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At the Crossroads of Civilizations: The Cultural Orientations of Malaysian Intellectuals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Daniel Regan
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Extract

Too often civilizational analyses remain sealed in a hermetically closed vacuum. Disembodied motifs, designs, and themes tumble over one another in symbolic space, while fragments of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other civilizational complexes vie for idealistic preeminence. Intercivilizational encounters come to resemble pure clashes of ideas, not of individuals or strategic social groups, whose relevance for collective behaviour is minimized. The power of ideas, to mobilize and transform people and be transformed themselves, is thus denied.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , September 1980 , pp. 320 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1980

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References

A version of this paper was presented at Plenary Session IV on Societies, Cultures and Civilizations: Autonomy and Interdependence at the Ninth World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala, 19 Aug. 1978. I want to thank Margaret M. Schmidt for her timely research assistance. Thanks also to Rainer Baum, Clifford Geertz, Juan Linz, and John Marx for helpful comments.

1 On “strategic groups”, with special reference to Southeast Asia, see Evers, Hans-Dieter (ed.), Modernization in South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur and London, 1973), p. 114Google Scholar.

2 Kadushin, Charles, The American Intellectual Elite (Boston and Toronto, 1974), p. 7Google Scholar

3 Shils, Edward, “Metropolis and Province in the Intellectual Community”, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago and London, 1972), p. 356Google Scholar.

4 Hirschman, Charles, Ethnic and Social Stratification in Peninsular Malaysia (Washington, D.C., 1975), p. 9Google Scholar.

5 Members of the dominant group, the Malays, are defined legally as those habitually speaking Malay, following Malay custom and professing Islam. bin Hashim, Tan Sri Mohamed Suffian, An Introduction to the Constitution of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, 1972), pp. 247–49Google Scholar.

6 Gullick, J.M., Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Simandjuntak, B., Malayan Federalism, 1945–1963 (Kuala Lumpur, 1969)Google Scholar.

7 Esman, Milton J., Administration and Development in Malaysia: Institution Building and Reform in a Plural Society (Ithaca and London, 1972), p. 46Google Scholar; Kasper, Wolfgang, Malaysia: A Study in Successful Economic Development (Washington, D.C., 1974), p. 7Google Scholar.

8 Shils, “Metropolis and Province”.

9 Lopata, Helena Znaniecki, “Members of the Intelligentsia as Developers and Disseminators of Cosmopolitan Culture”, The Intelligentsia and the Intellectuals: Theory, Method and Case Study, ed. Gella, Aleksander (Beverly Hills and London, 1976), pp. 59–78Google Scholar.

10 Shils, “Metropolis and Province”, p. 358.

11 Ibid., p. 361.

12 Regan, Daniel, “Secular City? The Religious Orientations of Intellectuals in Malaysia”, Cultural Pluralism in Malaysia: Polity, Military, Mass Media, Education, Religion and Social Class, ed. Lent, John A. (DeKalb, 1977)Google Scholar.

13 See above. From this usage of the concept, it is clear that a distinction central to this study is between the professional academician and the intellectual. Many intellectuals, of course — in this study 32 of 133, or 24% — will be located within the university. By keeping these roles conceptually separate, the approach used makes it possible to gauge the actual participation of university lecturers and other academicians in broader intellectual roles.

14 The accumulation of additional names by reputational criteria basically confirmed the comprehensiveness of the original positional list. Of the 133 people interviewed, only 10 were included solely on the basis of the “snowball”. In the interviews, many declined the opportunity to add to the list of names shown to them on the grounds that, in their view, it was already complete.

15 Of the 133 people interviewed, 109 satisfied one or two of the sampling criteria discussed previously, and were designated the “outer circle”. Twenty-four individuals — the inner core of “stars” — satisfied 3 or more of the sampling criteria and/or were the authors of clearly the most important, most discussed, and oft-quoted “works”.

16 See Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1960)Google Scholar.

17 For some of the geographical or, perhaps better, ecological imagery used in this paragraph, I draw upon the useful work by Lynch, Image of the City.

18 Lopata, “Intelligentsia as Developers of Cosmopolitan Culture”, p. 60.

19 Shils, “Metropolis and Province”, p. 361.

20 Comparable to “Mr.”

21 See, for example, Gordon who writes, “The ‘marginally ethnic intellectual’ is, from many points of view, the most interesting and the most significant type.” Gordon, Milton M., “Social Class and American Intellectuals”, Human Nature, Class and Ethnicity (New York, 1978 [1954/55], p. 238Google Scholar.

22 Shils, “Metropolis and Province”, p. 363.

23 Ibid., p. 358.

24 Ibid., p. 357.

25 Ibid., p. 364.

26 Ibid., p. 367.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., p. 361.

29 Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber, An Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley, 1977 [1960]), p. 263Google Scholar.

30 Political complacency is not always the lot of provincial intellectuals. Encik Ali, for instance, is far from uncritical politically. Still, on the whole, the Malaysian intellectual elite tends to be a somewhat conservative group. See Regan, Daniel, “The Politics of Malaysian Intellectuals”, Journal of Asian and African Studies 13, nos. 3–4 (1979):212–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The conservatism of the “provincials”, compared to other intellectual subgroups, particularly the Islamic-oriented, may reflect the relative contentment of individuals who, despite rather meagre circumstances, have achieved some measure of elite status.