The Malay peninsula is Siamese in its narrow or neck portion. The head is inhabited by three racial groups. The Semang in the interior are pure Negritos. The Sakai or Senoi, also in the interior, are short in stature, dark, and broad nosed, but wavy-haired. They resemble a series of hill tribes scattered from India to the East Indies: the Vedda of Ceylon, the Irula and other tribes of southern India, the Toala of Celebes (§ [27], [257]). Perhaps the Kolarians or Munda-Kol of central India, the Moi and other groups of Indo-China, the Nicobar islanders, and certain nationalities of Sumatra are also to be reckoned as partial representatives of the same type. This race, if it is such, is generalized, with certain Caucasian and other Negroid but few Mongoloid resemblances. It is perhaps to be classed as Australoid, and has been named Indo-Australoid. The third racial group of the peninsula are the Malays, who, at least in large part, are emigrants in comparatively recent centuries from Sumatra. Culturally the Malay peninsula belongs with the East Indies rather than with Indo-China.
Three main layers of civilization are evident in Indo-China. The old native culture was allied to that of the East Indies and the islands beyond—whatever the speech may have been. Even to-day backward tribes of both regions, especially inland, often show strikingly similar customs: the use of bark cloth, for instance, separate houses for unmarried men and girls. This culture remains fairly well defined in spots as far west as Assam and the Kolarian region of India.
The two other civilizations have flowed in from India and China. Practically everything of higher culture in Indo-China traces back directly to these two countries. The Indian influence has been both wider and deeper than the Chinese. It brought in Buddhism and writing, and colored art and architecture. This Indian influence began more than two thousand years ago, and while it may have weakened somewhat after India’s return from Buddhism to Brahmanism, it has never ceased. As there were no notable Indian conquests, this influence is an excellent example of the normal, gradual type of cultural pervading. Chinese contacts are equally old as the Indian, but have mostly remained confined to the area adjacent to the Middle Kingdom. The Anamese have adopted the Chinese system of family names, Confucianism, literary examinations, and the like, sometimes more largely as a conscious endeavor than in fact.
261. Oceania
From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea; and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations. Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian, prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the “Indo-Australians.”
262. The East Indies
Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions, in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal. However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree, although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. This began nearly two thousand years ago and remained active for over a thousand; it introduced architecture, sculpture, writing, monarchy, religion, iron, cotton, and a host of other elements of higher culture. The earlier Indian influence was Buddhist and its seat of power centered in southern Sumatra; the later was Brahman and reached its zenith in Java. The number of immigrants was probably small, their effect enormous. A group of refugees, a younger son of a royal house with his retinue, a band of adventurers, would found a colony, sometimes conquering the natives, sometimes attaching them peacefully to their leadership, and soon a little kingdom was flourishing, which in time sent out other offshoots or absorbed its rivals until its name commanded respect and tribute for long distances across the sea. It was a procedure which the Mohammedanized Malays later repeated over the East Indies, and which on the Asiatic continent some centuries earlier had carried Chinese civilization far to the north and south of its original limits, and Aryan speech and culture throughout India. The kingdoms struggled, throve, decayed, and succeeded one another; the permanent aspect of the process was the ever deeper though irregular permeation of life with new arts and ideas.
The influence of China came later and was less than that of India. In the thirteenth century the Sumatran Malays were converted to Mohammedanism and began a career of expansion which culminated in the complete conquest of Java by 1478, carried their faith over much of the area, and was checked only by the advent of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch. Mohammedanism, besides its cult and law, introduced some new elements of culture, such as firearms; but perhaps its most important effect was that it put an end to the growth of the specifically Indian type of influence in Malaysia.
Underlying these strains from the historic civilizations of Asia was a semi-primitive culture, many of whose elements were shared by the East Indians with the Indo-Chinese and Melanesians, and which in part can be traced from India to Polynesia. This Indo-Oceanic culture included agriculture—with rice and sugar cane in Malaysia and on the mainland; domestic animals of its own—the buffalo, pig, and fowl—different from those of north and west Asia; pottery, bark clothing, possibly bronze, though if so this was intrusive; men’s clubs or sleeping houses; a non-political organization of society on the basis of kinship and tribal community; and such practices as head hunting and skull cult. The employment of bamboo and rattan was a prime characteristic, and seems to have prevented a vigorous stone age from having flourished in the East Indies and adjacent regions. Bamboo is perhaps capable of serving more different cultural uses than any one other plant. It makes satisfactory houses, rafts, knives, spears, bows, arrows, blowguns, textiles, cooking vessels, receptacles, and musical instruments, with a minimum of labor. It is best worked with metal tools, and has therefore perhaps experienced its most thorough utilization at the hands of peoples too backward to secure a large supply of metals for themselves but able to obtain a limited stock of iron from their neighbors. Nevertheless even the prehistoric culture of the region is likely to have made large use of bamboo.
This primitive culture of course varied locally. It was also not of unitary origin. It certainly contained elements that were older than others, or that originated in different parts of the area. Rice and fowls for instance are likely to be more recent than skull cult and use of bamboo. The culture may even resolve, when it shall have been analyzed more intensively, into two or more fairly separable strata. But, taken in block, it must once have prevailed with fundamental similarity from eastern India well out into the Pacific, since everywhere within this tract there are to-day hill and jungle peoples whose culture conforms at least roughly to the type. It is necessary to remember, however, that nowhere does this culture survive in purity. To some degree the influence of the greater Asiatic civilizations has made itself felt among the most aloof tribes. They mix a few Hindu religious concepts with their head hunting rituals, for instance, or know how to forge imported iron, or even grow American maize. They have everywhere been exposed in some degree to contact with cultures of subsequent level. Thus it is characteristic that the Negritos, whose scattered distribution indicates that they may have been the first inhabitants of the East Indies, possess a debased or parasitic Malaysian culture instead of a specific Negrito one.