The search for the 'origins' of Melayu

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 315-330

  Andaya, Leonard Y ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042303229     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0022463401000169     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. A. C. Milner, Kerajaan: Malay Political Culture on the Eve of Colonial Rule (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982);
2. Shamsul A. B., 'Bureaucratic Management of Identity in a Modern State', in Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States, ed. Dru Gladney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 151-69, 135-50;
3. Jane Drakard, A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1999);
4. There is a large amount of literature on ethnicity and identity, written principally by anthropologists. The debate has swung between two poles, with one arguing the existence of 'primordial' values that identify a group, and the other emphasising instead the 'situational' circumstances that determine who a group is at any particular time and place. There is also an intermediate position that suggests that there is a dialectic at play, in which the primordial values change in response to circumstances with reinterpretations becoming transformed and reified as a primordial sentiment. Ethnicity and identity are thus not fixed but continually moving between primordialism and situationalism and evolving in a spiral fashion. See especially, Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1998). The working of such a dialectic has important implications for the interpretation of Southeast Asian history.