Tribal cosmopolitans : Malaysia's Semai tribe and the Bahá'í Faith

Abstract

The Semai are the largest of the 18 indigenous tribes, collectively known as “Orang Asli”, who inhabit the forest fringes and foothills of West Malaysia. Beginning in the 1960s, they became popularized by anthropologists as a non-violent people, whose culture had been shaped by an explicit orientation around solidarity and egalitarianism, even in the face of centuries of slavery, and continued systemic oppression by the state. Beginning in the 1960s, thousands of Semai came to identify as members of the Bahá'í Faith, a new world religion that had only just arrived on the shores of Malaya. The Bahá'í Faith emerged in the late 1800s in Iran, and its journey to the Semai is the result of the travels and encounters of cosmopolitan individuals, through India, Japan, and Singapore, finally arriving in colonial Malaya, before making its way to the Semai shortly after Malayan independence. Structurally, the religion is organized around world citizenship through elected councils at the local, national and global levels, and Semai Bahá'ís continue to participate in this process today. This study is about the encounter between the Bahá'í Faith and the Semai. Why was this unknown religion deemed pertinent to the Semai at the time, and how has its practice and relevance evolved in the 50 years since? Theoretically, I use the term “tribal cosmopolitanism” to anchor this encounter. In contrast to globalization, recent critical debates surrounding cosmopolitanism have highlighted the construction of “third cultures” as an inner, reflective response to encounters with Others. This encounter is one such example, but it is also directly relevant to the explicit Bahá'í teaching of global citizenship, summarized by the statement that “the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens”. This study is thus a conscious attempt to bridge the gap in the literature on cosmopolitanism, which tends to distinguish between “philosophical” and “lived” streams of cosmopolitanism. The former highlights normative ideals; the latter theorizes cosmopolitan subjectivities in the lived realities of people. This study transcends this gap: It is an empirical case of a tribal community consciously attempting to live according to a normative cosmopolitan ideal. The thesis is based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a network of Semai villages, and informed by over ten years of participation within Bahá'í communities across Asia. This study is rooted in an explicitly collaborative methodology, and the issues highlighted in the different chapters included in this thesis, ranging from changes in religious practices to land conflicts, were determined through an ongoing consultative process with collaborators ranging from individuals, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, as well as elected Bahá'í institutions at the local, national and global levels. This thesis is thus designed as both a contribution to the Bahá'í community’s emic discourses as well as to the broader academic community, incorporating debates spanning the anthropology of development, the anthropology of religion as well as the anthropology of wellbeing.