In the Wake of Religious Conversions: Differences in Cognition and Emotion Across Three Religious Communities of an Indigenous Tribe in Malaysia

The Indigenous spirituality of a hunter-gatherer tribe (Temiar) of Peninsular Malaysia, in the Southeast Asian region, has been fractured by religious conversions into three religious communities-Traditional, Muslim, and Christian. Based on the theoretical framework of strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities (Sundararajan, 2020), this study explored the varying degrees of change in cognition and emotion when the kinship-based spirituality of Indigenous Temiar came under the influence, through conversion, of the globalizing world religions. Thirty-seven traditional-Temiar, 32 Temiar-Muslim, and 32 Temiar-Christian took part in the semistructured interviews which elicited suffering narratives. The transcripts were then translated and back-translated into English for psycholinguistic coding via Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on linguistic variables that operationalize the cognitive styles and emotional expression profiles. The between-group comparison revealed that traditional-Temiar and Temiar-Muslim groups retained much of the strong-ties cognitive styles of their ancestral niche, as evidenced by a significantly higher score in "collective self-representation " (e.g., we and they) compared to the Temiar-Christian group. For emotional processing, Temiar-Christians overall utilized significantly more "experience-distant modes " (e.g., intellectualization) of emotional expression than their counterparts. This mixed-method study showcased the Indigenous spirituality of an understudied tribe (Temiar) in Peninsular Malaysia. It demonstrated that changes in cognition and emotion can happen within a single generation if the conversion entails systematic weakening of strong-ties rationality, whereas if the conversion is friendly to the kinship-based infrastructures of traditional societies, converts may retain much of the traditional strong-ties rationality. This documentation of stability as well as change of an Indigenous spirituality can shed some light on the resilience and challenges of traditional strong-ties societies in the globalizing era.