Tribal Communities In The Malay World

The Malay World (Alam Melayu), spanning the Malay Peninsula, much of Sumatra, and parts of Borneo, has long contained within it a variety of populations. Most of the Malays have been organized into the different kingdoms (kerajaan Melayu) from which they have derived their identity. But the territories of those kingdoms have also included tribal peoples - both Malay and non-Malay - who have held themselves apart from those kingdoms in varying degrees. In the last three decades, research on these tribal societies has aroused increasing interest.This book explores the ways in which the character of these societies relates to the Malay kingdoms that have held power in the region for many centuries past, as well as to the modern nation-states of the region. It brings together researchers committed to comparative analysis of the tribal groups living on either side of the Malacca Straits - in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. New theoretical and descriptive approaches are presented for the study of the social and cultural continuities and discontinuities manifested by tribal life in the region.

This publication brings together the work of several writers in documenting and understanding the consequences of state-formation on ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore, thirty years after the two nations went their separate paths.

This volume departs from conventional historiography concerned with colonialism in the Malay world, by turning to the use of knowledge generated by European presence in the region. The aim here is to map the ways in which European observers and scholars interpreted the ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity which has been seen as a hallmark of Southeast Asia. With a chronological scope of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, contributors examine not only European writing on the Malay world, but the complex origins of various forms of knowledge, dependent on local agency but always closely intertwined with contemporary metropolitan scientific and scholarly ideas. Knowledge of the peoples, languages and music of the Malay world, it is argued, came to inform and shape European scholarship within a variety of areas, such as Enlightenment science and anthropology, ideas of human progress, philological theory, ethnomusicology and emerging theories of race. But this volume also contributes to ongoing debates within the region, by discussing ideas about the Malay language and definitions of ‘Malayness’. The last chapters of the book present a reversed viewpoint, in examinations of how local cultural forms, theatrical traditions and literature were reshaped and given new meaning through encounters with cosmopolitanism and perceived modernity. This book was previously published as a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World.

The Malay-language term for the indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, “Orang Asli”, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. This volume is a comprehensive survey of current understandings of Malaysia’s Orang Asli communities (including contributions from scholars within the Orang Asli community), looking at language, archaeology, history, religion and issues of education, health and social change, as well as questions of land rights and control of resources. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by various combinations of hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and trading forest products. By the end of the century, logging, economic development projects such as oil palm plantations, and resettlement programmes have displaced many Orang Asli communities and disrupted long-established social and cultural practices. The chapters in the present volume show Orang Asli responses to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing world. The authors also highlight the importance of Orang Asli studies for the anthropological understanding of small-scale indigenous societies in general.

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Bringing together the results of over twenty-five years of research on the indigenous peoples of Malaysia, this fascinating book illustrates the experiences of modernity in indigenous communities through a detailed case study of the Rual Menraq of Malaysia.

People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called "e;Malay"e;, or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of a kebangsaan Melayu (Malay as nationality) as the basis of membership within an aspiring postcolonial nation-state, a political rather than a cultural community embracing all residents of the Malay states, including the immigrant Chinese and Indian population.In Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, the contributors examine the checkered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu by considering hitherto unexplored case studies dealing with use of the term in connection with origins, nations, minority-majority politics, Filipino Malays, Riau Malays, Orang Asli, Straits Chinese literature, women's veiling, vernacular television, social dissent, literary women, and modern Sufism. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a creative approach to the study of Malayness while providing new perspectives to the studies of identity formation and politics of ethnicity that have wider implications beyond the Southeast Asian region.