THE ORIGINS OF MARGINALIZATION OF MALAYS IN SOUTH EAST ASIA

THE ORIGINS OF MARGINALIZATION OF MALAYS IN SOUTH EAST ASIA

The economic success of the Chinese in Southeast Asia has often led to tense relations between them and the politically-dominant ethnic groups. We can examine the changing nature of the Chinese business community in Malaysia over three decades, and suggests a way to understand conflict and co-operation among the Chinese and Malays over the economy. The analysis bridges the gap between two contrasting views on the future of Chinese businesses: one which sees the state as using the Chinese for their present skills on the way to reducing their economic strength, and another that sees the rise of China and the consolidation of Chinese overseas networks as giving added leverage to Chinese capital over the state. If this is true, we can argue that a simple Chinese versus Malay view of ethnic conflict is no longer useful, and suggests that approaches to ethnic conflict should take into account the interplay of two key variables—the internal organization of the Chinese business community and the class structure of indigenous society. Changes have occurred in both, resulting in reduced levels of ethnic scapegoating and broader political support for higher-growth strategies over narrow ethnic redistributive issues.
However, we can also critique the view that Southeast Asia has emerged as a key theatre for terrorist activity. While accepting that al-Qaeda and the indigenous Southeast Asian group Jema’ah Islamiyah have emerged as a potent threat to regional security, it interrogates the view that this renders Southeast Asia more dangerous than many other parts of the world. The argument suggests that this exaggerated sense of threat rests largely on a failure to account for nuanced differences in the nature of Islamist politics in the region. As a small step towards redressing the said problem we can outline a typology of Islamist organizations. It also suggests that a person's location within this typology is more than a function of religiosity but reflects instead relative degrees of social and political alienation.
From another approach of analysis, we can examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. This is where we can explore this issue by positioning contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the 'war on terrorism' and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.
Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements. This is where we can introduce and assess a new political explanation for the origins of “developmental states”—organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation. Conventional wisdom holds that developmental states in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore result from “state autonomy,” especially from popular pressures. We argue that these states' impressive capacities actually emerged from the challenges of delivering side payments to restive popular sectors under conditions of extreme geopolitical insecurity and severe resource constraints. Such an interactive condition of “systemic vulnerability” never confronted ruling elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand—allowing them to uphold political coalitions, and hence to retain power, with much less ambitious state-building efforts.
We can also evaluate the development of militant Islamic threats in Southeast Asia from the early 1990s onwards and its security implications for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This analysis contends that the extent of extremist Islamic infiltration of the region was obscured by governmental rhetoric, along with much Western opinion, which argued erroneously that ASEAN was following a unique developmental path based on shared regional values that had resulted in economic growth and political stability. However, by ignoring underlying religiously motivated tensions within and among its membership, and by refusing to countenance mature debate about them within their societies, ASEAN has succeeded only in incubating its potential nemesis.
Southeast Asia is the most populous Islamic region in the world yet has gained only limited attention. This situation tries to explain what are the specific characteristics of Islam in this world region. After a historical overview of the spread of Islam in insular Southeast Asia, its contemporary political contexts in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Thailand, and the Philippines are scrutinized. Finally, a number of contentious issues in Southeast Asian Islam are discussed, such as the nature of Islamic revivalism, current outbreaks of ethno-religious conflict, and the possible threat of extremism.
Most of the major studies of terrorism in Southeast Asia emphasize international terrorist links and religious ideology, while more locally-embedded accounts draw attention to historical and political context. Despite this plurality in terrorism studies, flaws and omissions across four issues are common: the nature of terrorist links and information on them, Islam, the United States and the causes of terrorism. A substantial section of studies of terrorism are based on compromised information and substitute descriptive detail for analysis. They frequently depict Islam and anti-American views as incipiently threatening precursors to terrorism and underplay political grievances, particularly as they relate to the United States. Valuable research work has drawn attention to local political contexts and grievances, and has begun to explore the ideas and perceptions of militant groups. However, most of the leading experts on terrorism in the region are engaged in academically unproductive attempts either to reconstruct the trail of terrorist activity on the basis of official information or to explain terrorist violence as the product of individual pathology.
In the 1960s, the renowned American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, in his seminal work, "The Integrative Revolution" concluded: "The havoc wreaked both upon themselves and others by those modern (or semi-modern) states that did passionately seek to become primordial rather than civil political communities... have only strengthened the reluctance publicly to advance race, language, religion and the like as bases for the definition of a terminal community." Yet, contrary to that conclusion, and forty years later, the Southeast Asian region contains a plethora of groups who profess a commitment to separatism, or the establishment of states on an ethno-religious basis. In accounting for the present rise or decline of ethno-religious conflict in Southeast Asia, this overview will focus on the following factors:

· the character of the state and its role and capacity in ameliorating or exacerbating such conflict;
· the role of local factors (ethnicity, religion, and the distribution of resources) in the durability of conflict; and
· the significance of the external dimension, particularly the challenge emanating from Islamic religious revivalism in the persistence of conflict.
We can also offer insights into the identification of cases with a significant potential for ethnic conflict over a 2-3 year time horizon through an examination of the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to the analysis of ethnic conflict potential in those cases. The goal is to suggest an analytical framework with applicability to the assessment of ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia and beyond; thus, factors are identified that tend to precipitate or facilitate ethnic conflict in a world dominated by the norms of the modern state system.
Twenty-four ethnic minority groups are identified in Southeast Asia that have some potential for conflict over the next coming years. The AHP methodology is then employed as a means to measure the potential for ethnic conflict among these twenty-four groups. Potential is defined as the product of desire or motivation to act (i.e., the motivating factors) and the ability or capability to act (i.e., the enabling conditions), such that:

POTENTIAL = (MOTIVATION) X (ABILITY).

This approach to ethnic conflict analysis promotes consideration of the contextual factors that influence feelings of marginalization and capacity to effect change—a considerable step forward over approaches that are based on (inevitably problematic) generalizations about the shared attributes or historically rooted prejudices toward ethnic groups.

Mobility is the great story of capitalist modernity. What this story tells is the epic movements of trade, peoples, cultures, and capital across the globe, movements that are greatly intensified in the contemporary "postmodern conditions". Accompanying these movements is mobility of another kind: a fluid and progressive sensibility eager to strike against established relations and cultural norm, one that impels a person "to move, to change, and to invent" (Asad 1993, p. 11). These innovative qualities are something of the modern subject. The key to the modern subject is empathy--or as we shall prefer to call it, cosmopolitanism--which takes a person beyond her primary identifications and view social situations from another cultural and communal perspective (Asad 1993, p. 11). The two kinds of mobility--one social and material, one subjective and personal--are closely intertwined if not causally related. One feeds on the other to produce that transformative work for which capitalism is renown. For the authors of The Communist Manifesto, the massive "cosmopolitan character in production and consumption in every country" (Marx and Engels 1959, p. 17) is invariably tied in with cultural and intellectual processes:

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal and inter-dependent of nations. And, as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become a common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible (Marx and Engels 1959, p. 18).

What Marx and Engels wrote resonates with the tempting vision of radicals and liberal-democrats alike: the sweeping law-like changes, and the spread of secular and rationalistic ethos, brought about by capitalism and economic growth in general. The vision is at once dramatic and teleological. In the literature on Southeast Asia, we find also the tendency to write about the inevitability of transnational capitalist forces in transforming local societies and politics in the recent decades. Turning to my specific concern, in analysis of the rise of the middle classes, terms such as capital, class, trade, and the market take on qualities of an "universal thinghood", harnessing and riding on local constraints, and to which national aspirations must pitch themselves in response. In truth, as I shall show among the Malay middle classes in Malaysia, the movement from "cosmopolitan production to cosmopolitan culture", to rephrase Marx and Engels, is a twisted and convoluted process. Capitalist transformation is neither straightforwardly about benefits of market economy and its redistributive effects, nor is it always linked to the rise of the cosmopolitan middle class, who are all ready to pry open the prison-house of tradition and political authoritarianism. In avoiding the pitfalls of teleology, we need more than the rejection of these wishful theoretical views.

From here, we can develop the concept of "gender pluralism" to analyze historical and ethnographic material bearing on Southeast Asia since early modern times. Deployment of this concept in the context of an analysis that approaches transgenderism as an optic through which to view such pluralism entails an intervention against the grain of much writing on gender and sexuality. This intervention involves an interpretive framework conducive to the comparative historical investigation of culturally interlocked domains that are often separated or ignored in scholarly accounts, as occurs when "gender" is construed as a code word for "women" and is thus stripped of much of its significance before research has begun or when transgender practices or certain modalities of sexuality are examined in relative isolation from other salient components of the more encompassing sex/gender and cultural-political systems of which they are a part. It is argued that for this region and period transgenderism provides a valuable window on gender pluralism partly because the vicissitudes of transgendering are broadly indexical of the greater formalization and segregation of gender roles, the distancing of women from sources of power and prestige, the attenuated range of legitimacy concerning things erotic and sexual, and the constriction of pluralistic gender sensibilities as a whole.

The Chinese have had a long tradition of curiosity about its southern neighbours, often called the Nanyang (or South Seas), and some of their accounts constitute an indispensable source for the writing of premodern Southeast Asia. The volume under review represents an important step towards an understanding of the knowledge about the Malay world by the Chinese from the mainland and the other Sounteast Asian countries.
Nature is an artifact, understood and interacted with by people via culturally specific symbolic systems. In Indonesian rainforests, bee-hived trees are considered spiritual beings, and when people harvest the honey the bees are praised in bee-songs as beautiful girls. Fishermen cast magic spells to cajole the spirits of fish residing in the seas. Forests and marine landscapes that look "empty" to outsiders are in fact full of various cultural meanings and values that require culturally grounded semiotic processes of interpretation.
As reflected in Alfred Russel Wallace's 1869 classic, The Malay Archipelago (1869), European accounts have traditionally depicted insular Southeast Asia as one of the "Spice Islands," a source of exotic commodities such as cloves and nutmeg. In the past two decades, the vast forests and rich natural resources of Southeast Asia have attracted both foreign and domestic investment. To outsiders, the region's thick tropical forests and boundless expanse of seas seem "wild" and empty, and therefore unclaimed. Thus, the allocation of land and resources has often been determined by external agendas and without consideration of local needs. In this context, large-scale influxes of foreign direct investment, and resulting processes of rapid industrialization and urbanization have produced many social problems, including the displacement of local [End Page 335] people coupled with low levels of compensation for their land by exploitative developers. Indigenous peoples of the region have been marginalized, impoverished, and displaced from their ancestral territories. Indeed, they stand to lose even more because they do not have any public voice. In the face of immense pressures exerted by state power and transnational economic forces, the indigenous communities are forced to employ multiple strategies to maintain their rights to their lands and livelihoods.
From the mountains and the interiors: a quarter of a century of research among Fourth World peoples in Southeast Asia (with special reference to northern Thailand and peninsular Malaysia)
Malaysia's development trajectory has been comparatively successful, and the country arguably represents another example of the 'Asian developmental state'. However, when examined more closely, the Malaysian development experience is a deviation from the ideal-type 'East Asian success model', in that it occurred in the context of a predominantly Islamic cultural background, marked ethnic-religious heterogeneity, a relatively democratic political system, a strong reliance on FDI, abundant natural resources and a confined state autonomy. This discussion puts the Malaysian puzzle into perspective by giving a holistic account of the country's success against all odds and by applying an analytical framework centred on the concepts of embedded state autonomy and sociopolitical legitimacy. It is concluded that Malaysia's distinctive social, political and economic features constitute a web of countervailing forces that evolved into a positively self-reinforcing, if sometimes precarious, system of socio-economic reproduction.
Based on reading “Breaking the Community Circle” a book which helps to break new ground, in challenging some myths about the nature of "community", a concept often left unexamined. More specifically, it is also a detailed study of the effects of development projects involving the irrigation and mechanization of a core padi-producing region of Malaysia, the North Kedah Plain. As a social geographer, the author uses to full advantage his cartographic expertise in portraying the spatial scope of relationships within local "community" life, with a series of maps providing the reader with a graphic illustration of social networks on the ground. Yet De Koninck is just as concerned with mapping and understanding the social and moral basis of community, which goes beyond the simple notion of a "geographical space inside which are inscribed basic networks of social relations ... for production and reproduction purposes", or as a social isolate. He explores the notions of a "moral economy/community", as portrayed by James Scott Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)~, and also the ideas of Jeremy Kemp Seductive Mirage: The Search for the Village Community in Southeast Asia (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988)~, for whom the "community" is a fiction, obscuring the importance of networks transcending the immediate locality, and subject to constant external inputs. By his own evidence, the author illustrates for Kedah the absence of clear community boundaries and the cross-cutting nature of different relationships. His own historical reconstruction also reveals the relative newness of the kampungs studied, as products of the sedentarization and centralization of a once-mobile population under the colonially strengthened sultanate in Alor Star. The process of settlement of the Kedah plain within the last few generations also raises questions as to the nature and genesis of peasantry. De Koninck debates Diana Wong's concept of "peasantisation" Peasants in the Making: Malaysia's Green Revolution (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987)~, for the contemporary period, and proposes instead that for Kedah, primary peasantisation occurred in the late nineteenth century, while today's situation resembles a form of petty commodity production within a capitalist framework. The body of the book presents a meticulously researched and analysed series of findings gathered in a longitudinal study between 1980 and 1987, by a team of foreign and local scholars (including the author). One of the principal aims was to document the implementation and consequences of the Muda irrigation and double-cropping scheme in Kedah's rice bowl, and to assess the predictions of the more radical developmental theorists as to the long-term effects of the Green Revolution. While the findings do generally support the latter's expectations of the emergence of greater social and class stratification and gender marginalization, together with the creation of a pool of land-poor waged labour in the wake of mechanization, in fact the situation is rather more complex. Access to, and dependence on tractor and combine-harvester technology and resources is now the prime determinant of success, combined with the ability of the household to command labour, itself a resource almost as important as land. Since this requires capital, the entire process, as elsewhere in the rural world, tends to favour those already with some means, although De Koninck's case studies show how initiative can help to create capital out of meagre initial resources. As would be expected, the input and co-operation of Chinese entrepreneurs played a role in the early stages of the mobilization of capital and in transferring the new technology to the Malay villages, but today, most of the external resources, loans and marketing assistance are provided by the state, if only for political reasons. In this sense the Malay padi-grower has also come full circle, from a "traditional" dependency on a royal/colonial state, to one of a producer subject to the demands of a modern, increasingly centralized and bureaucratized economy. The findings are presented through a comparison of two kampungs, one within, and the other outside, the Muda area, and each with rather different histories, hinterlands and degrees of economic self-sufficiency. Within these two villages, more detailed case studies of selected families illustrate their place in the process of economic restructuring. What emerges from these family histories of marriage, migration and land management, is that almost all the successful cases were able to make full use of the new technology, of an assortment of state assistance, and had a capacity to mobilize labour. Interestingly, however, despite the growing polarization of capital-rich machine and land-owners and labour, the ties of kinship still seem to persist, and often a "wage" payment to a worker-kinsman is expressed in terms of a religious (zakat peribadi) contribution. This causes the author some angst over the clear delineation of divisions of "class", although he does not relate this question back to the issue of the "moral" economy. Do the economics of exchange transform faster than the cultural metaphors of relationships within which they operate? Finally, as women are increasingly eased out of central roles in padi cultivation, they either become "non-employed housewives" (suri rumahtangga), or are sucked, along with landless males, into the pool of unskilled labour which often migrates in search of work elsewhere. Thus the tentacles of the kampung economy expand outwards, even as the state and its institutions converge inwards. This is a volume densely packed with primary material, from which the reader can independently draw many inferences, and while the author develops and tests many theoretical ideas, they are not all conclusively summarized at the end. In this reader's view, more attention to some of the non-economic measures of social relationships, especially kinship and religion, would have enriched the picture even further. Nor was mention made of the added burden of zakat tax on padi produced by double-cropping workers (as opposed to landowners), or on the role of politics in this highly politicized economy (save for one suggestive quote from Gibbons, p. 191).
This discussion is critical of the culturalist perspective as an explanation for the development of Chinese entrepreneurship. Drawing on Eu Tong Sen's business strategies and career between 1897 and 1920 as case study, it identifies the endogenous and exogenous conditions affecting Chinese business activities in colonial Malaya. Alfred Chandler's work on the rise of the modern business enterprise is argued to be particularly relevant for an economic history of Chinese business in Southeast Asia.
Recent research in second-language acquisition has revealed that the language learning process is a complex interplay of many variables in which social roles, relationships, power relations, and identities are constantly reconstituted. Most research studies on language and identity have been conducted in predominantly English-language native-speaker settings (McKay & Wong, 1996; Peirce, 1995). This discussion presents the findings of my doctoral research study on the relation between language and sociocultural identities of English as a second language (ESL) learners in a multicultural society in Southeast Asia. Using a qualitative research approach, 14 Malaysian participants were interviewed using critical ethnography research methods (Carspecken, 1996). They also had to write a personal narrative and complete a questionnaire. The findings reveal that in a multicultural, postcolonial society such as Malaysia, identity issues are far more complex and multilayered. Identity shifts take place frequently in strategic and nonstrategic ways as the participants find their way in society in search of acceptance and belonging.
This analysis looks at how Malaysia's political institutions and policies have constrained Chinese acculturation with the dominant Malay population. Particular attention is paid to the nature of electoral institutions; such as the ethnic party structure, the apportionment of electoral districts, and the debate over Malaysia's education system. These political institutions, and not just the coercive apparatus of the state, coupled with the way the Constitution defines a person as ‘Malay’, effectively maintain a distinct boundary between who is Malay and who is Chinese or Indian. Ethnic categorization in Malaysia has, in the past, masked equally wide divisions between classes. More recent efforts at creating a ‘Malaysian’ national identity may clash with a political structure still largely organized by ethnicity, and may bring these other fissures to the forefront.
The term ‘crony capitalism’ describes the close relationship between the state and big business in contemporary Southeast Asia. Yoshihara argued in 1988 that cronyism produced an entrepreneurially weak, ersatz capitalism. Crony capitalists were ‘private-sector businessmen who benefit[ed] enormously from close relations’ with leading officials and politicians, obtaining ‘not only protection from foreign competition, but also concessions, licences, monopoly rights, and government subsidies’. Yoshihara's thesis has been subject to some criticism, but, in summarizing that debate, Ian Brown states that ‘there are…substantial areas of the South-East Asian political-economic landscape where government and business remain bound to the protection of inefficient vested interest, to the defence of monopoly and preference, and where speculations and short-term profit-taking are rife’. Entrepreneurial weaknesses in Southeast Asia appeared fully exposed by the financial crisis of 1997, when the economies of the region could not withstand the cruel buffetings of the international economy.
The raison d'être of the management of the minority ethnic Chinese citizenry in Indonesia and Malaysia is not adequately examined in most studies. In this discussion, ethnic domination is put forth in explaining the dynamics of ethnic conflict management. New multi-ethnic states often opt for selective nation-building by creating institutionalized ethnic boundaries. Ethnic domination occurs when one ethnic group prevails over another through the systematic marginalization of the dominated group's political influence, cultural reproduction and way of life.
In conclusion, beneath the veneer of assimilation and consociation, the central identity encouraged is that of the indigenous bumi 'imagined community' from which the citizen-Chinese is excluded. Ethnic riots are symptomatic of the failure of incomplete ethnic domination, especially in the economic and cultural realms.