FARTHER ASIA Anthropology.—In south-eastern Asia there is a heterogene ous mixture of racial elements, and a population which contains very varied elements at all stages of culture and much confused by race mixture. The wooly-haired peoples are represented by the Negrito and Papuasian races, the • wavy-haired by the Pre Dravidians, Dravidians and Nesiots, and the straight-haired by the Pareoean or south Mongoloid race, while invading elements of Chinese, Tibetans, Arabs, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British have added to the general mixture, so that owing to the absence of accurate data and to the fusion of races and types accurate classification is almost impossible. A group of Mongoloid tribes stretches from Assam to Formosa and includes the Khasi, Mikir, Bodo and Garo of Assam, the Lisu of Yunnan and the Lolos of Szechuan, who are probably more allied to white-skinned races than to yellow-skinned Mongolians. This, the protomorphus, apparently represents an unspecialized strain surviving from the original type from which both the white European stocks and the yellow-skinned stocks of eastern Asia are derived. A definite Caucasian stock appears to be present in the aboriginal population of Indo-China and has doubtless survived as a submerged ele ment in other hill tribes in south-east Asia.
The earliest inhabitants of south-east Asia were probably Negrito or Pre-Dravidian in race and representatives of both these races survive in a submerged condition and generally more or less mixed in blood by contact with their neighbours. They are naturally hunters and collectors of food, not cultivators, and where they possess cultivation it seems to be a recent acquisi tion from outside, and is communal in character. Generally they move about in family groups where game, fish, and wild yams are easiest to obtain. The social unit is the family, and the social structure of the simplest description. Excluding the Andamanese the Negrito is represented in this area principally by the Aeta of the Philippines and the Semang of East Sumatra and the Malay peninsula. They have no domestic animals and their dwellings are of the frailest description; they have separate quarters, probably, for the bachelors and spinsters of each community, the dead are buried or exposed in trees, and religious ideas are of the vaguest, but a land of the dead is believed in and spirits on their way thither have to pass over a perilous bridge guarded by a demon. This belief is characteristic of the Indonesian area gen erally and extends alike to the pure Negrito of the Andaman islands and to tribes in which Negrito affinities are unsuspected. So, too, the segregation of the unmarried is typical of the area in general and the practice extends from central India to Formosa and southwards into the Pacific. The typical weapon of the Negrito is the bow and arrow, and both Aeta and Semang poison the arrows. Though naturally kind and gentle the Negrito once embittered evinces the most implacable hostility towards his enemies. He survives, however, as a distinct tribe only in the An damans, the Malay peninsula (Semangs) and in the Philippine islands (Aetas), though traces of his blood are to be seen else where in the archipelago and the mainland. Even in Assam the physique of some of the hill tribes and their traditions of the past suggest their survival to a comparatively recent date.
The Pre-Dravidians of this area are repre sented primarily by the Sakai (q.v.) of the Malay Peninsula whose mode of life is not dissimilar to that of the Negrito, but others (Pre-Dravidians) of less pure stock survive in East Su matra and in the Celebes, as the Toalas, and no doubt the race has contributed to other existing stocks in the East Indian archi pelago, and perhaps on the mainland, where the strain is probably present in the hill tribes of Assam and Burma, and in Dutch Borneo it has been suspected in a slightly larger proportion in the Ula Ayar tribe. Their distinctive weapon for war and the chase is the blow-gun (q.v.).
The Papuasian branch of the Oceanic Negroes was perhaps a later arrival in this area than the Negrito branch, but is less definitely represented among the present in habitants. Even in the most south-easterly islands of Indonesia where it is best represented it has generally been modified by contact with other races, but traces of its presence are to be found in Assam again both in the physique and disposition of some of the Naga tribes, particularly in the inaccessible interior of the hills, where individuals, and sometimes whole communities show decided signs of Papuasian blood in their frizzly hair, prominent or aquiline noses, in their very excitable disposition, mirthful, voluble and cruel, and in the artistic bent which shows itself in wood-carving, as well as in a number of minor items of material culture, which can be traced from Assam at any rate to Fiji. Their typical culture, however, should be sought in Papua and Melanesia (q.v.).
The Oceanic Negroes and the Pre-Dra vidians are present in south-east Asia merely as archaic survivals, and have probably contributed little to its culture. As far as can be inferred from existing data, the first known civilization of the area seems to be that of a race which may be described as In donesian, which was probably composed of a Caucasic stock which occupied this part of Asia at a very early date, and was modified by Mongolian infiltration. This race, though now every where submerged by the flood of Pareoean invasion is probably responsible for certain general features still found throughout the less accessible parts of the area in societies showing every diver sity of political structure. How far the general features here described are typical of the submerged Indonesian race is largely a matter of conjecture, but it is sometimes possible to indicate a definite change which has taken place or is taking place suggest ing that the disappearing element belonged to an earlier culture than those which now predominate. Thus the Mon-Khmer language is now represented by isolated languages surviving in patches in Cambodia, in Yunnan, and in the Wa and Palaung lands in Burma, in the Khasia hills in Assam and in the Munda speaking areas of Chota Nagpur in India, suggesting that the area once covered by languages of this stock stretched across the Irrawaddy river into the Ganges basin, though it has since been superseded by the tonal Tibeto-Burman tongues.
So, too, the existing patrilineal society seems to have been preceded in most tribes by a matrilineal system such as survives in the Khasia and Garo hills in Assam, and the prevailing policy of government by secular chiefs is strongly associated with recent Pareoean invaders and probably superseded a highly democratic structure such as that which sur vives in parts of Assam, but which may itself have been merely the result of degeneration from a society dependent upon highly tabued priest-chiefs like those surviving in the Konyak Naga tribe, where the recent tendency seems to have been to replace such chiefs by rather amorphous democratic societies, in which age-grades play a prominent part. Exogamy is everywhere the rule rather than the exception, and endogamy, where reported, appears generally to be rather a matter of linguistic or social convenience than of principle. Exogamous clans, though usually claiming to have originated in a patronymic ancestor, sometimes show what seem to be traces of a pre-existent totemism. Traces are frequent and tangible of a dual organization (q.v.) of society, which may perhaps be due to Chinese influence, particularly as the two moieties sometimes seem to represent the earth and sky. This dual system has perhaps been intensified by the need in founding a new village for two exogamous clans to combine in order to provide each other with marriageable women, and three-group systems may have sometimes been produced by the fusions of conquering and conquered dualities, in which the superior con quered class has been identified and fused with the inferior of the two classes of the conquerors. The "Khel" system, under which a particular class occupies a particular quarter of a village, and is more of ten than not in a state of avowed or latent hostility to the other clans in the other quarters of the village, appears to be another result of the same process, and gives way, under the secular chiefly rule, to a mere division into wards governed by different chiefs, the clan bond disappearing, as also the bachelors' hall, which is prominent and necessary as a local centre of clan activity under the democratic system, and appears as an impor tant appendage of the chief's house under the sacrosanct priest chief organization. This bachelors' hall has been shown to be by origin the communal house from which private dwellings split up (vide Peal "On the Morong," etc., Jrnl. Anthropl. Inst., xxii., p. 256 and pl. xviii.), and while it appears to retain its original form in the "Long House" in Borneo (q.v.), and to remain as an appanage of the sacrosanct Ang's house in the Konyak Naga country, it has become a village club house in the democratic Naga communities, and survives in the Kachari and Hinduized plains tribes in the village Narnghar or prayer-house, while in the societies which have secular chiefs like the Semas or Thados it has almost entirely disappeared, though in some such tribes it still survives with some of its former functions as in the case of the Lushei zawlbak. It has already been noted that it is a wide spread institution and is shared even by the Negritos of the Andamans.
Another item probably to be associated with the Indonesian culture is the tanged and shouldered celt, a very distinctive form of polished stone adze which has been found in Indo-China, Malaya, the Irrawaddy basin, Assam, and in Chota Nagpur in India. It survives in the form of shouldered iron hoes still used by some hill tribes as by the Khasi and by some Nagas. The use of the throwing spear seems also typical of a pre-Pareoean people, and simple bamboo and sago-palm javelins, innocent of iron, but sometimes "feathered" like an arrow, usually with pandanus leaf, are still used in the remote interior of the Naga hills. A straight two-handed iron sword is, or was till recently, used as a sword of state by the Kings of Siam ; it is depicted as carried by f oot-soldiers on the bas-reliefs of Ang kor Wat in Cambodia and it is still handed down as an heir loom in Naga, Khasi, and Kachari families in Assam. It is possibly an introduction from India, where the straight two handed sword was in vogue at the time of Alexander's invasion. The carved lion, more symbolic than naturalistic, which is so popular from Assam eastwards in regions in which the lion is not known at all, may also be of Indian origin, though if so he has perhaps been hybridized by the Chinese dragon. It seems to be long to the Shan and Burman elements rather than to the In donesian, and the true Naga tribes have no word for "lion," though the Kukis above have one. So, too, the use of the cross bow seems to be of Mongolian origin, and it is popular with the hill tribes of Indo-China and with many of those of Burma; only some of the Assam tribes use it, and it does not reach the Western Nagas, who have only the bullet-bow, or the Khasis who, like the Thado Kukis, use a simple bow, a weapon which may perhaps be associated with Negrito survivals.
is practised generally throughout Farther Asia, but the extent of its use varies greatly. With the Burmese it holds the rank of a fine art, and it is generally practised by all the Tai peoples and by some others. But whereas the Burmese and Shans seem to tattoo the male only, some of the Assam Burman hill tribes tattoo the female only, and others, as in Borneo, both sexes, the operation being performed in the Naga hills as by the Kayans of Borneo by women. In Borneo as in Assam tattoo patterns usually have reference to rank, or to head-hunting exploits, or to recognition in the next world.
A feature of many hill tribes in this area, which calls for notice, is the use of a large wooden xylophone or "drum" (it has no membrane) made from a hollow top and sometimes described as a canoe-drum. Its distribution is not universal, but it is frequent in the Naga hills, and the Khasi uses what is perhaps a degenerate form of it ; it is found among the Wa of Burma, occurs in the Malay Peninsula and in Borneo, and appears to be connected with the Fijian lali, and with the Melanesian upright type. Some Amazon tribes in South America use a similar instrument. Its Indonesian origin is perhaps indicated by the buffalo into which its head is so often carved, even where the gayal or mithun has superseded the buffalo as the principal domestic animal, by the occasional use of a crocodile pattern (reported and depicted by Peal, loc. cit.) by tribes who have never seen a crocodile, and by the tradition of the "wooden drum" that belonged to the pre Burmese king of Arakan. It may possibly be associated with the use of the war-canoe, as its construction appears to be attended in the Naga hills by tabus identical with tabus common in the construction of canoes in Melanesia, and canoes have been used, occasionally at any rate, for drumming in Manipur, in Papua and in Oceania.
The buffalo appears to be associated with the Mon-Khmer culture. It appears in Borneo, used by the Murut tribe, and in the Philippines, in both cases associated with irri gated terraces. In Assam it is generally used in the plains, but has been superseded in the Naga hills, where it was probably once universal, by the gayal or mithun, a much more tractable animal when kept in a semi-feral state. The mithun appears very definite ly to have been introduced by the Kuki-Kachin migration from the Himalayas down the Chindwin valley to the Bay of Bengal. Irrigated rice cultivation, however, though now general in the plains is far from universal in the hills. Millet undoubtedly preceded it as a staple crop as in Formosa and in Assam, and probably also in the hill tracts of Burma and Indo-China, and terracing combined with the regeneration of land by the preser vation of pollarded alders appears in the Naga hills to have pre ceded irrigated terraces for rice, which has spread at the expense of millet faster than irrigation, and is often grown as a dry crop.
The megalithic culture of this area has also been associated with irrigated terracing, but it appears to exist also where irrigation is not practised, and in some cases where rice is not grown. This megalithic culture usually takes the form of menhirs and dolmens. It is to be intimately connected with a cult of the dead, and also with a phallic cult. The general theory underlying it seems to be that the soul of the dead takes up its abode in the erect or the recumbent stone according as the sex is male or female, and that the fertilization of the crop and propaga tion of all life is dependent on the action of the soul which is assisted by a process of sympathetic magic dependent on the symbolic form of these megalithic erections. The survival of this idea is probably to be seen in the forms taken by the temples of the more civilized religions of the area, e.g., in Assam, and which reach their culmination in the marvellous structures of ancient Cambodia and Java, such as the famous Angkor Wat. The sur vival of this cult in Chota Nagpur in India, in Assam, in parts of Indo-China and in Madagascar, though in the intervening areas it seems to have died out, suggests that it originated at a very early date in the history of the area, and perhaps preceded the expansion of the Proto-Malay race.
Head-Hunting.—Intimately associated with this phallo-mega lithic cult is the practice of head-hunting (q.v.), the purpose of which is to secure souls to add to the general village stock of soul matter which is required for the successful propagation of animal and cereal life. Head-hunting is still practised by the wilder tribes of Assam, Burma, the Indonesian archipelago and Formosa. Connected with it is a conception of a material soul permeating the body, and also apt to infect any object directly associated with the body. It is, therefore, dangerous for believers in this principle to touch objects which may already be impregnated with soul matter stronger than theirs, or to allow anything likely to be imbued with their own soul to pass into the possession of a stranger who might through it be able to influence them adversely. Be liefs of this kind are strong in many of the less sophisticated tribes such as the Toradja of the Celebes, and the Konyak Nagas of Assam, while the Karen of Burma hold the theory of the soul as a fertilizer in a peculiarly concrete form. Other tribes hold a rather vague and ill-defined belief in what amounts perhaps to mana (q.v.), or a dynamic soul-principle giving the possessor power to control unconsciously the forces of nature so as to enhance his own happiness, prosperity and good luck, but this belief is probably much the same as the other in origin, this principle, called wren by the Ao Nagas, probably consisting in emanations of soul matter, which attracts other soul matter to itself.
Head-hunting also serves as an instrument of the vendetta, a feeling for which is strong throughout the area, though in places it finds expression rather in the taking of slaves than of heads, and in the Moi word comam means both "slave-hunter" and "avenger." Slavery, however, is generally a mild institution and the domestic slave is commonly treated as a member of the family.
Houses.—Among the less cultured communities houses are built of bamboo, and the difference of two types, one on the ground, the other on piles, is noticeable as the two forms used by different tribes exist together in Assam, as they do in Java, where the true Javanese builds on the ground, while the Malayan Sundan ese builds on piles. Bridges are made of cane ropes, slung some times across tremendous gorges with astonishing skill, and in places ficus trees are cultivated by the riverside and their aerial roots trained so as to span the stream with living timbers. In the hills villages are concentrated and palisaded and defended with caltrops of bamboo spikes.
The most prevalent religion is probably Buddhism, but Mohammedanism is strong in the islands and the coast, and Hinduism, at one time ascendant, has left many survivals. Prob ably, however, these more civilized faiths nowhere go very deep, while the whole population is steeped in ideas based on a sort of polytheistic animism, and the worship of the dead. Some of these ideas have already been alluded to, but many other beliefs, appar ently more or less inconsistent, exist alongside them, and are held simultaneously. The idea of a beneficent, but remote, Creator (or Creatrix) is frequent, and so is that of a village of the dead in reaching which the soul has to travel on a perilous path guarded by a malignant demon. This is usually located underground, though sometimes the souls of the blest ascend to the sky. In the case of the islands, the land of the dead is sometimes over seas. Ideas of metempsychosis (q.v.) also occur independently of Buddhism, and the soul is reborn as an insect. The dead are treated with great variety, burning, burial, and platform exposure all being practised, the latter being accompanied sometimes by separate disposal of the head. Boat-shaped coffins are used, some times where boats are unknown, and a sort of urn burial is still common in parts of the Naga hills, the pot being covered with a flat stone. Corpses of persons dying by "bad deaths," as in child birth, suicide, by wild animals, etc., are usually treated differently from those of persons who die normally. Burning, when practised, does not seem necessarily to have any reference to Hindu in fluence, as it is practised by the Maru branch of the Singphos, and in preliminary funerals by the Khasis. Some tribes, e.g., the Kacharis and Manipuris, attach special importance to the frontal bone and dispose of it in running water.
The origin of the Mon-Khmer culture is still obscure. It was much influenced by India, and the con nection probably dates to the pre-Aryan epochs of the history of that country. It is now generally recognized that the (so called) Dravidian inhabitants of India, probably a branch of the Medi terranean race, had acquired a high state of culture before the more barbaric Aryans entered from the north, and it is likely that southern India was the source of the Indonesian and Mon-Khmer cultures. Certain it is that in southern India early iron age graves have been discovered disclosing items of culture which must be associated with the existing Naga tribes of Assam. So, too, on now deserted uplands in southern India round cenotaphs appear associated with terracing strongly suggesting the culture of An gami Nagas. The Karens of the Golden Chersonese seem to have a tradition of origin from the Indian coasts of the Bay of Bengal. Colonies of South Indian elements have from time to time migrated further east, and the Klings of Malaya and the Talaings of Pegu, who were absorbed by, but gave their name to, the Mons of that kingdom, are merely offshots of the Telinga peoples, Dravidians from southern India. Therefore, we may perhaps look to southern India for the first source of culture in Indonesia. The connection continued through Brahminical and Buddhist times and survived the Mongolization of south-east Asia. In the south-east, however, the Mongolian connection must have begun at a very early date. Chinese influence was felt in Annam in the third millennium B.C., and from that era, perhaps, we must date the beginnings of the movement by which the Champa race in Cambodia, with its oceanic affinities, was grad ually submerged; though the Shans themselves, the most prom inent of the invading Mongolians, were still located in China in the second millennium B.C., and the Khmers, who effectively in vaded Siam in the sixth century, were still powerful in the third century B.C., though very strongly influenced by China.
Of the spread of the Oceanic Mongols or Proto-Malays noth ing is yet known; their range includes the oceanic domain of Farther Asia from Formosa to the Nicobars and Madagascar. Nearly everywhere also they are found forming hybrid groups by fusion with Negritos, Papuans, pre-Dravidians or Indonesians, and the latter in particular has almost everywhere been modified by the proto-Malay stock.
The expansion of Hinduism in Farther Asia had started by the fourth century A.D., by which time it had reached Burma; it had arrived in the Malay peninsula in the fifth and in Java in the seventh century, and the seventh century saw the introduction of its off-shoot Buddhism into Siam, while the same century wit nessed the advance of the Shan race towards the sea. The expan sion of the true Malays from their home in Sumatra began in the 12th century, and the spread of Islam in the oceanic area took place in the thirteenth.
Meanwhile on the mainland the expansion of the Burmese race had begun (in the 11th century), and their long struggle with the Shans for supremacy in what is now Burma. The Chinese in vasion of the 13th century, however, led to the rise of the Shans which lasted from that to the 16th century, the 14th being that of the greatest expansion of the Siamese empire. The Burmese, however, were in the ascendant by the 17th century, and the 18th was that of their greatest expansion.
The latest of all the Mongolian movements has been that of the Kuki-Kachin races, which is still in progress. The various branches of the Kuki race that inhabit Assam have come from the south up the range dividing Assam from Burma, but there has been an uninterrupted flow of migration from the sources of the Chindwin river down that valley to the sea, of which the northward flow to Assam is the backwash (v. Fryer, Khyeng People of Sandoway, J.A.S.B., 1878). It appears probable that the Kayans of Borneo formed part of the advance-guard of this stream. The Thado Kukis, at the head of the Assam backwash, were still moving northwards in 1917, and_ the Kachins, the rear guard of the whole movement, are still m(,v1ng southwards into Burma.
With the advent of the Portuguese in the 16th century the European influence began to be felt, but it is only the Portuguese and the Spaniards who have affected the population racially, and that hardly outside the Philippines, where their half breeds may be reckoned by the hundred thousand. The climate prevents northern Europeans from taking root, and the Oceanic Mongols, modified by the Indonesian and by minor isolated strains, pos sess the islands, as the southern Mongolians do the mainland except where the previous populations survive in the fastnesses of their inclement hills.
C. Haddon, Wanderings of Peoples, 1911 ; J. P. Bibliography.-A. C. Haddon, Wanderings of Peoples, 1911 ; J. P. Mills, The Lhota Nagas, (introduction by J. H. Hutton), 1921 ; Roland B. Dixon, The Racial History of Man, 1923. (J. H. H.)
