‘After the break’: re-conceptualizing ethnicity,national identity and ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ identities

Focusing on ethnic Chinese as cultural citizens of the nation, this paper examines national identity in the context of generational change. In so doing, it connects to colonialist conceptions of identity the dominant framework of ethnicity that operates in Malaysia. It argues that this framework allows for the nationalist imagining of ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ as ‘outsiders’. In probing the complex conceptual relationship between ethnicity, national identity and cultural citizenship, this article asks: How does ‘ethnicity’ enter into negotiations over the ‘national’ in the cultural realm? What are the notions of cultural difference and national otherness that operate in the negative dualisms by which nation and ethnicity are defined? How are these dualisms tied to notions of authenticity and cultural citizenship? Using the novel The Harmony Silk Factory by Malaysian author Tash Aw to address these questions, this paper argues the need to rethink current policies and narratives of ethnic and national identity in Malaysia.     

Constructing interpretive ethnicity in between two nations: television and diasporic discourses of identity in Malaysia

This article discusses the interpretation of television in relation to ethnic identity embraced by the female members of Javanese diaspora in Malaysia. The Javanese diaspora in this context refers to the descendants of the colonial Javanese migrants from Indonesia. In contemporary Malaysia, they are considered as Malays, but essentially they retain some cultural identifications of Javanese ethnicity, especially the language. As Malaysia becomes one of the destinations for Indonesian migrant labour and popular culture, the Javanese diaspora are certainly exposed to manifold images of their ethnic origin. Through the audience ethnography in a Javanese community of Selangor, this article reveals that the Malaysian Javanese women negotiate both representative and distant images of Javanese identity on television. Their interpretation of ethnic identity from television represents the notion of ‘interpretive ethnicity’.     

‘Playing’ at the ethnic boundary: strategic boundary making/unmaking among ethnic Chinese groups in Australia

The sociological literature has constructed a systematic typology of ‘modes’ and ‘means’ of strategic ethnic boundary making/unmaking. Through exploring different strategies, scholars illustrate the processes and contexts of boundary expansion or contraction. Other scholars also distinguish ethnic elements and ‘moral' values attached to certain ethnicities but not to others. This paper acknowledges dynamic boundary making/unmaking and moral aspects of ethnicity, while exploring the different degrees to which national and pan-national identity nest within each other among ethnic Chinese groups, as well as how ethnic boundary becomes a field where people ‘play' in their everyday interactions. Based on participant observations and in-depth interviews from two pan-Chinese worksites in Australia, the paper argues that different interpretations of ethnic identity as well as how different identities (national and pan-national) are nested give people room to ‘play' at the ethnic boundary and result in different outcomes. This paper also shows that people can cross the ethnic boundary (between Taiwanese/Hong Kongese and PRC-Chinese) without expanding/contracting the existing categories or ‘repositioning/transvaluing' their ethnic statuses.     

What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection

This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Paka's ‘big name’-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gell's seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his ‘big name’, Paka's photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation of ‘power’ and ‘objecthood’ in Southeast Asianist anthropology.     

Ethnic minority identity and movement politics: The case of the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

The level of political mobilization among ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe has often been regarded as directly dependent on the strong or weak ethnic identity of the groups involved. Less attention has gone to the role of ethnic leaders in creating ethnic group identities for political purposes. This article explores the influence of political mobilization on ethnic group formation in the case of the Roma (Gypsies) in the contemporary Czech and Slovak Republics. It examines the various ways in which Romani activists in these two countries have “framed” Romani identity. The article suggests that activists’ conceptions of Romani identity are closely tied to their political strategies. At the same time, Romani activists have not been able to gain complete control over the production of Romani identity. They have had to deal with powerful schemes of ethnic categorization promulgated by the media, public officials and policy documents.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an 'impurely' Christian world

This article seeks to render ignorance analytically and ethnographically productive by exploring practices and tropes of knowing and not-knowing among young Christian Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. It argues that these Bidayuhs' professed ignorance of the old 'religion', adat gawai , cannot be dismissed as a simple lack of knowledge or reflection of sheer indifference. Instead, their invocations of ignorance could be understood as a productive, empowering device for dealing with the dangers of living in a world in which religious conversion remains an ongoing, incomplete process. Through this ethnographic analysis, the article also offers a reflexive critique of the knowledge-centred impulses that often shape anthropology's epistemological and methodological projects.  

Résumé

L'auteure cherche à rendre l'ignorance féconde du point de vue anecdotique et ethnographique en explorant les pratiques et figures rhétoriques liées à la connaissance et à l'ignorance chez les jeunes Bidayuhs chrétiens du Sarawak, dans la partie malaise de Bornéo. Elle affirme que l'ignorance de « l'ancienne religion >>, adat gawai , professée par ces Bidayuhs ne peut pas être réduite à un manque de connaissance ou à l'expression d'une simple indifférence. Elle pourrait, au contraire, constituer un dispositif productif et efficace permettant de gérer les dangers d'un monde dans lequel la conversion religieuse reste un processus permanent et incomplet. Par cette étude ethnographique, l'article offre aussi une critique des impulsions centrées sur le savoir qui donnent souvent forme aux projets épistémologiques et méthodologiques de l'anthropologie.     

Racism,disadvantage and multiculturalism: towards effective anti-racist praxis

Measuring ethnicity in any society is a challenge. Given world immigration patterns, many countries face a growing dilemma in determining the cultural antecedents of their populations. A further complication is the reality that such determination occurs within the political and nationalistic settings where ethnic‐cultural groups may be potent forces in their own right. As societies mature and evolve, there is an increasing tendency for populations, especially those with many generations of residence in the country, to see themselves as ‘indigenous’ to the society in which they live. Canada is not alone in having to deal with the fluidity of the concept, ‘Canadian’, ‘American’, ‘Australian’, ‘Yugoslav’, and ‘Soviet’ are parallel concepts in other countries of multiple ethnic composition. Using 1991 National Census Test results, the article explores some of the parameters of the indigenous category ‘Canadian’. In particular, the location in Canada and mother tongue of respondents reporting ‘Canadian’ as the ethnic origin of their parents and grandparents or as their own ethnic identity are important indicators for this emerging ethnic category.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.     

Cyprus,ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage

This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the preservation of it as an unintended consequence of ‘freezing’ development. It also examines how ethnic groups and individuals may come to evaluate their ‘own’ heritage negatively, specifically as an inconvenient cultural load, in efforts to develop ideologically specific or socially ‘progressive’ identities.     

Ethnonationalism,ethnic nationalism,and mini‐nationalism: A comparison of Connor,Smith and Snyder

Some terms have been coined to highlight the important relation between nationalism and ethnicity. However, there has been much confusion as to the meaning of such concepts as ‘ethnonationalism’, ‘ethnic nationalism’ and ‘mini‐nationalism’. This article compares the three terms, as used respectively in the works of Walker Connor, Anthony Smith and Louis Snyder. These scholars are selected not only because of their well‐respected position in the study of nationalism but also because their works are representative of each of the three concepts. The comparison finds that since both Connor and Smith emphasized the ethnic dimension of nationalism, their ideas can be presented in one analytical framework. In fact, Connor's ‘ethnonationalism’ and Smith's ‘ethnic nationalism’ overlap with each other. However, Smith's theory of nationalism is comprehensive enough to take care of the fact that the nationalisms of many new states of today's world have no ethnic base at all, whereas Connor's analysis makes no mention of this. In this respect, Smith's model is preferred to that of Connor. Finally, Snyder's ‘mini‐nationalism’ is seen as the least useful concept, since the use of size rather than ethnicity to classify nationalisms does not increase our understanding of the concept.     

Ethnic and civic dealings with newcomers: naturalization policies and practices in twenty-six immigration countries

Over the last decade or so, the comparative study of nationalism has produced a large number of cogent critiques of classifying nations according to how ethnic or civic they are. In fact, these critiques have been so convincing that many scholars today seem to agree that any mention of the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ is unwarranted. This is unfortunate, because the distinction still offers a useful heuristic device to compare and classify different nation-building practices. This article analyses naturalization policies in twenty-six Western immigrant-receiving democracies in order to show that the distinction constitutes a valuable analytical tool to explore how different countries deal with newcomers. The naturalization policy index developed in this article proves to have a high degree of face validity, to be a good predictor of actual naturalization practices, and to match up well with previous classifications of ethnic and civic nation-building practices.     

The ‘other side’ of embedded ness: A case‐study of the interplay of economy and ethnicity

As interest in ethnics and their entrepreneurial activities has grown in recent years, sociologists have come to emphasize the importance of ethnic social structures as the source of actions propelling business growth. In a sign of convergence with the ‘new economic sociology’, recent literature suggests that embeddedness in ethnic networks and communities leads to cooperative, if not conformist, behaviour among ethnic economic actors. This article looks at the ‘other side’ of embeddedness, through a case‐study of African‐American, Caribbean, Korean and white construction contractors in New York City. I argue that, in construction, the embeddedness of economic behaviour in ongoing social relations among a myriad of social actors impedes access to outsiders. Embeddedness contributes to the liabilities of newness that all neophytes encounter, breeding a preference for established players with track records. However, the convergence of economic and ethnic ties has a further baneful effect, since outsiders also fall outside those networks that define the industrial community. While African‐American, Caribbean and Korean outsiders all experience these barriers in similar ways, they differ in the adaptive strategies that they have pursued. African Americans appear to be most disadvantaged, in part because they have been the most exposed to the social closure that results from the mobilization of white ethnics’ social capital. By contrast, Caribbeans and Koreans entered the labour market in societies where racial domination played little or no role in labour market outcomes ‐ a considerable asset since construction skills are transferable from one society to another. The Koreans appear to be the most embedded in ethnic networks, through which they secure jobs and skilled labour, though class factors play a role here as well and even the Koreans must reach out beyond the ethnic community for a clientele. By contrast, ethnic solidarity operates less powerfully among the black contractors, who are tied to a community where intra‐ethnic diversity and internal competition have grown as a result of immigration. In the absence of an ethnic market, black'entrepreneurs turn to the state, whose requirements and dependence on union labour expose black builders to risks from which their Korean counterparts are sheltered.     

Stonhet and Yelotop: Body Images,Physical Markers and Definitions of Ethnic Boundaries in Papua New Guinea

The Wampar of Papua New Guinea are an ethnic group with contested boundaries and a strong ethnic identity and consciousness. Since their first contact with White missionaries, government officials and anthropologists, body images have changed and become more important. ‘Foreign’ migrants from other PNG provinces are now coming in great numbers into Wampar territory, where they find wealthy Wampar make good marriage partners. From peaceful relations with ‘foreigners’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the situation has changed to the extent that Wampar now have plans for driving men from other ethnic groups out of their territory. Within two generations, ideas of changeable cultural otherness have developed into stereotypes of unchangeable bodily differences. In this paper, I describe (1) changes in the perception of foreigners, and in the definition of ‘foreigner’ itself, (2) body images of the Wampar, and (3) conditions for these changes.     

Social mobility of ethnic minority students in Laos

Idealistically speaking, schools are engines for upward social mobility. Education for ethnic minorities in Laos was set up to achieve nationalist, political, economic and sociocultural goals of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. It was hoped that education would shift ethnic minorities from a lifestyle based on superstitious beliefs to a modern one, so that they could participate and enjoy ‘equality’ through educational equity. The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of how equality as a promise in education has impacted on students’ upward mobility, particularly the political discourse of the ‘big man’. This paper explores social mobility provided by national education for ethnic minorities through boarding schooling. It finds that such education has yet to reposition ethnic minorities into the ethnic Lao sociocultural hierarchy. As a result, regardless of their educational success, students are still ranked as ‘ethnic minorities’ and as being ‘poor’ in the eyes of urban students, middle class and rich students, and the ethnic Lao elite.     

Internal ethnicity in the ethnic economy

Internal ethnicity refers to ethnic subgroups within an immigrant group. An ‘ethnic economy’ includes the self‐employed and their co‐ethnic workers. Although most research treats the boundaries of ‘ethnic economy’ and its variant, the ‘ethnic enclave economy’, as though they were coterminous with those of national‐origin immigrant groups, this assumption is unreliable. Ethnic boundaries need not coincide with those of nationality origin when internal ethnicity exists. To test this hypothesis, we utilize survey data collected from a sample of Iranians in Los Angeles. Because this national‐origin immigrant group contains four ethno‐religious subgroups (Armenians, Bahais, Jews and Muslims), the Iranians in Los Angeles operated four distinctive ethnic economies, not one. Each ethno‐religious subgroup had its own ethnic economy, and these separate economies were only weakly tied to an encompassing Iranian ethnic economy.     

Monitoring equal employment opportunity at the workplace: The crucial role of the 1991 Census

The fact that the 1991 Census of Population included a race and ethnic question followed evidence from the 1989 test Census that this was not likely to arouse strong public opposition ‐ while the case for race and ethnic data in the Census was overwhelming. This article focuses on the necessity of the data for the proper implementation of the Race Relations Act 1976, especially in relation to employment. It demonstrates how the linking of race and ethnic manpower statistics in the Census to the analysis of local labour‐market areas could provide employers with the means by which they can measure whether or not they are achieving genuine equality of employment opportunity under the 1976 Act. The article illustrates the recommended approach and shows the substantial effect upon the ‘benchmark’ data that results from analysing each major occupation group separately. Finally, the article notes some possible weaknesses in the 1991 Census data that will be available for monitoring equal employment opportunity in Britain.     

Citizenship and Resource Competition in Nigeria

This article discusses the growing tension between constitutionally defined citizenship and socially accepted practices of “we–they dichotomies” as a turbulent component of the national question discourse in Nigeria. It examines the adoption of dual citizenship across the country as well as how this generates violent ethnic conflict. Importantly, while citizenship refers to one’s full membership of a sovereign political community acquired either by birth, naturalisation or any other process legitimised and recognised by the supreme law of the state, indigeneship, on the other hand, is a discriminatory policy employed by local or provincial governments for protecting the rights of their so–called indigenous populations to employment, political power and other resources of the regions or states against domination by alien populations and outsiders. It is argued that while such distinctions have been made possible inter alia by Nigeria’s multi–ethnic character, the ensuing struggles and tensions have been driven by the normless competition over resource allocation. These have especially been the case in instances where ethno–territorial cleavages have been the primary beneficiaries and targets of such resource allocation. This article discusses land as a major economic resource over which heated ethnic conflicts have taken place in Nigeria. Drawing on the conflicts between Hausa–Fulani pastoralists and Yoruba farmers in South–Western Nigeria, it examines the question of how disputed access to land and water has underlain an almost permanent basis of conflict in Nigeria as well as their implications for the country’s fledgling democracy. How does the struggle over land affect the articulation of the citizenship question in Nigeria? How have scarcity and competition over resources affected the contest over citizenship and the forging of nationhood among natives and settlers in South–Western Nigeria? How have colonial framings of socially accepted practices of indigeneship entrenched an understanding of the state in Nigeria as a representation of permanently defined subnational conceptions of ethnic citizenship? What role can the state in Nigeria play towards transforming the multiplicities of traditional societies into coherent political societies as a basis for (i) eliciting deference and devotion from the individual to the claims of the state, and ultimately for (ii) increasing cultural homogeneity, political integration and value consensus? Drawing on data generated from an ethnographic study carried out in South–Western Nigeria between October 2009 and March 2015, this study interrogates these questions.     

The terms of the debate: Untangling language about ethnicity and ethnic movements

Theoretical debates on ethnicity suffer from a general confusion about the divergent meanings which academics ascribe to key terms. ‘Primordialist’ approaches include biological, psychological and cultural explanations, whose conflation tends to confuse proponents and critics alike. ‘Instrumentalist’ approaches conflate all ethnic movements within a profile of political opportunism, failing to recognize the varying degrees to which underlying social‐institutional incompatibilities may contribute to ethnic conflict. ‘Constructivist’ approaches vacillate between a focus on the influence of intellectual ethnic discourse and an understanding of ethnic identity as developing out of wider bodies of social experience. Greater attention to the varying contribution of ‘deep’ culture to ethnic conflict can clarify why these subschools find such differences among ethnic movements, which can indeed be understood to vary along a spectrum of political functions: at one pole, ethnic movements seek to inflate ethnic sentiment for political purposes; at the other, they seek rather to reconstruct the existing political position of a distinct cultural formation. This distinction can permit more appropriate policy‐making towards the resolution of ethnic conflict, yet raises new challenges to the biases of the researcher.     

Containing political instability in a poly‐ethnic society: The case of Mauritius

In a continent whose political record has been largely marred by almost three decades of post‐independence political turmoil verging on genocidal proportions, the small state of Mauritius has devised a sociopolitical system that has largely succeeded in containing some of the worst excesses of bloody political confrontation usually associated with poly‐ethnic societies, for example, the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s; the Tutsi/Hutu conflict in Burundi in 1988–89, and so on. In this article it is argued that Mauritius has devised and maintained a three‐pronged strategy to safeguard political stability, namely: (1) the adoption of constitutional safeguards to accommodate ethnic divisions; (2) a spoils system of (ethnic) parliamentary representation designed to ensure that no section of the population is alienated, thereby respiting in the politicization of ethnic divisions; (3) a ‘national patronage’ system through which massive social welfare spending has been maintained since independence. This has functioned to dampen the possibility of political violence nourished by general poverty and the resultant alienation. Finally, the commitment of the various ruling coalitions to the parliamentary process has had the effect of impelling the major opposition parties to seek to gain power through peaceful constitutional means rather than through violent political confrontation.