Composite Culture in a Multicultural Society by Bipan Chandra

Author:Bipan Chandra
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9788131785218
Publisher: Pearson India
Published: 2006-04-09T18:30:00+00:00

Malaysian Composite Culture: A Resolution?

There does seem to be an interpretation of Malaysian culture, by Ziauddin Sardar (2000), for example, which tries to resolve the immigrant minorities’ dilemma of identity in Malaysia by a single stroke of leger de main. It goes back to the historically deep multicultural roots of Bumiputera culture itself marking it out as a distinctively Sino-Indian-Islamic conglomerate, which had been repressed and suppressed by Western colonial representations. However, as in most civilizations (unlike non-literate and so-called ‘primitive’ societies) the Bumiputera cultural identity remains true to its multicultural roots in that, in everyday life in Malaysia, elements of that deep-rooted past burst forth in resistance to the colonial overlay. As in Indic civilization, which is an agglomeration or palimpsest of diverse cultures,26 the Malaysian culture, contemporaneously postmodernist as in the architecture and consumption of the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, is only a magical touch away from the primeval forest and legendary tales of Sejarah Malayu that resonate and haunt its ethos. In this interpretation, Malaysia comes alive as a land of distant and not-too-distant diaspora. At the same time as its rival Malay leadership of Mahathir and Anwar laid bare the fangs of a war of attrition, the ambience of the ancient civilization of the Eastern Indian Ocean cultural zone underlay the politics and poetics of contemporary Malaysia.

There has been a tendency in the social science interpretations of our own day and age to either reduce culture to the politico-economic domain (viz., in certain types of Marxism) or to reduce political economy to the dimension of culture (viz., in certain kinds of anthropological structuralism). Our attempt in the foregoing has been to try doggedly to avoid these extremes and, indeed, to synthesize the gains from both approaches.

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