The peoples of Malaysia [233]

In the final pages of ‘The peoples of Malaysia’ Fay-Cooper Cole deals with the future of the Malayan peoples, but first it is necessary to reconsider their past. In the introductory chapter he made the assumption that Malayan cultures were once fundamentally similar, and that if we were able to subtract foreign influences we might gain an idea as to what is "native" as opposed to those things introduced from India, Europe, and America.
At the end he scanned certain test groups that most fully illustrate differences in culture, and have noted historical contacts for a period of more than one thousand years. To test the various assumptions with which he started, he had prepared a chart in which the distribution of eighty "native" traits among ten groups can be readily followed. It appears at once that all have much in common, despite long separation from one another and despite powerful, but often different, outside influences. This unity would be even more striking had he included objects of everyday use, for basketry, cooking utensils, traps, nets, and implements of warfare are essentially the same, although often exhibiting some local specialization. Outside contacts have brought a veneer of foreign goods to the courts and to the well-to-do, but articles of peasant life differ but little.

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