Who gets to be called indigenous, and why?

Geoffrey Benjamin
Senior Associate
Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS)
College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore 639798
ben_geo@ethnographica.sg

Full text, slightly revised, of the keynote address (10 April 2015) at
International Conference on Access to Justice for Indigenous Peoples
Centre for Malaysian Indigenous Studies (CMIS) and Faculty of Law
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, 911 April 2015

Geoffrey Benjamin, 2015

Introduction
Given that I have no background in legal studies, I feel that I should first justify accepting the organisers
kind invitation to address this primarily legal conference.1
First, with regard to Malaysia in particular, I have been researching Orang Asli (especially Temiar)
society, culture and languages for over half a century, during which time I have continued to study and
report on their changing life-circumstances.2 Second, I have strong sociological interest in the neglected
question of the contrast between indigeny and exogeny as the underlying dimension of all social
formations. Last, and directly relevant to the aims of this conference, I recently contributed a chapter
(Benjamin in press a) on the more general topic of Indigenous peoples to the Routledge Handbook of
Asian Law. My talk today is based on that chapter.
A key point arising from my investigations is the following: if the justice mentioned in the title of this
conference is to be achieved, it will be essential to draw a distinction between specifically tribal or posttribal circumstances and the much more general circumstance of being indigenous, in the several often
conflicting senses of the term. I hope what I say here will clarify this assertion. A second point is the need
to distinguish between place-linked indigeny and all other forms of indigenousness. Tribality and indigeny
typically co-occur, but they need to be examined separately when seeking to gain a better understanding.

Indigenous is multiply ambiguous

At first glance, the meaning of the word indigenous might seem obvious. Most Malaysians, I suspect,
would recognise just which populations are the intended focus of the Centre for Malaysian Indigenous
Studies at the University of Malaya. However, closer examination of the way in which the word
indigenous is actually used around the world shows that in practice it is multiply ambiguous. Some of its
usages even contradict some of its other usages, as I show later.
What then are the various meanings of indigenous as actually employed? Currently, the word is used
as a label for at least six distinct social circumstances even though they differ, sometimes profoundly.
Since each of these circumstances engenders its own political and legal consequences, they are clearly not
all indigenous in the same sense or to the same extent. It is therefore preferable not to place them under a
single undifferentiated label. This is especially important whenever the concept indigenous people is the
object of judicial deliberations, as is currently the case in Malaysia and elsewhere. A more refined
terminology is therefore desirable. My proposed solution requires employing the words indigenous and
tribal in carefully specified ways, along with the less familiar terms indigeny, indigenism and
endogenous.
One term that is best avoided is indigeneity, a newly coined word that lumps together under a single
portmanteau label the very different circumstances listed below. Instead, as a more neutral cover-term, I
suggest the word indigenousness, which has an older history than the recently coined indigeneity.
The varieties of indigenousness
To proceed further, therefore, we need to look more closely at the question raised in my title, Who gets to
be called indigenous? My provisional answers would include the following set of distinctions:
1) Those whose familial ancestors have always, so far as is known, inhabited the same specific
places that their present-day descendants still live in. I employ the term indigeny to label the
distinctive cultural consequences of this circumstance.
2) Those who have resisted incorporation into centralised states by organising themselves into
autonomous segmentary social formations. This circumstance, for Southeast Asia especially, is
1. I am grateful to Professor Ramy Bulan and Dr Rusaslina Idrus for inviting me to present this keynote address.
2. My recent book on the Temiars (Benjamin 2014a) reports on a half-century (and more) of cultural and social change among
one Orang Asli population.

3)

4)

5)

6)

more correctly labelled tribal or tribality.3 The form post-tribal is also useful, in relation to
the rapid socio-economic changes experienced by such populations.
Those claiming protection of traditional land-rights that have been denied to them in the modern
political sphere. This is currently the most widespread self-ascribed use of the label indigenous,
and is the primary intended sense of the term at this conference. (The label native as used
officially in Sabah and Sarawak overlaps with this usage.)
Those regarded as having arrived earliest into a territory, however defined, that later also came to
be inhabited by populations regarded as originating elsewhere. This is not a homogeneous
category, and such populations cannot be described simply as indigenous, largely because of the
varying time-depths that would have to be taken into account. The term aboriginal is employed
in this sense in Australia and Canada, and it was formerly employed in Peninsular Malaysia in
relation to the populations now known as Orang Asli original people.4
Those who are regarded as members of the self-declared definitive founding population of a
national political tradition. This is discussed below as an example of indigenism, which
corresponds to one of the primary meanings of the Malaysian term bumiputera son of the soil.
Those who are regarded as the ancient originators of a distinctively named archaeological
tradition. To avoid confusion with present-day usages of indigenous or with present-day
populations, which is always difficult to determine, such traditions (not peoples) are better
referred to as endogenous.

As stated in my opening remarks, there are two main reasons for distinguishing between these different
kinds of indigenousness. First, the common practice of subsuming tribal circumstances completely under
the term indigenous misrecognises its peculiar status as a distinctive societal pattern. Second, there is a
fundamental difference between true place-based indigeny and all other forms of indigenousness. In
taking a closer look at these two issues, I start with the distinctive social character of tribality, which is too
often mistakenly thought of merely as the left-behind remnant of social evolution.

Tribality
As several recent publications have shown,5 the adjective tribal (at least in reference to the
ethnographically and reported Southeast Asian populations) identifies uncentralised, segmentary,
culturally and autonomous formations, historically organised to resist incorporation by the state, whether
premodern or modern, which they have wanted to keep off their backs. In other words, tribality as
currently understood arose out of a millennia-old dissimilatory process that led to the emergence of the
three distinct but mutually defining pre-modern forms of sociality: rulers, peasants and tribespeople.6 In
premodern times, therefore, tribality meant resisting peasantisation for peasants are people who,
whether they like it or not, have been incorporated into the state. All ethnographically reported tribal
populations, in Asia especially, therefore emerged as active responses to the state, not as passive or
primordial antecedents to it. The character of tribal society has been shaped by the proximity of the state:
3. Note the adjectival usage: tribal, not tribe(s). Anthropologists recognise that tribes as discrete bounded social units
hardly ever occur in reality. But social formations organised on a segmentary tribal (the adjective) basis certainly have
existed in many parts of Asia, and continue to do so. For anthropological critiques of the concept of tribe see Fried (1966)
and Godelier (1977).
4. Public discussion of this issue in Southeast Asia, and Malaysia especially, frequently makes use of outdated migratory-wave
theories. (See footnote 12 for an example.)
5. For Southeast Asia, these include Zawawi (1995), Benjamin (2002), Scott (2009), Persoon (2009) and Wawrinec (2010).
6. From a sociological point of view, rulers and their accomplices placed themselves in control. Peasants lives were controlled
by agencies of the state, which they provisioned (often under force) in exchange for a little reflected cultural and religious
glory but no counter-control, while continuing to support themselves through their own family-based subsistence activities.
Tribespeople, on the other hand, resisted the state and its rulers by organising themselves in a segmentary (tribal) manner
and retaining distinctive cultural frameworks.

tribespeople have known what they were doing, and were familiar with their non-tribal neighbours
alternative ways of life. In their drive for autonomy, they have maintained distinctive languages, cultural
practices, religions and subsistence modes, rather than accepting more widespread majority ways. The
tribal/peasant/ruler framework is therefore not a ranked evolutionary series constituted of supposedly
different types of people, but the consequence of otherwise similar people reacting in different ways to
ever-shifting political circumstances.7
Decolonisation and modernisation, mostly following the Second World War, led to the absorption of
the premodern polities into a much smaller number of modern nation-states. This has led to a progressive
dissolution of the ruler/peasant/tribespeople distinctions in favour of a more uniform citizen status, at
least in de jure terms. Consequently, it has become increasingly difficult for either peasants or
tribespeople to maintain true place-linked indigeny. Modern states impose the hegemony of administrative
and financial capitals over other places within their territories. They therefore seek to destroy indigenybased forms of consociation, typically by breaking the linkage to specific places through enforced
population movements euphemistically described as resettlement or relocation.8

Tribespeople and peasants as indigenes

Most tribespeople are indigenous in the indigeny sense to the particular places they inhabit.9 But so also
are many state-dominated peasants. In Asia, moreover, the label indigenous is often applied in some of
its wider senses to the overwhelming majority of the regions inhabitants, regardless of their specific
social circumstances. Consequently, the distinction between true place-linked indigenes and the dominant
population is less clear in Asia than in other parts of the world. Being indigenous in the tribal or peasant
sense of the term therefore often has less to do with purportedly distinct origins than with processes of
deliberate dissimilation between different patterns of social and cultural organisation within the same
overall framework. Place-linked tribespeople and peasants therefore often find themselves in the same
boat with regard to the modern state and its greed for land.10
Nevertheless, the circumstances of tribespeople and peasants differ significantly in certain key
respects, especially under modernisation. The widespread use of the word indigenous as a synonym for
tribal overrides this distinction, and generates conceptual and legal problems. The confusion this has
generated is exhibited in the statements of the two inter-governmental bodies most closely involved in this
issue, namely the United Nations and the International Labour Organization. The United Nations declared
1993 as the International Year of Indigenous Peoples (Waterson 1993), which they followed by adopting
the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 and hosting a further World Conference on
Indigenous Peoples in 2014 (United Nations 2014). No mention of tribal peoples is made in these
proceedings, nor is any unambiguous definition offered of the term indigenous peoples. However, the

7. There has also been movement in and out of tribality by individuals and families, mostly in the majority direction through
peasantisation but also in the opposite direction through secondary tribalisation. Some secondarily tribal populations, such as
the Tasadays of Mindanao (Llamzon 1972; Yen 1976: 97183) and the Mlabris of northern Thailand (Rischel 1995),
voluntarily hived themselves off from peasant populations a few centuries ago. These and other instances of secondary
tribalisation in Southeast Asia are listed and discussed by Fortier (2014), who clearly regards such cases as not especially
rare. Dove (2006: 192) draws attention to the parallel process by which peasants re-label themselves as indigenous people
(virtual tribespeople, so to speak) to claim protection for their traditional rights in the modern sphere.
8. Such resettlement does not take into account a communitys resource zone: the people are treated as if they were just moving
house. As pointed out by Colwell-Chanthaphonh & Ferguson (2006), sites that outsiders see as physically abandoned may
still remain connected directly with a living population through such spiritual tokens as the perennial fruit-trees, spiritcharged sites and cemeteries that they leave behind to keep their indigeny intact. Urbanites concern for the preservation of
heritage hardly ever extends to such non-monumental remains. The traditional owners are therefore usually powerless to
prevent the bulldozing that precedes urbanisation or the setting up of commercial plantations or garbage-dumping sites.
9. A few present-day tribal populations are not strictly indigenous to the places they currently occupy, as they are known to have
migrated there from elsewhere within the past few generations.
10. The premodern states of Southeast Asia were mostly greedy for people rather than land.

text of the 2007 Declaration (United Nations 2007: 2) makes it clear that tribespeople were its intended
focus:
indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization
and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in
particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests.
This is not just a terminological quibble. The failure to define indigenous or to employ the term
tribal has allowed some Asian signatory governments, including Malaysias, to interpret the Declaration
in a manner considerably at deviance from its intended purpose. For example (and despite what I said
earlier about the University of Malaya), following the publicly stated views of at least two of the countrys
former Prime Ministers,11 the authentically aboriginal Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia are currently
officially characterised as not indigenous. This stands in stark contrast to accepted international practice,
where the terms indigenous people, indigenousness or indigeneity are most commonly understood to
refer to long-established but endangered minorities, usually tribal or post-tribal, who suffer political,
cultural, legal or economic disadvantages that are not borne by the majority sectors of their countries
populations. This is certainly the sense of indigenous adopted by the United Nations.
The International Labour Organizations Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (no. 169)
goes a step further by differentiating explicitly between tribal and indigenous peoples. The status of
tribal peoples, it suggests, is regulated wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by
special laws or regulations, whereas that of indigenous peoples results from their having been
conquered or colonised and who therefore irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own
social, economic, cultural and political institutions. Despite this clarification, the remainder of the
Declaration for practical reasons applies the term indigenous to both categories, while adding selfidentification as a criterion for determining which populations the provisions of the Convention should
apply to.
Unfortunately, and especially in Asia, self identification leaves the question of just who is
indigenous open to political manipulation. I personally witnessed an example in November 1993 at the
Government-sponsored International Seminar on Indigenous People in Kuala Lumpur. In his introductory
Malay-language address, Anwar Ibrahim, who became Malaysias Deputy Prime Minister a few days
later, inserted the name Melayu (Malay) into the middle of a long list of bumiputera (purportedly
meaning indigenous) Malaysian populations. But since the conference had been convened to address the
problems of minority tribal societies world-wide, and since the Malays of Malaysia constitute a non-tribal
politically dominant majority, Anwars declaration was felt to have missed the point. However, this
particular submerging of tribality under the label indigenous did not fully deprive the tribal and posttribal populations of their indigenous status; it merely diluted it. It was the previous assertions of two
former prime ministers, as remarked earlier, that would completely deprive the Peninsular tribespeople

11. Mahathir Mohamed (1970):

Aborigines are found in Australia, Taiwan and Japan, to name a few, but nowhere are they regarded as the definitive
people of the country concerned. The definitive people are those who set up the first governments and these
governments were the ones with which other countries did official business and had diplomatic relations. There is
another condition. The people who form the first effective Government and their legal successors must at all times
outnumber the original tribes found in a given country . The Orang Melayu or Malays have always been the
definitive people of the Malay Peninsula. There was no known aborigine government or aborigine state. Above
all, at no time did they outnumber the Malays.
Tunku Abdul Rahman (1989):
There could be no doubt that the Malays were the indigenous people of this country because the original inhabitants
did not have any form of civilization compared with the Malays.

and their descendants of their indigenous status, in a stance that appears to remain current government
policy.12
The ability to self-identify as indigenous or tribal also depends crucially on the specific language in
which the discourse is mounted. Almost always, this will be a standardised official language rather than
the language or dialect that the people themselves employ in their daily lives. Consequently, such
indigenist discourse will necessarily have to be carried on in the exogenist standard-language context, as
also would any pro-indigene campaigns organised by non-governmental bodies. (The latter, though, are
usually run by persons who are well aware of the specific local issues, including the question of
language.)
Thus, although Asian tribespeople and peasants might both be thought of as indigenous peoples in
various respects, they have historically inhabited different social and cultural worlds. Moreover, as I am
about to clarify, they have sustained different modes of attachment to the land and places where they live.
The widespread fusing of the terms indigenous and tribal fails to capture this distinction. Consequently,
whenever the primary reason for asserting indigenous rights is to protect the circumstances of current or
recent tribespeople, the label indigenous may prove self-defeating. Indeed, the problems experienced by
peasants are sometimes opposed to those of tribespeople, and may lead to conflict between them as has
actually occurred in Peninsular Malaysia between rural Malays and nearby Orang Asli. This is further
aggravated whenever the majority population employs the label indigenous to assert its political
dominance over other sectors of the population. Peasants usually fall religiously, linguistically and
ethnically within the majority sector, whereas tribespeople do not. Consequently, the label indigenous
sometimes draws attention away from the problems experienced by Asias tribal populations.

Indigenyexogeny and indigenous rights

From a sociological point of view, the distinctions between the various kinds of indigenousness presented
earlier reflect a yet more fundamental societal dimension, namely the one that stretches between indigeny
and its antonym exogeny. Indigeny, which is best characterised as inherited embodiment by place, differs
in its cultural consequences from all other societal forms, which are examples of exogeny (even if they are
labelled indigenous). Exogeny, namely inherited estrangement from place, is the precondition for
modernity and for engagement with formal legal systems. It is paradoxically also the precondition for
active indigenism, as discussed later.
In Asia, tribespeople (as well as some peasants) regularly suffer varying degrees of disadvantage,
ranging from racial or class prejudice to expropriation of their land without consultation, compensation or
considerations of legality. Expropriation occurs frequently, whether carried out by state agencies or by
private actors with the states compliance. However, the difficulties confronted by the removed people in
attempting to remedy the situation do not result primarily from their tribal, post-tribal or peasant status.
Rather, it is their place-linked indigeny that puts them at a peculiar disadvantage when confronted by this
kind of enforced social change. What is it about indigeny that makes it so difficult to manage indigenous
rights within the modern legal framework?

12. Indeed, on the day following this keynote address, many of the attendees were informed by a (Malay) attendant in the
theatrette of the Orang Asli Museum in Ulu Gombak that: (1) the Orang Asli trecked to Malaysia 8000 years ago from
Yunnan; (2) the Malays came (later, presumably) from Sumatra; (3) the Orang Asli are therefore pribumi, but they are
definitely not indigenous, because they came from elsewhere. It is hard to make sense of this garbled fusion of oldfashioned migratory-wave ethnology with the current official stance that the Orang Asli are not indigenous especially as
pribumi and bumiputera are usually both translated as indigenous! I can only assume that regardless of the supposed timedepths, the speaker thought of Sumatra as here and Yunnan as elsewhere. I subject this kind of claim to detailed refutation
in Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book on Malay-World ethnohistory (Benjamin, submitted). For up-to-date professsional
studies of Aslian-language time-depths and emergence within the Peninsula, see Dunn, Kruspe & Burenhult (2013) and
Bulbeck (2014), who show that 8000 years and Yunnan have nothing to do with the reality.

Indigeny
Indigeny is a concrete reality constituted of the historically maintained connections of particular
individuals and families to particular places.13 In the strictest sense, indigeny should therefore cease to
characterise those who have moved away from their ancestral places. Moreover, a person can be more or
less indigenous with respect to any or all of several features. First, place can be more narrowly or more
broadly defined. Second, because indigeny attaches primarily to individuals and families rather than to
whole populations considered as undifferentiated peoples or ethnic groups, an individuals own
ancestors may have lived there longer than someone elses. Third, some ancestors may be considered
more salient than others, especially in the unilineal or unilaterally biased systems found in several parts of
Asia.
Indigeny is not a rhetorical construct, and should therefore not be treated in the same way as the
rhetorically asserted indigenist connections of whole populations to whole territories especially when
those populations are defined ethnically. Place-linked indigenes understanding of their own
circumstances is tacit, non-articulated and constantly sustained by the substance of their daily lives, in
which home and workplace are the same and there is no distinction between family and co-workers. For
people living under indigeny, especially if they are tribespeople, the land itself is a mainstay of the
sociocultural framework a subject, so to speak, rather than commoditisable object.14 Indigenes may
therefore find it difficult to get their views across appropriately when acting within the formally rational
framework required by modern exogenous institutions, including the law courts.
Place-linked indigeny is transmitted within families rather than through any wider institutional
framework. Indigenes traditional environmental and technical knowledge, which is currently being
rapidly lost, is embedded in their familiarity with specific places. Those living under such circumstances
find it difficult to encounter the kind of single-stranded separations on which formal rationality depends.
Accordingly, indigeny is associated with the various non-formal modes of rationality that Weber
collectively identified as substantive rationality, exemplified especially in the informal and restitutive
legal procedures that he referred to as kadhi justice.15 This has a profound bearing on the acceptance of
modernity and of the kind of explicitly rule-based legal framework on which it depends.
Exogeny
Exogenes, on the other hand, having estranged themselves from any such subjective attachment to land,
are emotionally and cognitively freer to take an exploitative approach to their surroundings. With their
homes and workplaces spatially separated, and their families differentiated from co-workers, they can thus
easily think of their own and others land as objectified commodities open to exploitation by alteration
and sale. In turn, this will have predisposed them to achieve greater economic success than indigenes.
Exogenes are even free to treat culture, including language and religion, as an exploitable commodity.
Indeed, the spread of exogeny is frequently associated with religious conversion from an unnamed local
religion to a named world religion.
The same is true of the exogenous attitude to land: once registered under a modern legal system it
becomes viewable solely in that light. Consequently, exogenes will find the indigenous framework
difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, the unregistered land of indigenes, whether tribespeople or
peasants, is treated under the law as not belonging to them but to the state despite the immensely long
periods it may have served as their subsistence and cultural base. Regardless of the real circumstances,

13. In this section, indigenes refers solely to those living under true indigeny, and not to the other social circumstances that are
sometimes also referred to as indigenous.
14. Laird (1979) discusses an unusually complicated Orang Asli (Temoq) example from Malaysia. Delang (2003: 160178)
explicitly applies the contrast between indigeny and exogeny as drawn here to his extensive study of land-linked social and
economic change among the Karens, a peasantising tribal population in Thailand.
15. Weber had practised as a lawyer and earned a doctorate in legal history.

therefore, indigenes customary prior residence is hard to prove in court in the absence of documentary
evidence of registration. Why should this be?
Exogeny has a close affinity with formal rationality, namely the belief that one can do just one thing at
a time in a calculable and separable manner a view that, according to Weber, favours those who already
hold power or might wish to gain power.16 Adherence to an externally imposed, bureaucratically codified
judicial system is based on formal equality before the law rather than on the inter-personal specificities
that typify true place-linked indigeny. Since the phrase indigenous people is most frequently invoked in
relation to land-rights, and since land-rights cases are increasingly coming before the courts, conflict thus
arises between the true indigeny-based principles underpinning so-called native land-title and the formal
exogeny-based principles that the courts are constrained to abide by. Lawyers acting on behalf of
indigenes whose rights are threatened thus face the problem of translating between distinct and barely
bridgeable systems of land-tenure. The judges in charge of such cases must therefore sometimes consider
judicial precedents emanating from other parts of the world, such as Canada, Australia and the United
States, where issues of tribal land-rights have been brought before the courts.
Thus, it is necessary to incorporate a concern for the sociology of indigeny when dealing not just with
tribal societies but also, under modernisation, with state-based societies and macro-economic issues.
Exogenes political and economic dominance, even when they adopt a purportedly indigenist stance (as
with the bumiputera and pribumi ideologies in Malaysia and Indonesia) may lead them to misconstrue the
real indigenes difficult socioeconomic position as being due to laziness, ignorance or even supposed
primitivity, rather than from usurpation by exogenes of the indigenes subsistence base.

Indigenism
Unlike indigeny and exogeny, which label a variety of socio-cultural circumstances, indigenism identifies
a set of overt political stances or ideologies. Indigenist discourse usually relates to politically defined
territories rather than to concrete individuated places, and is therefore necessarily espoused within an
exogenous, rather than indigenous, frame of action. As Hirtz (2003, with reference to the Philippines) and
Dove (2006, more generally) have argued, mounting an indigenist campaign requires a degree of
exogenous and modern life-experience on the part of its proponents. (This assertion should not be read as
denigrating or minimising the importance of such efforts, which I support and regard as very important.)
Two varieties of indigenism are particularly significant with respect to legal issues. First, there is the
local-level indigenousness or indigeneity (as it is now often called) asserted by tribespeople, former
tribespeople and peasants when trying to protect and guarantee their land-rights. Internationally, this is the
type of indigenism most commonly regarded as deserving of attention and support, as in the stances taken
by the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, and several non-governmental
organisations. Second, and in contrast, there is the overtly national-level indigenism of which the
Bumiputera and Pribumi ideologies of Malaysia and Indonesia are examples.17 Bumiputera and pribumi
are primarily political terms, relating to nation-state concerns; they are not proper tools of sociological
analysis, and do little to aid understanding of the specific life-circumstances of the people they label.
By entering the cash economy, tribespeople increasingly become rural proletarians (Zawawi 1995) or
even middle-class urbanites. Consequently, they lose control over the land and maritime resources on
which their families subsistence was previously based. When this happens, they and their supporters
typically adopt an explicitly indigenous identity to reinforce their land-rights claims and reject
unwelcome cultural influences. The latter include restrictions against their language and pressure to
16. This argument, deriving partly from the work of Ernest Gellner, is spelled out in more detail in Benjamin (2014b; in press a,
in press b). For its application to religious change among an Orang Asli population, see Benjamin (2014a: 301393).
17. For informed discussions of the terms bumiputera and pribumi, see Siddique & Suryadinata (1981/82), Aguilar (2001) and
Nah (2006). The pribumi category in Indonesia is supposed to have been abandoned in 2006, following the passing of a
national citizenship law (Wawrinec 2010 : 102); but there has been no such relaxing of the bumiputera concept in Malaysia,
where the word pribumi is currently gaining ground.

undergo religious conversion changes that their peasant neighbours succumbed to centuries ago as
tokens of the reflected civilisational glory (through conversion to Buddhism, Islam or Catholicism) that
they mostly came to feel proud of. Paradoxically, therefore, indigenism actually constitutes a
manifestation of the covert exogeny experienced by people who have moved away from the places
inhabited by their presumed familial ancestors. But as noted earlier, exogeny is a precondition for the
generation and maintenance of societal modernity and the formal rationality that it depends on. Without it,
the mounting of explicitly indigenist land-rights claims would not be possible.
Political national-level indigenism, on the other hand, is open to manipulation of the notions of place
and territory. Sometimes, these are re-categorised as indigenous land-reserves in the ethnicnationalistic sense, while the people who formerly lived there under true indigeny lose their ownership
rights. This is the case, for example, of several declared Malay reserves in Peninsular Malaysia that were
formerly occupied solely by aboriginal Orang Asli.
These two varieties of indigenism thus often lead to conflict. Advances made on behalf of the
nationalist-indigenist approach tend to override the wished-for advances asserted at the local land-rights
level. The latter typically involves the desire for a degree of autonomy from or within the state; the former,
however, refers to a stance adopted by the state for its own purposes.

Being indigenous in some Southeast Asian countries

I end this paper with brief accounts of the kinds of problem that have arisen in some Southeast Asian
states with regard to the idea of indigenous people.
The various usages demonstrate that there is no generally recognised synonymy between tribal and
indigenous throughout Southeast Asia, nor is there a clear distinction between indigenous people as
defined ethno-nationally and indigenous people as defined by their place-linked indigeny. Accordingly,
when steps are taken to protect the rights of tribal or post-tribal people, employment of the term
indigenous without further qualification will prove inadequate. The specific details must be spelled out
in each case, down to the individual, family or community level. This requires research into the peoples
documented local history, which is more likely to be found in administrative archives and ethnographers
notebooks than in published works. Unfortunately, the coverage of such materials is usually partial.
The courts must therefore also consider the evidence of oral history, and be willing to accommodate
the special circumstances of people whose land-attachments are expressed in a radically different manner
from that of the established law codes, especially where the Torrens system applies. In Malaysia, at least,
judges have seemed more open to this approach than administrators.
Indonesia
The Indonesian equivalent to the Malaysian bumiputera is pribumi, also regularly translated as
indigenous. This is an indigenist label, referring normally to those whose ancestors originated from
anywhere within the vast territory of the current Republic of Indonesia in contrast to those whose
ancestors came from outside Indonesia, especially China. Thus, people who have transmigrated from
Java to Sumatra, for example, are officially still pribumi, even though they are no longer indigenous in the
place-linked indigeny sense discussed earlier. Local practices sometimes differ, however, even with
regard to the term pribumi, which may be used in a more localistic sense.
In the Riau Islands (Propinsi Kepulauan Riau) a more traditional approach is followed. There, the local
Malays sometimes distinguish between those who are Melayu asli indigenous Malays and those who are
Melayu murni pure Malays (Wee 1988: 212214). The Melayu asli are members of locally derived
populations, often tribal in social organisation, but the Melayu murni are mostly higher-ranking people of
exogenous non-Melayu (usually Bugis) origin, whose members have often tried to decide for the other
Malays just what constitutes cultural Malayness.
Indonesias many tribal populations, along with some peasant communities, were formerly categorised
officially as masyarakat terasing unintentionally separated societies rather than as indigenes. They are
8

now referred to officially and in the Constitution as masyarakat adat customary-law societies. As
Persoon (1998: 281) reports, the view that the population of Indonesia is predominantly indigenous
justified the governments decision to ignore the UNs Year of Indigenous People in 1993. Tribality as
such, therefore, mostly goes unremarked in Indonesian usage. But, as Li (2007: 21) reports, exogenous
outsiders have an interest in maintaining the tribality of certain populations because their supposed
failure to improve (to turn natures bounty to a profit) can then be used to justify assigning their land and
resources to people who will make better use of them. This has recently been exacerbated by imposing
an adminstsrative distinction between those who live within officially registered desa settlements and
those who choose to remain masyarakat adat, presumably for fear of diluting their indigenous cultural
institutions.18
This deliberate misrecognition of the special life-circumstances of true place-linked indigenes
peasants as well as tribespeople has led to the expropriation and damaging of their land and forest
resources in favour of commercial-crop estates or paper-pulp enterprises. Nevertheless, the indigenes
long-established swidden farming is often blamed for generating the toxic haze (in reality, smoke) that
envelopes the region annually, but which is actually the product of the industrial-scale enterprises that
destroyed the indigenes subsistence base in the first place.
Malaysia
In Malaysia, indigenous has become the preferred English translation of the politically loaded term
bumiputera son of the soil, which has been deployed for decades as a label justifying the special
situation of just some of the countrys citizens. In Peninsular Malaysia, bumiputera is normally taken to
refer to the Malays a population that has long continued to assimilate individuals of non-Peninsular
origin. This is clearly an indigenist usage, which has left the aboriginal Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia
and the so-called native populations of Sarawak and Sabah (especially the non-Muslims among them) in
limbo: are they, or are they not, also bumiputera, and hence indigenous? The matter remains unsettled.
In 2009, Malaysias delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations referred explicitly to the
aboriginal Orang Asli as indigenous people, showing that his government or at least its foreign
ministry understood that the UNs use of indigenous does indeed mean tribal. Malaysia, therefore, as
a signatory to the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, is morally if perhaps not legally
bound to apply all of the Declarations terms to the Orang Asli.
Within Malaysia, however, as already mentioned, official sources, including, at least two of the
countrys former prime ministers, have on several occasions asserted publicly that the Orang Asli are not
indigenous. (See also foonote 12.) For them, indigenous identifies not the people whose ancestors have
inhabited the Peninsula for the longest time (aboriginally, endogenously), but solely the descendants of
those the Malays who supposedly first brought civilisation, presumably meaning the state, to the
country. The Deputy Director of the Department of Orang Asli Development (himself an Orang Asli!)
reasserted this view publicly in 2012. In other words, the public rhetoric of indigenism in Malaysia relates
solely to the nation-state construct, and has nothing to do with temporal priority. Officially, therefore, only
the Malays qualify as indigenous to Malaysia in a practice that continues to relegate the Orang Asli to
an historical and legal limbo, especially with regard to land-rights.19 Matters are somewhat different in
Sabah and Sarawak, which have their own legal codes in which the category native is explicitly

18. I am grateful to Professor Ida Bagus Wyasa Putra for drawing my attention to this recent development.
19. For reviews of the land-rights situation of the Orang Asli and other such Malaysian populations, see Bulan (2007), Idrus
(2010) and Subramaniam (2013). These studies include reports on the court cases that have passed judgments, frequently in
their favour, on land-rights claims made on behalf of various Malaysian tribal populations. Perhaps because of disagreements
in Malaysia about the meaning of indigenous, government agencies have usually chosen to mount appeals against these
judgment, greatly delaying the eventual carrying out of the courts decisions. Unfortunately, the Malaysian Department of
Orang Asli Development (JAKOA) has hitherto lent its support not to the Orang Asli claimants, but to the parties against
whom the claims were being made.

recognised, but which has nevertheless not protected them against much of the land expropriation that is
taking place there.
Philippines
Unlike Indonesia, the Philippines explicitly recognises that its population contains many tribal and posttribal peoples, as indicated by the passing of a national Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) in 1997.
There are also many non-governmental organisations concerned with their welfare. (See Persoon (2009:
206214 for a comprehensive account.)
In other respects, however, ideas about indigenousness in the Philippines are similar to the Malaysian
case. William Scott (1974: 7) noted that the tribal hill-populations were regarded by the lowlanders as
non-Filipinos and hence not indigenous because they were the only true resisters to Spanish
colonialism. Similarly, Aguilar (2005: 612620) has shown that a popular Philippine version of the
obsolete ethnic migratory-wave theory accords indigenous status not to the various tribal populations, but
to the supposedly third-wave lowland-dwelling Indios, because they were the reputed bringers of
civilisation. As in the Riau-Malay and Malaysian cases, Philippine rhetoric thus fuses an ideology of
indigeny with the notion of civilisational purity. This allows exogeny to appropriate indigeny to itself,
thereby legitimising a proclaimed exogeny as the basis of the right to rule over the more indigenous
portions of the population.
Singapore
Since the late 1980s, there have been no tribal populations in Singapore. The last such were the then nonMuslim Orang Seletar living on the islands north coast who, like most other Singaporeans, have since
been resettled into high-rise apartment blocks. They thereby ceased to be tribal. These and other formerly
tribal populations have presumably now merged into the so-called Malay sector of the population, all of
whom according to Section 152 of the Singapore Constitution are the indigenous people of the Republic,
regardless of their specific familial origins. Nevertheless, according to studies in the 1980s (Samsiah
1986; Ali 1984), there were significant cultural and socio-economic differences within the Singapore
Malay community as between the locally indigenous ones and those who were descended exogenously
from migrants. The latter displayed significantly higher degrees of educational attainment and of religious
(Islamic) orthodoxy (Ali 2002). Contrariwise, Malays of more indigenously Singaporean descent
exhibited relatively less educational success and lower degrees of Islamic orthodoxy.

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Benjamin, Geoffrey. 2014a. Temiar Religion, 19642012: Enchantment, Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Malaysias Uplands. With a Foreword by James C. Scott. Singapore: NUS Press.

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Benjamin, Geoffrey. In press a. Indigenous peoples: indigeneity, indigeny or indigenism? To appear,

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