“Reading Orang Asal Survivance and Malaysian Multiculturalism”

This chapter explores two postcolonial indigenous storytellers from the historic margins of the Malaysian nation-state. The first is the late Mak Minah (Menah Anak Kuntom), a Temuan woman who learned songs of the forest from her husband and kin, and later joined forces with non-Orang Asli musicians to form a fusion band, Akar Umbi, and became the first Orang Asli storyteller to sing to a wider public. In contrast, Akiya (Mahat Anak China), the author of Tuntut (Claiming), Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders' war) and Hamba (Slave), comes from a younger and better educated generation of Orang Asli. The analysis presented here suggests that through their creative works, performance and discursive practice, indigenous storytellers are subverting what Norbert Elias calls 'the civilising process'. In both the anthropological literature and the practices of indigenous governance of the British colonial state and the postcolonial nation-state, 'civilising the margins' has generally been identified with policies that assumed the state's role as bearers of progress (read: 'civilisation', 'development') towards the allegedly 'backward' ('primitive') Orang Asli communities. These two variants of the 'civilising process' are examined to demonstrate how they further marginalised the Orang Asli and ruptured their sense of identity, dignity and social worth. The critical subtext of Mak Minah's and Akiya's storytelling interventions is that they represent indigenous people's assertion of agency, empowering a sense of identity and ontology, which embodies their rights to humanity and self-esteem, their desire for participatory development and, most of all, their historical pursuit of peace and love. In the context of an evolving Malaysian nation-state, its grand narratives and dominant discourse have constantly denied the Orang Asli these rights. This chapter argues that the narratives and discursive content of storytelling as articulated by Mak Minah and Akiya constitute a remaking of an indigenous postcolonial discourse aimed at 'civilising the centre'.

IWGIA Document No. 95 (International WorkGroup on Indigenous Affairs, Copenhagen) & Center for Orang Asli Concerns (COAC), 2000

THE ORANG ASLI AND THE CONTEST FOR RESOURCES traces the history of the Indigenous Peoples of Peninsular Malaysia from early times to the present; from when the Orang Asli were an independent and autonomous people, to a situation where others are seeking to control their lives today. THE ORANG ASLI AND THE CONTEST FOR RESOURCES argues that development programmes and policies for the Orang Asli, cloaked in a policy of assimilation and integration into the mainstream society, have a single ideological goal - to enable the control of the Orang Asli and to control their traditional territories and resources. Efforts aimed at diminishing Orang Asli autonomy, and the concurrent contest for their traditional territories and resources, have caused much social stress in Orang Asli communities. THE ORANG ASLI AND THE CONTEST FOR RESOURCES describes how this common experience helped develop an Orang Asli political consciousness beyond the local level such that a new Orang Asli indigenousness emerged as a political strategy for more effective affirmation of their rights. However, because aspirations and motivations vary between individual Orang Asli, the state is able to exploit such differences and set the Orang Asli against themselves, especially in the contest for resources. Towards this end, THE ORANG ASLI AND THE CONTEST FOR RESOURCES examines how the Malaysian state continues to effectively control the Orang Asli as a people and, consequently, exercise control over their traditional territories and traditional resources as well.

1998

2000

If there is one major qualification to be made for the post in the post-colonial it is that the political nationalism that took formerly colonised societies into freedom and independence was, as Partha Chateijee has termed it, a 'derivative discourse',^ which relies heavily on the paradigms and frameworks that are bequeathed by colonialism, even while appearing to be anti-colonial. With regard to Malaysia, the area of 'race' is one of the institutionalised political and Uterary discourses which continues to occupy a dominant position in a post/neo-colonial situation. The dream of nineteenth-century European racism with its ideology of a racially coherent and homogenous nationhood is a spectre that continues to haunt the former colonial world. The hegemony of nationalism, especially elite and bourgeois nationahsm emergent in the early independence period, formulates deliverance from colonial oppression as the seizure and transformation of state and society into an eth...

Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-Making in Asia, 2017

Based on a comparative study of two indigenous cultural villages, namely the Mah Meri Cultural Village in Carey Island, and the Orang Seletar Cultural Centre in Johor Bahru, both in West Malaysia, I seek to explore the motives for the development of these indigenous cultural villages, their contribution to broader politics in Malaysia, and their impacts on the cultural heritage of the indigenous communities. I will examine the dynamics surrounding the establishment of these cultural villages, focusing on the Malaysian government’s ideologies to assimilate the indigenous communities into the mainstream Malaysian society vis-à-vis the indigenous communities’ own sense of cultural identity and heritage, and the roles of cultural brokers in these establishments. My study shows that traditional knowledge and practices, which form an integral part of the indigenous communities’ sense of cultural pride and identity, take on additional meanings as communities adapt to the demands of modernisation and development, and serve as a lifeline for communities in the face of adversity. Cultural heritage is dynamic and constantly evolving, as indigenous communities are actively involved in the refashioning of their cultural heritage to cope with the challenges of rapid urbanisation and development on their traditional lands. Although these communities have established indigenous cultural villages to showcase and preserve their cultural heritage, the level of success enjoyed by the communities in instrumentalising their cultural heritage for the reassertion of their identity and self-determination hinges on the level of agency and authority extended to the communities in managing these indigenous cultural villages.

2002

Positions: Asia Critique, 2021

For the published version and bibliographic information, see https://muse.jhu.edu/article/784145 Scholars have argued that nation-states justify both their usurpation of indigenous people's rights to self-determination and their claims to their land and other economic resources in the name of "national interests." Indeed, in the encounter between nation-states and indigenous society in Southeast Asia, "civilizing the margins" has become a common policy that unites nation-states in their engagement with their respective indigenous minorities living on the periphery (Howitt, Connell, and Hirsch 1996; Duncan 2008). In this process, an alien political and legal form of governance, which has no continuity with the indigenous peoples' past life and history, has been imposed by the nation-state. Political scientist Alberto Magnaghi calls this "deterritorialisation": The interruption of the historical process constructing places occurs when one of the cycles of civilisation (the contemporary cycle) becomes independent from all the previous ones. The territory is treated as a tabula rasa, a mere support on which to design settlement according to abstract rules with no relation to the nature, quality, and identity of place. Here deterritorialisation does not take the form-as in the past-of a phase of transition towards a new territoriality (a new form of jointly evolving relations between the human settlement and the environment). This time it has been determined by an intrinsically deterritorialised socioeconomic system, organized in an increasingly artificial atemporal abstract space destructuring (because of the form and speed of the process) the historical stratification of regions, places, and their territorial types.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 1998

Geografiska Annaler Series B-human Geography, 2006

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous - were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno-nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.

2014

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and postcoloniality have critically embraced the global by arguing for the need to theorize transnationalism from marginalized perspectives. However, casting the global and the national in oppositional terms ignores the fact that national racial ideologies both actively shape and are shaped by globally circulating ideas about race. An understudied site in postcolonial studies, Malaysia-formerly known as Malaya-is an exemplary case that unsettles this binary opposition. Informed by racialized distinctions between "native" and "migrants" inherited from colonial rule, the constitutionalized "special position" of "bumiputera" (literally sons of the earth or autochthonous group) citizens effectively renders race a defining aspect of national identity. This dissertation presents translation as an entry point into theorizing the relation between the national and the global in the production of the Malaysian racial imaginary. Drawing on theories of cultural translation, I begin with the premise that translation is a process of figuration, vii Cheng Khoo and Leah Souffrant read drafts of chapters and offered incisive feedback. Gaik's work paved the way for my foray into Malaysian indie cinema-in fact, she laid the groundwork for that field of study-and has generously shared her knowledge with me. Arnika created many opportunities for me to share my work with audiences in film studies and Southeast Asian studies; I am enriched by our illuminating conversations and hope there will be many more. Randy Barbara Kaplan, who has provided unceasing encouragement, invited me to share a portion of this work at my alma mater, SUNY Geneseo. For their advice and support in navigating the academic profession, I thank Ammiel Alcalay, Susan