Suchergebnisse

Willford reviews MALAYSIA: The Making of a Nation by Cheah Boon Kheng.

Résumé L'idéologie de développement de l'État malais trouve son expression concrète dans la capitale, Kuala Lumpur, dont le gouvernement a fait une ville qui est l'illustration urbaine du modernisme islamique. L'esthétique islamique et moderniste de la ville vise à créer un sujet national ethnique. Construire l'identité malaise-islamique en tant qu'identité moderne de la nation non seulement déplace la minorité tamoule culturellement, politiquement et dans l'espace, mais aussi favorise une ambivalence identitaire entre Malais et Tamouls qui est le signe d'un déplacement psychologique. Dans le présent article, j'avance que le fétiche de la modernité malaise-islamique rend étrange ce qui n'est pas moderne, comme le montre l'identité tamoule-hindoue et l'espace qui la produit. Les Tamouls nient le stigmate qui marque de plus en plus leur culture au sein de l'enclave urbaine en affirmant leur valeur spirituelle. J'utilise le revivalisme tamoul et l'investissement ethnique qu'il suppose pour analyser l'ambivalence de la résistance culturelle à partir des pratiques rituelles et des divisions qu'elles génèrent aux niveaux personnel et communautaire.

The development ideology of the Malaysian state is materialized in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, where the government has crafted a city that provides an urban iconography of Islamic modernism. The city's Islamic & modernist aesthetic is aimed at creating a national ethnic subject. Constructing the Malay-Islamic identity as the nation's modern not only displaces the Tamil minority culturally, spatially, & politically, but also fosters identity ambivalence among Malays & Tamils, which is indicative of psychological displacement. In this article, I suggest that a fetish with Malay-Islamic modernity produces the uncanny of the unmodern, as signified by Tamil-Hindu identity & the space that produces it. Tamils negate the stigma that increasingly marks their culture within the urban enclave through affirmations of spiritual worth. In investigating Tamil revivalism & the ethnic investment it entails, I probe the ambivalence of cultural resistance by focusing upon ritual practices & the divisions they produce within selves & communities. 24 References. Adapted from the source document.

The development ideology of the Malaysian state is materialized in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, where the government has crafted a city that provides an urban iconography of Islamic modernism. The city's Islamic and modernist aesthetic is aimed at creating a national ethnicsubject. Constructing the Malay-Islamic identity as the nation's modern not only displaces the Tamil minority culturally, spatially, and politically, but also fosters identity ambivalence among Malays and Tamils, which is indicative of psychological displacement. In this article, I suggest that a fetish with Malay-Islamic modernity produces the uncanny of the unmodern, as signified by Tamil-Hindu identity and the space that produces it. Tamils negate the stigma that increasingly markstheir culture within the urban enclave through affirmations of spiritual worth. In investigating Tamil revivalism and the ethnic investmentit entails, I probe the ambivalence of cultural resistance by focusing upon ritual practices and the divisions they produce within selves and communities. 24 References. (Original abstract - amended)

Introduction -- Marginal existence and social distance: "worthless dregs in a prosperous society" -- The ritual expression of Tamil identity in Malaysia : a festival of power and penance -- Fetish, space, and displacement in Kuala Lumpur : Tamils and the ethnic uncanny -- Hindu ecumenical movements and "middleness" : familiarity and ambivalence in Tamil identity -- Making distinctions : "we had become the laughing stock of other races" -- Sacred Malaysia, Greater India

Bangalore is often heralded as India's future—a city where global technologies converge with multinational capital to produce a cosmopolitan workforce and vibrant economic growth. In this narrative the city's main challenge revolves around its success: whether its physical infrastructure can support its burgeoning population. Most observers assume that Bangalore's emergence as a "global city" represents its more complete integration into the world economy and, by extension, a more inclusive and cosmopolitan outlook among its growing middle class.Andrew C. Willford sheds light on a growing paradox: even as Bangalore has come to signify "progress" and economic possibility both within India and to the outside world, movements to make the city more monocultural and monolinguistic have gained prominence. Bangalore is the capital of the state of Karnataka, its borders linguistically redrawn by the postcolonial Indian state in 1956. In the decades that followed, organizations and leaders emerged to promote linguistic nationalism aimed at protecting the fragile unity of Kannadiga culture and literature against the twin threats of globalization and internal migration. Ironically, they support parochial cultural policies that impose a cultural and linguistic unity upon an area that historically stood at the crossroads of empires, trade routes, language practices, devotional literatures, and pilgrimage routes. Willford's analysis, which focuses on the minority experience of Bangalore's sizeable Tamil-speaking community, shows how the same forces of globalization that create growth and prosperity also foster uncertainty and tension around religion and language that completely contradict the region's long history of cosmopolitanism.Exploring this paradox in Bangalore's entangled and complex linguistic and cultural pasts serves as a useful case study for understanding the forces behind cultural and ethnic revivalism in the contemporary postcolonial world. Buttressed by field research conducted over a twenty-two-year period (1992–2015), Willford shows how the past is a living resource for the negotiation of identity in the present. Against the gloom of increasingly communal conflicts, he finds that Bangalore still retains a fabric of civility against the modern markings of cultural difference.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- § 1. History and Anthropology: Strange Bedfellows -- § 2. In Search of the Colonial Subject -- § 3. Laughing at Leviathan: John Furnivall, Dutch New Guinea, and the Ridiculousness of Colonial Rule -- § 4. Export Ceramics in Philippine Societies: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives -- § 5. Chronotopes of a Dystopic Nation: Th e Birth of "Dependency" in Late Porfirian Mexico -- § 6. Foretelling Ethnicity in Trinidad: The Post- emancipation "Labor Problem" -- § 7. The Nationalization of Anthropology: Japan and China in Manchuria -- § 8. The Figure of the Tamil in Modern Malaysia -- § 9. Unsettled Stories and Inadequate Metaphors: Th e Movement to Historical Anthropology -- Contributors -- Index

Introduction -- An emergent betrayal: Tamils and the development of Selangor's plantations -- Plantation fragments -- Tapping memories: plantations are not a workplace -- Interruptions, insurrections, strategies -- The locus of God's power: the faith of spirit and its incomprehensible shattering -- Ethnic riots and other myths -- Flats -- The law's betrayal -- Hindraf and the haunting of justice

In 2006 dejected members of the Bukit Jalil Estate community faced eviction from their homes in Kuala Lumpur where they had lived for generations. City officials classified plantation residents as squatters and, unaware of years of toil, attachment to the land, and past official promises, questioned any right they might have to stay, wondering "How can there be a plantation in Kuala Lumpur?"This story epitomizes the dilemma faced by Malaysian Tamils in recent years as they confront the moment when the plantation system where they have lived and worked for generations finally collapses. Foreign workers from Indonesia and Bangladesh have been brought in to replace Tamil workers to cut labor costs. As the new migrant workers do not bring their whole families with them, the community structures--schools, temples, churches, community halls, recreational fields--need no longer be sustained, allowing more land to be converted to mechanized palm oil production or lucrative housing developments. In short, the old, long-term community-based model of rubber plantation production introduced by British and French companies in colonial Malaya has been replaced by a model based upon migrant labor, mechanization, and a gradual contraction of the plantation economy. Tamils find themselves increasingly resentful of the fact that lands that were developed and populated by their ancestors are now claimed by Malays as their own; and that the land use patterns in these new townships, are increasingly hostile to the most symbolic vestiges of the Tamil and Hindu presence, the temples. In addition to issues pertaining to land, legal cases surrounding religious conversion have exacerbated a sense of insecurity among Tamil Hindus. Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this compelling book is about much more than the fast-approaching end to a way of life. Tamils and the Haunting of Justice addresses critical issues in the study of race and ethnicity. It is a study of how notions of justice, as imagined by an aggrieved minority, complicate legal demarcations of ethnic difference in post colonial states. Through its ethnographic breadth, it demonstrates which strategies, as enacted by local communities in conjunction with NGOs and legal advisors/activists, have been most "successful" in navigating the legal and political system of ethnic entitlement and compensation. It shows how, through a variety of strategies, Tamils try to access justice beyond the law--sometimes by using the law, and sometimes by turning to religious symbols and rituals in the murky space between law and justice. The book will thus appeal not only to scholars of Southeast Asia and the Indian diaspora, but also to ethnic studies and development scholars and those interested in postcolonial nationalism

Cover -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Religion, the Nation, and the Predicaments of Public Life in Southeast Asia -- The Priestess and the Politician: Enunciating Filipino Cultural Nationalism through Mt. Banahaw -- The Modernist Vision from Below: Malaysian Hinduism and the "Way of Prayers" -- Fraudulent and Dangerous Popular Religiosity in the Public Sphere: Moral Campaigns to Prohibit, Reform, and Demystify Thai Spirit Mediums -- Islam and Gender Politics in Late New Order Indonesia -- A Sixth Religion?: Confucianism and the Negotiation of Indonesian-Chinese Identity under the Pancasila State -- Relocating Reciprocity: Politics and the Transformation of Thai Funerals -- Immaterial Culture: "Idolatry" in the Lowland Philippines -- Picturing Aceh: Violence, Religion, and a Painter's Tale -- Contributors