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<body> <b><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="6" face="Copperplate Gothic Bold">Babas and Nonyas</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A Study of Sino-Malay Ethnoculture</p> </font><font FACE="Helvetica"> <p> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A</p> </font><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">bare barb</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">stinging touch</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">thorn among roses</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">blooming in all seasons</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">hearts always open to the world</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">enduring, happy and sad, everlasting</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ever inviting, enticing, romancing</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">your patience long lasting</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">through rain and sun</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">yet blossoming</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">then wilting</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">falling</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">fallen</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">one by one</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">from off the hip</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">petals stir in the breeze</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">colorful flames float upon the water</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">perfumed clouds drift between heaven and earth</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">blowing with the leaves across mountains and valleys</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">lost within the lengthening shadows of the twilight</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">beneath the evening moon and morning stars</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ephemeral moments so enchanting</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">brief spell finally broken</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">simple serenity</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and beauty</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">all gone</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">but</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">tell me</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">if you can</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">where are they now</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">my daughters of the soil?</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Helvetica"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">For my two little Nonyas</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1994</p> </font></b><font FACE="Arial"> <hr> <p><font size="5">Babas & Nonyas Contents:</font></p> </font> <p><a href="#Preface"><font face="Arena Cond Light" size="4">Preface</font></a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><font face="Arena Cond Light" size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/BabaNonya/BabaNonya1.htm">Introduction</a><a href="#Introduction">: The "Peranakan Problem"</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="#OverseasChinese"><font size="4" face="Arena Cond Light">I: The Overseas Chinese</font></a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="#BirthBabas"><font size="4" face="Arena Cond Light">II: The Birth of the Babas</font></a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="#NonyaCulture"><font size="4" face="Arena Cond Light">III: Nonya Culture</font></a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="#PeranakanPeople"><font size="4" face="Arena Cond Light">IV: Peranakan People</font></a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><font face="Arena Cond Light" size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/BabaNonya/BabaNonya6.htm">V</a><a href="#StraitsChinese">: The Social World of the Straits Chinese</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="#Bibliography"><font face="Arena Cond Light" size="4">An Annotated, Comprehensive Bibliography</font></a></p> <font FACE="Arial"> <p ALIGN="left"> </p> <hr> <p align="center"><font size="5"><a name="Preface">Preface</a></font></p> <p align="center"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="left"><font size="3">I first wrote the book I entitled <u>Peranakan</u> in 1992, based upon extensive bibliographic research and a modicum first-hand experience in a Malaysian setting. The challenge of the Peranakan was to demonstrate alternative ethnocultural identities that are possible when political interests and other communalistic cleavages serving to segregate and divide people in the world are contraposed. Political changes can often create long lasting boundaries and conflicts where none may needed to have existed in the first place. </font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">There are two wonderful and at least superficially contradictory processes that occur in the historical development of any cultural grouping of people who are situated trans-generationally in a place, or that become transplanted, in relation to other, alternative groupings with whom they may come into contact on some limited but regular basis. The first, natural tendency is for the development of isolating variations and differences, as demonstrated for instance in dialectical variation, that serves to partition people into ever more local and well defined geo-historical configurations. All languages, and all cultures, tend toward this process of increasing differentiation, and it is analogous very much to the process of speciation in evolution. The apparently contraposed tendency is the process of homogenization that frequently accompanies related structural processes of centralization, functional integration and the superimposition of a set of cultural standards or norms in the daily lives of the complex constituency of the state. Thus we end up historically with very large nation states, like the USSR for instance, that may encompass and span a vast range of different peoples under a common umbrella of a central governmental administration. </font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">It is evident that what makes culture different from genetics is that, unlike species that allopatrically divide into two or more reproductively isolated groupings, cultures offer us the historical possibility of horizontal dissemination, of individuals passing between cultures, and of two or more cultures coming together in time or place with a fusion of elements from alternative cultural orientations, sometimes even leading to production of entirely new cultural patterns. This process may be the consequence of some colonial framework that tends to cast people from different groups into a common pot for the purposes of the organization of production, or it may happen in a vacuum of any larger historical framework as the result of interchange and exchange between people.  Of course, colonial apparatus can offer forces that serve to overcome the kinds of isolating boundaries that have served to separate ethnocultural groupings as distinctive entities. </font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">In the modern period, the rise of new nationalisms in underdeveloped nation states has often been accomplished at the expense of one or more other groups in favor of those who have gained the upper hand of power and control in society. In such contexts, the promulgation of national integration, as in Malaysia, can proceed on a separatist basis that serves to identify some minority group as an "out-group." It is possible to imagine that in a more democratic and less authoritarian context, the relations between the main minorities in Malaysia might have proceeded along another set of lines than what appears to have happened. There is a sense, on a very basic level of personality inventories and behavioral observations, that different kinds of Malaysians, whether they are Malay, Chinese or Indian, share as much in common, as Malaysians with a shared national heritage and culture, as they share in differences in terms of religion, social values and other basic cleavages. National policies, promulgated by Mahathir under the aegis of control of his UMNO party, appear to have served two sets of competing and basically contradictory interests at the same time. In one sense it has forged a strong national identity among most Malaysians, but in another way it has structurally embedded and perpetuated those "racial" distinctions between the different ethnocultural groupings through systematic affirmative action policies that has drawn an official line between what it means to be a Malay on one hand, and what it means to have be Chinese or Indian, on the other.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">To apply this example to one closer to my own homeland, I must wonder how much 30 odd years of systematic efforts of the US government in affirmative action, that has served primarily minority interests, has served also and equally as much to maintain the basic racial cleavages and boundaries between ethnocultural groupings than to tear these kinds of boundaries down. In this we can see a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy and the social construction of ethno-cultural differences along racial lines in a kind of ethno-schismogenesis.  If we look beneath the superficial aspects of skin color, one will find that black Americans and white Americans, on average, share greater cultural affinities than they share differences, except where issues of class and history have served to demarcate and segregate these communities unevenly. Most black Americans would find, for instance, that they share more in common with their white counterparts in the US, than they would share with Kenyans or Ugandans from the African Continent. We can look back the other way, as for instance it was quite obvious that my Malaysian Chinese wife would get along much more smoothly with Muslim Malays from her own homeland, that she could with mainland Chinese, even though her own ancestor's once came from China.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">At any rate, in a Malay dominated Malaysia that draws a strict socio-structural boundary between Chinese and Malay, inbetween ethnocultural orientations as represented by the creolized Peranakan orientation, are no longer allowed to exist or possible. All relations between ethnocultural groupings that would permit this possibility are sundered by bureaucratically reinforced separation between the groups. An analogy of this exists in US history in the schism separating the Native Americans from the white communities that followed the trailblazers to the west. It is evident that upon the plains and prairies of the US, a full generation or two before the coming of white farmers and the US cavalry to protect them, there was an extensive, full-blown Metis cultural orientation that was well developed with horse and cattle road-ranches throughout the west, long before any states were formally recognized or organized.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">This orientation was not based only upon the amalgamation between French fur traders and their squaw wives, as almost fifty percent of the fur traders were not French, but of Scottish and American and even black American extraction as well. These people had forged a unique ethnocultural orientation on the plains that was represented by several generations of offspring who were fully involved in the cultural amalgamation, including calico dresses, square dances, horse rearing and Indian trading. Subsequent events associated with the appropriation of Indian lands for white settlement, gold, and the internal colonization of Indians upon reservation lands, led to the demise and fracturing of the basis of this inbetween ethnocultural orientation, which, if allowed to thrive, might have resulted in an entirely different history of relations between Indians and the whites.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">But of course, the rise of the Peranakan in the Straits settlements, like the rise of the North American Metis on the central plains of North America where once only bison roamed, was part of a larger episode of history, in the former case, the British colonization of Malaysia, and in the latter, the penetration of the West by the great fur trade companies. When these larger structures of history passed away, so too did those groupings of people who were most closely attached to these frameworks.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">In presenting these texts in these web-pages, I have sought to present the "Peranakan problem" as one that is intrinsically interesting from a theoretical and anthropological point of view, not only because of the unusual processes of amalgamation that are so important to these patterns, but also for the case of exemplifying basic and distinctive ethnocultural models. From this standpoint, these studies fit clearly within an ethnocultural methodology that attempts to relate the life-experiences and daily events and attitudes of culture bearers to the larger historical and cultural contexts that unfold more gradually and imperceptibly in the background of their lives. I first attempted this approach in studying and seeking to understand the predicament of Vietnamese boatpeople who had eventually found themselves washed up on the shores of a distant and very different homeland that was not traditionally their own. Relating the large, regional and general frames of reference to the immediate, concrete, little everyday events, and trying to make sense of the systemic relationships and patterns involved in the articulation of the lives of these people, invoked an additional requirement of attempting to understand in a comprehensive manner the knowledge, or the social construction of information, relating to these people. Thus, doing ethnocultural fieldwork was more than merely doing ethnographic fieldwork, which usually involved hanging out with people for extended periods of time. It became like ethnohistory, the full detailed hermeneutic and philological excoriation of all evidence, textual and otherwise, surrounding and relating to and serving to demarcate the identity of a group of people as somehow a distinctive culture.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">Subsequent to the first work with the Vietnamese refugees, which culminated successfully I believe in a fairly well integrated ethnocultural approach, I have had and made for myself the opportunity to conduct similar research with the Hokkien Chinese of Malaysia, with Modern Malaysians, the Peranakans, and later, the Metis of North America. Each presented unique challenges to the technical and formal problem of the ethnocultural study of people. Each presented new forms of understanding about ethnocultural studies in both a larger and more general sense and in terms of detailed operational approaches.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">This work was a significant part of that effort. It is presented here in two sets, an earlier version which was done in requirement for an Ethnohistory seminar  I had taken with Dr. Ray Wood, and the second version that was rewritten to fulfill requirements for another Technical writing seminar I had undertaken with the same professor the following year.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">I present both first and second editions together in these pages because web-publishing makes it easy to do so, and to demonstrate the progression of the development of ideas relating to ethnocultural studies that are associated with this research upon the Peranakan peoples as well as upon other peoples in the world.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">Its order and presentation originally was intended to reflect the methodological organization and operationalization of formal ethnocultural studies as a distinctive and well defined form of anthropological inquiry that is both theoretically interesting and methodologically rewarding. I hope in the future that I will have further opportunities to conduct similar ethnocultural studies upon other interesting groups of people in the world, and to thereby further refine and develop the systematic study of ethnoculture as a valuable contribution to world scholarship.</font></p> <p align="left"><font size="3">An updating of these works is in order by subsequent works undertaken by European scholars and by Malaysian Chinese scholars, namely Felix Chia, Ho Ming Wing and Tan Che Beng, now head of the Anthropology program at Hong Kong National University. Peranakan studies is now fairly well defined in outline, when in 1994 it remained only very vague in form. These recent developments speak of the remarkable progress and growth of knowledge, both as an industry in itself, and as a function of advancing scholarship and publishing in the world. I am glad that Peranakan studies have come of age now in the appropriate academic departments of the world as a legitimate area of inquiry. </font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4"><a name="Introduction">Introduction</a></font></p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5">The "Peranakan Problem"</font></p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> </b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b>"The Baba, a product of an accident of history, is a time-traveler; he has come and he must go." (Felix Chia, <u>The Baba</u> 1980:193)</p> </b></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> <p>"Peranakan" is a Malay term designating a particular Creole culture of partly assimilated Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia. To an unknown extent, these peoples' distinctive identities were the by-products of political-economic and culture historical forces of social integration within a colonial Southeast Asian context which arrested pre-colonial "mosaic" processes of amalgamation and assimilation, and tended to foster social isolation and structural separateness between the main groups--Europeans, ethnic Overseas Chinese, and Indigenous peoples.</p> <p>With modernization dating from the turn of the twentieth century, and with the subsequent advent of new nationalisms in Southeast Asia, this sense of difference has resulted in systematic segregation, discrimination, cultural erosion and eventual disintegration of Peranakans and their cultural life-ways, who have been forced to redefine their identities in relation to dominant reference groups in more adaptive ways.</p> <p>In certain places during the colonial era, especially in the so-called Straits Settlements; of Penang, Malacca and Singapore, the "Peranakans" emerged as a distinctive, fully crystallized ethno-cultural orientation with its own sense of cultural focus and elaboration of distinctive, ethnically defined traits. This became the highly stylistic culture of the "Babas and Nyonyas."</p> <p>This culture is remarkable from an anthropological standpoint because it is predominantly "Nonya" in focal orientation--featuring the elaboration of basic traits, dress, housing patterns, residence, kinship, marriage, arts, religion, beliefs and values, entertainment and cooking, which were the principle prerogative of nearly completely domesticated womenfolk. The men, the "Babas," active in outside, worldly affairs, were left relatively unconstrained to define their identities vis a' vis dominant and traditional reference groups, ie, the European colonial culture and traditional Overseas Chinese culture. On the wane, we are left to ethno-historically account for this somewhat unusual cultural development, especially when we consider that it emerged from a basic Chinese cultural orientation which has always been strongly patriarchal and patrilineal in tradition.</p> <p>This is only part of a more complex paradox in trying to account for the origins, influences, factors, and dimensions of an "inbetween" ethnocultural grouping, whose fundamental identity has remained somewhat ambiguous in outline, and especially when we must account for its identity in "ethnic" terms which comprised seemed to comprise the basic organizational "ethos" of the people.</p> <p>The entire problem is complicated by the relative paucity of substantial information about this group--the majority of ethnographic and historiographic studies of this group have been done only since World War II, within a context of modern Nationalisms--well after the time of its heyday in the nineteenth century and well into the period of its social disintegration.</p> <p>The "Peranakan Problem" is defined in the course of this work as a number of different dimensions and themes which intersect to create certain central foci--different arguments are elucidated, not so much for the sake of creating a consensus, as for revealing contradiction. The "Peranakan Problem" exists at several different levels of theoretical generality and methodological analysis, and is not one primary issue or hypothesis. It is as much a "problem" of the researcher's definition and terms of description and explanation than it is anything that is, or was, ever "out there" in the human world.</p> <p>Like the human reality it is held to represent, it is many different things, with many different possibilities. And yet, all the theoretical and hypothetical diatribe notwithstanding, the "Peranakan Problem" can perhaps best be exemplified in the statements of a single person who is peranakan by birth and cultural heritage.</p> <p>What does the understanding of Peranakan ethnoculture and ethnohistory have to contribute to general theoretical interests in cultural anthropology? What does general anthropology have to contribute to the understanding of the Babas? Such questions serve as a fulcrum point for the movement and articulation of basic research in the world--it is a question meant to be asked but never finally answered.</p> <p>The Babas represent something unusual and therefore interesting in the world, but not something that was to be unexpected, given the social conditions and historical contexts in which they emerged to define themselves as distinct and separate from all other people. They are not to be facilely dismissed as but one more of many sub-groupings of the Chinese nation, but another minor variant upon a dominant theme of sinicization, because they stand clearly apart from all other Chinese in Southeast Asia--their cultural orientation ran somewhat across the Chinese grain.</p> <p>They represent a dynamic aspect of Chinese cultural character which would be considered uncommon in terms of the patriarchal and xenophobic sinitic stereotypes--a synthetic and syncretistic capacity of Chinese to readily incorporate and assimilate foreign elements in a creative way when given the context and opportunity, and incentive, to do so, and to redefine their own identity in a way which does not always fall beneath the umbra of their Ancestor's Shadow.</p> <p>But the Babas also stand for something else which is perhaps more interesting from an anthropological standpoint--the study of their provenience in time and place, their emergence, historical elaboration, and subsequent submergence beneath the tides of modern historical developments, allow us to ask critical questions about some of foundational concepts concerning culture, ethnicity, social structure, historical patterning, and even evolutionary processes of change.</p> <p>They represented an interstitial, as opposed to marginal, sub-grouping of a wider stream of humanity. Their lifeways straddled the entire rural-urban continuum, and was as much a product of the city-scape as it was of the countryside. They were not a "band," or "tribe," or peasant village--they were not a ghetto, an ethnic enclave, a colony, a cult or sect, a caste, a class, a party or a corporate institution, and still, as an enduring yet ephemeral historical phenomena, they were as real and distinctive as any grouping on earth. Uncommon as they have been, they did not stand completely alone in the annals of history--there have been other similar kinds of groups in other parts of the world.</p> <p>To claim that the Baba Chinese were a residuum of a colonial era is only a biased part of the whole picture--the emergence of their kind is to be expected any time there has been prolonged, organized, and creative contact between different cultures, different civilizations, different "races", and different streams of history--such groups form like swirling eddies in the confluence of great rivers.</p> <p>They are not so much '"transitional cultures" as they are "cultures of transition"--new and emergent possibilities of cultural patterning created as a result of acculturative interchange and historical transition. They are "cultures of convergence" that are only possible when different groups of people are forced to live together in some degree of mutual symbiosis and tolerance.</p> <p>From the standpoint of the study of cultural transmission and change, the case of the Baba's represent an interesting model of an evolutionary process of cultural "speciation" that occurs as the consequence of acculturation--the fundamental reconfiguration of basic cultural patternings as the direct result of such processes of acculturation, and the emergence of a new and viable cultural orientation with its own distinctive sense of cultural value and historical tradition.</p> <p>This process of cultural convergence and speciation affects virtually every aspect of the cultural configuration--evidence for the basic changes are to be found in language, religion, arts, social structure, values, world view, dietary patterns, ethnic identity, etc. The patternings produced by the convergence of two or more separate cultural configurations form something of a moire' which contains elements of both configurations but in a new arrangement.</p> <p>With the Babas, we get a glimpse of "culture history in the making"--if not actually on the level of individual actors and their decision-making, then on the next higher level of primary social groups and communities acting in concert and in a directed manner to fashion a sense of history.</p> <p>We can also see, in the momentous and inevitable turn of the wheels of history, the larger historical structures which remain always in the background, like the hour hand of a clock, slow and imperceptible in its movement, yet inexorable in its constraint and imperative for human action. We can clearly see how new cultural possibilities can be created, and then taken away, by larger mitigating historical structures--if the conditions are not appropriate for the germination of culture, as for the germination of seedlings in the earth after a long and severe winter, then no amount of growth can be expected.</p> <p>With the example of the Babas, the general framework of culture history can be articulated with the narrower focus upon the ethnohistories of particular peoples of particular periods and places. With the Babas, we can get a partial picture of how cultural dynamics intermesh with historical process. We can write, and rewrite, the story of the Baba's in such a way that combines the narrative frame of historical explanation with the descriptive frame of ethnographic exemplification.</p> <p>"Ethnos" is the study or knowledge of the life-ways of a group of people--it comes from the Greek meaning "Nation," "race" or "people." From it are derived many of the terms central to anthropological method and theory--ethnography, ethnology, ethno-history, ethnocentrism, ethnogeny, ethnicity, ethno-nation, ethno-linguistics, ethno-musicology, ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, ethnomedicine, ethnobotany. The central conceptual importance of 'ethnos' to the field of anthropology should go without saying, and yet its centrality and significance has been left largely taken for granted--as something adjectival and dependent upon some other conceptual preoccupation.</p> <p>Ethnos names a basic operative principle in the definition of human identity and difference in a social world--human history has largely been a narrative of the formation, conflict and resolution of human identities and differences between different groups of people across time and space.</p> <p>Ethnos also marks off a central principle in the study of the human condition in the world, of its many variations, its 'grand arc' of possibility, and its basic structures of pan-humanness. Basic human identity is constituted socially and historically in the world--it is "constructed"--and then, in turn, becomes the central organizing principle for the construction of the world. We make the world in terms of how we see ourselves in it in relation to other people, and we make our own identity in terms of how we see the world of others.</p> <p>"Ethnoculture" is my designation for the distinctive identity and difference of a people that is defined both socially in relation to other groupings, and historically in terms of its origin, development and direction, in <u>terms which are emically salient for the people who are so defined.</u> The objective of the study of ethnoculture is to discover and derive the basic principle of ethnos as it is culturally and historically elaborated and operative in the world, as well as the factors which constrain and influence its development.</p> <p>Ethnoculture is the notion of the distinctive symbolic identity that is shared and elaborated by a particular cultural grouping. It shares with ethnohistory a common ground in the idea of the base-line as the point of departure and final reference in our constructions of the symbolisms and group identities of a people. For the student of ethnohistory the concept of the baseline is rooted in the "ideal Past."</p> <p>as a fossilized origin point and source. For the student of ethnoculture the baseline becomes translated as the "eternal present" that focuses upon the core continuities that remain traditionally conservative and fundamentally definitive of a groups worldview and distinctive identity.</p> <p>Ethnoculture inevitably involves the inseparable problems of the construction and "re-presentation" of reality, and the construction of "reconstructions" as well as the problem of defining the subjective/objective basis of group integration and the influences of change. Thus, both ethnoculture and ethnohistory centrally deal with the dilemmas of "historicity" and "facticity" in seeking primary sources and questioning the political and ideological foundations of knowledge and the tautological conundrums of theories, and hence both are a needed antidote to fast and nonreflexive explanations about human experiences.</p> <p>The ethnoculture of the Baba's is exemplary, and problematic, for a number of important anthropological reasons. In seeking to establish a "base-line" for "traditional" Baba Chinese culture, it will be discovered that such a "base-line" is at best only a model, an ethnohistorical construction, which we need elaborate only in order to subsequently amend or refute by the discovery of contrary, alternative or supportive evidence.</p> <p>The ethnocultural continuum of the Peranakan Chinese of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia manifests several significant dimensions which can be referred to as social structure and process, language, religion and ethnicity. Though the most visible Babas and Nonya's were the upper class merchants of the port cities of the Straits, and were thus very much fixtures of the urban city-scape, we can probably correctly claim that the "average" peranakan was a petty merchant trader who was "in the middle" in a variety of senses, and also we cannot ignore a substantial number of rural Peranakans who were agricultural pioneers and entrepreneurs, or who were long settled in small village colonies that dotted the countryside.</p> <p>We must therefore take into account a fairly broad range of social stratification and occupational differentiation within Peranakan communities--to be Peranakan was not to be only one kind of person, and peranakan cultural orientation did not imply simply one set of acquired traits--it consisted more of local and regional variations upon a common theme, and even thematic variation upon a common, polythetic set of cultural features. Peranakan social realities varied widely over both period and place--what it may have been in pre-contact Malacca, versus what it apparently had been in Nineteenth Century Singapore, to what it was to become in Indonesia or Penang in the modern, post-colonial era, may well be quite different sorts of things only somewhat spuriously subsumed under the same basic epithet.</p> <p>Of course, from an ethnocultural point of view, we must assume at least one basic chain of continuity between the distant past and the immediate present and that is the linkage of cultural, if not biological, heredity--of people who are the direct descendants, whatever the number of generations removed or diluted, from those who first were known as or eventually came to be called "Peranakan," and who have retained some minimal sense of what it is to be a Peranakan. And in this sense of familial inheritance, early childhood socializations, primary social networks and corporate institutions, and important life experiences which become played out in the relative presence or absence of the most significant others, critically influence and shape the nature and culture of this kind of ethnocultural identity.</p> <p>And in this regard, both ethnos and culture become very real and very significant social and historical forces to be reckoned with, as both come to have a molding influence upon the subjectively felt, lived experiences of the individual "culture bearer," and both come to have a massive, basic shaping and constraining effect upon experience and interaction in the world, as both subjectively internalized and externally objectivated, and as both a realizing agency of potentiality and a mediating mechanism in dealing with change and difference.</p> <p>This speaks for a much deeper and more basically rooted connection between ethnos and culture than many scholars of ethnicity, who stress the communicative, social, economic and political aspects of ethnicity, seem willing to acknowledge. A pri-mordialist view of the relation between ethnos and culture holds that such an identity is more foundational and less easily alterable than other kinds of identities--national, religious, social--and that these other identities might achieve some sense of ingrained embedding by their primoridialist connections with a peoples shared ethnoculture.</p> <p>There are two theoretical implications of this primordialist view of ethnoculture. First, the basic ethnocultural continuities--the common core of a shared identity--cannot be simply negotiated away, transacted, traded in or changed "for a new suit of clothes." Though boundaries between groups are negotiated, these boundaries are always fuzzy and always encompass a more conservative "prototypical" core. Second, the outward aspects of ethnoculture are largely historically determined, and thus the actual significances of ethnocultural identity are quite variable across space and time--the combination of the core traits are likely to be lost or added, variably mixed and interchanged.</p> <p>A third implication forthcoming from the first two is that ethnocultural identity tends always to draw from the past, from its traditions, its styles, customs, habits, lessons and myths, for purposes of the present, and to appropriate elements and aspects of the present for the sake of reconstructing and overcoming the "lost sense" of the past. This makes ethnoculture both very functionally adaptive and very conservative. This always creates a dialectical tension about ethnocultural identity that is never without some contradiction and some interesting conflicts.</p> <p>Another significant dimension of the problem of peranakan "Ethnoculture" are the social distances, contradictions and obstacles, spanned between traditional Chinese cultural foci, on the one hand, and becoming a part of the Malay cultural tradition, on the other. Peranakan culture was not just intermediate in the socio-structural sense of being comprised of "pariah" merchant middlemen, but they also were an in-between socio-cultural phenomena as a "transitional culture" or a "culture of transition" arrested somewhere along the process of assimilation of a minority Chinese group into the social ethos of the dominant Malay host culture.</p> <p>On top of being such a culture defined somewhere along a continuum of assimilation, the Peranakans also came to constitute a "culture of amalgamation" that was defined by some modicum of ethnic intermarriage and intercultural integration. Even more problematic, we must also take into account its orientation as a "culture of acculturation", subject as it was to strong foreign influences.</p> <p>And, to top all this sociological jargon off, we may speak of peranakans as being commonly also a "culture of accommodation" in that its basis was formed in a context which promoted mutual interaction, basic reciprocities, and mutual adjustments to social differences during different historical periods. So we must again ask ourselves, what, and where, is Peranakan ethnoculture?</p> <p>In this regard it is commonly assumed that the principle barrier to full assimilation of the Peranakan Chinese into the dominant Malay or Indonesian societies has been the Islamic faith which prohibits intermarriage without conversion--but evidence supports the contention that Islam was not everywhere equally the same kind of barrier to intermarriage that it has more recently and commonly become. It is also commonly contended that Malay culture and ethnic identity has been founded centrally upon the principle of being a good "fundamentalist" Muslim. This is a legal prejudice that has become predominant in modern nation-states that failed to effectively separate church and state--but being Malay has long been something more, or else, than only being Moslem. Conversely, it is often argued that traditional Chinese cultural identity has been founded upon the principle of ethnos that is relatively independent of any religious components. Traditional Chinese religious orientation is held to reflect the openness and syncretistic character of the Chinese social world, and the synthesizing qualities of the Chinese mind. But evidence also suggests that there is something fundamental to the core of "Chineseness" which has basic religious overtones, that the Chinese world and worldview may not always be as open as it is represented to be much of the literature, and that Islam may not provide the only barrier to the assimilation of the "Peranakans" into the host society--"Chinese Religionists" frequently seem to present as great a barrier to passing between Chinese and Malay worlds as anything Islam has been purported to do.</p> <p>Regarding intermarriage, it is evident that interethnic social integration and cultural amalgamation can effectively proceed without the requirements of members of contraposed groups being wed, and that intermarriage is also a sociocultural possibility whether or not other processes of social integration and assimilation are occurring. What it seems to require most is the tolerance and willing acceptance of the different families, and communities, that are thus united--and nothing can so divide brothers and families against one another as relatively remote, and frequently self-serving, political interests.</p> <p>It is worthwhile to briefly speculate on the "ethnogenesis" of Peranakan ethno-culture, especially the focal and elaborate kind of "Baba and Nonya" culture which apparently developed during the Nineteenth Century in the Straits Settlements.</p> <p>A romantic model would be a story of the original "Nonya" who set the entire Nonya culture snow-balling in its development through the many successive generations, from mother to daughter in an unending chain. Was she a Chinese woman, the daughter of an Imperial emperor of China, sent to Malacca to take the hand the Malay Sultan, adopting Malay dress, Malay speech, Malay beliefs, but remaining basically Chinese to the core? Or was she but a young outcast of a Malay Kampong, a debt-slave or a concubine of a rich Chinese Kapitan, basically Malay in most aspects but constrained in fundamental ways by a patriarchal Chinese tradition? Are the Nonya’s basically Chinese or Malay?</p> <p>It is not too far fetched to imagine a relatively small group of original Nonyas of Malacca, somewhere in the Sixteenth Century, who found themselves in a unique situation to create a whole new cultural patterning and style, and to subsequently elaborate and hand this culture down through their daughters, essentially unchanged, until the twentieth century.</p> <p>In this regard, it would do well to remember the subservient role of the woman in traditional Chinese society. Only as a mother and matriarch of a domestic household does a woman hope to have any power or influence, and only as this power could be realized through a father, a husband or a son, or alternatively, only through a separate status network-hierarchy of other women, mothers and daughters.</p> <p>The suffocating love of the mother for the son is a fundamental cultural psychological theme of Chinese tradition and ethos. In an almost exclusively male community--male dominated in every way--in the early trading outposts of the Nanyang, an empty niche would have been created in a displaced and makeshift Chinese cosmos--a niche that would have had symbolic, social, structural and psychological components, by the dearth of Chinese women and "mothers" that could not be simply filled by the services of a few prostitutes. This niche would not have been an unattractive one to fill, as it had the promise of some wealth and advantage among tradition bound people who would not have otherwise realized such things. This empty niche left an opening in the traditional Chinese cosmos for the incorporation of foreign elements.</p> <p>We must seriously ask why it was almost exclusively domestic and female Malay elements which came to so strongly define what was distinctive about Nonya culture, and we are left with a kind of proposition that there may be basic dimensions to its culture which were defined along lines of female and male identity respectively. A useful kind of distinction to make is between ethno-political symbols that are primarily concerned with external boundary maintenance and ethno-religious symbolisms which involve domestic relations and conceptions of sacredness, and the association with these kinds of symbols to male and masculine domains and features, and feminine and female traits, respectively. In the case of the Babas and Nonyas, what fell away from the tradition-bound Chinese Confucian orientation was the whole female side of its cultural orientation, to become infused, ethno-culturally, if not quite racially, with many Malay elements.</p> <p>The second alternative was that while Baba fathers and sons were left to fill play the part of "reality culture" bearers--to use Alfred Kroeber's distinction--in networks which were externally oriented to culture brokerage and the mediation of differences, Nonya mothers and daughters were left separately to play a role the construction and elaboration of an almost exclusive "value culture" which was almost entire a feminine prerogative. Within domesticated social spheres, women were left to claim and compete with one another for status.</p> <p>When we consider the religious orientation of the Babas and the Nonyas, we are faced with another paradox--though incorporating many Malay elements involving trance, superstition, animistic spirituality, spirit possession and ritual, the Peranakan pantheon of deities remains basically Chinese in character. We must confront the possibility that no religion or religious system, as it is lived by an ethno-cultural grouping of people, is a purely unitary phenomena. We only have to look to the incorporation of local deities, beliefs and cults, all over the world, into the sainthood of a strictly monotheistic Catholic orthodoxy to see a similar kind of "lived" religion in action.</p> <p>The alleged matrilocality of the Babas and Nonyas, as a persistent and pervasive social institution, also demands some sort of explanation in terms of origins and primary causes. Though their’s was not a culture characterized by chronic warfare which demanded the long term absence of the males, they were a settlement of "sojourner-traders" in which the economic interests of the males demanded long periods of absence, and they were also a group which may have always been defined by some kind of interethnic stress or tension, if not always outright conflict and competition. It is also apparent that though the traditional Nonyas may have held the keys to the home, even the shop, as well as to whatever domestic wealth possessed by the family, they were not themselves involved in any forms of primary production or external economic activity.</p> <p>Unlike many other Southeast Asian women, they were not themselves petty traders or producers. Thus we are left to explain an apparent exception to the cross-cultural rule of matrilocality, in terms of origins and causal factors which stress the "rarity-value" of women who were in every respect a minority, based upon their reproductive role as the principle providers and care-takers of children who were brought up to think of themselves and call themselves Chinese even though they often acted and talked like Malays, and in terms of the elaboration of a strictly domestic, female-centered culture which was transmitted through processes of both primary and secondary socialization through the daughters.</p> <p>The daughters became the principle culture-bearers, and inheritors of values, attitudes, characteristics that were distinctively Nonya. And if the mothers were the principle arrangers in their children’s marriages, then they must have taken much care in finding suitable partners who would contribute to, rather than take from, their domestically oriented, female-focused culture.</p> <p>Another paradox is that though in relation to their male relatives the Nonya women were always in a subordinate position, at least within the interior world of their domestic household, the differences of age came to override those differences based upon gender. Within their own internal world, the Nonya’s came to control resources, power, prestige and privilege which sometimes matched that of the Babas in the outside world. It is even more of a paradox when we consider that young Nonya daughters still had inferior value compared to that of Baba sons--though they were the principle agents and carriers in the transmission of Nonya lifeways, they did not gain ascendant status except through marriage, motherhood and the subsequent marriage of their own sons and daughters. The Baba boys were clearly privileged, even though from a strictly cultural point of view they would always remain peripheral, because they still were under the penumbra of the Ancestor’s shadow--it was still the Confucian thing to do.</p> <p>Peranakan ethnoculture, especially the distinctive form that came to bloom in the Straits Settlements during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, was clearly something more than just a by-product of colonial political economy within a plural society. In fact, its occurrence may have been quite separate and independent of the colonial setting, and some evidence at least suggests that the colonial framework may have actually hindered and limited its development and florescence in fundamental ways.</p> <p>European colonialism did clearly serve to highlight it, to underscore its ethnocultural distinctiveness and difference in ways which it may not have otherwise been emphasized. The fortunes of the Babas and Nonyas within a foreign administrative structure were only indirect results of this contact and acculturation--the effect rather than the cause of such contact and acculturation. It was the very inbetweenness of Straits Chinese society which permitted them the latitude to serve the critical role of "culture brokers" and as articulatory intermediaries within a colonial social system, a role which was effectively not available to the members of other, more tradition-bound groups. And with their increasing wealth and structurally defined privilege and opportunity within the colonial framework, their visibility , distinctiveness, status and prestige also increased.</p> <p>If the Babas and Nonyas were not directly the by-product of a somewhat superficial colonial arrangement, then they must be understood in another set of terms. If they weren’t primarily "colonial," then they were preeminently "traditional"--and what has been pulling them apart today have been larger forces of modernization which have been wearing away the fabric of many different peoples’ cultural traditions. What is "tradition" from a modern, secular point of view? Values and orientations of family, lineage, respect for and preservation of the authority and legitimacy the past, as central place in one’s world for religion, the primacy of the family as the principle agent of socialization and cultural transmission, values of nurturance and interdependency rather than independence and personal dominance. "Tradition" defines the principle domain of ethno-culture.</p> <p>The very factors which fostered their structural fortune in the colonial era, led to their structural misfortune, their social disintegration, their loss of visibility and status in the post-colonial era which as to define itself along new lines, imported from the West, of modernization, development and nationalism. As the Overseas Chinese have come to face increasing ethnic segregation and discrimination in most modern Southeast Asian nation-states, the splitting apart of splintered ethnic segments of society and the widening gulf between indigenous majorities and Chinese minorities, has tended to pull apart and distintegrate the Peranakans who were structurally inbetween.</p> <p>Each new generation of Baba and Nonya is left with fewer alternatives other than to attempt passing into one or another of the segments of modern society--less and less of their own culture and their own people are left over by which to continue to construct and maintain a separate, distinctive peranakan identity. Because passing downhill and out of a contexts defined by overpopulation and fierce social circumscription and competition for very limited resources, is much easier than passing uphill, most Peranakans have been undergoing resinification.</p> <p>For some reason, becoming a Moslem in order to pass into Malay society has never been a viable option open to most peranakans--the losses in social status and individual identity in both Chinese and Muslim worlds would have been much greater than the few gains in social security and acceptability. Though the Malays are in a structurally predominant and superior position to the Chinese, their place is by no means an enviable one. Few Chinese would undergo circumcision in order to trade places with their Malay counterparts, neither in politics and especially not in business.</p> <p>The only other alternative seems to be one of escape from the Southeast Asian setting--to Singapore, or better yet, to the common wealth countries or to the United States. English language, Western education, the acquisition of money, material wealth, and Christianity are all efficacious vehicles for such escape.</p> <p>With the disintegration of peranakan ethnoculture, we are witnessing a kind of socio-cultural atomization of peranakans into smaller and smaller groupings--ultimately to become enclosed as separate family units, or even as lone individuals culturally astray in the wider social stream. With fewer and fewer social basis available for interaction in the wider world in purely peranakan fashion, more and more peranakans are feeling themselves cut off from their roots, from the tradition in which they themselves were raised, adrift upon the tides of change.</p> </font><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4">I</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <a name="OverseasChinese"> The </a> </font><a name="OverseasChinese">Overseas Chinese</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The peranakan problem cannot be finally resolved if it is not sufficiently situated within a larger setting--ultimately within the framework of traditional and colonial Southeast Asian civilization. Many of the basic structural features which underlie the formation and ordering of the Peranakan world are features basic to the patterning and developmental processes of much of the Southeast Asian world--the maritime openness and outward-looking orientation, the natural, tropical environment, the role of rivers in the integration and incorporation of diverse and different ecologies within a single "interregional system," the recurrent structural theme of the "organization of diversity", that like the supernatural percussive melody of gamelan, reverberates in every ritual, in every myth, in every language.</p> <p>Foremost of the themes which have united Southeast Asia as a region and which help to contextualize the "Peranakan problem" is the influence which diverse, foreign cultures have had in the stylistic and structural development of what can be referred to as a typically "Southeast Asian civilization." Acculturation--religious, political, economic, social--has long been a perennial influence in the region, and different culture historical phases of acculturation can be used, almost in the manner of archaeological stratigraphy or stylistic seriation, to uncover the many layers of culture that have become embedded one on top of the other throughout Southeast Asia. Each phase contributed to the development of Southeast Asia upon a new level of socio-cultural integration and structural articulation. The incorporation of foreign elements, ideas, things, and people, served as a common catalyst, a common stimulus, to the endogenous elaboration and development of Southeast Asian civilization.</p> <p>Inextricably entangled with the problem of such acculturation and the incorporation of diversity, is the problem of "ethnos" as a central organizational principle of Southeast Asian civilization. Ethnicity as the study of ethnic identity and ethnogenesis as the study of ethnic origins, are intrinsic and basic dimensions of Southeast Asian studies in general. "...ethnic diversity is so fundamental in Southeast Asia that it is one of the great laboratories for the study of ethnicity." (D. E. Brown, 1976: 99) It was in general reference to Southeast Asia, and in specific relation to the pervasiveness of the Overseas Chinese there, that had led J. S. Furnival to formulate his now classic theory of "radical pluralism"--the social integration of people of many cultures in a common market place and under the aegis of a common political structure.</p> <p>Because the Peranakan were basically Chinese, members of the so-called Nanyang, the centrality of the principle of ethnos is especially important in their study, such that we may refer to a basic Chinese cultural "ethos of ethnos" that was part of the openness, organizational refinement and intricacy, and adaptability of the Overseas Chinese social system.</p> <p>This brings out the central dilemma of the study of ethno-culture--the problem of determining the appropriate criteria for drawing the line between what constitutes an ethnic group, or an ethnic phenomena, or an ethnic category or identity, and what is constitutive of genuinely cultural ethos and difference, cultural traits, orientation and tradition.</p> <p>Anthropologists have typically treated culture in a nominal manner as if it were some kind of boundable entity, a group, an organization of meaning and value that endures through time and that evolves according to its own internal logic--while ethnicity has remained somewhat of a sociological aspect, a process of intergroup identification and ascription, reference and boundary-maintenance.</p> <p>Ethnicity is commonly associated with a chauvinistic kind of pride--the ethnocentric pride in the superiority of one's own way of life over others, and, as well is commonly conflated with fallacious and fictitious ideologies of racial origins and biological difference. Culture is typically treated as something which is more fundamental, and basic to humankind--it is social, it is universal, it is pervasive in all we do, it is largely out of awareness, and thus mostly transparent and invisible within ourselves. And yet ethnos and culture cannot be effectively separated in our analysis of human reality, as neither can we teeth out what are psychological variables, historical changes and continuities, and our own shared constructions of reality.</p> <p>Ethnos and Culture coexists along a common continuum, a continuum which is multidimensional and which is itself constituted by a complex relational dialectic between many mutually constraining factors and forces. This ethno-cultural continuum exists through real historical time, across real social space--it only exists because all people, as actors upon the same stage, face a common dilemma in transacting and negotiating the boundaries and areas of their realities with other, different peoples.</p> <p>Ethnoculture then, is the study of how people, their identity, their social positionality, their consciousness and outlook upon the world, are critically conditioned and constrained by their inevitable relationships with other peoples. It is a study of human difference, of how such difference can be constitutive of both unity and diversity, cooperativeness and conflict, in the world.</p> <p>Ethnoculture is also a study in how we become shaped by the many influences of the social world that we live within, and how, in turn, we come to shape that world. Finally, Ethnoculture is also a critically reflexive study of the relative limits of our knowledge of both others and of ourselves in the social world--just as we cannot clearly disentangle where the study of ethnos ends and the understanding of culture begins, so too we cannot finally say where ends the problematic understanding of ourselves and where begins the unproblematic study of others.</p> <p>The understanding of Peranakan ethnoculture cannot be had outside of its broader 'traditional' Southeast Asian context. It shares many of the continuities that are distinctive of Southeast Asian civilization. Civilization is here taken to be a trans-cultural and pan-human process of historical development--a process which is socially and culturally integrative and interregional in scope. Certain general cultural style-patterns are associated with particular instances of civilization, as are particular incidences of "Great Men" or genius whose innovativeness and spirit serve to characterize the style-patterning of the age. The civilizing process consists of a structural dialectic of emergent complexity in interregional systems, a dialectic involving social, political, economic, religious and psychological factors. It involves increasing levels and areas of integration and increasing heterogeneity of socio-cultural transmission from local to regional and interregional to even global contexts, which result in stimulus generation of modified patterns at all levels of human organization. Processes of both exogenous, or external, acculturative influences of change, as well as internal, endogenous enculturative influences are involved in the construction and transmission of ethnoculture.</p> <p>Peranakan ethnoculture as both part of a wider confluence of Southeast Asian Civilization and as constituting a particular culture historical instance of typical, and in some ways, prototypical, Southeast Asian civilization, is the product of many diverse extraneous influences. Thus, Peranakan culture has its place within broader cultural and historical streams of the human world which deserve closer study and understanding.</p> <p> </p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Making of "Southeast Asia"</p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Southeast Asia remains one of the most heterogeneous, long settled, and most culturally, ethically, racially, linguistically and historically complicated regions in the World. Geographically, it has been conventionally divided between insular, or "Island Southeast Asia"-- including Malaysia, Borneo, Singapore, Brunei, and the vast arc of island archipelagos including Indonesia and the Philippines--and peninsular, or Mainland Southeast Asia--including Thailand, Burma, Kampuchea, Laos and Vietnam--reflecting another important contrast in the region between the maritime orientation of the many miles of shoreline and the 'mountain' orientation of the highlands. Strong culture historical reasons are sometimes given for including Sri Lanka, the Andamans, the Nicobars, Assam, Yunnan, Hainan, Formosa and even New Guinea and Madagascar, although these political entities are conventionally peripheral to the region circumscribed by the designation of Southeast Asia.</p> <p>There is a sense that words like Southeast Asia  name both more and less than the reality they are held to designate--more are the hidden implications of power and asymmetry between the namer and the named ; the less is the sense of "science fiction" that is created by the labeling process, the metaphorical allusions of exoticism, strangeness, and romance that accrete to such distant toponyms. "Thus in East and West alike the word "Asia" is really an equivoque. It has no fixed meaning--no clear-cut denotation--but it is extraordinarily rich in emotional conotations. Though these make it the despair of the logician, they enhance its value for the poet, the artist--and the politician." (J. Steadman, <u>The Myth of Asia,</u> 1969: 35)</p> <p>The term "Southeast Asia" leads to a reification and projection of a spurious sense of homogeneity, unity and boundedness onto the region it delimits on the globe, one that is actually as culturally diverse and complicated as it is historically entangled and unbounded--the cross-roads of the orient has long been a meeting place, and a region of cultural intermingling, between many different kinds of people, such that one will find anywhere one travels in Southeast Asia a profusion of different religions, ethnic identities, and cultural orientations within the same marketplace, within the same city limits, even under the same roof. Southeast Asia, from a regional perspective, becomes a veritable mosaic of human difference and variation.</p> <p>There are common themes in Southeast Asian life which confer an overall unity to the diversity of life found there. "Unity in diversity" is the predominant theme of Southeast Asian Studies. A vegetable culture, a bamboo culture, a rice and fish culture, a monsoon culture, a riverine culture--Southeast Asia can be characterized by its commonly shared characteristics which have helped to shape its lifeways. But also recurrent in the region are other general themes--the importance of maritime trade, the Chameleonness of identity, the relatively high status of women, the dialectical tension between the peoples of the highlands and the peoples of the lowlands, the role that great religions and indigenous spirituality has always played in the daily life of its peoples, the proximity and cultural appreciation of the natural world, the unifying role that the rivers and streams have long played in the integration of its areas, the outward looking orientation of its peoples, the periodic waves of acculturative change that have occasionally swept through the region, and the autochthonous origins and deep sense of cyclical, rhythmical time of ancient, traditional civilizations.</p> <p>Such common themes amount to no more than the reiteration of trite truisms whose substantive basis is not apparent until one has lived and traveled within Southeast Asia among Southeast Asians. In claiming that the Southeast Asian setting, its nature, its geography, its climate, has had an important shaping influence upon Southeast Asian culture and character is to risk falling back into an old argument about environmental determinism.</p> <p>But the influence is there, and has been remarked upon in reference to the use of space and geographical orientation among the Balinese; the ritual ecologies of New Guinea highlanders or the Rhade of the Vietnamese highlands; the thematic recurrence of nature symbolism in Vietnamese literature and poetry, art and music; the spiritual animism of the Dayaks of Borneo; in the cultural ecology of highlanders throughout the region; in the ecology of rice among the Thais and the Javanese, etc. Many other examples can be found to attest to the direct symbolic role and value that nature and the natural environment has played in influencing the aesthetic sensitivities and religious sensibilities of the peoples of Southeast Asia.</p> <p>Perhaps it is because nature in this tropical setting is so intrusive in virtually every part of one's life--whether it is a morning parade of ants through the halls of one's home, a resident "chi chak" in one's kitchen sink or six inch long centipede in one's outhouse sink, the encroaching jungle growth that appears in every crack of the sidewalk, the torrents of rain that fall endlessly from the high clouds, the monitor lizard in the parking lot of a major university. One cannot easily escape the direct contact with nature that living in a Southeast Asian setting brings.</p> <p>Not all Southeast Asians are equally and unequivocally lovers of nature or conscientious conservationists of the region's natural resources--irreversible destruction of many primeval forest habitats continues at a ceaseless and alarming rate. Many people in their daily activities and attitudes evince little concern or appreciation of their natural environment. And yet many of the most basic cultural patterns which predominate in Southeast Asia can be found to have direct linkages with the natural tropical habitat.</p> <p>What is commonly referred to in the literature as the traditional, interregional system of Southeast Asian civilization, must be seen as a structurally and socially persistent patterning, constrained by its ball and chain mountain, maritime and tropical cultural geography, of the <u>organization of diversity</u>--diversity that is ecological, economic and ethnic. The principle of ethnos lies at the base of Southeast Asian cultural identity. Social organization based upon such a principle of ethnos, is characteristically of a "plural" and culturally heterogeneous society. Indeed, the ethnic concept of "pluralism" was coined by J. S. Furnival in reference to Southeast Asia.</p> <p>.i.D. E. Brown; (<u>Principles of Social Structure</u>, 1976) notes seven conditions necessary for the maintenance of radically plural societies which are typical of Southeast Asian settings: 1. continuity of stable economic and ecological conditions (ibid., pp. 82); 2. Relative isolation of the radically plural society from other similar sized but differently structured societies (ibid., p. 85-6); Demographic ratios between ruling and rule should be maintained or change in favor of the ruling elite (ibid., p. 86); Social identities and boundaries are maintained by generalizing differences across all spheres--religious, familial, educational, occupational, economic, etc.--thus restricting inter-group acculturation and mobility (ibid., p 87); Symbiotic relations offering primary compensations for the subordinate minority and religious or ideological orientations offering deferred compensations are encouraged (ibid., p. 88); The corporate exclusiveness, superior organization, solidarity and cohesion of the ruling group should be systematically promoted (ibid., p. 88); Authority should be sacralized and legitimated by an inclusive cult offering compensation in another life or advocating withdrawal from worldly affairs. (ibid., p. 90).</p> <p>The basic model of corporate social structure based upon the principle of ethnos implied by this formal paradigm is held to characterize the developmental dynamics of typically Southeast Asian civilization from its first prehistoric inception perhaps as long ago as several thousands of years until today. It is a model in which numerous, relatively homogenous, local groups came into increasing contact with one another, and with extra-regional peoples, and in the resulting processes of intercultural contact and transmission, there developed increasing levels of heterogeneity and socio-structural complexity. This model is held to be critically linked to the development of the economic exploitation of the entire region, and the emergence of an increasingly complex interregional system, based upon commerce and hinterland exploitation, in which local peoples were to become increasingly integrated and more culturally sophisticated and cosmopolitan.</p> <p>Civilization is thus also held to be a developmental process of interregional integration, represented by increasing levels of complexity of socio-political organization, increasing economic integration and exploitation, and the increasing influence of religious ideas and orientations upon the social organization.</p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Nanyang Network</p> </b> <p>Of course, the history of the so-called "Straits Settlements in which the Baba's are mostly associated, is but one small chapter, one small part of the total Southeast Asian tapestry. These settlements, including Singapore, Malacca, Penang, as well as the major port and inland cities of Java, are the principle centers for the development of Baba and Peranakan culture, which spread outwardly into the hinterland regions of the various provinces of peninsular Malaysia and insular Indonesia.</p> <p>The Chinese presence in Southeast Asia, or what is known among the Chinese as the South Sea, or Nanyang, dates back to before Christ. Long present in the Southeast Asian setting, they have always been there as merchants, travelers, ex-patriots seeking refuge. The Chinese of the Nanyang have long been the classic "sojourning entrepreneurs" seeking their fortunes in foreign lands. Sojourning involves migration of men and the remittances of money back to the homeland--the Overseas Chinese, no matter how far the traveled or how long away, never really forgot their original ties back in their homeland--among the Nanyang Chinese it also involved local, overseas organization for the mobilization of men, resources, capital and money. "The sojourning pattern is found centuries back in Asia within China, between China and Southeast Asia, and within Southeast Asia..." (John T. Omohundro, "Trading Pattern of Philippine Chinese: Strategies of Sojourning Middlemen, in <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction inSoutheastAsia</u>1977:113-4). Long present in Southeast Asia, perhaps as early as the first century A.D., and certainly by the fifth, the early Chinese communities were considered 'transient' and not well organized. Early Nanyang contacts in Southeast Asia were primarily colonial, mercantile and maritime. Undoubtedly many of these first sojourners were 'pirate-traders' issuing from the sea coasts of southeastern China, as well as part of the regular Southward bound excess of human population thrown off by perennial political turmoil in the Great Agrarian State.</p> <p>Political and social pressures beginning far to the North in China had long had a rippling effect that stimulated an ever southward movement of Chinese and their civilization. When during their march south reached the South China Sea, they found land routes cut off to their advance, these same peoples took to the seas in expanding economic, versus territorial, frontiers. The closing of the southern borders with the newly won independence of Vietnam in the Ninth Century, and the gradual shift of commerce from Haiphong to the major port cities of Southeastern China, led to a growing maritime exodus and exchange of Chinese peoples over the whole of the Nanyang. Subsequent periods of migration of Nanyang Chinese are considered like 'waves' that fanned out from Southeastern China and swept across the entire Southeast Asian region and beyond.</p> <p>From the Tang and Sung Dynastic periods, circa the Seventh through the Tenth Centuries, in which foreign trade in China became a more important source of revenue, there is an emergence of a somewhat separate and distinct merchant class--a successful and wealthy bourgeoisie that did not fit into the traditional Chinese Mandarin system.</p> <p>The design and construction of more sea-worthy, deep-draft junks allowed the Chinese to venture further a field from the coastlines to which they previously clung so closely. This phase represented the early "tribute-bearing/junk-trade" missions that helped to establish Chinese political authority, as distant as it was, as well as to secure much prized exotic trade goods. This period most notably climaxed with the voyages of Imperial Eunoch Cheng Ho, who in command of a fleet of more than sixty large junks carrying more than thirty-thousand soldiers, resulted in the conquest of many kingdoms, establishment of Imperial Chinese influence and presence in the Nanyang, as well as in the founding of the trading port of Malacca in 1408.</p> <p>The next phase of Chinese activity in the Nanyang is linked to the political ascendancy of the Manchus over the Ming Dynasty--the "contact period" is marked by the introduction of European interests in the region, inaugurated by the capture of Malacca by the Portuguese only one hundred years after its founding, and cumulatively increasing competition for control over the region. Official Chinese interest in the Nanyang was withdrawn, and Chinese immigration to the Nanyang was even banned under penalty of execution. Thus, Chinese subsequently migrating to the Nanyang, from the mid-seventeenth until the early nineteenth centuries, were those who were politically oriented away from Manchu China, and who sought refuge in the Chinese communities of the Nanyang.</p> <p>Though European domination in Southeast Asia subordinated the role of the Chinese, it opened up new and lucrative niches for economic development in expanding colonial markets, and stimulated new waves of economic migration to the Nanyang which the Europeans hardly controlled, and in some cases even promoted.</p> <p>The Chinese, as a pariah class, provided an important linkage in the articulation of the colonial system of resource exploitation--they became the inveterate merchant-middlemen/money-lenders. They became agricultural pioneers of the tropical frontiers, miners, small planters, and overseers. They came to occupy the middle positions of the colonial administrative apparatus. They were also the source of a bottomless supply of cheap coolie labor, easily mobilizable, transportable, extremely adaptable to adverse environments and difficult circumstances.</p> <p>Among the Chinese, a veritable Nanyang empire developed--a vast network through which the movement of labor, finance, capital and commerce was facilitated by a wide range of interlinked exchange agencies and agents at every level and in every niche of the Southeast Asian setting. The relative mobility of "capital and labor increases Chinese responsiveness to market fluctuations, allowing them to bail out quickly from failures and capitalize fully on fleeting opportunities." (John T. Omohundro, 1977:117)</p> <p>The Nanyang of this period continued to prosper in the area of trade and finance to the point that it gained virtual monopolies over many sectors and areas of the Southeast Asian interregional economy--particularly rice and metal. Many of their practices were extremely exploitative, and their success at the hands of European colonists was often strongly resented by indigenous peoples.</p> <p>As Nanyang civilization developed and grew more economically integrated, its agents grew increasingly situated by and entangled within local arrangements and became increasingly unable to uproot themselves in order to return to China. The line between sojournership and actual colonization was thus thin--as the ties to the homeland grew distant and were severed the Chinese who found themselves locally and regionally entangled within the Nanyang network, reoriented their outlook and attitude toward their local Southeast Asian context. The first thing they did was to send for their wives and children from China. First, brothers joined brothers, then "sisters" began increasingly to come and settle in Southeast Asia.</p> <p>The sex ratios of the Chinese communities, always male-biased, became stabilized by the late 19th Century, and this tended to stabilize the community, its Chinese identity and the 'transience' within it. The increasing presence of Chinese women in the Nanyang reversed the trend toward intermarriage with local people and led to the formation of a Chinese community which maintained its separate biological and cultural identity--Nanyang civilization, as a typically "Overseas Chinese" cultural orientation, became more "complete" (Yen Ching-Hwang, 1986)</p> <p>The Twentieth Century, modernization, and especially World War II, brought a change in the position of the Nanyang in Southeast Asia, but not an end to its Empire. New Nationalisms throughout Southeast Asia supported structural policies of enforced assimilation, systematic discrimination, ethnization, and even political persecution of the Chinese minorities of the Nanyang. In some aspects the Nanyang empire has been slowly melting, or eroding under the gradual, long term impetus of these policies. But the Chinese, and their position in the Southeast Asian economy, has proven difficult to replace.</p> <p>Crucial to the historical background of the Straits Settlements has been the larger context of the so-called "Nanyang"--the Overseas "Imperio im Imperium", or "Empire within an Empire," that extended Southeastward from the Southeast Coastline of China, throughout Southeast Asia, stretching across the Polynesian Pacific to eventually encompass the New World, the Imperial pathways of the British Commonwealth, spreading its net even into the Caribbean.</p> <p>The extensiveness of this economic empire is to be matched only by its subterrannium character, the entrepreneurial efficacy and savvy of its agents, and the strength of social ties which have so effectively held it together through more than a century and a half of persecution, discrimination, hardship and struggle. A gigantic iceberg--it rears its tiny head above the surface of the Pacific only in Singapore and Hong Kong. Long a two-headed dragon, it is soon to become only a single entity--Singapore--a strange feudalistic anachronism in a modern age of political capitalism and economic imperialism; a mercantile city-state; an island unto itself at the very tip of the Eurasian continent. But its influence is still strongly felt in almost every country bordering the Pacific, and in many beyond.</p> <p>In many respects representative of the unique cultural stylizations of the Nanyang world, the place and rise of the Babas as a distinctive cultural orientation, must be, more than any other single factor, fit within the framework of the development of Nanyang civilization--in many respects representative of the unique cultural stylizations of the Nanyang world. However Malayized the Babas might have become, they remained importantly, and distinctively, Chinese in orientation.</p> <p>It would serve well to briefly compare and contrast Nanyang culture and ethnicity with Baba ethnoculture. As an empire, the Nanyang is interregional, and incorporates a wide arc of humanity beneath its broad umbrella. Singapore has become the exclusive capital city of this empire, the central core of its civilization, and Singapore has also always been one of the principle places of the Straits Settlements.</p> <p>The Baba's, with their Western orientation, were the original founders of Singapore. They became the traditional ruling elite of the capital of the Nanyang, and it is in this way that the Baba culture has come to serve, somewhat ambivalently and ambiguously as an indirect cultural model for Nanyang civilization.</p> <p>But not all citizens of the Nanyang are or were Babas--most were not--and the Baba has been in the contemporary epoch a dying breed though important remnants of the Baba orientation remain with a strong Chinese identity, a Western outlook focused upon the British model, and strong ties to a local Southeast Asia cultural setting. What has been lost most from this orientation has been the Malayanized aspects that gave it a distinctive flavor and style.</p> <p>A model of the function of ethnos in the decision-making process of migration, identity and development that goes into the history of the making of Nanyang civilization is evident from the consideration of Baba culture in the larger context of the Nanyang--the Babas were a kind of pariah class created through cultural integration, acculturation, and amalgamation between Muslim Malays and Buddhist Chinese, in which basic differences in religious tenets precluded the kind of complete cultural assimilation that was possible in Thailand.</p> <p>Post-Independence Malaysia fostered strict policies of structural discrimination and segregation between the Malays and the Chinese--these policies led to the disintegration of the basis of Baba culture. Singapore, a Chinese city, gained its own independence from Malaysia, and, in the definition of its newfound national identity, excluded all that was Malay from its own identity. Those aspects of Baba culture which were Malay were cast out, leaving a gulf in its identity between the East and the West. At first it strongly oriented itself to the British model, and later has gone through a period of resinicization in renewing trade contacts with Taiwan.</p> <p>The situation for the Baba's of Malacca was just the reverse. The oldest Baba community, and in many respects the most Malayized, these people found themselves symbolically appropriated and at the same time enclaved as the museum pieces of Malaysian national heritage. They have since come to represent the archetypical Babas, though they were but a variant of a more general theme. These Babas had no option in the matter but to submit to their own cultural cooption by the Malays.</p> <p>In Penang, the next oldest Baba settlement, which remains more than 90% Chinese in composition, the pathway taken by the Baba communities was a bit more tragic. These Baba's strongly identified with the British, and were less Malayized than the Malacca Chinese. They initiated a separatist movement for Penang's status, similar to Singapore, but failed, not receiving the backing by the British.</p> <p>Ethnos can be seen as a principle determinant factor in the decisions and opportunities open to people in the course of their lives. People attempt to optimize their prospects, given alternative sets of possibilities, but these possibilities themselves are constrained within a larger, ethnically defined context, such that choices made are not unlimited, and vary considerably for different peoples.</p> <p>The Nanyang can be seen as a vast network of cris-crossing pathways which allow labor, resources and capital to move in different, frequently shifting, directions. Against systematic discrimination or persecution, Chinese are faced with a range of alternative choices--they can either opt to assimilate completely into the local population, become enclaved and ghettoized, segregated and discriminated against, migrate back to china or seek a new homeland in another part of the Nanyang. The flight of Capital from Hong Kong to the U.S., the Nanyang and the Commonwealth, is but one more example of this social historical movement of people, wealth, resources and culture.</p> <p>Which directions Chinese take will depend partly upon the dialect group--Cantonese will take Cantonese pathways, and Hokkiens will follow Hokkien roads. Not all Chinese of the Nanyang hold Singaporean culture to be the model or principle orientation of their lives. The Singaporeans have, by and large, been cut from their roots to the Chinese homeland, but many Chinese throughout the Nanyang, Malaysia included, have maintained these Ancestral ties for generations. Chinese may see Singapore symbolically as a success story, as a financial capital and trade center of the Nanyang, but they do not identify with the Anglicized, modernized Baba orientation of the Singaporean people--they look elsewhere for their models of Chineseness.</p> <p>The principle virtue and limitation of the Baba people are that they no longer live directly under their Ancestor's shadow. Singaporean culture is native to Singapore and the Straits, this is their homeland to which they are fixed. Chinese who have kept their ties to the mainland have other options open to them, but do not see Singapore or Singaporean culture as the primary alternative for their lives.</p> <p>The virtue of the larger Nanyang identity that depends upon its old identification with the mainland is that this permits the Chinese a relatively wide access to a number of possible alternatives--Chinese become united under a broader umbrella of pan-Chineseness which encompasses different dialect groups. Such Chinese are permitted to work together and even trust one another in contexts in which the only common bond may be a superficial knowledge of Mandarin. This latitude is an advantage of maintaining a Nanyang orientation not permitted to the Babas.</p> <p>The principle of the cultural models of ethnos in providing options and in constraining the directions of decision-making in peoples' lives is an important one. We can see that such ethnos is always defined vis-a' vis reference or counter-reference groups--for the Singaporeans, the Malays are a counter-reference other, and constitute the greatest threat to their separate identity. On the other hand, the British model has served as the principle reference group for these peoples. Other models are available to other Chinese--some may still look to the mainland, others to the Nationalist Government of Taiwan. Many undoubtedly see their successful cousins in the United States and the Commonwealth. Many are likely to follow those who came before them.</p> <p>Perhaps the greatest illusion that a Westerner could entertain with regard to the Chinese is that they are all basically the same. The very basis of ethnic Chinese identity is its cross-cutting "nesting" of identities within a larger network of social distinctions on the basis of village, clan, kin-group, dialect, class, age, etc. Every Chinese has a place within the vast theater, and every Chinese is supposed to know this place. Indeed, ethnos, or ethnicity, for the ethnic Chinese is the primary organizational principle of their society. Chinese typically draw fine distinctions between other Chinese which are invisible to Non-Chinese eyes.</p> <p>Intra-ethnic Chinese distinctions have been referred to as "subethnic" identities based upon local-linguistic-ethnic distinctions. It is highly ascriptive in character, being linked to the strong patrilineal reckoning of Chinese kinship.</p> <p>Chinese successfully exploited this organizational ethos of ethnos in navigating and negotiating several different status-role identities within more than one organizational structure. They thrive on a fundamental status ambiguity, inter-positionality between structures, and a kind of Chameleoness of code-switching, which would befuddle others.</p> <p>Chinese may well be one big family, but it is a family divided under one roof. The terminological distinctions made in kinship reckoning are fine and of massive detail. It is fitting that both Chinese Heaven and Hell are vast multi-tiered bureaucratic structures occupied by greater and lesser gods. Clan organization and a segmentary lineage structure facilitates mobilization as well as fine-tuning of internal differentiations. Trade associations, secret societies, Kong si's, all cross cut Clan and lineage structures to weave Chinese into a closely knit social cloth.</p> <p align="center"><b>Mestizo Chinese</p> </b> <p>The formation of the Baba culture may have been unique in Southeast Asian History, but cultural correlates are to be found in other places and other periods of the Nanyang. The mestizo Chinese of the Philippines, distinguishable there since the eighteenth century, have made important contributions to the historical development of the Philippines--being principally implicated in the Philippine Revolution against the Spanish, serving as a major catalyst in social change and economic development of the Philippines, and a leading component in the hispanization and creation of a distinctive Filipino culture. Structurally similar to the Baba's, they constituted a pariah group situated between the ethnically stronger Chinese and the indigenous Philippinos. "....in most parts of Southeast Asia the Chinese <u>mestizos</u> (to use the Philippine term for persons of mixed Chinese-native ancestry) have not been formally or legally recognized as a separate group--one whose membership is strictly defined by genealogical considerations rather than by place of birth, and one which, by its possession of a unique combination of cultural characteristics, could be easily distinguished from both the Chinese and native communities." (E. Wickberg, "The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History", in <u>Journal of Southeast Asian History,</u> Vol. 5, no 1, 1964) These Chinese mestizos had become prominent in land-holding, whole-sale merchant activities, and in the professions. They grew in wealth as a middle-man pariah class, concentrating and virtually monopolizing on the internal trade of the Philippines.</p> <p>The Chinese mestizo of the Philippines was strongly hispanicized, politically, in the adoption of Catholicism, in the adoption of Philippine versions of Hispanic culture. Their dress was unique in this regard--"models of what the urbanized Filipino of the late nineteenth century would wear." (ibid. p. ?) Their culture was an urbanized one, and the maternal influence hispanicized, catholicized mothers in the rearing and socialization of the children, were important factors in the development of the cultural distinctiveness of the Chinese mestizo.</p> <p><b>Me’tis Chinois'</p> </b> <p>The Chinese presence in Cambodia and Cochin China, or what later became South Vietnam, has been very old. Early evidence from the eleventh and twelfth centuries A.D. mention the presence of a small Chinese community in Anghor Thom, merchants and carpenters who came by sea and who married local women. By the thirteenth century, a substantial Chinese settlement in Phnom-Penh is noted, and the emergence of this center from a locally oriented one to a major foreign trade entrepot, coincides with this settlement. Chinese communities were found there by the Spanish and later by the Portuguese in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Cantonese mercenaries in the service of the Annamese emperor established a fort at Mytho along the Mekong.</p> <p>After more than a century of occupation, these Chinese were later forced to abandon this settlement and migrated to the location near Saigon that later became known as Cholon, "...and soon established a trading town that soon became the centre of Chinese trade for the whole of Indochina. Many of these Chinese adventurers married Annamese women and produced the Minh-Huong, the Sino-Annamese who were treated as a separate minority group throughout the nineteenth century in Annam and Cochinchina, and who, for a short period, constituted a separate legal group in Cambodia as well." (W. E. Willmott;, "History and Sociology of the Chinese in Cambodia Prior to the French Protectorate", in <u>The Journal of Southeast Asian History </u>,Vol. 7, no. 1, 1966)</p> <p>By the time of the arrival of French and British explorers, Phnom-Penh was mostly a Chinese city, composed primarily of immigrants from Cholon, and who had tied up the local trade in fish and rice. These Chinese were probably mostly Cantonese and Hainanese, the descendants of Ming patriots.</p> <p>Reference is made in the legal code of the Khmer Kingdom to granting of positions of authority over the Chinese community to "me'tis-chinois" (Lecle're, 1898:115). Chinese were not subject to the legal marriage prohibitions between Cambodian Buddhists and foreigners--perhaps because they were Buddhist as well, and because it was relatively easy for a Chinese to assimilate, if he so desired, into Cambodian society--"Any Chinese born in Cambodia was considered a Cambodian if he adopted Khmer customs and dress...Sino-Khmer were automatically Cambodians" (ibid, pg. 31)</p> <p><b>Thai-Chinese</p> </b> <p>The Chinese in Thailand represent another instance of partial assimilation and the formation of an important pariah group. Constituting perhaps an eighth of the total population, they are small traders and merchant middlemen--"virtually any article bought or sold in Thailand passes through the hands of one or more Chinese middlemen." (Richard Coughlin, <u>Double-Identity</u> 1960: 2). Chinese traders in Thailand date back at least to the thirteenth century. A French account from 1687 reports about 3,000 Chinese at Ayuthia. By this time, the Chinese controlled most of the trade in the country. A Teochiu Chinese, Taksin, rose to power as the King of Siam after expelling Burmese invaders who had destroyed the capital. The predominant presence of Teochiu Chinese in Thailand is probably related to this important historical episode. Taksin was assassinated by his son-in-law, Chao Phya Chakkri, who founded the present Bangkok Dynasty. The royal palace was established in the old Chinese quarter of the city, "ruled by a rich Chinese merchant with the noble rank of Phraya."</p> <p>Continual warfare with Burma and Cambodia had decimated the Thai population, and thus Chinese immigration was welcome--"Meanwhile a war-surplus of females became available to the bachelor (or otherwise) Chinese immigrants, and Chinese blood was literally fused with both the royal and common blood of the Thai people" (Joseph P. L. Jiang, "The Chinese in Thailand: Past and Present", in <u>The Journal of Southeast Asian History, </u>Vol. 7, no. 1, 1966:42)</p> <p>Chinese figured prominently in the economic development of Thailand--they held many 'tax-farms' and controlled the junk trade which was held by a royal monopoly on foreign commerce. They constituted artisans, craftsmen, metal smiths, builders, as well as mining, planting and timber.</p> <p>Chinese-Thai intermarriage was great in old Siam, and there seems to have been no boundaries or discrimination against such amalgamation. The net effect seems to have been near complete assimilation of Chinese by the third or fourth generation, with only some Chinese cultural elements, such as ancestor worship, remaining. "Since the earliest times prominent Chinese were often recruited to governmental, especially diplomatic service. The majority of these were second generation, and were more than half assimilated...(ibid, pg. 51)</p> <p>The status of the Nanyang Chinese in Thailand was directly tied to Thai tributary tutelage to Mainland China, and to their usefulness to both the Thai royalty and to the Thai people in economic activities. The Chinese were not discriminated against, and were given virtually free and ungoverned reign in their own spheres of activity, and yet the Chinese were clearly made politically subordinate to the Royalty.</p> <p>They filled a critical, intermediary niche as a pariah group that was not traditionally a part of Thai social structure, but which was necessary and vital to the economic development of old Siam. With the encroachment of Western domination over China, its loss of status to the Thai Royalty signaled a reversal in the status of the Chinese in Thailand, so much so that by the early 20th Century we find mention of the Chinese of Thailand as "Asian Jewry" and the promotion of Thai nationalism, an orientation inherited from the West, is closely linked to growing anti-sinicism. Policies of enforced assimilation of the ethnic Chinese into Thai culture--"Thai-ification"--and of systematic discrimination against the Chinese in business and public life, have grown and continue unabated until today.</p> <p><b>Burmese-Chinese</p> </b> <p>The Chinese in Burma; are not outstanding in the History of the Nanyang. Burma shares a common border with Mainland China, and this has constrained status of the overseas Chinese there in important ways that the Chinese of Burma have not been ignorant in taking advantage. Though highly visible in many sectors of the economy, they were never as economically predominant there as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, in part because they had close competition with Indian merchants. Victor Purcell notes that intermarriage between Chinese men and Burmese women was not uncommon, and that the male offspring of such unions remained identified as Chinese, while the female offspring become identified as Burmese. He goes on to remark that Chinese there become almost completely assimilated by the second or third generation, losing all their Chineseness--thus, despite a continual influx of new Chinese immigrants into Burma, the total number of people identified as Chinese there remains effectively stable.</p> <p><b>"Borneo" Chinese</p> <p></b>Evidence supports the possible presence of Chinese upon the island of Borneo from as early as the 7th Century, and possibly even earlier, with archaeological evidence dating to 117B.C., upon an old site in the region now occupied by Brunei and Sarawak. (Victor Purcell, 1966:11) Early Chinese Chronicles of the Liang(502-566) and Sui(589-618) Dynasties mention "P'oli", known since the Tang(618-907) Dynasty onwards as "P'oni" and thought to be the early name for Brunei, had given a description of its direction and of it's inhabitants which fit well that of Borneo. Later Chronicles mention the same kingdom comprising fourteen provinces extending along the northern Borneo coastline and as far as the Philippines. (John Chin, <u>The Sarawak Chinese</u> 1981:1-2)</p> <p>Assimilation of Chinese, of ulu-traders, in Borneo has been held to have been widespread. Rates of intermarriage with native Dusun and Sulu peoples were probably high. The Chinese have long figured in the "ulu" trade and resource exploitation of Borneo, as well as in its mining and agricultural pioneering. An Early Kong Si system provided the organizational base for the mobilization of labor and resources in the development of trade and resource production in Borneo. Trade networks with indigenous peoples brought them into continuous contacts and interactions with these peoples, as these people grew accustomed to their goods and their presence. Chinese now comprise a significant minority in Borneo, comprising most of the ethnic-dialect groups representing the Overseas Chinese. Intermarriage with local wives was frequent, especially in the earlier periods, in part because of the male-biased sex ratio among the Chinese, and because such conjugal unions facilitated economic relations with the indigenous peoples. More recently, such intermarriage is virtually nonexistent, in either urban or rural segments of Chinese society, and "Peranakans" of means are remarrying back into "pure" Chinese society. "When it does occur it reflects the low status of the individual involved and his difficulty in finding an acceptable mate within the bounds of his own ethnic group." (David Fortier, "The Chinese in North Borneo", 1957:16-7)</p> <b> <p>Peranakans/Babas</p> </b> <p>The Peranakan Chinese of Indonesia, "Peranakan" meaning literally "mixed blood", are the group most closely related to the Baba's. They are virtually identical in many cultural aspects, and yet they have had different histories and different trajectories of development. Both groups are principally Hokkien Chinese, both groups have assimilated similar elements of Malayo-Indonesian culture, and yet both groups looked to different European Colonial masters for their primary orientation in the modern world. The demographic profiles of the .Peranakans of Indonesian; and the Babas of Malaysia are substantially different--while the Nanyang Chinese of Malaysia constitute about 40% of the national population, being the largest group of overseas Chinese, the Baba's represent only a small minority of the Chinese. On the other hand, the Chinese of Indonesia, while almost as numerous as the Malaysian Chinese, constitute only about 3% of the total population of Indonesia. But on the Island of Java, where the Nanyang Chinese are most numerous, the Peranakans constitute over 50% of the overseas Chinese. Enforced segregation, a policy begun with the Dutch, has long served to mark off and isolate the Chinese communities in Indonesia. The principle division there is between the Totok or Singkeh Chinese, and the Peranakan, or "mixed-blood" or "Indonesian born" Chinese. More than 85% of the Peranakans are to be found in Java, concentrated in the main urban centers. The Peranakans were Hokkien descent, while the Totoks who came later were primarily Cantonese.</p> </font><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4">II</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial" size="5"><a name="BirthBabas">The Birth of the Babas</a></font> </b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The Babas of Malaysia and Singapore and the Peranakans of Indonesia share a common kind of Creole orientation in a local and regional context. Their communities constitute local variations upon a shared cultural continuum, the limits and dimensionality of which are, broadly speaking, the function of a style of accommodation and a kind of broader acculturation. These communities all share basic, derivative and distinctive cultural correlates within a similar, regionally defined culture-historical framework, which can be treated in a comparative manner and can be used as a relative index of acculturative influence, cultural change and continuity, as well as the basis for the construction of a hypothetical, prototypical ethnocultural and ethnohistorical baseline by which a broader, deeper culture historical understanding can be derived.</p> <p>Issues of ethnoculture and ethnohistory cannot be clearly separated, especially in regard to such groups as the Babas and Nonyas whose social organization, ethnic identity, history, and culture appear to be inextricably interrelated in such a way that we cannot analytical separate out for study one dimension without becoming entangled in all the other dimensions of study.</p> <p>An attempt to write an ethno-historiography in recognition of these inherent complexities constitutes an attempt to combine stylistic elements of ethnographic description and ethnological explanation with other stylistic elements of historiographic narrative and chronology, as well as an attempt to effectively integrate macroscopic dimensions of culture historical and political economic proportions with microscopic dimensions of human participants making human decisions and mistakes in everyday situations. In this regard, the key linkage is held to be the effective context of the small group network --at which level of analysis individual decision-making becomes bound to and critically constrained by small group-dynamics, values, group incentives and cultural constraints.</p> <p>Such small, sub-cultural groupings are not strictly molecular in their structural organization--they are cellular in possessing semi-permeable boundaries and osmotic qualities which allow a certain amount and kind of crossing over. These boundaries are defined, refined and revised in relation to other such groupings, to individuals' reference points, and to larger social contexts of participation and historical events.</p> <p>They are symbolic as well, being more the nature of maze-ways and maps, passageways, doors and keys, defined by elements of language, nonverbal communication, social positionality, world-view, cultural orientation and models, which individuals learn to navigate their relationships with different people. Such boundaries are rarely static and are always socially, psychologically and culture historically dynamic. They are negotiated, transformed, maintained, etc., through our ongoing interrelatedness with others.</p> <p>Ethnicity has come to encompass a variety of different meanings--ethnos, ethnic identity, classification, ethnic studies, ethnogeny, the nexus of "race, culture, ethnic groupings and nationalities", as structuralist "ethnic boundaries" rooted in "eco-niches", competitive exclusion for resources, social or material, social stratification, ethno-religious value orientation, and ethno-political ideology and ethnic group organization and mobilization.</p> <p>There is intrinsic to the understanding of ethnicity created in plural social settings, the notion of ethnarchy, the ethnic stratification of communally ordered societies involving unequal "majority/minority" relations and internal/external colonization of groups, social and structural discrimination, of interregional or world systems framework which defines structural and social asymmetries between core, semi-periphery and peripheral regions. There are also acculturation perspectives that deal with analytical problems of social integration, amalgamation, assimilation, accommodation as well as problems of transmission, mobility, and stratification.</p> <p>Then there is labeling theory, which focuses upon the foundation and effects of ethnic stereotyping and labeling in maintaining social distance, thresholds and barriers between groups. A symbolic approach views the ethno-historical repository and revitalization of symbols of ethnic identity and ethnic group solidarity, which may be used differentially in different periods and places to configure and reconfigure identities of difference and sameness.</p> <p>A Marxist theory of "ethnikos" defines an ethnic community, "or ethos in a narrow sense of the word", "as a historically formed aggregate of people who share common, relatively stable specific features of culture (including language) and psychology, realization of their unity and distinctiveness from other similar aggregates of people as well as the self-nomination." (Yu V. Bromley, <u>On the Typology of Ethnic Communities,</u>1978:18) Ethnikos is not an isolated phenomena, but occurs in a nexus of several levels of social institutionalization "from family to state". "The combination of ethnic properties with social properties as such depends, to a certain extent, on the spatial parameters of ethnikos, on a compact or scattered distribution of the bearers of ethnic properties themselves." (ibid., pg. 18)</p> <p>This definition of ethnikos fits the general problem of ethnicity within a larger political economic and social systems framework. Immanuel Wallerstein does not distinguish between "nations, nationalities, peoples, ethnic groups,", but all these terms "denote variants of a single phenomenon" which he refers to as "ethno-nations" which are identifiable by their articulatory function within the world economy as a whole.</p> <p>We may extend and modify this thesis somewhat to say that such ethnikos fits within variable levels of familial, local, provincial, state, regional, interregional and global systems, all of which are interrelated. Ethnikos must always be framed within a larger structure of social interaction--ethnic analysis must take into account the relative positioning, and inter-positionality of both individuals and communities within these different systemic levels. Immanuel Wallerstein distinguishes between ranges of interest and interaction within the core, periphery and semi-periphery. "The meaning of ethnic consciousness in a core area is considerably different from that of ethnic consciousness in a peripheral area precisely because of the different class positions such ethnic groups have in a world economy." (I. Wallerstein, <u>The Capitalist World Economy</u>, 1979:pg. 24-5)</p> <p>The ethnic identity of the Overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia is within a semi-peripheral social position, in which consciousness is "inter-class" and therefore inherently ambiguous in its relative juxtapositioning between core and periphery. From the perspective of the periphery, it shares features of the core. From the standpoint of the core, it shares aspects of the periphery. Structurally and socially, therefore, the ethnic status identity of the Chinese of the Nanyang is inherently ambivalent and problematic, an ambiguity which reverberates upon all levels of its articulatory functioning.</p> <p>The problematic function and dilemma of this ethnic consciousness is to span and effectively resolve this dilemma. We may refer to this as a process of ethnization---as a mode of social production, as an ideological mode of information, and as a dialectical mode of "ethnic realization."--it is an open-ended historical process in its extension, reapplication to historically situated and particular phenomena, and thus accretes new meanings and a transformational base for its growth and development as a distinctive ethno-cultural phenomena. It becomes a referential and organizational metaphor as well--realities and issues become ethnicized when cast in the terminology of an "ethnical language game". Ethnic groups, boundaries, identities and categories become, to some extent, phenomena of reification which the researcher takes part in reinforcing--such reified ideas and words then take a life and history of their own.</p> <p>We must also refer to an ethnic style or stylization which is distinctive and culture historically unique, and which may also be quite adaptive in functional integration within a given social context.</p> <p>We must see the process of ethnization and stylization from both an etic and emic point of view, as dialectically interdependent and systematic, and involving processes which are both endogenous and exogenous, internal and external, in origin and orientation.</p> <p>Ethnarchy carries the connotation of hierarchy within a communalistic framework--stratification which has structurally variable social, psychological, political, economic, religious and cultural dimensions--which may be expressed or emphasized differentially in the process of ethnization. Furthermore, ethnarchy in ethnization also implies a process of colonial institutionalization, or 'colonization'--implying the function of "social distance" in the political control of identity and practice <u>primarily for economic interests and intentions.</u> Social distance as a mechanism for ethnic stratification also involves the notion of group 'boundary' maintenance.</p> <p>Interethnic conflict in Malaysia between Chinese and Malays can be seen as an effective smoke-screen for the maintenance of intra-group vertical stratification, and for the protection and promotion of the interests and prerogatives of an exclusive elite. There is a hidden 'elite-mass' dimension to the communal policies and politics of ethnic difference. Economically, as defined by the class relations of a common market place, a hierarchy of interests is effectively masked by ethnic stratification. The existential realities of both Chinese and Malays are rooted in the same economic dilemmas of underdevelopment and structural poverty.</p> <p>Political power and economic advantage exist in a socio-structural dialect--access to resources, opportunities, skills and incentives underly empowerment and political organization--and political legitimacy and mobilization in turn decisively determines and critically conditions economic change, development and differential access to resources.</p> <p>In Nanyang social structure, the path to leadership lay through social influence obtained through economic achievement and acquisition. Political privilege in turn increases wealth and prestige. "The circle was complete..." (John Chin;, 1981: 79) From the standpoint of the structural efficacy of power, ethnic labels "conceal the underlying struggle for the appropriation of certain economic, political, and social advantages among the different racial and status groups in the wider Malaysian society...(Lawrence K. L. Siaw, <u>The Legacy of Malaysian Chinese Social Structure)</p> </u> <p>As merchant middlemen, the Chinese were focused upon the Southeast Asian marketplace and market economy. They came to depend upon what Max Weber has called the critical market "moment" of class advantage in the buying and selling of commodities. As such, they were a marginal minority, articulating and mediating different levels of the political-economic structure of Southeast Asian society.</p> <p>Their place within a developing Southeast Asian context was pivotal--existing for purposes of social stability and for buffering in conflict-laden tensions between core and periphery, elite and masses. It is bought off from the top, and becomes the scape-goat for tension from the bottom--it is therefore caught in the classic dilemma of the double-bind, depending for its very ethnic identity on structural processes and positions which threaten that identity. It becomes both exploiter and exploited, without political legitimacy or independence, a commercial-urban middle-stratum containing social pressures towards social integration and homogenization, in a marginally discontinuous position rendering them constantly vulnerable to conflict or confiscation.</p> <p> </p> </font><b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Baba Beginnings</p> </b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>The Babas of Malaysia commonly referred to themselves as Peranakan, and even though among Malays this may have had derogative connotations of "mixed" or impure blood, the Baba's were proud of their heritage and of their name. John Clammer notes that Peranakan "is the Malay designation for 'local-born people'"(1980:3) According to Tan Giok-San who wrote the first comprehensive ethnography of the Peranakans of Indonesia, the word "peranakan" is derived from the Malayo-Indonesian root "anak", meaning child, with the prefix "per" and suffix "an", rendering the meaning "born of"(1963:pg. 11). In modern medical terminology, "peranakan" is the part of the female anatomy closely describing the uterus. (Wazir Jahan Karim, "Prelude to Madness: The Language of Emotion in Courtship and Early Marriage" in <u>Emotions of Culture: A Malay Perspective</u>, edited by Wazir Jahan Karim, 1990:49) "Malay midwives describe it as the place in the abdomen where 'the foetus clings' and the baby begins to grow. Hence it is closely associated with blood, semen and fertilization, in the sense that a foetus is recognized to develop from a clot of blood after fertilization takes place." (ibid. pg. 49-50) Peranakan Indonesia or Peranakan Malaysia refers to "born of Indonesia" or "born of Malaysia" respectively. It came to have the euphemistic connotation of "mixed-blood" and was applied to any native-born who were of mixed descent--Arab Peranakan, Chinese Peranakan, Dutch Peranakan, Jawi Peranakan, etc. It seems as though the Chinese Peranakan, always a significant, if not a preponderant, minority, appropriated the term as their own.</p> <p>The terms Baba and Nonya, or Nyonya or Nona, are often applied to the Peranakans, particularly of the Straits Settlements. These terms mean "Man" or "mister" and "Woman" or "Mrs." or "Miss," and carry the connotation of "Gentleman" and "Lady." Again, according to Tan, Indonesian kin-terms used by elderly women, referring to Child's spouse, were sexually marked-- "<u>Babah mantu"</u> (Daughter's husband) and "<u>Njonja mantu"</u> (Son's wife) (Tan Giok-lan, 1963:pg. 125). One can only speculate whether the terms Baba and Nonya became marked for those of mixed marriage between Chinese and Malayo-Indonesians, and thus appropriated by the Peranakans to refer to the male and female spouses of such marriages.</p> <p>J. D. Vaughn, in his early work <u>The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements</u>(1879) traces the etymology of the word Baba; as the a term used by Bengali descendents to designate European children, "and it is probable that the word was applied by the Indian convicts at Pinang to Chinese children and so came into general use." (reprint,1971: 2) R. J. Wilkinson held that Baba was a descriptive name for "European, Eurasian and Chinese males to distinguish them from men born in Europe and China", and "Descriptive name applied to male Straits-born Chinese."(R. J. Wilkinson, <u>A Malay-English Dictionary</u>, 1959: 50) Kobayashi Shinsaku; has speculated that Baba may have been a corruption of the Malay word for father, Bapa, employed as an honorific for the peranakans of Java. (Kobayashi Shinsaku, <u>Shina Minzoku no Kaigai Hatten Kakyo no Kenkyo</u>, 1931:93) John Clammer cites speculation that "Baba" should be rendered as "ba-ba", indicating ignorance of Chinese language and customs. "If this is at all true, it would account for many Straits Chinese disliking the term when it is applied to them!"(1980, footnote, pg. 5) On the other hand, Png Poh-Seng notes that "In the heyday of Straits Chinese prestige and influence, it was an advantage to be a Baba, and it is not far-fetched to assume that all Straits-born Chinese then liked to be known as Babas." ("The Straits Chinese In Singapore" in <u>The Journal of Southeast Asian History</u>, 1969:pg. 97) Png Poh-Seng concurs with the early definition provided by the Rev. Carstairs Douglas, "as it is fairly certain from accounts of Sino-Malay marriages in Malacca that the term was introduced to describe the progeny of such mixed parentage." (ibid., pg. 96)</p> <p>.i.Png Poh-Seng; notes that "It was also not uncommon for families, especially local-born Tiechius, to name their sons Tua-ba..., Ji-ba..., San-ba..., Si-ba..., and their daughters Tua-nya..., Ji-nya..., San-nya..., and Si-nya..., in order of age." (ibid. pg. 98)</p> <p>My wife, a direct descendent of the Nyonyas from Penang, sometimes sings to our baby girl "Noni, noni keng, Ah pek jeep pang keng, pang keng mui bey key so, Ah pek long toe" (translated, it reads "Noni, noni keng, old man goes into the bedroom, forgot bedroom door is not locked, the old man pushes it down") I ask her what the terms "Noni, noni keng" stand for, and where she first learned it, and she says she doesn't know, it just rhymes with the rest of the song, and it is something she had been singing since she was a child.</p> <p>Excessive ink spilt over the speculative etymology of such words as Baba and Nyonya and Peranakan is not mere equivocation, as it points up a fundamental dimension of ambiguity of such primary terms of reference--an ambiguity that is carried over into the other apellatives. "Straits-Born" and "Straits Chinese" which is frequently used synonymously. The British Rev. Carstairs Douglas;, in his dictionary of spoken Amoy Hokkien, notes that the term "Baba" carried over into the Hokkien language to refer to "a half-caste Chinese from the Straits." In the Straits, however, the term is applied to all Chinese born there, half-caste or not." (J. D. Vaughn;, 1879:pg. 2) John Clammer; again comments that "there was from a very early date a distinction between the Straits Chinese, who were culturally distinct, and the other immigrant Chinese in the Straits Settlements"(pg. 4).</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The fundamental ambiguity found in all three sets of terms, Peranakan, Baba and Nyonya, and Straits Chinese, is one of the implicit denotative/connotative significance of 'local born/mixed-blood', respectively. Not all local born Chinese were half-caste or half-breed even though they may or may not have been called "peranakan", Baba, or Straits Chinese, and, at least for the Indonesian Peranakans, about three-quarters were of mixed parentage.</p> <p>This ambiguity is essential to understanding the identity of the Peranakans and Babas, because they constituted an interstitial group situated somewhere between the Chinese and the Malayo-Indonesians, along two separate but convergent dimensions--racial and kinship identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, cultural identity. It was just this inbetweenness, so important in group and individual reference, which became linguistically "marked" by such special apellatives and that connote ethnic pride or dysphemistically in a derogative way to register cultural/racial inferiority. The connotation of 'native' or local-born is more positively salient than the meaning of 'half-breed' which carries a negative connotation.</p> <p>Some of the earliest evidence for the Chinese in the Nanyang comes from archaeological sites in Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, including Chinese sepulchral pottery vessels, that date to the second and first centuries B. C. "From these finds, De Flines inferred, no doubt correctly, that Chinese colonists or merchants must have lived in Indonesia; as early as the Han period." (Victor Purcell, <u>The Chinese in Southeast Asia</u>, 1951: pg. 11)</p> <p>There can be little doubt that the Chinese had been in Java for a long time. No doubt that in these long settled communities, Chinese took local wives and established families. There was in these Islamic societies a barrier to the local assimilation of the Chinese. It is apparent that the Chinese took wives from the lowest social classes, or slaves, from non-Islamic groups or the Balinese. The inferior status of these women precluded their capacity to culturally assimilate the offspring of these marriages "so decisively in favour of native culture as did Thai wives. Furthermore, if sons and daughters remained within the Chinese community, after a few generations, native-Chinese intermarriage would decline, as the Chinese community provided its own wives. We know that the first headmen or kapitans of the Chinese in seventeenth century Batavia had Balinese wives, but by the eighteenth century their successors were marrying daughters of other Chinese officers." (Mary F. Somers-Heidhues, <u>Chinese Minorities in Southeast Asia</u>, pg. 36-7)</p> <p>Dutch policies legally prohibited intermarriage of the Chinese (1717) and their assimilation to native status. They were quartered off in their own colonies, required to wear typically Chinese dress and were not permitted freedom of movement outside of these except when in service of the Dutch interests. Later, in 1854, they were set into a separate, higher tax category. Later influx of Chinese Totoks, and especially Chinese women, even further discouraged assimilation and acculturation of this group, and even resulted in some degree of resinification into the new Chinese communities.</p> <p>It appears that the Peranakans of Java, and perhaps Baba communities of Malacca, became effectively stabilized sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as effectively closed and self-perpetuating communities which had their own cultural orientation. Coincidental with this period were Imperial Edicts beginning in the early eighteenth century and in effect until the early nineteenth century which effectively prevented further emigration from Southeastern China and which strongly discouraged the repatriation of those Chinese abroad, under penalty of punishment. It was then, during this period that the Chinese communities could no longer look back to China with the hope of some day returning to be buried there. This must have provided a strong incentive for these Chinese to reorient themselves to their local context, to effectively break off their ties to the homeland, and to cultivate a sense of a local cultural orientation which involved some degree of indigenous acculturation and assimilation. Once formed, these separate and isolated Chinese communities, with their peranakan cultural practices and orientation, remained effectively segregated up until their eventual disintegration and demise under the modern policies of the new Indonesian and Malay Nationalisms.</p> <p>The earliest evidence for Chinese communities in the Straits must be taken to date from Eunoch Cheng Ho's founding of Malacca in 1408. It can be safely assumed that from the time of its founding, Chinese must have had a regular, if not continuous, residence there. It is likely that the earliest Chinese settlement had more of the character of a transient camp or a small trading colony than of a settled, internally organized community. "From the available Chinese, Malay and Portuguese sources, it seems certain that there was a Chinese trading community in the port-city of Malacca before the fall of the Sultanate in 1511. But whether these Chinese represented a permanent or a fluid society, that kept coming and going with the monsoons, is still uncertain. The size of the Chinese trading community was probably small and insignificant. However, it laid the foundation for the development of a permanent Chinese community in Malacca." (Yeh Hua Fen, <u>Historical Guide of Malacca</u>, 1936)</p> <p>There is not uniform agreement on this score of the early Chinese settlement of Malacca. Victor Purcell is somewhat skeptical stating that permanent Chinese communities were not established of any significant size until the coming of the Europeans. It is apparent that Chinese had formed settlements in some of the port cities of Java prior to the European contact, and these perhaps constituted some of the earliest Chinese settlements in the Straits. Mention in the early Portuguese references is only of Chinese junks whose crew and traders remained on board. A "Campon China" is given on the map in Eredias history of Malacca, 1613, but this settlement is only of a very small size. The paucity of reference to the Chinese in the early Portuguese texts on Malacca may not be an indication of the lack of Chinese inhabitants there so much as an indication of the lack of Portuguese attention or interest in such details.</p> <p>There is a story of Sultan Mansur Shah, from 1462, to whom the Emperor of China's daughter, Hong Li-po, was sent for their hands in marriage. The Emperor sent a fleet of one hundred "pilus" bearing 500 daughters of his paramantris as handmaidens to the Princess.</p> <p>The well mentioned in this reference has long been the source of drinking water famous for its taste, and perhaps its curative properties as well, so much so that its waters have been transported to neighboring countries, as far as Sumatra, during times of drought and pestilence. The location of the later Bukit China, of the Princess Hung Li-po's dwelling, on this hill, and the digging of a well at its base, may have been, from the standpoint of Chinese Geomancy, a propitious place.</p> <p>It seems likely that, sometime between Cheng Ho's first visit, in 1403, Alfonso d' Albuquerque's conquest of Malacca in 1511, and the Dutch conquest in 1641, Chinese sojournership at some point crossed the thin line to colonial settlement. Evidence of grave inscriptions at the Chinese cemetery, Bukit China, the oldest of which date to the sixteenth century, and the next set which date to the beginning of the Ching Dynasty in the 1644, have some bearing on the early Malacca Chinese. "One of them is that of the husband and wife of a certain Ng by surname...The tombstone of the right one shows that the dead was a Kapitan, surnamed Tay, while that of the left, the Kapitan Nya, or Lady Kapitan or the Kapitan's wife, probably a native woman...." (Yeh Hua Fen, <u>Historical Guide of Malacca</u>, 1936:pg. 79). The oldest family lineages of Malacca Chinese, the Tans, Tays and Li traditions, do not go back further than the first half of the seventeenth century. (Victor Purcell, "Chinese Settlement in Malacca. <u>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Socity</u>, Vol. XX, Part I, pg. 122-3)</p> <p>The Dutch give reference to a Chinese community--"The 300 or 400 Chinese shopkeepers, craftsmen and farmers could be allowed to settle down at their own convenience, provided they cultivate the gardens within their territory. They can hire or occupy those empty houses which can be saved from collapse or destruction....The ruined gardens between the river Boekit Tjina and the southern suburbs should be lent to Netherlanders, Portuguese, Malaccans, and Chinese to be cultivated....For these some 800 to 1,000 Chinese settlers would be very useful." (Justus Schouten, "Report of 1641 to the Dutch East India Company") The Dutch appointed "Kapitans China" to manage the Chinese community of Malacca, much as they did in Java and Batavia. "The Chinese living at Basar on the north of the city have their own Captain Notchin who lives on small merchandise." Thus we get the beginning of a succession of "at least" eleven Kapitans China. These were Hokkiens, and their descendants, who had fled the Manchus and who maintained strong loyalty to the old Ming Dynasty.</p> <p>By 1678, Governor Balthasar Bort gave a census figure of 892 Chinese in Malacca out of a total of 4, 884 people. "The Chinese had 81 brick and 51 atap houses with 127 men, 140 women, 159 children, 93 male slaves, 137 female slaves, and 60 children of slaves inside the city limit." (Victor Purcell, 1947:pg. 124)</p> <p>By 1750 the Chinese population was 2,161, dropping to 1,390 in 1760, which remained stable until the British occupation in 1795.</p> <p>Most of the Hokkien of this early period were merchants, but this community became joined by a large Hakka contingent of farmers who pioneered into the hinterlands and played an important role in the opening of the interior states. "The famous pioneer of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loi, a Fui-Chiu Hakka, was one of them..." (ibid., pg. 83)</p> <p>With the onset of British rule in the Straits Settlements, the Chinese population increased greatly there. The British found the Chinese useful, and did not discourage the Chinese from developing the coolie system, or the "credit-ticket" or "Kheh-tau" system, of immigrating indentured Chinese laborers in massive numbers. Within seven years of the British acquisition of Penang in 1786 and the founding of its fort there in their effort against the French, the Chinese population had increased to over three thousand. Sir Francis Light, the British Founder of Penang, encouraged the Chinese to immigrate there, "whom he held to be 'the only people of the East from whom a revenue may be raised without expense or extraordinary efforts of government.'" (T. Braddel, 'Notices of Penang", <u>Journal of the Indian Archipelago </u>, 1850:641)</p> <p>The first Chinese to establish themselves in Penang came from a Chinese community in Kedah, and the first Kapitan China was a baba from there named Koh Lay Huan. He settled there as a merchant, planter and tax farmer, and maintained one family in Kedah and another in Penang. His son by his Penang wife accompanied Sir Stanford Raffles to Singapore in its opening in 1819. The other most influential Chinese families were the Khoos and the Kohs, who were interrelated by marriage. The Khoo Kong Si is an old historical monument to be found in Penang today. My wife's father's family may have been descended from this lineage. "In the former days long-settled Chinese families in Kedah and Penang had intermarried with Malays, but with increased immigration from China from the middle of the nineteenth century, this mixed Chinese-Malay or Baba stock tried to marry pure-blooded Chinese."("An Immigrant Society", pg. 10-11)</p> <p>It seems apparent that some of the first Chinese there were also the Baba business men from Malacca, who rapidly took advantage of the opportunities that were the result of British colonization.</p> <p>A similar pattern began in Singapore with its founding in 1819, at which time there were no Chinese present, but the Chinese population of which grew to several thousand within a year. "Many of the principal Chinese families of Malacca took part in the opening up and growth of Singapore and Penang, but continued to keep their families and the family houses in Malacca..." (Yeh Hua Fen, <u>Historical Guide of Malacca, </u>1936, pg. 16) Thereafter, the Chinese population in the Straits Settlements grew steadily. "In 1840, 5,063 of them arrived, and by 1865, twenty-five years later, the number had increased threefold to 17,439. However, the formation of large and more permanent Chinese communities in Malaya did not take place until the 1880's when large-scale Chinese immigration began.</p> <p>The influx of Chinese immigrants by the thousands was mainly the result of the establishment of British political control over the Malay states after 1874. The economic development and the law and order brought about by the British served as a great stimulus to immigration, and hence the Chinese population in Singapore and Malaya increased substantially." (Yen Ching-Hwang; <u>The Overseas Chinese and the 1911 Revolution</u>, pg. 4)</p> <p>A census figure for the Chinese of Singapore in 1848 lists 1,000 "Malacca Chinese" versus 9,000 Hokkiens, 19,000 Tiuchius, 6,000 Cantonese, 4,000 Hakkas and 700 Hainanese. (Siah U Chin, "The Chinese in Singapore", <u>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</u>, Vo. 11, 1848:pg. 290) An 1881 census recorded in Singapore 4,513 "Straits-born" men out of a total Chinese male population of 72,571, and 5,014 "Straits-born" women of a total of 14,195 Chinese females.</p> <p>It is apparent that during this early era of British colonization, the Baba Chinese held an exclusive advantage over the new "singkeh" Chinese. Maurice Freedman writes that "When Singapore was founded as a British settlement in 1819 Babas were among its first inhabitants, and they occupied throughout the nineteenth century a prominent position in local Chinese society, maintaining leadership within it by virtue of their commercial success and by absorbing ambitious immigrants from China into their ranks." ("Chinese Kinship and Marriage in Singapore" <u>in The Journal of Southeast Asian History)</p> </u> <p>It is apparent that these Baba's also held a kind of monopoly over the institution of marriage among the Chinese of the Straits. "The Chinese who congregate here are a mixed mass from all parts: the unmarried ones among them are very numerous and the married ones very few....upon a general calculation I should suppose there were about 2000 married Chinese." (Siah U Chin, "The Chinese In Singapore", ibid., pg. 284) The same author notes that the greatest number of married Chinese men are "found among the Malacca born Chinese; next to them among the Hok-kien shop keepers, then the Tio-Chin....As for common laborers and coolies and those who have no fixed employment very few among them get married."(pg. 284)</p> <p>It was apparent that the local orientation and settled state of the Baba communities in the Straits resulted in the need to establish and maintain a local system of marriage and kinship. With increasing immigration of Chinese into the Straits Settlements, this community soon became a minority of about 10 percent of the Chinese population in Singapore. Most of the Chinese born in the Straits Settlements during this era were Baba by birth. Before the turn of the Twentieth century, very few Chinese women immigrated into the Straits, and the ratio of men to women in these communities was very imbalanced. "Originally the inhabitants of Malacca, the Babas later spread to the Malay States and other British settlements. With increased immigration, half-caste Sino-Malay girls married immigrants from China as their fathers were reluctant to marry them to Malays, and their <u>progeny</u> would have less Malay and more Chinese blood. In time mixed parentage almost disappeared, but the descendants of the Sino-Malays continued to be known as Babas. Then by the time the Straits Settlements came into being in 1826 there were few Babas who were actually Sino-Malays." (Png Poh-Seng, pg. 96-7)</p> <p>With the turning of the 20th Century, the Straits Settlements; are well established within a Nanyang network which extended across the Straits to include the Peranakan communities of Java, as well as hinterland communities in the interior states of Malaya. Penang, Malacca and Singapore had all developed into Baba communities along divergent lines--those of Penang being more Chinese, the Malacca more traditionally Sino-Malay, and the Singaporeans, more strongly oriented towards the English due to the role of English in education, modernization, urbanization and development.</p> <p>The Twentieth century brought with it a basic change in the status and position of the Baba and Peranakan communities of the Straits. Modernization, the importation of Western-styled nationalisms in the form of new political parties and movements, both in China, in many Southeast Asian nations, as well as in the Nanyang, tended to increasingly exclude the participation of the traditionally and colonially oriented Babas. The Babas lacked the socio-political organization of their Chinese cousins, and came into increasing competition with these organizations. This lack of internal organization had its advantages for entrepreneurship and acculturation to the British colonial system, but it had critical disadvantages in the lack of mutual support, political-economic mobilization and organization, etc.</p> <p>The Baba's tended to lack the political conscience which begun to spring up among both the indigenous Malays and the singkeh and "Totok" communities--having defined their identity primarily in relation to the British administrative authority. Indeed, in many occasions, their self-professed loyalty to the Queen was more British than the British.</p> <p>Thus the beginning of the Twentieth century marked the beginning of the end of the traditional Baba way of life. Baba culture continued to sustain itself as a community, but with increasing adversity and difficulty. It is likely that socially and culturally it became increasingly atomized and disintegrated, becoming a kind of home-bound family orientation which had less and less to do with the changing outside world. They persisted with what became increasingly ethnocentric, snobbish airs of cultural superiority based upon their predecessorial claims, but this was in the face of decreasing relevance and credibility within a modernizing world.</p> <p>Invasion by the Japanese marked the end of Baba supremacy in the Straits settlements. Many Baba leaders were executed by the Japanese. After the war, the Baba community retained much of its wealth, but lost most of its privilege. In Singapore, they were effectively absorbed by the larger Chinese component, and "The result of these processes was to make the Singapore Babas less easily distinguishable--especially from the English-educated Chinese; who not only abound but are on the increase." (Clammer, pg. 8) In Malaysia, the Straits Chinese developed their own political associations, later known as the "Peranakan Association," from about 1900. In Indonesia, the Peranakan were relatively late in forming their own political organizations, remaining politically disinterested and neutral as long as possible, until increasing discrimination encouraged the formation of "Baperki" in the late 1950's.</p> <p>In Penang, Straits Chinese leaders began the Penang Secession movement which lasted from 1948-1951, and which was defeated by the joint efforts of the British and Malay parties. The failure of this movement sealed the fate of the Penang Straits Chinese to determine their own political, economic and social future in relation to the newly emerging nation of Malaysia.</p> <p>Since the independence period of Malaysia and Indonesia, the Babas and Peranakans have been considered a dying breed and a cultural anachronism of a bygone colonial era. Peranakan status in Indonesia, subsequent to the riots and political upheavals and anti-communist reaction of 1963 and 1965-6, has declined as a segregated community, and the Peranakans seem to have undergone systematic 'ethnocide'.</p> <p>In post-independence Singapore, the Peranakan community was resinified and became increasingly modernized and westernized. Singapore national culture effectively absorbed its Baba basis, using its western orientation as a basic cultural model for its modernization--in the process Baba culture in Singapore has become a thing of the past without much relevance to a nation preoccupied with modern development.</p> <p>Old Chinese sections of the city, a nostalgic reminder of the Chinese colonial past, have been nearly completely razed to make room for modern business buildings, malls and tenement flats. In modernizing Malaysia, the Chinese community in general, including the Babas, has been on one hand effectively segregated through structural and social discrimination, and has endured under policies designed to enforce cultural assimilation to the Malay national culture which remains traditionally Muslim in orientation.</p> <p>The Babas of Malacca have been more or less symbolically appropriated as an anachronistic model of Sino-Malay cultural assimilation. The Babas of Penang and elsewhere have seen their community basically split apart--some becoming reabsorbed by Hokkien and Tieu Chiu Chinese communities, others more inclined to the English language and British culture, being left furthest out on the limb, with many who could afford the cost migrating to the Common Wealth countries.</p> <p>Ethnic revitalization can only happen in a dominant society which honors its cultural heritage and traditions--and yet this can prove to be almost as ethno-historically revisionist as a society which seeks to hide or erase its past. Past cultural forms and models can be adopted by an emerging middle and upper-middle class, which is defined by its standardized national cultural orientation, as almost a kind of national mythology and as a form of elaborate play which mediates the new and old in the transformations of the past into the present. As an intermediate, somewhat transitional cultural model, Sino-Malay Baba culture can and has been appropriated by both Singaporean and Malay societies to legitimate a larger range of national cultural interests--different elements of the original culture have been highlighted and emphasized, and other, contradictory aspects, conveniently ignored or even forgotten.</p> <p>"The Baba is thus faced with a terribly difficult identity problem--he has a culture, but one for which the sustaining conditions have vanished; yet he is encouraged to think of his culture as an important contribution to the Singapore ethnographic scene. Indeed, I have even heard it said that the Baba culture is the only 'true' Singaporean culture. Mutiracialism as a policy may well therefore have the (presumably unintended) consequence of artificially supporting minority cultures which in the normal course of events would probably pass naturally away.' (John Clammer;, 1980: 139) Yet the contradiction was not a part of the original culture, but a part of the current conflict of competing identities, interests and trajectories.</p> </font><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4">III</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><a name="NonyaCulture">Nonya Culture</a></font> </b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">An old theory of cultural dynamics (Melville Herskovits, 1948) maintains that any culture has a central focus within which it highly develops certain attributes, the elaboration and variation of which leads to a directional development of the culture along certain distinctive pathways--a culture drifts in these directions. The socialization of children combines with the sanctioning of habituated, acquired adult behavior, to perpetuate a cultural patterning and its transmission through time. Possibilities of deviation and alteration exist in the socialization process, in adults who willing go against the sanctioned norms, and in the process of cultural elaboration itself. This theoretical orientation is important in understanding the culture of the Babas and Nonyas, as a certain complex of cultural attributes were highly elaborated, which provide a sense of center and focus for its cultural orientation.</p> <p>It has been argued that the Baba's did not in fact possess their own culture. Rather, they possessed a distinctive ethnicity that became translated in certain specific ways. "....The term 'Baba Chinese' is commonly used as an ethnic label and it should not be assumed that since there is such a thing as an ethnic group there must therefore be a Baba Chinese culture which is shared by all Baba Chinese and entirely distinct from other ethnic groups....What can be derived is that there was and is such a thing as a Baba Chinese ethnic group who used some cultural traits to distinguish themselves ethnically; we cannot, however, conclude from such scanty data that there is a distinctively Baba Chinese culture....(Cecilia Ng Siew Hua, 1983:pg. 98-9)</p> <p>Such an argument begs the critical question of where we should draw the line between an ethnic group and a genuine culture, and how we should define both culture or ethnicity in contrast to one another. In this regard, the Babas had shared with the rest of the Nanyang, albeit not as strongly, in the basic Chinese organizational principles, an ethos of ethnos--such that ethnic identity and difference became the basis of a shared cultural orientation.</p> <p>It seems that socio-cultural barriers of language, religion, custom and belief were great enough to have caused an effective separation, isolation and emergent distinctiveness of cultural orientation among the Baba's and Peranakans. Barriers to marriage and mobility by Chinese in Islamic society, unless proclaiming faith in Islam and foregoing one's own, usually cherished Chinese cultural identity, were strong enough to prevent rapid or complete assimilation of the Chinese merchant communities. These communities also maintained some modicum of contact with the Chinese mainland and with other Chinese communities, as well as with a broader, outside world. These Chinese had an Imperial civilization several thousand years old to look back to as a source of ethnic pride, identity and solace--a civilization that was quite developed and sophisticated for its time. Chinese have long been notoriously Sino-centric in their value orientation and world view, where ever they may be found. They never give up completely a core of Chineseness. Furthermore, these communities were likely to have received periodic injections of new immigrants, sojourners, or refugees who were navigating the Nanyang, even during its era of Imperial ostracism and isolation from China.</p> <p>Thus, community separateness of these early Chinese in Java and Malacca was defined as much from without as from within. Once these communities had grown to a sufficient size, say several thousand, they were stable enough to be both racially and culturally self-perpetuating, and the two or three hundred year period of their early pre-modern development was certainly long enough for the emergence of a unique cultural orientation to be well-formed and virtually complete in most aspects. In this regard we only have to look back upon our own shallow sense of American history to see how quickly, and firmly, a typically 'American' character and culture formed in the world, and what its consequences may have been in the world.</p> <p>It is possible that the base of this cultural orientation developed relatively early in its basic form, and once having come into being, grew in size and elaborateness, but remained basically the same to be perpetuated via 'ethno-endogamy' through the many generations.</p> <p>It is difficult to refute, and to interpret, the material evidence for Baba culture. Silverwork, Chinaware, styles of dress, cuisine, marriage customs, speech, all suggest a basic difference and shared uniqueness of the Babas from either more traditionally oriented Chinese on the one hand, and the Muslim Malay culture on the other.</p> <p>To attempt to triangulate Baba ethno-culture, we can sense a convergence of the evidence toward support for the idea of a distinctive cultural orientation--distinctive aspects of Baba culture emerge in language, religion, material culture, social structure and organization, in values, world-view, in literature, as well as in self-professed aspects of personal identity and group affiliation.</p> <p>Furthermore, if the Babas and their Peranakan cousins in Java in fact constituted a unique cultural grouping in the world, then there is a need to find some sense of focus and center for such an orientation, as well as a sense of its own self-styled 'raison d'etre' and basic understanding in relation to the world.</p> <p>The cultural focus of Baba and Peranakan culture was upon the domestic life of its womenfolk. Virtually every material artifact that is identified as distinctively Baba is related to the personal dress, adornment, cooking, and marriage of the women. It is something of a paradox that we should choose to call it "Baba" culture as opposed to Nyonya culture.</p> <p>This focus fits the historical picture of the origin of the culture-women had central value and status, as they were relatively few in a immigrant colony context that was heavily male-biased. John Clammer speaks of the "rarity-value" of girls in such a society, which accounts for the seclusion imposed upon younger women, especially unmarried Nyonyas, as well as for the relatively high status of Nyonyas, and even for the frequent occurrence of female heads of households--"A woman, particularly an elderly one, would on the death of her husband become household head, rather than allowing such a position to fall to her eldest son. This is not so surprising when one recognizes that she would already have been exercising considerable (if informal) social power in her household."(1980:38)</p> <p>It seems likely that the Nyonya wives of the Chinese were the principle elaborators of its distinctive cultural traits. They were not the silver smiths, potters and craftsmen who made these artifacts, but they must have been the mothers of the craftsmen, as well as the principle buyers of the wares. It also seems as if the cultural orientation was set up, from early on, to secure its reproductive base, to confer upon its women a special, privileged status which made them symbolically and socially attractive in lucrative marriage arrangements, and to promote a social structure that is based upon 'marrying in' to the community rather than marrying out, and to 'marry up' the social ladder rather than across or down.</p> <p>If the original wives of the original Babas were in fact low status or slaves or concubines, ("In addition to such voluntary unions, it was possible for the Baba community to purchase Malay girls who were debt slaves or to marry those who were partial outcasts because of their social behaviour." L.A.P. Gosling,1964:216) then these wives must have from early on formed their own sense of anti-structural communitas, within the context of which they elaborated their own symbolic system which they subsequently bequeathed to their children and grandchildren.</p> <p>This female orientation of Baba culture would explain the relatively a-political nature of its orientation, and the freedom which the Baba male had in defining his own identity as either Chinese "Towkay" or Western "Orang Pute". The male was involved almost exclusively in mercantile activities which accrued material wealth to the household and the community. If perchance he became a leader, a "Kapitan China" or a Towkay, then this was done so on a model that was more appropriately, prototypically Nanyang Chinese. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Babas wore either western dress or Chinese costume, but rarely the Malay sarong. On the other hand, the customary dress for the Nonya was the Malay sarong and kebaya, adorned with jewelry distinctively peranakan in style. The Baba was quick and emphatic in stressing his Chinese identity--the Nonya was persistent in cultivating a more Malay style of life.</p> <p>If this is the case, then the apolitical character of Baba culture allowed the male the freedom and capacity to acculturate and accommodate different political symbol systems--either Western or Chinese or Malay, without his cultural identity as Baba being threatened or compromised. It was not that the Baba could not deal politically in life. Indeed he often did so with unusual talent--rather his cultural orientation allowed him the freedom to engage politically or not without cultural constraint. Notions of territoriality and boundary were negotiable. About the only real political boundary firmly in place being that boundary which secured the domestic life of the culture.</p> <p>The domestic life of the women, perhaps being more religiously oriented rather than political, constituted the core of the Baba culture. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Nyonya women were rarely themselves engaged in petty trade--a not uncommon preoccupation among Southeast Asian women in general. Rather, they were engaged in domestic management, and perhaps as well, in their husband's bookkeeping. Furthermore, they were renowned as inveterate gamblers, with their own style of card game. It can be expected that the religious patterns of the Nyonyas were distinctive in several ways which helped to reinforce and reflect this somewhat exaggerated domesticity and female orientation of the culture.</p> <p>Nyonya women had eventually achieved, within their cultural universe, a degree of independence, autonomy and status which was not characteristic of their more traditional Chinese or Malay sisters. "A change came over our people. With good intentions, certain people relaxed the old rules and gradually the old restrictions became impossible, and almost all at once our Nyonyas insisted on their <u>rights</u>....All the evils complained of against the Nyonyas may be traced to the pernicious bondage under which they have been brought up...."("Our Nyonyas" <u>Straits Chinese Magazine</u>; Vol. VII, No. 4, Dec. 1904) They were not marked off as an inferior caste, but came to claim for themselves the principle prerogatives of their culture.</p> <p>Uxorilocal residence patterns has long remained a curiously anomalous feature of Baba culture--institutional arrangements which have persisted historically in spite of the loss of its original cause and reason. The wife's spouse married into and lived in the mother's household. The senior Nonya in such a situation would come to have a degree of influence, especially when her husband was away on business, which would make their status and position in society enviable. The wife would retain a measure of respect and familial support she would not have if she had moved into the husband's parent's household. The husband would find himself in a peculiar position, especially for a more traditional male not brought up in such a household, in which he would have to compromise some of his male prerogatives, and in which he would find himself compelled to achieve in ways he may not otherwise have done.</p> <p>The male, and the son, probably retained much of his privileged, paternal Chinese status--but was more compelled to define that identity exclusively in terms that was outside the household, and, furthermore, basically outside of the central bounds of the culture of which he was attached, if not by birth, then by marriage. His only cultural obligation was to protect and support his domestic base of support, but not necessarily to dominate it or to be a central part of its domestic orientation.</p> <p>According to my wife who is a direct descendant of Nonyas, the male child would be taken out into the male world by the father, while the female child would remain in the female world of the mother.</p> <p>The following is a a summary of most of the cultural traits which are identified as distinctly Baba and Nonya. It is worth reiterating that these traits are all related to the world of the Nonya.</p> <p><b><u>Straits Silverwork</p> </u></b> <p>A long tradition of local handiwork by Chinese silversmiths dating back to at least the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and which became obsolete in the early 20th century, produced many kinds of objects now quite rare that belonged to a distinctive style tradition. Silver and silver-gilt articles were long regarded by Nonyas as status symbols (Ho Wing Meng, 1976:38<u>)</u> They commissioned or bought from local silversmiths mostly fine items of jewelry for personal adornment, ornamental articles and "utensils specifically to give that added touch of luxury and ostentation to their ornately furnished homes." (Ibid. pg. 38) These articles were not the large size of similar European goods, but were confined to "personal ornaments, objects of vertue, occasional pieces of trophies, decorative bowls with matching saucers and spoons, little tea-cups, teapots, wine-ewers, pillow and bolster plates, incense burners, curtain hooks, ornamental plaques, little vases and betel nut or sireh boxes."(ibid. pg. 38)</p> <p>Extant pieces of antique Straits silverwork are generally small, fine and noted for their intricate workmanship. Their decorative motifs first present to the eye a chaotic confusion lacking unity of theme. Phoenixes, Dragons, Lions, dogs, against a floral background of prunus blossoms, chrysanthemums, lotuses and peonies, occasionally interspersed by Buddhist-Taoist symbols. This heterogeneous assortment of motifs made such silverwork unappealing to early connoisseurs as compared to the more elegant and simple designs of Malay silverwork which presented only geometric or arabesque floral motifs. The bulk of this silverwork was intended as wedding gifts, and the symbolisms portrayed carried Chinese cultural-religious significance for the recipient of the gift. The style, though cluttered and thematically ununified, is exuberant with energy and is so clean and clear in relief that it conveys a sense of three dimensionality.</p> <p>Not all Straits silver is this fussy, some is of quite simple design, and some is done with an eye for patterned symmetry. Overall, the conception of design of Straits silver is held to be simple and recognizable clear--for its ornateness and intricacy its patterns are rarely distorted or ornamentally overburdened. Chinese silversmiths preserved the original form and integrity of the basic utensil no matter what the design--the designs is exclusively relief as opposed to chased or engraved works, ornate and varied.</p> <p>Buntal pillow plates for embellishing bridal pillows were adopted from ancient Hindu-Javanese civilization of Palembang and Kedah. Other kinds of articles include bracelets, Nonya hairpins, sireh boxes, curtain hooks, ornamental bells, caskets or "ganchu ranjang", and talismans for the bridal bed, distinctive belts and buckles worn by Nyonyas, ladies purses, key holders, brooches, "kerosangs" or buttons for the front of the kebaya blouses, necklaces and chains, earrings, finger rings, anklets, hairpins, or "kerok kuping chuckuk sanggul" which means to "scratch the ear, pierce through the hair", as well as other miscellaneous items such as chopsticks, pocket plaques, buttons, "and other types of ornamental accessories for the bridal troussseau." (ibid., pg. 89)</p> <p>"....The majority of Straits Silverworks......may generally be dated back to the nineteenth century; for it was during this period that the baba community reached its zenith of prosperity; so that large quantities of silver ornaments, jewelery and other objects of vertu were turned out to meet the requirements of the nonyas whose love of ostentatious display was proverbial....by the 'twenties or the 'thirties Straits silverworks had virtually become a thing of the past." (ibid, pg. 95)</p> <p><b><u>Nonya Ware</p> </u></b> <p>The Nonya's were renowned for the elaborate and richly decorated porcelain--"....in the days gone by, the wealthier babas spared no expenses or trouble to procure direct from the famous porcelain-centre of Ching-te'-chen, Kiangsi Province, grandiloquent vases, ornamental jars, gold-fish bowls, flower pots with matching stands, ceremonial basins and complete dinner services and tea sets sometimes running into thousands of pieces specially designed and decorated to their own specifications." (ibid., pg. 38) The designs of these pieces are noted for their multiple colors, their variety and richness of design, and for the presence of design patterns on the inside of bowls and plates.</p> <p>My wife's mother owned a collection of these dinner ware handed down from her grandmother, which she would have inherited were they not destroyed in the container in which they had been packed away. According to my wife, they consisted of plates and bowls of various sizes, spoons, a big porcelain soup ladle. The designs were deep, muted blue in color, of an indistinct wavy floral pattern--brushed on designs which were undefined.</p> <p><b><u>Nonya Costume</p> </u></b> <p>The "baju panjang", a long sleeved, knee length, thin transparent blouse, with scalloped edges, worn with an inner white undershirt, held together by the "kerosangs", a set of "three round silver-gilt or gold brooches studded with pearls and other precious stones.. Underneath a sarong was worn. They tie their hair into a top bun, tied with three pins. For special occasions, cloth slippers are worn, "often richly embroidered with silk or gold threads, sequins, beads and gilded ornaments" (Png Poh-Seng,1969:110) "Except for young girls, a large handkerchief folded diagonally into a triangular shape was usually draped over the right shoulder as part of their outfit. This was fastened to the <u>baju</u> with a jeweled brooch from which might dangle a bunch of gold lucky charms." (ibid, pg.110)</p> <p><br> The style of Nyonya dress has seemed to change over the generations. From about the "baju panjang" gave way to the sarong and kebaya, introduced by the Javanese peranakans and adapted from the Malay "baju kurong" similar to the "baju panjang" worn by elderly Nyonyas. The Kebaya was adopted by younger Nonyas, a shorter version of the "baju panjang" made of muslin-like or voile fabric and much more elegant in appearance. The Nyonyas used a great deal of fine floral or foliage lace in their kebayas, the best embroidery coming from Javanese Chinese tailors. This was worn over an inner vest-coat. The Nyonya kebaya differs somewhat from the Malay or Indonesian forms by being more loose fitting, whereas the latter are typically body-hugging "V" shaped "tapering towards the waist and then flaring downwards to emphasize the women's narrow waist-lines. "(ibid., pg.27) The tighter fitting form has been adopted by the younger Nyonyas--the grand-children of the Nyonyas of a half-century ago who wore the more traditional "baju panjang".</p> <p>The Nonyas adopted their own style of hair-dressing from the Indonesian and Malay customs of combing their hair backwards in long tresses which are twisted and turned into a large loose knot, shaped like a donut, at the back of the head, which is secured by clips and pins. The Nonyas combed their hair very tightly back in the form of a long plait held together by the application of a water glue, and twisted into a small, tight top-knot called "sanggul siput," that means literally "sea shell." "The top-knot, in the old days, was usually embellished by three remarkable-looking, silver hair-pins of various sizes; the largest being about seven inches long, with a bolt-like crown, is inserted right through the knot, while a second and shorter one, more delicately designed to look like a spray of leaves set with pearls or semi-precious stones, is inserted crosswise into the base of the top-knot; and finally, the third and smallest hairpin, similarly designed, is inserted into the stem of the knot. Like their Malay and Indonesian counterparts, the Nonyas sometimes inserted jasmines and other highly scented flowers into their hair buns." (Ho Ming Weng, 1976: 27-8)</p> <p>Nyonya women were noteworthy for their over-dressing and ornamental ostentation of jewelry. "It has been suggested that many wives pestered their husbands to buy them valuable jewels to enhance their security; others found in diamonds a salve for the trials and tribulations of domestic life" (Png Poh-Seng, 1969:111)</p> <p><b><u>Nonya Beadwork and Embroidery</p> </u></b> <p>Nonyas made in their homes colorful beadwork and embroidery. They embroidered their kerbayas in colorful, lacy floral patterns. They made cloth shoes, slippers, vases, purses, spectacle holders, jewelry containers, wedding ornaments out of colorful beads--items which resemble in both design and form both the silverwork and the ceramics. Mothers taught their daughters and the work was mostly domestic.</p> <p><b><u>Nonya Cuisine</p> </u></b> <p>Spicy, using a lot of tamarind, coconut milk, chili, banana leaves for wrapping and balachan, a fermented shrimp paste, "petai" and "jering", a kind of seed, "gulai" curry, and Kueh, small cakes using a lot of coconut milk, gula malacca, or brown sugar, screw-pine leaf, or "daun-pandan", "bunga telang", giving the Kueh coloring, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. Chinese dishes would be added variations of fragrant seasonings to give an extra tang to the dishes--"Food which is neither hot nor spicy is considered unsavory to peranakan palate." Nonya cuisine has largely passed away, except for a revived interest and taste in it as an "ethnic food". Among the Hainese of Singapore, Nonya food became a part of their own style of cooking. "Until recently the Hainanese cake-vendor popularly known as the "Otah" man was a familiar sight in Singapore. His daily visit was welcomed by most Straits Chinese women and children." (Png Poh-Seng, foot note, pg. 100)</p> <p>While residing several months in Penang, our street would be visited daily by an Indian man on a bicycle peddling Nonya "kueh," sweet cakes and curry puffs. My wife always delighted in his coming, and thereby first introduced me to the blue-green sweet rice cakes of the Nonyas. "The preparation of food in nonya style, it should be noted in passing, is a complex and laborious process, and it may be for this reason too, that this sophisticated art might be irretrievably lost when the last surviving generation of elderly nonyas passes from the scene." (Ho Wing Meng, 1976:30)</p> <p>Nyonya cuisine is said to have been similar to that of the Peranakans of Java. According to the ethnography of the Peranakans of Sukabumi by Tan Giok-Lan, the Peranakans preferred food basically Javanese in style--dry boiled rice, sate, goat, chicken, beef, pork, vegetables, especially "pete" and "djengko", a sourish vegetable soup called "sajur assem", a kind of salad called "gado-gado" served with fried bean curd or "tempe" and peanut-cake or "ontjom". My wife on occasion has made for me "gado-gado", served with "krupuk" or fried shrimp chips. "The popularity of this dish is indicated by the fact that it appears at the table of even the elaborate parties of wealthy Peranakans. (Tan Giok-Lan, 1963:42-5)</p> <p>Chinese elements incorporated into this menu include Chinese noodles, or "Mie", or "Hokkien Mi" or "mee", bean-curd, "tao hu" or "tahu", bean sprouts, or "taoge", bean sauce, or "taotjio", soya sauce called "ketjap", and dried shrimp called "hebi". All these imported items are known by terms derived from Hokkien--an indication of the Hokkien origins of the Peranakans of Java. "As with most of he food of Chinese origin, a Peranakan noodle dish looks and tastes different from a Totok one." (ibid, pg. 44)</p> <b><u> <p>Sireh Chewing, Tea and Cards</p> </u></b> <p>The chewing of sireh, or betel-nut, is a common Southeast Asian trait adopted by the Nonyas, who are alone among the Nanyang Chinese in practicing this custom. A thin layer of quicklime paste was applied over the sireh leaf, along with a sprinkle of the astringent 'gambier' and thin slices of areca nut. The leave is folded into a small square and then chewed. Chewing the leaf has a slight narcotic effect, is bitter in taste, and stains the mouth a reddish color.</p> <p>It was customary politeness to offer sireh to guests, and the sireh service, "tepak sireh" was a standard accoutrement of the Nonya household.</p> <p>My wife remembers these sireh sets, simple lacquered pieces not as ornate as the fancier silver ones found in the picture books. The set consisted of a small lidless box with four smaller caskets and cups on a tray. "No important social function went by without the presences of that ubiquitous 'tepak sireh'" (ibid. pg. 29) The exchange of betel nut was an important part of the prenuptial ceremonies of a nonya wedding. For the most part, sireh chewing was mostly a Nonya habit rarely adopted by men.</p> <p>Sireh-serving was typically accompanied by tea, a typically Chinese and un-Malay aspect of the practice--steeped in fine porcelain tea-pots and served in small, dainty tea-cups. The Malays customarily served coffee instead of tea. My wife remembers that her mother would brew up both coffee and tea for her guests.</p> <p>Nyonya women were noted for the frequency with which they were brought before British courts on charges of gambling. They played a card game called "chap-ji-ki" or "Cherki," that required four players. The games would last a long time, several hours running. Nonyas would pay little children to shuffle the deck. My wife mentions the long narrow cards that they would play with, and their special style of handling these cards. They would gamble with money, or even jewelry. One court case involved eleven nonyas, reported by a husband of one of players who had lost $50,ooo in jewelry and had attempted to replace this by cheap imitations. "The other event was known as the "Wong-tye-sin" case. Wong-tye-sin was a god of fortune which had come into prominence by prescribing medicine during an outbreak of the plague in Canton some fifteen years before. This god had been brought to Singapore and four shrines had been opened, whither a large number of <u>nyonyas </u>went for advice as to lottery tickets..." (Song Ong Siang, 1967440-1)</p> <p><b><u>Architecture</p> </u></b> <p>Some evidence suggests that in some cases, an architectural variant in interior house design, and in the design of business fronts, existed among the peranakans--incorporating both Malay, Chinese and European styles and designs. The interior usually contains a large central hall, for receiving guests and for the location of an ancestral altar. The altar is on the far side, facing the front doors and the steps up to the house. "While the staircase of the house is a cultural feature of the Malays, it is treated as if it were the main entrance of a traditional Chinese house and is built at the position which fits into Chinese architectural thinking." (Tan Chee-Beng,1982 pg.34-8)</p> <p>Usually built on stilts, they are raised off the ground, and the spot on which they are built are also raised slightly. These houses vary slightly depending upon the affluence of the families living in them. But such adherence to traditional building styles is also uncharacteristic of either the Malays or the urban dwelling Chinese. Windows are small and barred, and the interior is dimly lit. Bedrooms lead off to either side of the central hall, flanking it. The kitchen may be located on either side or to the back of the house.</p> <p>My wife drew me a floor plan of her Grandmother's house. The floor plan is remarkably similar to that mentioned above, complete with the central hall, flanking bedrooms, front door and stairway, ancestral altar and kitchen. Like most of these rural homes, it was built up upon stilts, and had an atap and corrugated tin roof.</p> <p>Nineteenth and early twentieth century architectural design in Singapore and Penang, especially of the shop houses of Chinese businesses, suggest a distinctive "Straits" style that incorporates elements of an English tradition with those of a Chinese. It was a style sometimes referred to as "Chinese Baroque;" or "Chinese Palladian"--"that unique neo-classical European architecture, characterised Greco-Roman columns, and the Peranakan-Chinese style originating in Malacca" (Ilsa Sharp, <u>The Straits Times</u>, April 28,1979.) The facades of these houses often presented a smallish appearance which belied the multi-floored spaciousness within.</p> <p>Interiors of wealthy Straits Chinese homes also showed traits typically Baba. "A whole new culture, reflected in quite unique forms, including the domestic interior, had grown out of the amalgam of Chinese, Malay, and European ways. Certainly in their desire to identify with their British overlords, the Straits Chinese were the first to enthusiastically embrace Western fashions internally and externally." (Norman Edwards, 1990:122-3) Generally, in Straits Chinese terrace houses, guests were entertained in a front hall containing the principle altar of the household, "dedicated to the Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Yin, and the God of Wealth. Set behind the altar was a wall or screen to deflect the path of evil spirits and to demarcate the first hall from the second, immediately behind. Views beyond this screen of the interior of the house--its succession of courts and interior spaces--were only admitted gradually and under privilege. Distant acquaintances and visitors were allowed into the first hall only. Friends and closer colleagues were taken into the second hall. In the truly traditional Peranakan household, close relatives and other members of the family and lifelong friends were granted admission to the third or the fourth halls." (ibid., pg. 154)</p> <p><b><u>Furniture</p> </u></b> <p>Closely related to the architecture was the distinctive design of the furniture which completed the interior--ornately carved, inlaid wooden pieces were common in the homes of the wealthy, and simply but similar pieces could be found in the more humble homes. The "tu kacha" or glass cupboard, black and white wooden sofas and chairs, or "hup soo ee", a movable screen, the "kepong angin" or "blocking of the wind", a Nonya dressing table, or "mega sanggol rambot", and the reclining armchair or "krosi sandah," jewelry boxes, and the elaborate, grand "ranjang kemantin" or "the bride's bed."</p> <p><b><u>Birth Customs</p> </u></b> <p>Nonya women were strict adherents of traditional Chinese customs and beliefs relating to child-birth. They observed taboos relating to the killing of animals, moving furniture in the home, digging gardens or repairs, "for fear that the baby might be born with disfiguring marks" (Png Poh-Seng;, 1969:pg. 114).</p> <p>Women who had given birth were ritually confined for a month, and those who visited her risked "contamination". Medicinal foods were given during this time for the healing of the mother. At one month, food is given out, including nasi kyunit, curry chicken, red eggs, Chinese koay--the rice and curry are customs which other Chinese seem to have picked up from the Nonyas.</p> <p><b><u>Marriage Customs</p> </u></b> <p>Baba and Nonya customs of marriage are in some respects unique, and have both Malay and Chinese elements incorporated into an elaborate ritual ceremony. This ceremony, as well as the institution of marriage among the Babas, has been a central topic in the discourse about their cultural uniqueness. Chinese marriage practices are dominant. Both newlyweds adorn traditional Chinese marriage costumes. Match making was Malay in style, except for the exchange of horoscopes which was traditionally Chinese. The "lap-chai" ceremony held three days before the wedding. The groom's family would send twelve attendants bearing gifts to the brides family's home, or "rumpah abu" to the accompany of Chinese trumpets.</p> <p>These presents were carried on brass or red lacquered trays, and were all of Malay origin or which bore Malay names--"kian songket" (embroidered sarong), "belanja kalwin" (marriage expenses), which included several "ang pows" or red packets of money, the first "wang tetok" containing 12 dollars and called "nursing money", the second called "wang belinja" and called "expense allowance" and a third called "wang sireh" or "betel nut money", and "pinang mas" (golden betel nuts) and "pisang rajah" or "a comb of a species of bananas known as "royal bananas" (Ho Wing Meng,1976:31<u>)</u>. There is also a tray containing the marriage agreement called "surat kahwin", written in Chinese characters. The bridegroom's attendant, the "Pak chindek" was dressed in Malay costume. Otherwise, there were no striking differences in marriage customs from those of the Hokkien Chinese.</p> <p>My wife mentions that in the wedding ceremonies of very wealthy Nonyas, Indian servants would be hired to carry large trays of the bride wealth along the streets, and that this was a big occasion attended by many spectators. The payment of bride price included a sum of money, or "pien kim", which ranged in the mid-nineteenth century from 60 to 100 dollars. "Business was frequently brought to a stop in Penang while traders and others craned their necks from upper windows to see the procession of a wedded couple's gifts. On large and nicely decorated carts were placed furniture, washstands, plates, other household utensils, jewelry, and so forth. Behind and in front marched the musicians, in all kinds of uniform with a variety of instruments, principal among tem being the ubiquitous drum...(John Balibain, <u>Hail Penang! </u>1932:pg. 131<u>)</u></p> <p>For a complete description of a traditional peranakan wedding, the reader is referred to the excellent account by Ruth Ho (<u>Rainbow Round My Shoulder,</u> 1975:pgs. 6-28), and, somewhat surprisingly, by .i.J. D. Vaughn; (<u>The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements</u>, 1879:pgs 22-29)</p> <p>The more modern Babas and peranakans have dropped many of the paraphernalia, and costs, of such elaborate wedding rituals. They have often adopted western style wedding dress, which can be seen in many wedding photos. Tan Giok-lan writes "One of the most radical changes that occurred was the discarding of the elaborate and heavy traditional Chinese robes; they were exchanged for the western white dress and veil for the bride and the dark or light suit for the groom. The wearing of western apparel was already taking place around 1920. The writer was informed that the last time a bridal couple was dress in traditional Chinese style in Sukabumi was around 1930, but this was only for the ceremony; thereafter they put on western style dress." (pg. 86) Tan goes on to note that wedding ceremony is one of the best examples of the incorporation of elements from all three cultural backgrounds--there are apparently no rigid rules and no strong consensus about correctness.</p> <p>A wide range of selection is possible, and no social criticism is attached to such selection. Selection of wedding elements tends to follow the amount of modernization, westernization, or Chineseness or Indonesian acculturation of the newly weds and their families. "There is one ritual, however, which is never omitted, except in families converted to Christianity. This is the honoring of the groom's ancestors by both the bride and groom, which is essentially the traditional Chinese ceremony of presentation of the bride to the groom's ancestors, thereby incorporating her in his lineage." (ibid., pg. 87)</p> <p>Matrilocality is a typically and distinctively Baba cultural trait which is noted by many authors. The husband of the newlywed usually goes to live in the home of the bride. This is a rather uncommon pattern among more traditional Chinese which became more prevalent among the Straits Chinese and that deserves some explanation. Surname exogamy, except for marriage between kin of different ranks, and tolerance of marriage between maternal first cousins were all Chinese practices which were in general carried on by the traditional Babas, but not as strictly adhered to.</p> <p>Matrilocality also sometimes became uxorilocality and matriarchy, especially when the brides lineage had no agnatic issue and thus depended upon bringing in a son-in-law to adopt the paternal surname of the bride. This type of matrilocal marriage was not an unknown practice among the more traditional Chinese. "But among the latter it is regarded shameful for a man to enter into such a marriage as in Hokkien colloquial he is said to "sell his lantern" (Boe toa-teng) and in Tiechiu to "have his ribs trampled upon" (thiam phian-li)." (Maurice Freedman, 1962) Freedman in fact referred to such a kind of husband as "as sort of male daughter-in-law." A more common form of matrilocal marriage was chin-tsin, in which a man on being married lived in his wife's home without prejudice to his rights as a father." (Png Poh-Seng, pg. 112)</p> <p>Freedman notes that the practice of uxorilocality had persisted until recent times. The children of such marriages take the father's surname and inherit property from him, but "are raised mainly among their matrilateral kin (people related to them on their mother's side) and in houses which tend to pass down the generations through women.</p> <p>My wife's sister's husband, whose family came from Singapore, and who did not have money, moved into the Nyonya mother's household in Penang, the mother having paid for all the wedding arrangements as well as the bridewealth. The mother helped the children, and the grandchildren, financially as well as caretaking, and treated the son-in-law quite well. The husband stayed with the household until the mother broke up with the father.</p> <p>Among the Peranakans of Sukabumi, Tan Giok-Lan notes that the ideal of patrilocality is strictly observed, except upon numerous occasions in which availability of accommodations or lack of money mitigate the arrangements. (pg. 88)</p> <p>It is interesting that in Ruth Ho's account of the wedding ceremonies, that if during the ceremony the bride managed to step on the bridegroom's toes, "it meant that she would be the more aggressive partner. It seems that some brides' mothers made it a point to tell their daughters to be sure to step on HIS toes!" (pg. 20) She also notes that throughout the Peranakan wedding, "one is struck most forcibly not only by the dependence on astrology, symbolism or what some people might call plain superstitition, but also by the great importance attached to virtue, filial piety, respect for elders and familial ties..."(pg. 26). G. Minchin, in another classic description of the Peranakan wedding,( <u>Notes and Queries on China and Japan,</u> Vol. 4, no. 6, 1870, pg. 85) writes "It is a strange fact, that when any real Chinaman is married in Malacca or Singapore, he is obliged to talk Malay to his wife in order to be understood."</p> </font><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4">IV</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font face="Arial" size="5"><a name="PeranakanPeople">Peranakan People</a></font></p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font FACE="Book Antiqua">Ethnoculture exists within an historical stream, a human confluence of social change in the world. It is defined from without in interrelationship with a wider world as much as it is generated and defined from within by the people who compose and continuously reconfigure its patterning. The possibilities for development of this patterning always exists across time and space in a wider field of possibilities.</p> <p>We search for a so-called base-line called "Nonya culture"--some normative or ideal sense of a conventional, traditional center, and find only a continuous stream of variation upon a few basic themes--themes which are defined as much by the exceptions as by the rule. We then arrive at the conclusion that such a base-line conceptioning of an ideal cultural orientation possessing some kind of "center" is at best a statistical statement of averages, likelihood, and central tendencies, and at worst someone's reified, factitious fiction--a projection of our own superficial sense of reality.</p> <p>In searching for the external outlines of Peranakan social reality, there are four sets of variables which appear salient, and which may be upon a more general level of understanding somehow interrelated with one another in rendering the conception of Peranakan social reality significant within a larger world. These four variables include: social patterning, religious orientation, language, and, finally, what has become known as ethnicity.</p> <p>In a more general sense, the convergence of these four salient aspects of peranakan culture is upon what has been referred to as the social construction of reality. It is a glimpse into the daily dynamics of the Peranakan world, and how its members interact to produce, individually and collectively, a socially constructed reality. Part of this process has to do with social praxis and performance--with the sense of presentation of self in the everyday world. Part of it has to do with the process of social production--externalization and objectification of a shared stock of knowledge, symbolisms and values, and part deals with the dialectically complementary process of social reproduction--with the problem of socio-cultural transmission of these externalized forms, and their internalizations, or subjectification, into the individual personality.</p> <p>These processes can be seen to be 'functioning' dialectically at several levels--the infra-structural level of economic adaptation, the social structural level of social interaction and integration, and the super-structural level of ideology--and these three levels themselves constitute a sort of parallel-processing dialectical system, a 'complex' self-organizing system with a robust sense of historical structure which involves numerous interacting and mutually limiting variables.</p> <p>It is important to see that this set of social processes is also occurring and impinging upon a larger stream of social reality. The social construction of human reality is also, concomitantly, the psychological construction of human reality. Social definition of self and the psychological definition of society are also part of larger processes of human civilization, processes which involve boundary identification, projection, psycho-social reference, accommodation, acculturation, assimilation, etc. Both self and society are defined in mutual interrelation with one another, and with a larger world of otherness that has both psychological and sociological components.</p> <p>Peranakan society, wherever it had taken root and flourished, wherever it had spread its seed, always had its own sense of order, organization, purpose and outlook upon the world. It has always had some kind of class structure within which each member's status-role identity has been shaped and measured. It has long had its hopes for the future espoused in its own way of bringing up its youngest generation, and a sense of present importance with the generation that has come of age in the world, and an orientation toward the past that is passing away with the oldest. If we look closely, we find that Peranakan society has always been composed of a seamless web of people caught up in the trials and tribulations of daily living, in the throes of larger events that shape the world around them, and in the fortunes and misfortunes of the grand game of life. This web of people stretches in time through many periods as well as across many places, and each person has some sense of what it means to be Peranakan in the world, each person carries a part of the Peranakan present, past and future, upon their shoulders.</p> <p>As a social phenomenon, Peranakan society stretches across many boundaries and zones, social and ecological, and includes many different habitats and niches. Its centers can be found in different city-scapes, and its tendrils can be found stretching out into the remotest of countrysides. Peranakan society may be a finite phenomenon, but its finiteness is too vast to calculate, too confusingly complex to neatly separate.</p> <p>If we take as our prototypical representative of Peranakan Society, the wealthy, spoiled, elderly Nyonya who has an incurable passion for gambling, chewing sireh, and hen-pecking her son-in-law, then we are leaving out too much of other peranakan social realities--too much of its range of human variation and historical possibility. The Babas of the seventeenth century were clearly not the same as those of the nineteenth century, and these were not the same as those who claim to be so today. And the urban elite of the Baba pyramid were only the somewhat ostentatious pinnacle of a larger social base--what of its more anonymous base? No History is purely a Great Man narrative--of Towkays, Kapitans, Bankers and Prime Ministers--but social history is also told of the many whose names are now forgotten, seldom remembered, but without whose combined efforts history would not have been made at all, Great or small--not even Chinese history.</p> <p>Before we seek to explain Peranakan society in jargonistic terms like "political economy,", "social structure," "ethnicity," "pluralism," "acculturation," "assimilation," it is important to highlight several dimensions of their world which seem problematic and interesting from the standpoint of social science--first is the amazing apparent capacity for the Peranakans to adapt to their local environment, and to take full advantage of the opportunities within this setting. Secondly, there is the Chinese standpoint, the somewhat exceptional openness and syncretic orientation of the Peranakan culture which made of itself a curious amalgamation of different, and often contradictory, cultural models. Finally, related to the first two points, is the somewhat ambiguous and indeterminate status of Peranakan society within a larger pluralistic world.</p> <p>Peranakan society, fit within a larger framework, must be seen as both a "transitional culture" in a larger stream of cultural assimilation, and a "culture of transition" that emerged as a self-sustaining social pattern in the interstitial regions between different cultural orientations. Peranakan culture and character emerged as a distinctive configuration where ever and when ever the processes of assimilation which were occurring in the passing of Chinese into Malay or Indonesian society was systematically arrested--incorporation into the larger, predominant host society remained incomplete and partial and was, for the most part, a relatively gradual process.</p> <p>It is likely that this happened more than once, in more than one place, and that therefore the reasons for its happening were not a matter of historical happenstance, but were more structurally basic and therefore stable, such that when circumstances were ripe, the emergence of a Peranakan orientation was a little more than likely. "The whole process must, moreover, have varied greatly between different areas in Malaya, and it is theoretically possible that in some areas, depending on such factors as the supply of land, type of crop, and relative geographical isolation, some Chinese may have assimilated Malay women to their community."</p> <p>With its repeated occurrence, it was more than likely that these people would form distinctive communities with their own separate orientation, and that these separate communities would eventually become interlinked and interrelated to form a larger region-wide socio-cultural phenomena.</p> <p>G. William Skinner; speaks of a socio-historical continuum; in which different Chinese communities of Indonesia; "can be ranged along a gradient according to the degree of indigenous influence in their synthesized culture." (1963:104) Position along this continuum is held to have been a function of the length of time that elapsed between the social formation of the community and the "arrival of significant numbers of immigrant China-born women. Among the many other relevant factors one must note the comparative cultural level of the indigenous population. The Chinese found much that was attractive and valuable in a highly differentiated, rich, complex and literate culture such as that of the Javanese, considerably less in the simpler local culture of the Bangaka,.... and still less in the relatively impoverished, non-literate cultures of the Borneo aborigines." (ibid.: 105)</p> <p>According to Skinner, this process began in the sixteenth century in Java, the culture of which was stabilized by the eighteenth century. In Borneo and Bangka it began later in the eighteenth century, and a culturally distinctive local society was formed only by the mid-1800's. In other communities, such as Bagan Siapi-api, the process began "as late as the last decade of the nineteenth century and cultural stability is only now being achieved." (pg. 104)</p> <p>In another study, Skinner compared the differential rates of assimilation between the Chinese of Thailand and Java, who have been in both countries for similar lengths of time and who came from similar regions in China--in Thailand the rate of assimilation was three times more rapid than in Java, and Chinese in Thailand were incorporated fully into the Thai social world by the second or third generation, and it is uncommon to find a Chinese who can trace their lineage for more than four generations, while it was not uncommon in Java to find Chinese going back twelve generations. Skinner isolated six factors contributing to such a differential in rates of assimilation: cultural vigor, in which the unconquered Thai did not share the same "cultural inferiority" complex as did the Javanese; The Thai defined themselves by culture, whereas the Javanese defined themselves by race and descent; The Thai elite were indigenous and local, the elite of Java were outsiders and the Javanese upper class was deprived of any real power; There was much less ethnic stratification in Thailand than in Java, in which Dutch policies ethnically stereotyped occupational categories which put the Chinese above the Javanese in socio-economic status; In Thailand the Chinese were relatively unrestricted in their activities, while in Java the Dutch put restrictions on their residence and mobility; Finally, in Thailand there was a recognized mechanism available to Chinese for passing from Chinese to Thai identities, in which a person, coming of age, would declare himself either under Chinese or Thai administrative control--no such mechanism for passing was available to the Chinese in Java.</p> <p>According to D. E. Brown, (1976) differential rates of Chinese assimilation varied directly with rates of upward social mobility--such vertical mobility was relatively open and available to the Chinese in Thailand, making the incentive to assimilate into Thai society much greater, while in Java the ethnic hierarchy was relatively closed and fixed. He combines this with the promotion of "false ethnic origin stories" which perpetuate ethnic pluralism and difference, to create a general proposition that "Ethnic diversity varies with the hereditary closure of ranking systems."</p> <p>More generally, in the structural processes of Southeast Asian civilization the formation of ethnic diversity and the establishment of a fixed hierarchy were complementary and dialectical processes--"If enhancing ethnic differences promotes the stability of the radically plural society, why couldn't Southeast Asia's indigenous radically plural societies have been created by fabricating 'ethnic' differentiation to complement a hierarchy which was established among essentially homogenous peoples?" (D. E. Brown;, 1976:94)</p> <p>Another study by Juliet Edmunds (1968) of the relationship between Islam, intermarriage and rates of assimilation between the Chinese and the Malays, notes that though Islam has been widely regarded as a significant barrier to the assimilation of the Chinese, as compared, say to Theravada Buddhism in Thailand, conversion to Islam was a process which varied historically and socially "according to the state of relations between the two groups concerned as to any theological dictates". (1968, pg. 57), as well as to the degree to which such conversion imposed other conditions of assimilation upon the convert.</p> <p>Intermarriage is the key element of the process of assimilation. "The effects of intermarriage on the relationships between the communities depend not only on how frequently it occurs, but also on the type of relationship and how the children of the unions are defined." (ibid., page 58) Formal marriage institutionalizes the "movement of individuals from one group to another. Alternatively, they can result in the growth of some intermediate category of persons. In general it must be the host society which imposes the rules on this as well as other spheres of social life, though this does not mean that the minority, in this case the Chinese, have been entirely without a say in the process." (ibid: pg. 58) In sociological jargon, intermarriage is known as the process of "amalgamation", a part of the more general processes of acculturation and social/structural assimilation. From this standpoint, Peranakan society, constituting both a transitional category in the assimilation process as well as a pariah culture of transition, may be fittingly referred to as a "culture of amalgamation;". Historically, intermarriage between Buddhist Chinese and Muslim Malays has always been infrequent, though the demographic pattern of such intermarriage has been difficult to reconstruct for a number of reasons.</p> <p>Somewhat paradoxically, Peranakan society, as a culture of amalgamation, has been centrally defined by such intermarriage--"In every case, the formative period for the locally rooted society began when immigrants settled on the land, formed alliances with indigenous women--Chinese women almost never immigrated over-seas prior to this century--and reared children who were taught to identify themselves as Chinese.</p> <p>Marriage among these mixed-blood descendants of immigrants led eventually to the development of a fairly stable society..." (G. William Skinner, 1963:pg. 104) Edmunds notes that with the coming of European colonial administration, and especially with the rise of new ethnic nationalisms, the Islamic proscriptions became enforced in counter-reference to the predominantly Christian conquerors, and, combined with the emergence of strongly Nanyang immigrant Chinese communities, as well as policies promoted by both British and Dutch administrators, the barrier to intermarriage and thus assimilation of the two communities became more rigid--thus a new pariah "peranakan" identity became established that was less 'transitional' in status.</p> <p>Not every scholar unanimously supports this thesis of intermarriage as being the principle basis in the formation of Peranakan society and social identity in the Straits. John Clammer; notes that lack of evidence for such intermarriage in the small pre-colonial Chinese community such as Malacca, which were internally self-sufficient and intra-communally balanced in terms of its sex-ratios. "In fact, there is no evidence at all that peranakan culture emerged from a process of biological syncretism; rather, it is the result of cultural assimilation and adaptation to the host country, a process which did not begin in a systematic way until the nineteenth century..."(John Clammer, 1980:46)</p> <p>Clammer cites the near absolute negativity of the Islamic religion which presented a strong barrier to such intermarriage, as well as the shallowness of peranakan lineages which do not extend back before the nineteenth century. He claims that peranakan culture did not become a cohesive, internally coherent phenomena until this time, and attributes the principal basis for its emergence as being the British colonial system which promoted their marginal pariah status.</p> <p>The actual historical patterning and importance of such intermarriage has remained unresolved. There is a romantic facticity about the peranakan origin myth of low-status Malay women marrying higher status Chinese merchants and traders and becoming the famous Nyonyas who minded the store in their husbands' absence, cultivated strong domestic values and skills, nursed these values in their daughters, as well as lovingly cared for and commanded their baba and nyonya babies, and chewed sireh and gambled among themselves in their spare time, all the while unknowing that they were sowing the seeds for what would later develop into a full blown cultural configuration. Clammer refers to this argument, and to the Malay/Minangkabau origin of Matrilocality, as "folk arguments" which lack historical or social evidence. But this dilemma does point up the inherent ambiguity of identity of the Peranakans, of their inbetweenness, and of the possibilities, and impossibilities, of becoming either Chinese or Malay.</p> <p>What remains rather certain is that at some point such intermarriage ceased fairly early, and from the standpoint of its Nyonya orientation, the Peranakan society became a closed one. Chinese men and women, as well as some Malays or others, were later incorporated into its ethos, through capitalizing on the marriage market in the Straits, but the society remained otherwise separate and distinct.</p> <p>Another social historical dimension of Peranakan society that may help to resolve this ambiguity of Peranakan identity is consideration of its regional/local variations and, especially, of a kind of rural-urban continuum. In the same work, John Clammer ;notes the hypothesis that the "frontier conditions" of Straits society inhibited the formation of deep lineages by requiring extensive cooperation between unrelated lineage fragments. Only where such frontier conditions do not exist does patrilineal ideology and lineage become predominant. Such lineages in the South of China are also correlated with wet-rice agriculture. According to Clammer, the urban orientation of the Peranakans as merchant men, and the frontier conditions of Peranakan society, discouraged the development of patrilineal/patrifocal identity, and encouraged the development of the distinctive matrilocal patterns which "bias was free to flourish" (1980:pg. 39).</p> <p>A number of studies have been done of rural based Peranakan communities in both Indonesia and Malaysia, and these frontier oriented societies must be taken into account in consideration of the origin and development of peranakan social identity. Central in such pioneering development of the hinterland regions was the Kong Si system within which the urban based Chinese settlements financed and provided the organization and labor reserve, as well as the middle-men function and markets for the interior pioneering communities which depended upon a 'slash and burn' method of shifting cultivation and which produced an expanding agricultural frontier.</p> <p>Such a system depended upon establish trade and exchange relations and partnership based upon an ethnic Chinese ethos of reciprocal trust and the notion of dependability. Cross-cutting ties of dialect, lineage, village association, tended to reinforce these bonds, but even more importantly, kinship ties were the best available means of cementing a dependable network.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">Networking is one of the most important aspects of seeing how history and culture painted with a large brush articulates with, and is moved by, the day to day interactions of individuals along their many 'pathways of practice.'</p> <p>We can see Straits societies, as the pioneering forerunners of the later conglomerate Nanyang society, playing a pivotal role in the development of the Nanyang civilization in Southeast Asia. A Russian study of the Nanyang by Simoniya social structure reveals a vast financial- credit-market system which extends throughout Southeast Asia, with Chinese merchant-middlemen, within a colonial and neo-colonial framework, serving as the key articulators of the entire regional political economy. Within this system there emerges a resolute class structure in which plantation laborers and coolies are at the bottom, small petty merchants and planters range somewhere in the middle, and urban based professionals and financiers are at the apex.</p> <p>As established "culture brokers" and as the first Chinese to settle in the Straits, the Babas emerged on top of this developing Nanyang social structure during the colonial era, and helped provide the impetus and direction for its further development. They provided the leadership and local models of adjustment and accommodation which allowed the system to work as effectively as it had.</p> <p>Winzeler notes a distinction in the Kelantan region between peranakan "village Chinese" and "town Chinese" "who perceive themselves as possessing a 'purer' model of Chinese culture. The so-called village Chinese in general show more Malay and Thai influences in their Chinese culture. The womenfolk, for example, wear sarong although girls do wear all kinds of modern dress especially when they go to town. Like the Baba, the women also wear the Malay-style blouse called <u>kebaya</u>;. The men folk wear sarong most of the time and in the village they usually do not wear any shirt. When they go to town they put on shirt and trousers. It is common for both men and women to carry <u>kain batik lepas</u>....a long piece of cloth which women use as head scarf while men tie it around their waist or use it as head-cloth (<u>semutar</u>). As for food, the village Chinese eat both Malay and Thai food as well as food prepared in Chinese style. Eating with fingers is common among these chinese. (Tan Chee Beng, "Peranakan Chinese in Northeast Kelantan" in <u>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u>, Vol. 55, 1982:pg. 28)</p> <p>These "village Chinese" do not identify themselves as such, and, while mostly rural, have spread into the local townships and, while retaining many Malay traits, have become more urban in orientation.</p> <p>Tan notes at some length the difficulty in finding a suitable label for these "village Chinese" whose patterns of acculturation are not quite the same as for the "Babas" of Malacca. Finally, he opts for the term "PeranakE"....</p> <p>Robert Winzeler (1983) emphasizes the difference between the "rural Chinese" of Kelantan, whom he refers to as Peranakans on the basis of acculturation, and the Babas of the Straights and the Peranakans of Java. One important difference is the influence of Thai, and the intermarriage between Chinese men and Thai women. According to Tan, early Chinese accounts of the settlements in Kelantan mention that Chinese were not permitted to marry the locals, but when they did marry, took Siamese wives. "The descendants of those early Chinese settlers who married local women had close contact with Siamese and Malays who were the majority people. This eventually led to the acculturation of the Chinese and gave rise to the formation of Peranakan Chinese society. The Peranakan Chinese culture once formed perpetuated itself until today." (Tan Chee-Beng;,1981:32-3)</p> <p>Another difference is linguistic--they do not speak the Baba-Malay of the Straits, but are basically bi-lingual or tri-lingual. Finally, in terms of kinship organization he notes that these communities tend to adhere toward a partilineal/patrilocal system, observing principals of adherence to surnames and surname exogamy--or 'avoidance of common surname marriage." Otherwise, there is little evidence to suggest "extra-familial patrilineal descent groups of a social, economic or even ritual nature." (pg. 19) He notices that kin-groups establish themselves in proximity to one another, but do not form corporate, patrilineal organizations. There is a bias towards a more bilateral pattern.</p> <p>Tan's conclusions are that "close interethnic interaction in northeast Kelantan is the main factor for good interethnic relationship and the acculturation of the Chinese. Interethnic socialization from childhood to adulthood has fostered a greater interethnic understanding and respect. As a result of such socialization, members of different ethnic groups have developed certain common values and "cultural taste". At the group level, he notes the persistence of '"structural" contradictions which tend to maintain group boundaries between the rural Chinese and the Malays. Overtly, the Peranakan Chinese appear more Malay than Chinese because of their dress and language, "which are exhibited everyday, are very much acculturated" (pg. 48), but on close scrutiny, they remain basically Chinese in orientation. Interestingly, it is in the area of religious differences, and syncretisms, that the strongest basis for difference and identity are to be found.</p> <p>L. A. P. Gosling's study on the rural Chinese of Trengganu,(1964) whom he calls "Baba Chinese" ("used in recognition of the popular usage of the term to apply to all Chinese in Malaya displaying a significant level of cultural and biological assimilation" (pg. 203)) focuses upon the pattern of pioneering settlement; in the region by rural Chinese. Those Chinese who remained behind in settlements and did not move on to greener pastures, or those settlements that proved unsuccessful, were fully incorporated by the Malays.</p> <p>Gosling cites that among the rural Malays, there were few if any significant barriers of Islam to intermarriage. "Malay marriage partners were not difficult to obtain. The details of Islamic law were not well known to the rural Malays, and prohibition on marriage between Muslim Malay women and pagan Baba Chinese males does not seem to have been strictly applied." (pg. 215) While most such intermarriage involved the incorporation of females into the Baba community, there was also a lesser reverse flow of Chinese into the Malay community, as households remained behind in the advance of the Chinese settlements, and became incorporated by the local Malays who were more sedentary in orientation. Babas could easily assimilate into the Malay communities because they were already partly acculturated "in physical appearance, language, costume, and behaviour." (pg. 217)</p> <p>Furthermore, a premium may have been placed upon lighter coplected Chinese Babas. In terms of physical appearance, which Gosling takes as primary evidence for such biological assimilation, the Baba Chinese varied over a wide range between Malay and Chinese. Older generation individuals looked more Malay in appearance. He advanced the hypothesis that areas most visible to external contact are the most acculturated, while the least visible areas show least evidence of acculturation. Acculturation seems also to have been a function of the relative isolation of the Chinese communities and members from other Chinese--attenuated contacts in rural areas, promoted more contact with the local, host society. On the other, the onward resettlement of some Chinese tended to isolate these communities from contact with the Malays, thus reducing the amount of assimilation. Gosling divides the history of these settlements into three periods. The first, from 1820 until 1890, was a period of growth, "and the process of acculturation and biological assimilation proceeded rapidly" (pg. 215). The second period, between 1890 and 1920, is one marked by declining population, during which Babas were increasingly assimilated into surrounding Malay communities. From 1920 until the present, assimilation into the Malay communities has been all but completely arrested, and the size of the Baba community, identified as distinctly peranakan, has stabilized. There is recent evidence to suggest a more recent trend of resinification by a larger Chinese community.</p> </font> <p><font FACE="Book Antiqua">Social stratification exists within, defines, and is defined by, a continuum of social interaction, enduring relations and interpersonal experience that exist throughout time and across space. Social stratification is transmitted through the generations and between different groupings and sub-groupings. It delimits group boundaries and asymmetries of power, and, in the sense of transcending the lived experience of any single individual, must be considered to be "corporate" in structure.</p> <p>Social stratification; can be seen to underlie ethnic stratification;, boundaries, groups and identities. Just as social stratification varies through time and across space, so too do ethnic differences vary continuously in a corresponding way. Such continuous variation is the basis for speaking of an ethno-cultural continuum of human experience. It sometimes happens, as in the cases of radically plural societies, that ethnic stratification becomes the defining principle of social stratification, with the resulting "ethos of ethnos." In such cases, ethnic differences and ethnic identities come to take on a social significance, and a real potency, which they might not otherwise have had. Also, defining social ethos in primarily in terms of "ethnos" tends to constrain and shape its patterning in ways which it might not have otherwise been shaped.</p> <p>Though perhaps inextricably interrelated, the two kinds of phenomena--social stratification and ethnic stratification--are yet separable and potentially independent processes. Socio-cultural homogeneity within a society may preclude some of the organizational problems which heterogeneity causes, and ethno-cultural differences also entail its own kinds of dilemmas. Yet stratification occurs in either case, and in neither case does such homogeneity or heterogeneity preclude the potential for competition and conflict on the one hand, or cooperation and social integration on the other.</p> <p>Within the colonial framework of a plural society, immigrant Chinese communities were divided along subethnic lines in both cooperation and competition--subethnic identity delimited the field of opportunities and actions open to the immigrant. Although internal class distinctions existed, these were of far less significance in daily life than ethnic solidarity. "In sum, cleavages and alliances within Chinese immigrant society were both complex and of daily significance, whereas for all but the elite, contacts between Malays and with Europeans were few and relatively unimportant." (ibid, pg. 242)</p> <p>In a landmark study in reference group theory, Alvin Rabushka's work <u>Race and Politics in Urban Malaya</u>(1973) reveals some of the fundamental differences between Chinese and Malay. Chinese tend to be more culturally ethnocentric than the Malay. More cosmopolitan contexts, inducing social extroversion, hence greater interracial social interaction, reduces such ethnocentrism, while social introverts tend to be much more ethnocentric in orientation. In terms of relative social distance, and the degree of tolerance between these groups, "Penang Malays are more tolerant of the Chinese than their Kuala Lumpur counterparts, but they are less tolerant on the question of interracial marriage. But omitting eating and marriage, the two associations affected by religion, we find (with one exception) that two-thirds of all Malay respondents are not opposed to crossing racial boundaries in employment, social activity or neighborhood of residence." (ibid., pg. 62)</p> <p>In regard to Chinese attitudes, no religious obstacles interfere with Chinese eating with Malays in the same eating houses. "Chinese in both Kuala Lumpur and Penang are more tolerant of Malays than Malays are tolerant of them. In greater degree, they are willing to eat, work, joining and live with members of the Malay race." The study holds that racial stereotypes have little or not role in promoting social or political harmony, and that positive or negative attitudes are relatively independent of such stereotypes.</p> <p>Malay stereotypes of the Chinese; are that they are intelligent, ambitious, active, honest, thrifty, industrious and hardworking, yet ritually unclean and impure. The Chinese tend to see the Malays as clean, and yet lacking ambition, while "Intelligence, thrift, activity, and honesty are given approximately equal point values... and fall significantly below the scores registered for cleanliness and (lack of) ambition." (Alvin Rabushka,1973:67)</p> <p>Rabushka considers such stereotypes as economical means for storing large amounts of information, which might otherwise be costly. Stereotypes do not vary in relation with social introversion/extroversion and are not correlated with expressed attitudes of willingness to interact. "....the holding of narrow stereotyped views in Malaya has no visible impact on either social interchange or political unity." (ibid.,pg. 67)</p> <p>From these findings, a conclusion is drawn, among others, that "multi-racial living experiences do not necessarily promote racial tolerance or political unity" (ibid., pg. 101) The data tended to support a "transaction hypothesis" that higher levels of daily social interaction tended to promote higher levels of positive effect. On the other hand, evidence points out that social integration does not necessarily correlate with "democratic political stability"--"the transaction model does not clearly distinguish the political and nonpolitical aspects of "integration." Living in multiracial neighborhoods increases affect, whereas ethnic enclaves reduces it. Education enhances interethnic interaction, while age, religious and sexual differences have little impact "on the extent of racial integration." (ibid., pg. 124-5) Non-Baba Chinese look down upon Babas because they do not speak well the Chinese language--they are perceived "as not quite Chinese", and as "like Malay", which for the Non-Baba Chinese, is a counter-reference group. Those who speak English, the language of an ascendant reference group, are more acceptable--this category cross-cuts the Baba-Non-Baba distinction. Outside of the Baba areas, there is not a great deal of understanding of their ethnic culture--when seen buying pork in the market, they are frequently mistaken for being Malay. (Tan Chee-Beng,; 1979:21) Non-Baba Chinese may call them "Baba siau"--a derogatory name meaning "Baba semen"--and "Baba kia" meaning "Baba kids." Babas often experience direct insults by Non-Babas in many social contexts. Babas complain that they are looked down upon by the Non-Babas.</p> <p>Baba Chinese, on the other hand, have traditionally looked down upon the Singkehs, or newcomers, who in an earlier period were generally poor coolie laborers. "Cinageh" is heard among Babas when they talk unfavorably of non-Baba Chinese.</p> <p>Nevertheless, in reference to a host Malay community, both Babas and non-Baba's share a common sense of Chineseness, a common Chinese cultural core, a common religious orientation, and a common ethnic and existential context of structural and social discrimination. "Now the common perception of discrimination unites the Babas and the non-Baba Chinese in a common political sentiment." (Tan Chee Beng 1979:22)</p> <p>They also share as certain degree of social relatedness--marriage across these subethnic boundaries is quite common and normally unconstrained, in which extended kinship alliances can be cultivated. Such kinship linkages extend to "ritual kinship"--adoption of a child by a God-mother or God-father. My wife took me to see her God-mum, whom she called "Lau Mak" which means "old Mom", an old Cantonese woman who was her amah as a child--she was the only person who gave us an-pao and ritual offerings for our wedding. Religious ceremonies and rituals are an important means and locus of such subethnic interaction which helps to define and reinforce a common "Chinese" identity.</p> <p>Non-Baba Chinese frequently disdain Malays, and completely avoid them. They are seen as untrustworthy and are not extended credit. They feel Malays "are decidedly different from themselves in ways of thinking and feeling--<u>xinli butong</u>--and the assumption seems to be that the differences are irreconcilable." (Judith Strauch;, 1981: 254)</p> <p>Chinese tend to see Malay behavior in the local context as childlike, with a lack of ambition--"traits that can be smiled on with some condescension" (ibid. pg. 254) These attitudes are somewhat separate from feelings of structural discrimination as "second class citizens". "Government officials, by contrast, may be viewed as heavy-handed tyrants spoon-feeding the Malay peasant on the one hand and constricting natural Chinese rights on the other." (ibid., pg. 254)</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">According to Judith Nagata, though there is a great deal of irregular subethnic diversity, the most salient element of Malay ethnic identity is cultural--a Malay is a Muslim, habitually speaks the Malay language, and follows Malay <u>adat</u>, or customary law (Nagata, 1974:335) Malay Muslims, whether Malay, Arabic or Indian, situationally defines themselves according to different reference groups varying along three dimensions: simple comparison of social distance and solidarity; immediate expediency; and normative statements regarding comparative values of social status. (Nagata, 1974:340, In Judith Strauch, 1979:256) Individuals may oscillate flexibly between identities without negative psychological or social consequences--such oscillation may be both personally and socially adaptive.</p> <p>In terms of interaction between Babas and Malays;, the same perceptual categories of inferiority do not hold--rather stereotypes are common which contain negative and positive attributes. From the standpoint of Non-Baba Chinese, both Babas who are "like Malays," and Malays, are often seen as less hard working or industrious as the Chinese--a core value of Chineseness. Neither are Malays seen as trustworthy--such trust in business interaction being another central tenet in the economic underpinnings of ethnic Chinese identity. For the Baba community, if they identify more strongly with the Chinese, then they are apt to view the Malay in similar terms--if they identify more with a separate Baba identity, they are apt to distinguish themselves from the Chinese and identify more strongly with the Malays. (Tan Chee-Beng, 1979:25) "Malays, when questioned about their perception of the identity of the Babas, will often reply that "They are just like us".(John Clammer,1980:133) Babas interact more closely and frequently with Malays, than do other Chinese, and yet they are separate in the spheres of kinship and religion from the Malay--spheres which they share with other Chinese. Malays perceive the Babas as easier to interact with than the Non-Baba Chinese.</p> <p>On the other hand, many peranakans have picked up many values and views which can be considered traditionally Malay, such as the distinction between refined, "alus" or "halus" and rough or crude, or "kasar"--a distinction that is brought out in the way that a peranakan may speak to another depending upon the social category that the peranakan identifies the person with. Also, Nonyas have picked up many of the superstitions that were Malay--I have frequently heard my wife say under her breath "I 'pantang' that" only to learn later that it meant a strong "dislike," and specifically, an omen of ill-fortune. In spite of the structural differences between the two communities, there still exist many interethnic social ties between the them--people are customarily invited to and attend friends weddings, parties, and ceremonies as a token of interethnic solidarity. In such situations, discussion of issues of structural discrimination or difference may be avoided or else joked about. "This points to the fact that where there is structural conflict between two ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic country, the interaction between individuals of the two ethnic groups need not necessarily manifest conflict." (Tan Chee-Beng, 1979: 27) In such multi-ethnic conflicts, certain norms, of avoidance, of not offering pork for instance, are mutually worked out to smooth interpersonal social interaction in the wake of structural difference and inequality. To some extent, personal identity is separate and independent of ethnic-group identity.</p> <p>We are left to consider "ethnos" as a function of "reference" and as such subject to an intrinsic kind of psychological and social relativity of our self-awareness in relation to others. Identity is built up from enduring social interrelation and frequent social interaction. In this sense, the psychological awareness of the self and the social perception of others are inextricably entangled, and overlap in an intermediate region which is not quite internal and not completely external. In this sense, relative deprivation, cognitive dissonance, social difference and distance, are all phenomena which have both psychological and sociological facets in experience. In this regard, status-role ascription, identification, projection of "collective representations"--all symbolic processes-- and labeling serve to reinforce and articulate this region of interethnic, psycho-social consciousness.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font size="4">V</font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5"><b><a name="StraitsChinese">The Social World of the Straits Chinese</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The center of Baba and Peranakan culture must be found somewhere along a continuum of possibilities between what it has meant to be traditionally Chinese, on one hand, and traditional Malay or Indonesian on the other; between being a sub-cultural and inter-ethnic orientation barely distinguishable in its basic components from the dominant cultures in which it was born and became situated, and being its own, fully grown Creole culture with its own distinctive orientation to the world; its own basic patterning of cultural sanctions, views and values, and characteristics of personality which are enculturated and transmitted with each subsequent generation.</p> <p>There is another corresponding continuum of language in which the speech of the Babas and Peranakans lies along a continuum between spoken Amoy Hokkien, on one hand, and vernacular Malay, on the other, as well as between Chinese/Malay and English. Baba and Peranakan culture has also existed along a continuum of traditional versus modern, as well as along a continuum of urban versus rural. In all, we can distinguish these basic dimensions which intersect somewhere in the center that we would define as the locus of Baba/peranakan culture.</p> <p>If we can refer to the social construction of reality, in which processes of externalization, objectification, reification, subjectification and internalization are, in that order, dialectically interdependent and convergent in the critical moment of social reproduction and transmission, attendant especially upon the processes of primary and secondary socialization and discourse, we can also talk about an antithetical "psychological reconstruction of reality" which, from an historical point of view, becomes somewhat independent and primary in the ongoing patterning and processes of cultural development and social history. Once internalized in the form of such cognitive models, psycho-cultural orientations become in a sense "naturalized", "habitualized", "subconscious" and also, most importantly, self-fulfilling in rebounding back upon the social processes which led to their original constitution and constraint in the first place.</p> <p>There is a sense in which ethos and ethnos represents an internalized frame of mind of the participant, and that though there is a wide range of divergence and variability between individuals, there is also some form of convergence upon common ground in core values, cognitive and normative orientations and collective symbolic representations upon which a consensus of shared ethnos is based.</p> <p>To a great extent, a person's attitudes and outlook is a function of that person's social and structural positionality and situational context within this continuum, as well as a function of that person's capacity to negotiate and intermediate between alternative positions--people commonly adopt and internalize status symbolisms which reflect not so much the reality of their status positionality within a society, but the ideal direction and expression of where that person ideally wants to be, as well as where that person may somewhat fictitiously believe him/herself to be. But cognitive orientation and positionality also become dialectical in the articulation of social action and historical happenstance--to a large extent, given the appropriate circumstances, such values and orientations do become 'self-fulfilling,' albeit in ways that most participants may not anticipate.</p> <p>Furthermore, in entertaining the possibility of a variety of alternative positions within the cultural continuum, some of which may be mutually incompatible or contradictory, the ability to negotiate new positions and intermediate between them is a function of a person's past experience in doing so, as well as a function of that person's capacity to effectively mediate the boundaries between different positions, status-identities, roles, and internalized states of being. Past experience with diversity results in an openness to new varieties of experience, whereas an 'introverted' orientation to one or a few positions results in decreased capacity to integrate or deal effectively with a wide range of plurality. Furthermore, the ability to negotiate boundaries demands the mastery of certain social skills--the ability to linguistically, emotively, cognitively and behaviorally code-switch and code-mix; the ability to function along a number of parallel continuums of cognitive orientation, and to adopt the "other's" point of view.</p> <p>In this sense we must see psycho-cultural identity as a function of a kind of "cognitive pluralism" in which an individual is able to maintain a number of different cognitive orientations in relation to one another within a single universe of experience, and we may properly refer to an "ethno-psychology" of social experience. There is a suggestion for a weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis in that code-switching between Malay, English and Hokkien requires the adoption of different conceptual codes and cognitive orientations which have different foci, different dimensions of significance and salience, and which exclude some elements that are central in other cognitive orientations.</p> <p>Though the basic cognitive structure may remain the same in each of the cases, the "cognitive style" of orientation and operation between orientations may be quite different, and even contradictory. Furthermore, the internalization of code-switching/mixing in complex social situations to accommodate for diversity acquires a mode of social functioning that becomes habitual and automatic, based on a wide latitude of "native speaker/hearer intuition" which must not only fill in the many gaps, but cross-over the many switching points.</p> <p>There is in this sense that such a complex, heterogeneous orientation, is based upon a kind of minimal structure, like a pidgin or creole, which is in many of its features reduced in the amount of constraint or redundancy it requires. Code-switching/mixing discourse must have a structure which is open to many variables and quite flexible in its applicability. And what is true on a linguistic level, is reflective and representative of a deeper symbolic and culturally encoded level of cognition and experience--people are not only switching and mixing codes in a quasi-regular but informal way on a linguistic level, but also upon meta-lingusitic and cultural levels as well.</p> <p>Language, religious orientation in both values and world-view, and ethnic identity are all interrelated in certain important ways. Language comes to reflect our symbolic universe of understanding, and our language becomes a primary vehicle for the expression and realization of such symbolic understanding. Who we are and what we are become defined by the words we use, and the words we use become framed within the compass of our social knowledge and the kind of social understandings with which we approach the world. Ethnicity and ethnic consciousness; are a kind of relative psycho-social identity that falls somewhere within the dialectic between the spoken and textual realities of the lanuage we use, and the social and symbolic contexts of relation in which we use that language.</p> <p>The problematic understanding of Ethnoculture comes to rest upon the nexus of relations between language, religious beliefs and values, and ethnic identity. Language has a tremendous internal consistency and order. It has its own separate sense of history, change and directionality of development. Religious orientation is also a kind of living, performed symbolic system. It has a traditional momentum which, through processes of socialization, shape and reshape human character and culture in a constraining and conservative way. Ethnicity, and ethnic stereotypes, reemerges time and again with amazing persistence in spite of the social processes and historical forces which always threaten to disintegrate them, despite ideological prejudices which seek always to deny them, stigmatize or euphemize them, or even efface or eradicate them.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b>Baba Malay</b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>One of the most visible aspects of any society is the language. "Even more striking than Malay physical appearance is the Baba's general Malay behavior: hence they not only look like Malays, but they walk, gesticulate, shake hands, eat, chew betel, sit, squat, expectorate, defecate, laugh and talk like Malays." (L. A. P. Gosling;,1964:pg. 212)</p> <p>Malay, particularly the bazar or "pasar" Malay, has been the primary lingua franca, or "business language" of the Malay peninsula and Indonesia between the many different ethnic groups. Before the coming of the British, Dutch and Japanese, each of whom promoted their own language curriculum, Malay was the preferred language of choice in doing business with other people outside of one's own community. It is therefore reasonable to expect that this language, as a primary index of acculturation and assimilation, should be spoken by any community which has achieved some degree of successful adaptation and accommodation within the larger Malay social world. Tan Che-Beng, in his study of the "rural Chinese" of Kelantan, notes.</p> <p>Part of the reason for this assimilation has been the proximity and convenience of Malay schools and the lack of availability of Chinese or English-medium schools. But linguistic acculturation is also a normal and expected aspect of accommodation to a host society--children acquire the socially predominant language quite naturally through indirect means, whether it is spoken in the home as a primary language or not.</p> <p>The early article by Chia Cheng Sit ("The Language of the Babas" in <u>"The Straits Chinese Magazine"</u> Vol. II, 1898) notes that though in religion, manners, customs and though the Babas remain Chinese, for the most part they speak Baba Malay with little Chinese infusion, except for the Penang Babas. The article claims that the Baba speaks a "patois" of Malay adulterated with many borrowed idioms and words. The grammar is greatly reduced, dropping the many particles of proper Malay speech, and, similar to Chinese, without prefixation or affixation and with the syntactical significance of words defined by their relative positioning. In somewhat condescending manner, Chia notes that the patois was sufficient for everyday business and practical matters, though insufficient for the expression of ideas on social, ethical and philosophical subjects.</p> <p>A more informed linguistic analysis by Sonny Lim (1982 <u>Baba Malay: The Language of the Straits Born Chinese</u> Master's Thesis, Australia: Monash University), comparing Baba Malay to Pasar Malay Chitty and Portuguese Malay, places it along a continuum bridging the gap between Baba Malay and Standard Malay. Baba Malay is primarily used intra-communally--i.e., spoken between themselves. It is defined situationally by a number of elements, including accommodation, and is variably mixed with English and Chinese. Literacy and illiteracy has been an important factor in the history of the language. "The Rising Star" was an awkward Baba attempt at standard Malay. The rise of Baba Malay as a lingua franca in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries reflected the economic importance of the Chinese. It represented the growth of a pidginized Malay to a Creole Malay featuring a syntactic reduction and simplification. Thus Baba Malay is a special creolized form of the wider form of Bazaar Malay, arising from the latter as an early pidgin or pidginized variety.</p> <p>According to Lim's analysis, Baba Malay has a reduced topic-comment structure featuring the "Punya" article meaning literally to "possess" and is semantically related to the Hokkien form "e". This particle has three functions, as a possessive marker, as a marker of temporal and locative modifiers and as a relativizer, all of which correspond exactly to the Hokkien word "e" but which are foreign to standard Malay. Similarly the particle "kasi" or "to give" is related to the Hokkien "ho" and has the same functions of benefactive, causative-benefactive, causative and passive marker. Also "kena" corresponds almost exactly to the Hokkien "tio?" with overlapping semantic fields. Similar particles include "Mau" (intention), "Pigi" (to go), "Nanti" (to wait) and the sentence final "la" which is originally a Hokkien form and which is an emphatic marker signaling "rapport, solidarity, familiarity and solidarity between speakers."</p> <p>The word order of Baba Malay is Hokkien, in which noun phrases preceded by a marker will embed a sentence with an obligatory "punya" relativizer. Lim summarizes the admixture of Malay and Hokkien as strictly syntactic-semantic in nature--meanings and syntactic functions have been borrowed from Hokkien but not the forms, and mostly constitute direct substitutes for parallel and convergent Malay forms. Lexicon is mostly Malay with Hokkien elements borrowed which cover those Chinese aspects of Baba culture--kinship, marriage, religion, birth, death and some moral precepts. The pronomial system has also been modified by Hokkien.</p> <p>"Baba Malay is essentially the Malay language pared down to the minimum, with the expected morphological and some syntactical features of Malay altered or missing, and with radically modified phonology" (Lim, 1982:p. 11) The sentence structure of Baba Malay reflects the pascification or topicalization, or a "topic-comment" structure of Standard Malay--in which information "is arranged such that the part of the information that is given, or the part that is already familiar, is placed at the front of the sentence (and thereby highlighting it as well)" (ibid., p. 116)</p> <p>Robert Winzeler, in his study of the village-Chinese in Kelantan, notes that these communities never completely lost use of their Chinese dialects as the Baba and Peranakan communities of the Straits and Java had, but usually became bilingual or even trilingual. Code-switching and code-mixing is a common pattern in radically plural societies. In Penang, fused and independent bilinguals with competence in three or more languages are not unusual, but, on the contrary, are to be expected. Ann Pakir's linguistic study of the natural discourse patterns of members of a Baba community in Singapore reveals a pattern of code-switching between Malay, Hokkien and English in which speakers attempt to negotiate "a collective social identity" and accommodate to other speaker/hearers. I have observed extensively a similar pattern among Penang Chinese--many speakers being quite expert in code-switching/mixing between several different languages. Such linguistic skills seem to be acquired quite early and remain permanent part of speakers linguistic facility.</p> <p>Several brief studies on "Baba Malay" are extant. There seems to be about as much linguistic variation across peranakan societies as anything else, and in general a "Peranakan" dialect can be said to rest along a continuum of creolization between mainly Hokkien, Malay or Indonesian, as well as a third or more languages, whether English, Dutch or another Chinese dialect or another regional language--for instance Siamese, or Dayak. It appears that the degree to which Chinese or Malay is the predominant language of discourse is a measure of the extent of acculturation of the particular peranakan community. But for the majority of Hokkien peranakans of Java and Malacca and Singapore, Malay appears to be the base language--"Baba Malay" is structurally and lexically the same as other vernacular dialects of Malay, with only a few phonological dialectical variations in the form of glottal stops, dipthongs, final alveolars and fricatives.</p> <p>There are numerous Hokkien loan words, associated with Chinese-derived institutions, which has had otherwise relatively little effect on the phonological system (Anne Pakir, 1986) According to Pakir, Baba Malay stands as a unique dialect of Malay, in which the influence of Hokkien has been overestimated by other scholars. Hokkien borrowings are present in extent limited to certain semantic and cultural fields, including value judgments and emotive terms. Though other Malay dialects have incorporated Hokkien terms, the way that Baba Malay uses Hokkien is unique.</p> <p>According to Tan Chee-Beng, Penang Hokkien is also unique due to its Baba cultural influence, by its incorporation of many Malay words. Baba Malay spoken in Penang is also held to be different from the variety spoken in Malacca and elsewhere because of the greater influence of Hokkien and English. The Hokkien of Kelantan that is spoken by the "village Chinese" is also dialectically distinct in intonational patterns, due to the alleged influence of Malay and Siamese.</p> <p>Victor Purcell, in his book <u>The Chinese in Malaya(1948)</u>, declares that Baba Malay is different from Malay in many important respects, and is "practically a different language". He states that a great many Malay words are unknown to the Babas, as well as the "more polished syntax of the Malay. They are ignorant of the words connected with the Mohammedan religion. Also they mispronounce many Malay words..." (pg. 294)</p> <p>He goes on to state that the greatest divergence between Baba Malay and Malay is in its construction, in which the former follows the Chinese pattern in a reduced form. It is possible that the sources of data between Ann Pakir's analysis and that of Victor Purcell, or Rev. Shellabear's, are different, reflecting substantial areal variations in the pattern of the 'patois' as different speakers range along different parts of the continuum. If Purcell's interpretation is accurate, it would reflect speakers who are using Chinese as the basolect, and Malay as the mesolect. On the other hand, Pakir's source suggests just the reverse--Malay remains the base language only slightly modified by the superimposition of Hokkien lexicon.</p> <p>It is evident that Purcell based part of his study on the earlier study made by Reverend W. G. Shellebear, published in the <u>Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u>, (Vol. 65, 1913), which was reprinted as an appendix in John Clammer's work <u>Straits Chinese Society(</u>1980). Shellabear emphasizes the influence of the Chinese idiom, and the distinctiveness of Baba Malay from either the High Malay of the literature of the Malay peninsula, or the low Malay spoken in Indonesia. "It is true that the number of Chinese words which have become assimilated with this dialect is not very large, and that many words have been borrowed from English, Portuguese, Dutch and Tamil, and from other neighbouring tongues, but it is rightly called "Baba Malay", for it is largely the creation of the Baba Chinese, and is their mother tongue, so that it belongs to them in a sense that no other people can or do claim it as their own. " (ibid., pg. 156)</p> <p>Tan Chee-Beng; takes a more restrictive definition of Baba Malay as that dialectic spoken by the Baba's of Malacca, that became the 'business dialect' of the three Straits Settlements--Penang, Malacca and Singapore. The Malay learned by members of each of these settlements was dialectically different--and the bazaar Malay, or "Melayu pasar" from which Baba Malay developed was a lingua franca for commerce.</p> <p>Hokkien loan words are more salient in areas of customs, religion and kinship, for things related to the house, furniture, food, utensils, personal effects and other things. "In general it may be said that Chinese loanwords are used mostly for things and concepts which are of Chinese origin or which have no Malay equivalents." (Tan Chee-Beng,1980:156)</p> <p>Maurice Freedman, who made an important study of the kin terms in Baba Malay, states that "in general, Malay words were used for junior relative and Hokkien-derived terms for senior. And this usage appears to correspond with that of the analogues of the Babas across the water in Java, the Peranakans, among whom both Malay and Javanese terms come into play for junior relatives."         ("Chinese Kinship and Marriage in Singapore," 1962)</p> <p>Tan Chee Beng concludes by noting that "Linguistic acculturation does not necessarily mean that a people have to speak the same dialect or language of the "host" group. In fact, a new dialect may develop, giving the people a distinct dialect which also serves as a crucial symbol of ethnic identity..."(1980:165)</p> <p>Language serves as one of the most important agents and vehicles social integration. In a plural context, it can be both a barrier and a facilitator to interethnic interactions. Racial, ethnic, and class differences are all reflected in linguistic differences, and linguistic difference is an important indicator of an individual's social status, orientation toward the larger social world, background, and ability to successfully interact in the world.</p> <p>The contribution of a unique genre of Peranakan literature from Java is noteworthy--it is a genre of fictional novels, poems and plays which has not been well studied. The Baba's of Singapore made their own contribution to Peranakan literary development in the form of stories translated from the Chinese and English in Baba Malay, newspaper and journal articles, as well as a few original works in English. "Baba Malay literature continued to be printed in Singapore until about the Second World War." (Maurice Freedman,1962)</p> <p>John Clammer points to several interrelated social factors in the relative paucity of this literature. Many Peranakans up until the turn of the century were basically illiterate. Furthermore, as an interstitial community, there was a fundamental ambivalence of cultural identity that precluded any such great literary florescence--even what language to primarily publish in Chinese, Baba Malay or English, remained a critical trilemma. Due to the basic ambiguity of their cultural identity "at the nexus of three civilizations" and their lack of any clear political culture, except that framed by the colonial administration, the Peranakans lacked the appropriate developmental or cultural context conducive to the cultivation of a refined literature. "The mutual reinforcement of socio-political-cultural and literary values of this kind was absent from Straits Chinese society at its outset. Indeed, what peranakan culture had to do was to find or create precisely such a nexus of interrelated influences.." (John Clammer,1980: 68)</p> <p> </p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Baba Religion</p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Religious orientation has always been an important factor in the Southeast Asian setting, especially to the extent that religion becomes implicated in the mediation of cultural and ethnic boundaries. "Religion is one of the main mechanisms that defines and maintains ethnic boundaries in Southeast Asian societies." (John Clammer,1980: 45)</p> <p>The negativity of the boundary to intermarriage and cultural assimilation which Islam has maintained, the fundamental incompatibility with basic Islamic values and Buddhist values, as well as basic differences between a Muslim cultural orientation and a traditional Chinese one, have all been pointed out as contributing to the maintenance of a separate Peranakan community. In this regard, religious conversion can be a mechanism of assimilation, just as religious orthodoxy can be a mechanism of boundary-maintenance.</p> <p>A survey conducted in Malacca in 1976 (John Clammer, 1980) revealed that 70 percent of the Babas professed faith in the traditional Chinese Religious orientation. Twenty percent comprised a "no-religion/free thinker" category, eight percent were nominally Christian, and the remaining two percent "being members of minority religious movements." There were no Muslims. Of course, people who would have professed their faith in Islam would probably have become fully incorporated into the Malay community. One basic difference between the Peranakan communities of Java and the Baba communities of the Straits Settlements was the number of the former who were Muslim, in part constituting the basis of their peranakan identity. In L.A.P. Gosling's study of the assimilation and migration of rural Chinese of Trengganu, movement by Baba Chinese into the Malay community posed no real problem, as outwardly they were already very assimilated, genetically they were mixed. Because of their general social positioning at an attenuated and tenuous distance from their own Chinese cultural tradition, the geniality and general acceptance of the Baba's by the Malays, the rather simple process of conversion by professment of faith, the relaxed and secure pace of life among the Malays, all contributed to the pull of peranakans into the mainstream of the host society. "The major element in the loss of population was the increased assimilation of Babas into the Malay community.</p> <p>Rates of assimilation between different religious communities vary--it is greater between Chinese and Christian, Hindu and especially for Theravada Buddhists, than it has been between Chinese and Muslims, or between any of the other faiths and Islam. Perhaps the most important difference is that in order for a Muslim to marry a person who is non-Muslim, then that partner must convert to the faith, even if only nominally. This alone creates a barrier around Islam such as does not exist for other religions. In this regard must also be noted the great degree of mutual tolerance, even respect, for the deities, temples and ritual practices of people of different faiths within the plural societies of Southeast Asia--people may be nominally one faith or another, and regular attend its ceremonies, and yet also frequently pay homage or attend ceremonies of other faiths. The degree of religious syncretism; commonly found in Southeast Asia is unusual in the World. In such religiously plural contexts, religiosity, holiness, spirituality and sacredness are common values recognized in the deities, icons, beliefs, and ritual practices of many different faiths. A local spirit, a kramat, or whether a deity that is in origin Hindu or Theravada Buddhist or Mahayana Buddhist or Taoist, is given the same degree of passing respect as any other.</p> <p>The prevalence of new religious movements and minority religious cults, and their popularity in Malaysia, is another indication of the basically syncretic religious orientation to be found there. The only exception to this rule is the Mosque, which remains effectively closed off to outsiders participation or visitation. "Islam....has two leading characteristics which contrast with this--it is exclusivistic (as opposed to syncretic and eclectic), and it is closely tied to a particular social structure, so much so that in Malaysia the idea of a non-Muslim Malay is quite unthinkable." (John Clammer,1980:47)</p> <p>Evidence of this syncretic orientation among the Peranakans is also available--part of what it means to become a good Malay and a good Moslem is in a sense to accept only one god, and to close the doors of one's imagination other possibilities. Traditional Chinese religious orientation can be defined by the "Conflation of the Three Teachings." Tan Giok-Lan, in her ethnography of the Perankan Sukabumi (1963, records an important peranakan religious organization --"Sam Kauw Hee"--one which is predominantly composed of peranakan Chinese families.<br> "Sam Kauw" means literally "Three Religions"--referring to Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. This organization was oriented towards the promotion traditional Chinese religious values. (Tan Giok-Lan 1963:158) A strong syncretic religious movement in Singapore, one of many organizations there, was called the "Red Swastika Society."</p> <p>Baba religious orientation shares with other Chinese religious orientations its tolerance and syncretism, often under the same roof, of many, competing, often Non-Chinese religious orientations. Babas observe, but in general do not adhere as strictly to, the Chinese festival calendar, and they also regularly participate in other traditional magico-religious systems, such as temple worship, ancestor worship, consultation of the Chinese horoscope, geomancy, etc. They have also adopted a number of more indigenous Malay magico-religious beliefs and customs--worship of kramats or local deities, Dato Kramats, or spirit-mediums, consultation of Malay bomohs, or traditional medical practictioners, use of magical charms, etc. Malay elements, such as the offering of satay, sireh or lime, are also incorporated into Chinese religious rituals.</p> <p>The first Chinese temple built in Malaya was the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple in Bukit China in Malacca. In 1704 Chan Li Lock built the main hall of the temple and placed there the figure of the Goddess of Mercy, or "Kwan yin" or "padma-pani." (Yeh Jen Fen; <u>Historical Guide to Malacca, </u>pg. 81-2) The preeminence of the Goddess of Mercy in the Straits settlements is important to a consideration of early Chinese religion in Malaysia. J. D. Vaughn details the design of the Goddess of Mercy temple in Pitt St. in Penang, which dates to 1848, still the principle and most active temple of worship by the Chinese in Penang. We had offering made during our wedding day there by my wife's God Mom, her old Amah who cared for her when she was a child.</p> <p>Victor Purcell, in his work <u>The Chinese in Malaya</u>, gives the following account of Kwan Yin as " one of the most popular goddesses in the Chinese pantheon. "</p> <p>The Chinese of the Straits must not be mistaken as taking their religion lightly or unseriously--the pragmatism of their religious devotions has fundamental spiritual, moral and utilitarian efficacy which is taken quite seriously by the Chinese.</p> <p>In an uncertain world, conversion to Christianity has been increasingly seen as a viable option for many Straits Chinese. Conversion to Christianity actually "promotes interethnic marriage or inter-communal marriage, in the former case between Chinese and Eurasian, and in latter case between Baba and non-Baba." (John Clammer, pg. 55)</p> <p>The religious component is separate from other components of language, culture, race in the ethno-cultural identity of the Chinese. Among the Malay, being Muslim is central to that identity."...the religious factor, far from being a peripheral one, is actually central to the study of the assimilation, integration or lack of assimilation of Chinese minorities to their "host cultures" throughout Southeast Asia. (ibid., pg.59)</p> <p>Another aspect of religious syncretism notable among the Peranakans are particular beliefs, ritual-religious practices and ceremonies. A striking example is the use of water with flower petals and cut lime as a purfying or cleansing agent. A friend wanted to give us this ceremony while in Malaysia because of a small streak of misfortunes we had been having. My wife gave me a variant of the same bath during a later period in which we were having a run of hard times. She mixed the flower petals from seven different kinds of flowers, and cut half a lime, and poured the water over my head three times. "The client or the person on whose behalf the client sought the spirit medium's help, has to have a bath including a hair wash before taking a ritual bath. The lime is squeezed and the juice is then poured over the body of the person. The spirit medium stresses that the pulp of the lime must be thrown away after the ritual bath. (Cecilia Ng Siew Hua, "The Sam Poh Neo Neo Keramat: A Study of a Baba Chinese Temple", pg. 118) Ritual baths with water only are a common part of Malay animism--water is interpreted as a 'boundary weakener, which, therefore allows passage from one state to another. (J. Endicott, 1970)</p> <p>The Chinese believe that the lime, petal and water concoction clean impurities from the body. Lime is seen also as a cleansing agent--the impurities becoming concentrated in the lime pulp. Lime is also used for divination by a spirit-medium in trance. In this case, seven lime pieces are cut, just as the petals of seven flowers are used--seven "transcends distinctions based on differences in colour" (Endicott 1970:pg. 137) It too, becomes a boundary weakener. "Though the Malays seem to have no unified symbolic classification based on colour, differences of colours are often used to establish or indicate particular boundaries between significant categories." (ibid.: pg. 137)</p> <p>Cecilia Ng, in her analysis of the practices of a Baba temple, notes that the spirit deities of the temple are "ethnically ambiguous" which parallels the ethnic ambiguity of the Baba Chinese. "The consultation, however, is conducted in both the ways of the Malay Animist and the Chinese Religionist ritual paraphernalia limes, petals and benzoin are often used in Malay animism while the red dye, charm papers and the seal of the deities are characteristic of Chinese Religion. The Peranakans have accepted the "keramats" who "can be either people, animals or inanimate things which have supernatural powers" (pg. 124), but in the case of this particular study they are not inclined to seek the services of "bomohs" or healers, "who they perceive to be evil sorcerers conjuring spells and creating trouble." (pg. 124) Ng compares her study of the Baba temple with an earlier study, the only of its kind, by Rosie Tan of a spirit medium who was probably a peranakan and who served the Baba community.</p> <p>Rosie Tan's study deals with "kramats" as local shrines dedicated to honored spirit deities, marking often the graves of local holy men or founding fathers, and the more popular of which attract a great many pilgrims and supplicants. Private "kramats" do not have a "Datu Kramat" and therefore require a spirit medium to call upon and intercede with the spirits on behalf of the worshippers. Worshippers beseech the advice and aid of the Datu Kramats for a variety of reasons--for husbands, for children, for health, or for information.</p> <p>Ng concludes her study by stating that while the Datuk Shaik Ismail shrine had more overt Malay elements, the Sam Poh Neo Neo temple was Chinese religionist at the structural level, at the periphery of the Chinese religious system, with many borrowings from Malay animism--"the religious system under study is not syncretic, but borrows certain elements from Malay Animism and incorporates these into an essentially Chinese religious system." (ibid., pg.129)</p> <p>The Baba's choose Malay rather than Chinese religious elements, because the important reference group against which they must distinguish themselves is not the Malay, but the Chinese. "It is therefore logical that Malay elements were used as emblems to accentuate their differences from the ethnic Chinese." (ibid., pg. 129) The earlier study of the more Malay shrine differed from the later example of the Sam Poh Neo Neo temple because "the Baba Chinese no longer enjoy the favoured position of social brokers and indeed with the multi-racial ideology which was widely publicised in recent years, the Baba Chinese are faced with either not fitting into the publicly accepted model of society or alternatively to redefine their ethnic boundaries and identify themselves with the Chinese." (pg. 129) The fact that the Baba's of the temple "bai" all the deities as if of the same "Chinese" pantheon is not convincing counterevidence against the thesis of the inherent syncretism of Chinese religious orientation--in fact if anything, it is a demonstration of just such syncretism that the Chinese would treat all deities as if their own. "It would appear that these Malay elements are but emblems to distinguish the ethnic Baba Chinese; from the ethnic Chinese....In more general terms it can be said that a section of the Baba Chinese population practice a religion which is the religion of many Chinese in Singapore." (ibid.:130)</p> <p>While living in Penang, I attended with my wife and her friends a "Birthday Party" for a local Malay deity. The party went for three days straight and was attended by numerous Chinese, many of whom were quite respectable and well-off. The spirit medium was a Chinese man dressed in the outfit of a Malay bomoh. It was conducted in a Chinese home in which the Shrine had been erected. The Birthday was given for the benefit of children who had been born with handicaps. Many Chinese attended and gave offerings of donations in exchange for talismans. Food was served freely--nasi kunyit, chicken curry, bee hoon. No pork was served--the food was cooked in brand new pots and pans for purity. The Datuk smoked "Cheerot" a heavy Malay cigar, and went into a trance, danced the "ronggeng" with Malay dancing girls as well as with Chinese. There was a Malay band. He performed "automatic writing" on the ground--giving numbers which people kept note of what he would mark upon the ground--the number spreading through the crowd like wildfire. An older Chinese matron went into a trance and began dancing--becoming the focal point for the audience. The show would last from evening until 12:00. In the morning there were prayer sessions which people would randomly visit. Not all of these people were Peranakan--many were very traditionally Chinese, yet the Malay elements-- the structure of the whole ceremony, and the syncretism of the event, its spiritual importance for a larger urban community-- could not be ignored.</p> <p>Tan Chee-Beng, in his description of the peranakan Chinese from the same area (1982), describes the same kind of celebration, but as a Hokkien ceremony, which, like with the Penang Hokkien, refer to the ceremony as "Ang Kong su" or "The Affairs of the Deities." The patron god of the local town has no temple, but is taken care of by different families in rotation. The ceremony takes place in the compound of the home that holds the altar. Each year divination is employed to select a committee to take care of the deities altar. "The celebration usually lasts for three or four days. Part of the celebration involves a spirit-medium going into trance. In the evening, <u>menora</u> drama is staged. This is a kind of Thai dance-drama in which songs are presented in Kelantan Thai but comic verses are usually presented in Kelantan Malay...."(ibid.,pg. 42)</p> <p>The menora, or "Nora Chatri," is a local Thai-Malay folk dance form that derived from the Sudhana-Manohra tale of the <u>Jatakas</u>. Its features and associated beliefs are strongly linked to animistic and shamanistic orientations "upon which the Sudhana-Manohara" story has been planted." (Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof;, "Nora Chatri in Kedah: A Preliminary Report", <u>JMBRAS </u>Vol. 55, no. 1, 1982:pg. 53) The dance lasts for three consecutive nights, and is performed for ritual occasions as well as for entertainment. Part of the performance involves an opening trance session in which performers and non-performers participate to the rhythms of the Gamelan music which slowly and steadily increases its tempo. The trancer is possessed by a local spirit who descends to take possession of the trancers body. The trance state involves a noticeable change in behaviour--shivering, sometimes violent behavior, and the name of the possessing spirit is revealed. Following the trance session are the presentations of sets of Lakons, or plays, by the manora dancers. My wife had attended one of these dances in Penang, taken by her mother, held by Peranakans in a local town. She went every year. Mostly Chinese, except for a Malay man who had married a Chinese. They would attend all three days. The musical instruments would begin around 10:00 in the morning, breaking only for lunch and dinner, and quitting late, after 12:00. Everyday the "Gaku" in charge would go into trance, in the morning, and again in the evening, everyday of the performance. He would sit on the floor cross-legged, to enter the trance. This is a typical Malay way. He would wear a Malay shawl, chew sireh, and put Malay tobacco into his mouth. People would consult him for their problems. Donations were given voluntarily outside in a box. Different deities would possess him--speaking Thai or Malay for the respective deities. An older brother always acted as the interpreter. The last spirit to enter him would be a tiger--crawling around the floor, picking up food that is given as offerings, and pointing at people to give the food to--so that everyone who is related to him gets something.</p> <p>Tan Chee-Beng also notes the presence of a "Chinese bomoh"--a spirit-doctor and magical practitioners who learned their art from the traditional Malay or Thai religious specialists. Tan expresses the conviction that "Perhaps the component of Peranakan Chinese culture which best expresses the Chineseness of the Peranakan is their Chinese religion." (ibid.,pg. 42)</p> <p>Tan maintains that Chinese religion draws an ethnic boundary between the Peranakan Chinese and the Malays. Between the Chinese and the local Thai's, there is no such boundary between religions--"thus religion does not act as a barrier of interaction between the Chinese and the Thai." (pg. 49)</p> <p>It is interesting in this regard that Tan Giok-Lan's study of the Peranakan Chinese of Sukabumi;, in Java, supports the thesis for the basically Chinese religious orientation of the peranakans in general. There, patrilineal descent and patrilocality; are still predominate, if flexible to local circumstances. No where among the peranakans are there deep lineage trees.</p> <p>How much Chinese culture or religion presents a barrier to crossing ethnic lines, or Malay, or both, seems to be a matter of some conjecture--as well as what constitutes a genuinely syncretic orientation, versus a "non-exclusive" openness to incorporate diverse elements while preserving a traditional base in belief and ritual.</p> <p>The study of trance and spirit possession within the Malaysian social context reveals the differential expression of states based upon a kind of "cognitive pluralism." Stereotypes help to maintain role expectations in the performance and reactions of actors within an interethnic context--stereotypes and categories facilitate the process of communication of intention and significance. Cognitive diversity reflects ethnic diversity. "Social actors can respond appropriately and predictably to each other without sharing the same meanings and interpretation of events. Complementary, reciprocal expectations of behavior--what Wallace has termed "equivalence structures"--emerge over time despite cognitive heterogeneity." (Susan K. Ackerman and Raymond Lee, "Communication and Cognitive Pluralism in a Spirit Possession Event in Malaysia", 1981:790) "All societies are, in a radical sense, plural societies." (A.F.C.Wallace, <u>Culture and Personality</u> 1970:109-110) The organization of cognitive diversity into stable role behaviors becomes problematic, and there is no necessary correspondence between collective representations and equivalence structures--participants with a diverse range of motives and orientations share equivalence structures, and a potentially unlimited number of such equivalence structures can be 'mapped' onto collective representations.</p> <p>At one level of communication, the anticipation of role behavior implies that individuals create for themselves a model of common group structure which is based upon a conception of a generalized other. Participants can locate each other's position on a behavioral map. Although the behavioral gestures are mutually predictable, they do not require the participants to hold the same motivations, intentions or definitions of the behaviors performed. Upon another level, people internalize these enactments and evaluate them variously and differentially, giving rise to the cognitive diversity. Conversation between actors further modifies retrospective and on-going responses and role behaviors. "The sequences of complementary interaction performed on the primary level are continuously reconstructed through ongoing conversation between the participants. This reconstruction of accounts is the major mechanism by which primary-level interactions are objectified or made real, and it extends secondary-level communication indefinitely through time. Such events as spirit possession, and their social significance, emerge as ongoing possibilities of social action from this process of communication of "retrospective interpretations." (ibid. pg. 791)</p> <p>Spirit possession in Malaysia has been interpreted as a traditional, and culturally elaborated style of stress-management. Such spirit-possession, a popular form of entertainment in Northern Malaysia, is viewed as a symbolic representation of personality and polity that connects illness and possession to other power-laden contexts. The symbolic language of spirit possession can be regarded as a conceptual system through which abstract power relationships (related to Malay royalty) are represented. (Kessler ,1977)</p> <p>There are a number of reactions which belong to a broad category of spirit-possession in Malaysia which are not as contextually well-defined or formalized as the main puteri seance. Latah, running amok, Malay hysteria and mass hysteria are common instances of relatively spontaneous and uncontrolled possession which emerges suddenly in response to some discrete stimulus and involves the enactment of normally intolerable aggressive behavior "that can range from uncontrolled verbal abuse to physical violence." (Susan K. Ackerman and Raymond Lee, 1981:792)</p> <p>Ethnic stereotypes emerge as inter-group equivalence structures in complex events of multi-ethnic spirit possession, which enable a degree of management and mutual adjustment to such events--they can be seen to function as self-fulfilling prophecies which mutually reinforce, and implicitly legitimize, such events. They do not direct decision-making, except perhaps indirectly, nor are they "instrumental in shaping the rules of the implicit contract." Whatever direction social process would take, alternative equivalence structures would emerge which allow for the mutual behavioral accommodation of the different groups--different sets of equivalence structures would emerge from the social interactive process.</p> <p>We are left to consider the role of symbols, and their linguistic expression, in the articulation and mediation of experience upon several parallel levels of social reality--an internal dialectic of consciousness, meaning and affect, an internal/external dialectic between internalized frames and externally derived experience, and the dialectic between self and other in the construction and maintenance of psycho-social identity. Religious symbols largely mediate the boundaries between these different levels of experience, and provide an adaptive mechanism for the resolution of conflict and contradiction, in social relations, in phenomenologically derived experience, in one’s own internalized frames of reference/inference. In this regard, ethnic symbols, and the ascriptive labels which articulate these symbols, can be appropriated psychologically and culturally for service of maintenance of a sense of ego reality. Face-to-face discourse, and the discourse functions of code switching/mixing, serve to maintain and reinforced internalized/external frames, to bolster ones subjective orientation in the world, bringing this into alignment with the objective social world. Such symbol systems serve the function of the transmission and mediation of cultural forms, values and orientations. In the social construction of reality;, we can speak of primary and secondary socializations, and of possible discrepancies between these two levels of "basic" and derived experience--disjunction creates dissonance and potential conflict. We can see in this regard ethnicity and culture working simultaneously, culture in terms of primary identity, and ethnicity in the form of secondary and derivative forms of socialization that nevertheless become internalized and have a shaping influence upon one’s primary identity. It can be seen that several alternate, even contradictory secondary forms can become partially internalized without the concomitant level of commitment or affective, subjective identification which accompanies the "subjective inevitability" of primary socialization--allowing an individual to manipulate and alternate between different status-role identities and social realities. Also, it is important to understand that the socialization process itself is always open-ended, partial and never complete--only complementary cultural closure can provide a measure of completeness and unequivocal finality to one’s subjective sense of the world. It is this fundamental unfinishedness and partiality of socialization and identification which makes secondary processes influential upon the development of personality--allowing for the possibility of both adaptive change and regressive pathology. Finally, it is the very fact of its psychological internalization that confers such power and strength to the process. It has great realizing potency that it tends to be realized in the process of becoming internalized. Identification is likely to accompany closely internalization, and internalization is likely to accompany identification. The social construction of reality, via symbol systems which are normatively religious, ethnically referential, and linguistically encoded, becomes the psychological reconstruction of reality which is experiential, affective, perceptual, cognitive and normative in expression, and vice versa.</p> </font> <hr> <p> </p> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </SCRIPT> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="Bibliography">A Comprehensive, Annotated</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Bibliography on Peranakan Studies</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright © 2000, by Hugh M. Lewis<br> February 19, 2000</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">(This bibliography may be printed and used for research and classroom purposes only)</p> </font></b> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Ackerman, S E & Raymond M Lee</p> <p>1981 "Communication and Cognitive Pluralism in a Spirit Possession Event in Malaysia"</p> <u> <p>American Ethnologist</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Outlines spirit possession events in northern Malaysia, specifically instances of mass hysteria involving Malay factory women, comparing these to ritually ordered trance, and discusses how these events are managed, manipulated, and mediated through ethnic stereotypes and interethnic expectations in ongoing communication</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1988 <u>Heaven in Transition: Non-Muslim Religious Identity and Ethnic Identity in Malaysia</u></p> <p>Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A brief descriptive study dealing with contemporary religious movements in modern Malaysia, and the relation of ethnicity in participants involvement with these social phenomena</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Balibain, John</p> <p>1932 <u>Hail, Penang!</u> ?</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An old work by a British administrator. It contains an interesting description of Chinese courtship and marriage customs, and is interesting from the standpoint of the colonial history of Penang</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Bastin, John; & R Roolvink, editors</p> <p>1964 <u>Malayan and Indonesian Studies: Essays Presented to Sir Richard Winstedt on his Eighty-Fifth Birthday</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u> <p>Oxford: Clarendon Press</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Blumberg, Paul, editor</p> <p>1972 <u>The Impact of Social Class</p> </u> <p>New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Bonacich, Edna</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1980 "Middleman Minorities and Advanced Capitalism"</p> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Ethnic Groups</u> Vol. 2: 211-219</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Braddel, T</p> <p>1850a "Notices of Penang"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</u></p> <p>1851b "Notices of Penang"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</p> </u> <p>1852c "Notices of Penang"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</p> </u> <p>1857d "Notices of Penang"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1855e "Notes on the Chinese of the Straits"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </u> <p>1856f "Notes on Malacca"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</u>, n.s. 1</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Brown, D E</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1976a <u>Principles of Social Structure: Southeast Asia</u></p> <p>Westview Press, Inc.</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An insightful and well written social anthropological study of a theory of corporate social organization based upon alternative "principles" such as ethnicity, kinship, occupation, etc., using case studies drawn from Southeast Asia</p> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1964b <u>Southeast Asia: Its Historical Development</u></p> <p>New York, N.Y.: McGraw Hill Book Co.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Clammer, John</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1979a <u>The Ambiguity of Identity: Ethnicity Maintenance and Change Among the Straits Chinese Community of</u> <u>Malaysia and Singapore</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Occasional Paper, #54 Singapore: University of Singapore Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1980b <u>Straits Chinese Society</u></p> <p>Singapore: Singapore Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A key reference text treating the sociology of the Straits Chinese, based in part upon statistical studies done in Malacca, contesting some of the common "folk-stories" of matrilocality and intermarriage among the Babas and Malays. Contains an excellent, exhaustive bibliographic review of literature relating to the Peranakans, a study of Peranakan Literature, as well as a reprint of the 1914 article by Rev. Shellebear on the Baba Malay dialect</p> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 "Studies in Chinese Folk Religion in Singapore and Malaysia"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography</u>, Editor, No. 2, August. Singapore: National University of Singapore</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Coedes, George</p> <p>1968 <u>The Indianized States of Southeast Asia</u></p> <p>Honolulu, Hawaii: East-West Center Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Coppel, Charles A</p> <p>1983 <u>Indonesian Chinese in Crisis</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur Malaysia: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Coughlin, Richard J</p> <p>1960 <u>Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand</u></p> <p>Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Cowan, C D, & O W Wolters, editors</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1976 <u>Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays Presented to D.G.E. Hall</u></p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Cornell, New York: Cornell Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important collection of studies treating a wide range of subjects in Southeast Asian studies</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Chia, Felix</p> <p>1980 <u>The Babas</u></p> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A well written descriptive study of Baba culture which has an excellent chapter on Baba Malay, on wedding customs, on the game "Cherki" as well as illustrations of Nonya-ware and Nonya furniture.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 <u>Ala Sayang!: A Social History of the Babas & Nyonyas</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Eastern Universities Press Sdn. Bhd.</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Cultural aspects and customs, language and social patterns of the Baba and Nyonyas</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1994 <u>The Babas Revisited</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Heinemann Asia</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A revised edition of his earlier work <u>The Babas,</u> focusing mainly upon the Sinaporean Babas</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Chin, John M</p> <p>1981a <u>The Sarawak Chinese</p> </u> <p>London: Oxford Univ. Press</p> <p>1988b <u>The Nonya</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Kementerian</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Chew, Daniel</p> <p>1990 <u>Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontier: 1841-1941</u></p> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Chew, Ernest C T, and Edwin Lee</p> <p>1991 <u>A History of Singapore</u></p> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Crissman, Lawrence W</p> <p>1967 "The Segmentary Structure of Urban Overseas Chinese Communities."</p> <u> <p>Man</u>: Vol. 2 (New Series) 185-204</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Dawson, T R P</p> <p>1969 <u>Tan Siew San: The Man from Malacca</u></p> <p>Singpapore: Donald Moore Press, Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>de Moubray, G A de C</p> <p>1931 <u>Matriarchy in the Malay Peninsula and Neighbouring Countries</p> </u> <p>London: Routledge & Sons, Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Ding Choo Ming</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1978 "An Introduction to the Indonesian Peranakan Literature in the Library of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u> Vol. 51</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Edmonds, Juliet</p> <p>1968 "Religion, Intermarriage and Assimilation: The Chinese in Malaya"</p> <u> <p>Race</u>, Vol. X, I: 57-67</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Discusses the role of intermarriage in interethnic assimilation among the Peranakans of Malaysia, the changing role of Islam in imposing an obstacle on this process, and the changing socio-political factors in colonial and post-colonial societies that have had an effect upon this assimilation</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Edwards, Norman</p> <p>1990 <u>The Singapore House and Residential Life: 1819-1939</u> Singapore: Oxford University Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A very interesting and valuable study of the architectural styles and history of Singapore</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Elliott, Allan J A</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1955 <u>Chinese Spirit-Medium Cults in Singapore</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Monographs on Social Anthropology, No. 14, London: The London School of Economic and Political Science</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Emerson, Donald K</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1986 "Southeast Asia": What's in a Name?"</p> <u> <p>Journal of</u> <u>Southeast Asian Studies</u> Vol. 19: 1-21</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Discusses the etymology and political implications of the topographical and areal designation of "Southeast Asia"</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Endicott, Kirk Michael</p> <p>1970 <u>An Analysis of Malay Magic</u></p> <p>Oxford: Clarendon Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Eng-Lee Seok Chee</p> <p>1989 <u>Festive Expression: Nonya Beadwork and Embroidery</u></p> <p>Singapore: National Museum</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Felix, Alfonso Jr., editor</p> <p>1969 <u>The Chinese in the Philippines, 1570-1770, Vol. I</u>,</p> <p>Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House</p> <p>1969 <u>The Chinese in the Philippines, 1770-1898, Vol. 2,</p> </u> <p>Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Fitzgerald, C P</p> <p>1965 <u>The Third China</u></p> <p>Univ. of British Columbia</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Fortier, David H</p> <p>1957 "The Chinese in North Borneo"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Colloquium on Overseas Chinese</u>, edited by Morton H. Fried, New York, N.Y.: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Freedman, Maurice</p> <p>1958a <u>Lineage Organization in Southeastern China</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Athlone Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1959b "The Handling of Money: a Note on the Background to the Economic Sophistication of Overseas Chinese"</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <u> <p>Man</u>: 56-7</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1962c "Chinese Kinship and Marriage in Singapore"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u>, Vol. 3, no. 2</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Deals with the social anthropology of the Babas and overseas Chinese in Singapore, their kinship structure, religious practices, language, marriage practices, and the institution of matrilocality</p> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1966d <u>Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung</p> </u> <p>The University of London: The Anthlone Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Freedman, Maurice & Marjorie Topley</p> <p>1961 "Religion and Social Realignment among the Chinese in Singapore"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Asian Studies</u> Vol. 21: 3-23</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Discusses the history of different Chinese religious movements in Singapore</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Freedman, Maurice & William E. Willmott</p> <p>1961 "South-East Asia: With Special Reference to the Chinese" <u>International Social Science Journal</u> Vol. 13: 245-270</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Fried, Morton H</p> <p>1958 <u>Colloquium on Overseas Chinese</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u> <p>New York, N.Y.: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An early collection of articles about the Overseas Chinese in Borneo, Indonesia, the Carribean, Peru, Burma, the United States</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Gosling, L A P</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1964 "Migration and Assimilation of Rural Chinese"</p> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Malayan and Indonesian Studies</u>, edited by John Bastin and R. Roolvink, Oxford: Clarendon Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A frequently cited reference that deals with the assimilation and settlement patterns of the rural peranakan Chinese in the pioneering and subsequent social history of the state of Trengganu in Malaysia</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 "Changing Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture & Politics</u> edited by L. A. Peter Gosling & Linda Y. C. Lim, Singapore: Maruzen Asia, Pte. Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Gosling, L A P & Linda Y C Lim, editors</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1983 <u>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Ethnicity and Economic Activity</p> </u> <p>Vol. I, Singapore: Maruzen Press, Pte. Ltd.</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important collection of studies about the Overseas Chinese in many different nations of Southeast Asia, focusing upon important theoretical points of their ethnicity, social patterning, and economic orientation.</p> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 <u>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture and Politics</u></p> <p>Vol. II, Singapore: Maruzen Press, Pte. Ltd.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Gwee, William Thian Hock</p> <p>1993 <u>Mas Sepuloh: Baba Conversational Gems</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Armour Publishing, Pte. Ltd.</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An excellent reference for Baba terms and idiomatic expressions</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Hall, Kenneth & John K Whitmore</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1976 <u>Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, No. 11, Univ. of Michigan Press</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Hamilton, Gary</p> <p>1978 "Pariah Capitalism: A Paradox of Power and Dependence" <u>Ethnic Groups</u>, Vol. 2:1-15</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Treats the political perspective in the creation and exploitation of middlemen minority groups like the Jews of Europe and the Chinese of Southeast Asia.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Harrison, Tom & Stanley J O 'Connor</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1970 <u>Gold and Megalithic Activity in Prehistoric and Recent West Borneo</u>,</p> <p>Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Southeast Asia Program</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Ho, Ruth</p> <p>1975 <u>Rainbow Round My Shoulder</u></p> <p>Singapore: Eastern Universities Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A fast reading narrative of the author's past as a Nonya, with a valuable description of a peranakan wedding</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Ho, Wing Meng</p> <p>1976 <u>Straits Chinese Silver</u></p> <p>Singapore: University Education Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An authoritative and exhaustive guide to Straits Chinese silver, showing its range of types and styles, and distinguishing it from Malay silver. Has an interesting description of Baba culture as well. The other books on Straits Chinese porcelain, beadwork and embroidery are colorful, beautiful and interesting guides to Straits Chinese material culture</p> <p>The four books below are excellent and colorful authoritative references to Nonya material culture.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 <u>Straits Chinese Porcelain: A Collector's Guide</u></p> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> <p>1984 <u>Straits Chinese Silver: A Collector's Guide</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> <p>1987 <u>Straits Chinese Beadwork & Embroidery: A Collector's Guide</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> <p>1994 <u>Straits Chinese Furniture: A Collector's Guide</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Holloman, Regina & Serghei A Arutiunov, editors</p> <p>1978 <u>Perspectives on Ethnicity</u></p> <p>Mouton Publishers</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Hutterer, Karl L, editor</p> <p>1977 <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia:</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Perspectives from Prehistory, History and Ethnography</u></p> <dir> <dir> <p>Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, No.13: University of Michigan Press.</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An indispensable collection of studies about the prehistory and development of traditional Southeast Asian civilization as an "interregional system"</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Hutton, Wendy</p> <p>1995 <u>The Food of Malaysia: Authentic Recipes from the Crossroads of</p> <p>Asia</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Periplus, Pte, Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Jiang, Joseph P L</p> <p>1966 "The Chinese in Thailand"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u></p> <p>Vol. 7, no. 1, March</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Johns, A H</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1976 "Islam in Southeast Asia: Problems of Perspective"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays Presented to D. G. E. Hall</u> edited by C. D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Karim, Wazir Jahan</p> <p>1990<u> Emotions of Culture: A Malay Perspective</u></p> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Kennedy, Jean</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1977 "From Stage to Development in Prehistoric Thailand: An Exploration of the Origins of Growth, Exchange and Variability in Southeast Asia"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u>, edited by Karl Hutterer, Michigan: Univ. Michigan Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>King, Sam</p> <p>1992 <u>Tiger Balm King: The Life and Times of Aw Boon Haw</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Khoo Kay Kim</p> <p>1991 <u>Malay Society: Transformaton & Democratization</p> </u> <p>Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk Pub. Sdn. Berd</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Khoo Su Nin, editor</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1989-91 <u>Pulau Pinang: A guide to the local way of life & culture of Penang</p> <dir> <dir> </u></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A very rich and informative periodical published in Georgetown and devoted largely to the Nonya heritage there</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Kobayashi Shinzaku</p> <p>1931 <u>Shin Minzoku no Kaigai Hatten Kakyo no Kenkyo</u></p> <p>Tokyo</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Kroeber, A L</p> <p>1957 <u>Style and Civilization</u></p> <p>New York: Cornell Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Kuchler, Johannes</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1965 "Penang's Chinese Population: A Preliminary Account of its Origin and Social Geographic Pattern"</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <u> <p>Asian Studies</u>, Vol. 3, no. 3</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Lee, Poh Sing</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1978 <u>Chinese Society in 19th Century Singapore</p> </u> <p>Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Leonard, Jane Kate</p> <p>1984 <u>Wei Yuan and China's Rediscovery of the Maritime World</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u> <p>Harvard East Asian Monographs III: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ.</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Lim, Betty</p> <p>1994 <u>A Rose On My Pillow: Recollections of a Nonya</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Armour Publishing Pte Ltd</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Autobiographical account spanning the pre and post war era in Singapore, Malacca and Penang</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Lim, Sonny</p> <p>1982 <u>Baba Malay: The Language of the Straits Born Chinese</p> </u> <p>Master's Thesis, Australia: Monash University</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An excellent descriptive analysis of Baba and Pasar Malay</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Lind, Andrew W</p> <p>1974 <u>Nanyang Perspective: Chinese Students in Multi-Racial Singapore</u></p> <p>Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Mackie, J A C editor</p> <p>1976 <u>The Chinese in Indonesia</u></p> <p>Singapore: Heineman</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>McCloud, Donald G</p> <p>1986 <u>System and Process in Southeast Asia: The Evolution of a Region.</p> </u> <p>Westview Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>McVey, Ruth, editor</p> <p>1963 <u>Indonesia</p> </u> <p>Southeast Asian Studies: Yale Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Milner, G B, editor</p> <p>1978 <u>Natural Symbols in South East Asia</u></p> <p>London: School of Oriental and African Studies</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An interesting study of the role of symbolisms of nature in Southeast Asian culture</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Minchin, G</p> <p>1870 <u>Notes and Queries on China and Japan</u>,</p> <p>n. s. 4, no. 6 Hong Kong</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Moench, Richard</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1961 "A Preliminary Report on Chinese Social and Economic Organization in the Society Islands"</p> <dir> <dir> <p>Paper presented at the Tenth Science Congress of the Pacific Science Association: University of Hawaii</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Nagata, Judith</p> <p>1974 "'What is a Malay?' Situational Selection of Ethnic Identity in a Plural Society"</p> <u> <p>American Ethnologist</u> Vol. 1, no. 2:331-350</p> <p>1979 <u>Malaysian Mosiac: Perspectives from a Poly-ethnic Society</u></p> <p>Canada: Univ. of British Columbia Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Newell, William H</p> <p>1962 <u>Treacherous River</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur: Univ. of Malaya Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Ng Siew Hua, Cecilia</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1983 "The Sam Poh Neo Neo Keramat: A Study of a Baba Chinese Temple"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography</u>, edited by John R. Clammer, Singapore: National Univ. of Singapore</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A valuable ethnographic and ethnological study of a Baba Temple in Singapore, supporting the contention that the Baba's are to be defined as an "ethnic group" rather than as a culture.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Omohundro, John T</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1977 "Trading Patterns of Philippine Chinese: Strategies of Sojourning Middlemen"</p> <dir> <dir> <p>in <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u>, edited by Karl Hutterer, The Univ. of Michigan Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1981 <u>Chinese Merchant Families in Iloilo</u></p> <p>The Ohio Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Oon, Violet</p> <p>1978 <u>Peranakan Cooking</u></p> <p>Singapore: Times Publications</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Pakir, Anne Geok-In Sim</p> <p>1987a <u>A Linguistic Investigation of Baba Malay</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>PhD. Dissertation, Ann Arbor, Mi.: Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 12(1), June</p> </dir> </dir> <p>1988b "The Baba Malay Lexicon: Hokkien Loanwords in Baba Malay"</p> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Applied Linguistics Association of Australia: Occassional Papers</u>, 10: 3-30</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1989c "Linguistic Alternants and Code Selection in Baba Malay"</p> <u> <p>World Englishes</u>, Vol. 8, no. 3, Winter : pages 379-388</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1991d "The Range and Depth of English-knowing Bilinguals in Singapore"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>World Englishes</u> Vol. 10, no. 2: 167-179</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Png Poh-Seng</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1969 "The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A Case of Local Identity and Socio-Cultural Accommodation"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u>, Vol. 10, no. 1</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A much cited reference which deals with the basic aspects of Baba Chinese culture in Singapore</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Purcell, Victor</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1947 "Chinese Settlement in Malacca"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u> Vol. XX, part 1 : 115-125</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1948 <u>The Chinese in Malaya</u></p> <p>London: Oxford Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important source talking about Chinese religion in Malaysia, and its history, with an appendix treating Baba Malay</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1956 <u>The Chinese in Modern Malaya</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Donald More</p> <p>1965 <u>The Chinese in Southeast Asia</p> </u> <p>2nd Edition, London: Oxford Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A comprehensive work to be considered a textbook about the Overseas Chinese, their history, demography, and social patterning and predicament in different Southeast Asian countries</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Rabushka, Alvin</p> <p>1973 <u>Race and Politics in Urban Malaya</u></p> <p>Hoover Institution Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important empirical study of urban Malays and Chinese in Kuala Lumpur and Penang, Malaysia, treating their interethnic attitudes and supporting a "transactional hypothesis"</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Raybeck, Douglas</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1980 "Ethnicity and Accommodation: Malay-Chinese Relations in Kelantan, Malaysia"</p> <u> <p>Ethnic Groups</u> Vol. 2: 241-268</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1983 "Chinese Patterns of Adaptation in Southeast Asia"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture & Politics </u>Vol. 2, edited by L. A. Peter Gosling & Linda Y. C. Lim, Singapore: Maruzen Asia, Pte. Ltd.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Roff, William R, editor</p> <p>1974 <u>Kelantan: Religion, Society and Politics in a Malay State</p> </u> <p>Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Roth, H Ling</p> <p>1966 <u>Oriental Silverwork: Malay and Chinese; A Handbook for Connoisseurs, Collectors, Students and Silversmiths</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A reprint of an early work done in the twenties which shows clear photos of Chinese and Malay silver work. An interesting introductory chapter describes the traditional techniques and tools of such silver-work</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Seah Eu Chin</p> <p>1848 "The Chinese in Singapore"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</p> </u></font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Shellabear, W G</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1913 "Baba Malay: An Introduction to the Language of the Straits Born Chinese"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Straits Branch</u> no. 65</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Siaw, Lawrence</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1981 "The Legacy of Chinese Social Structure"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian Studies,</u> Vol. XII, No. 2, Sept</p> <p>1983 <u>Chinese Society in Rural Malaysia: A Local History of the Chinese in Titi Jelubu</u></p> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Simoniya, N A</p> <p>1961 <u>Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia--A Russian Study</p> </u> <p>Cornell University</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important Marxist study of the political economy of the Nanyang Chinese, their social structure and political history</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Siow, Moli</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1983 "The Problems of Ethnic Cohesion among the Chinese in Peninsular Malaysia: Intraethnic Divisions and Interethnic Accommodation"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture & Politics</u> Vol. 2, edited by L. A. Peter Gosling & Linda Y. C. Lim, Singapore: Maruzen Asia, Pte. Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Skeat, Walter William</p> <p>1984 <u>Malay Magic: Being An Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula</u></p> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Skinner, G William</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1957a "The Chinese of Java"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Colloquium on Overseas Chinese</u> edited by Morton H. Fried, New York, N Y: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations. pg. 1-10.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1963b "The Chinese Minority"</p> <u> <p>Indonesia,</u> edited by Ruth McVey. New Haven: HRAF Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Contains a key theoretical statement about the "peranakan social continuum" in Java. Also see Skinner for comparative work on differential assimilation between Chinese in Thailand and Java</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Somers, Mary F</p> <p>1965 <u>Peranakan Chinese Politics in Indonesia</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Ph. D. Dissertation, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Indonesia Project</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An early work that deals with the formation of a peranakan political movement, called "Baperki" in modern Indonesia</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Somers-Heidhues, Mary F</p> <p>1974 <u>Southeast Asia's Chinese Minorities</u></p> <p>Longman Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A valuable overview of the Oversea's Chinese, with discussion of the Baba and Peranakan communities in both Malaysia and Indonesia</p> <dir> <dir> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Song Ong Siang</p> <p>1967 <u>One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in Singapore</u> Singapore: University of Malaya Press</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Written by a Straits-Chinese, it contains many detailed tidbits about Singapore's past, with referenct to the Babas. Contains reprints of early articles by the <u>Straits Chinese Magazine</p> </u></font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Sopie, Mohd. Noordin</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1973 "The Penang Secession Movement, 1948-51"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian Studies</u>, Vol. 4</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Southeast Asia Ceramic Society</p> <p>1981 <u>Nyonya Ware & Kitchen Ch'ing</u></p> <p>Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Steadman, John</p> <p>1969 <u>The Myth of Asia</u></p> <p>New York: Simon and Schuster</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Steinberg, David Joel</p> <p>1987 <u>In Search of Southeast Asia</u></p> <p>Honolulu, Hawaii: Univ. of Hawaii Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Strauch, Judith</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1980 <u>The Chinese Exodus from Vietnam: Implications for the Southeast Asian Chinese</u></p> <p>Boston, Harvard Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Judith Strauch has made important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of the Overseas Chinese, to their structural ambiguity and discrimination by Southeast Asian host societies. All her work is highly recommended.</p> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1981 "Multiple Ethnicities in Malaysia: The Shifting Relevance of Alternative Chinese Categories"</p> <u> <p>Modern Asian Studies</u> Vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 235-60</p> <p>1981 <u>Chinese Village Politics in the Malaysian State</u></p> <p>Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Suryadinata, Leo</p> <p>1981 <u>Peranakan Chinese Politics in Java, 1917-1942</u></p> <p>Singapore: Singapore Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Tan, Chee-Beng</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1979a "Baba Chinese, Non-Baba Chinese and Malays: A Note on Ethnic Interaction in Malacca"</p> <u> <p>Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science</u>, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-2: 19-28</p> <p>1980b "Baba Malay Dialect"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u> Vol. 53, Part 1: 150-166.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1982 "Peranakan Chinese in Northeast Kelantan"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u> Vol. 55, part 1.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A study of the rural Chinese in Northeastern Malaysia, comparable with a similar study by Robert Winzeler. A discussion of the building style, the language differences, and the social patterns of the rural Chinese compared to the Malays and the "town Chinese"</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>1983 "Acculturation and the Chinese in Melaka: The Expression of Baba Identity"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture & Politics</u>, Vol. 2 edited by L. A. Peter Gosling & Linda Y. C. Lim Singapore: Maruzen Asia Pte. Ltd.</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1993 <u>Chinese Peranakan Heritage: In Malaysia and Singapore</p> </u> <p>Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn. Bhd.</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A short ethnological style work that highlights the some of the intraethnic differences between the Straits settlements, especially of the Babas of Penang</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Tan, Giok-Lan</p> <p>1963 <u>The Chinese of Sukabumi: A Study in Social and Cultural Accommodation</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Modern Indonesia Project, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asia Studies</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>One of the first comprehensive ethnographic studies of Peranakan Chinese, based in the town of Sukabumi, on Java. It is a very accurate, detailed and reliable study, with substantial appendics of Peranakan kin terms and loan words</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Tan, Rosie Kim Neo</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1958 <u>The Straits Chinese in Singapore</u></p> <dir> <dir> <p>Unpublished Dip. Soc. Studs. Dissertation, University of Singapore</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An ethnographic study of the Sinapore Babas, with an important definition of baba identity</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Tan, Terry</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1981 <u>Terry Tan's Straits Chinee Cookbook</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> </u> <p>Singapore: Times Books International</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Tham Seong Chee</p> <p>1977 <u>Malays and Modernization</u></p> <p>Singapore: Singapore University Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Turnbull, C M</p> <p>1972 <u>The Straits Settlements: 1826-67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony</u></p> <p>University of London: The Athlone Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Vaughn, J D</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1854 "Notes on the Chinese of Penang"</p> <u> <p>Journal of the Indian Archipelago</p> </u> <p>1879 <u>Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements</u></p> <p>1971 reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A widely available, highly readable early account of the Babas and Overseas Chinese in Penang and Singapore. Interesting from the standpoint of colonial attitudes and views of the Chinese, as well as nice descriptions of Chinese secret societies, wedding customs, games, etc.</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wallerstein, Immanuel</p> <p>1979 <u>The Capitalist World Economy</u></p> <p>Cambride: Cambridge University Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wallace, Anthony F C</p> <p>1970 <u>Culture and Personality</u></p> <p>New York, N. Y.: Random House</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wang Tai Peng</p> <p>1994 <u>The Origins of the Chinese Kongsi</p> </u> <p>Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications Sdn. Bhd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wheatley, Paul</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1966 <u>The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula Before A.D. 1500:</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: University of Malaya Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important study of the early documents of the colonization and exploration of the Malay Peninsula</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Williams, Lea E</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1964 "Chinese Leadership in Early British Singapore"</p> <u> <p>Asian Studies</u>, Vol. 2, no. 2</p> <p>1966 <u>The Future of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia</u></p> <p>New York: McGraw Hill</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Winzler, Robert L</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1970 <u>Malay Religion, Society and Politics in Kelantan</u></p> <p>PhD. Dissertation, Chicago, Illinois</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1983 "The Ethnic Status of the Rural Chinese of the Kelantan"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>The Chinese in Southeast Asia: Identity, Culture & Politics</u> Vol. 2, edited by L. A. Peter Gosling & Linda Y. C. Lim. Singapore: Maruzen Asia, Pte. Ltd.</p> </dir> </dir> <p>1985 <u>Ethnic Relations in Kelantan: A Study of the Chinese and Thai as Minorities</u></p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Singapore: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Whitmore, J K</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1977 "The Opening of Southeast Asia: Trading Patterns through the Centuries"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Economic Exchange and Interaction in Southeast Asia</u> edited by Karl Hutterer. Michigan: The Univ. Michigan Press</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wickberg, Edgar</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1964 "The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u> Vol. 5, no. 1, March</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1965 <u>The Chinese in Philippine Life: 1850-1898</u></p> <p>Yale Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Willetts, William</p> <p>1964 "The Maritime Adventures of Grand Eunoch Ho"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u> Vol. 5, no. 2, Sept.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Willetts, William & Lim Suan Poh</p> <p>1981 <u>Nonya Ware and Kitchen Ch'ing</p> </u> <p>The Southeast Asian Ceramic Society West Malaysia Chapter</p> <p>Oxford University Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Willmott, W E</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1960 <u>The Chinese of Semarang: A Changing Minority</u> <u>Community in Indonesia</u></p> <p>Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press</p> <p>1966 "The Chinese of Cambodia"</p> <u> <p>Journal of Southeast Asian History</u>, Vol. 7, no. 1, March</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>Willmott, W E, editor</p> <p>1972 <u>Economic Organization in Chinese Society</u></p> <p>Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Win, Shein</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>? "The Chinese Community of Burma: Problems in Relations between Different Ethnic Groups"</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Winstedt, Richard</p> <p>1961 <u>The Malay Magician: Being Shaman, Saiva and Sufi</u> London: Routledge & Paul Kegan</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wolters, O W</p> <p>1982 <u>History, Culture and Religion in Southeast Asian Perspectives</u></p> <p>?: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>An important theoretical contribution to the history of Southeast Asia</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wood, William, editor</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1977 <u>Cultural-Ecological Perspectives on Southeast Asia</u></p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>Athens, Ohio: Papers in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series No. 41</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Wu Yuan-li & Wu Chun-hsi</p> <p>1980 <u>Economic Development in Southeast Asia: The Chinese Dimension</p> </u> <p>Hoover Institution Press</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Yeap Joo Kim</p> <p>1993 <u>The Patriarch</p> </u> <p>Singapore: Lee Teng Lay Pte. Ltd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Yeh Hua Fen</p> <p>1936 <u>Historical Guide to Malacca</u></p> <p>Singapore</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A nice discussion of the early Chinese history of Malacca.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Yen Ching-Hwang</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1976 <u>The Overseas Chinese and the 1911 Revolution: With Special Reference to Singapore and Malaya</u></p> <p>Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Oxford Univ. Press</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <p>1981 Ch'ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644 -1912)</p> <u> <p>Modern Asian Studies</u> Vol. 15, No. 2:261-285</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <p>1986 <u>A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya: 1800-1911</u></p> <p>London: Oxford Univ. Press</p> <dir> <dir> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>A valuable discussion of Overseas Chinese social structure and its history, treating class, the Kong Si system, religious organization, etc.</p> </font> <p> </p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Yong, Paul</p> <p>1994 <u>A Dream of Freedom: The Early Sarawak Chinese</p> </u> <p>Petalying Jaya: Pelanduk Publications Sdn. Bhd.</p> </font> <p> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p>Yousof, Ghulam-Sarwar</p> <p>1982 "<u>Nora Chatri</u> in Kedah: A Preliminary Report"</p> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <dir> <u> <p>Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</u> Vol. 55, Part 1:52-61</p> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </dir> </font> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. 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