The Malay-language term used for indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, “Orang Asli”, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by various combinations of hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and trading forest products. By the end of the century, logging, economic development projects such as oil palm plantations, and resettlement programmes have displaced many Orang Asli communities and disrupted long-established social and cultural practices.


The chapters in the present volume provide a comprehensive survey of current understandings of Malaysia’s Orang Asli communities, covering their origins and history, cultural similarities and differences, and they ways they are responding to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing world. The authors, a distinguished group of Malaysian (including Orang Asli) and international scholars with expertise in anthropology, archaeology, biology, education, therapy, geography and law, also show the importance of Orang Asli studies for the anthropological understanding of small-scale indigenous societies in general.

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.

This study challenges the depiction of the Orang Asli as naïve innocents, unwittingly manipulated by outsiders for their own purposes. Heavily outnumbered, they looked to their own resources to survive, in the face of relocation, conscription, random bombings, and haphazard killing. Leary argues that they were shrewd enough to recognize the winning side and backed their judgment with force where necessary.

Violence and the Dream People is an important study of a much neglected facet of the Malayan Emergency and of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula.