Robert Knox Dentan

Ambiguity, synecdoche and affect in semai medicine

Semai descriptions of their beliefs about health and disease vary from person to person. Moreover, at different times the same person expresses mutually incongruent beliefs. This amorphousness and fluidity merit analysis rather than neatening. This paper details Semai beliefs, loose ends and all, and suggests that their formal peculiarities are due to the prevalence of synecdoche in conceptual organization. Their inconsistency and fluidity may stem from individualistic egalitarianism within Semai society and powerlessness in the face of nonSemai attack. Finally, it is suggested that construing indigenous medicine as a crude form of Western medicine leads to overtidiness and consequent error.

Ceremonies of innocence and the lineaments of ungratified desire; An analysis of a syncretic Southeast Asian taboo complex

We see them only as eccentrics or as survivors ... locked into a religiose fantasy-world; they are quaint historical fossils ... But where social or political assumptions or enquiries into value are at issue, then the answer must be very much more complex. The danger is that we should confuse the reputability of beliefs, and the reputability of those who professed them, with depth or shallow ness. (Thompson 1993:107-8.)

Lucidity, Sex, and Horror in Senoi Dreamwork

This chapter is a description and analysis of aspects of the dream praxis of the Senoi, a Malaysian people whose way of interpreting and responding to dreams has had much influence on Europeans and Americans interested in the psychotherapeutic use of dreams. Recent publications have made it plain that much of the “Senoi” ethnography with which Western dreamworkers are familiar is of dubious reliability. This chapter indicates, by example, that the differences between the familiar version of Senoi life (by Stewart) and the accounts given by anthropologists are not merely matters of interpretation.

Problems and Tactics in the Transcultural Study of Intelligence: An Archival Report

We deal here with conceptualizing mental retardation transculturally and with its problems—with the way a modest transcultural library study of mental retardation might be done within a limited geographical area. Finally, because finding useful references is difficult and time-consuming, an archival appendix gives a data base that might serve as a starting point for future, more ambitious studies. While readers may not agree with the conclusions we draw from the data, the accessibility of our data archive should make informed discussion easier.