8 - Islam, Modernity, and the Popular in Malaysia

Summary

Introduction: The Paradoxes of an Anthropology of the Malays

The anthropology of the Malays soon runs up against a paradox, even a contradiction, that seems irresolvable, at least within the parameters of the discipline. On the one hand, during the last thirty years at least, Malaysia has become more and more like the Western societies that gave birth to the discipline of anthropology in the first place. However we choose to characterize these changes — as industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, commodification, globalization, modernization, and so forth — Malaysia seems increasingly to have become “just like the West”. The judgement of Claude Levi-Strauss, on first taking up his Chair at the College de France, seems especially pertinent to the case of the anthropology of Malaysia:

The character of ethnographic investigation is undoubtedly changing as the small savage tribes we used to study disappear, merging into vaster groups in which problems tend to resemble our own … A sound scientific attitude would not seek to develop ethnology where its method is mixed with other methods, where its object is confused with other objects (Levi-Strauss 1987, pp. 25–26)

To those who object that since Levi-Strauss uttered this critique of “ethnology … in a diluted state”, the discipline has acquired an admirable record of coping with the study of modern society, one can only point to a continuing impression among colleagues that conducting anthropology in Malaysia is still somehow illegitimate, if not downright boring, when compared to ethnographic research in more exotic locales. In fact, it seems that the most successful ethnographic accounts of Malays in recent years have been those that have managed to demonstrate the “persistence” of a profound otherness, even in the midst of a nation undergoing rapid agricultural and industrial development. When such constructions are absent, it seems that at least Western audiences, especially those with a taste for anthropological writing, are simply not very interested.