ome of it based on fact and some based on assumptions-that disintegration if not the extinction of these groups or their cultures will be the culmination of their greater interaction with the outside world. This concern is particularly expressed for those tribal communities who continue to rely principally on the natural environment for a major portion of their subsistence. There are indications that tribal community interactions with outsiders have principally benefited the latter. It is claimed that these groups are increasingly being marginalized socio-politically, economically and environmentally.
Apart from the fact that this concern with the survival of ethnic minorities is now globalized, there is nothing particularly new about development leading to the erosion and disintegration of tribal cultures, and the degradation of their living environment' following intensification of their interaction with the outside world. There is abundant historical evidence (Pringle, 1970; Wang, 1958) and anthropological and archaeological testimony (Colless, 1969; Dunn, 1975; Hutterer, 1974, 1983b; Rambo, 1969, 1988; Wales, 1940) as well as information from geographical sources (Lien, 1988; Potter, 1988) on environmental abuse and economic exploitation of tribal people living in this region. As Dentan (1965) noted in his study of the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia, social, economic and physical exploitation is not recent.
Up until the early 1900s, the Orang Asli within the states of Perak and Pahang, for example, were known to have suffered adversely at the hands of the Malays.
Today, as in the past, the frontier regions are still the warehouses of resources demanded by the outside groups and the world at large. For centuries, South-East Asia was the scene of violence and exploitation, arising in the early periods from competitive demands for spices and valuable forest products such as sandalwood, and subsequently from forced cultivation of cash crops like coffee, coconut, rubber and sugar-cane by various colonial powers. Every student in South-East Asia has been taught in history lessons about numerous examples of economic exploitation of the larger groups, such as those associated with indentured labour in the agricultural plantations and estates in Malaya and the culture system introduced by the Dutch in Java, but they have learned less of the problems faced by the tribal minorities.
Lately, exploitation has moved in a big way into the remaining forests, within which many tribal peoples have continued to preserve their identity after having been driven from areas long ago converted to agriculture, or absorbed among the more densely settled majority populations of these areas. Although the variety and amount of forest resources that are currently being exploited still represent only a small portion of the wealth that the tropical rain forest environment offers, their extractions frequently result in the degradation and extinction of the remaining resources, and generate an enormously heavier impact on the forest-dwelling people than in the past.
There are other causes of socio-economic and environmental destabilization of indigenous societies. Severe depopulation of tribal peoples was another familiar feature of the early years of frontier development until as late as the turn of the twentieth century. In Borneo, for instance, the introduction of new types and strains of viruses and diseases by foreign traders and European administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a major cause of massive depopulation of many tribal communities, and the total extinction of some tribal clans (Lien, 1987). Other causes include punitive raids to impress tribal populations of the overwhelming force available at the government's disposal, and thereby to gain their 'co-operation' (Hose, 1926; Pringle, 1970). Such raids inevitably resulted in severe loss of life, directly by war and indirectly through seriously disturbing the subsistence economy. There have also been more subtle means of interference, such as the extension of gove