It is said that there are three main ethnic groups in the Malay Peninsula of Malaysia: the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. In addition to these ethnic groups, various ethnic minority people live the Malay Peninsula. One them is the Orang Asli. Many anthropologists have conducted research on the Orang Asli so far. They described the “traditional” life world of the Orang Asli in their ethnographies. However, the Orang Asli have experienced a drastic change in recent years becouse of the intervention from the outer world: that is, development and Islamization. It is said that the traditional life world of the Orang Asli has rapidly disappeared in the process of “de-culturalization.”
The purpose of this article is to elucidate the life world of the Orang Asli in the present situation, using the ethnographical data from my fieldwork (1996-1998). The data in this article were obtained mainly by household survey. The data concerning household income are supplemented by the data concerning earnings from rubber tapping and durian harvest.
In the first half part of this article, I will sketch the village history of Durian Tawar to explicate the process of social stratification among villagers: a differentiation between “upper people” and “lower people”. I will demonstrate income disparities between them, using data from household survey and data concerning earnings from rubber tapping and durian harvest.
The second half in this article presents detailed information on each household in numerical order as “Household Memorandum,” Having a difficulty in conducting a complate analysis of “Household Memorandum,” I shall explain a discovery process of research topics. By drawing up “Household Memorandum,” I discovered various research topics; for example, differentiation of occupation, logic of development, complicated kinship relationship, hybridity and so on. Thus, it can be said that “Household Memorandum” shows the present life world of the Orang Asli.

Key Words: life world, hierarchy, household survey, indigenous people, development

There is a narrative that salmon is a necessary resource for the aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast of Canada. This narrative has often been stressed, not only among the aboriginal societies themselves but also by those who observe them from outside, such as the Canadian government, the mass media and anthropologists. Generally, this narrative includes explanations of the significance of salmon in relation to two dimensions: the socio-economic demension, which involves their routines and daily lives, and the religious-symbolic dimension.
Although explanations concerning the former dimension necessarily require statistical empirical evidence, both the aboriginal peoples themselves and outsiders abstain from using such procedures, and the latter seem to recognize only the surface of the narrative of the aboriginal peoples.
Under these conditions, this article aims first to shed light on the data collected during the author’s fieldwork among the Kwakwaka’wakw, one of the aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast, then to examine the significance of salmon in the socio-economic dimension from the field data, and to compare the result to the narratives on the significance of salmon. Readers will see from this that there is an explanatory gap between the narratives and the field-data analysis, that the former emphasizes the significance of salmon in the domain of subsistance (food fishery), while the latter points out the significance in the domain commercial fishery, in which aboriginal people of the area have been engaged for over 100 years (and which has been somewhat ignored in the narratives).

Key Words: Kwakwaka’wakw, salmon, commercial fishery, food fishery, crew group