"Getting By"

M. Nonini Donald

Description

How do class, ethnicity, gender, and politics interact? In what ways do they constitute everyday life among ethnic minorities? In "Getting By," Donald M. Nonini draws on three decades of research in the region of Penang state in northern West Malaysia, mainly in the city of Bukit Mertajam, to provide an ethnographic and historical account of the cultural politics of class conflict and state formation among Malaysians of Chinese descent. Countering triumphalist accounts of the capitalist Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, Nonini shows that the Chinese of Penang (as elsewhere) are riven by deep class divisions and that class issues and identities are omnipresent in everyday life. Nor are the common features of "Chinese culture" in Malaysia manifestations of some unchanging cultural essence. Rather, his long immersion in the city shows, they are the results of an interaction between Chinese-Malaysian practices in daily life and the processes of state formation-in particular, the ways in which Kuala Lumpur has defined different categories of citizens. Nonini's ethnography is based on semistructured interviews; participant observation of events, informal gatherings, and meetings; a commercial census; intensive reading of Chinese-language and English-language newspapers; the study of local Chinese-language sources; contemporary government archives; and numerous exchanges with residents.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Malasia
• Malaysia
• Ethnic studies
• Social class
• History of Asia
• Malaisie
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 11 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801456220
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

“GETTING BY”

“GettingBy” Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Donald M. Nonini

ITHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of grants from the Depart ment of Anthropology and the University Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which aided in the publication of this book.

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a Subsidy for Publica tion grant from the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (USA), which generously assisted in the publication of this book.

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2015 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Nonini, Donald Macon, author.  Getting by : class and state formation among Chinese in Malaysia / Donald M. Nonini.  pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 9780801452475 (cloth : alk. paper)  ISBN 9780801479083 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1. Chinese—Malaysia—Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang)—Politics and government. 2. Chinese—Malaysia—Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang)— Ethnic identity. 3. Social classes—Malaysia—Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang) 4. Nationalism—Malaysia—Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang) 5. Ethnology— Malaysia—Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang) 6. Bukit Mertajam (Pulau Pinang, Malaysia)—History. I. Title.  DS595.2.C5N66 2015  305.8951'05951—dc23 2014038677

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design: Richanna Patrick. Cover photograph: Street Scene, Jalan Pasar, Bukit Mertajam, 1979. Photograph by Donald M. Nonini.

Contents

Par t I

Par t II

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Historical Ethnography of Class and State Formation  1 . Counterinsurgency, Silences, Forgetting, 1946–69

DEVELOPMENT (1969–85) Preface: Colonial Residues and “Development”  2 . “Boom Town in the Making,” 1978–80  3 . “Getting By”: The Arts of Deception and the “Typical Chinese”  4 of the Urban: Hegemony or State Predation?. Banalities  5 Dismissed!. Class  6 in Motion: The Dialectics of “Disputatiousness”. Men and “RiceEating Money”  7 . Chinese Society as “A Sheet of Loose Sand”: Elite Arguments and Class Discipline in a Postcolonial Era

GLOBALIZATION (1985–97) Preface: Going Global  8 and Encompassment: Class, State Formation,. Subsumption and the Production of Urban Space, 1980–97  9 Global: Exit, Alternative Sovereignties, and. Covert Being Stuck 10 on Two Roads” and “Jumping Airplanes”. “Walking Epilogue: 1997–2007

Appendix: A Profile of Economic “Domination”? Notes References Index

vii

1

27

51

57

82

109

125

165

185

213

221

243

262

286

303 309 323 339

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to adequately acknowledge the assistance of all the very kind friends and acquaintances in Malaysia and in the United States who have made the ethnographic and historical research and writing that have taken place over a period of more than thirty years possible. Above all, I must thank the residents of Bukit Mertajam—all ages, classes, ethnicities, and genders—who patiently endured my at times impertinent and insensitive questions, tried to answer them as best they could, and led me to new insights. I have been extraordinarily privi leged by their gracious help and teaching over many years, combined with a hos pitality that has touched me deeply. I owe a particular debt to my field assistants during several periods of research in Bukit Mertajam from the late 1970s through the late 2000s, who went beyond the usual tasks I asked of them to become superb friends, informants, and coethnographers—Kuan Yew Chieo, Tang Swee Huat, Zhou Jinfu, Lim Hai Long, Ng WenSheng, and Lim Kun Heng. In the United States, Changhui Qi and Elizabeth Jones also served ably as research assistants at various times. I have a special debt of another kind to those who were my hosts in Bukit Mertajam—Goh Chee Ngoh and his family (in 1978–80 and again in 1985). Mrs. Goh was an exceptional host from whose wise and incisive observations I learned much. Between 1978 and 1980, Clifford and Georgeann Sather and family in Georgetown provided very much needed refuge for an overwhelmed researcher. I’ve had the singular good fortune of becoming friends with several residents of Bukit Mertajam who have instructed me brilliantly over many years—Tan Chong Keng for his deep knowledge of politics in Bukit Mertajam, Ang BakKau for correcting my Mandarin and for his insights into local history, and Ng Bak Kee for generously sharing his intimate understanding of Bukit Mertajam social life. In 1985, Guo Zhenming provided me with superb instruction in Hokkien. I can now thank him only posthumously for his patience and keen wit, as he taught a farfromtalented pupil the Hokkien language in its performative as well as linguistic dimensions. There are other friends, particularly Chinese working men and women, who in the interest of confidentiality I must thank anonymously for indulging my impertinent and often ungrounded inquiries, and reminding me, as a person

vii

viiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS

with workingclass origins, of another mode of learning beyond the formal spo ken and written word—learning through labor. I will always treasure their gen erosity and friendship. My thanks go to the Malaysian Government for permitting me to carry out the research on which this book was based. In particular I wish to thank Moham med Nor Ghani, directorgeneral of the Socioeconomic Research and General Planning Unit of the Prime Minister’s Department in 1978. I am also grateful to Goh Cheng Teik, deputy minister of transport in 1978, for his suggestion that I visit Bukit Mertajam as a potential research site and for providing me with introductions to people there. Other prominent Malaysians offered me academic hospitality and invaluable assistance, including Ungku Aziz, then vice chancellor of University Malaya; Awang Had bin Salleh, then deputy vice chancellor, Uni versity Malaya; and Kamal Salih, then dean of the School of Comparative Social Sciences at Universiti Sains Malaysia. I have been fortunate to make the acquaintance of and learn from superb Malaysian scholars while in Malaysia over many years from the 1970s to 2000s: at the University of Malaya, Raymond Lee, Susan Ackerman, Lim Mah Hui, Tan Chee Beng, and K. S. Jomo (now of the United Nations); at the School of Com parative Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Francis Loh Kok Wah, Johan Saravannamuttu, Khoo Boo Teik, and Masnah Mohamed; at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia: SoakKoon Wong, Cheah Boon Kheng, Richard Mason, and Lok ChongHoe. I hope that bringing this book to fruition after so many years will repay to some small extent the many kindnesses, insights, and suggestions they have freely extended. At the last moment, Sin Chuin Peng of the National University of Singapore Library came to my rescue by sending me scans of issues of the newspaperGuan ghua Ribaofrom 1979 in the library’s collections needed for chapter 7. I grate fully acknowledge his aid. All too sadly, I must especially acknowledge those many friends, informants, and teachers in Bukit Mertajam and elsewhere in Malaysia who are now deceased. If I have a major regret in the long and circuitous route to publication of this book, it is that it is appearing when they are no longer able to know how pro foundly in their debt I am for their contributions to it. Over a career now extending into its fourth decade, which has taken many twists and turns, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have a number of intel lectual companions from whom I have learned more than I can say: Aihwa Ong, Tom Patterson, Bruce Kapferer, the late Stanley Diamond, Jonathan Friedman, Ida Susser, the late Bill Roseberry, Don Kalb, James C. Scott, Faye Harrison, Nina Glick Schiller, Gerald Sider, Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Gavin Smith, and many other friends at the Anthropology of Political Economy Seminar at the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

University of Toronto. I am indebted particularly to the late G. William Skinner, my dissertation advisor at Stanford University, who originally set me on this path in 1977, although he might well disagree with the route I’ve taken on the way to this book. I have many debts, large and small, extraordinary and quotidian, to my col leagues and students in the Anthropology Department and other departments at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for making my intellectual and personal life more enjoyable and productive: Dorothy Holland, Arturo Escobar, Charles Price, James Peacock, Margaret Wiener, John Pickles, Michal Osterweil, Weeteng Soh, Euyryung Jun, and Marc David. Everyone should be so fortunate! Despite the best efforts of friends and informants to correct me, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation in this book. In all situations in the book that follows I have referred to people living or with whom I have had interactions by pseudonyms. I have been fortunate to receive funding for research in Malaysia from the National Science Foundation (Dissertation Completion Grant, 1979–80); and from the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies Advanced Research Grant on Southeast Asia, 1992. For providing me with time to conduct further research and writing for this book, I thank the UNC Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts and Humanities Fellowships on two occasions, Spring 1991 and Spring 2007, and the Department of Anthropology, UNCChapel Hill for time for two research and study leaves. I have delivered previous drafts of chapters for this book at the National Uni versity of Singapore; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Bergen; Universiti Sains Malaysia; Duke University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Illinois at ChampaignUrbana; the workshops on “Glo balization, the State and Violence” organized by Jonathan Friedman in Kona, Hawaii, and New York City, sponsored by the Henry F. Guggenheim Founda tion; University of Puerto Rico; the National Humanities Center; University of Toronto; Murdoch University; York University; Monash University; and the Social Science Research Council/European Social Research Council at Princeton University. Parts of this book have been adapted from previously published material and are used with the permission of the publishers: “Shifting Identities, Positioned Imaginaries: Transnational Traversals and Reversals by Malaysian Chinese,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnational ism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 204–228; “‘Chinese Society,’ CoffeeShop Talk, Possessing Gods: The Politics of Public Space among Diasporic Chinese in Malaysia,”positions: east asia cultures cri tique 6, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 439–474 (Duke University Press); “The Dialectics of