The discourse of development is especially effective in rendering indigenous lands as terra nullius or an empty frontier waiting for the benevolent settler colonizing state to extract human and material resources through various stages of capitalism. Staging Indigenous Heritage attempts to address the turn toward UNESCO's “culture for development” discourse that is based on instrumentalizing indigenous cultural heritage as a socio-economic resource for local communities. The book asks the question: Is it possible for indigenous communities to utilize their cultural resources for a sovereign form of self-development or self-empowerment, without falling prey to extractive enterprises linked to settler states and corporations?
Staging Indigenous Heritage critiques the “culture for development” model by exploring the complexities of the middle-person brokerage system that connects indigenous communities in Malaysia with external stakeholders interested in funding and consuming indigenous cultures. Ideally, “culture for development” instrumentalizes indigenous culture as a commodity in exchange for resources that can aid the local community's development. However, the case studies in this monograph show how individual brokers with access to social, political, and economic resources become gatekeepers to the cultural villages they manage, while indigenous communities' cultural resources and alienated labor are extracted in these cultural villages. The politics of representing indigenous cultures through this brokerage system has created a “culture of dependency” between the brokers and the local communities who are supposed to be the recipient of developmental aids. Cai argues that this “culture of dependency” places a middle-person as a barrier that prevents cultural self-determination, thus furthering the marginalization of indigenous communities in Malaysia.
Four indigenous cultural villages in Malaysia are examined as case studies in four chapters. The Mah Meri Cultural Village (Carey Island) and the Orang Seletar Cultural Centre (Johor Bahru) are located in Peninsular Malaysia, while the Monsopiad Cultural Village and the Linangkit Cultural Village are located in Sabah, East Malaysia. The four case studies are similar in their designation as museum-styled cultural villages. The author delves into the intricate historical, political, and anthropological contexts to show how these different stakeholders and circumstances lead to a “culture of dependency” between powerful brokers and the indigenous communities.
The monograph begins with an overview of the scholarly discussions on the role of brokers in development studies, followed by critical museology's interpretations of indigenous cultural heritage. As one of the keywords in the monograph's title, the “instrumentalization of cultural heritage” is a key concept used to evaluate the practice and effects within a larger economical and political context within Malaysia. Based on an “ethos of cultural relativism” (p. 4), cultural heritage is analyzed as a commodity for cultural tourism in all four case studies, and utilized to perform land claims against the settler state and justify ritual practices in the community. For example, in the Orang Seletar Cultural Center in Johor Bahru, indigeneity was “performed” in legal proceedings to dispute land claims from the Danga Bay Area developer. Cai reads this as a necessity to perform indigenous cultural practices as being integral to the environment to the Malaysian courts in order to legitimize indigenous land claims.
Scholars interested in a critical analysis of decentralized developmental aids for cultural institutions via a brokerage or middle management in Asia will be interested in how individual brokers position themselves in these four case studies. The author shows how brokers mediate external access to specific tangible and intangible indigenous heritage while controlling the allocation of funds to local communities. Depending on their personal motivations and ethics, this may result in further centralized power in the hands of the brokers and increases the disempowerment of indigenous communities. The Linangkit Cultural Village (Sabah) brokers are either prominent members of the indigenous Lotud community or affiliated via marriage to the prominent Jilan family. However, management and relations with the local community broke down when the main broker passed away. Positive brokerage includes the work of Judeth John Baptist, who collaborates with indigenous communities in Sabah to document and translate a Magavau ceremony from various Kadazan community groups into a collaged performance to represent Malaysia at a regional conference in Bangkok (pp. 136–138). While the monograph would have been made richer with a Marxist class analysis, the brokers are evaluated on their methods of resource and labor extraction from the indigenous communities, the amount of local collaboration and networking, and the measure of resources they channel back into the communities.
This multi-sited ethnography of the four cultural villages is framed within critical museology to evaluate the authenticity, discourse of representation, commoditization of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and the management of museological practices in Malaysia. Scholarship on different critiques and analyses of “authenticity” are applied throughout the case studies to examine the question of cultural relativism and invented heritage within these cultural villages. Cai evaluates these strategies as attempts to perform indigeneity or an “ecologically noble savage” for the settler colonial gaze to legitimize either the status of indigeneity or claims to land and resources. As such, another central theme of the monograph is the “double bind” of indigenous groups to perform an exoticized “other”-ness in order to be recognized as authentic by mainstream politics and tourists. The brokerage system utilizes this “double bind” by becoming the authority on the terms of cultural authenticity. This is especially visible in the Mah Meri Cultural Village where the locals, employed as casual workers, are “willing accomplices” in a divided community to self-essentialize their culture as “primitive” (p. 87). They were active in their co-option to perform an alienated and commodified culture that is perceived as “authentic” for tourists and the Malaysian state. Cai argues that this emphasis on their difference through self-exoticization furthers their marginalization from the majority non-indigenous population in Malaysia.
The colonial lens on Indigeneity, specifically seen through various state and academic traditions informed by linear colonial time (primitive past versus modern present) and rigid definition of social and cultural categories, are already alienated from the everyday lived practices of indigenous communities and their desires to co-produce themselves in relation with their encounters. The description of Adam Gotusan, the youngest apprentice bobohizan trained in Kadazan rituals, seems to exemplify a practice based on his intersecting relations. He works in the Monsopiad Cultural Village, performed in the Magavau ceremony organized by Judeth John Baptist, and more importantly, he is accepted as an “immensely popular bobohizan” requested to conduct rituals in many villages. However, Cai notes that he failed to observe some cultural taboos and replaced one of the required ritual practices with elements from the Magavau ceremony that Judeth John Baptist synthesized in consultation with several Magavau ceremony elders. The author wonders if there is an infringement on intellectual property rights with respect to the Magavau ceremony (pp. 139–141). There is a tension between a dynamic local knowledge networks as represented by Adam Gotusan's practice, the question of rigid academic categories in terms of authenticity (culture as being unchanged from the past), and the question of alienated ownership of knowledge in capitalistic frameworks through intellectual property rights. The tension between cultural change through indigenous agency and cultural authenticity imposed by the colonial gaze remains unresolved in the monograph.
In attempting to present multiple antithetical perspectives between local and colonial (academic and state) ways of knowing, Cai is ambivalent on the positive role that certain brokers play and the impossibility of representing the depth of indigenous cultures and traditions to outsiders or audience misinformed by the colonial lens. Positively, brokers create webs of relations and responsibilities between themselves, indigenous community groups, and external stakeholders. There are negative cases when these relations and responsibilities break down, especially when prioritizing capitalist, private, and state interests over local responsibilities.
A similar ambivalence on the role of brokers and the tension between indigenous agency and the colonial lens is played out in the case of Anne Lasimbang. Anne Lasimbang works as a broker to position indigenous peoples in Sabah as “ecologically noble savages” in order to gain cultural and land rights from the Malaysian state. She talked about her choice to wear a “loincloth” as her act to reclaim her pride in being both indigenous and educated (in Western sciences). Cai interprets this as an act of strategic essentialism that “consciously maintains the construction of difference between indigenous and non-indigenous people, recasting the former as backward and undeveloped” (p. 143). Within this tension, it remains unclear if Anne Lasimbang's fight for indigenous rights is co-opted into a colonial discourse of the “primitive native” or that the Malaysian Forestry Department has failed to ethically collaborate with different indigenous communities to come up with a respectful definition of adat (native customary rights).
In conclusion, Staging Indigenous Heritage is filled with detailed ethnographic notes on various rituals and cultural practices within the four case studies that will be of interest to scholars interested in learning more about the dynamics within indigenous community groups in Malaysia. It also serves to inform future Asia development studies projects on the issues on the brokerage system.
