Juni: Happens all the time. They drink poison. My younger cousin killed herself. Her thoughts were susah, hard [to bear]. She wanted this guy, and she was quarrelling with her tnee’-mnang, siblings. Ngah Hari: There was a woman, the mnang, younger sister, of Bah Yusop [a half-Chinese man at Mncaak]. Both men and women kill themselves, usually by drinking rubber poison, pnglaay cbuur [pesticides or the acid used to “cure” rubber latex]. Juni: Bah Jasin from Kniik. A litaw [young man]. He drank rubber ­poison in the evening, after hanging out [drinking] all day with his buddies in [the lowland town of] Kampar. Worked for Guan Yu Co. It’s always mnaleeh or litaw [immature young women or men]. Lots of cases on the Cameron Highlands, Tapah Road, up as far as the 19th milestone, no further. They drink rook, poison [usually pesticides like Round-Up]. Ngah Hari: It’s because they are entered by a Satan [demon]. (Discussion at Pangkaad, Teiw R’eeis, 13 April 1992).

Headman: I don’t remember any names, but I have heard of Semai killing themselves. I guess they do it because susah i’ nuus, their hearts are troubled. Maybe because they’re afraid of maay [non-Semai people, strangers]. Saad: It’s a woman’s way when bi-dndaam, she’s treated with disrespect, by maay. Headman: [Or] she’s got a rival. Saad: The man goes tomcatting around and shames her. Sometimes a man’s wife sleeps around and he kills himself. It’s always a man-woman thing. Headman: That’s right. Saad: It’s a sign that [the person found the decision of] a bicaraa’[town meeting] trial unsatisfactory. Usually people use pnglaay cbuur, the poison you spray on rubber trees. I remember this man who drank pnglaay cbuur, just a little bit of it, when he was having trouble setting up a marriage with his girl friend [smiles wryly]. (Discussion at Pangkaad, Teiw R’eeis, 4 May 1992).

[Y]ou found a lot of suicide over love affairs. That was exactly what I expected based on the limited sample that I had. There is an incredible amount of anxiety surrounding the relationship between not only lovers, but also husbands and wives… I expect that the intense emotions generated by jealousy can exceed their capacities for control. Given the socialization at every level against the externalization of anger, I suspect that in at least some people it is introjected, resulting in the depressive state associated with sasoo [sasaaw] and in suicide. (C. Robarchek, pers. comm., 1992).

Introduction

[T]he attempt to understand the relation between emotion and culture lies in the ­ethnographic description of the emotional lives of persons in their social contexts… begin[ning] with a set of problems of social relation or existential meaning that cultural systems often appear to present in emotional terms. (Lutz & White 1986: 429)

2The focus is thus on 1) social conditions conducive to suicide and deep grief; 2) social construction of “depression”-like phenomena; and 3) applying psychiatric models of “depression” cross-culturally. Ethnographically, it is the first study of suicide among West Malaysian indigenes (Orang Asli) and fleshes out an earlier study of Semai psychoses (Dentan 1968). It also undercuts popular stereotypes of Semai as people whose famous peaceability stems from an absence of psychological distress (Domhoff 1985: 1-34).

Love and Grief

4The relationship between “learned helplessness” and grieving is complex. “Learned helplessness” predisposes people to depression, e.g., when rejected by a beloved ­person (Peterson et al. 1993: 169-170, 186-188, 240-243, 254-258). The centrality of mutual affection and dependency in traditional Semai imagination can also make the experience of loss particularly poignant (Dentan 2000b). Love and the need to foster each other are recurrent themes in speeches that community leaders make at the town meetings through which some west Semai communities resolve disputes (Robarchek 1979, 1997; see Gardner 2000: 218-219). In the old days, when the world outside Semai society was just a threat, loving each other was easier, perhaps. People made the things they needed. Few people had anything other people lacked. Men exchanged blowpipes, for example, not to get a better blowpipe, but just as a sign of friendship. Most exchanges worked that way.

Suicide Narratives

8Perforce, therefore, like my earlier work, this essay is an “interpretivist” and “ethnopsychological” treatment of mostly second-hand accounts of suicide and systematized delusions (Lutz & White 1986: 420; Dentan 1967, 1968; Nowak & Dentan 1984). Given the personal editing that affects word of mouth, it was sometimes hard to tell whether two accounts referred to two cases or two versions of the same case. But such case studies also have their strengths: “ethnographic writing has its greatest integrity when it stays close to the small slices of social interaction that provide its data…” (Brown 1991: 17). The case study method

occupies an accepted but still somewhat dubious methodological status. Questions are invariably raised by those who use universalistic methods of survey research and ecological analysis concerning the representative character of the cases selected. If they are not “representative” of the broader society demographically, economically, and politically, it is usually argued that no sustainable generalizations can be drawn from them… [But the cases] are bound by the presence… of a set of interrelated narrative frameworks for the interpretation of the meaning of violence. The cases, therefore, are most interesting not because they are representative, but because, though each is virtually unique…, they are linked by discourse (Brass 1997: 30-31).

This linkage shows up in Semai narratives, which I therefore quote in detail. Sometimes the empirical accuracy of these accounts is questionable. But they express how Semai say suicides normally happen and how they interpret them.

Semai Theories of Suicide

9“I’d be afraid to kill myself. I guess the only reason you’d do something as scary as that’d be your husband or wife was fooling around or you wanted to marry somebody and your father wouldn’t let you,” said Alang, a twenty-year-old woman from Tiduk, Mile 8. Killing oneself in Semai is prndaad luuy, from pr-daad, cause to be daad, limp and unconscious, dead. But Semai often say “kill one’s nyawa” or “discard one’s nyawa,” using from Malay nyawa, literally “breath,” by extension “life” in the narrow sense of not being dead (as opposed to being conscious or animated). Semai usage usually lacks the Malay connotations of “soul” or “divine emanation” except in narratives drawn from Malay originals (Rawski 1998; but see Endicott 1970: 47-93).

10Both in remote settlements like those along the Tluup and in marginal areas like Mncaak Semai usually attribute suicide to bereavement and grief. In 1991, two Waar men, an old headman and a younger man named Tambang, told me about Tma’, from Cba’ Tnlop, on the middle Waar:

• 8 Semai suicides prefer poisoning to other methods. Strictly, dook is poison from the sap of the ipoh (...)

He killed himself after his wife died. She fell sick, her arms and legs swelled up. He -jaap, cried, after she died [an unusual display of emotion]. They buried her. He dreamed of her after six days [the time one needs to “close” the grave ritually, so that the ghost, kcmooc, doesn’t come back to haunt one’s dreams. In the dreams] she wanted tobacco and matches [tokens of love]. She stayed on his mind, his sngii’, for a long time. [Tma’ began to] think she was still alive [he -sasaaw, suffered denial-based delusions, see below], went from settlement to settlement looking for her. He asked Tambang’s father to caaw, asperge, him [with magical neutralizing paste, to cool his body and drive off the demon, his wife’s kcmooc], saying his wife had been on his mind a long time. People said don’t [kill yourself], but finally, in 1976, he drank dook dart poison.8 The JHEOA said not to report the suicide to the police. He -pr-daad i’ nyawa’ pasal cruuk i’ sngii’ bi-rugi’ i knaah, killed his life because for [a] long [time] his mind obsessed over losing his wife.

12Similarly, no Semai I talked with attributed suicide to anger or to “anger turned inward” (Freud 1966: 45-47). Still, Semai say that breaches in interpersonal relations can cause physical injury (Dentan 2000b). And Semai suicide occurs in situations which can facilitate interpersonal violence. A Semai Methodist missionary from near Mncaak said that snabuuh knaah, suspicion of one’s wife, could lead to violence or ­suicide and that sexual “fooling around” was involved in most of the cases he knew about. A Waar River shaman said (Bei’ Aly, 29 Feb. 1992) : “If I suspected my wife [of fooling around], my sngii’ [mind] would be upset, I’d be angry. But if my sngii’ wasn’t upset, it’s her business, I’d just withdraw. The first time, I’d think it over: ‘Maybe it makes her happy.’ The second time, I’d -sa’guu’, go to the two of them and ask for gifts [a traditional response, which lets them show that they love and respect him and assuages his distress]. If I was still unhappy, I’d take them to the headman [for adjudication, perhaps at a public meeting, bicaraa’]. If it kept up, I’d get a divorce.”

14His wife said, if he was fooling around, she would keep her feelings to herself, not express them, though her sngii’, consciousness, was angry. Semai usually avoid expressing (prnhool, externalizing, exposing) emotions.

16Semai recall suicides when they want to be unkind. It makes them refrain, sometimes, from cruelty. They are not kinder than other peoples, but they understand spiritual wounds better, I think. At least, they understand them differently. To want to kill yourself, “you would have to feel alone,” they say. What would being alone, that badly, be like? You need to understand that for Semai the love of people close to them is all the security they have, the ground of any happiness they have.

The Effects of Contact with the Outside

18Deep grieving seems to result in suicide oftener among Semai exposed to outside influences than among Semai in isolated upland settlements. Cubun, a sixty-year-old woman from the middle Waar, said (1991): “[L]owland people kill themselves because susah i sngii’, their minds are troubled. If they quarrel with their wives, they kill themselves. We quarrel, we bl’aal, get angry, but the next day we’ve got over it.”

19The headman of a settlement a little farther upriver added: “I’ve heard lowland people do that [kill themselves] and people in Pahang, but I don’t know any names. In the lowlands it’s because susah i sngii’, like a woman can’t get a wife [sic], gets chewed out by her father and mother. They drink poison, I hear.”

21Similarly, two men and a woman from Mncaak knew about a mnaleeh at Mndang on the Perak flatlands. Her elder cousin confirmed their story: Communist terrorists had killed her father during the Emergency [an uprising in the 1950s]. A Mncaak man adopted her younger brother, but not her. Still, her cousin says she was a knoon prncaa’, foster child (lit., “fed child”). Any Semai orphan would be fostered. She worked “like a man” for Chinese, hoeing their cash crop taro garden, and used her wages to buy things, her father being dead. “Maybe she felt neglected,” speculates her cousin. But then, at 17, she got pregnant. Her mnah, parent’s younger brother, bawled her out because he -sl-siil, was embarrassed that she was pregnant and unmarried, and by a Chinese man at that. The girl harangued (-lees) him [about lecturing her]. She came home from work one day, bathed, went to the Wednesday market, bought herself shoes and clothes, came home and drank pnglaay cbuur, “rubber poison,” in this case the powerful pesticide Round-Up [banned in the United States].

Grieving, Melancholy, and Delusional Disorder (snasaaw)

*bereavement… : It is usual for survivors to go through a period of grief. Grief may be ­expressed physically (by a lack of energy), cognitively (through confusion and disbelief), emotionally (with guilt and depression) and behaviorally…; *delusional disorder: a psychotic disorder which is not part of a schizophrenic diagnosis, yet is also characterized by the presence of one or more delusions…; *denial: a defense mechanism in which a person may deny some aspect of reality. For example, someone who cannot come to terms with the death of a loved one may still talk to them, set a place at the table for them and even wash and iron their clothes (Cardwell 1996: 30, 67, 68).

The intense love that afflicts Semai adolescents or parents is dangerous in other ways. Infatuation comes easily, and can lead to pain. For instance, in 1962 an American woman once arrived to visit us. The people put her up in the sleeping compartment of Cong, a teenaged litaw (the term refers to boys and men who are sexually mature but usually childless and always irresponsible). Cong fell desperately in love with her. After she left, he would come over to our house and sleep on our floor, day and night. He dreamed of her, often, back in the Marketplace, as Semai then called the society downriver. He lost his appetite and cheery good nature. It took him a month or two to recover. One of his neighbors, Bungsu’, the shaman, jilted and also afflicted with recurrent dreams of his beloved, managed to recover after a dream in which she gave him a melody with which to summon her headsoul during shamanic seances. Her current man had her body, he said, but Bungsu’ had her headsoul (Dentan 1979: 85). But some people do not cope.

Semai Accounts of Denial Delusional Disorder

23S(n]asaaw is a disease of the sngii’, mind, probably caused by demons, nyanii’. It begins with susah nuus, troubled heart, and does not affect children. The cause is desertion or rejection: the death of one’s beloved child, the death or unfaithfulness of a spouse or lover, the violent death of a beloved relative. Sufferers become abstracted. The quality of their work deteriorates. Since traditional Semai tasks require little attention, work provides no relief. Indeed, walking or hauling water or cutting wood seem to “trouble the heart” even more.

25I suspect this generalized description is affected by the example of a Mncaak woman, whom I have known since 1963, when she was 32. She was a slim silent woman with a pleasant smile, a hollow-cheeked long face, and loose unkempt straight black hair that hung over her shoulders. Sometimes she carried a Coca-Cola bottle around in a sarong-sling around her neck and across her chest, the way you carry a baby. Her husband had deserted her, and she had evolved a loving fantasy family to take his place.

26Two people from Ayer Denak in the Perak lowlands told me a similar story about a man, Panda’, about forty years old in 1963, whose wife died of illness when Panda’ was still a litaw, young man, in his early twenties:

• 16 Probably because the place was so alien and because Western-style psychiatric hospitals in Malaysia (...)

Panda’ transferred all his love for his wife to his little boy. He took the boy with him wherever he went and lived alone with his child. At the age of four, the little boy died. Panda’ refused to leave his house, though most people would have moved in with kinsmen or friends. He was waiting for the demon, nyanii’, which had killed his child, he said, so that he could attack it. He began to hear the little boy’s voice but, although he would search the house, he could not at first find the child. He cooked for the boy and hauled water for him, when he heard the child ask him to. He finally made a doll out of cloth, as Semai do for their children. The voice he heard, he said, came from this doll-child. Panda’ tells his imaginary little boy that he couldn’t have any cookies, then say Agoo’ jaap, “Don’t fret,” and pretends to feed the doll cookies, although eventually he will eat the cookies himself. He carries on conversations with the doll-child, which, like the Mncaak woman, he carries around in a sling. Also like her, he rarely enters other people’s houses to socialize. He thinks they are staring at his penis. Still, he never bothers other people [Dentan 1968: 149-151]. He is a good fisherman and has an income from his father’s rubber plantation. He spent a couple of years at the Tanjung Rambutan psychiatric hospital, without showing any improvement.16

27In 1963, Mncaak people said the mother of an elder, in her sixties, would -sasaaw, especially during the full moon. I noticed that she didn’t join in conversation much. People rarely talked to her, perhaps because she was pretty deaf. Her clothes were ragged, her movements slow and apparently painful. People said she often wept and wailed; that she wandered around the settlement at night and then returned home where she would sit weeping. One man thought a rejected lover might have said a Malay curse to make her -sasaaw. Mostly women were affected by snasaaw, he said, probably because, among Semai, only men knew the Malay black arts. That is, in this case, bereavement is only an indirect cause of snasaaw.

28He knew of only one other case, but I had heard of several similar ones on the River Tluup in Pahang the year before. Mrlooh, a young man just emerging from litaw status, told of a Temiar woman who married a Semai man and eventually fled back to her people in the adjacent state: “Her two children had left her, one to join the Senoi Praak [a parapolice unit for indigenous peoples like Semai and Temiar, with Malay officers], one to attend Malay boarding school. Every day she wept wordlessly, except to say that her children were dead, cut up with machetes or thrown into jail. She would chase her husband with a machete or pestle, cursing him or telling him to find the children’s graves or accusing him (wrongly) of sleeping around; and then she would burst into tears. She was sure that people in his settlement wanted to beat her up.”

29Mrlooh’s elder brother knew of another case: “After her husband died during the British ‘regroupment’ of Semai around a Jungle Fort, a mature woman, in her fifties, became papaa’. She would sit at her door waiting for people to pass by, and then pull up her sarong, exposing her genitals, and cry, ‘Look! Look!’ Her children, who looked after her, were greatly embarrassed but couldn’t stop her. She never left the house, even to defecate or urinate, and never said anything but ‘Look! Look!’”

30These women were papaa’, said Mrlooh, like the unmarried mnaleeh of around twenty-five, who would sit in a corner with folded arms, unspeaking. She refused food when people tried to give it to her but would steal it, so they would tell her not to come into their houses. The word papaa’ is from Sanskrit “unfortunate” or “destitute,” Malay papa (e.g., Kasimin 1991: 67). For Semai it has bad connotations, mostly involving aberrant sexual behavior, especially incest (Dentan 1968). Papaa’ people will have sex with their biological parents. The affliction needn’t involve emotional disconnection, though it often does. For example, Mrlooh said that his mother-in-law, a thin widow with a sharp face and tattooed forehead (two chevrons on a vertical line) became papaa’ whenever she fell sick, e.g., with headaches, coughs or malaria: “She stares at the hearth fire a while, then lets her sarong fall, exposing her vulva. She sits by the fire singing to herself, swaying and clapping as if dancing. After the fire goes out, she sneaks over to sleeping people, men or women, and embraces them, doesn’t care about incest taboos. When the people wake up, they run away. But normally she’s okay, a productive member of the community. The shamans held some seances for her. No use.” Although Mrlooh did not attribute her behavior to being widowed, trying to become intimate with sleeping people would be in line with felt bereavement.

Discussion

Experiencing Grief

32Talking about how other people experience emotion is tricky (Kleinman 1995; Kleinman & Good 1985; Lutz & White 1986). Translating -jaap is difficult; -ryaak, even harder. In many parts of the world, people seem to experience distress as a physical disorder, a process called “somatization” (e.g., Kleinman 1995: 101-119). Moreover, the connection between such personal pain and the social or political circumstances which affect sufferers makes it possible to treat such somatized suffering as a form of “resistance” to oppression. The question becomes whether people actually “feel emotions” like grief or simply experience physical distress.

33This problem stems from the Western Cartesian dichotomy between “mental” and “physical” phenomena (Lutz & White 1986: 406-407), a distinction less salient in Semai thought. For instance, although the core meaning of -jaap is behavioral, people use it when the subject is neither weeping nor wailing. Semai taboos, to take a more complex example, seem to rest on notions of the results of disrespect. These notions resemble Western notions of “stress,” in which “mental,” “social,” and “physical” factors interact (Dentan 1979: 55-64; 2000b). Stress empirically does raise the risk of deleterious physical changes. Saying that people treated with disrespect may be attacked by a tiger is one way of talking about this increased “danger to one’s ­physical and psychological self” (Lutz & White 1986: 427). But to say that Semai experience disrespect as being attacked by a tiger would go far beyond the evidence, confusing discourse with reality, the map with the terrain.

34Semai do talk about emotions in the abstract, although not in contrast with ­physical feelings. (What Semai refrain from discussing is their personal feelings.) The word ­sra’ngii’, “be affected by mental states,” from sngii’, “will, mind, feeling, consciousness, cognition” (Dentan 1979: 82), embraces most “mental” phenomena. “Heart” is the metaphor for sngii’, its location in the body. Luka’ sngii’, “mental wounds,” result from disrespect (Dentan 2000b). How is this terminology different from talking about “psychic trauma”? Southeast Asians in general seem not to “somatize” feelings as much as some other peoples (Pfeiffer 1968, Beiser 1985), like white Anglophone American men who apocryphally don’t know whether they are angry or have a headache. In the Semai case, suicide “somatizes” grief but only to eliminate it. So does the systematic denial in some cases of snasaaw. As far as feeling “mental” pain goes, Semai do not strike me as very different from the Americans I know, although the occasions for pain differ.

Grieving and “Depression”

35A related question is how Semai snasaaw resembles what psychiatrists used to call “depression.” It does fit a stripped-down definition: “the name given to behaviors that result from the loss of major sources of reinforcement… beyond the coping ­ability of the individual” (Akiskal & McKinney 1973, cited in Schieffelin 1985: 116).

36But the fit requires stripping away “culture specific” phrases. Semai deny that they reward grieving with “attention and sympathy.” Even snasaaw reaps benign neglect (Dentan 1968), not the “rewards of the sick role” other than a session or two of shamanic treatment.

37Moreover, although the cases of grieving described here seem extravagant to me, Semai never indicated that they would judge whether other people’s emotions were “appropriate.” How you feel is a private matter, not up for judgment; and almost all Semai feel that bereavement, like any disruption of social ties, can be catastrophic (Dentan 2000b). While snasaaw may involve a “disorder of the interpretive process” (Good et al. 1985: 381), the grief which it relieves is appropriate in Semai terms.

38Finally, although, cognitively, Semai “learned helplessness” shares many characteristics with “depression,” it lacks the distinctive ones: “thinking in an all-or-nothing manner,” “focus on the negative in the environment and… discount of the positive” and “overgeneralization and selective abstraction” (Good et al. 1985: 381-382). Even snasaaw fits rather badly with the usual definitions (Cardwell 1996: 69).

Traditional Suicide and Snasaaw

39These narratives suggest a “culturally normative dimension” to how Semai should respond under the social circumstance of bereavement. Bereavement “provide[s] an opportunity, a compulsion, and a program for feeling that way” (Schieffelin 1985: 106). Whether Semai reluctance to talk about feelings also leads to suicide and snasaaw is moot.

41I suspect this personal developmental trauma feeds into the historically based “learned helplessness” perpetuated by Semai abasement in a society in which more than four out of five of them remain termiskin, the poorest of the poor (Dentan 1997; Nicholas 2000: 17-39). “Learned helplessness” makes Semai particularly vulnerable to deep grieving after bereavement or rejection (Peterson et al. 1993: 186-188; Williams 1997: 60-64, 148-149). The chance one might “take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them” must seem as exotic to Semai as it did to Hamlet when he was contemplating suicide. But everywhere people trying to understand what betrayal or abandonment means use the transition from infancy to childhood as an intellectual and emotional (“oretic”) model for the adult experiences which recall that first bereavement: “sometimes I feel just like a motherless child.”

42People sometimes forget that, besides his three sociocentric categories of suicide, Durkheim (1951: 63-67) recognized four sorts of egocentric psychiatric suicide. Of these, one, “melancholy suicide,” would embrace traditional Semai suicides and snasaaw. In Durkheim’s terms, traditional Semai suicide was “egoistic” in the sense that distressed people did not take advantage of the remedies for personal pain which the society offered, some of which appear in the narratives above – like taking ­another partner, calling for bicaraa’ or demanding gifts to soothe personal distress (Dentan 2000b). This felt isolation from nurturant others was the main reason for the suicide. The relatively rare suicides due to slniil, shame (see note 12) are not different in kind: “Shame… begins… very early… Infants show the precursors to shame – physical responses such as painful blushing and “heat” – when their vocalizations for parental response or gestures for recognition go unacknowledged… I have come to believe – following Judy Jordan, my colleague at Harvard Medical School – that shame can also be described as the feeling state that accompanies an emotional disconnection” (Pollack 1998: 32).

43Emotional disconnection against one’s desire is traditionally dangerous for Semai. Any unassuaged desire, they say, threatens one’s physical health, even one’s survival (Dentan 2000b). But their stress on autonomy means that there is nothing that anyone else can do to assuage the pain of emotional disconnection. Autonomy and learned helplessness reinforce each other. Adult Semai rarely comfort each other (Dentan 1979: 64). “You feel grief, but it isn’t real grief. For you, it has to be like a movie.” There is no sense of being complicitous in the disconnection. People in distress must seek their own relief.

44Euroamerican adults are more inured to such emotional disconnections and felt betrayals than Semai adults are (Pollack 1998). Many pressures make Semai cling together: geography, xenophobia, an economic system based on sharing and reciprocity, public discourse that stresses loving each other. Conversely, many pressures pull Euroamericans apart: geographical mobility, often continental homelands, an ­economic system based on scattered opportunities for individual profit, a public discourse that stresses individual striving and reward.

“Modern” Suicides: A Social Psychological View

46More specifically, the apparent difference in suicide rates between traditional and “modern” Semai, which informants described and which seem to appear in these incomplete data, may connect with Semai success at assimilating to Malaysian lifestyles (see Baer 1999: 119). In Durkheim’s terms, the situation becomes “anomic”: there are no institutions from which distressed abandoned individuals can confidently seek help. Alienation from traditional institutions also exacerbates “learned helplessness” (Peterson et al. 1993: 169-170, 240-243). So it is not surprising that suicide seems commonest among Semai on the margins of their heartland, i.e., on the Perak flatlands and along the Tapah Road.

47A related factor may be increasing disparity between the genders. Among traditional Semai the division of labor by gender was vague and optional: “Unlike more advanced peoples there is no really clear cut distinction between male and female activities other than obvious ones such as nursing babies but even then I have seen fathers with a nursing bottle. Once I lived in a Semai ladang [settlement] for a month and tried to note down every day what tasks were done by men and what by women but I found so many tasks shared that my observations were relatively valueless” (Williams-Hunt 1952: 51; his punctuation).

49The disjunction between the genders which “modernizing” brings seems as disruptive as the increased patriarchy. Young lowland Semai man now boast of being knoon kraal, “manchildren,” i.e., fearless and pugnacious, not traditional Semai values (Dentan 1999a). Against their parents’ express wishes, Semai boys occasionally try to fight back against Malay and Chinese bullies at school. By 1990, older lowland men were routinely eating apart from women and children, who clustered in the kitchen and sometimes even entered the houses by the back door. Unlike Tamil or Chinese girls, Semai schoolgirls often had to wear Malay/Arab style clothing and curb their normal witty ebullience to conform with Muslim ideas of feminine modesty (Dentan 2000c, 2000d). There seems to be an upsurge in transvestism among litaw and mnaleeh, and in concomitant homophobia (which I had never encountered before) among those not affected (for the relationship between these phenomena and patriarchy, see Erchak & Rosenfeld 1994).

50More concretely, on the Perak plains and along the road between the town of Tapah in Perak and the Cameron Highlands, weddings, jknuk, have become much more elaborate and expensive than in the old days, involving many kinsmen as contributors (see Dentan 1979: 73-76). The expense makes fathers reluctant to allow their daughters to marry lovers in the old-fashioned casual way and gives them the economic power to prevent marriages of which they disapprove. Women nowadays supposed to be chaste before marriage, in contrast to traditional Semai free love. Questions of legitimacy become important, and some people nowadays treat their foster children worse than their own biological children. The importance of having a flashy wedding – instead of a jknuk coo’, “dog wedding” – grows. This situation multiplies the occasions on which shame is an appropriate emotion for men: when the woman for whom a man is “responsible” gets pregnant, when a man’s wife is “fooling around.” It also increases the authority of parents, especially fathers, to coerce and frustrate their children, in order to avoid shame. Parental or paternal refusal to support a wedding is a novel occasion for suicide among dependent children of either sex. It would have been unthinkable among Semai on the Tluup in the 1960s. Thus empowering fathers increases potential obstacles to the relationships litaw and mnaleeh can develop and thereby increases the risk of bereavement.

Conclusion

51Semai expect that a case of suicide or snasaaw will involve losing beloved people. That is what they imagine happens, even if they don’t know the details. The depth of the love which binds Semai together, which “integrates” them in Durkheim’s terms (1951: 208), creates the context of traditional Semai suicide. The failure of these ties as Semai “modernize” leads to what he would call “anomic suicide” (Bohannan 1960: 8-10). In most Semai accounts of suicide the narrator either knows or imagines that somehow the bonds of love have been broken. Among a people who have no reason to think that things are going to get better, who have learned helplessness, such emotional disconnection can drive one mad, or to suicide.

52Increasing peaceful contact with the modern state and Malay culture introduces new stresses: familial patriarchy, enacted in the need for parental consent to defray the expenses of the conspicuous consumption required by Malay-style weddings; isolation from one’s family in boarding schools or away at jobs supervised by strangers who screw you and don’t love you; regroupment with strangers, whom you don’t love and with whom you must compete for inadequate resources. As the community collapses, the loneliness of traditional personal autonomy degenerates into the utter loneliness of capitalist individualism. Will anyone ever love you? No. Will things ever get better? No. Why live?