Category: Ethnic & Ethnic Relations

The paper sets out to examine present-day alcohol consumption as well as positive and negative experiences related to alcohol in Peninsular Malaysia as well as in Sarawak, East Malaysia. The focus of the paper is to study the impact of ethnic and religious identity on alcohol consumption in East and West Malaysia. The information on… Continue reading Negotiativing Ethnic Identies – Alcohol as a Social Marker in East and West Malaysia

Indeed, terrorism and insurgency were much more acute problems in nearly all the Southeast Asian countries from the 1940s to 1980s. Similarly, religious consciousness and identity began to rise in Southeast Asia from the 1970s. While it is more visually pronounced among the Muslims, it is also evident among followers of other faiths, especially Christianity… Continue reading Terrorism, Insurgency and Religious Fundamentalism in Southeast Asia

Anyone observing the national unity scene in Malaysia would have noted the signs of decline for quite some time now. Views differ over when the slide began in earnest. I, like quite a few others, would put it in the Seventies, when issues of race and identity became sharpened after a spell when they moderated… Continue reading Tending to the Ties That Bind

The plight of the Malay-Muslims in southern Thailand is no different from the appeal of non-Malay and non-Muslim minorities in Malaysia and Indonesia: “Listen to us, respect us, recognise our culture, language and identity. And then we will be citizens like any other.” Farish Noor reports for Aliran from southern Thailand.  Author 1 Farish Noor. … Continue reading The perils of assimilationist politics

This paper examines some conceptual premises of the notion of transnationalism in the light of work on Chinese in Britain and in Malaysia and Singapore . It finds that in the communities studied, migrants are likelier than settled groups to identify transnationally.  Author: Benton, Gregor & Gomez, Edmund Terence.  [Download]

One of the most glaring failures of the Malaysian nation-building project is our failure to develop a national language that is actually used as the lingua franca of all Malaysians, writes Farish Noor. While the laborious debate over whether BM should be termed ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ or ‘Bahasa Melayu’ has been raging for decades, it is… Continue reading Linguistic supremacy and hegemony: The roads not taken post-1969