Anthropological theory is rarely the subject
of news headlines. In Malaysia, however, over the past several months, a new
‘theory’ of the racial origins of ‘bangsa Melayu’ (Malay race) has caught the
attention of the media and generated reactions from the public. Some have
embraced these theories uncritically as breakthroughs in anthropological and
scientific research while others have condemned them as being downright racist
These reactions, largely expressed through social media,
have yet, however, to lead to a critical scholarly and public debate. Such a
debate should interrogate not just the content of the theory itself, but also
the very persistence of the concept of ‘race’ in Malaysian public life. Why
does ‘race’, an outdated category in so many parts of the world, still matter
so much in Malaysia? And what does the rise in research on racial origins and
authenticity actually reveal?
Southbound invasions and
civilisational envy
The ‘theory’ surfaced publically on September 28, when
Zahara Sulaiman, a so-called historian affiliated with the Malaysian
Archaeological Association, came under the media spotlight for her now-infamous
Nam Tien lecture.
In her presentation, Zahara inventively extended the concept
of 'Nam Tien', a term long-used to refer to the migration from the Red River
Delta to the Mekong Delta that occurred between the 11th and 18th century, to
present an argument that the Malay race (a category in which she included Mons,
Khmers and Chams) has for thousands of years been the target of a deliberate
southbound invasion from the Northern peoples (namely, the Chinese) who have
been allegedly jealous of the superiority of Malay civilisation and innovation.
Zahara’s ‘research findings’ came from a research project
that seeks to trace the origins of the Malay race. Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam,
former Chief Minister of Malacca and president of the state-linked organisation
Dunia Melayu Dunia Islam (Malay-Islamic World) announced that the project,
which also involves professors from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the
University of Malaya, apparently after some 20 years of ‘scientific’ research,
has generated ‘ground-breaking’ new findings that trace the origins of the
Malay race all the way to the Middle East.
Neither scientific nor anthropological research seem to have
been taken seriously in the development of Malaysia’s latest racial origin
theory. While this pseudo-theory was presented as an important contribution to
‘scholarship’, it bears, alas, little trace of academic rigour.
In late November, a video showing Zahara expounding the
findings of the new research at a seminar began circulating on YouTube. In her
introduction, she states that the Malay race "is the most-envied
race", envied, indeed, "by the entire world".
She then goes on to describe the prehistoric nature and
wide-spread existence of the 'Malay race', a label conveniently applied to all
Austronesian linguistic populations, from Madagascar to the Pacific.
The story becomes more complex, however, as a category of
'pure Malays' (‘Melayu Tulen’) emerges from the wider Malay stock with the
migration of the lineage of Cyrus the Great (Zulkarnain yang Agung) whose
ancestry can apparently be traced directly to Prophet Abraham.
While this pseudo-theory was presented as an important
contribution to ‘scholarship’, it bears, alas, little trace of academic rigour.
Contradictory theories are clumsily lumped together as ‘evidence’ to support
three principal claims—that the ‘Malay race’ is ancient, populous and superior;
that the Abrahamic religions (namely, Islam) are not external influences but an
originary structure of ‘Malayness’; and that the greatness of the ‘Malay race’
has resulted in jealousy from foreigners, Chinese invasions, colonialism, and
on-going plots to weaken and destroy Malay civilisation.
Indeed, the theory blatantly ignore decades of sound
scientific and anthropological research on human variation and diversity that
indicate that the whole category of ‘race’ as a classifier of human difference
is ultimately a product of philosophical, political and colonial history, not,
as it is still assumed in some circles, of real biological variation.
Race, nativism, and origin myths
The idea of a Malay race was first proposed by the German
anatomist and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who included ‘Malay’
in the 1795 taxonomy of the 5 major races in his highly-influential but
long-denounced system of racial classification.
The concept was reinforced and elaborated by British
colonial administrators of the likes of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and Sir
Frank Swettenham, through their highly influential writings, and was inscribed
as a legal category when the 1891 Straits Settlements census replaced the 48
ethnicities registered in the previous census into six major racial categories:
Europeans, Americans, Malays and Other Natives of the Archipelago,
Chinese, Tamils and other Indians, and Other Races.
Today, however, the typology of ‘race’ is regarded as
out-of-date in most parts of the world. This is not only because it has come to
be considered increasingly politically-incorrect in a post-colonial world, but
also because it is now recognised that there is, in fact, no scientific
evidence that race based on unambiguous groupings with visible physical traits
(skin-colour, hair texture, bone structure, etc.) is a natural category at all.
On the contrary, recent genetic research, including that
conducted by the Human Genome Project, has shown that the concept of ‘race’ as
a biological reality conceals the fact that human beings are 99.9% genetically
identical, and that 94% of physical variation actually takes place within
so-called racial groups.
In the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology has
come a long way from its own colonial roots and the study of ‘native tribes’
and is now at the forefront of critiquing race and situating it in its historic
context as a socially-constructed and politically-salient concept.
In 1998 the American Anthropological Association issued a
‘Statement on Race’, which declared:
“Race... evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that
distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs
constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the
abilities and behavior of people homogenized into ‘racial’ categories. The
myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind,
impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior,
implying that both are genetically determined… Scientists today find that
reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to
countless errors.”
But neither scientific nor anthropological research seem to
have been taken seriously in the development of Malaysia’s latest racial origin
theory.
In place of credible evidence and rigorous academic
analysis, what the so-called theory does possess are the workings of an origin
myth, with its meta-narratives of the genealogical purity of a people who share
a single traceable point of origin, both biologically and culturally.
The subtext of the narrative is a teleological message of a
pre-destined return to the original state of glory, but one that will only be
possible with a conscious striving to protect the ‘native race’ from external
threats.
The rise of folk-scholarship and
decline of academic integrity
In 1981, renowned Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould published his now-classic book The Mismeasure of Man, critiquing
scientific racism and the ways in which academics manipulated research to
conform to particular ideological agendas, both consciously and unconsciously.
These are lessons worth learning in Malaysia. If anything,
what the new ‘Malay race’ theory revealed is the rise of a new class of
folk-scholars who are ready to deploy racialised historiographies in the
service of a political hegemony that depends upon the reinforcement of racial
difference and privileges.
Indeed, it reveals the degree to which academic institutions
are motivated by particular political ideologies and the readiness to put
research so thoroughly at the service of politics. One need only examine the
institutional contexts within which the theories were generated to understand
that they were both more political than academic.
‘Nam Tien’ was presented at a symposium entitled ‘Malay
Leadership Crisis: Facing the Foreign Agenda’, discussing key ‘threats’ to
Malays (identified as the Chinese invasion, Shia teachings, free trade
agreements, Americanisation and Christianisation). In addition, the close
political links of many of the university institutions involved in
race/civilisational research to UMNO compromise their academic credibility.
The issue is not one that is limited to the ruling
coalition, as the exact same concerns would apply to the opposition and any
links they may have with academia. The issue here is the subsuming of academic
freedom and integrity to political agendas, which is the biggest threat to the
very principles of objectivity, neutrality and independence on which academia
is founded. This in itself should be of concern to the Malaysian public, who,
regardless of political views or affiliation, are entitled to expect that
scholarship and academic institutions are impartial, credible and independent
from political influence.
In a country as diverse and complex as Malaysia we need to
find ways of moving beyond the problematic discourse of race that reduces
people to one-dimensional racialised caricatures and forecloses the emergence
of a civic sensibility and nationalism that is based on equality, respect for
diversity of all kinds-- cultural, socio-economic, intellectual and even
political.
Perhaps what is needed is a much more systematic public
critique of race-thinking, its intellectual genealogy, its political
beneficiaries, and the institutions that produce the power/knowledge that
maintain the hegemony of racial discourse. Anthropology, precisely because of
its reckoning with its own colonial and racialised history, has a lot to offer
in the way of contributing to that critique, and, possibly, in finding ways of
moving beyond it. - December 25, 2013.
* Lilianne Fan is an anthropologist and independent
researcher on religion, race, nativism and political violence in Southeast
Asia.
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