ETHNOS AND ANTHROPOLOGOS

"The Baba, a product of an accident of history, is a time-traveler; he has come and he must go." (Felix Chia, The Baba 1980:193)

by Hugh M. Lewis

What does the understanding of Peranakan ethno-culture and ethno-history have to contribute to general theoretical interests in cultural anthropology? What does general anthropology have to contribute to the understanding of the Babas? How do we explain theory in anthropology on the basis of what is known about the Babas, and how can we explain the Baba's on the basis of our anthropological theory? These are legitimate and reasonable questions which any ethnological researcher is supposed to ask of both theory and data and yet perhaps which can never be sufficiently or validly answered.

Such a question serves 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. Its asking helps to keep our books about the world open, our attitude professionally clear and scientifically sober, and our relationship with the world honest and as informed by the world as it is informative about it.

The Babas, their ethno-culture and ethnohistory, 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 that 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. They represent a dynamic aspect of Chinese cultural character that 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.

But the Babas also stand for something else, which perhaps is 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, allows us to ask critical questions about some of foundational concepts concerning culture, ethnicity, social structure, historical patterning, and even evolutionary processes of change. 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 yet 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, other similar Chinese in other parts of Southeast Asia, other emergent, interstitial Creole cultures in other epochs.

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 are to be expected any time there is prolonged organized, and creative contact between different cultures, different civilization, different "races", and different streams of history--they form like swirling eddies in the confluence of great rivers. 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.

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.

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 two or more separate cultural configurations form something of a moire' which contains elements of both configurations but in a new, emergent arrangement.

The anthropological perspective has something interesting and important to contribute to the study of the Baba's, and to the more general field of Southeast Asian and Nanyang studies, that is not otherwise available to a sociological, historical or cultural geographical perspective. On the other hand, the anthropological study of Baba ethno-culture and ethno-history has something interesting and important to contribute to the field of general anthropology, something which casts a new and critical light upon such basic concepts as "culture," "ethnicity," civilization, social structure, etc.

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The history of culture contact has been more often than not a tragic one in which asymmetry of power combines with historical accidents to create patterns of destructive interference between cultural groupings. Patterns of assimilation, segregation or enforced ethnocide have been a predominant theme of histories of acculturation--this makes those occasional cases in which contact is culturally constructive and creative of new patternings all the more interesting and important to study.

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.

We can also see, in the momentous and inevitable turn of the Wheel's 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. If rains come too soon, or too late, or not at all, then no amount of tender care and devotion by the farmer can save the season's crop.

With the example of the Babas, the general framework of culture history can be articulated with the narrower focus upon the ethno-histories of particular peoples, and particular periods and places. With the Babas, we can get a partial picture of how cultural dynamics intermeshes 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.

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"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.

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. 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.

Ethnos, as the basis of human identity and difference in the world, has been changing with the world. How Europeans saw the world and were seen by others in the World during the age of discovery and exploration, is vastly, and fundamentally, different from how Western peoples see the world and are seen by it in the modern era. The basis of fundamental human identity and difference in the world today has been radically transformed--new sets of allegiances, interests, alignments, social contracts, make of old loyalties and chauvinisms anachronisms of a bygone era. If the Gods received a death certificate thousands of years ago, God was declared dead a century ago, and power of our new secular delusions are quickly being undermined by the rapid march of new visions of reality.

"Ethno-culture" is a designation for the distinctive identity and difference of a people, both socially in relation to other groupings, and historically in terms of its origin, development and direction, in terms which are emically salient for the people who are so defined. The objective of the study of ethno-culture 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 in the world.

"Ethnoculture" is a notion of the distinctive symbolic identity shared and elaborated by a particular cultural grouping of people. Both ethnoculture and ethnohistory share a common conceptual ground in the notion of a cultural "base-line"--a hypothetical ideal paradigm, or exemplary model, serving as a point of departure and final reference in our conceptualization of the group identity and symbolisms of a people, and forming the mythological boundaries of our ethnological comprehension, beyond which we are not supposed to stray. It is the groundwork and floor plan, the blueprint upon which we are supposed to reconstruct the structure of a cultural grouping.

For the student of ethnohistory, the baseline is the ideal "Past" as the source, point of origin, and fossilized remnant, from which the cultural-grouping has subsequently drifted in the course of time. For the student of ethnoculture, this hypothetical base-line is found within the ideal "Eternal Present"--as that theoretical core of cultural continuity which has supposedly remained unchanged time immemorial, and remains unalterable within the fundamental patterning of sociocultural patterning. The model of the base-line is presupposed and largely implicit as an ideal rational horizon upon which we project our ethnological comprehension, and from which we are supposed to infer the meaning of ethnological experience.

The ideal metaphor of the base-line is the myth of the ethnologist--a meta-logical myth which determines the parameters of ethnological consciousness. Ultimately, it is derived from the sense of being "traditional" or a "traditional" sense of being. It is the part of the myth of our personal consciousness, our apperceptive awareness of ourselves as of a particular cultural character, or characteristic culture.

Much lip-service is paid in the literature to notions of particular "traditional cultures" without this hypothetical base-line model ever being clearly or conclusively explained. What it is supposed to be like is largely taken for granted and only tacitly presupposed to be realistic or true or to have some actual existence somewhere "out there" in human reality....(Hugh Lewis, unpublished manuscript, 1986 pages 47-48, 1988 page 2)

The ethno-culture 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 to refute by the discovery of contrary evidence.

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The ethno-cultural 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 merchant classes of the port cities of the Straits, and were thus very much fixtures of the urban city-scape, and we can probably correctly claim that the "average" peranakan was a petty merchant trader who was in the middle in a variety of sense, 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 dot the countryside, and thus a kind of "rural-urban" dimensionality of the problem. We must also 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. Of course, from an ethno-cultural point of view, we must assume at least one basic chain of continuity between the distant past and the immediate present, from the over there to the right here, and that is the linkage of biological and cultural heredity--of people who are the direct descendants, whatever the number of generations removed or diluted out, from those who first were known as or eventually came to be called "Peranakan." And in this sense of familial inheritance, early childhood socializations, primary social networks and corporate institutions, and of important life experiences played out in the relative presence or absence of the most significant others. 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 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.

Another significant dimension of the problem of peranakan "Ethno-culture" 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. Furthermore, 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. 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 culture?

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 is 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 is founded centrally upon the principle of being a good 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 is 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 that has basic religious overtones, that the Chinese world and world view may not always be as open as it is represented to be much of the literature, and that Islam may not provide the only negative barrier to the assimilation; of the Peranakan into the host society--"Chinese Religionists" frequently seem to present as great a barrier to passing between Chinese and Malay worlds as anything Islam is purported to do. And 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 process of social integration and assimilation are occurring. What it seems to require most is the loving 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.

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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.

A romantic model would be a story of an original "Eve", 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 remain 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?

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.

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. 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 void 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 much wealth and privilege among tradition bound people who would not otherwise realized such things. This niche, empty and open, left an opening in the traditional Chinese cosmos for the incorporation of foreign elements.

The prevalence of worship of the Goddess of Mercy, or Kwan Yin, not only for the peranakans, but for many Overseas Chinese, represents a significant, symbolic testament to the sacred value and supernatural importance of a pan-ethnic cult of mother worship within a Chinese religious universe predominantly Confucian and male.

In this regard we must seriously ask why it was almost exclusively domestic and female Malay elements that 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.

And yet it is evident that when we consider the religious orientation of the Babas and the Nonyas, we are faced with something of a 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 Christian Catholic orthodoxy to see a similar kind of "lived" religion in action.

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. 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 both processes of primary and secondary socialization through the daughters. 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. Following A. L. Kroeber’s distinction between reality culture and value-culture, what emerged as Nonya culture must be seen as most a kind of value oriented culture that did not have as its central basis survival and subsistence.

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 in power 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 their 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.

Peranakan ethno-culture, 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 floresence in critical, fundamental ways. But European colonialism did clearly serve to highlight it, to underscore its ethno-cultural 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 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.

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 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. I have these basic value conflicts virtually everyday with my Nonya wife. Finally, tradition defines the principle domain of ethno-culture.

The very factors which fostered their structural fortunes 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 models, 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 peranakan group that was, ethno-culturally and structurally, inbetween. Each new generation of Baba and Nonya is left with less and less choice 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 pressures and competition for very limited resources, is much easier, most Peranakans have been undergoing "resinification." 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 would be 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’s 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. The only other alternative seems to be one of escape from the Southeast Asian setting--to the Singapore, or better yet, to the Common Wealth or to the United States. English language, Western education, the acquisition of money and material wealth, and Christianity are all efficacious vehicles for such escape.

With the disintegration of peranakan ethno-culture, 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 for interaction in the wider world in purely peranakan fashion available, more and more peranakans are feeling themselves cut off from their roots, from the tradition in which they themselves were raised, and adrift upon the tides of change.

I am witnessing this disintegration of Baba culture right in my own home, and I am sure that the same thing is happening to many other Baba families. To begin with, I did not marry a Nonya, and my children speak only a little (and faulty) Baba Malay, the patois which the first Babas spoke. It is a corrupt form of the Malay language which includes words and phrases of the Hokkien dialect. My children, naturally enough, take to their mother’s Cantonese tongue. Although I encouraged them to imbibe the culture into which I was born and with which I grew up, I was always cut short whenever I explained the significance of some of the customs by their often repeated remarks that "nobody does that anymore". And in spite of my mother’s help in keeping alive the flame of Baba Malay in our home, by speaking to my children in Baba Malay, in preference to English which she also speaks, my children would often utter a word or two in reply with apparent embarrassment, while looking affectionately at their grandmother who, being every inch a Nony at seventy-two, could well be the last of her kind. Many other Baba families, too, I am certain, possess the last link in the centuries-old chain of their generations. (Felix Chia, 1980:viii)

Nonya: A Brief Account of Nonya Ethnoculture in the Straits Settlements