ABSTRACT
It is very seldom that Orang Asli, the aboriginal people of Malaysia, are the object of media attention. They become newsworthy only when there are reports, usually based on misconceptions or myths, about their cultural practices, deemed bizarre or exotic by the public at large, or when dignitaries visit one of their villages or when something sensational involving Orang Asli happens. In April 1993, the event of a homicide in an Orang Asli settlement achieved media prominence by making it to the front page of most of the national newspapers in the country. As in the above extract from one of the national dailies, we are told that three people were killed allegedly by a group of Orang Asli near the town of Jeli in Kelantan, close to the MalaysianThai border. The homicide victims were Malays, members of Malaysia’s dominant ethnic group. This event, which has come to been known as ‘the Jeli incident’, was of more than special interest to me because the Orang Asli men came from the village, Sungai Rual (shortened to Rual hereafter), where I have carried out anthropological research since 1976 and because homicidal conflict is virtually unheard of in the community I studied. The Orang Asli of Rual belong to an ethnolinguistic group called the Semang or Negritos. I prefer calling them Menraq, a word meaning human or people in most of the languages spoken in the Rual settlement and it is a term that Rual people use to refer to themselves.1
