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Bad Day at Bukit Pekan
Author(s) -
Dentan Robert Knox
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1995.97.2.02a00020
Subject(s) - possession (linguistics) , storytelling , history , reputation , state (computer science) , narrative , political science , art , literature , law , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , algorithm
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 recounted with relish, while first‐person accounts of violent acts are descriptively revealing but emotionally neutral.