Abstract

In the absence of concepts that correspond to those of chance, luck, or fortune, how do people account for why seemingly random desirable or undesirable events occur? Based on long-term fieldwork with the Chewong, a small hunting-gathering and shifting-cultivating group of people who live in the Malaysian rain-forest, I study their theory of causality. It is argued that cause is a universal category of the human mind, but that an understanding of cause cannot be separated from an examination of the ontology and epistemology in each case.