Bad Day at Bukit Pekan

Abstract

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.