WILL the REAL BABA's and NONYA's

PLEASE STAND UP?

A Brief Ethno-historical De/Con/Structuration of

Straits Chinese Creole Culture

by Hugh M. Lewis

For any students of the Overseas Chinese the images of the Babas and Nonyas represent a curiously anomalous and in many ways archetypical example of Sino-Malay culture historical amalgamation. The question of precisely who were the Babas and Nonyas (or what is somewhat literally referred to as 'Straits born Chinese') remains to be satisfactorily answered when given the multiplicity of identities which have been variously assigned by different authors, researchers and indigenous informants. What is somewhat officially and officiously recognized as contemporary Straits Chinese culture remains but a somewhat 'revised' socio-cultural artifact (and artifice) of what had apparently once existed--a fragmentary ethnic survival of what had been a vital Creole culture of a bygone era of intercultural contact, trade and acculturation. Yet substantial evidence remains--evidence that is archival, documentary, material, photographic, linguistic and oral historical to support the contention that the Straits born Chinese in fact constituted a long enduring and distinctive 'Creole' culture complete with its own style patterns of cuisine, fashion, language, value orientation and possibly even its own world view and own form of corporate familial and ethnic social structure built around a framework of custom, belief and ritual practices.

The case of the missing ethnic identity of the Straits Chinese presents anthropology and ethno-history with a possibly alternative conception of what constitutes 'culture' and 'ethnic identity' demonstrating the critical value of the determination of larger cultural historical contexts in framing the constructions of cultures, past and present, and pointing up the hermeneutico-critical strengths and limitations of applying 'at long range' (in both time and space as well as across unfathomable cultural distances) the 'direct historical approach' especially when this method is constrained by conventional and unconventional anthropological models and by the testimony of divergent and frequently contradictory lines of evidence drawn from a variety of sources.

Ethnic identity, or 'ethnos' is presented as an inherently multifaceted and essentially symbolic process of psycho-social ascription, reference and identification which has fairly wide versatility as an instrument of ideology, for the maintenance of in-group/out-group boundaries, in-group solidarity and out-group projection, necessary for corporate group survival and consolidation of resources and power in competition and contact with other groups.

Ethnic identity is a relatively variable and ephemeral phenomenon which varies significantly as a function of inter-group contact and the long term structure of inter-group relations. Culture is presented as a more stable, deeply rooted and essentially historical social phenomena which constitutes a symbolic/material substratum underlying ethnos. Culture is inherently conservative in its transmission of traits, aspects and orientations of lifestyle, custom, belief and practice. Because it is highly integrative upon an unconscious, out of awareness and normally transparent level of psycho-social identification and because it tends to be highly integrated within the complexities of its symbolic, behavioral and material interconnections, it tends to be internally 'centripedal' in pulling towards its central locus the many elements which constitute its constellation of things and their interrelations, while remaining externally 'centrifugal' in tending to resist the incorporation of or to throw off elements which are essentially foreign. When it does incorporate new elements it tends to do so selectively and on the basis of adaptive and functional values of these elements but such incorporation of the new entails some degree of displacement and substitution of old elements which become 'anachronistic'.

A strong but insufficiently necessary correlation may exist between the level of achieved integration of a culture and its adaptation to a given, circumscribed socio-geographical area. Cultural integration and adaptation are interdependent and therefore relative to one another. Cultural integration tends to be a function of its adaptation, cultural adaptation tends to be a function of its achieved integration. In other words, a culture has 'roots' in a given time and space. The importance of this cultural rootedness is demonstrated clearly in cases of radical cultural displacement, as, for instance, in the case of the Vietnamese boat people, whose only partially successful efforts to reconstruct past lifeways has become centrally focused and dependent upon a socio-geographical center of a 'Little Saigon'.

The adaptive/integrative foundation of a cultural orientation in both time and place constitutes one possible measure of the functional 'structuration' of a cultural grouping. A culture may be seen to be 'falling to pieces' when its pattern of integration is no longer adaptive to changing circumstances. The acculturative inundation of a local indigenous culture by a much broader based and more powerful civilization--as with the historical 'accidents' of Western World Imperialism--has figured as a major force in the disintegration of many cultural lifeways.

Culture and Ethnos are separate but dynamically interrelated historical processes of psycho-social identification and inter-group relation. The distinction between them corresponds roughly to the Saussurian structuralist distinction between 'langue' and 'parole' or what may be a distinction between relatively shifting pragmatic and conventionally arbitrary semantic dimensions of language and more enduring and autonomous syntactic processes.

Culture and Ethnos exist in an historically dynamic and dialectical interrelationship. Culture constrains ethnic identity within the parameters of a given 'cultural paradigm' and provides the processes of ethnic identification with the source of available schemata and the variable frames by which ethnic identity can be constructed. Ethnos is the ongoing, living expression of culture, revitalizing its elements and giving to cultural orientation a relative focus. Furthermore, ethnos intermediates in its 'boundary maintenance functions' a larger historical dialectic of inter-cultural relationships of power and asymmetry and internal processes of cultural integration and corporate consolidation. Ethnic identification vis-à-vis other groupings has been a principle means by which both the individual and the group to which the individual belongs adapts to a changing world and achieves and maintains an adaptive level of cultural integration. Ethnic identity mediates the dialectic between exogenous forces of culture historical acculturation and endogenous forces of 'enculturation' and 'focal elaboration' of culture--i.e. 'civilization as culture historical' process.

Culture can be construed as the river bed which channels and directs the flow of water, while ethnos can be construed as the water itself which flows down and along the banks of the river. Culture constraints the direction and expression of ethnos, while ethnos works gradually to systematically erode and alter the course of culture.

The ethno-historical and anthropological study of Straits Chinese Culture serves as an hypothetical exemplification and demonstration of the plausibility of the relationships between a changing sense of ethnos on the one hand, and an enduring conception of culture, on the other. Because of its intrinsic 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' cast, any such re/construction of the past lifeways of a people is bound to remain undemonstratable in any strictly positivistic sense, but this 'hermeneutic horizon' of historical and humanistic understanding is not thereby any less rigorous or systematic in its effort at documentation and validation, and does not thereby lessen the critical importance of such 'cosmographic' understandings.

One of the central dilemmas plaguing any effort in ethno-historical or ethno-graphic construction is the determination of an 'ethno-cultural' baseline by which historical change and cultural continuity may be measured, either retrojectively, subsequently or comparative with other cultural groupings across period and place.

Any such baseline is at best a hypothetical construction and at worst an ideological myth. The myth that plagues the positivistic social sciences is the myth of the statistical reality of the 'norm' or the 'mean' upon which so much fact and fiction ultimately depends for its efficacy. All averages are only convenient, ideal substitutes disguising the realities of the variation and identity of individual cases. The baseline remains only a working, heuristic representation--a model or 'symbolic imaging' device which provides a sense of order to our thinking about both the proximate past and the distant present. Its primary value as a model is that it remains open to revision, refinement and continual, virtually infinite, amendment. When constrained by statistical parameters of probability it becomes a convenient if sometimes complex means of systematically separating the more likely from the relatively implausible and for systematically excluding the impossible. As a heuristic device it provides a vehicle for discovering new understandings and for distinguishing between what is possibly knowable and what is ultimately unknowable. It is a means for accumulating added meaning which enhances the relative value of any 'unpetrified' text or narrative.

The first and final bottom line of an ethno-historical ethnography of Straits Chinese culture is that its study remains ultimately, paradoxically without and etic, externally referential baseline upon which its re/construction and a timeline of its historical transformations can be based. Despite a common core of cultural artifacts and traits, being a Baba or a Nonya has meant different things to different people in different periods and places. At best, a baseline model is achieved by a process of systematic 'triangulation' between the many pieces of the puzzle with the hope that we may find even a fragment of an edge or a corner of the whole Straits Chinese tapestry.

Ethno-history has always served, if only implicitly, as the larger, more general frame of reference for ethnographic analysis and construction. The efforts to establish a general structural theory or synchronic sense of social order by a strictly positivistic anthropology has always represented the tacit attempt to step outside of this purview of historical narrative. Because history is a human affair, it is primarily a political process, and because it maps the pathways of power in the real, lived world, it is never a clean, clear and unproblematic matter. The outcome of social action, interaction and reaction always remains indeterminate and unfinished except in the retrospective hindsight of the historical perspective.

Because history of necessity constitutes the general frame of reference for ethnographic analysis, its purview subsumes all other levels of such analysis, whether structural, organizational, symbolic or those of practice and transaction or even the most subjectively emic reflexive accounts of personal ethnographer's field experiences. Its general framework also provides a table of organization and chain of reasoning by which ethnographic/ethno-historical narrative can be written. Such ethno-history can operate at all levels, from the most general background to the most particular, personal life historical events, as well as all intermediate levels of analysis--regional, local, familial, situational.

By the construction of an hypothetical narrative purporting to describe who the Straits born Chinese really were and what they have become, the table of organization of which illustrates a 'multi-level' and 'multi-modal' design incorporating several different levels of analysis within a single narrative structure, the attempt will be made to render explicit what usually remains only implicit about the relationships of ethno-historical contexts and accounts to ethnographic 'facts' and their interpretations. This approach is proffered as a viable and somewhat novel alternative to all that has become conventional about ethnographic texts--an approach which is nonetheless productive, informative and lending itself well to critical evaluation and verification.

In concluding it must no be forgotten that the effort to construct a model of Baba and Nonya culture is itself a participation and a 'revitalization' of its 'ethnos'--the political implications of this process of study and ethno-historiographic construction in contributing to its history and its ideology cannot be ignored. All such ethno-history and ethnography ultimately constitutes a 'metalogue' between the past and the present, the model and the actual, unrecoverable reality the model purports to represent. The past impinges upon the present as the present frames the past. Reality makes the model as its becomes modified by the model.