Song of a Reformed Headhunter

An immense scholarly achievement. Erudite, persuasive, and gracefully written, it is the kind of intellectual history that changes our understanding of ourselves, our ideas, our cultures, and our world. Yes, it focuses on the strain of anti-Judaism in Western thinking, but it is also about the making and writing of history more generally. Particularly I learned from its analysis of Marx. That in critiquing the evils of capitalism, Marx not only deployed the hated figure of the Jew, but also claimed the figure's reality in society. He thought he was doing sociology as well as economic theory, and so opened the possibility to future persecution of "real" Jews. It is too easy to slip from capitalism to Jewry in one's thinking. A fault that plagues the Left. 

"Ethnographies are mountains and endure," writes Dentan, but "theories are mayflies and don't." This work of ethnography is certain to endure like the mountain it is, and its theory about Semai peaceability is likely to be developed, strengthened, and affirmed by future ethnographers. To state its theory simplistically, Dentan argues that Semai peaceability originated as a functioning adaptation to Malay and British invasion, colonization, and child slavery. The Semai response to overwhelming violence, rape, and kidnapping is to flee, and when they cannot flee from the encroaching hegemonic state, to "surrender," in the author's specific sense of acting with the understanding that success is not within their control. The alternative is death and extinction. Semai elaborated this response into a religion of demon lovers (identification with one's oppressors), protective rituals, an egalitarian ethos, and a respectful way of raising kids, all des...