Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past

Abstract

Within recorded history. most Southeast Asian peoples have been of "southern Mongoloid" physical type, whether they speak Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, or Hmong-Mien languages. However, population distributions suggest that this is a post-Pleistocene phenomenon and that for tens of millennia before the last glaciation ended Greater Mainland Southeast Asia, which included the currently insular world that rests on the Sunda Shelf, was peopled by short, dark-skinned, frizzy-haired foragers whose descendants in the Philippines came to be labeled by the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers as "negritos," a term that has since been extended to similar groups throughout the region. There are three areas in which these populations survived into the present so as to become part of written history: the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, and the Andaman Islands. All Philippine negritos speak Austronesian languages, and all Malayan negritos speak languages in the nuclear Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic, but the linguistic situation in the Andamans is a world apart. Given prehistoric language shifts among both Philippine and Malayan negritos, the prospects of determining whether disparate negrito populations were once a linguistically or culturally unified community would appear hopeless. Surprisingly, however, some clues to a common negrito past do survive in a most unexpected way.

Making Fun of Animals: Ontological Implications of Rituals and Taboos Observed in Geographically and Linguistically Discontinuous Regions of Southeast Asia and Southwestern China

“…I then introduce a ritual performed in southwestern China and a complementary taboo from the same region, both of which concern laughing at animals and therefore significantly extend the geographical and ethno‐linguistic range of the aforementioned pattern of practices and beliefs. As such, this new evidence lends support to a possibility first proposed by Blust (1981, 2013), that these usages are of remarkable antiquity and that, in essentially the same form, were already present among some of the earliest humans to arrive in this part of Asia. According to Blust (1991:525), a belief that making fun of animals can result in a punitive storm is found nowhere outside of Southeast Asia.…”

“…Yet an Austronesian origin does not explain closely comparable features of the complex found among Philippine and peninsular Negritos. Not the least of these are similar conceptions of, and apparently related names for, a punitive thunder deity found in both places (Blust 1981, 2013; Cooper 1941). Nor can it explain similar forms of the complex reported for phenotypically and socio‐economically similar Negrito populations living well to the west, in the Andaman Islands.…”

“…Actually, taboos on laughing or otherwise mocking animals have not been recorded for Andaman Islanders. At the same time, other taboos and practices symptomatic of the thunder complex can be found in the Andamans, as can other evidence for all Negritos being heirs to a unitary pan‐Negrito culture (Blust 2013).…”

“…I have no issue with this argument, which finds further support in the spotty distribution of the complex among Central‐Malayo‐Polynesian‐speakers in eastern Indonesia and its apparent absence among Malayo‐Polynesian‐speakers in Polynesia, Micronesia, and Madagascar. For the moment I leave aside Blust's further thesis (2013), that this cultural complex points to the historical and linguistic unity of all peoples classified as ‘Negrito’ (that is, all Southeast Asian Negritos and Andaman Islanders). Instead, my objective is to investigate a previously unremarked variant of the complex from southwestern China, which takes the form of a ritual associated with Miao (Hmong) and other ethnic minorities but is also engaged in by Han Chinese.…”

Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion

“…Reconstructing ancestral character states on phylogenies based on genetic or linguistic data has proven valuable in revealing the history of various sociocultural phenomena (Currie et al 2010 ; Opie et al 2014 ; Walker et al 2011 , 2012 ). Although religious beliefs are regarded as one of those cultural traits that are historically labile and prone to cultural borrowing (Guglielmino et al 1995 ), cross-cultural research suggests that religion (and mythology) can be surprisingly stable across time and space, and shared religious beliefs can be indicative of deep ancestry (Berezkin 2008 ; Blust 2013 ). The use of phylogenetic methods is important for understanding not only the origins of religious traits, but also the behavioral systems that emerged from them that have determined patterns of social constraint and have impacted believers and non-believers alike.…”