Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Hardcover

Baxstrom, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804758913 ISBN 13: 9780804758918

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. Baxstrom offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of anthropological research and an engagement with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, and moves beyond previous studies of Southeast Asian cities by linking larger conceptual issues of ethics, belief, and experience to the concrete trajectories of everyday urban life in the region.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Richard Baxstrom holds the position of Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh.

Richard Baxstrom holds the position of Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh.

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HOUSES IN MOTION

The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban MalaysiaBy Richard Baxstrom

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5891-8

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................viiIntroduction..............................................................................................................11. The Founding of Brickfields and the Prewar Development of Kuala Lumpur.................................................252. The Malayan Emergency, Islamic Reform, and the Trajectory of Urban Governmentality in Kuala Lumpur.....................543. Law, Justice, Disappearance: The Experience of Place in a Time of Radical Transformation...............................854. Strangers, Counterfeiters, and Gangsters: Figures of Belonging and the Problem of Belief...............................1305. Ambivalent Encounters in the City: Islam, Hinduism, and Urban Governmentality..........................................176Conclusion................................................................................................................217Notes.....................................................................................................................223Bibliography..............................................................................................................253Index.....................................................................................................................277

Chapter One

The Founding of Brickfields and the Prewar Development of Kuala Lumpur

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to provide a brief history of Brickfields and of the development of the area as a distinct neighborhood in the city in the context of the founding and growth of prewar Kuala Lumpur. By examining the processes through which Kuala Lumpur was established as the capital of colonial Malaya, this chapter hopes to show how neighborhoods such as Brickfields acquired their own identity within the city. Of particular concern in this narrative are the ways in which the urban environment was differentially understood and inhabited by the colonial authorities and other social groups. This chapter will provide a summary of the multiple understandings and uses of the urban space in colonial Malaya, paying close attention to how conflicts over what constituted the proper form of the city arose and how these conflicts were addressed by each of these groups. Framing the early history of Brickfields and Kuala Lumpur in this way turns our attention to the practical nature of everyday life in the colonial city, highlighting the space of the urban as a contested terrain both in terms of colonial ideologies of proper social organization and the local meanings generated through the seemingly mundane practices of the everyday.

Since the 1960s theorists of urban development have sought to establish frameworks that distinguish the development of colonial cities from classic conceptions of the urban that broadly privilege "preindustrial/ industrial" or "sacred city/market city" dichotomies (Forbes 1996; Sjoberg 1960, 1965). Scholars such as David Simon, Ronald J. Horvath, and Terence G. McGee observed at that time that classic theories of urbanization did not take into account the force and impact of colonialism when applied to so-called Third World cities. While recognizing the diversity of forms that the colonial cities could take, these scholars articulated a notion of urban development in colonial contexts that attempted to account for the relations between the social and functional features of these spaces and their role in the establishment and maintenance of colonial rule (Horvath 1969; King 1990; McGee 1967; Simon 1984). In her survey of this emergent literature pertaining to colonial cities, Brenda S.A. Yeoh identifies three characteristics particular to the colonial city that are commonly cited by these theories: (1) the racial, cultural, social, and religious pluralism characteristic of colonial cities, (2) the presence of a system of social stratification distinct from that associated with the class structures of preindustrial and industrial cities in the West, and (3) the concentration of social, economic, and political power in the hands of a racially distinct colonizing group (Yeoh 1996, 1-3). In general terms, all three of these characteristics were present in colonial Kuala Lumpur. From its founding in the 1870s the city has been home to a diverse population of immigrant Chinese and Indian communities, small Malay enclaves, and British expatriates (Adnan 1997; Gullick 1993, 2000). These populations were subject to a system of social stratification rooted in nineteenth-century understandings of race that defined the social and economic terrain under which each of these groups lived and worked. Finally, although the British instituted a system of indirect rule that granted formal sovereignty to the Malay sultans, actual governance was largely in the hands of the British residents, the colonial bureaucracy, and the European economic interests operating in the colony.

While this framework is useful in formulating an analytic understanding of the organization of Kuala Lumpur as an urban configuration, its usefulness must be qualified in light of the assumptions regarding the nature of power in colonial societies and the relative stability of social categories that are evident in its logic. In particular, the assumption that an overwhelming asymmetry of power existed between stable groups of colonized and colonizers that allowed for the colonizers to largely "create" colonial cities and towns is complicated considerably in the case of Kuala Lumpur. There is ample evidence that British government officials and city planners imagined an urban landscape ordered by segregated living quarters, racially defined economic functions, and separate social worlds. Just as clearly, local imaginations of community, justice, and order emerged as equally critical factors in the material development of Kuala Lumpur as a city and Brickfields as a distinct neighborhood within that city.

The struggle between the colonial power and the various categories of inhabitants to define people and places is key to understanding the creation of Brickfields. Colonial power in Malaya was exercised through the imagination and the attempted imposition of definitional categories related to the social and the spatial that sought to order both public and private domains. Yet this power could not be exercised in an unbridled way. In more recent times scholars, following Foucault's insights regarding power, discourse, and discipline (Foucault 1977, 1991), have argued that local arenas of action must also be considered in understanding the development and regulation of colonial cities (Ferguson 1999; Holston 1989; Low 1999; Mitchell 1989; Rabinow 1989; Yeoh 1996). As with other colonial cities, the microprocesses of everyday life were critical factors in the formation of urban space in Kuala Lumpur.

The physical environment of Kuala Lumpur held different uses, meanings, and interpretations for the various communities who came to live there. As such, there was no absolutely dominant or privileged discourse that operated to totally define or dominate the space of the city. Spaces like that of colonial Kuala Lumpur must be seen as polydiscursive, with the operating discourses in constant flux due to everyday...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804758913
• ISBN 13: 9780804758918
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande