Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition

Factory Women in Malaysia

Aihwa Ong

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438433561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline has become an ethnographic classic in the fields of anthropology, labor studies, and gender and globalization studies. Based on anthropological field work in an agricultural district in Selangor, Peninsular Malaysia, Spirits of Resistance captures a moment of profound transformation, illustrated by the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences in the lives of Malay women during the rapid industrialization associated with Malaysia's rise as a tiger economy. Aihwa Ong's nuanced approach to the Malay women factory workers' experiences of the contradictions of modern globalized capitalism has inspired subsequent generations of feminist ethnographers in their explorations of key questions of power, resistance, femininities, religious community, and social change. With a new critical introduction by anthropologist Carla Freeman, this new edition of Spirits of Resistance continues to offer an exemplary model of sophisticated analysis of culturally based resistance to the ideology, surveillance, and institutional authority of globalized corporate capitalism.

PART I

Capitalist Development and Cultural Experience

Certain human realities become clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system … the meaning of capitalism will be subject to precapitalist meanings, and the conflict expressed in such a confrontation will be one in which man is seen as the aim of production, and not production as the aim of man.

Michael Taussig (1980: 10, 11)

[Under capitalism] labour must … be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.

Max Weber (1958: 62)

Chapter 1

Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation

Writing this book is rather like opening Pandora's box: what kinds of spirits is one releasing? My inquiry into the meanings industrialization has for Malaysian society necessarily elicits the social significance of neophyte factory women not only for peasants but also for managers of transnational companies, government officials, Islamic zealots, school teachers, village children, and the wider society. Ethnographic knowledge builds upon a negotiated reality between the anthropologist and informants, and my claim to this alongside other possible interpretations rests on the inclusion of many voices seldom heard in the cacophony of academic and political exchanges. By documenting changes in rural society and weaving a multi-stranded, multilingual social reality into the account, this text discloses diverse reactions to an emerging Malay female proletariat, as well as their own eloquent descriptions of the disruptions and ambivalences of cultural change. Thus, while my interpretation may refract like a multifaceted lens, it preserves a dialectical tension vis-à-vis various particularistic views expressed about changing Malay society. In this account, the hantu (evil spirit), hovering over the passage of young Malay women into industrial modernity, becomes “an image which mediates the conflict between [non]capitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition” (Taussig 1980: xii).

The introduction of industrial capitalist discipline into Malay society involves both resistance and assent to change in work patterns, consumption, group identity, self-consciousness, and ultimately, a greater synchronization of local life with the rhythm of advanced capitalist societies. The historical and ethnographic contexts lead me to ask: What are the effects of capitalist development on Malay peasant society? What are the possible connections between capitalist discipline and cultural discourse? How are the experiences of neophyte factory women and their images of vice and virtue mediated by the visitations of Malay spirits in modern factories?

To answer these questions, I take a dialectical approach by juxtaposing opposed or contradictory social phenomena. My descriptions will continually oscillate between the analysis of changing material relationships and the interpretation of cultural attitudes and practices both emerging and receding in the wake of Malay proletarianization.

This book seeks to illuminate cultural change in an industrializing society by talking about changing peasant beliefs and practices in a situation of shifting, complementary, and contradictory meanings. Previous analyses of Southeast Asian cultures have emphasized the syncretist paradigm of cultural streams (Geertz 1964) or the two-tiered model of great and little traditions (e.g., Scott 1976). Departing from this framework of society as a segmented system of cultural traditions, I consider divergent and discordant cultural forms in Malaysia where a complex network of bureaucratic mechanisms has been deployed to mobilize meaning in the discursive practices of everyday life, for the maintenance and reproduction of the political economy.

For too long, anthropological concepts of “culture” have been one-dimensional, overly comprehensive and extrahistorical. Clifford Geertz made a significant break when he urged that “culture” be taken as “webs of significance” (1973: 5), constituted by a system of shared meanings, symbols, and practices, to be read “from the native's point of view” (1979). What has been of less interest to Geertz is the question of power in the production, definition, and maintenance of dominant cultural patterns. More recently, Eric Wolf called for an examination of different cultural forms in specific social-historical contexts. He emphasized the importance of relating alternative symbol systems and practices to the “field of force” generated by the mode of production (1982: 387). The task of the analyst is to decode and understand changing cultural meanings, their making and unmaking, in relations of domination and resistance.

In this book, “culture” is taken as historically situated and emergent, shifting and incomplete meanings and practices generated in webs of agency and power. Cultural change is not understood as unfolding according to some predetermined logic (of development, modernization, or capitalism) but as the disrupted, contradictory, and differential outcomes which involve changes in identity, relations of struggle and dependence, including the experience of reality itself. Multiple and conflicting complexes of ideas and practices will be discussed in situations wherein groups and classes struggle to produce and interpret culture within the industrializing milieu. Raymond Williams has suggested that in class-divided societies hegemonic domination is not to be understood as merely controlling ideas and practices but as “a saturation of the whole process of living.” By this he means that dominant meanings and practices shape the substance of everyday experiences: our lived expectations, meanings, and practices constituting our sense of social relationships and of reality (1977: 110).

In Malaysia, industrialization has been accomplished through pervasive bureaucratic redefinitions of group identity and relationships in domains of public and private life, including the constitution and boundary-marking processes which define these domains. Such processes are currently intensified in many third world states undertaking capitalist development. Since hegemonic attitudes and practices are necessarily incomplete (at any time, oppositional forms exist), continual activities through education, media, and employment structures are required to defend, modify, and even incorporate the countercultural tactics of subordinated groups in order to shore up hegemony (Williams 1977: 121–27).

Taussig (1980) and Williams thus emphasize the cultural construction and reconstruction of divergent meanings and action which embody a specific distribution of political and economic forces. Such a formulation enables us to deal with cultural change without a false opposition between ideology and practice. Michel Foucault's explication of the varied forms modern power takes is pertinent for our understanding of how social organization and realities are being reconstituted in some third world societies. By suggesting that the operations of modern power are in fact productive rather than repressive (i.e., effectuated through repression) he argues that schemes of discursive practices are involved in the complex production of rituals, objects, and “truth” (1979: 194). The effects of power/knowledge relations (e.g., scientific management) are to implant disciplinary techniques in bodies and human conduct, thereby complementing more overt forms of control in everyday life. In transnational corporations, we see that relations of domination and subordination, constituted in scientific terms, operate not only through the overt control of workers' bodies but in the ways young female workers come to see themselves. In their changing positions within the family, the village, the labor process, and wider society, they devise counter tactics for resisting images imposed on them and come to construct their own images.¹

A heightened sexuality attributed to Malay female workers by the Malaysian public can be considered the contradictory cultural constructions of a society intensely ambivalent about the social consequences of industrial development. In looking at the complex relation between sexuality and gender, it is necessary to eschew the assumptions of received concepts such as “women's roles,” “sexual inequality,” and “patriarchy” either in their implied sense of “achieved states” (Williams 1977: 11–20) or as suitable starting points of analysis. Many ethnographies written about “women's status/role” in third world societies often lack this critical understanding of gender as cultural constructions, both imposed and increasingly selfdefined, in particular historical situations. Even more rare, as Marilyn Strathern has pointed out, is the recognition that in some societies, gender may not be the primary organizing code of sexual difference but rather an idiom for other kinds of social differentiation, such as prestige ranking (1981). Perhaps most critically, the preoccupation of “women's studies” with statistical measurements of structural “inequality” overlooks the self-formative activities of women which partially structure their identities and the immediate relationships within which they are enmeshed in daily life. As a consequence, they leave underanalysed the dialectical relation between processes out of which constraints are developed and within which gender is culturally formed and transformed. This inquiry asks why sexuality should become a key image/construct in Malay transition to industrial capitalism; what does it tell us about culture as a dialectical construction? It is a major contention of this work that local meanings, values, and practices have been reworked within the operations of administrative organs, capitalist enterprises, and civil institutions.

In Malaysia, capitalist discipline operates through a variety of control mechanisms in social, political, and work domains both to regulate and legitimate unequal relations which sustain the process of industrial modernization. By “discipline” I mean the effects of the exercise of power on the subjugated, and the enforced and induced compliance with the political, social, and economic objectives, considered rational and functional for capitalist production. The development of political mechanisms of control, whether in state offices, development projects or factories, necessarily involves changing material relations as well as an altered sense of reality, changing selfknowledge, and cultural justification of the social order, in times of noncrisis.

The following section will discuss how the cultural construction and reconstruction of meaning, gender relations, and sexuality are involved in new disciplinary systems and forms of resistance generated in rural Malay society. It will be argued that class formation is not the only process whereby new consciousness and practices emerge or are superseded.

The concept of “proletarianization” is fraught with Marxist assumptions derived from Lenin's discussion of the transition from Czarist feudalism to agrarian capitalism in Russia (1964). The situation in the corner of Peninsular Malaysia I am concerned with is not representative of the classic case of rural differentiation into a small number of agrarian capitalists and a multitude of rural laborers. Rather, the on-going dispossession of Malay peasants in Kuala Langat will be considered in relation to (i) an expanding state bureaucracy for the integrating fractions of the peasantry loosened from the land, and (ii) global corporate strategies based upon the fragmentation of the labor force dispersed throughout the world system. In other words, we are talking about circumstances in which the changing conditions of production and reproduction are less ordered by merchant capital than commanded over by the state apparatus and by global capital. This centralization of bureaucratic control over local reproduction processes is not limited to the production of exchange values but extends to the production of cultural values as well.

The crisis is seen in processes involved in the social reproduction of the kampung, the basic community, territorial unit, and the social matrix of everyday life. In Kuala Langat, kampung households exhibit differential capacities to reconstitute the labor process in smallholding production as more households come to control smaller parcels of land. But the formalism of landownership categories is only one (and often misleading) dimension of changing peasant-capital relationships. The making of new class relations is dependent not only upon access to land but also upon the ability of households and individuals to realize new forms of linkages with the state machinery and modern labor markets. Furthermore, recognition of the domination by the state and capital over the labor process is politically justified in terms of development in the interest of rural Malays. This is a form of “misrecognized” domination Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence” (1977). However, as I will try to show, complicity in their own social domination, if an obstacle to group interests, can also be a hidden channel to individual upward mobility.

As more kampung folk become wage workers, downward mobility is more commonly endured by the majority than upward mobility into the ranks of bureaucratic or industrial employment. Increasingly, individual educational and occupational trajectories beat a path out of kampung society, a structural effect of market and bureaucratic disciplining operating selectively on individuals rather than on groups. Such individuated grassroots reactions to the changing economy make doubtful the significance of peasant responses such as household strategizing (White 1976) and resistance to market and state policies (Scott 1976) which have been claimed for rural societies elsewhere in Southeast Asia. As my description of kampung society will demonstrate, group strategies adapted to changes in the local economy are not very effective for class mobilization when the field of conflicting interests becomes integrated within wider structures of political coercion and labor market manipulation. Dispossessed peasants, set upon different trajectories of survival and mobility, are individuated as much by gender, education, village origin, and political affiliation as by social class aspirations.

As productive activities on the land give way to the sale of labor by household members, the power configuration of domestic relations is continually realigned, both in cooperation and in conflict. In this t...