Identity and the State in Malaysia

Fausto Barlocco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317932383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using the case study of the Kadazan of Sabah, a region in the Malaysian section of Borneo, this book examines national, ethnic and local identities in post-colonial states. It shows the importance of the connection between lived experience and identity and belonging, and by doing so, provides a deeper and fuller explanation of the apparently contradictory conflict between different collective forms of identification and the way in which they are employed in reference to everyday situations.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and historical analysis, the book reconstructs the development of the cultural forms and labels associated with the collective identities it studies. The author employs an approach that sees collective identification as an expression of everyday practices and that stresses the importance of participation and familiarity between forms of identification and lived experience. In this context, he considers anthropological debates about state-minorities relations and issues of 'dignity' and 'respect'.

Explaining state-minority relations in Malaysia and more generally in other post-colonial realities, the insights presented are highly relevant to other cases of conflicting allegiances and identity politics in settings of post-colonial nation-building.

1 Introduction

The present world is a world of groups competing in the arena of identity politics for power, influence and recognition. Many of these groups do so in relation to what, despite the changes brought by globalisation, are the main actors officially endowed with sovereignty: the states. Boulanger (2009) argues in a convincing way that those who fully embrace universalism pay the price of being unable to understand the appeal and significance of particularistic phenomena such as ethnicity and the importance of studying them.

While Boulanger’s (2009) discussion is based on what I believe is a very illuminating case, that of ethnic sentiment in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, Southeast Asia had already been singled out by Kahn (1998), against a view that would see the region as completely taken by the goal of economic development, for the striking resurgence of identity politics.

The reason that makes Malaysia particularly interesting is that it seems to be an extremely successful example among postcolonial states, despite the fact that, as highlighted by Postill (2006: 2), it came about with an economy strongly dependent on export products and an ethnically divided population. The success of Malaysia is testified to by various accomplishments: a steady improvement in the standard of living of its citizens, a stable and relatively democratic political system, the fact that it has successfully come out of the economic crisis that hit the region at the end of the 1990s, and it seems well on its way to fulfil its government’s project Wawasan 2020 (‘Vision 2020’), the achievement of the status of a developed nation by 2020.

Another element of Malaysia’s success is, according to Postill, the fact that nation builders have been able to ‘create a nation within their allocated territory’, by establishing an ‘integrated system of cultural institutions and practices’ constituting what he calls a ‘thick culture area’ (2006: 15), in which even peripheral groups such as the Iban of Sarawak have become deeply ‘Malaysianised’.

This book looks at the same phenomenon put in relief by Boulanger (2009) while trying to remedy a limitation of her work: in a passage of her book she describes how, at a conference of the Borneo Research Council in which she was talking about ethnicity in Sarawak, a man from the audience argued that her discussion did not address the problem of ‘how he, as a person who was ethnically Bidayuh, felt’ (2009: 17, emphasis in original). The attempt, in my view, is essential not only to give adequate consideration to the participants’ views of their own culture, a fact already accomplished by Boulanger, but mainly to reach a deeper and fuller understanding of the phenomenon of identity. This understanding is possible, in my view, only by taking into account the fact that identity and all the forms it can take, such as national, ethnic, local and religious, is something produced in the lived experience of individuals and that makes sense to them only in relation to that dimension.

This starting point requires a focus on the lived experiences of individuals and an analysis of the material conditions influencing them, and, as a result, identity. This approach, in my view, can put remedy to the apparent contradiction between Postill’s (2006) conclusion that Malaysian nation builders have been successful in Malaysianising citizens (even though he never talks directly about identity) and Boulanger’s conclusions about the enduring strength and importance of ethnic and other alternative forms of collective identity. In doing so, I will follow Chua’s insights about the Bidayuh of Sarawak, whose experiences of Malaysian citizenship she describes as characterised by ambivalence and by ‘a complex blend of enthusiasm and resentment’. This is determined by the fact that, while they are aware of being Malaysian and keen to be part of the modernity offered by the country, they also experience the fact that Malaysian modernity is a ‘highly uneven ethnic and religious terrain’ in which they often constitute a disadvantaged group (2012: 34).

The perspective proposed by this book aims to show how the Malaysian state can create the basis for the development of a shared collective identity based on the commonality of lived experiences among citizens, while, at the same time, other aspects of individuals’ lived experiences can support the formation of alternative ones or strengthen them. My argument is that the strength of forms of collective identification alternative to the nation derives primarily from a condition of marginality, a concept described by Wenger as a restricted form of participation dominated by non-participation (1998: 164–66). The notion of marginality has been used by various anthropologists (Tsing 1993; Winzeler 1997a; Rosaldo 2003; Chua 2012) to describe the condition of hinterland minorities in island Southeast Asia. While the conditions generated by the Malaysian state make it possible for minority groups to imagine themselves as members of the national ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991), at the same time the lack of power to define the role they can play in it, and the lack of participation afforded, lead them to identify more strongly with groups closer to their everyday experience and over whose definition and destiny they feel they have more control.

The aim of this book, therefore, is that of studying the main collective identities, national and ethnic but also sub-national and local, available and used by individuals in Sabah, East Malaysia, and their relationship with practices that form the essential part of their lived experience and with discourses circulated by the government and other cultural and political actors. The study focuses on an ethnic minority, the Kadazan of Penampang District, also known as Tanga’ah or Tangarah in local languages, who constitute a subsection of the largest non-Malay ethnic group of Sabah, at present officially labelled as Kadazandusun. The state of Sabah seems particularly interesting as a case study because of its history of opposition politics, led by Christian members of the Kadazandusun community, and for the massive presence of immigrants, mostly from the bordering Indonesia and Philippines, who have altered the ethnic balance as they make up now about one-third of the state’s population (Sadiq 2005). These elements give hints about the specific experiences of Sabahans and especially of the Kadazan: the importance of ethnic and religious belonging, the feeling of being in a remote and underdeveloped resource-rich borderland, the disparity between the material development enjoyed by people in the Peninsula and locally.

The reasons for choosing the case study are various. First of all, studying the Kadazan provides a chance to look at issues of ethnicity, religion and locality within the context of the state–minority relationships of a very interesting case of postcolonial state constituted by a sort of ‘state engineering’ that has so far been relatively stable but has underlying tensions. Second, it offers the possibility to look at identity in a context that is common to many realities in the developing but also in the developed world: that of citizens feeling further and further away from states that, despite the fact that they have in some way ‘built a nation’ in their territories, are not providing enough sense of participation to their citizens, who often turn to alternative, ‘closer to home’, forms of collective identities.

In order to follow this line of enquiry, this book takes an approach that concentrates on the experience of the subjects, accessing it through various ethnographic techniques. The central focus of the research is identity as emerging from lived experience, a reality constituted primarily by practices, many of which become objectified as symbols. The theoretical framework with which I am trying to understand the relationship between practice and identity is derived from the work of Etienne Wenger (1998), who described identity as an experience of meaning involving both a practical aspect of ‘participation’ and a discursive one of ‘reification’. Both these aspects, according to Wenger (1998), are involved in the processes of identity building and of shaping the meanings in the social context. This aspect of Wenger’s theorisation, discussing the tension between ‘identification’ and ‘negotiability’ (see later) brings the discussion to the issue of the relationship between identity and power, the aspect that has been more commonly discussed and analysed in the recent social scientific literature on the topic. This would lead us to understand the necessity of looking at the construction of collective forms of identification over time, an approach already followed by many authors who have discussed the development of ideas of the nation, ethnicity, and locality. In particular, I am following the idea that the nation is a modern creation brought forward by scholars such as Gellner (1983) and Anderson (1991), as well as Scott’s (2009) radical constructionist view of ethnicity.

Ethnic minorities and the state in Southeast Asia: ‘internal colonialism’, ‘cultural citizenship’ and ‘dignity’

This book situates itself within the anthropological debate about the relations between minorities and states, a field that has seen some important contributions specific to the Southeast Asian region. This section will briefly review some of the most relevant of them.

Winzeler (1997a) stressed the similarity, and sometimes continuity, between the treatment of the colonised peoples by the European rulers and that of indigenous peoples of Borneo by the states of which they are citizens (Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei) through the concept of ‘fourth world colonialism’ or ‘internal colonialism’. However, he remarked that while European colonialists limited themselves to pacification and administration, postcolonial governments go much further in their efforts at transforming the indigenous peoples by imposing on them a national culture, religion and language and attempting to eradicate traditional beliefs, customs, lifestyles and modes of adaptation that are seen as backward or savage. The impositions made on them by the state, Winzeler (1997a) argued, provoke diverse and often ambiguous reactions by the indigenous peoples, involving dependency and acceptance but also hostility and resistance. Despite the fact that it usually does not challenge the dominating ‘developmentalist’ paradigm, resistance derives from the perception of being exploited and of the fact that, contrary to the propositions of the government propaganda, it is very hard for indigenous peoples to reach the level of wealth and development enjoyed by the dominant groups of their polity.

A similar point has been made by Rosaldo (2003), who argued that, by trying to draw minority groups into nation-building projects driven by ideas of development, modernity, assimilation and nationalism, metropolitan centres in various Southeast Asian countries ask members of minority groups to stop being what they are and transform into citizens. The hinterland minorities, on their part, struggle ‘to be treated with what they define as respect’, a struggle that often takes the form of ‘cultural citizenship’, expressed in claims they make as citizens ‘against the state’ in terms of formal rights and in terms of recognition as ‘full members’ against a second-class position (ibid.: 1–3).

These considerations have been expanded by Boulanger (2009), who dedicated a whole book to the discussion of the way in which modern states took away the ‘dignity’ and ‘autonomy’ of members of previously ‘classless societies’ by creating systems of distinction, which in postcolonial states take the form of ethnicity, creating classes of individuals with different rights and access to resources. Concentrating on the specific case of Sarawak, she argues that ethnicity appeared as a different form of class distinction, taking away dignity from lower groups such as the indigenous Dayak¹ by ‘animalising’ them. While the state used ethnicity to uphold the existence of a society within which privileges would be granted to an elite and to eradicate the sense of autonomy of previously classless peoples, these responded by defending their dignity and using ethnicity as a weapon in the struggle. Ethnicity, she thinks, can be considered as a form of resistance to modernity as it ‘defies the logic of capital, withholds value from the market, repersonalises exchange and respects subsistence’ (2002: 231). In Sarawak, Boulanger (2009) argues, while all possibilities of obtaining political control are closed off for the Dayak, they have resorted to the search of material prosperity, not only for the obvious benefits it brings, but also as a way to achieve a sense of dignity and parity with members of other groups. By doing so, according to Bou-langer (2009), not only do they reinforce the domination of the elites, but they also find themselves suffering for the discrepancy between the hegemonic promise of equal possibilities of access to prosperity and dignity and the fact that they are disfavoured by pro-Malay favouritism by the government.

The dissatisfaction described by Winzeler (1997a), Rosaldo (2003), Bou-langer (2002, 2009) and Chua (2007, 2012), who talks about ‘irksome mut-terings and anti-Malay/Muslim sentiments’ as a form of ‘low-level resistance’ by the Bidayuh of Sarawak (Chua 2007: 275), and of a ‘strong sense of mar-ginalization and disgruntlement over national political realities’ (Chua 2012: 34), is very much the same I found during my fieldwork among the Kadazan. Like the authors I have considered, I believe that the issues facing them have to do with both material and non-material aspects, which cannot in fact be separated. Also, I agree with Boulanger (2009) and Scott (1990, cited in Boulanger 2009: 5) that the value of maintaining ‘dignity’ and ‘autonomy’, and of ‘being treated with respect’ (Rosaldo 2003) is often superior to that of obtaining material prosperity, and that often the latter is seen as a means to the former, in the case of the Kadazan.

While I agree with Boulanger’s (2009) point that ethnicity can be used as one, and possibly the most politically effective, form of resistance against the elites’ hegemony, and that it can transcend its origins and become something else in reality, I think that it is exactly the significance and reality for the people involved that should become the main object of enquiry for the anthropologist. This is what the present book attempts to do: to shift the perspective to a lower, yet, in my view, most important level, that of the lived experience, in which the dissatisfaction and sense of loss of autonomy and dignity are rooted and constantly re-lived, made sense of and used to give meaning to other experiences. It is in order to understand these aspects that the present book focuses on issues of identity, applying Wenger’s (1998) theory about the role of participation in its formation. The main ideas forming this theoretical framework will be summarised after giving some brief definitions of the main concepts used in the book and already mentioned in the introduction.

Definitions: ethnicity, the nation and identity

Ethnicity

The term ‘ethnic group’ was first used in the period following the Second World War as the main way to refer to human populations with a common origin and culture, including both small-scale societies, previously mostly referred to as ‘tribes’, and larger groups constituting significant components of a state population, previously referred to as ‘peoples’, or sometimes ‘races’ or ‘nations’. According to Eriksen, while the new conceptualisation did not challenge the discrete character of groupings so defined, it implied that their members were ‘aware’ and ‘in contact with’ members of other groups (1993: 9).

In its early stage, the anthropological debate on ethnicity was dominated by discussions about the origin and objective grounding of subjective claims to ethnic belonging. Scholars dealing with these issues mostly followed two main approaches, referred to as primordialism and instrumentalism. The former, under which the position of Barth (1969) is often subsumed (see Cohen 1974: xii-xv), viewed ethnicity as a more or less immutable category to which people resort to find solutions to the disruption of conventional ways of understanding and acting in the world caused by social changes (Bentley 1987: 26). Instrumentalists, on the other hand, considered ethnic groups as being generated under specific circumstances and for specific purposes, either for obtaining political and economic gains within situations of struggle over resources (Cohen 1969, 1974) or to provide a sort of ‘cognitive map’ needed by recent rural migrants to orient themselves in a novel multi-ethnic setting (Mitchell 1956).

While both approaches provided some valid insights into different aspects of the issue, I share Bentley’s (1987: 26) criticism that they are both unable to clarify the processes by which collectivities of interests and sentiments come into existence, and, more specifically, that instrumentalist theories do not deal adequately with the individual level, ‘where ethnic identity formation and manipulation presumably take place’ (ibid.: 26), therefore not being able to explain why belonging to an ethnic group should constitute an essential element of people’s sense of who they are and how that takes place. It is one of the aims of my approach to do just that by looking at the way in which the sense of ethnic belonging is developed by individuals through engagement in practices shared with others.

More recently, most scholars have adopted a constructionist view of ethnicity, based on the previous insights of authors such as Leach (1954), who had realised the lack of fit between cultural traits and ethnic belonging, and Moerman (1965), who demonstrated that hill peoples in Thailand chose between ethnic belongings based on calculations of advantage. King stressed the absence of correspondence between sets of cultural traits, especially language, and a ‘society’ for many peoples of Borneo, concluding that ‘society and culture are the consequence of complex multi-dimensional processes’ (1982: 30). In a later paper, King defined folk taxonomies of Borneo as comprising ‘overlapping yet often conflicting sets of ethnic categories, labels and defining criteria, [which] constitute indigenous attempts to comprehend and bring order to complex and dynamic local social and cultural relations’ (2001: 3–4).

Many scholars writing on island Southeast Asia have adopted this approach (e.g. Barnard 2004; Benjamin and Chou 2003; Chua 2009, 2012; Kahn 1993, 1998, 2006; Lan 1998; Reid 2001; Schrauwer 1998; Shamsul 1996), some (Barnard 2004; Shamsul 1996) even deconstructing one of the best established ethnic categories in the area, that of Malay. This approach is well exemplified by Kahn, who declares his approach as focusing on clarifying how subjectivities in the case he examined were constituted by specific sets of cultural practices and through which social and historical processes these practices had been generated (1998: 17). Similarly, Chua takes the approach of locating ethnicity in the process by which fixed entities like ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are created within state, popular and even earlier anthropological discourses (2007: 262–63).

The present book follows a constructivist approach to ethnicity or, more precise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Modern Anthropology of Southeast Asia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Introducing the 'field': the ethnographic setting of the research
• 3 The formation of the Kadazan: ethnic identities in precolonial, colonial and early postcolonial Sabah
• 4 The Dusunic peoples and Malaysian nation-building (1967-present)
• 5 Self and other: collective identities between citizenship rights and illegal immigration
• 6 Media and belonging to the nation
• 7 The constitution of village belonging through leisure sociality
• 8 A tale of two celebrations: the Pesta Kaamatan as a site of struggle between the Dusunic peoples and the state
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index