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Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen’s richly detailed study of contemporary elite Malay polygamy in Malaysia is a welcome addition to scholarship on the country and beyond. Based on fieldwork stretching over twenty-five years, the book is organized thematically around narratives from seventeen key female informants drawn from elite circles in Kuala Lumpur (KL). ...

This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultural forms and pointed to the crucial place of gendered imaginaries within modern social orders, with women being frequently identified and deployed as bearers of nation, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilisation’. Unpacking and challenging the received categories and paradigms – not least ‘woman’ – has proved demanding, however. Problems have been intensified by prevailing Eurocentrisms, and conceptual divisions of the world into essentialised binaries like ‘modern' and ‘traditional', ‘West' and the 'Rest', and latterly Islam and the West. With increased contests around the concept of modernity – feminist and non-feminist – some writers have argued for a pluralisation of modernity, with such concepts as multiple modernities or alternative modernities, or through conceiving of a global modernity. Engaging critically with such ideas, and grounding the discussion in empirical work on Malaysia carried out in dialogue with Joel Kahn, this article looks to possible further developments in framing debates about gender and the modern, exploring the contributions that locally based, anthropological scholarship can make to theorisations of modernity and its relationship(s) with gender.

Writers and activists dealing with gender issues in Malaysia regard ‘development’ as producing a very mixed result for women in the country. Malaysia has seen massive social change since independence in 1957. Contemporary Malaysian modernity can be seen as a highly specific form of being modern. It has not simply followed the western liberal capitalist path to development but rather one common to many countries in the Asian region, in which the state acts as a ‘midwife’ to capitalism. Discussions of the dramatic effects of ‘development’ on Malaysian women’s lives have appeared in a number of different contexts, including academic writing, Malaysian popular culture, local activism and western representations of the country. The British colonial regime left a legacy of large business and plantation interests in ascendancy in the Malaysian economy. Few accounts of class in Malaysia discuss women, apart from young women factory workers.

This chapter argues that a gendered reading of the cosmopolitan debates points people to significant sites for exploring questions of cosmopolitanism in its many meanings. It discusses one particular case, that of the Malaysia women’s movement. The significance of the absence of gender concerns from ‘mainstream theorising around cosmopolitanism becomes apparent when people consider a series of highly influential feminist arguments about intersectionality, the mutually constitutive nature of gender, race and class. The end of the twentieth century saw many social movements around the world moving to articulate their central claims in the language of rights, especially that of human rights. A small group of professional tertiary-educated women, including anthropologist Norani Othman, Sisters in Islam was formed in 1988. It has had a large impact nationally, and within feminist circles globally, receiving many overseas invitations to speak and holding a very successful workshop at the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995.

Debates about cosmopolitanism have pointed both to its exclusionary character as a problematic child of western modernity, analytically and politically dubious, and to the possibilities offered by the new cosmopolitanisms stressing cosmopolitan practice and ethics. This paper suggests that a gendering of such arguments can add important dimensions to these debates. Exploring the gendered character of the hospitality at the heart of cosmopolitanism's founding arguments, the discussion is grounded in an examination of the situated cosmopolitan hospitality offered by several prominent women-centred asylum seeker and refugee support and advocacy groups in Australia. These groups have created significant spaces of hospitality welcoming “Others,” deploying explicitly feminine imaginaries against the counter-cosmopolitanisms of the increasingly securitized and militarized border politics of the Australian state, and xenophobic anti-refugee nationalisms. The situated cosmopolitan hospitality and affective politics of these practices are linked to feminist arguments about political mobilizations of the feminine, especially the maternal, in social movements.

This chapter explores the significance of gender relations, gendered action, and women’s rights claims in making new politics, new publics, and new private spheres within the Malaysian national Islamic modernity project. The closely entwined moral projects of a modernizing state and revivalist Islam, especially the highly gendered cultural politics of the recent Islamizing order, have posed significant challenges for both Muslim and non-Muslim activists seeking spaces for women’s rights claims. Rejecting a simplistic association of struggles for gender justice with secularisms and secular modernity, however, the chapter points to the roles of Muslim women in the long histories of women’s organizations and women’s sections of parties, and the importance of women’s active engagements in the remaking of Muslim thought and practice in recent years. Contemporary womanist and feminist dialogue and practice are seen as highly significant elements in the ongoing reshaping of “public” and “private” spaces alike.

Synopsis This paper explores cultural contests around parental custody, religion and ethnonationalism in Singapore and Malaysia through the examination of some key episodes both past and present, in particular the famous case of Maria Hertogh, or Nadra. Political battles around this 1950 child custody case at the heights of the institutions of religion and state led to large-scale rioting in Singapore, which has reverberated to the present. The paper then analyses the later high-profile Jacqueline Gillespie case in the 1990s and some recent cases involving religious freedoms within Malaysia in which child custody became key issues. A core interest is the ways in which women, mothering – and children – are at the epicentres of important intersections of religion and nation; yet the gendered – and ‘childed’ – dimensions of these cultural contests appear to be regularly downplayed in scholarly and official history accounts, with most emphasis on the macro level of nationalist and /or ethnonationalist politics. It is argued that paying attention to the ways that ‘family’, the ‘domestic’, ‘intimate’ and structures of feeling can be seen to configure these events and operate as drenched symbolic structures can greatly enrich understandings of the forces at work.

Synopsis This article explores the cultural politics of the state's ‘family values’ project in Islamising Malaysia. It examines some of the complex intersections among versions of local and global family values discourses and their place in nationalist, Islamic and Islamist projects in the country: these versions include local and more global claims about family values, ‘Asian family’ values, and versions of ‘Islamic’ family values. Seeing the moral project of family values as occupying a central place in the cultural contests staged by state, religion and the media, the article argues that the embeddedness of this widely-supported project in a number of versions of ‘Islamic values’ and in wider alliances with conservative global forces has important implications not only for family, gender relations and women's (human) rights within families, but also for understanding Malay(sian) nationalisms. These developments pose significant challenges for activists seeking to reform family relations.

1. Introduction: Gender Politics and the Reimagining of Human Rights in the Asia Pacific Maila Stivens 2. Sexual Violence, Silence, and Human Rights Discourse: The Emergence of the Military Prostitution Issue Vera Mackie 3. The State and The Women's Movement: Instabilities in the Discourse of 'Rights' in India Kalpana Ram 4. Dead Daughters, Dissident Sons, And Human Rights in China Antonia Finnane 5. The HUman Rights of Gendered Citizens: Notes from Indonesia Krishna Sen 6. Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No?: Women's Rights , Human Rights, and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu Margaret Jolly 7. 'Hear Us, Women of Papua New Guinea!': Melanesian Women and Human Rights Martha Macintyre 8. The Contemplacion Fiasco: The HAnging of a Filipino Domestic Worker in Singapore Anne Marie Hilsdon 9. Mothers of the Disappeared in tne Diaspora: Globalisation and Human Rights Beryl Langer 10. The Emergence of 'Modern' Gay Identities and the Question of Human Rights Dennis Altman

This chapter argues for the significance of gender relations in thinking about the evolution of the relationships between the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’. Examining the decline over the last few decades of the local economy of the state district of Rembau, in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, it proposes a number of ways in which gender relations are important for understanding the articulations of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in the ongoing processes of this decline. Much of the writing on Malay ‘rural’ dwellers has tended to essentialise the rural/urban divide: this chapter suggests, however, that the history of the area can only be understood within a model that conceives of a long-standing interplay between the increasingly blurred entities, rural and urban, especially given villagers’ long histories of intermittent ‘migrant’ wage and salaried work. The piece looks at the central place that gender occupies within a number of key points of articulation between these entities: these include village production, the continuous, long-term circulation of people between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and the kinship and family linkages that have constituted both important economic flows and a multisited domestic sphere. It ends with a discussion of the place of adat perpatih – matrilineal ‘customary law’ – within cultural constructions of the disappearing rural.

Synopsis This article looks at the difficulties facing feminist scholars in conceptualising the fate of women caught up in agrarian transformations and passages to modernity throughout the world. It is argued that while the dominant discourses dealing with peasantries have been able to marginalise or exclude gender, the attempts to displace those discourses have proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped: a deconstruction of the received categories leaves scholars facing the awkward and difficult task of reconstructing and reclaiming gender from the edifice of concepts that implicitly include it but exclude any real consideration of its workings. Against a background of ethnographic research in Rembau, Negeri, Sembilan, Malaysia, the article explores the implications of these issues for ‘peasant studies’, with special attention to the debates about the application of western mainstream/malestream and feminist theories to the ‘periphery’. Arguing that merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating ‘effects on women’, will not necessarily advance our understanding of the operations of gender in history, it suggests that we need to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. But to do that we need to rethink many of the categories used in such analyses to overcome the obfuscation produced by gender absence.

Tables and mapsAcknowledgmentsSelect glossaryIntroduction: A modern Malyasian matriliny1 People and places2 Past and present I: Gender and the remaking of adat perpatih3 Past and present II: Gender and the remaking of Rembau peasant economy4 Gender and a marginal village economy I: Women of property5 Gender and a marginal village economy II: Local production and income6 Gender, work and inequality in Rembau7 Rembau femininities8 Modernising kinship and family in contemporary RembauConclusion: Female autonomy in Rembau?NotesBibliographyIndex

Gender and Power in Affluent Asia is the first major study to analyse the relatioships between gender and power that have accompanied the rise of Asian affluence.

This chapter looks at the modernizing of mothering in Malaysia, exploring the successive imaginaries of the ‘mother’ in both scholarly and political cultural production in the country, especially in the post-Independence, nation-building period. But as I shall argue, a series of uncertainties pervades any discussion of gender, women and mothering within Malaysian ‘modernity’. To work on these issues in the context of my research, first in rural and then urban Malaysia, has inevitably enmeshed me in a series of modern scholarly insecurities; these include furious debates about positionalities, the decentring of liberal humanist ideas and the scepticism of many ‘Third World’ scholars and activists about Western anthropological claims to know about and speak for its objects located beyond Euro-America. Exploring Malay mothering To examine ‘modern’ mothering in Malaysia, we need first to attend to the particularities of modernity in the country. As I suggest elsewhere (1994b, n.d.b), imported Eurocentric models of ‘modernization’ project ideas deriving from Western social developments directly on to analyses of Malaysia. I argue that we cannot unproblematically apply to Malaysia assumptions about a standard linear progression from ‘tradition’ to the rationalization, bureaucratization, industrialization and secularism of mainstream Western models of modernity; this is to ignore both the specificities of the development process in the country and the problems within contemporary social theory with the increasingly unstable category of modernity itself.

G.J. Abbink, Serena Nanda, Cultural anthropology, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company (second edition), 1985, 398 pp. - H.J.M. Claessen, Patrick Vinton Kirch, The evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge etc. Series: New Studies in Archaeology, edited by Colin Renfrew and Jeremy Sabloff, 1984. 314 pp., index, glossary, bibliography, maps, and figures. - H.J.M. Claessen, Jarich O. Oosten, The war of the gods. The social code in Indo-European myths, London etc.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. 175 pp., bibl., figs. - H.J. Duller, P.W. Preston, New trends in development theory. Essays in development and social theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1985, 200 pages. - H.J. Duller, M. Stiefel, Production, equality and participation in rural China, UNRISD, Geneva & Red Press, London, 1983, 172 pp., W.F. Wertheim (eds.) - M. Grijns, Kirsten Hastrup, Basisboek culturele antropologie. Bewerkt door Yme Kuiper & Nellejet Zorgdrager. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1983, 353 pp., Jan Ovesen (eds.) - Simon Kooijman, Jelle Miedema, De kabar 1855-1980. Sociale structuur en religie in de Vogelkop van West-Nieuw-Guinea. Dissertatie Katholieke Universiteit van Nijmegan, Dordrecht 1984: ICG printing BV. Gelijktijdig verschenen als Verhandelingen 105 van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden, Dordrecht 1984: Foris publications. - Adam Kuper, R.H. Barnes, Two crows denies it: A history of controversy in Omaha sociology, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska press, 1984. - C.L.J. van der Meer, Steven Piker, A peasant community in changing Thailand, Anthropological research papers, no. 30, Arizona State University, 1983. - J. Miedema, Mark S. Mosko, Quadripartite structures: Categories, relations, and homologies in Bush Mekeo culture, Cambridge: University Press, 1985, XIII + 298 pp. - David S. Moyer, Rodney Needham, Against the tranquility of Axioms, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983, xi + 182 pp. - Anke Niehof, Imke Swart, Die Traditionellen Grundlagen der Erziehung im Zentralen Java, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983. (130 pp.) - J.H.B. den Ouden, R.S. Khare, The untouchable as himself. Ideology, identity and pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars, Cambridge studies in cultural systems, Cambridge University Press, 1984. - Rien Ploeg, James A. Boon, Other tribes, other scribes; symbolic anthropology in the comparitive study of cultures, histories, religions, and texts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. xiv + 303 pp., appendixes. - Frank N. Pieke, Rubie S. Watson, Inequality among brothers: Class and kinship in South China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xiii + 193 pp., 3 maps. - Rien Ploeg, Durk Hak, Watching the seaside. Essays on maritime anthropology. A. H. J. Prins; Festschrift on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of Anthropology, University of Groningen, University of Groningen, 1984, 251 pp., ill., diagr., Ybeltje Kroes, Hans Schneymann (eds.) - Rien Ploeg, Ladislav Holy, Actions, norms and representations. Foundations of anthropological inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. VIII + 134 pp., Milan Stuchlik (eds.) - Rien Ploeg, Nancy L. Hamblin, Animal use by the Cozumel Maya, Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1984. 206 pp. - Ronald H. Poelmeijer, Lilly Eversdijk Smulders, Een jaar bij de yogiýs van India en Tibet, Deventer 1983. - Ype H. Poortinga, Dean Peabody, National characteristics, Cambridge/Paris: Camnbridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lýHomme, 1985. - Karen Portier, Khin Thitsa, Nuns, mediums and prostitutes in Chiengmai: A study of some marginal categories of women (41 pp.). - Karen Portier, Signe Howell, Chewong women in transition: The effects of monetization on a hunter-gatherer society in Malaysia (34 pp.). - Karen Portier, Maila Stivens, Sexual politics in Rembau: Female autonomy, matriliny and agrarian change in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia (50 pp.) - R. de Ridder, Dennis Tedlock, The spoken word and the work of interpretation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. ix + 365 pp., 8 ill. - R. de Ridder, Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh, The definitive edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. 380 pp., 32 ill. - G. van Roon, Dietmar Rothermund, Die Peripherie in der Weltwirtschaftskrise: Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika 1929-1939, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schýningh, 1983, 295 pp. - Thilo C. Schadeberg, Gýnter Dabitz, Geschichte der erforschung der Nuba-Berge, Arbeiten aus dem Seminar fýr Výlkerkunde der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitýt Frankfurt am Main, Band 17, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985. 280 pp., maps, tables, illus. - L. van Vroonhoven, Ger van Roon, Derde Wereld in depressie, Leiden: Nijhoff, 1985, 139 p. - Wim van Zanten, Nigel Phillips, Sijobang, sung narrative poetry of West Sumatra, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, no. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. xi + 255 pp., photos, texts and translations, short glossary of Minangkabau words, Bibliography, index.

G.J. Abbink, Serena Nanda, Cultural anthropology, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company (second edition), 1985, 398 pp. - H.J.M. Claessen, Patrick Vinton Kirch, The evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge etc. Series: New Studies in Archaeology, edited by Colin Renfrew and Jeremy Sabloff, 1984. 314 pp., index, glossary, bibliography, maps, and figures. - H.J.M. Claessen, Jarich O. Oosten, The war of the gods. The social code in Indo-European myths, London etc.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. 175 pp., bibl., figs. - H.J. Duller, P.W. Preston, New trends in development theory. Essays in development and social theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1985, 200 pages. - H.J. Duller, M. Stiefel, Production, equality and participation in rural China, UNRISD, Geneva & Red Press, London, 1983, 172 pp., W.F. Wertheim (eds.) - M. Grijns, Kirsten Hastrup, Basisboek culturele antropologie. Bewerkt door Yme Kuiper & Nellejet Zorgdrager. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1983, 353 pp., Jan Ovesen (eds.) - Simon Kooijman, Jelle Miedema, De kabar 1855-1980. Sociale structuur en religie in de Vogelkop van West-Nieuw-Guinea. Dissertatie Katholieke Universiteit van Nijmegan, Dordrecht 1984: ICG printing BV. Gelijktijdig verschenen als Verhandelingen 105 van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden, Dordrecht 1984: Foris publications. - Adam Kuper, R.H. Barnes, Two crows denies it: A history of controversy in Omaha sociology, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska press, 1984. - C.L.J. van der Meer, Steven Piker, A peasant community in changing Thailand, Anthropological research papers, no. 30, Arizona State University, 1983. - J. Miedema, Mark S. Mosko, Quadripartite structures: Categories, relations, and homologies in Bush Mekeo culture, Cambridge: University Press, 1985, XIII + 298 pp. - David S. Moyer, Rodney Needham, Against the tranquility of Axioms, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983, xi + 182 pp. - Anke Niehof, Imke Swart, Die Traditionellen Grundlagen der Erziehung im Zentralen Java, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983. (130 pp.) - J.H.B. den Ouden, R.S. Khare, The untouchable as himself. Ideology, identity and pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars, Cambridge studies in cultural systems, Cambridge University Press, 1984. - Rien Ploeg, James A. Boon, Other tribes, other scribes; symbolic anthropology in the comparitive study of cultures, histories, religions, and texts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. xiv + 303 pp., appendixes. - Frank N. Pieke, Rubie S. Watson, Inequality among brothers: Class and kinship in South China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xiii + 193 pp., 3 maps. - Rien Ploeg, Durk Hak, Watching the seaside. Essays on maritime anthropology. A. H. J. Prins; Festschrift on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of Anthropology, University of Groningen, University of Groningen, 1984, 251 pp., ill., diagr., Ybeltje Kroes, Hans Schneymann (eds.) - Rien Ploeg, Ladislav Holy, Actions, norms and representations. Foundations of anthropological inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. VIII + 134 pp., Milan Stuchlik (eds.) - Rien Ploeg, Nancy L. Hamblin, Animal use by the Cozumel Maya, Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1984. 206 pp. - Ronald H. Poelmeijer, Lilly Eversdijk Smulders, Een jaar bij de yogiýs van India en Tibet, Deventer 1983. - Ype H. Poortinga, Dean Peabody, National characteristics, Cambridge/Paris: Camnbridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lýHomme, 1985. - Karen Portier, Khin Thitsa, Nuns, mediums and prostitutes in Chiengmai: A study of some marginal categories of women (41 pp.). - Karen Portier, Signe Howell, Chewong women in transition: The effects of monetization on a hunter-gatherer society in Malaysia (34 pp.). - Karen Portier, Maila Stivens, Sexual politics in Rembau: Female autonomy, matriliny and agrarian change in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia (50 pp.) - R. de Ridder, Dennis Tedlock, The spoken word and the work of interpretation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. ix + 365 pp., 8 ill. - R. de Ridder, Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh, The definitive edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. 380 pp., 32 ill. - G. van Roon, Dietmar Rothermund, Die Peripherie in der Weltwirtschaftskrise: Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika 1929-1939, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schýningh, 1983, 295 pp. - Thilo C. Schadeberg, Gýnter Dabitz, Geschichte der erforschung der Nuba-Berge, Arbeiten aus dem Seminar fýr Výlkerkunde der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitýt Frankfurt am Main, Band 17, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985. 280 pp., maps, tables, illus. - L. van Vroonhoven, Ger van Roon, Derde Wereld in depressie, Leiden: Nijhoff, 1985, 139 p. - Wim van Zanten, Nigel Phillips, Sijobang, sung narrative poetry of West Sumatra, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, no. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. xi + 255 pp., photos, texts and translations, short glossary of Minangkabau words, Bibliography, index.

Malaysia has recently experienced a significant growth in industrialisation. This chapter looks at a case study of changing patterns of ‘family’ among Malays, with special reference to arguments about the emergence of a nuclear family form in Malaysia, the effects of a remittance family economy and rising levels of female employment. It argues that the political economy of contemporary Malaysia, in particular state policies encouraging overseas investment in manufacturing, is having a profound effect in restructuring patterns of dependence within the extended family and discusses these findings in relation to arguments about the family as both an instrument and object of state policy. It finishes with a discussion of recent moves by Malay politicians in the government to abandon family planning policies and strongly encourage a return to motherhood, and the effects such moves might have both on women’s situation and the family economy in which it is embedded.

This unique Handbook contains substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work on economic processes and issues, and on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life. Furthermore it describes conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists, and presents summaries of key issues in the anthropological study of economic life in different regions of the world. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a particular topic and to those who want to see the breadth and fruitfulness of an anthropological study of economics.

The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work by anthropologists on economic processes and issues, on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life and on the conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists. This thoroughly revised edition brings those discussions up to date, and includes an important new section exploring ways that leading anthropologists have approached the current economic crisis. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a particular topic and to those who want to see the breadth and fruitfulness of an anthropological study of economy.