all these lessons, but I remain the only one to blame for the weaknesses of my work. 2 Summary Terima kasih.....................................................................................................................................2 Introduction......................................................................................................................................5 Chapter 1. Orang Asli in Malaysia...................................................................................................7 Chapter 2. Kampung Peta..............................................................................................................15 Chapter 3. Rituals and Society.......................................................................................................23 Chapter 4. Subsistence Activities...................................................................................................41 Chapter 5. Primary Sector Commercial Activities.........................................................................53 Chapter 6. Self-Employment (Except Primary Sector) and Wage Employment...........................69 Chapter 7. Tourism Economy........................................................................................................81 Chapter 8. Several Effects of Market Economy..........................................................................101 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................115 Appendices...................................................................................................................................117 Glossary...................................................................................................................................118 Interviews................................................................................................................................120 Households Sources of Income...............................................................................................121 Maps, Diagrams and Photos....................................................................................................122 List of Photographs, Tables, Maps and Diagrams...................................................................129 Bibliography............................................................................................................................131 Table of Contents....................................................................................................................141 3 4 Introduction In Kampung Peta, a Jakun village of northern Johor, almost everyone dreams of tourism, whether it is imaginable or not to access the jobs it offers. Villagers judge by this measure every other opportunity within their reach. I asked myself what were the motivations of their choices, the constraints on them and the activities that they must accept for lack of better ones, their aspirations if they were allowed to dream. What do the inhabitants of the village live on and would like to live on? An initial survey, carried out with the help of my informant and hostess, of each of the houses and the activities carried out there by the members of the hostel allowed me to have an idea of the proportion of each activity in the village: collection of forest products, agriculture, tourism employment and other jobs. I was able to verify the accuracy of these informations in the interviews I conducted subsequently in about 15 households. We worked with my informant to meet people of all economic conditions and working in all sectors. I conducted these semi- directed interviews alone, more rarely with her, keeping in mind that her presence as much as my residence at her place could bring me a privileged contact with the villagers as well as enroll me in a fabric of complicated, even conflicting relationships (Beaud and Weber 1998). As these incomes were unstable (Wollenberg and Ani 1998), my respondents refered to a baseline income, a sort of year-long average that they seemed to have in mind before my questions, or the income of the last few months. I accepted this imprecision, supplemented with a second part on expenditure and followed up with a final part devoted to choices, assessments, constraints and dreams. "And if you had a choice…" (Kalau ada pilihan…) was my most common introduction. The following pages are based on this ethnographic survey. After a presentation of the overall situation of the Orang Asli in Malaysia, the village of Kampung Peta is described in its natural environment and social organization. I describe then their sources of income in four chapters by separating subsistence activities and commercial activities from the primary sector (collection of forest products and agriculture), self-employment and wage earning without tourism and then within tourism, to better measure the particularities of this sector and its links with 5 environmental protection. A final chapter is devoted to some of the effects of the development of the market economy, in particular the increased income inequalities between women and men and between households, as well as the decline in the "moral order" in which the Jakun economy has long been situated. 6 Chapter 1. Orang Asli in Malaysia 1.1. Orang Asli in Malaysia, a Complex of Peoples The Federation of Malaysia is composed of eleven states in the peninsula and two others in Borneo, as well as three federal territories. In 2017, of the 28.74 million Malaysians, 23.2% are Chinese and 7.0% are Indian (Department of Statistics 2018b). The majority is 68.8% Bumiputra. This status confers a "special position of the Malays and natives of any of the States of Sabah and Sarawak1," according to Article 153 of the Constitution (1957 Constitution, revised in 2007), which grants "preferential treatment to the Malays" (Lafaye de Micheaux 2012). This positive discrimination is sometimes extended, according to the institutions, to the Orang Asli, which represent approximately 178,000 people, or 0.76% of the peninsula’s population (2010 figure, Endicott 2016: 2). Indigenous peoples in Western Malaysia are traditionally divided into three main branches: Semang (or Negritos), Senoi and Proto-Malay (or Indigenous Malay). This classification, which is common today in academic literature as well as in administration and the general public, is based primarily on linguistic criteria: speakers of Austronesian languages on the one hand (or indigenous Malay: Jakun, Temuan, etc.) and on the other hand speakers of Austro-Asian languages: Semang and Senoi peoples. The tripartite division of Orang Asli groups into Negritos (Spanish for "little blacks"), Senoi and Aboriginal Malays developed from early 20th century European racial concepts, with the Negritos (short, dark-skinned, curly-haired people) being seen as the most primitive race, the Senoi (taller, lighter-skinned, wavy-haired people) being more advanced and the Aboriginal Malays (tall,