Senoi Culture ID

The Senoi are an indigenous people of the interior of the Malay Peninsula, among the aboriginal inhabitants of its forested highlands long predating the coastal Malay states.

Senoi communities lived in the rainforest by a combination of shifting cultivation, the gathering of forest products, hunting, and fishing, moving with the rhythms of the forest.

Society was organised around small communities and kinship, and religious life centred on the spirits of the forest and the world around them, interpreted through dreams and ritual.

As one of the aboriginal peoples of the peninsula's interior, the Senoi preserved a forest way of life apart from the lowland world.