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.
Donald M. Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of British Colonial Rule and the Resistance of the Malay Peasantry, 1900–1957, coauthor of Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics, and editor most recently of A Companion to Urban Anthropology.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Historical Ethnography of Class and State FormationChapter 1. Counterinsurgency, Silences, Forgetting, 1946–69Part I. Development (1969–85)Preface: Colonial Residues and "Development"Chapter 2. "Boom Town in the Making," 1978–80Chapter 3. "Getting By": The Arts of Deception and the "Typical Chinese"Chapter 4. Banalities of the Urban: Hegemony or State Predation?Chapter 5. Class Dismissed!Chapter 6. Men in Motion: The Dialectics of "Disputatiousness" and "Rice-Eating Money"Chapter 7. Chinese Society as "A Sheet of Loose Sand": Elite Arguments and Class Discipline in a Postcolonial EraPart II. Globalization (1985–97)Preface: Going GlobalChapter 8. Subsumption and Encompassment: Class, State Formation, and Production of Urban Space, 1980–97Chapter 9. Covert Global: Exit, Alternative Sovereignties, and Being StuckChapter 10. "Walking On Two Roads" and "Jumping Airplanes"Epilogue: 1997–2007Appendix: A Profile of Economic "Domination"? Notes References Index
'Getting By’ illuminates in arresting detail what it means to be working class ethnic Chinese in Malaysia where racial discrimination molds everyday existence. Donald M. Nonini’s deep ethnography of ethnic Chinese under siege tracks their daily practices of surviving as a subjugated ethnic and class minority. The political, economic, social, and cultural costs of living under majority rule inspire an art of deception and disputation, as well as backup plans to leave a beloved multiethnic homeland. This rare ethnographic history of the Malaysian present is a path-breaking intervention in Chinese diaspora studies. It casts a necessary light on how ordinary ethnic Chinese, often vulnerable to racial discrimination, are the urban backbone of Southeast Asia.
Edmund Terence Gomez
Exceptional scholarship! In 'Getting By', Donald M. Nonini offers an insightful critique of three long-standing theoretical perspectives on the links between class and ethnicity involving the Chinese and then proposes the necessity of adopting a historical ethnographic view focusing on the issues of position and structure.
