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.
