Southeast Asian Culture and Heritage in a Globalising World

Diverging Identities in a Dynamic Region

Rahil Ismail, Brian Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754672616
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317052203
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Southeast Asia has in recent years become a crossroads of cultures with high levels of ethnic pluralism, not only between countries, sub-regions and urban areas, but also at the local levels of community and neighbourhood. Illustrated by a series of international case studies, this book demonstrates how the forces of 'post-colonialism' in their various manifestations are accelerating social change and creating new and 'imagined' communities, some of which are potentially disruptive and which may well threaten the longer term sustainability of the region. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book brings together geographers, historians, anthropologists, architects, education specialists, planners and sociologists to make connections and new insights and to provide a truly comprehensive view of heritage, culture and identity in this dynamic region.

Chapter 1

Diverging Identities in a Dynamic Region

Brian J. Shaw

Introduction

Writing on the modern history of the region, Nicholas Tarling begins with the statement that ‘Southeast Asia is marked by ethnic diversity’ (Tarling 2001, 3). This statement recognises the importance of Southeast Asia as a cultural crossroads, a quality that has given rise to high levels of ethnic pluralism, not only between countries, sub-regions and urban areas but also at the local levels of community and neighbourhood. The foundations for such diversity can be traced back to the earliest migrations of early Homo populations, which settled in the region some 1.5 million years ago, characterised today as ‘Java Man’ by virtue of extensive fossil finds at Sangiran, in present-day central Java. However, notwithstanding the region’s claim to importance in human prehistory during the Pleistocene Epoch, it is the more recent migrations occurring during the present Holocene period, specifically between 12,000 and 5,000 years BP, which are now credited by archaeologists as laying the foundations of the region’s current ethnolinguistic diversity (Bellwood and Glover 2004). By that time, the area now occupied by present day China was an ‘ethnic mosaic’ with no less than five language families, namely the Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Tai, Hmong-Mien and Austronesian, making up the earliest populations of agricultural villages based on the cultivation of foxtail and broomcorn millet in the north and rice in the south (Bellwood 2004; Bellwood and Glover 2004).

Subsequent migrations, through Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula and via Taiwan and the Philippines, expanded these populations throughout the region, and beyond. Most spectacularly, the Austronesian dispersals that occurred between 5,500 and 1,000 years BP took such peoples into Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, and ultimately as far as Hawai’i and Easter Island (Bellwood 2004). It was however in the fertile flood plains of the Southeast Asian mainland that the great agrarian kingdoms developed, based on intensive wet-rice cultivation systems that were finely attuned to the cycle of the prevailing monsoon (Wolters 1999). Here the highest caloric output per land area was achieved for cultivated grain, sustaining the economy and culture of successive agrarian empires that fostered the development of urban centres with their military power, religious institutions and artistic and cultural elites. However, as Owen (2005, 9) points out,

… these kingdoms rarely managed to establish long-term political, economic, religious or linguistic control over the uplands that surrounded them … hill peoples, often ethnically and linguistically different from those below … would seek protection from the next adjoining kingdom, manipulating tribute relationships to try to sustain their security.

Scholars have characterised such territorial arrangements as akin to the concept of the mandala, a Sanskrit term, which used in this way symbolises the waxing and waning of territories and group allegiances in the absence of firm boundaries and declared identities (Higham 1989). In a region where land was plentiful and population density still relatively low, rulers were more interested in the number of potential slaves that might be captured by a conquering army, rather than in the control of land per se (Jerndal and Rigg 1998).

Inevitably the history of the region has revolved around the stories of these ‘kingdoms and super-kingdoms’ such as the Mon-Khmer kingdom of Funan established at least two thousand years ago, the Khmer civilisation at Angkor, Champa in present day Vietnam, Pagan in Burma, Ayudhaya in today’s southern Thailand, and the more recently documented sea-borne empire of Srivijaya (Tarling 2001, 10–15) (see Figure 1.1). Such predisposition has tended to downplay the fortunes of people living in highland areas, those who for the most part lived without written records. Moreover, lowlander prejudice towards these highland groups has defined their interrelationship in a classic ‘hill-valley’ dualism. Geography and ethnicity combined to produce minority groups in places such as present day Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, while in Burma the Shans, Karens and other minorities belied the concept of the nation-state. Yet, Milton Osborne (2000, 53) makes the point that hill peoples, while outsiders, ‘played an important if highly varied role throughout the region. They could supply, or be a source of slaves, trade in forest products, or offer special skills such as the training of elephants.’ However, while the highland ethnic minorities may have enhanced the glory of kings this most probably was not in conditions of their own choosing. As the Chinese emissary to Angkor, Zhou Daguan, saw fit to observe in the late thirteenth century,

Wild men from the hills can be bught (sic) to serve as slaves. Families of wealth may own more than one hundred; those of lesser means content themselves with ten or twenty; only the very poor have none (Freeman and Jacques 2006, 37).

The extent to which the emergence of the ‘god-king’ (deva-raja) endowed with mystical power and exalted status derives from the transfer of Indian culture and religion has been the subject of intense debate. Certainly the establishment of both overland and maritime trade connections between the sub-continent and the lands of ‘Further India’ immediately to the east fostered acculturation, but the prevailing wisdom now favours a process of ‘localisation’ whereby Southeast Asian societies adapted elements of both Indic and Sinic culture to meet their own needs (Hill 2002; Bellina and Glover 2004). Osborne (2000, 5–6) makes the point that the countries of Southeast Asia were neither ‘little Indias’ nor ‘little Chinas’, arguing the case for broad similarities across a wide area, through the adoption of the nuclear or individual family and the existence of linguistic unity particularly enhanced through the wide usage of Tai and Indonesian/Malay languages. But Osborne (2000, 8) then argues against his own thesis stressing ‘the profound differences that do exist from place to place and between one ethnic group and another’. This apparent volte-face underlines the fundamental impasse that pervades the contents of this volume; to what extent should we celebrate the continuities that have formed this region’s separate identity, or alternatively, stress the fragmentary nature of group and national identity and the challenges these pose for longer-term economic, political and social sustainability?

Figure 1.1 Southeast Asia

Source: Map by Bernard Shaw.

Maritime Incursions

Mention has been made of the maritime empire Srivijaya, which flourished between the fourth and thirteenth centuries, with a ‘golden age’ between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Unlike the mainland empires this was a thalassocracy centred in the area of present day Palembang, controlling the Melaka and Sunda Straits in both intra- and inter-regional flows of people, goods and services through port cities such as Aceh, Makassar and Patani. The ports functioned not only as commercial entrepôts, but also developed as political and cultural centres, described as ‘port-polity’ (Kathirithamby-Wells and Villiers 1990). Accordingly, this maritime empire displayed a high degree of ethno-linguistic variety with no dominant group, unlike the mainland empires with their ‘insider-outsider’ structure. This cosmopolitanism was enhanced by the nature of the monsoon environment, for in the days of sailing ships, suitable havens were particularly important in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Java Sea and Malacca Strait, when strong winds confined vessels to harbour until the change of season. During the waiting periods for the changing winds traders would stay for extended periods of time, building fortified camps near to pre-existing indigenous villages, and thus foster the development of hybrid settlements. Johannes Widodo (2004, 3) summarises these exchanges,

The trading ships and immigrant boats were not only carrying people and goods, but also conveying cosmological and geometrical memories … the different layers from different cultures have been super-imposed, adapted, and undergone process of indigenisation … forming a truly blended cosmopolitan urban morphology and culture.

Srivijaya’s success owed much to its tributary relationship with China, a country that jealously guarded its interests in the southern seas, which the Chinese termed Nanyang. During the early fifteenth century, the Ming Dynasty extended Chinese influence through the seven great expeditions of the Chinese-Muslim missionary navigator Admiral Zheng He, which further stimulated the development of cosmopolitan trading ports throughout the region. Anthony Reid (1993, 38) argues that the ‘creative melding’ of Chinese and Javanese marine technology in the wake of these expeditions prompted the subsequent expansion of Javanese shipping during the fifteenth century. A further beneficiary of greater Chinese presence in the region was the emergent port of Melaka, which became Southeast Asia’s last great pre-colonial entrepôt. Thereafter, with the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511, to be followed by Spanish, Dutch, French, British and American incursions, port cities were increasingly captured as footholds for Western powers, operating as ‘beachheads of an exogenous system … peripheral but nevertheless revolutionary’ (Rhoads Murphey quoted in Reid 1989, 54). The subsequent ‘colonial period’ of Southeast Asia has thus been characterised as a ‘watershed’ in the region’s development (Osborne 2000, 35–7), but in the context of maritime Southeast Asia it may be seen to have merely accelerated a process of ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism that had been taking place over previous centuries, most notably with the diffusion of Islam from the beginning of the thirteenth century.

While the mapping of European conquest in Southeast Asia ultimately revealed swathes of colour-coded territory depicting the possessions of the major colonial powers, impacts before the nineteenth century have been characterised as ‘pin-prick imperialism’ (Reed 2000, 69). Territorial possessions were largely confined to the coastal areas of insular Southeast Asia where a network of garrisoned ports supported local ‘factories’ engaged in overseas trade, but as Murphey (1989, 234) asserts ‘Westerners and even their ships and trade remained less important than Asians and the trade they carried’. Traditional rulers continued to enjoy power, many of them willing partners in the ‘divide and rule’ policy’ most successfully employed by the British. Numerically the number of Europeans was relatively small and the shortage of ‘white women’ in the colonies perpetuated that scarcity. Intermarriage, advocated by the Portuguese as a solution to this problem, produced communities of westernised Eurasians but this presence was essentially confined to coastal cities such as Melaka where their descendants survive to the present day (Hoyt 1993). The exception to this pattern was found in the Philippines where the Spanish conquistadors were driven, as in the Americas, by missionary zeal and the desire to secure colonised lands for the Spanish Crown. The Spanish replaced pre-existing indigenous beliefs and social systems with Roman Catholicism and the encomienda whereby conquistadors were granted a feudal form of trusteeship over the indigenous population (Ulack 2000).

In consequence, rather than being eclipsed by the arrival of a succession of colonial powers, a variety of other ethnic groups participated in the expanding trade networks. Shipping was conducted by Chinese, Javanese, Malays, Indians, Arabs, and increasingly as the eighteenth century drew on, by Buginese traders based in Makasar. The Chinese in particular prospered under the patronage of the European powers, not only as entrepreneurial traders but also as agriculturalists, craftsmen and miners, to the extent that Southeast Asia, in the eighteenth century, could be characterised as ‘a zone of offshore production for China’ (Carl Trocki quoted in Owen 2005, 27). Unfortunately, such propinquity had its downside when the Chinese, despite treaties assuring their protection, were caught between the interests of colonial powers, local rulers, rival elites and the indigenous populations. Most infamously in Manila 1603, and in Batavia (Jakarta) 1740, thousands of Chinese were massacred when colonial authorities overreacted to local tensions. Over the succeeding centuries eruptions of anti-Sinic sentiment throughout the region led variously to the imposition of immigration restrictions, sundry deportations and occasionally local pogroms against ethnic Chinese (Pan 1998). These atavistic tensions were most recently manifest in the 1998 Indonesian riots which scapegoated the non-pribumi (non-indigenous) Chinese population in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbours

Prior to the nineteenth century the main preoccupation of the European colonisers lay in the extraction of concessions and maintenance of trade routes within insular Southeast Asia. This situation changed with the demand imperatives that accompanied growing industrialisation in the West and a number of significant innovations that transformed relations between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’. The gradual arrival of both the steamship and the international telegraph, followed by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, facilitated more effective communication between metropolitan-based governments and their distant colonies (Osborne 2000; Reed 2000). Attention turned towards the land-based empires of Southeast Asia where the imperial ambitions of the British and French found a new theatre for their political manoeuvres. The expansion of British power into northeastern India and the desire to secure imperial borders in the areas of Manipur and Assam challenged the Burmese Konbaung dynasty. In Indochina the French invasion of Vietnam as a precursor to opening up trade with China ended that country’s independence. Squeezed between these imperial pincers, the kingdom of Siam, under the reigns of Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn (Ramas IV and V), carried out a series of modernisations and made substantial territorial concessions in order to preserve the existence of the Thai state (Shaw 2001).

A casualty of these now rapidly colliding empires was the mandala, or notion of alliances based upon traditional yet shifting allegiances. The colonial powers demanded the security of frontier zones and the imposition of formalised boundaries, concepts that were alien to the indigenous rulers. The Treaty of London 1824 marked the division between British possessions in the Malay Peninsula and Dutch interests in Sumatra, thus splitting the area once part of the Srivijaya kingdom. Siam, which had made substantial trading concessions to Britain under the terms of the Bowring Treaty 1855, was subsequently forced to relinquish to the French its suzerainty of territories east of the Mekong, following the Pak Nam incident in 1893. Then, in 1909, Siam ceded to the British its southern dependencies of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Terengganu. The British conquest of Burma, completed by the end of the nineteenth century, left former areas of Burmese influence beyond the border with India (Osborne 2000; Owen 2005). These and other boundary changes forged six political entities out of the kaleidoscope of pre-colonial states, namely British Burma; quasi-independent Siam; French Indochina; Spanish Philippines, British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. While some subdivisions have taken place in the context of postcolonial nationalism, these political entities have for the most part survived to the present day (Elson 2004).

From an indigenous perspective these new boundaries were arbitrary and restrictive. At the stroke of a pen ethnic groups were relegated to the status of ‘minorities’ in their own traditional lands. Moreover, colonial authorities moved to ‘regulate, constrict, count, standardise and hierarchically subordinate’ the areas and peoples of the region (Benedict Anderson quoted in Owen 2005, 78). Psychological fences were erected between ethnic groups as the colonial practice of racial ascription classified them according to their economic or political potential within the colonial system. Some tribes were considered ‘lazy, independent and turbulent’ others ‘low down in the scale of humanity’ following the anthropological assumptions of the time. In Borneo the Iban were identified as good fighters and used to quell disturbances among other ethnic groups; the Chinese were encouraged for their trading skills; the Malays courted as political allies. Where indigenous populations were not considered suitable for specific economic activity, others were imported: Indians into Malaya’s new rubber plantations, Tamils into tea plantations in Ceylon. The end results of such policies, legacies of colonial rule, were an identification of ethnicity with economic or political function, the forced, assisted or encouraged migration of ethnic groups and the displacement of indigenous peoples. The economic transformation of the region, undertaken as a colonial imperative, initiated a corresponding social and cultural transformation, elements of which are still enduring (Osborne 2000; Owen 2005; Reed 2000).

Yet, the most significant change that accompanied this intensification of colonial rule was a population explosion that began around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and indeed still continues to the present day. An early observer, John Crawfurd, wrote that Siam was ‘inhabited by monkeys rather than people’ (quoted in Hill 2002, 23), citing a population of 2.7 million for the whole country which also included territory in Laos. He gave estimates of some 5 million for Indochina, 6 million for Java, with 11 million for Indonesia as a whole, estimating the region’s population at some 25 million in 1830 (Fisher 1964). These broad estimates were largely confirmed by other contemporary observers who noted the substantial population increases as the century progressed (Fisher 1964, 174–5). By the end of the nineteenth century, censuses conducted by colonial authorities recorded a regional total of over 80 million, and this figure more than doubled again by 1950 (Buchanan 1967; Fisher 1964; Hill 2002; Owen 2005). The reasons for this sudden increase after centuries of constancy are still open to debate, but change was not due to any major influx of population from outside the region with only some seven p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Diverging Identities in a Dynamic Region
• 2 ‘Di waktu petang di Geylang Serai’ Geylang Serai: Maintaining Identity in a Globalised World
• 3 Paradise Lost? Islands, Global Tourism and Heritage Erasure in Malaysia and Singapore
• 4 ‘Being Rooted and Living Globally’: Singapore’s Educational Reform as Post-developmental Governance
• 5 Morphogenesis and Hybridity of Southeast Asian Coastal Cities
• 6 Nation-building, Identity and War Commemoration Spaces in Malaysia and Singapore
• 7 Being Javanese in a Changing Javanese City
• 8 Re-imagining Economic Development in a Post-colonial World: Towards Laos 2020
• 9 When was Burma? Military Rules since 1962
• Index