Ethnic Ontology: “Our People” Vs. Orang Asli of the Chewong, Malaysia

As one of the “Orang Asli”, the Chewong is considered by the state as backward, uncivilised people subject to teaching and development. The Chewong resist this perspective of “seeing like a state”, refraining from contact with the outsiders, especially afraid of any physical confrontation. They maintain three layers of ethnicity: “our people”, “forest people”, and Malays/Chinese. This paper argues that the reason for the Chewong’s fear of outsiders is ontological. They think they live in a cosmos of non-human humans—spirits, animals, plants, ghosts and gods, each of which is animate only because of individual Ruwai (“濡外”), the vital principle essential to life. A Chewong should protect their Ruwai from loss in physical confrontation, or they may never be able to ascend to longevity after death. This shared sense of ethnicity among the Chewong is ontological, a sense I propose to call “ethnic ontology”, potential to transcend the anthropocentric concept of ethnicity—primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism.