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Asian Cultural Traditions
by Carolyn Brown Heinz
Department of Anthropology
(Waveland Press, 1999; 417 pages; $21.95, paperback)

The following excerpt is from Chapter 4, "Tribal Peoples," where Heinz discusses the collective identities of tribe, state, and ethnic group.

Throughout Asia are many people living on the margins of nation-states who are dominated by groups ethnically different from themselves. Among these groups are the Santals and Mundas in India, the Akha and Hmong in Thailand, the Tana Toraja and Dayaks in Indonesia, the Kachin and Karen of Burma, and the Dai and Miao of China. These peoples have been captured by more powerful ethnic groups in the process of state building and boundary drawing. They are viewed as problematic in various ways by the nations that have captured them. Tribal people may be viewed as impediments to full national integration because they retain non-normative customs, languages, and adaptations. Their citizenship may be in doubt if they maintain strong connections with similar communities across national borders, or if their swidden-style cultivation or pastoral nomadism require them to move their villages frequently. They may be viewed as insufficiently civilized (at worst, they are "wild" or "living fossils"), requiring expensive remedial action on the part of the majority society. Yet, when viewed as indigenous peoples whose present cultures somehow preserve the ancient past, their claims to territory and rights may be seen to have some moral ground. Every modern state has devised policies to deal with these "tribals" or "minorities," and the targeted groups have themselves responded in interesting ways to the kinds of attention, definitions, and policies set by central governments.

Identification of such groups is filled with political difficulties. First, minorities are not necessarily tribal people. The Chinese are a minority in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, yet they are by no means tribal, nor are the Indians in Singapore and Malaysia or the Vietnamese in Cambodia. On the other hand, what is a tribe? A century of anthropological research has not resulted in satisfactory concepts, far less consensus, for identifying a tribe. Tribes tend to be defined by what they are not: they are not states.

"A tribe is an animal without a central regulative system," wrote Marshall Sahlins (1968) in a famous attempt to define and describe a particular kind of social formation, the tribe. What he meant by that is that the tribe is a simpler system than the state, which has centralized political control and a monopoly on the use of force, yet the tribe is more complex than simple hunter-gatherer bands...

Further difficulties in identifying tribal groups arise when governments for one reason or another are trying to suppress consciousness of ethnic difference. Burma, for instance, which has enormous, well-organized, and territorially based ethnic groups in a state of more or less perpetual armed conflict, has deliberately not taken an accurate census since the last one done by the British back in 1931 (Smith 1995). In its 1970 census Malaysia gave total "aboriginal" population of seventy thousand for peninsular Malaysia, but since then the category has mysteriously disappeared, and the Orang Asli have been redefined as Malay. Why? The New Economic Policy grants constitutional preference to indigenous Malays over Chinese and Indians. There can, by definition, be no group more indigenous than the Malays.

Other nations, intent on clarifying once and for all exactly who is from what tribe or ethnic group in an effort to rationalize government and to administer "civilizing" or "uplifting" programs, have overclarified to the point of creating identities that never exactly existed before. China, in a concerted effort of social science-cum-bureaucratic research, has determined there are exactly fifty-six ethnic groups (minzu), no more and no less, including the Han, who are 93 percent of the population, or 1.11 billion people. Different rules apply to the minority minzu than to the Han; the one-child policy, for example, does not apply to them, and they have been granted a form of regional autonomy under the 1984 Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities.

India has identified more than two hundred tribes speaking one hundred languages scattered throughout the subcontinent. These are registered as "Scheduled Tribes" (there is also a list of "Scheduled Castes") who are deemed to need protection and uplift. Perhaps they benefit from the many laws intended to protect and assist them, such as India's version of affirmative action (actually a quota system) that reserves seats in national and state legislatures and spaces in universities for them, but most of these advantages prove to be better on paper than in reality. The vast majority of Scheduled Tribes are among the poorest 30 percent of the Indian population (Burger 1987).

In the 1980s and 1990s, a new word has begun to be applied to tribal peoples: "indigenous." Indigenous refers to the original population of a territory, as the Native Americans are the indigenous people of the United States. The term began to be used in the late 1950s when the International Labour Organization adopted a treaty intended to protect "indigenous and tribal" populations (ILO Convention 107). The term made good sense where first applied, such as in North America and the Amazon Basin, where the indigenous people have been there for ten or twelve thousand years, while the colonizing people have been there for a mere two hundred. It seems a little less illuminating when applied to Asia, however. The Orang Asli may have been in Malaysia for ten thousand years, but the Malays have been there for four or five thousand. The Malay term for themselves, bumiputera, means "sons of the soil." Who is not "indigenous" in Asia?

However, the term is likely to be with us for a long while, since it is becoming the term of choice in a number of international institutions such as the World Council of Indigenous People and the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous People, and also because minority groups in Asia are becoming politically mobilized around the term.

These examples show the conceptual difficulties and the political stakes for "minorities," "tribes," or "indigenous people," however they are labeled.