SPIRITS OF RESISTANCE

AND
CAPITALIST DISCIPLINE
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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Second Edition

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 Spirits of Resistance and
Capitalist Discipline
SECOND EDITION
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 SUNY series in the Anthropology of Work
June C. Nash, editor
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 Spirits of Resistance and
Capitalist Discipline
SECOND EDITION

FACTORY WOMEN IN MALAYSIA

Aihwa Ong

Introduction by Carla Freeman

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 Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2010 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ong, Aihwa.
Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline : factory women in
Malaysia/Aihwa Ong. — 2nd ed.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in the anthropology of work)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3354-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)—
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4384-3355-4 (pbk.: alk. paper).

1. Peasantry—Malaysia—Selangor.
2. Selangor—Rural conditions.
3. Social change—Case studies.
4. Working class—Malaysia—Selangor.
5. Women electronic industry workers—Malaysia—Selangor.
6. Economic anthropology—Malaysia—Selangor. I. Title.
HD1537.M27054 2010
306.3’6095951—dc22

2010004832

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 To my parents
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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Introduction by Carla Freeman xv
List of Abbreviations xxi

PART I
Capitalist Development and Cultural Experience

1 Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation 1

2 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to 11
Commodity Production

PART II
The Kampung Society of Coastal Selangor

3 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 37

4 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 57
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

5 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 85

6 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 115

PART III
Neophyte Factory Women in Late Capitalism

7 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing 141

Gender Hierarchy
8 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 179
9 Spirits of Resistance 195
10 Conclusion 215

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 viii Contents

Notes 223
Glossary 239
Bibliography 245
Index 259
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 List of Illustrations

TABLES
Table 1 Malay Population in Selangor, 1891–1957 18
Table 2 Crop Acreage in Selangor, 1933–1948 25
Table 3 Prices Obtained by Kampung Malay
Smoked Sheet Rubber, Selangor, 1932–1958 31
Table 4 Ethnic and Sexual Division of Estate Workers,
Selangor, 1948 32
Table 5 Acreage Under Cash Crops in Kuala Langat,
1966–1978 41
Table 6 Estimated Average Monthly Incomes from
Malay Holdings, Kuala Langat, 1979 41
Table 7 Distribution of Households by Land Access,
Sungai Jawa, (Sample of One-Third of Total
Population), 1979 59
Table 8 Primary Occupations of Household Heads
by Land Access, Sungai Jawa, 1979 60
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Table 9 Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Men and

Women in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979 64
Table 10 Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Girls and
Boys in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979 65
Table 11 Composition and Size of 242 Households,
Sungai Jawa, 1979 69
Table 12 Retention and Dispersal of Children 18 Years
and Older in 138 Families, Sungai Jawa, 1979 70
Table 13 Average Labor Time Spent by Children and Adults
in Household and Income-Earning Activities,
Sungai Jawa, 1979 75

ix

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 x List of Illustrations

Table 14 Primary Occupations of Men and Women,

One-Third Total Population, Sungai Jawa, 1979 83
Table 15 Causes of Malay Divorces by Percentage Each Year,
Kuala Langat, 1969–79 132
Table 16 Peninsular Malaysia: Distribution of Total
Labor Force by Industry, 1970–80 144
Table 17 Average Wage Rates in Selected Industries for
Manual Laborers in Selangor, 1976 147
Table 18 Distribution of EJI Employees by Ethnicity,
Gender, and Earnings, 1979 156

MAPS
Map 1 Selangor: Districts, Pre-1942 Boundaries 13
Map 2 Kuala Langat: Land Use, Towns and
Transportation Lines to the Klang Valley 38

DIAGRAMS
Diagram 1 Work Organization and Occupation Ranks in
EJI, Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979 157
Diagram 2 Ethnic and Gender Distribution in
the Transistor Assembly Section in EJI,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979 160

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 Preface

Why are Malay1 women workers periodically seized by spirit posses-

sion on the shopfloor of modern factories? Educated Malays regard
spirit beliefs a cultural relic which, like rustic speech and gestures,
should have been left in departed villages. My aim in this book is to
demonstrate how spirit attacks speak to the contemporary experi-
ences of Malay women and their families as they make the transition
from peasant society to industrial production.
To discover the meanings the market economy and industrial wage
labor have for Malay women, it is necessary to talk about women as
historical subjects and in terms of their subjective experiences. This
inquiry deals with struggles over the means and meanings of gender
in the context of exchange, disjunctions, and conflicts generated by
land dispossession and the subjection of peasants to new forms of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

control and domination.

The proliferation of new disciplinary techniques, sexual images,
and episodic outbreaks of spirit possession in the industrializing
milieu leads me to ask: What is the relationship between work disci-
pline and sexuality? What contradictions in the social experiences of
factory women are mediated by evil spirits? In the new constellation
of power relations, what do conflicting agencies and consciousness
tell us about the nature of cultural change?
Capitalist development in Malaysia2 engenders new forms of dis-
cipline in the everyday life of Malays, who up until recently were
largely rooted in village (kampung) society and engaged in small-
scale cash cropping. If “discipline” is taken to mean the effect of
the exercise of power in the interests of capitalist production, then
social control can be traced through a variety of cultural forms
xi

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 xii Preface

which enforce compliance and order within and outside economic

enterprises. This inquiry will explore how changing relationships
in the peasant household, village, and the global factory mediate
divergent attitudes towards work and sexuality among Malays and
within the wider society.
The extension of capitalist relations in Malaysia involves the
simultaneous processes of agrarian transition and industrial capital-
ism which together are transforming Malay society in fundamental
ways. In coastal Selangor, developmental change has produced not a
classic proletarianization but a multiplicity of social strata. Caught in
the flux of land dispossession, the majority of villagers are cast into
unstable wage employment generated by the operations of transna-
tional factories. What are the structural effects of centralized state
power, on the one hand, and the decentralized operations of trans-
national corporation, on the other, on the nature of class power in
the countryside?
The rise of a female Malay industrial force in Malaysian “free trade
zones” is accompanied by divergent representations of female gen-
der and sexuality in the ideological discourse of dominant political
groups. Almost overnight, neophyte factory women barely out of
their adolescence have become contradictory symbols in public com-
mentaries on morality and “truth.”3 How do these conflicting images
of their sexuality mediate the diverse interests of groups and classes?
What do they tell us about the deployment of sexuality and hege-
monic ideology?
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Within the factory, working women confront industrial discipline as

a manifold and wide-ranging network of overt and covert power rela-
tions. Marxists frequently assume that capitalist relations of produc-
tion have an over-determined logic, based on the extreme separation
of mental and physical labor, and the banishment of imaginative life
from the factory floor. If that were the case, what is one to make of the
production of “corporate culture” in transnational corporations? How
are technology and cultural practices brought to bear in the produc-
tion of “docile bodies,” and a new subjectivity in female workers?
Caught between noncapitalist morality and capitalist discipline,
some factory women alternate between states of self-control and
spirit possession. The hantu, evil spirit of an archaic Malay world, is
not alien to the sanitized environments of high technology factories.
If one considers the complex hantu imagery as part of a noncapitalist

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 Preface xiii

critique of capitalist practices, what are the contradictory meanings of

these nightmarish visitations in modern factories? Does the symbol-
ism of possession episodes speak to an elegant opposition between
the production of use values and of exchange values, as Michael
Taussig has claimed for South American workers (1980)? Alternately,
is the devil simply the shadow of a traditional belief system, or does
it represent a contemporary assault on the Malay sense of humanity?
Furthermore, does the hantu metaphor disclose an intense ambiva-
lence in the factory women, their felt tension between old claims and
new desires induced by capitalist culture?
To answer these questions, I have woven many narrative streams
through the work. The voices of neophyte factory women, in coun-
terpoint to corporate images and in protest against public abuse,
articulate an intersubjective mode of apprehending the world. In
their everyday vocabulary of moral piety, as well as in the posses-
sion indictments of male power, women workers seek to express
new identities, to empower their relations with men and the wider
society, and finally to diminish control by dominant power struc-
tures. This study is thus a composition in many discordant voices,
claiming no final authority. It is an unfolding story that remains
to be told more fully by young women living in the shadowy
recesses undisclosed by the electronic gaze of the late twentieth
century.
This book grew out of my meetings with hundreds of informants
and friends in Kuala Langat, Selangor, where I spent fourteen months
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in the field (1979–80). I wish to express my gratitude to the people

of the district — smallholders, factory workers, day laborers, petty
traders, ordinary villagers, government officials, factory personnel —
women, men, and children of different ethnic backgrounds who made
my stay an enriching and unforgettable experience. In Sungai Jawa
(a pseudonym, like all other village and personal names in the main
text) Md. Naim b. Ahmad and Misripah bt. Hj. Ali welcomed me into
their family as someone kurang Jawa (“not yet Javanese”), to be guided,
with kindness, patience, and humor, through the intricacies of Malay-
Javanese kampung life. My field assistant, Rageswari Balakrishna,
competently conducted reams of time budget surveys. Villagers
displayed warm hospitality and occasional impatience, breaking eas-
ily into conversations of remarkable interest and wit. I hope that by
presenting their stories and daily experiences, which form the stuff of

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 xiv Preface

this study, I nowhere betray their trust or interest. May the book be
of some satisfaction in particular to the young factory women whose
quiet courage and steadfast loyalty to their families and themselves
are yet to be appreciated by the wider society.
My training in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia Uni-
versity brought me, by a circuitous route, back to the heartland of
Malaysia I had not known as a locally-born Chinese. My academic
sensibility has been guided by Joan Vincent, Clive Kessler, Robert
Murphy, and William Roff.
I am grateful to the following institutions for funding various
phases of my dissertation research from which this book is derived:
The National Science Foundation (grant no. BNS-787639) and the
International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, which pro-
vided additional support for preliminary write-up at the Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. I also wish to express my
appreciation of research facilities at the following institutions: Arkib
Negara Malaysia (The National Archives of Malaysia), Petaling Jaya,
the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Universiti Sains Malaysia,
Penang, and the National University of Singapore.
June Nash took an early interest in my dissertation and encour-
aged its metamorphosis into a book. Asraf Ghani’s penetrating com-
ments sharpened the contours of my argument as I began the task of
revision for publication. Before it went to the press, this manuscript
benefitted from critical suggestions by Brackette Williams. Different
chapters were also read by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Alan Dundes,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Scott Guggenheim and Cristina B. Szanton. Finally, the Department

of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, provided the
necessary situation and diversions for time away from the task of
writing. With such fine support, remaining flaws in interpretation
are mine alone.

Berkeley, California
March 1986

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 Introduction
by Carla Freeman

Aihwa Ong’s Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline marked a

critical shift in global anthropology and in feminist scholarship. At
the time of its publication in 1986, globalization was not yet a recog-
nized topic in anthropology. Since then, this stirring ethnography of
factory women in Malaysia has become a classic in the fields of labor,
gender, and capitalist transformation in the global South. Spirits of
Resistance was quickly recognized as path-breaking, not only for
documenting the cultural and political effects of “runaway factories”
on the developing world, but also for its innovative analysis of the
lives of young rural women who helped launch Malaysia’s rise as a
tiger economy. Drawing on fieldwork among Muslim Malay peas-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ant families, Ong captured the paradoxical experiences—capitalist

discipline and new freedoms, virtues enforced by Islam and desires
unleashed by capitalism—of neophyte factory women as they
struggled to shape a version of modern Islamic womanhood amidst
massive social transformation. In many ways, this was the first
ethnography of contemporary globalization, a story about how rural
Muslim girls, industrial labor, and spirit possession came together in
an explosive mix that marked a shift in the workings of capital.
Anthropology had been dominated by a split between interpre-
tive and political economy approaches; new tools of analysis were
needed for new global circumstances. In a significant departure, Ong
shifts from Marxian class struggle to Foucauldian analytics of power
to illuminate power dynamics on and off the shop floor. She frames
her study in terms of the play of strategies and counter-strategies in

xv

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 xvi Introduction

different fields of power. Management’s strategies of surveillance

and discipline are juxtaposed alongside tactics of resistance and
subversion by factory women. Industrial employment, opportunities,
and new mechanisms of control changed social life beyond the factory
as the broader society became alarmed by the specter of jean-wearing
factory women invading public space. Islamic fundamentalism
intensified the surveillance and control of female workers as they
explored opportunities for pleasure and autonomy in an urban secu-
lar environment.1
Ong begins with the complex forces of history to explore the range
of resistant tactics employed by ordinary people to manage their inte-
gration into new modes of capitalist discipline. Her analysis of the
micro-techniques for controlling workers’ bodies, and the women’s
clever tactics for challenging and circumventing such disciplinary
schemes has inspired many studies of the intricate power dynamics
at play in the modern factory.2
For Ong, resistance entails a wide range of practices both subtle
and dramatic, individualized and collective, that plays out unevenly
across domestic and workplace terrains. Whereas women’s wage-
earning status confers them new forms of authority at home, they
face convergent forces of patriarchal discipline and surveillance in
the industrial domain. Their cultural struggles and scattered tac-
tics of resistance entail a mix of capitalist and non-capitalist rela-
tions and worldviews. In short, both Japanese corporate managers
and women themselves draw upon peasant ideologies, kampung
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

(village) beliefs, and pre-capitalist gendered practices and symbols

in their efforts to advance their own agendas. Subversive practices,
from crying and complaining of “female problems” to requesting
prayer time and falling prey to angry spirits, Ong says, women enact
“an idiom of protest against labor discipline and male control in the
modern industrial situation” (207). If “female complaints” and dis-
tress are frequent tactics women utilize in response to the arduous
production targets and harsh manner of male factory managers,
these serve to simultaneously reinforce their gendered and sexual-
ized vulnerability.
No example of local, culturally derived resistance more evoca-
tively conjures the subtle dialectics of self-regulation and resistance
than the dramatic case of spirit possession in the factory. These
episodes of “hysteria” give expression to tensions between kampung

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 Introduction xvii

subjectivities and a growing consumer-oriented modernity, between

a growing sense of individuality and the inextricable grip of capitalist
wage labor, that shaped women’s unconscious capacity to regis-
ter a critique of their subjugation by male authority—the male gaze
of sexual suspicion as well as the punitive masculine demands of
the assembly line. Further, these episodes quite literally proclaim
women’s need for “greater spiritual vigilance in domains reconsti-
tuted by capitalist relations of production” (207). Ong argues that
these charged events become hidden tactics of resistance that on the
one hand re-inscribe traditional gendered stereotypes of feminine
weakness and vulnerability, and on the other, extract temporary relief
from the tedium and stress of the assembly line. The Malay working
women she describes were not expressing greater class consciousness
per se, but were articulating new gendered subjectivities in light of
their factory employment, increased family pressure for economic
support, delayed marriage, and desire for enhanced freedoms. The
factory women craft new identities and forms of self-regulation that
paradoxically reinforce patriarchal controls associated with broad
religious and social surveillance. Such contradictory social outcomes
stemming from large-scale female public employment in Malaysia
have intriguing parallels in many subsequent studies on the complex
links between flexible labor, gender, and subjectivity elsewhere in the
world.
Spirit possession and its relationship to capitalist discipline oper-
ates, as the title’s clever twist on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

of Capitalism suggests, both as striking ethnographic illustration and

analytic metaphor for Ong’s central thesis. She argues via Foucault
that cultural logics and expressions are not epiphenomenal effects of
class relations but are themselves the constituting knowledge/power
systems that produce the very truths by which we live our lives (180).
For these women, factory work in the free trade zone represents not
only their structural vulnerability to the alienation and surveillance
of capitalist industrial production but a convergence in moral man-
agement by village elders and religious leaders. Confronting various
threats to their feminine virtue, some women become co-conspirators
in this campaign for moral purity, while others instead attempt to
claim newly individualized feminine subjectivities. More broadly,
Ong’s ethnographic findings challenge socialist feminists’ claim that
factory work will unambiguously liberate women from patriarchal

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 xviii Introduction

power. Her ethnographic study reveals that while working women

gained some measure of autonomy in their personal lives, they came
under nonkinship forms of patriarchal power enforced by the factory
management, Islamic institutions, and state authorities.
This work, now in its twentieth year, remains powerful for its
refusal to over-simplify the complexities of export industrialization
as a model for economic development, and for its demonstration
of the intimate dialectics of culture, economy, gender, religion, and
class, and the meaningfulness of place amid the swirling forces of
global capitalism. Sophisticated and broad-reaching, Spirits of Resis-
tance helped to illustrate the gross oversimplification of emergent
macro models of the world system portraying developing coun-
tries as “reserve armies” of labor waiting to be tapped by the ever
expanding reaches of global capitalism, as well as that of the early
“women and development” studies which imagined the incorpora-
tion of women into systems of capitalist production to provide the
solution to their “low status.”
What continues to make this story powerful in our contemporary
efforts to examine globalization is Ong’s analysis of the often contra-
dictory gendered dynamics within capitalist production itself and
its specific entanglement with the simultaneously changing realms
of household, village, state, and foreign corporation. Several femi-
nist analysts of late have begun to examine the gendered nuances of
capitalist and non-capitalist systems operating in conjunction with
one another, in an effort to show the local specificity of globaliza-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tion “on the ground.” Ong’s work helped to spawn these analyti-
cal inclinations. How marriage arrangements are reconfigured and
sexuality regulated, for instance, become central foci for Ong and
for the social and political discourse surrounding factory women,
as well as for the emerging subjectivities of the women themselves.
Early characterizations of rural third world women as docile and
malleable labor awaiting incorporation into the inevitable clutches
of industrial capitalism are made both more complex and laden
with contradiction and cultural particularity in Ong’s sophisti-
cated account. Her evocative illustrations of the changing cultural
practices and rural rhythms of life, from education and marriage
arrangements to the role of indigenous Malay spirits and sorcery
within a transforming Islam and a shift in understandings of tempo-
rality itself under capitalist production, provides us with a window

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 Introduction xix

into the complex cultural terrain otherwise made invisible in the

gloss of “globalization.”
Ong’s Spirits of Resistance was published in SUNY’s “Anthropology
of Work” series, edited by June Nash, along with Maria Patricia
Fernandez-Kelly’s For We are Sold, I and My People: Women and Indus-
try in Mexico’s Frontier (1983). Together, these two texts signaled not
only a new feminist rethinking of industrialization and economic
development, but the dawn of a new kind of ethnographic engage-
ment in which the traditional community focus became situated
dynamically within a world system of both colonial enterprise and
post-colonial global capitalism. So powerful were these early works
in charting a radically new path for anthropology that together,
they prompted my own radical reorientation of graduate research
to a subsequent twist along the global assembly line, engaging the
themes of gendered and class subjectivities, technologies of power,
and modes of resistance.
The novelty and enduring power of Ong’s analytic innovation was
in her observation that the technologies of power—the discourses
and practices though which not only factory production but all
aspects of everyday life were framed in the Malaysian context of
export industrialization—simultaneously hinge upon and refashion
gender. Drawing on Foucault, she emphasizes the disciplinary tech-
niques that act upon the body, re-constitute subjectivities, and pro-
duce both coercive and resistant effects in the terrain of femininity.
This analytical breakthrough helped not only to reorient a growing
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

body of women and development studies beyond merely document-

ing the devaluation and separate spheres of women in the economy
or advocating their capitalist incorporation, but also advanced a crit-
ical feminist reading of political economy itself.
Feminist ethnographers working in such wide ranging locations
as Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka,
the Philippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Barbados have
been inspired by Ong’s nuanced approach to the intricacies of global
circulations of labor and production, whether factory work, domestic
labor or “carework,” sex work, or a host of unanticipated domains of
transnational services involving information technologies, call cen-
ters, and even medicine. These radical transformations have called
for new epistemological approaches and for new approaches to the
practice of ethnography. We see in Spirits of Resistance an early such

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 xx Introduction

model of analytically wide-angled and multi-scalar ethnography in

which the state, the transnational corporation, the kin group and reli-
gious community, and the local social actors figure simultaneously
in the drama of social change. Spirits of Resistance also offers an
intriguing window into Ong’s later contributions to our understand-
ings of the cultural logics of global capitalism. We can find the seeds
here of her subsequent queries into the cultural logics of globaliza-
tion and regimes of labor. Whether through the concept of “flexible
citizenship” or her provocative rendering of neoliberalism, we find
a critical insistence on situated analysis, a refusal to interpret global
capitalism as monolithic and all-determining, but a critical insistence
on ethnographic analysis of the situated articulation of global tech-
nologies, politics and ethical subject-formation.3
As global production and consumption have become ever more
complexly intertwined, new works increasingly draw our attention
to not just restructured arrangements and multidirectional flows but
to their powerful affective meanings in new projects of self-making.
This book offers an important reminder of not only the inseparability
of political economy and culture but their mutually constitutive rela-
tionships. Ong is interested not so much in questions of identity per
se, but rather in emerging social identifications and points of friction
as people encounter changing institutional technologies and disciplin-
ary techniques, such as those encountered by Malay peasants as they
navigate the gendered minefield of new global production lines and
urban spaces. Spirits of Resistance opened up many of the questions
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

that should continue to inspire our analyses of globalization today.

Indeed, these questions are equally compelling for the reader return-
ing to this work after twenty years and for the reader new to this text
and to the intriguing and complex puzzles of globalization. How are
gender, sexuality, and class challenged and reconstructed across the
changing terrains of family relations, religion, and the shifting tides
of global labor regimes? How are power and resistance articulated in
the hidden, intimate crevices of human experience as well as in the
remarkable visible acts that capture our attention? And how might
the tools of ethnography offer an ever more critical and nuanced van-
tage on the complex convergences of discourse, desire, the imaginary,
and the materiality of globalization in the contemporary age?

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 List of Abbreviations

ABIM Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia — Islamic Youth

Movement of Malaysia
D.O. District Officer
EJI Electronics Japan Incorporated
ENI Electronics Nippon Incorporated
FELDA Federal Land Development Authority, government
land schemes for the settlement of landless families
FMS Federated Malay States
FTZ Free Trade Zone
JCC Joint Consultative Committee
JKK Jawatan Kuasa Kampung — Village Committee
KEMAS Kemajuan Masyarakat — Community Development
projects for women
K.L. Kuala Lumpur
MAS Malaysian Airline System
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MUZ a manufacturer of musical movement components

NEP New Economic Policy
PAS Partai Islam Se Malaysia — Islamic Party of Malaysia
SSDC Selangor State Development Corporation
TOL Temporary Occupational License
UMNO United Malays National Organization, the dominant
party of the ruling National Front coalition

xxi

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 PART I

Capitalist Development and

Cultural Experience

Certain human realities become clearer at the

periphery of the capitalist system . . . the meaning of
capitalism will be subject to precapitalist meanings,
and the conflict expressed in such a confrontation
will be one in which man is seen as the aim of pro-
duction, and not production as the aim of man.
Michael Taussig (1980: 10, 11)
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

[Under capitalism] labour must . . . be performed as

if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such
an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It
cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone,
but can only be the product of a long and arduous
process of education.
Max Weber (1958: 62)

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 Chapter 1

Spirits and Discipline in

Capitalist Transformation

Writing this book is rather like opening Pandora’s box: what kinds
of spirits is one releasing? My inquiry into the meanings industrial-
ization has for Malaysian society necessarily elicits the social signifi-
cance of neophyte factory women not only for peasants but also for
managers of transnational companies, government officials, Islamic
zealots, school teachers, village children, and the wider society. Eth-
nographic knowledge builds upon a negotiated reality between the
anthropologist and informants, and my claim to this alongside other
possible interpretations rests on the inclusion of many voices seldom
heard in the cacophony of academic and political exchanges. By doc-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

umenting changes in rural society and weaving a multi-stranded,

multilingual social reality into the account, this text discloses diverse
reactions to an emerging Malay female proletariat, as well as their
own eloquent descriptions of the disruptions and ambivalences of
cultural change. Thus, while my interpretation may refract like a
multifaceted lens, it preserves a dialectical tension vis-à-vis various
particularistic views expressed about changing Malay society. In this
account, the hantu (evil spirit), hovering over the passage of young
Malay women into industrial modernity, becomes “an image which
mediates the conflict between [non]capitalist and capitalist modes of
objectifying the human condition” (Taussig 1980: xii).
The introduction of industrial capitalist discipline into Malay society
involves both resistance and assent to change in work patterns, con-
sumption, group identity, self-consciousness, and ultimately, a greater
1

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 2 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

synchronization of local life with the rhythm of advanced capitalist

societies. The historical and ethnographic contexts lead me to ask:
What are the effects of capitalist development on Malay peasant soci-
ety? What are the possible connections between capitalist discipline
and cultural discourse? How are the experiences of neophyte factory
women and their images of vice and virtue mediated by the visitations
of Malay spirits in modern factories?
To answer these questions, I take a dialectical approach by juxta-
posing opposed or contradictory social phenomena. My descriptions
will continually oscillate between the analysis of changing material
relationships and the interpretation of cultural attitudes and practices
both emerging and receding in the wake of Malay proletarianization.
This book seeks to illuminate cultural change in an industrializing
society by talking about changing peasant beliefs and practices in a
situation of shifting, complementary, and contradictory meanings.
Previous analyses of Southeast Asian cultures have emphasized the
syncretist paradigm of cultural streams (Geertz 1964) or the two-tiered
model of great and little traditions (e.g., Scott 1976). Departing from
this framework of society as a segmented system of cultural traditions,
I consider divergent and discordant cultural forms in Malaysia where
a complex network of bureaucratic mechanisms has been deployed to
mobilize meaning in the discursive practices of everyday life, for the
maintenance and reproduction of the political economy.
For too long, anthropological concepts of “culture” have been one-
dimensional, overly comprehensive and extrahistorical. Clifford
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Geertz made a significant break when he urged that “culture” be

taken as “webs of significance” (1973: 5), constituted by a system
of shared meanings, symbols, and practices, to be read “from the
native’s point of view” (1979). What has been of less interest to
Geertz is the question of power in the production, definition, and
maintenance of dominant cultural patterns. More recently, Eric Wolf
called for an examination of different cultural forms in specific social-
historical contexts. He emphasized the importance of relating alter-
native symbol systems and practices to the “field of force” generated
by the mode of production (1982: 387). The task of the analyst is to
decode and understand changing cultural meanings, their making
and unmaking, in relations of domination and resistance.
In this book, “culture” is taken as historically situated and
emergent, shifting and incomplete meanings and practices generated

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 Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation 3

in webs of agency and power. Cultural change is not understood as

unfolding according to some predetermined logic (of development,
modernization, or capitalism) but as the disrupted, contradictory, and
differential outcomes which involve changes in identity, relations of
struggle and dependence, including the experience of reality itself.
Multiple and conflicting complexes of ideas and practices will be dis-
cussed in situations wherein groups and classes struggle to produce
and interpret culture within the industrializing milieu. Raymond
Williams has suggested that in class-divided societies hegemonic
domination is not to be understood as merely controlling ideas and
practices but as “a saturation of the whole process of living.” By this he
means that dominant meanings and practices shape the substance of
everyday experiences: our lived expectations, meanings, and practices
constituting our sense of social relationships and of reality (1977: 110).
In Malaysia, industrialization has been accomplished through
pervasive bureaucratic redefinitions of group identity and relation-
ships in domains of public and private life, including the constitu-
tion and boundary-marking processes which define these domains.
Such processes are currently intensified in many third world states
undertaking capitalist development. Since hegemonic attitudes and
practices are necessarily incomplete (at any time, oppositional forms
exist), continual activities through education, media, and employ-
ment structures are required to defend, modify, and even incorpo-
rate the countercultural tactics of subordinated groups in order to
shore up hegemony (Williams 1977: 121–27).
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Taussig (1980) and Williams thus emphasize the cultural construction

and reconstruction of divergent meanings and action which embody a
specific distribution of political and economic forces. Such a formula-
tion enables us to deal with cultural change without a false opposition
between ideology and practice. Michel Foucault’s explication of the
varied forms modern power takes is pertinent for our understand-
ing of how social organization and realities are being reconstituted
in some third world societies. By suggesting that the operations of
modern power are in fact productive rather than repressive (i.e., effec-
tuated through repression) he argues that schemes of discursive prac-
tices are involved in the complex production of rituals, objects, and
“truth” (1979: 194). The effects of power/knowledge relations (e.g.,
scientific management) are to implant disciplinary techniques in bod-
ies and human conduct, thereby complementing more overt forms of

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 4 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

control in everyday life. In transnational corporations, we see that

relations of domination and subordination, constituted in scientific
terms, operate not only through the overt control of workers’ bod-
ies but in the ways young female workers come to see themselves. In
their changing positions within the family, the village, the labor pro-
cess, and wider society, they devise counter tactics for resisting images
imposed on them and come to construct their own images.1
A heightened sexuality attributed to Malay female workers by
the Malaysian public can be considered the contradictory cultural
constructions of a society intensely ambivalent about the social con-
sequences of industrial development. In looking at the complex
relation between sexuality and gender, it is necessary to eschew the
assumptions of received concepts such as “women’s roles,” “sex-
ual inequality,” and “patriarchy” either in their implied sense of
“achieved states” (Williams 1977: 11–20) or as suitable starting points
of analysis. Many ethnographies written about “women’s status/
role” in third world societies often lack this critical understanding of
gender as cultural constructions, both imposed and increasingly self-
defined, in particular historical situations. Even more rare, as Marilyn
Strathern has pointed out, is the recognition that in some societies,
gender may not be the primary organizing code of sexual difference
but rather an idiom for other kinds of social differentiation, such as
prestige ranking (1981). Perhaps most critically, the preoccupation
of “women’s studies” with statistical measurements of structural
“inequality” overlooks the self-formative activities of women which
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

partially structure their identities and the immediate relationships

within which they are enmeshed in daily life. As a consequence, they
leave underanalysed the dialectical relation between processes out of
which constraints are developed and within which gender is cultur-
ally formed and transformed. This inquiry asks why sexuality should
become a key image/construct in Malay transition to industrial capi-
talism; what does it tell us about culture as a dialectical construction?
It is a major contention of this work that local meanings, values, and
practices have been reworked within the operations of administra-
tive organs, capitalist enterprises, and civil institutions.
In Malaysia, capitalist discipline operates through a variety of
control mechanisms in social, political, and work domains both to
regulate and legitimate unequal relations which sustain the process
of industrial modernization. By “discipline” I mean the effects of the

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 Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation 5

exercise of power on the subjugated, and the enforced and induced

compliance with the political, social, and economic objectives, con-
sidered rational and functional for capitalist production. The devel-
opment of political mechanisms of control, whether in state offices,
development projects or factories, necessarily involves changing
material relations as well as an altered sense of reality, changing self-
knowledge, and cultural justification of the social order, in times of
noncrisis.
The following section will discuss how the cultural construction
and reconstruction of meaning, gender relations, and sexuality are
involved in new disciplinary systems and forms of resistance gen-
erated in rural Malay society. It will be argued that class formation
is not the only process whereby new consciousness and practices
emerge or are superseded.
The concept of “proletarianization” is fraught with Marxist
assumptions derived from Lenin’s discussion of the transition from
Czarist feudalism to agrarian capitalism in Russia (1964). The situa-
tion in the corner of Peninsular Malaysia I am concerned with is not
representative of the classic case of rural differentiation into a small
number of agrarian capitalists and a multitude of rural laborers.
Rather, the on-going dispossession of Malay peasants in Kuala Langat
will be considered in relation to (i) an expanding state bureaucracy
for the integrating fractions of the peasantry loosened from the land,
and (ii) global corporate strategies based upon the fragmentation
of the labor force dispersed throughout the world system. In other
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

words, we are talking about circumstances in which the changing

conditions of production and reproduction are less ordered by mer-
chant capital than commanded over by the state apparatus and by
global capital. This centralization of bureaucratic control over local
reproduction processes is not limited to the production of exchange
values but extends to the production of cultural values as well.
The crisis is seen in processes involved in the social reproduction
of the kampung, the basic community, territorial unit, and the social
matrix of everyday life. In Kuala Langat, kampung households exhibit
differential capacities to reconstitute the labor process in smallhold-
ing production as more households come to control smaller parcels of
land. But the formalism of landownership categories is only one (and
often misleading) dimension of changing peasant-capital relation-
ships. The making of new class relations is dependent not only upon

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 6 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

access to land but also upon the ability of households and individuals
to realize new forms of linkages with the state machinery and modern
labor markets. Furthermore, recognition of the domination by the
state and capital over the labor process is politically justified in terms
of development in the interest of rural Malays. This is a form of “mis-
recognized” domination Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence”
(1977). However, as I will try to show, complicity in their own social
domination, if an obstacle to group interests, can also be a hidden
channel to individual upward mobility.
As more kampung folk become wage workers, downward mobility
is more commonly endured by the majority than upward mobility
into the ranks of bureaucratic or industrial employment. Increas-
ingly, individual educational and occupational trajectories beat a
path out of kampung society, a structural effect of market and bureau-
cratic disciplining operating selectively on individuals rather than
on groups. Such individuated grassroots reactions to the changing
economy make doubtful the significance of peasant responses such
as household strategizing (White 1976) and resistance to market and
state policies (Scott 1976) which have been claimed for rural societies
elsewhere in Southeast Asia. As my description of kampung society
will demonstrate, group strategies adapted to changes in the local
economy are not very effective for class mobilization when the field
of conflicting interests becomes integrated within wider structures
of political coercion and labor market manipulation. Dispossessed
peasants, set upon different trajectories of survival and mobility, are
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

individuated as much by gender, education, village origin, and polit-

ical affiliation as by social class aspirations.
As productive activities on the land give way to the sale of labor by
household members, the power configuration of domestic relations
is continually realigned, both in cooperation and in conflict. In this
transition to industrial labor, special pressures are brought to bear
on women, but especially daughters, in the Malay kampung family.
Parents’ attempts to set sons and daughters on different career paths,
in accordance with selective market demands, are often fraught
with conflict and ambivalence. Pierre Bourdieu notes the cumula-
tive structure of dispositions (habitus) cultivated through education,
acquired values, and practices — symbolic capital — in individual
and collective pursuit of upwardly mobile pathways (1977; 1984). The
acquisition of symbolic capital in particular families thus mediates

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 Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation 7

the relationships which restructure emotions between parents and

children, brothers and sisters, governs those relationships which dis-
tribute individually acquired material resources within and between
generations. In this new configuration of day-to-day relations, what
women and men come to mean to each other in the domestic domain,
and how they perceive the household, are aspects of their cultural
history too often overlooked in ethnographic accounts.
In the new milieu of their production activities, neophyte factory
women and men experience power as a manifold, ever-changing,
and elusive force. Much of the literature on third world women and
multinational corporations has neglected to recognize the multiple
forms and foci of power relations which constitute the social domains
of these industrial workers. State linkages to foreign investments and
to labor control condition the constellation of power relations exer-
cised over the nascent working classes. Political disciplining of the
rural population involves support for the privileged few who can be
integrated into the state apparatus, on the one hand, and political
and material constraints on the majority, on the other. The Malay
laboring poor, subjected both to bureaucratic culture and to the call of
Islamic revivalism, consider themselves politically informed Malay-
Muslims rather than a class in the Marxist sense. Female workers
express in the culture of their everyday life the ambiguous images
and practices of a fragmented, mobile, and ultimately dispensable
labor force harnessed to global industrial production.
Induction to capitalist relations of production generates profound
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

contradictions in the Malay peasant’s orientation towards work and

life. Hitherto, village life was ordered by the rhythm of agricultural
cycles, daily Islamic prayers, and kampung tasks largely carried out
according to personal compulsion; everyday life was decidedly non-
capitalist. The over zealous villager seen cycling to his garden on a
hot afternoon is mocked as “devil-driven” by neighbors jealous that
he is “planting capital” while they take their customary nap. More
critically, kampung folk expect to work at their own volition, be their
“own boss,” and not be ordered around by others. In daily life, it is
often only young girls who are supervised, if at all, in their domestic
tasks by female relatives. Thus, I would argue, the trauma of indus-
trial labor for village women is in the rigidity of the work routine,
continual male supervision, and devaluation of their labor in the
factory. Spirit possession episodes, in which women become violent

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 8 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

and scream abuses, are interpreted, against Taussig (1980), not as a

‘non-capitalist critique of abstract exchange values, but as a heartfelt
protest against the loss of humanity/autonomy in work. Six or more
years of elementary schooling have not dampened the carefree spirit
of peasant girls for whom corporate control and labor discipline is a
continuing personal and social crisis.2
However, contrary to some Marxist assertions (e.g., Burawoy
1979), capitalist relations of production cannot be assumed to have an
inherent logic, operating as they do in diverse situations of the mul-
tiple and shifting play of power relations. I maintain that the series
of disciplinary mechanisms brought into play in the transnational
corporation combine both labor control and management techniques
disguised and reworked into a “corporate culture” which pervades
the workaday life. Drawing on Foucault’s insights, I argue that in the
labor process, young women are being reconstituted as instruments of
labor and as new sexual personalities. Foucault has observed that the
deployment of sexuality, as part of the expanding political technol-
ogy of modern power, unavoidably induces self-management in the
subjected, who, in becoming a self-affirming subject, “opens up the
possibility of a substantial shift in tactics” (1980: 130). The elaboration
of a culture of consumption or a cult of purity by different groups
of Malay factory women must be seen in this light of differentiated
resistance and cultural maneuvers in changing power domains.
For the Malaysian public, the sexuality of these new working
women in transnational factories becomes the focus of anxiety over
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

the social effects of capitalist development. This study therefore

seeks to understand the industrial transformation of rural Malay
society by looking at the predicament of young kampung women.
In the public eye, neophyte factory women have become the medi-
ating images of truth, the currency of discourse for parents, broth-
ers, factory managers, male workers, politicians, Islamic revivalists,
and themselves. I will talk about the varied coinage of sexuality in
the home, the workplace, and the public forum, alternating between
external representations of gender roles and sexual meanings and
the self-constitution of identity by the neophyte factory women.
In the rural household, the cash-earning unmarried daughter
becomes a challenge to the local ideology of male protection: what
are the changed perceptions of fathers, brothers, and “boyfriends” (a
new category) to the working girl-woman no longer accommodated

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 Spirits and Discipline in Capitalist Transformation 9

under a unified concept of “maiden”? How do factory women

handle the contradictory experiences of economic autonomy from
kinsmen and political coerion by men in the corporation and the
wider society?
Are the hantu hallucinations a residual image of remembered
village, a present shadow in their industrial life, or both? This sense
of affliction is induced as much by a particular corporate surveil-
lance as by a general public gaze of disapproval. In the prolifera-
tion of consumer culture, how do neophyte factory women come to
reimagine power relations and the public perception of women as
sexual/moral threat? What can notions of counter tactics and alter-
native self-images contribute to our analysis of their attempts to
redefine themselves, restructure gender relations, and form different
linkages to class and economic power?
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

The anthropologist shares a meal with village friends

This book is arranged in three parts. Chapter 2 deals briefly with

the colonial history of Malay peasants, composed of local inhabitants
and immigrants from the wider Malay archipelago who established
cash cropping villages in coastal Selangor. The rest of the study
draws upon fieldwork investigation conducted in 1979–1980.

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 10 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Part II takes the reader into a contemporary subdistrict (mukim

Telok) of Kuala Langat to observe changes in the daily life of Malay
villagers, mainly of Javanese ancestry. Primary focus is on the
reworking of domestic relations, the structuring of feeling and fam-
ily strategies in a situation of rapid proletarianization.
Part III concerns the experiences of Malay peasant women in trans-
national electronics factories located in a nearby “free trade zone.”
Management techniques of control in the labor process include the
management of emotions and the production of a new sexuality. In
analysing the rearrangements of power relations, I will discuss the
symbolic meanings of the hantu, and of the neophyte factory women,
for the various participants in this local drama which momen-
tarily suggests the universal features of cultural change in the late
twentieth century.
Moving through this threefold study is the theme of cultural resis-
tance among rural Malays at different phases of their encounter with
and incorporation within the world capitalist system. Over the last
one hundred years, the introduction of new relations of production
and exchange into rural Malay society has involved the cultural
reconstructions of ethnicity, family, female, male, and morality within
changing configurations of power relations. In the transition from
cash cropping to industrial labor, preexisting meanings, values, and
practices were reformulated by Malay peasants in their everyday
acquiescence in and resistance to larger structures of domination.
This is a story of cultural struggle in which the dialectic between
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

spirits of resistance and new forms of discipline is the key refrain of

rural Malays as they enter into the world of laboring by the clock.

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 Chapter 2

Malay Peasants from Subsistence

to Commodity Production

Through centuries of seafaring trade, immigration, and foreign

conquest, coastal Selangor on the Malay Peninsula was one of many
landing points on the Straits of Malacca (see Map 1). This study of
changing Malay society explores the particular outcomes, at the
individual, domestic, and regional levels, of the interplay between
local cultural structures and external influence through successive
waves of integration into the world system. It is also the untold story
of immigrant and local Malays who over the past hundred years
have been reconstituted as cash cropping peasants and laborers in
the transnational companies of late capitalism.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Drawing on colonial records, the present chapter traces changing

relations of production and cultural practices as Malay society in
Selangor became the object and subject of British colonial policies
within the local and international contexts of industrial capitalism.
Through “indirect rule” of the Malay States (1874–1957), British offi-
cials introduced politico-legal changes governing native land, culti-
vation, and populations of diverse origins. Colonial policies also gave
birth to a discursive existence of the “native,” ideologically differen-
tiated from immigrant Chinese and Indian populations. The actual
experiences of immigrant Malay populations in pioneer kampung,
rice fields, and new rubber holdings have to be gleaned from colonial
accounts. Politically situated by colonial practices, buffeted by mar-
ket forces, the Malay household economy evolved flexible strategies,
not to accumulate wealth but to ensure survival in economic crisis
11

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 12 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

originating elsewhere in the world system within which they were

now integrated.

Rural Malay Society on the Eve of British Intervention

The people lead strange and uneventful lives. The men are
not inclined to much effort except in fishing or hunting, and,
where they possess rice land, in ploughing for rice . . . The
women were lounging about the house, some cleaning fish,
others pounding rice; but they do not care for work, and the
little money which they need for buying clothes they can
make by selling mats or jungle fruits. . . .
Isabella Bird (1967: 138–39)

In the nineteenth century, the coastal regions of the Malay Peninsula

were loosely controlled by unstable tributary systems. These petty
systems were given political legitimacy, Islamic aura, and cultural
focus by Malay sultans, momentarily the strongest monarchs, who
were ensconced in royal towns situated at river mouths. Below the
sultan, conceived in native terms as the source and concentration of
all wealth (Milne 1982), local “big men” (orang besar) extracted tribute
from territories (Negeri) conveniently shaped by rivers, the main lines
of trade, cultivation and hence control. The rakyat, as direct produc-
ers on the cleared land, paid out taxes, levies on riverine trade, and
corvée labor to “big men” who administered local justice and defense
(Gullick 1958: 36). Under the kerah system, “big men” could demand
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

unlimited customary services from villagers to carry out large proj-

ects of jungle clearing or construction. Debt slaves and war captives
also provided labor for the nonproducing class (Sadka 1968: 297).
Malay cultivators in small settlements held usufruct rights to land
from the sultan in return for such tributes in kind and labor. Royal
grants to Peninsular Malays and Muslim peoples from elsewhere in
the Malay archipelago were the means for accumulating, retaining,
and replenishing the cultivating population. Once land was cleared
and developed by a Malay settler, it could be transferred to fam-
ily members, so long as they continued to cultivate and occupy the
land, while meeting their customary rents to “big men” and sultan
(ibid., 340).
Thus a tension was engendered between village production for
subsistence needs and production for surplus extraction by the

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 13

Map 1
Selangor: Districts, Pre-1942 Boundaries
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

non-producing class. Kampung production was accordingly curtailed,

the level determined by individual domestic subsistence needs, sur-
plus payments, or the ability to evade such customary exactions. The
locale and size of settlements, consisting of 20 to 50 households, were
determined by the possibility of wet rice cultivation along swampy
river banks. Despite the low level of technology, villagers exploited
different ecological niches — jungle, river, and sea — which provided
produce for self-sustenance, tribute, and sometimes small-scale trade.
Given the particular combination of easy access to abundant jungle
land and not uncommon peasant attempts to evade heavy exactions,
families remained small in size (often consisting of less than five indi-
viduals) and dispersed over scattered settlements. There was little
incentive to accumulate land since land not improved by labor was

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 14 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

“dead land” (tanah mati) (Maxwell 1884: 173). Only cultivated land,
which could be tended and passed on by family members, was “live”
(tanah hidup). Since uncultivated land was in abundant supply, family
formation and dissolution were influenced by the early departure of
children to make new plots in the jungle. Furthermore, the combina-
tion of low yields and high corvée demands would have induced the
early dispersal of children, contributing to scattered, lightly-populated
settlements.1 Indeed, given the mode of extraction, wealth accumu-
lation by the rakyat would have invited the unwelcome attention of
rapacious lords. The peasant household thus strove to be small, self-
sufficient, and structurally adapted to easy relocation or dispersal of
members, as required by ecological or political contingencies. Indi-
vidual domestic groups did not require sustained exchanges with
other households or with the market to ensure simple reproduction.
As cultivators living on the edge between jungle and river-sea,
daily activities were carried out according to a simple division of
labor between men and women, adults and children. Women worked
on rice fields and raised garden produce and poultry. Among immi-
grant groups like the Javanese and Minangkabau, peasant women
took up petty trading in regional markets (Winstedt 1981: 131). To
supplement their meagre production, men, women, and children
turned to fishing and the gathering of wild vegetables and animals.
As village society was not divided into occupational groups, the
family head furnished household and farm implements from jungle
material. There was almost no need for cash, although occasionally,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

cash was earned by ferrying travellers across rivers (Gullick 1958:

30–31). A small quantity of surplus products was sold to Chinese
tin-mining camps which gradually became a feature of the Malay
Peninsula from mid-century onwards.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, as British mer-
cantile interests were drawn by tin deposits in the Malay Peninsula,
coastal Selangor was disrupted by intermittent warfare between rival
kinsmen for the Bugis royal seat. Village settlements, if never stable
before, became “consciously impermanent” as villagers turned en
masse to flight, a customary response to heavy exactions and inva-
sions by overlords (ibid., 29). By 1874, when agents of the British East
India Company intervened to stabilize conditions for the tin trade,
many villages in the region had been depopulated, and the inhabit-
ants fled to other parts of the Peninsula (Rathborne 1898: 117–118).2

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 15

It was in such circumstances that rural Malay society first came

under the scrutiny of British administrators and visitors. Follow-
ing the imposition of a Residential system,3 British colonial officials
handsomely pensioned off the sultan and gained administrative
control of the territory under his sovereignty for the systematic col-
lection of revenue. In the early 1880s, passing through the Malay
Peninsula, Isabella Bird observed that Malay men were “not inclined
to much effort except in fishing and hunting, and, where they poss-
ess rice land, in ploughing.” She commented that Malay women
could use more of their time making artifacts to sell for cash (1967:
138–139). Viewing the precapitalist society with market lenses, she
found the work patterns and time allocation of Malays wanting. In
the next few decades, British perceptions of Malay peasants evolved
into an image of the “indolent native,” part of a colonial ideology
which obscured actual changes wrought within rural Malay com-
munities by British rule and capitalist transformation of the wider
society. Politico-legal changes in land control and immigration
broke the economic self-sufficiency of the Malay peasantry, integrat-
ing their production activities within the circuit of the embryonic
capitalist economy. As peasant access to land became restricted, and
they turned increasingly to cash cropping, the reproduction of the
domestic group as a unit of production and consumption came to be
governed by world market forces.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Colonial Rule: Malay Immigrants and Peasants

The Malay never works if he can help it, and often will not
suffer himself to be induced or tempted into doing so by
offers of the most extravagant wages.
Hugh Clifford (1927: 19)
British colonial official in Malaya

Indirect rule by the British India Office enabled British mercantile

interests to undertake primitive accumulation in Malay territories.
This process of capital expropriation was twofold — the subjugation
and consolidation of the Malay peasantry, and the exploitation of pri-
marily non-Malay immigrant labor in capitalist enterprises. First, a
nascent capitalist economy was built upon British and Chinese capital
and the large-scale influx of male immigrant labor from China and
India. Chinese and Indian immigrants cleared the land, built towns

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 16 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

and the infrastructure necessary for capitalist development. They also

provided cheap labor for tin mines, plantations, and urban services.
Second, British policy towards Malays was one of mutual accommo-
dation with the royal elite; a structure of colonial administration and
preserved royal privilege for the reconstitution and domestication of
a peasantry artificially shielded from capitalist disruptions. Thus the
colonial state, through a dual policy of selective peasantization and
immigration, deployed local and immigrant populations in differenti-
ated sectors of the emergent “plural society.” This “divide-and-rule”
strategy complemented the process of “uneven and combined devel-
opment” in the colonial territory.
In Selangor, an immediate task of British administration was the
fortifying of the diminished peasant population. At the time of
British Intervention, only about 5,000 Malays were left in the state
(Rathborne 1898).4 Under colonial administration laws governing
land, immigrant labor, and market activities enabled the colonial
power to increase the peasant population in allotted spaces within
the changing economy. During the first decade, revenues generated
by the fast-expanding tin industry enabled the colonial administra-
tion to lift the taxation burden from other sectors of the economy. In
1879, Frank Swettenham, the Assistant Resident of Kuala Langat,
formulated his land policy by asserting “we do not seek revenue
but population” (Sadka 1968: 331). He felt that the main need was
to get a permanent population onto the soil so that the expansion
of a food-producing peasantry would ultimately produce indirect
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

revenue (ibid., 343).

Thousands of immigrant Malays from the Dutch East Indies were
encouraged by rent remissions and small loans to settle in the district.
Javanese, Sumatrans, and Outer Islanders arrived in groups, often
led by leaders who applied for state land for their followers.5 By 1886,
two-thirds of the Malay population in Selangor consisted of immi-
grants from the Netherlands East Indies (ibid., 1968: 327–328). These
immigrants were considered potential peasants; they were given land
grants in swampy coastal areas to found kampung on the borderlines
of the interior dominated by towns, plantations, and mines. These
were quickly connected by a network of road and rail paid for by tin
revenue. In the next few decades, the majority of immigrant Malays
arriving in the Federated Malay States (FMS)6 were Javanese.

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 17

By the new century, the demands of Western capitalist economies

for rubber propelled the FMS into the mainstream of the world
market. Javanese immigration into the Malay States has to be seen
in this context. Built upon indentured laborers from Tamil Nadu,7
the Malayan rubber plantation industry also engendered a small
stream of Javanese contract workers from the Dutch East Indies,
many by way of Deli, North Sumatra.8 There were two systems for
imported Javanese contract laborers. From 1926 through the 1930s,
plantations made formal arrangements to import Javanese work-
ers on three-year contracts. After their term expired, many applied
for land grants to settle down as “Malay” smallholders. Under the
second system of labor importation, Muslim shipping agents —
called “sheiks” — recruited and paid the passage of impoverished
Javanese to Singapore, where they were handed over to labor con-
tractors (tukang tebus). Bonded workers (wong tebusan) made verbal
contracts with their tukang, agreeing on a period of servitude as debt
payments (T. Shamsul 1967: 238; Khazin 1980: 10–11). In practice,
many wong tebusan were undoubtedly exploited beyond the contract
period and awarded varying shares of the land grants they helped
develop. An informant recalls that in the 1930s he was a bonded
laborer for ten years. During that time, he developed a 15-acre lot for
his tukang, for which he received a 3-acre plot. Finally, many “free”
Javanese immigrants, attracted by land grants and the quick wealth
rubber represented, attached themselves to patrons — earlier settlers
who were relatives and friends — until they could acquire their own
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

kampung holding.
British colonial authorities considered Javanese immigrants,
together with Banjarese, Minangkabau, and other Muslim peoples
from the Dutch territories as “immigrant Malays” who could apply
for kampung land and settle down as peasants. Thus, in the southern
half of the Malay Peninsula, scores of kampung came to be founded
by immigrant Malays who had entered both as free individuals and
as contract workers. These villages took root in the interstices of rub-
ber estates and mines or established themselves along trunk roads,
their gardens miniature homemade versions of the great plantations
within which they were enclosed. By the Second World War, immi-
grant Malays comprised almost half the total Malay population in
coastal Selangor, and a majority in Kuala Langat (see Table 1).

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 18 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Table 1
Malay Population in Selangor, 1891–1957

Local Immigrant
Year Malays Malays Total

1891* 23,750** 2,828 26,578

1901 34,248 6,392 40,640
1911 45,474 19,588 65,062
1921 63,995 27,826 91,821
1931 64,436 58,502 122,938
1947 103,456 83,868 187,324
1957 194,506 96,905 291,411
(Source: Dodge 1980: 463)
*This was the first census conducted in the state. In that year, there were 75,000
Chinese in Selangor because of the tin mining industry based in and around Kuala
Lumpur (Jackson 1964: 45–51).
**Immigrant Malays were probably also entered under this category; it was men-
tioned earlier that immigrant Malays comprised some two-thirds of the total Malay
population in 1886.

Constructing A “Malay Yeomanry”

Colonial rule profoundly changed the relationship of Malay culti-
vators to the land and to the wider society. For the majority of local
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

and immigrant Malays, the most immediate effect on their social situ-
ation was the introduction of the Torrens system of land registration.
Under the land code, village lands and new holdings developed by
Malays were entered into subdistrict (mukim) registers. Thus Malay
land, formerly not an item for exchange, thereby became a commod-
ity which could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or transferred, as the
registered titleholder so pleased. The rapid development in a market
for Malay-held or Malay-developed land soon threatened the con-
tinued existence of kampung society and raised the spectre of a land-
less class that would challenge its sultan’s rapprochement with the
British colonial masters. District land officials feared that once the
Malay peasant sold his land to go on the hajj, he soon “ceased to be a
Yeoman and [became] at best [a] day labourer and at worst, a vaga-
bond” (SSF 3170/10, no. 37).

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 19

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the expansion in

the Malayan rubber plantation industry set off a scramble for areas
not yet claimed by capitalist interests, i.e., kampung lands. Tempted
by land speculation, local and immigrant Malays sold their existing
land and newly developed holdings to Chinese planters, Chettiar
money lenders, and European companies. Villagers were induced to
sell their holdings by the offer of high prices or because neighbors
had sold land and departed (ibid.). Throughout the FMS, Malays
exercised their new power to participate in commercial land dealings
in return for quick sums of ready cash (Jackson 1968: 195–197).
In Selangor, district officers were alarmed that a total of 1,584
kampung holdings (some 7,567 acres) were disposed of by Malays to
non-Malay merchants and capitalists between 1909–1910. A report
from the Kuala Langat district office noted that twenty Javanese
families had recently moved out after selling over 28 lots (state
grants ranged from 4 to 7 acres); another 150 lots were going on the
market. Similar sales of village holdings were reported in other dis-
tricts; where the plantation industry was expanding, Malay lands
were purchased by large holdings or joint-stock companies. By the
time of the first rubber boom, the fringe areas remaining for Malay
settlement had already become very limited (SSF 3170/10, no. 37).
This potential dissolution of the kampung society and influx of
landless Malays into the capitalist sector threatened the colonial
framework for administering a plural economy. The district officer
of Kuala Langat warned that
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

from the government point of view not only does the disap-
pearance of the Malay Kampongs (villages) diminish the pros-
pect of a future agricultural population but it defeats the very
aim and object of which we are “protecting” the Malay States.
It also upsets all land administration . . . for a collector who
has been trying to keep European Estates, Chinese rubber and
Malay Kampongs each in their proper place, to find the whole
arrangement upset by the buying up of a flourishing Malay
Kampong to float a rubber company. . . . (ibid.)
To arrest the uprooting of local Malays and fix peripatetic immigrant
Malays to village land, colonial officers introduced paternalistic land
and cultivation regulations to restrict the commercialization of Malay
land and labor. Educated in public schools, Cambridge, and Oxford,
British colonial officers saw Malays as “a race of yeoman-peasantry

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 20 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

. . . deluded by visions of present but transitory wealth.” These

self-appointed caretakers of native populations felt that they had
to exercise better judgement on the behalf of “the Malay yeoman-
peasant” in order to prevent his “extinction” by the market economy
(SSF 10/12).
Consequently, the colonial administration in 1913 signed into law
the Malay Reservation Enactment. This setting aside of special areas
for Malay cultivations required a colonial legal definition of who
constituted a “Malay.” In 1913, the Malay Reservations Enactment
Committee defined “Malay” as “a person belonging to any Malayan
race who habitually speaks the Malay language or any Malay lan-
guage and professes the Muslim religion” (FMS Enactment no. 15,
1913). Accordingly, quit-rent of different classes of land was reduced
to encourage increased immigration by settlers from the Nether-
lands East Indies (SSF 3170/10, no. 37). In pressing for passage of the
legislation, the Legal Adviser to the FMS argued that
the present measure purports to provide for the protection of
Malays against the temptation to divest themselves of their
land. It is really a measure to provide protection for the Malays
against themselves (FCP 1913: 23–25).
Thus, in the name of “the continuation of the Malay race,” the reser-
vations act was passed.
Throughout the British-controlled states, Malay Reservations were
established in remnant, unsettled areas, the choicest lands already
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

having been claimed by plantation and mining interests (Lim T.G.

1977: 114). Any land within a gazetted Malay Reservation could not
be sold, leased, or otherwise disposed of to a “non-Malay.” Thirty-
five Reservations, ranging from 300 to almost 4,000 acres in size,
were established in Selangor. In setting aside this relatively small
area, the Reservations Enactment Committee declared that it was
“not to prevent any Malay that had the acumen to acquire land with
a view to profiting” (SSF 10/12). The official position was “to secure
to his heirs their hereditary rights . . . (the enactment) would at the
same time be a strong inducement towards permanent settlement
in the State” (SSF 3170/10, no. 37). Thus colonial policy intervened
to safeguard the political economic conditions whereby local and
immigrant Malays, threatened with the loss of land, could be recon-
stituted into a land-owning peasantry sheltered from the more dis-
ruptive forces of the nascent capitalist system.

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 21

Other measures to ensure a “Malay yeomanry” included restric-

tions on cultivation of cash crops in order to “preserve” the purported
kampung character of Malay lands and reinforce the assigned role of
Malays as food-producers. Such rules governing cash cropping in fact
arrested a self-generated movement among Malay smallholders to
grow rubber in places unsuitable for rice, and, more critically, to ben-
efit from the high prices for the commodity. In Selangor land offices,
the registrations of Malay “ancestral lands” (tanah pesaka) were accom-
panied by a “non-rubber” condition. District officers claimed that
this restriction made Malay lands less attractive to non-Malays, thus
forestalling the temptation to sell or purchase kampung holdings (SSF
3170/10). Planting restrictions were reinforced by a graded system of
taxation for cultivated plots in Malay Reservations; newly alienated
plots with rubber trees were most highly taxed (Lim T.G. 1977: 116).
Despite such legal constraints, rural Malays over the next decades
took up production of rubber and coconut, which provided the cash
needed by peasants increasingly dependent on the market economy.

British “Protection” and the Image of “Indolence”

The Reservations Act not only set aside Malay lands and ensured
the Malays’ continued existence as a peasantry, but it also gave
political-legal substance to Malay ethnic identity, thus shaping the
Malays’ role and location within the political economy for decades to
come. As early as 1900, the Resident-General of the FMS had elabo-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

rated this role vis-à-vis the colonial master:

The principal industry, that of mining, being practically con-
trolled by the Chinese and a few Europeans, it has been asked
what has British protection done for the Native peasantry,
“the real Malay.” The reply is that it has given him security
for life, and property, unknown before to the common people,
when wives, daughters and orchards were at the hands of the
aristocracy. . . . In return, the only contribution he makes to
the Government revenue is a very small annual quit-rent, if he
is a landowner. . . . The only complaint he can make is that
the British advisers have not forced him to become industrious
by making him work after the manner of the Dutch with their
natives in the East Indies. (FMS AR 1900: 10)
Thus political gratitude and servitude came together in the legal
construction of a specific set of relationships between Malays, the
land, and the market economy. Colonial hegemony structured the

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 22 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

circumstances of Malay life but also conditioned discourse on the

“indolent Malay.” In the sport of native watching, colonial officials
were continually struck by the self-determination Malays displayed
in the conduct of their everyday life. Kampung activities, unregu-
lated by disciplinary procedures in which British civil servants felt
at home, were viewed as evidence of cultural backwardness and nat-
ural dependency befitting subject populations. Swettenham, draw-
ing upon the cumulative weight of colonial soul-searching, declared
firmly that the Peninsular Malay was “unquestionably opposed to
continuous work.” He attributed this “inherent laziness” to preco-
lonial experiences in which wealth accumulation invited expropria-
tion (S. Hussein Alatas 1977: 44–45). Another colonial officer, Hugh
Clifford, saw Malays as a thirteenth century people propelled so
forcibly into the nineteenth century that they were “apt to become
morally weak and seedy.” Such colonial observations of native disre-
gard for clock-time and the assumed equation of unregulated activity
with moral laxity echoed bureaucratic warnings about policing the
“lower orders” back home in Great Britain.9 However, hegemonic
constitution of the social attributes of subject populations operates
in complex ways, depending on the particular alignment of relations
of domination and subordination. Whereas in England enclosures,
poor laws and new institutions such as mass education gradually
bent the freeborn Englishmen to the requirements of industrial disci-
pline, in nineteenth century British Malaya, the reconstituted “Malay
yeomen,” sheltered within legally-demarcated Reservations, were
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

celebrated for their self-directed activities as “Nature’s gentlemen.”

There is a grudging respect in Clifford’s complaint that “the Malay
never works if he can help it, and often will not suffer himself to be
induced or tempted into doing so by offers of the most extravagant
wages” (1927: 19).
A Malay scholar, S. Hussein Alatas, maintains that the “myth of
the lazy native” was “merely a veiled resentment against Malay
unwillingness to become a tool for enriching colonial planters”
(1977: 81). On the contrary, I would argue that the simultaneous
images of Malays as both indolent and free, outside the constraints
of colonial capitalist transformation, were part of an elaborate, rac-
ist ideology lending powerful moral legitimation to British “Protec-
tion.” An urban intellectual writing The Malays in Malaya: By One of
Them in 1928 employed native symbolisms to Malayize what was

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 23

essentially a British construction. Haji Abdul Majid b. Bainuddin

warned:
It is dangerous for the featherless young chickens like our-
selves, they would say, to move about alone when there are
hawks and eagles hovering about ready to pounce upon them
(1928: 93).
The colonial master was essential for guarding Malays from “preda-
tory” aliens in the changing wilderness wrought by capitalism. It is
within the British “divide-and-rule” framework — the Malays to be
food-producing peasants and not traders or wage laborers — that
the image of native indolence must be examined (including racist
images of alcoholic Tamils and brutish, drug-addicted, and grasp-
ing Chinese). Indeed, within the artifically shielded peasant society,
Malay daily activities were attuned to a rhythm different from the
forced-march pace of capitalist development which controlled and
regulated the lives of Chinese and Indian laborers.

Malay Peasants Under Colonialism: the View from Below

Colonial records have often lent themselves to varied interpretations
of changes in the dominated society, whether the subject is native “char-
acter,” female status, or grassroots protests against imposed rules and
regulations. Thus, an Ester Boserup can claim, despite contradicting
evidence, that European rule of African and Asian societies brought
about the decline of women’s participation in agricultural production
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

(1970). In Malaysian historiography, it was not until recently that local

historians challenged the accepted view that Malay peasants had been
politically passive under colonial rule and capitalist domination.10
To avoid the distortions of the top-down view of gender and power
relations under colonialism, it is necessary to seek out local practices
buried within the imposed coherence of colonial records. The cumu-
lative effect of colonial policies governing Malay settlers, land, and
cultivation was to reconstitute rural Malays into petty commodity
producers dependent on the market for their survival and long-term
reproduction. This transition was not merely a shift along the contin-
uum from subsistence production to market specialization, as some
scholars have argued (Firth 1966; Lim T.G. 1977), but a qualitative
change in the social character of the peasantry. Most critically, colonial
legalization of land as private property set into motion differential

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 24 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

access to land, enforcing the peasant transition from the production

of use values to the production of exchange values (commodities and
labor-power) destined for capitalist circuits of exchange. How did vil-
lage women, men, and children adapt to market forces and colonial
control? What were the tactics and strategies they employed to sur-
vive in circumstances beyond their control?

Cash Cropping Smallholders: Surviving Economic Crises

Ecological conditions and colonial policies shaped the patchwork
of Malay crop cultivations in Selangor (and elsewhere in the Malay
states). As small-scale producers of rubber, coconut, and even rice,
kampung households were now reproduced within the matrix of an
expanding capitalist system. Exposed to the fluctuations of the world
market, village households evolved a set of practices which enabled
families to respond in a flexible manner to economic crises. Domestic
labor deployment was finely tuned to local contingencies and price
fluctuations. However, the very ability of kampung households to bal-
ance multiple economic activities and survive depressions instilled a
false sense of peasant autonomy which persisted even as local Malay
society became internally differentiated.
In Kuala Langat, where ecological conditions were unfavorable
to rice cultivation, most of the communities founded by immigrant
Malays established smallholdings of coconut, coffee, and rubber (see
Table 2).11 Since these settlers did not produce the staple, they were
much more vulnerable than rice-growing peasants to volatile mar-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ket forces. Rubber/coconut smallholders had to be flexible in their

responses to changing prices for their cash crops, food, and other
consumer items. It became imperative for peasant households to
allocate limited resources and labor among different economic activ-
ities so that they could shift between limited food production and
wage work to minimize losses to the domestic economy through-
out the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s when the rubber market
went through spectacular swings from very high to low prices. Such
alternation between different tasks generated an increasing individ-
uation of interests within the household economy.
Smallholding production of rubber itself was an individual
operation which could be alternated with other kampung activities.
The crop was easily adopted by Malay peasants because it entitled
little starting capital — seedlings, tapping knives, cups, buckets, and

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 25

Table 2
Crop Acreage in Selangor, 1933–1948

Crop Grown 1933 1938 1948

Rubber (e,s) 503,000 511,977 503,704

Coconut (e,s) 111,900 117,905 119,707
Oil palm (s) 20,300 21,404 21,723
Tea (e) 790 1,680 2,137
Rice (s) 30,000 15,646 51,186
Kampong crops 23,000 24,536 15,996
Coffee (s) 6,600 8,148 n.d.
Pineapple (s) 7,500 6,560 3,333
(Source: SAR 1933, 1938, 1948)
e: estate crop
s: smallholder crop
n.d.: no data

perhaps hand-mangles for rolling sheets. The trees could be scat-

tered among other tree crops and, with little attention, would pro-
duce latex for twenty or more years. The procedures of bleeding trees
every other day, collecting the milky liquid dripped into cups, and
coagulating the latex for flattening into sheets were simple repetitive
activities which could be done by individuals on their own. Wet rub-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ber sheets were treated in smokehouses operated by Chinese dealers

or left on roads to be dried. The possibility of collecting and sell-
ing rubber every few days, and the “short-term labor elasticity” of
the peasant rubber enterprise, enabled the peasant family to shift
to other cash-earning activities whenever rubber prices fell, without
incurring major loss (Ooi 1959: 147).
Thus, world commodities prices, rather than credit-hunger, were the
primary determinants of supplementary activities pursued by rubber
and coconut peasants.12 The survival strategy of the rubber peasant
family is inscribed in its kebun, where rubber stands gradually merged
into fruit and spice trees surrounding the homestead. In times of bad
rubber prices, the household increased its stock of minor crops for
sale and for home consumption. The elliptical space — karangan — of
minor crops was by custom and preference women’s responsibility.

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 26 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Javanese settlers had from the earliest days intercropped pineapple,

bananas, and coffee among their maturing cash trees. By the late 1930s,
over 10,000 coconut holdings had been intercropped with coffee in
Kuala Langat (SAR 1936: 37). Peasant women tended and harvested
the coffee trees. They also helped the men to depulp and dry the cher-
ries in order to gain better prices for their secondary crop. These peas-
ants were thus less badly affected by falling copra prices than local
Malay families who derived all their income from coconut alone.
Food crops were even more critical whenever low market prices
and government ban on rubber production drove cash cropping
peasants back into subsistence production. Throughout the depres-
sion years (1929–33), many peasants cut down their less productive
rubber trees to grow tapioca, sweet potatoes, and bananas. In some
cases, almost three-quarters of rubber holdings were replaced by gar-
den crops tended by women (SAR 1932: 15). Coconut smallholders
in Kuala Langat who had neglected to raise minor crops were forced
to subsist on only one meal a day (Lim T.G. 1977: 197–199). During
the Japanese Occupation (1942–45), many rubber stands were aban-
doned while peasants reverted to the production of food crops and
rice cultivation in the swamps of Kuala Langat.
The prior demands of activities meeting home consumption needs
rather than market demands were reflected in domestic reorganiza-
tion of labor. Women and men turned to food-production and fish-
ing, leaving the old and very young to tap rubber trees which were
sometimes mutilated in attempts to extract more latex (SAR 1932:
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

15). Peasant women also dominated the “eight flourishing markets”

where they sold eggs, tobacco, poultry, and homecooked foods (SAR
1932: 20; SAR 1938: 199). This pattern of oscillating between cash
cropping and raising foodstuffs continued into the postwar depres-
sion, when Malay rubber smallholders produced about two-fifths of
their own food requirements (Bauer 1948: 84).
Colonial records seldom contain references to village children,
except those concerning rural hygiene and nutrition. In going over
rural health records, I found this rare reference:
(O)ne very often comes across an isolated house in charge of a
little girl aged eight or nine. The father and mother are away at
work during the day. She scarcely moves from the house until
the parents return at night. She cooks and washes for three or
four younger brothers and sisters, their only food being rice

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 27

and sauce and occasionally a bit of dried fish or a few green

vegetables (SAR 1936: 20).
In the same year, a separate report on “schoolboys” in Sungai Jawa
noted that in a number of households fresh fish was eaten once a
week, but meat or eggs were seldom consumed (being reserved for
the market). Rice was taken garnished with greens, but many chil-
dren went to school without a meal.
Besides not consuming food which could be sold, young children
helped in household chores as well as in tending livestock, fetching
firewood and water, and in different field tasks, thereby releasing
their parents for wage work. Women engaged in domestic indus-
tries — such as making thatch (atap), preparing soybean cakes
(tempe), and cooking palm sugar (gula jawa) — were assisted by their
children (SAR 1935: 19; SAR 1936: 144–145). During Ramadan, when
younger children did not fast, they helped their mothers in tapping
rubber trees while the men undertook heavier work in the fields
(Bauer 1948: 67).
With children taking over house chores, adult men and women
could participate in different kinds of short-term employment within
and without the village economy. Kampung women took in sewing
and laundry for richer households. Others earned additional income
as midwives (bidan) or bridal attendants, but these skills required
prior training. Women abandoned by men may have been forced into
domestic service in nearby towns. Men brought in additional cash by
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

working as temporary village barbers, part-time carpenters, or taxi-

drivers. Others operated outside kampung society as itinerant ped-
dlers, marketing agents for Chinese merchants, and even engaged in
clandestine trade with the Sumatran coast. Others joined road crews,
transportation workers, or plantation labor gangs whenever addi-
tional cash was needed. Such extraordinary income-earning activi-
ties could be started up or folded up easily, depending on the family
need for cash and the current price of cash crops. Given limited peas-
ant capital and perception of these activities as stopgap measures,
few households pursued sideline occupations for long. Once market
prices for their crops improved, these activities were phased out.
The ability of the Malay village household to adapt to fluctuat-
ing market prices by allocating family labor among multiple subsis-
tence and cash-earning activities ultimately minimized losses and
ensured the long-term survival of the domestic economy. Since the

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 28 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

production of minor crops, petty trade, and irregular wage work

were elements in a strategy for surviving market fluctuations and
government curtailment of peasant rubber production, village
Malays were not able to accumulate capital to bring about the rise of
Malay capitalist farmers. Instead, the short-term multiple activities
of peasant women, men, and children contributed to a false sense of
household autonomy from market forces and accounted for the rela-
tive political quiescence of Malay peasants throughout the colonial
period of boom and bust in the rubber industry.

Rubber, Peasant Protest, and Incipient Social Differentiation

Rubber, the tree crop that perpetually bleeds latex-wealth, pro-
vided the basis for the great British plantation industry in the Malay
States. Even a few Chinese and Indian immigrants, stripped of all
but their labor power, lived through the transformative effects of the
rubber industry to become capitalist farmers. For local and immi-
grant Malays, rubber gave germination to a sprawling checkerboard
of miniature cash tree holdings. They ultimately formed the verdant
reserve of an irregular labor reserve for capitalist enterprises in the
waning years of colonial rule.
The expanding rubber industry and immigrant flows from the
Netherlands’ territories planted the seeds of social differentiation
within Malay reservations. Small divisions existed between local
Malays and paupers from the archipelago, between “free” immi-
grant Malays and those who arrived as contract laborers.13 However,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

severe colonial restrictions on smallholding rubber production and

the growth of a Malay civil service simultaneously limited capital
accumulation while fostering the rise of a small number of Malay
rentiers in kampung society.
S. Husin Ali observes in his study of “social stratification” in
Kampung Bagan, Johore, that early Javanese settlers who gained
control over large tracts of land could hire contract laborers and
thus came to constitute. Later arrivals and contract workers receiv-
ing small parcels or no land at all formed the landless poor (1964:
37). For a number of reasons given in the oral histories of Javanese
settlers in Kuala Langat, I would argue that this early pattern of
differentiation was relatively unstable. The operation of Islamic
inheritance rules, frequently modified to award equal shares of
property to daughters and sons in the pioneer settlements, reduced

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 29

extreme inequality in land access by the second generation. Also,

daughters with landed property attracted landless but able-bodied
immigrants who were absorbed by marriage into families rich
in holdings. Finally, many of the earlier settlers sold off part or
entire holdings to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca (see also
Ramsay 1956: 122; SAR 1936: 142). I maintain that neither prior
arrival by settlers nor rubber-wealth deepened incipient differen-
tiation within Malay Reservations during the colonial period. It
was rather the progressive penetration of the state system and the
rise of a class of Malay civil servants which on the eve of indepen-
dence came to provide structural continuity in differential access
to village resources and power.
Under colonial rule, cash cropping Malays not only learnt to survive
market crises but also had to continually defend their ground against
administrative policies which worked against their interests. The linked
cycles of economic depression and colonial restrictions on peasant
rubber-production prevented Malay rubber-growers benefitting from
the rubber boom. Throughout the 1920s, world market prices fell while
British Malaya faced stiff competition from other rubber-producing
countries. The colonial government introduced two schemes which
restricted the extension of planted acreage as well as overall produc-
tion output, discriminating more severely against the peasant sector
than the plantation industry in both cases. The Stevenson Restriction
Scheme (1922–28) prohibited new planting of rubber except on reserve
land, which the estates held in supply. Malay peasants, who had almost
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

no reserve land, engaged in illegal planting of the crop (Bauer 1948: 14).
From 1928 until the war broke out in 1941, only a very small number
of lots were alienated to peasants for rubber growing (in 1928–30 and
1939–40); otherwise, new planting was banned.
Smallholder rubber output was also drastically curtailed by plant-
ers underassessing smallholding capacity and authorizing very low
levels of peasant output (Lim T.G. 1974: 139–154). Malay peasant
resistance to cultivation restrictions not only took the form of wide-
spread illegal plantings and sales14 but also of petitioning the British
Resident. In 1924, 26 Malay villagers from Klang, including nine
women, signed a letter protesting
(w)e are the people of this country. . . . By hard labour we have
managed to open up a few acres of land, which is life and death
to us, and we consider ourselves now worse off than before the

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 30 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

rubber restriction. . . . We do not mean to say that those Euro-

pean planters who have inspected our areas are bad-hearted
people, but they should be sympathetic in our case, for our
“kebun” could not be so well and cleanly kept as their own
estates (SSF 1138/24).
In fact, as Bauer points out, “when production (of rubber) was
unrestricted annual average yields per mature acre on Malayan
smallholdings were 12–30 percent higher than on estates” (1948: 80).
The low cost of peasant rubber production posed a formidable chal-
lenge to the plantation industry, with its heavy overcosts and huge
resident labor force (see also Lee 1973).
Thus, while rubber, more than any other crop, could have pro-
vided the basis for the emergence of an indigenous class of capitalist
farmers, complex schemes of restrictions on land alienation, peas-
ant production quotas, and the wild fluctuations of rubber prices
(see Table 3) meant that the peasant advantage in production costs
did not become the means for indigenous capital accumulation.
Ultimately, the low cost of peasant production contributed to the
extraordinary rubber revenues of the colonial state and the extended
reproduction of the colonial capitalist economy.
By the late colonial period, differentiation in access to village
resources deepened, not because of rubber ironically, but as a result
of the growing state system. Although the vast majority of Malay
peasants continued to operate holdings of under five acres (SAR
1935: 19), a very small group of Malay civil servants had become
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

medium-sized (over ten-acre lot) landowners in village society. Their

special connections to the state bureaucracy enabled this salaried
elite — teachers, health inspectors, policemen, and a few business-
men — to participate in land speculation and live off rent as absentee
landlords. Besides providing regular incomes, government service
was also a means of access to state subsidies for rubber replanting.
This emergent Malay bureaucratic elite, basking in the glow cast by
official and landowner status, did not invest capital to increase labor
productivity on village land. Neither did they engage in the reor-
ganization of rubber production; instead they merely rented their
holdings to sharecroppers who had to supply their own knives,
buckets, and sickles (Bauer 1948: 28–29). In effect, land speculation
and absentee landlordism led to poor cultivation techniques and
low quality in village rubber output. Retiring government officials
settled in their village houses while renting other properties, thereby

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 31

Table 3
Prices Obtained by Kampung Malay Smoked Sheet Rubber,
Selangor, 1932–1958

Price Range (M dollars)

Year per picul (133.3 lbs)
1932 (Depression) $ 5.00 – 10.00
1933 5.50 – 19.00
1934 17.65 – 31.00
1935 22.00 – 28.00
1936 25.00 – 44.00
1937 n.d.
1938 24.00 – 35.00
(World War II years) n.d.
1948 42.50 – 56.60
1951 133.00
1952 113.00
1955 (Korean War boom) 127.00 – 185.68
1958 93.00
Sources: Calculated from the Selangor Annual Reports (1932–38), The Federated
Malay States Annual Report (1951–1955), and Ooi 1959: 155 for the
1958 figure. (Average rubber price for that year was estimated at
70 cents per pound).
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

n.d. — no data

contributing to the spread of rentier parasitism on peasant society.

Michael Swift points out that this process of differentiation, induced
by the penetration of the state bureaucracy, accelerated after inde-
pendence in 1957, when land concentration in Malay Reservations
continued “the transfer of peasant land to an upper official class”
without effecting the transition to capitalist agriculture within Malay
society (1967: 254).
In the postwar years, communist insurgency (officially known as
“the Emergency,” 1948–60) against the reimposition of British rule
dramatically increased wage employment for rural Malays in the
capitalist sector. As early as the 1930s, the public works department
of the colonial bureaucracy had begun to recruit village Malays to
supplement their teams of Tamil workers (SAR 1936: 61). It was,
however, the communist insurgency which, by violently disrupting

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 32 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Table 4
Ethnic and Sexual Division of Estate Workers,
Selangor, 1948

Ethnic Group Men Women

Indians 21,668 18,742

Chinese 5,292 7,272
Javanese 2,362 737
Others 34 29

Total 29,356 26,780

(Source: SAR 1948: 20)

labor organization in capitalist enterprises, provided the conditions

for drawing rural Malays more deeply into wage employment. In
Selangor, peasant men left kampung holdings in the care of women
while they joined the Special Police or military forces. During the first
year of “the Emergency,” repeated guerilla attacks on smallholdings
and the withdrawal of rural men for lucrative jobs in the security
forces caused the rate of tapping in the smallholding sector to decline
from 75 percent to 62 percent. In Klang, labor strikes by Chinese
dockworkers led to the recruitment of 150 Malays as stevedores (SAR
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

1948: 19). Similarly, Chinese plantation workers suspected of being

infiltrated by communists were repatriated to China and replaced
by Javanese workers in Klang and Kuala Langat district. Among the
Malay-Javanese workers employed in Selangor plantations, almost
30 percent were female (see Table 4). Thus it took severe disrup-
tions of the operation of the “plural economy” for Malay peasants
to be released on a large-scale into the capitalist sector. As a colonial
bureaucrat blandly noted, the prewar “Malay reluctance” to work
in plantations and mines had been replaced by “an ever increasing
interest in local industry and commerce . . . The Emergency gave a
slight impetus to this tendency to engage Malays in preference to
Chinese” (SAR 1948: 35). Malay entry into sustained wage employ-
ment involved substituting for members of the other two major eth-
nic groups already well-entrenched in capitalist production.

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 Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production 33

From the perspective of the kampung household, short-term wage

employment in the plantation economy made most sense in relation
to fluctuations in commodities prices on the world market. Low rub-
ber prices at the beginning of “the Emergency” helped to push many
peasant men into estate work. In contrast, during the Korean War
boom in the early 1950s, the number of Malay workers in plantations
throughout the Malay States fell from 70,000 to 66,000 because of a
“movement back to self-employment in the kampong” (FMAR 1950).
It was estimated that rubber production in smallholdings increased
by 42,000 tons, which would have required over 30,000 additional
workers. Thus, when commodities prices were high, cash cropping
peasants could earn good incomes and perhaps accumulate some
wealth, without having to resort to wage employment. Even share-
cropping earnings in kampung exceeded those paid in plantations,
where female tappers were paid at 75 percent of male wages (FMAR
1952: 36–37).
Thus, as long as Malay peasants still controlled village resources,
they could resist being utilized as a major labor reserve for the planta-
tion economy. Such a situation could prevail only as long as progres-
sive social differentiation was held in check by land fragmentation
through Islamic inheritance rules, sharecropping practices, and the
low productivity of peasant holdings. However, since the 1960s,
the greater integration of kampung society into the wider economy
and state system has accentuated forces for irreversible dispersal
of Malay rural workers throughout the wider society, even if still
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

attached to kampung moorings.

The imposition of British colonial rule over the Malay States drew
Malay peasants into the volatile circuits of the capitalist world
economy. Despite strenuous policies to remake local and immi-
grant Malays into a “food-producing yeomanry,” sheltered within
Reservations and celebrated for their “indolence” as well as “natural
inclinations,” rural Malays became producers of rubber and coconut
demanded by world markets. Even as colonial authorities benefitted
from the vast rubber revenues, successive attempts were made to
arrest the expansion of the peasant rubber sector at the expense of
the foreign-dominated plantation industry. Colonial policies limited
alienation of jungle land and curtailed rubber production but failed
to halt the progressive transformation of rural Malays into petty
commodity producers. Increasingly dependent on the market to

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 34 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

sell their crops and to buy manufactured goods, village households

evolved multiple-occupational strategies to spread risks and mini-
mize loss; few were able to accumulate wealth. As peasant men
fanned out in search of wage employment in the wider economy, sal-
aried bureaucrats gained increasing control of village land for spec-
ulation and for rent. By the eve of independence, which was itself
negotiated for by aristocratic Malay officials, the local residence and
power of Malay civil servants had begun to increase social differen-
tiation within rural society.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 PART II

The Kampung Society

of Coastal Selangor

The process, humourously designated by statis-

ticians as ‘the tendency of the rural population
towards large towns,’ being really the tendency of
water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d’Urbervilles

But what was the use of beauty to farmers’ daugh-

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ters. . . . Men did not look for beauty when they

asked for a wife. Let those daughters of hers grow
dark. Let the soles of their feet grow pale and have
a thousand cracks. People would still ask for their
hands.
Shahnon Ahmad
Malaysian Novelist
No Harvest but a Thorn

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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Chapter 3

Tropical Confluences: Rural Society,

Capital, and the State

Driving into mukim Telok, Kuala Langat, one passes into the stag-
nant spaces of endless plantations. Obliquely receding rubber trees
are interrupted at intervals by estates of equidistanced oil palms, the
favored postwar industrial crop. Relief is in sight when the agribusi-
ness monotony is broken by coconut trees like welcoming banners
disclosing Malay kampung nestled within the plantation country.
This chapter delineates the changing pattern of village life within
the structures of corporate capitalism and state intervention. In the
two decades since independence from Great Britain, the fabric of kam-
pung society has become more firmly woven into the broader cloth of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

national society and capitalist economy. We will consider how village

land in Kuala Langat is no longer simply the basis for kampung liveli-
hood and social order. The expansion of the state bureaucracy, political
parties, and capitalist enterprises, facilitated by a fine communications
system, has elaborated disparate mechanisms of control, channels of
mobility, and new modes of thinking for kampung folk in the district.

A New Tropical Configuration: Kebun, Ladang, and Free Trade Zone

In official parlance, village holdings or kebun, usually under five
acres, are designated “smallholdings”, while any agricultural enter-
prise beyond 100 acres in size is labeled “estate/plantation” (ladang).
Kuala Langat in the 1970s still bore the stamp of its colonial landscape:
Malay cash cropping kampung along the coast and margins of European

37

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 38 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

and Chinese plantations which form a thick belt along the foothills
further inland. A winding trunk road feeding off the four-lane high-
way between Kuala Lumpur and Port Klang leads into the plantation
country. Its destinations are Telok Datok, the district capital, and its
uneasy Chinese twin, Banting, which expanded almost overnight from
the influx of squatter Chinese during the Emergency. (see Map 2)
The tertiary and commercial networks linking kampung and ladang
are complemented by the system of state bureaucracy. A paral-
lel political structure has been established by the United Malays
National Organization (UMNO) party, the dominant Malay faction
of the ruling National Front coalition in Kuala Lumpur (K.L.), the
national capital. From the District Office of Telok Datok, the day-
to-day administration is in the hands of the penghulu. As the lowest
state official, he oversees land and rural development projects and
acts as a political broker in his mukim (subdistrict).
Map 2
Kuala Langat: Land Use, Towns and Transportation Lines to the Klang Valley
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 39

The penetration of the UMNO party and its inseparable identity

with local government is reflected in rural political organization.
Since 1972, villagers can no longer elect their own headman or village
committee. Instead, the District Officer (D.O.), as the most important
UMNO leader in the district, selects UMNO members as village head-
men (ketua kampung). These are informal but critical grassroots links
between ordinary people and state party officials. In turn, the ketua
kampung favors UMNO members in his nomination of village elders
to sit on the village committee (JKK, i.e., Jawatan Kuasa Kampung).
A village identified as “pro-UMNO” is assured favored considerations
in the distribution of government resources. Furthermore, UMNO vil-
lage leaders receive a cut of state subsidies, construction projects, and
other programs for the “development” — pembangunan — of rural
Malays under the New Economic Policy.1
Between 1979 and 1980, I conducted field research in Telok, a
subdistrict of some 32,000 acres under Malay Reservations, estates,
and residual forest reserves. There are five kampung in the mukim.
I resided in Sungai Jawa (a pseudonym), the focus of my field inves-
tigation, made regular visits to the other kampung, and travelled to
communities throughout the district and along the coast.
Within the mukim, Kampung Telok is the miniature commercial
and administrative center. Malay teachers and civil servants reside
there, while Chinese and Malabari merchants handle their marketing,
retailing, and credit businesses. A rural flavor still adheres to Kam-
pung Telok: Malay stilt houses, orchards of rambutan and durian, and
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

the truncated line of two- story shophouses. However, the township

is newly girded by rows of concrete houses, the anonymous blocks
which have come to stand for “development” in so many third
world cities. Across an open space of red earth, the “low cost hous-
ing” points, as if indicating its intended center, to a palm oil factory,
owned by Malay aristocracy, and a “free trade zone” (FTZ).2 Road
services have been improved to connect the town to Port Klang and
the International Airport. The biggest village crop seems to be school-
leavers who have been identified as a labor reserve for Malaysian
industrialization. In the bureaucratic language of the state develop-
ment agency:
Industrialization on the periphery of the Klang Valley . . . would
put the vast pool of rural manpower to good use and would help

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 40 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

diversify an economy traditionally dependent on export of pri-

mary commodities (SSDC 1976: 19).
The FTZ has been sited to attract transnational capital, to invest not
in agriculture but in manpower. Since 1972, three Japanese micro-
component assembly factories have sustained a labor force of 2,000.
These are predominantly young women from the kampung, recruited
to turn out millions of microcomponents every day. Administered
urbanization has thus arrived in this region of declining Malay small-
holder economy. The district has become a contested terrain between
Malay villagers, national corporate interests, and foreign capital. The
story of the industrial impact on kampung life and culture is told from
Chapter 4 onwards, following our mapping of changes in agrarian
relations and political life in the district.

A Colonial Legacy
The most important thing [about my job] is to control
labor.
The workers are so encaged that if given freedom, they
would not know how to take care of themselves.
It is sad the laborers are so oppressed but you get used to it.
A Malay field assistant, an Indian field assistant, and a
Chinese engineer on a British plantation.

In the postwar decades, changes in the world commodities market

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

have been reflected in the local reorganization of plantation industry

and kampung economy. From the late 1960s onward, declining prices
have led to the reduction of total rubber acreage in the district from
66,670 acres in 1966 to just 12,800 in 1978 (see Table 5). Plantations
initiated the shift to oil palm production as prices for the product
rose steadily. Besides, oil palm cultivation does not require a perma-
nent labor force, as was the case with rubber estates.
The shifting regime of different tree crops in the district masks
the progressive loss of kampung land to urbanization and expanding
capitalist enterprises. The total cultivated area of the district became
roughly divided between plantations and smallholdings in the ratio
of 6 to 4 (see Table 5). It is necessary here to sketch a picture of the
plantation system which encircles Malay smallholding villages and
remains the heart of the Malaysian economy.

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 41

Table 5
Acreage Under Cash Crops in Kuala Langat, 1966–1978

Crops Estates Smallholdings**

1966* 1978 1966* 1978

Oil palm 21,254 41,184 2,948 14,825

Rubber 39,377 9,825 27,300 2,978
Tea 1,162 645 — —
Coconut 1,276 — 18,455 15,984
Coffee — — 7,141 8,984
Cocoa — 69 — 2,970

Totals 63,069 51,723 55,844 45,741

Sources: Laporan Tahunan: Jabatan Pertanian Selangor, 1966 & 1978.
*The total land ara of the district was larger in 1966 than in 1978 because the redraw-
ing of coastal lines had reduced the Kuala Langat share by about 6,270 acres. How-
ever, change in acreage under various crops was caused by changing patterns of land
use rather than by boundary adjustments. Coffee and cocoa were intercrops and occu-
pied the same land space accounted for coconuts.
**Smallholdings included commercial gardens under one hundred acres owned by
Chinese and Indians as well as Malays.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Table 6
Estimated Average Monthly Incomes from Malay Holdings,
Kuala Langat, 1979

Crop Income/Acre

Coconut-coffee M$ 100
Rubber 80
Oil Palm 160–250*
Cocoa 160*
Source: Agricultural Extension Officer, Telok Datok, Kuala Langat.
*When regularly infused with chemical fertilizers (which cost about M$ 350 each year
at government-subsidized prices).

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 42 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

There are over 21 major European plantations in Kuala Langat,

operated by companies which control estates elsewhere in the
Peninsula. For instance, just offshore is Carey Island which, except
for tiny orang asli (aboriginal) and forest reserves, is entirely owned
by Harrisons and Crosfield. The company operates three plantations
(80 percent under oil palm) covering some 26,000 square miles. As
a bastion of colonial days, the island is equipped with offices, mill,
clinics, school, a golf course, a sports club with a Tudor facade, and
English cottages.
The plantation system is stratified into at least seven tiers of occupa-
tional rank, almost color-coded by ethnicity. Two of the estates are still
headed by British managers, followed by a senior assistant, three field
assistants (each in charge of a division), field conductors (administer-
ing the work force and pay budget), and field mandur (leaders of labor
gangs). Whereas the supervisory staff is multiethnic, the last two cat-
egories consist mainly of Tamils. However, the plantation labor com-
position is rapidly changing because of changeover to oil palm and
cutback on labor cost. Compared to the tens of thousands of workers
required for rubber production in the 1960s, only a remnant labor force
of 277 Tamil workers and their families continues to reside in barracks
on each estate. In September 1979, the average take-home pay of the
general laborer was M$120 per month, thus making the resident estate
worker the true rural proletariat in the country (see e.g., Kusnic and
DaVanzo 1980:66 for statistical measures of household incomes).
Increasingly, the plantations rely on outside labor groups brought
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in by 16 labor contractors (mainly Chinese) to harvest and transport

heavy bunches of the scarlet nuts twice a month. Each gang consists
of 25 male laborers, many Malay, who are paid 20 percent of the col-
lective wage, or 15 cents for cutting down each bunch. Thus, one-
third of the plantation labor force (400 out of 1,231) is now recruited
from the surrounding kampung, which have become a labor reserve
for the plantation industry.
Within these villages, the average kebun is getting smaller; in Sungai
Jawa, most coconut-coffee holdings are 3.5 acres in size. Government
statistics for poverty among coconut growers in the country is around
50 percent (Third Malaysia Plan 1976: 72). In Kuala Langat, many of the
coconut trees are old and peasants have been encouraged to rely on
secondary crops for additional income. In 1979, the estimated monthly
incomes from the various crops grown by peasants put oil palm at the

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 43

top of the list: M$160 per acre (see Table 6). This means that a family
would still require at least a two-acre holding to live on the edge of
“poverty” — officially defined at living below the national standard
of nutritional health and the satisfaction of basic needs in clothing,
housing, and education (ibid.). Besides, most families in Sungai Jawa,
where I conducted four major surveys had around six to seven mem-
bers, i.e., those who engaged in some form of sharing and joint, if
episodic, residence. Obviously, the declining importance of kampung
holding, as a basic source of livelihood or means for structuring criti-
cal production relations, is a reality which is at the very heart of the
crisis Malay villagers confront.

Rural Malays, Land Hunger, and Bureaucratic Capitalism

What happens to my family? Do we have to live in the sea?
Here I am, a man who has served the King and country for
16 years, without an inch of land to my name. I am clearly a
deserving case for land. But to whom does the land go? Rich
people, that’s who! It makes my blood boil to see wealthy
people and people who have not even stayed in this area get
land while landless people like us have to suffer.
Malay villager and ex-serviceman
Darat Batu, Kuala Langat
New Straits Times, Oct. 5, 1979

Despite a decline in the immigrant flows immediately following

independence,3 the rural Malay population in the Peninsula has been
increasing rapidly ever since. By 1976, there were a total of 5.5 mil-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

lion Malays (including immigrants from the Indonesian islands), of

whom 82 percent resided in the countryside, where the rate of popula-
tion growth was the highest (Third Malaysia Plan 1976: 1949–50). Kuala
Langat was no exception in this general demographic trend. During
“the Emergency,” many rural Chinese and Indians were forcibly relo-
cated into “New Villages”; and after 1960, many non-Malays volun-
tarily resettled in Klang Valley as urban wage workers. Within twenty
years, as Malays came to constitute half of the population in the dis-
trict, demographic and economic pressures intensified competition for
resources within and without the Reservations.
At the kampung level, two processes made for constraints in peas-
ant access to land: (i) the operation of Islamic inheritance rules, and
(ii) the increasing aggregation of village holdings by civil servants
and capitalists. Under the Islamic rules of devolution, holdings are

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 44 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

divided, usually after the death of both parents, into equal shares for
sons and half shares for daughters.4 The effects of these rules were to
reduce holdings to uneconomical parcels by the second or third gen-
eration. A common situation is the legal fragmentation of single lots
into so many shares that it is no longer feasible to physically divide
the holding or renew the crops. In that case, coinheritors simply
share-crop the joint property and share the rent. Alternately, married
sisters living elsewhere would let their brothers manage the undi-
vided property in return for a small portion of the farm income.
My survey of 242 households in Sungai Jawa shows that the aver-
age holding in 1979 was just below 3.5 acres. However, this figure dis-
guises the fact that almost 24 percent of the sampled housholds owned
no land or only had a house-lot. Only 27 percent of households owned
properties between two and five acres, the farm size which would sus-
tain a family of six. Fifty-four percent of the total acreage surveyed
was controlled by 12% of the households (see Table 7, Chapter 4).
Since Malays are Muslims, all families are affected by the pro-
cess of land fragmentation through the implementation of Islamic
inheritance law. However, villagers or new arrivals with access to
external sources of income can counteract this levelling effect on the
distribution of village resources over time. Rich villagers can use
surplus farm incomes, savings from trade, and interest from loans to
purchase additional holdings, locally and elsewhere. Sixteen of the
richest households together controlled 343 acres (about 40 percent of
which lay outside Sungai Jawa but in nearby villages) dispersed into
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

more than fifty separate and noncontiguous parcels. One copra mer-
chant owned eight separate lots, totalling 22 acres. Although most of
his coconut trees were old, he recently used his savings not to renew
his crop but to buy low-quality rubber land in lower Perak, renting it
out to local sharecroppers.
Like rich peasants, civil servants also acquire village land in piece-
meal fashion for speculation. No attempts have been made in Sungai
Jawa to consolidate multiple holdings, nor do landowners take a
consistent interest in improving the quality of the crops and soil. The
kebun are tended by sharecroppers whose main intent is to maximize
extraction of the products. Whether civil servant or rich villager,
landlords tend to place less importance on the quality of the tree
crops than on the acquisition of multiple holdings, a practice which
in itself is a measure of kampung prestige.

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 45

Population pressure, parcellization of holdings, and land accumu-

lation have contributed to land hunger (lapar tanah) throughout the
district. Men would scrutinize holdings rumored to be up for sale,
comparing the relative value of the soils and tree crops. Coffee shop
speculations revolve around which official or rich peasant would be
the successful bidder for which piece of property.
By the 1970s, competition among the growing number of officials
for kampung lands has overtaken the randomness of fortuitous pur-
chases to produce a coordinated pattern of shared privileges. New
land lots opened up under the “green revolution program” (rancan-
gan revolusi hijau) intended for landless families in the district became
prizes to be fought over through patron-client networks. In one case,
a government clerk petitioned the land office to allocate 160 acres
on the fringe of Kampung Telok to local applicants. Applicants were
interviewed and selected through a lottery system. Nevertheless, the
lots were eventually awarded to the clerk’s relatives and friends —
62 Malays and 18 Chinese, many of whom were already property
owners. A few of the successful applicants, unable to pay the pre-
mium (M$190), resold their land titles to rich villagers. In such fash-
ion, some civil servants, teachers, and businessmen came to acquire
additional property under the “green revolution program.”
By the end of the decade, demand for land had built up to the
degree that illegal squatting on plantation and state reserves was a
widespread practice. The state government stepped up its plan to
clear the remaining jungle reserves for the settlement of landless fam-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ilies.5 In mukim Telok, the remaining 2,000-acre reserve was divided

into two-acre lots for distribution to Malay residents in Sungai Jawa,
Kampung Telok, and other villages. A village elder pointed out that
the new lots could only settle one thousand families, whereas the
actual number of landless families was much larger. As it was, many
young couples with children were compelled to reside with their
parents. But again, the distribution of new land lots ostensibly for
landless families with many young children brought intense compe-
tition from the landrich few. To maximize their chances in the land
lottery, kampung folk beat a path to the house of the local assembly-
man (himself a large landowner). They recited a litany of past acts
of loyalty which secured him his office; they appealed to his sense
of Islamic fairness to sponsor their deserving applications. In a more
subdued manner, members of the village JKK committee, who were

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 46 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

assured of land grants, squabbled over the relative merits of indi-

vidual parcels.
The growth of a market in village land has dramatically raised land
values beyond any hope of purchase by most villagers. Even as early
as 1962, the breakup of a 744-acre estate in the mukim, which went for
M$800–M$1,2006 per acre, was beyond the reach of the majority of
local Malays and Indians. Most of the buyers of the two-, five-, and
ten-acre lots were local Chinese and others from Klang. As one peas-
ant remarked, the only “gain” of the estate breakup for local Malays
was to be hired as laborers in the newly constituted smallholdings.
However, more recent sales of kampung holdings and newly cleared
lots, confined to Malay buyers, have not benefitted the majority of
Malay villagers either. In 1979, a scrub-covered three-acre lot in the
recently cleared jungle reserve cost about M$8,000. A similar hold-
ing, already planted with young oil palm, fetched M$17,000. In Sun-
gai Jawa, where the soils were richer and village life more attractive,
a three-acre palm holding would cost over M$24,000, i.e.. M$8,000 an
acre. These prices kept most but the salaried villagers out of the land
market. Indeed, buyers included Malay civil servants from Klang
and even Kuala Lumpur looking for bucolic settings in which to
build second homes.
As the last reserves in Telok mukim were being divided up, competi-
tion for scarce land elsewhere in the district brought forth angry pro-
tests and confrontations between Malay peasants and state officials.
The inequitable distribution of new land lots — 460 in the late 1970s —
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

did not slake the land thirst. In 1981, for instance, the awarding of 120
four-acre lots to residents in Darat Batu and Darat Kundang was chal-
lenged by villagers who claimed that only 79 applicants had qualified
under conditions set by the land office at Telok Datok. The protesters
claimed that some of the successful applicants already owned houses
and land. At least six of them, all teachers, were drawing salaries of over
M$1,000 a month.7 Confrontations with the state have also appeared
over squatting and residential rights throughout the district.
Clandestine squatting has been a form of protest against the chang-
ing land market since the 1960s. Illegally cultivated plots are a fairly
common feature in state lands such as areas marked off for road con-
struction, housing, and jungle reserves. Before the current land cri-
sis, state officers had turned a blind eye to squatters and been amply
awarded with tea money, fresh vegetables, and exaggerated deference.

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 47

One such 500-acre tract, sandwiched between a Malay reservation

and Brooklands Estate, had been planted with oil palm for the past
decade. To forestall impending eviction and loss of a valuable crop,
the 150 Malay and Chinese squatter families had filed for tempo-
rary occupational licenses (TOLs) from the district land office. State
officials frown upon squatter cultivation of permanent crops like oil
palm, because it would be difficult to evict them without paying com-
pensation.
In October 1979, forest officers and police forcibly evicted the
squatters by razing their huts and crops to the ground. Shocked by
this brutal onslaught, the squatters complained to the press that their
estimated material losses amounted to M$9,000 per family. Many had
used their wives’ jewelry or high-interest loans to purchase the palm
seedlings. They had laborered over clearing the land. One squatter,
harking back to a remembered custom, protested
I persuaded my friends to leave the area peacefully as we had
no choice although we couldn’t take it . . . We are poor people
and we believe we should be allowed to own the plots of land
opened up by us.8
Throughout the district, this sudden eviction of squatters was
widely believed to be linked to the impending exploitation of rich tin
deposits (conservatively valued at M$4 billion in 1980) in the area. In
1979, a mining agency, the Kumpulan Perangsang Selangor, had been
formed by 70 percent state interests and wealthy Malays to acquire
4,200 acres of Brooklands Estate for initial mining operations. Thus
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

far, tin deposits have been discovered in 40,000 acres within the dis-
trict, an area larger than the Kinta Valley, the major tin mining region
in Malaysia.9
The contested terrain lies in the constituency of the Selangor Chief
Minister who was on a pilgrimage to Mecca when the squatters were
expelled. The eviction thus prevented the squatters’ plight from
developing into a major political issue. Furthermore, the suddenness
of the takeover caught villagers by surprise and forestalled any move
to raise the prices of kampung land. Increasingly, landless and land-
poor Malays who seek informal access to land come into direct con-
flict both with the interests of the local Malay officials and new forms
of corporate power held by state and national Malay bourgeoisie.10
Thus the latest phase of competition for village resources in the region
is primarily a result of market speculation and investment moves on

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 48 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

the part of the external Malay elite, and not the result of changes in
village relations of production. We will now consider some of the
mechanisms whereby Malay professionals and politicians mobilize
other kinds of resources intended for “development of the Malays”
(pembangunan orang Melayu).

Administering Rural Development and Bureaucratic Culture

The population is the subject of needs, aspirations, but it
is also the object in the hands of the government, aware
vis-à-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant
of what is being done to it.
Michel Foucault (1979a: 18)

In this section I will trace the bureaucratic-party diffusion of mod-

ern strategies of government which in redefining social relation-
ships, discourses, and identities, constitutes a transformation that
is culturally singular in rural Malay society. Since the early 1970s,
kampung life has been the target of large-scale governmental inter-
vention which, by focusing on the economy, identifies problems spe-
cific to the Malay population for increasing management. Besides
the political patronage which ramifies the overlapping state and
UMNO party systems, social policies produce a bureaucratic culture,
fraught with political calculation and tactics, in the socialization of
the younger kampung generations.
UMNO Politics
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

For a rural district, Kuala Langat is peculiarly well-connected to

the Federal government: it contains the constituencies of an ex-Chief
Minister of Selangor and of the Minister of Social Welfare, a power-
ful female Member of Parliament. It was largely due to their efforts
as state officials and UMNO leaders that the national government
located the first rural-based FTZ in the district. This “brainchild” of
strategically positioned politicians is regarded by kampungfolk as the
centerpiece of a whole series of govenment awards, from piped drink-
ing water and macadamized roads to mosques and low-cost housing,
in return for regularly voting UMNO. UMNO enjoys support from
about two-thirds of the voters in the district. Its major contender is
the Islamic party PAS (Partai Islam Se Malaysia). Charismatic leader-
ship and concrete UMNO support has thus gained the district a repu-
tation as “the showcase of rural development.” Foreign dignitaries

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 49

from “less developing” countries (e.g., Papua New Guinea) are fre-
quently taken for a tour of Kuala Langat, perhaps not unexpectedly,
since it is within easy reach of the Subang International Airport.
The elaboration of a bureaucratic style among civil servants, teach-
ers and even barely educated village leaders is immediately evident
in their adept practices and languages of “development” (pembangu-
nan). Under the New Economic Policy, the introduction and adminis-
tration of various rural development programs fostered an expanded
state apparatus as the mode for the proliferation of UMNO organiza-
tions of the grassroots level. Civil servants were often selected for
their UMNO loyalty, or expected to demonstrate the proper party cre-
dentials whatever their hidden loyalties. This accounts for the control
of development resources by the state assemblyman (wakil rakyat),
the D.O., and his subordinates, technical experts and teachers, who
are also the leaders of local UMNO organizations. In the everyday
scramble for state largess, these brokers openly poclaim their support
for UMNO either in words or deeds, despite a state injunction requir-
ing civil servants to abstain from party politics. A district official and
leader of the UMNO Women’s Faction (Wanita UMNO) says
As a member of the District Council I cannot play politics in
front of government servants, but I may do so behind their
backs. I operate as part of the political machinery, becoming
involved for the sake of the party (UMNO) strength . . . But
even though I play politics, the development of (Malay) society
is also important.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

She is part of the new educated elite outside kampung society who
have arisen through secular schools, the state bureaucracy, and
UMNO party channels. Within the district, the interlocking mem-
bership of leaders in the main UMNO committee, UMNO Women
(Wanita), and UMNO Youth (Pemuda) divisions who hold positions
in the state system is striking. In 1978–79, the District Officer was the
UMNO leader for the district. The Pemuda Executive Committee in
Kampung Telok, for instance, was headed by a clerk from the state
Islamic Office, while most of the other eleven members were also
government officials, teachers, and dockworkers at the state-owned
Port Klang Board. Other local Pemuda and Wanita executive positions
were also filled by employees from various state agencies. In Sungai
Jawa, UMNO leadership of the tripartite executive committees had
become a family affair: the village head was the UMNO president,

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 50 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

his daughter the Wanita leader, and her husband head of the Pemuda
section.
The intermeshing roles of political leaders in state and party orga-
nizations provide them with a strategic position to intercept and
control the flow of pembangunan funds and tap them for political
as well as economic gain. Local politicians manipulate state-funded
community projects with the finest calculation of voting returns to
party investment. Sungai Jawa has been a favored UMNO constitu-
ency. It is the largest administrative village in the district, but its
size alone cannot account for its emblems of “development” — a
bus-stop shelter, a maternity clinic, a primary school, and short
lines of macadamized roads fed by piped water and electrical wires.
Forlorn-looking villages down the road advertise their stigma as
PAS strongholds. Within Sungai Jawa, the otherwise inexplicable
termination of piped water, electrical lines, and widened tracks
marks the beginnings of recalcitrant neighborhoods which did not
vote UMNO in the last election.
Besides the hamlet by hamlet doling out of government resources,
the implementation of development funds was also carefully timed
to wrest the highest political return. Months prior to the 1978 state
elections, cement courts costing M$800–M$1,000 were constructed
in the house compounds of UMNO leaders in Sungai Jawa. Every
week the courts blossomed with festivities as young men playing
ball were watched by female spectators while food vendors did a
brisk business. The political-sports arena drew attention to UMNO’s
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ability to deliver the goods, especially to the growing population of

restless and hostile youths. The opposition PAS has appeal for petty
businessmen, religious teachers, unemployed students, and disaf-
fected laborers, i.e., people who are not occupationally linked to
governmental agencies and who have given up hope of every being
so. Limited to private contributions, PAS was unable to indulge in
public displays of material progress and instead emphasized Islamic
asceticism by holding meetings “underground.” Villagers, wise to
the ways of both parties, threw their support behind UMNO as the
party best able to tap state and Federal sources for “development”;
the UMNO incumbent was returned.11
Sometimes, the desire for enhancing personal symbolic and eco-
nomic capital overrides the careful adjustment of state resources
to promised votes. In the same year, the incumbent assemblyman

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 51

diverted materials allotted for improving access to the primary

school to pave the track leading from the main road to his house.
This action probably cost him some votes and, perhaps, even won
him a few for his audacity and enhanced prestige. Despite whis-
pered accusations of corruption, many civil servants and village
leaders expect to receive a “cut” of any major state project (e.g., land
development, low-cost housing) which they can attract to their com-
munity. They also expect to get a large share of routine government
credit for fertilizers, replanting, and loans from the Farmers’ Bank
(Bank Pertanian). For instance, when the FTZ was first opened, a rich
UMNO supporter obtained a bank loan to buy two secondhand
buses. With his son, he ferried factory women between village and
FTZ. Thus, ultimately, the channeling of government resources and
the controlled transmission of vital information in UMNO meetings
serve to exclude most ordinary non-UMNO and even lapsed UMNO
members from sharing in the benefits of pembangunan.
It is important to mention that party patronage occasionally roped
in the less educated or the growing numbers of “fence-sitting” youths
and displaced traditional religious teachers (kijaji). For instance, a
school gardener was able to break into local UMNO party leadership
when he was asked to stand in for a teacher in a meeting of the Pemuda
Executive Committee in Kampung Telok. The gardener, despite his
illiteracy, cultivated UMNO leaders and articulated received party
truths. He was soon elected to the committee, in the process garner-
ing a portion of the tenders for local government projects. He thereby
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

gained an additional income as a labor broker. For those without

white-collar credentials, individual maneuvering and positioning
within the party structures can provide access to government forms,
licenses, and contracts which may be accordingly milked.

Social Policies: Village Clinic and School

In the spaces between the overlapping governmental and party
systems, specific policies governing issues of the population as a
whole come to constitute an administrative reality making the state
UMNO domination of society both intelligible and self-evident to
rural Malays. By what Foucault terms “bio-politics,” disparate poli-
cies regulating a plurality of problems such as health, family, educa-
tion, and religion induce conformity to a particular ordering of society
(1979a). In their technical competence, officials, teachers, and party

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 52 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

functionaries pronounce the goals of governmental policies, specify

the critical problems, and isolate the perceived threats to people and
development, thereby domesticating rural women and men to the
norms and techniques of political culture.
For the majority of villagers, whose daily lives exist outside the
activities of state offices and party organizations, the experience
of state party domination is less apparent but nonetheless real. An
important example is the Community Development Program (Kema-
juan Masyarakat: KEMAS), organized through the Ministry of Agri-
culture, which furnishes a bureaucratic base for mobilizing illiterate
women in adult education classes. In 1978, the district supervisor of
KEMAS (an acronym which means “clean”) women’s classes was a
young Wanita leader. Her formal responsibility was to implement
classes in childcare, nutrition, general hygiene, sewing, and home
budgetting. As Wanita leader, she selected 32 pro-UMNO villages in
Kuala Langat for these classes, and handpicked 35 village women,
each of whom had had six years’ education, to be instructors at M$150
per month. The village instructors in turn recruited about 30 favored
women as students. The localized clusters of rural women were linked
in a district-wide network which operated simultaneously as a chan-
nel of resources, a means for instructing peasant women in “correct”
attitudes and behavior, and a structure of mobility. In fact, the Wanita
supervisor admitted that “the politics (of the village instructors) is to
carry out government orders, thus strengthening the government.”
Few questions were raised when, in celebration of the 1978 UMNO
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

victory, those KEMAS instructors who had recruited most women

voters through their classes were each awarded M$1,000 to take a
vacation in Sumatra. Thus, it is in joining sewing bees and lessons in
elementary hygiene and handicrafts that the lives of village women
are progressively regulated and transformed through public poli-
cies. It is perhaps not irrelevant to add that the current Chief Minis-
ter of Selangor began his political career in the district as supervisor
of adult men’s classes, a position from which he could organize sup-
porters scattered in many villages throughout Kuala Langat. It was a
meteoric rise for a village man who started out as a labor contractor.
But the daily practices of ordinary village women who will never
attain official positions are transformed in more subtle ways.
Social welfare practices constitute women in particular as the
guardians of the Malay family, culture, and future by focusing on

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 53

specified problems of female sexuality: the risks of family planning,

the dangers for women working in the factories, and the problem of
female consumerism. Sungai Jawa is well-known in public health
circles for its resistance to family planning organized by the mater-
nity clinic located in the village center. Only 85 couples sign up for
contraceptives, in a kampung of about 1,700 families (and population
of over 7,000). Many women have said that they wished to reduce
or space the number of their children but came up against their hus-
bands’ resistance. The pill is believed to induce dizziness and “lazi-
ness” in women, and village men are said to refuse other forms of
contraception.
What is interesting here is an inversion of the national family plan-
ning program (up until 1984) by local politicians and teachers who
seek to link the personal activities of rural couples to “development”
problems of the Malay population. Local UMNO leaders, whatever
their own private practice, present the family planning program as
risky to women’s health, a challenge to the marital relationship, anti-
Islamic, and ultimately a threat to the Malay race. The extraordinary
manipulation of technical information by various religious groups,
including the dakwah (proselytizing Islamic fundamentalists),
impresses upon village women that “the pill” (unfortunately the
main contraceptive proffered) destroys fetuses. Dakwah advocates
have insisted upon the Prophet’s injunction against killing unborn
children, although older religious teachers question whether pre-
ventive measures are against Islam. Whatever their private wishes
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

regarding children, most village couples believe that family planning

is contrary to Islamic teachings and thus contrary to Malay interests.
A male teacher at the local primary school observes that educated
Malays are ideologically opposed to family planning because of its
implicit assumption that Malay parents are unable to raise many
children. To an increasing number of Malay white-collar workers,
family planning poses the threat of increasing ethnic imbalance in
urban constituencies which are dominated by non-Malay popula-
tions. As the teacher remarked ironically, “We plan our families as
well as plan the country.”
His words were unintentionally prophetic. In late 1984, the federal
government turned family planning on its head and reprogrammed
the national agency for “family development.” National economic
planning calls for accelerated population growth to reach the target

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 54 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

of 70 million (from a total population of 14 million) by the year 2000.

“Manpower” needs in an expanded industrial economy yet to be
constructed will be met by natural increases in the Malay population
and immigration from the Indonesia islands.12 Thus, the “political
economies” of bureaucratic discourse have produced new govern-
ment practices for constituting a new demographic reality. In the
emergent set of strategic practices, rural Malay women are obligated,
by a combination of religious, ethnic, and governmental injunctions,
to produce more children for realizing projected economic goals
through the rest of the century.
In a campaign speech, a Wanita leader and schoolteacher reminded
village women that their special role in ensuring the educational
success of their children was inextricably linked to the preservation
of the UMNO heritage of their grandchildren. The Wanita motto
warned that “The defeat of UMNO is the defeat of the entire Malay
race.” Thus, primary and secondary education for rural Malays is a
key institution for constructing the mentality and shaping the behav-
ior of not only boys and girls but also their parents. Throughout the
year, school officials, teachers, and political leaders symbolize power,
allocate funds, and provide critical contacts, thus generally estab-
lishing the norms of bureaucratic conduct in rural society. At school
celebrations, the main speakers are invariably UMNO state assem-
bly members whose lists of monetary contributions (drawn from
government funds) are meticulously read to the gathered crowds.
Speeches enjoin parents and students to be grateful for government
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

support of their local schools and to be loyal to Islam as well as to

teachers (the local UMNO representatives). Thus parents learn that
education excellence depends upon cultivating UMNO goodwill to
ensure the continuing flow of scarce resources.
The school system itself, socializing students to bureaucratic values
and the demands of the labor market, becomes a channel for indi-
vidual mobility. Nevertheless, there are divergent effects on boys and
girls. Social pressures, family sentiments, and educational practices
(which will be dealt with in Chapter 5) have a more adverse effect on
the performance of female than male students in secondary school.
Rural girls who do poorly in Form 3 are just the right age for employ-
ment (16 years old); not surprisingly, many end up as factory opera-
tors in the local FTZ. Students in the Upper Forms, mainly boys, are
streamed into vocational schools, while the brightest students are sent

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 Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State 55

on, equipped with scholarships, to matriculation, teacher-training, or

university education in the capital.
Besides attaining above-average grades, deferential relations with
schoolteachers and other UMNO functionaries provide contacts and
guidance for the ambitious student on his/her trajectory through the
educational-bureaucratic channels. By the Upper Forms and college
years, the ethic of government patronage has become so instilled in
upwardly mobile students that they are propelled into bureaucratic
jobs which seem to be awaiting them upon graduation. For the less
adept and lucky, any job outside of government (kerajaan) is consid-
ered merely temporary until they get “the real thing” in civil service.
Some older Malays remember their first experience of government
service in the armed forces after the War. They point out that those
kampung Malays who earn salaries in a government office enjoy other
social privileges: they can sit at a desk in an air-conditioned office
and perhaps be assisted by typists and peons. The latter two jobs
in some government outfit are the cherished goals of village boys
and girls who have ended schooling at the secondary level. Finding
themselves with the job options of factory worker (pekerja kilang),
or worse, manual laborer (kuli), many young men prefer unemploy-
ment. They also resist work on their parents’ holdings. Young men
hang around homesteads or drift through nearby towns until, feel-
ing the acute need for liquid cash, they reluctantly join older kuli in
oddjobbing around the countryside.
Kuala Langat, as a showpiece of administered development, is
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

being reconditioned by political technologies which operate in the

webs of government bureaucracy and party system. In the specified
spheres of social welfare, sexuality, and education, to name only a few,
the everyday lives of village Malays are being reconstituted accord-
ing to new concepts, language, and procedures. The kampung family
is gradually becoming the target of policies of regulation and sur-
veillance. Alongside state and party functions, social policies provide
supplementary channels for the inculcation of particular attitudes and
practices for individual strategizing. UMNO members frequently jus-
tify their manipulation of positions and funds as an unavoidable part
of the technical procedures necessary to ensure the “development of
race, religion, nation” (pembangunan bangsa, ugama, negara).
For ambitious villagers, the internal linkages to state bureaucracy
and the modes of disciplining embodied in the bureaucratic culture

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 56 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

are channels for individual mobility out of the countryside. It is such

bureaucratic elaboration of mobility trajectories which account for
limited rural group resistance from below.13 The conflicts between
different categories of upwardly mobile Malays are a different
dynamic expressed in religio-political terms (see Chapters 8 and 9).
We can now take a closer look at the distribution of life-chances in
Sungai Jawa as kampung families become more tightly integrated
into the wider political and corporate structures.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Chapter 4

Sungai Jawa: Differentiation

and Dispersal
Every immigrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to
return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return,
because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration. It is
equally impossible to return to that historical state in which every village
was the center of the world.
John Berger (1984: 64)

The kampung resides in the minds and hearts of Malays as a “garden

of culture,” the seat of simple yet enduring wisdom, an unadul-
terated haven against non-Malay worlds. It is also the home from
which they are departing in unprecedented numbers. In this chap-
ter, we will enter the village to discover why rural Malays are leav-
ing, even when they claim continuing, if sporadic, residence in rural
homesteads.
I begin by tracing the statistical universe of a kampung increasingly
differentiated by access to land and divergent linkages to labor mar-
kets and the state bureaucracy. By the selective use of quantitative
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

data, I intend to discuss the limits of economic models of “house-

hold strategizing” in accounting for changes in agrarian societies.
In Kuala Langat, and elsewhere in the Malaysian countryside, class
differentiation into relations of capital and labor involves the active
participation of the state. Through their particular access to different
labor markets and the state bureaucracy, kampung folk are reconsti-
tuted into a localized version of the Malay proletariat, or a fraction
of the emergent Malay middle class.

Tanam Modal, Jual Tenaga: Planting Capital, Selling Labor Power

An anthropologist seeking the social terrain of a kampung staked
out for “fieldwork” is readily provided with the homemade micro-
sociology of “poor folk” (orang miskin/susah), “ordinary people,” the

57

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 58 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

middle majority (orang biasa/sederhana), and “the rich” (orang kaya).

(See, e.g., S. Husin Ali 1975: 87–90). As a cluster of symbols for guid-
ing navigation, such native categories are easily misapplied by the
anxious cartographer bent upon imposing a “scientific” grid on
fluid waters. The statistical tables presented below should be read
in the light of this caution; at best, they distort and reconstitute,
by the very act of measuring, the very fleeting reality they hope
to arrest. Thus, quantitative data on village landownership, occu-
pations, household composition, and time budget1 are meant to be
taken as momentary and, alas, possibly misleading approximations
of social situations in flux. Such measurements are also intriguing
reminders that native terminologies stand askew to social scien-
tific concepts, questioning our assumptions and referring to native
schemes of meaning which we may ignore, but at the peril of end-
ing up in deep water.
Unlike some of their would-be analysts, Malay villagers distin-
guish between “family” (keluarga) and “household” (rumah tangga).
Given the choice, village Malays prefer to live as nuclear families
in separate but clustering dwellings. Since kampung houses are ele-
gantly, and sensibly, raised on stilts, the household, which may at
any one time contain an assortment of nonnuclear kin, is character-
ized as “sharing one stairway.” The household implies some degree
of sharing: in residence, earnings, consumption, and perhaps claims
to property. Land, the inherited estate (pesaka), is individually owned
by women and men, and can be claimed only by blood descendants
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

(special provisions have to be made for adopted children). Some-

times, household membership is limited only to occasional coresi-
dence, contingent upon continuing affection and perhaps sporadic
contributions to the family budget.
In 1978, I undertook an on-the-ground census of 242 house-
holds in Sungai Jawa, approximately one-third of the total number
recognized in official records. The richly varied nature of my find-
ings puts to rest at once the notion that village Malays derive most
of their living from crop cultivation. Although many other “facts”
slipped my net, the quantitative measures gathered reveal that the
multi-occupational household economy predominates, suspended
in webs of overlapping concentric labor markets, with nodes
as nearby as the local FTZ and as distant as Saudi Arabia. I will

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 59

provide snapshots of such divergent socio-economic relationships

by discussing differential household access to land resources, the
constraints on the use of child labor, and patterns of resource shar-
ing within the household.

Table 7
Distribution of Households by Land Access, Sungai Jawa
(Sample of One-Third of Total Population), 1979

Farm Size
Households (acres) Total Acreage

Landless 57 (23.8%) 0.0 – 0.5 10 ( 1%)

Landpoor 91 (37.4%) 0.6 – 2 132 (18%)
Smallholder 65 (26.7%) 2.1 – 5 226 (28%)
Middle 13 ( 5.3%) 5.1 – 10 92 (11%)
Rich 16 ( 6.6%) 10.1 – 70 343.5 (42%)

Totals 242 803.5

Although native categories recognize only three social strata — poor

folk, ordinary people, and the rich — I have made finer social dis-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tinctions in Table 7. My categories are divided according to whether

landownership alone permitted self-sufficiency (i.e., about five acres
for a family of six). For the landpoor, are wage incomes the primary
source of livelihood? For the landrich (ownership of more than ten
acres), does land operate mainly as a form of investment? On this
basis, I distinguish five social categories in Sungai Jawa: landless,
landpoor, smallholders, middle landowners, and rich landowners.
These are merely analytical devices to demonstrate the divergent and
fluid changes in rural property relations. At any point in time, some
households are upwardly mobile while others are slipping into the
pool of laboring poor.
Table 7 represents a snapshot of a moving rural scenario: 24 per-
cent of the total sample of 242 households fall within the landless

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 60 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

category. From another perspective, 88 percent of the households

have access to holdings under five acres, i.e., they depend to some
degree on nonagricultural earnings for their sustenance. Some 5 per-
cent of the total, the middle landowners, can live entirely off farm
income, while about 7 percent can certainly use part of their prop-
erty, not as a means of livelihood, but for market speculation.

Table 8
Primary Occupations of Household Heads by Land Access,
Sungai Jawa, 1979

Occupation Landless Landpoor Small Middle Rich

Farm operator 0 11 24 6 6
Kampung professional* 2 8 6 1
Trader 3 2 2 1 5
Landlord 1 1 3
Sharecropper 9 5
Casual laborer 20 35 19
Steady wage-worker 20 24 10 3 1
Salaried worker 3 5 3 1 1
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Totals 57 90 65 13 16
*Kampung professionals such as Malay spirit-healer (bomoh) and midwife (bidan).

The Limits of Household Strategizing

Like a number of other Southeast Asian societies, increasing land
parcellation has not given rise to a significant landlord class within
rural Malay society. This configuration indicates that land by itself is
not a major source of class differentiation. Relations of production
within the kampung economy are no longer the fundamental means
whereby rural Malay households are being reproduced. A glance at
Table 8 reveals the critical importance of wage employment to house-
hold heads and working adults residing in Sangai Jawa. The primary

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 61

occupation of household heads (mainly male) is determined by land

access: in the landless, landpoor, and smallholding categories, the
majority of family heads are (irregular) wage laborers. As might be
expected, household heads in the middle and rich landowning strata
are independent farm operators. However, the process of differentia-
tion by landownership is being supplanted by the dynamic of class
formation contingent upon access to wage employment and corpo-
rate capitalism.

The Domestic Deployment of Labor

In recent years, the “rediscovery” of the “household unit” by the
“New Home Economics” school, and the fashionability of statistical
models in the social sciences, have promoted studies which treat
households as autonomous units operating independently of the
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

A family of squatters on the village fringe.

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 62 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Home of a well-to-do village woman.

wider social contexts. The basic assumption is that “the house-

hold” operates like a capitalist firm in allocating scarce resources —
measured in time units — among competing activities in order to max-
imize productivity/utility (Becker 1965). Similarly, recent time budget
studies undertaken to account for demographic processes in Asian
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

societies have treated the domestic group as a unit of decision making,

with no attention to internal and external relations of domination and
expropriation (see some examples in Bingswanger et al. 1980).
Of particular appeal has been the “value of children” model which
draws upon the Chayanovian notion that the peasant household, at
different phases of family development, is “a distinct labor machine”
(Thorner 1966: 60). The argument is that in the technologically back-
ward Asian countryside, rural families depend on a large number
of children for maintaining a tolerable standard of living (Mam-
dani 1973; White 1976). While this may indeed be the case for food-
producing households in some countries, the labor contributions
of children should not be assumed to be of similar significance for
domestic groups in all levels of agrarian society.2

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 63

In Kuala Langat, social differentiation and divergent linkages to

external institutions, rather than agrarian demand for labor, are seen
to have an important limiting effect on household use of the fam-
ily labor. In addition, “development” processes such as mass educa-
tion and wage employment in service and manufacturing industries
have placed severe limits on rural household strategizing through
the control of child labor.
In conducting a time-budget survey3 of forty households in the
landless, landpoor, small, and rich categories, three sets of eco-
nomic tasks are distinguished. These daily activities are “household
maintenance” (childcare and house chores), “farm work” (self-
employment), and “wage labor” (sale of labor power). The tables
below will show that, depending on their access to village resources,
kampung households are devoting less time to cash cropping, mak-
ing minimal use of child labor in agriculture, and expending more
time in wage employment.
Table 9 shows that among families in four social strata, the distri-
bution of daily time by adult men and women (age seventeen years
and above) in different work categories is weighted towards wage
employment and most insignificant in farm chores. Among the land-
less households, over 60 percent of the total work activities are spent
in wage earning, whereas among the landrich, only 29 percent of
their daily work time falls within that category. Women in landless
households alone account for more labor time in wage employment
than the combined rate of man and women in rich households.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Household location in relation to village resources also influences

the kind of wage employment household members can participate
in. Among the landless, women tend to spend more time in steady
jobs, i.e., factory employment at the local FTZ, whereas their men
are primarily involved in casual labor on nearby estates. Landpoor
households, still holding on to small plots, expend most time in
casual wage labor and job contracts which may take them away for
months on end. Among the households with 2.1 to 5 acres of land,
time in casual labor decreases in importance to time spent in steady
wage employment, usually in government service departments and
factory work. Not surprisingly, men in landrich households rarely
engage in casual work, and even their participation in steady employ-
ment is at a lower rate than those of the other kampung strata.

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 64 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Table 9
Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Men and Women*
in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Household Farm Wage Labor Total

Chores Work Casual Steady

Landless
Men (11) 0.89 0.71 2.82 3.97 8.39
Women (13) 4.26 0.44 0.84 4.71 10.30

Totals 5.15 1.15 3.66 8.68 18.60

Landpoor
Men (20) 0.70 1.09 3.35 2.28 7.42
Women (22) 4.61 0.50 0.65 2.40 8.16

Totals 5.31 1.59 4.00 4.68 15.60

Small
Men (23) 1.11 2.29 0.92 2.63 7.73
Women (29) 4.66 1.07 0.46 2.14 8.33

Totals 5.77 3.36 1.38 4.77 15.70

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Rich
Men (18) 0.63 3.85 0.42 1.42 6.42
Women (18) 4.99 1.06 0.02 2.45 8.52

Totals 5.62 4.91 0.44 3.87 14.90

*Age seventeen years and older.

Labor time invested in wage employment is inversely related to time

expended in farm work. As expected, landless households spend neg-
ligible time on farm work, and the rate increases along with the degree
of land access. Only among the landrich households do both women
and men expend about one-third of their average daily work time in
farm-related activities. These time budgets confirm field observations
that coconut and coffee, and even rubber, require limited attention

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 65

Table 10
Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Girls and Boys*
in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Household
Chores Farm Work Wage Labor Total

Landless
Girls (11) 2.02 0.20 0.52 2.74
Boys (11) 1.28 0.51 0.78 2.57

Totals 3.30 0.71 1.30 5.31

Landpoor
Girls (16) 2.25 0.20 0.24 2.69
Boys (18) 0.71 0.44 1.10 2.25

Totals 2.96 0.64 1.34 4.94

Small
Girls (9) 2.30 0.16 0.26 2.72
Boys (13) 0.48 1.08 0.18 2.34

Totals 2.78 1.24 0.44 5.06

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Rich
Girls (7) 2.12 0.36 0.00 2.48
Boys (6) 0.17 1.50 0.20 1.69

Totals 2.29 1.86 0.20 4.17

*Age between six and sixteen years.

from the smallholders. For those who own oil palm holdings, farm
work is limited mainly to supervising day laborers in harvesting and
pruning. Since farm incomes are proportionately higher for the lan-
drich than for households in other land categories, men and women
in rich families shun manual labor in the fields. Prestige derives from
living off farm products/rents, doing office work, or teaching.

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 66 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

In all households, an average of five to almost six hours a day is

spent on household chores such as cooking and cleaning, i.e., the
daily physical and emotional care of children and adults which
ensures the biological and social reproduction of the population.4
Such domestic chores are largely performed by women, but among
the landless, women spend almost as much time seeking wage earn-
ings. Wives in the richest households, who do not seek any kind of
wage employment, expend most time in cooking, childcare, and
cleaning the house, the only activities deemed prestigious for women
in landrich families. Taking the overall view, one notes a definite cor-
relation between degree of land access and total average working
time: the poorest families spend most time in various work tasks,
whereas the richest families expend the least amount of time in work
activities (a difference of almost 4.5 hours). Young women from the
poorest households have the longest working day.
What about the children sixteen years and under? Do they under-
take farm chores while their parents seek wage employment? On
the average, children in the sampled households contribute about
30 percent of the total labor time expended by adults. However, by
breaking down the households according to land access, we see that
children’s work activities follow the pattern of their parents’ time
allocation in activities other than household chores (see Table 10).
Girls and boys from landless and landpoor families expend most
time in wage work, whereas in the small and rich households, chil-
dren spend more time on farm work.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

In other words, children in kampung society almost never engage

in work activities outside of parental direction and supervision. If
we were to test the “value of children” model, we would see that in
Sungai Jawa, the deployment of child labor is more or less significant
depending on the access of their families to land resources and/or
job opportunities in agriculture. Children in farm families can help
their parents by weeding, collecting palm nuts, tending livestock,
and other such tasks. In the well-to-do families, older children in
their late teens may begin to take over responsibility for harvesting
and marketing the crops in their parents’ holdings (see Table 13).
Thus, only those families in effective control of land can utilize the
labor of children. In such cases, grown children demand a wage,
revealing the degree of economic individuation within an apparent
joint production unit (see below).

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 67

Rural laborers from the landless and landpoor categories in some

sense have greater control over their young children’s labor and the
fruits of that labor. Day laborers working in plantations may take
along their sons to help cut down and carry palm nuts. By help-
ing their parents, boys still too young to be considered full laborers
can boost their father’s day wage, which is calculated according to
the number of bunches collected. Boys can also scatter through the
undergrowth looking for fallen nuts which can be surreptitiously
sold for additional income. Within the village economy, the coconut
gatherer is usually aided by his son or some young male relative.
A village woman seeking some cash income may organize her chil-
dren, especially the girls, into a party for picking coffee cherries and
drying the beans for a rich family. Although the acreage under rub-
ber has declined greatly, some villagers still supplement their farm
incomes by hiring themselves out as tappers, with their children tag-
ging along to carry latex buckets and collect scrap rubber. Children
are almost never employed on their own, i.e., hired directly, except
by a kinsman, and then they are only paid a child’s wage. The above
work activities, in which the children seldom receive a payment,
account for the labor time boys and girls from landless and landpoor
households expend in “wage labor.” Not unexpectedly, children from
rich households make no significant contribution to “wage labor.”
What is significant about Table 10 is the limited amount of time
kampung children spend in farm work and rural wage labor. The larg-
est amount of time is devoted to household maintenance chores, i.e.,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

from about 50 to 68 percent of their total work time. Young girls play a
significant role in the daily tasks of laundry, cooking, and cleaning the
house, while boys sometimes assist by gathering firewood or picking
fruits and wild vegetables. Reflecting the work patterns of adults, chil-
dren in poorer houses work harder than those in well-off families.
My discussion of the time allocation of adults and children is not
intended to claim an overdetermining relationship between land access
and the deployment of family labor by kampung households. As men-
tioned earlier, the social categories are essentially analytical constructs
to illustrate that differential access to land resources and employ-
ment opportunities requires a diversity of income-generating activi-
ties which often do not depend on parental control of children’s labor
power. In Kuala Langat, changing kampung society places limits on a
household strategy which is based upon the control and supervision

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 68 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

of children’s labor by their parents. Already, in the younger families,

fathers engaged as wage workers in urban private and public indus-
tries are rarely able to take along their children as additional labor
power. The “value of children” model assumes that domestic groups
will benefit from child labor because of the agrarian context. Insuf-
ficient attention has been given to the effects of rural differentiation
and wider labor markets on changing relations of production within
and without the household. Furthermore, we will next see that the
“demand for child labor” model cannot account for variations in
domestic composition and pooling of resources in Sungai Jawa.
Household Composition and the Sharing of Resources Between Generations
“Every child has its own fortune” [Tiap tiap anak ada rezekinya]
Malay proverb
As kampung society becomes a labor reserve for the wider economy,
domestic organization in Sungai Jawa produces a range of structural
forms. Building upon relationships of kinship and marriage, household
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

A grandmother and her grandson.

Credit: International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Social Sciences Division, Ottawa

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 69

formation is dictated more by interests in joint consumption and

coresidence than by joint production activities.
As mentioned above, rural Malays prefer nuclear family residential
units, but Table 11 shows that 20 percent of 242 households are three-
generational arrangements. These complex domestic structures are
better represented in the small and rich landholding strata than in
other categories. Besides, Tables 11 and 12 indicate that the retention
or expulsion of grown children by itself does not account for house-
hold composition and size. In the landless, landpoor, and small cate-
gories, families with children 18 years and older tend to retain about
40 percent of their grown children in the house, although their aver-
age household size hovers around 6.2 to 6.4 (see Table 11). Domestic
groups in the middle category retain most of their grown children
(78 percent), whereas the rich households exhibit the highest rate of
dispersal (63 percent) and yet continue to maintain the largest units
(see Table 12).
In deciphering these structural configurations, one must attend to
the ways relations of consumption and dependency influence house-
hold composition. Domestic composition is a dynamic process con-
tinually readjusting to the arrival of infants, the departure of grown
children and the recruitment/expulsion of other dependents and/or
income earners. Two households, headed respectively by a middle-aged

Table 11
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Composition and Size of 242 Households,

Sungai Jawa, 1979

Number Number of Generations Average

of Households One Two Three Household Size

Landless: 57 2 50 5 6.2
Landpoor: 91 3 72 16 6.2
Small: 65 2 45 18 6.4
Middle: 13 0 11 2 7.5
Rich: 16 0 11 5 8.3

Totals 242 7 189 (78%) 46 (19%) 6.92

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 70 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Table 12
Retention and Dispersal of Children 18 Years and Older
in 138 Families, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Families With Total Number Living in 131 Departed from

Children 18+ Children 18+ Households Parental Household

Landless 15 60 24 36
Landpoor 51 269 108 161
Small 49 217 91 126
Middle 10 32 25 7
Rich 13 70 26 44

Totals 138 648 274 (42%) 374 (58%)

man and woman, reveal contrasting patterns of resource sharing found

in Sungai Jawa. The pooling of cash incomes and balancing claims
between generations within the same household are at best provisional
measures.
Halim5 owns a half-acre holding which is taken up by his house-
plot and a miniature coconut-coffee garden. He and his wife have
six children at home: five daughters between the ages of ten and
21 years, and a twelve-year-old boy. Although his crops bring in less
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

than M$30 a month, the combined earnings of Halim, an office peon,

his wife, a coffee-picker, and three daughters, all factory workers,
provide the family with a monthly income of M$365, quite adequate
for their expenses. Besides, their simple wooden house is cluttered
with formica-topped furniture, a television set and a radio. Halim
has a motorbike; his family shares a bicycle.
Another family also owning a half-acre farm is very much poorer.
Divorcée Hayati barely manages to make ends meet from her aging
rubber trees and meagre earnings as a tapper on other people’s hold-
ings. She has a 20-year-old daughter in factory work who makes a
monthly contribution of M$45 and supports her two younger sib-
lings in school. Hayati attempts to limit monthly expenses to M$80
for the family of four. She worries about the immediate future when-
ever her daughter keeps a tryst with her boyfriend.

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 71

For domestic groups with decreasing access to land, the presence

of grown daughters and sons who will make “voluntary” cash con-
tributions to the family fund is a distinct advantage. A number of
households in the landpoor, small, and middle categories manage
to have a fair standard of living because at least two daughters and
sons agree to pool part of their earnings in the family fund. How-
ever, such strategies, depending not on the control of children’s labor
but on receipt of their earnings, are ad hoc and easily subverted by
rebellious children (see Chapter 5).
When the pooling of resources occurs between parents and married
children, stem-family structures of varying duration are established.
Among households with holdings between 2.1 and 5 acres, almost
one-quarter are stem-family arrangements. Six households include
married sons and sometimes married daughters (and families), and
the rest only married/divorced daughters (and families) and unwed
children. In a few instances, parents no longer able-bodied needed
sons or sons-in-law to help manage the farm and supplement house-
hold incomes. In other cases, married sons or married/divorced
daughters unable to support their families, have returned to the par-
ents’ household for short- or long-term support.
In one family where the father has retired from farm work, the
son, a stevedore at Port Klang, takes care of all household expenses,
supplemented by income from the father’s 3.5-acre plot, which is
tended by his mother and wife. In two other examples, where the
parents have larger holdings, the flow of resources is in the oppo-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

site direction. In the first case, the son with a wife and two children
live with his parents, who provide for all daily expenses. The son
merely pays the utility bills (M$16/month) and will only help his
father on the farm if he receives a wage in return. This is work on
the property which he will one day inherit in part, according to
Islamic law. What is especially illuminating about this case is that
the son, a married man and factory worker, does not consider his
labor power at the disposal of his father, despite coresidence on
the father’s land. The young man thinks that he should receive a
wage like any other hired laborer if he helps his father harvest the
palm. Familial relations are salient not as relations of production
but as relationships through which the different generations can
meet their housing needs, make material claims, and receive moral
support.

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 72 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Stem-family arrangements also occur when married daughters

return to their parents’ household after divorce or widowhood.
These women are often accompanied by their children, who will be
raised in their grandparents’ home. If their mothers remarry, they
move out, and the stem-family is reduced once again to the nuclear
form. In some stem-family formations, married daughters with hus-
bands and children coreside with the maternal grandparents. Most
of these arrangements involve married women who are youngest
daughters fulfilling their customary role of caring for parents in old
age. The son-in-law usually contributes a substantial amount of the
daily expenses, since his children are the main dependents and free
housing is provided. In the majority of such units, the daughters will
inherit the parents’ house after the old folks die.
As the above cases demonstrate, the nurturing of grandchildren
is usually the basic reason for complex family formation. Extended
households involve both temporary and indefinite arrangements.
Newly married daughters prefer to return home in the late stages of
their first pregnancy for comfort and support, often at the time when
their husbands are in the process of saving for or building their own
house. These are temporary but critical episodes whereby parents help
the young family ride through their first crisis before they begin house-
holding on their own. Other cases of in-living married children and
families are more long-term arrangements for raising the grandchil-
dren, a practice common among the landrich households. In two cases,
grandparents have taken in grandchildren because the childrens’ own
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

parents are too poor to take care of them as well. The old folks contrib-
ute food, lodging, and pocket money in return for housework, general
care, and the company provided by the children. The richest man in
Sungai Jawa, for instance, has a household of seventeen, including two
wives, ten (out of fifteen) unmarried children, and four grandchildren
whose parents are not coresident. Rich kampung families tend towards
complex household formation because they have the resources to shel-
ter and raise grandchildren, receiving in turn company, help in house-
hold chores, and perhaps management of their property.
Household composition in Sungai Jawa thus results from a multi-
plicity of practices for the sharing of resources within and between
generations. In nuclear formations, the retention of wage-earning
children accounts for the persistence of large households over a lon-
ger duration than was the case in earlier generations. In stem-family

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 73

arrangements, married sons and daughters coreside with their

parents, often not so much to care for the former as to receive a
stream of tangible and intangible benefits from the older generation.
The well-off aged may recruit grandchildren and others for house-
work or simply the satisfaction of having the house ring with the
voices of children. Finally, household size fluctuates with the assort-
ment of nuclear and non-nuclear kin who are in various stages of
dependence, e.g., grown children still in school, unemployed sons,
daughters waiting to get married, and other dependents.

A Note on Labor Time

As long as we are in the statistical realm, what other reading can
we make of rural time budgetting and what can it tell us about vil-
lagers’ experience of changing relations of production?
In the past decade, time-budget studies have been used to discover
the effects of increased market participation on time alloted to house-
work and childcare (Minge-Kalman 1978; Evenson 1978; Schultz
1980). In a survey of time-allocation studies drawn from agrarian and
advanced capitalist countries, Minge-Klevana maintains that with
the transition to industrial wage labor, “there is . . . overall increase
in labor time inside the home, that is, in activities pertaining to the
maintenance of the family itself” (1980: 287). I wish here to merely
point out that in agrarian transitions, changing patterns of labor uti-
lization can seldom be generalized even within the same community,
much less in gross comparisons across cultures and time spans.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

In Sungai Jawa, the total average time expended by children and

adults indicates that sustained participation in wage relations does
not necessarily increase time in household maintenance chores
(see Table 13). In landless and landpoor households, which exhibit
the highest rates of wage employment, reduced agricultural self-
employment has been compensated for by increased time in wage
labor. In other words, as the poor spend less time in farm activities,
their overall work day has become lengthened by wage employ-
ment. Among the rich adults, only 33 percent of total labor time is
spent in wage work, and yet time spent in household chores remains
at about the same rate as for all other social strata.
In other words, the table indicates that in the Sungai Jawa experi-
ence, proletarianization has led to an increase in labor time “out-
side” rather than “inside” the family (Minge-Klevana’s terms). As

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 74 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Malay villagers spend less work time on the land, more labor time is
devoted to wage-earning activities, contributing to overall increase
in market work. In addition, labor time in self-employed activities
such as farm work and household maintenance is reduced, espe-
cially for landpoor work households.
In the explosion of time budget studies, the human implications of
the transition from “nonmarket” to “market” labor time are almost
never considered. However unintended, time units can also be the
dumb but eloquent measure of a qualitative alteration in the expe-
rience of work. To discuss the actual “market” and “nonmarket”
costs of the shift from self-employment to sale of labor power, one
must put flesh and blood on these statistical structures, making them
speak of the lived experiences of social groups in the making.

Emergent Class Structure

The above abstractions regarding property and wage employment
are merely analytical snapshots of a situation of structural instability
as kampung households devise alternative strategies of mobility. Fur-
thermore, by using the same time-budget method, I demonstrated
that models narrowly based on quantitative measures of household
labor demands miss critical external relationships which reconstitute
relationships within and without domestic groups. In Sungai Jawa,
changing relations of production have been shown not to be a conse-
quence of basic transformation of the kampung economy but to have
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

emerged out of the intrusions of state institutions and the labor mar-
kets linked to the world system. This increasingly complex division
of labor spans rural and urban sectors, giving rise to or recombining
fractions of the bureaucratic elite, professionals, and entrepreneurial
elements who may continue to plant capital in the kampung but sell
their services elsewhere.
How may we understand these processes of transformation in both
class and cultural terms? Do native constructs necessarily mys-
tify changing relations of production, speaking in counterpoint and
perhaps offstage to the main “objective” events? Prior to the Second
World War, the occupational system in Kuala Langat was directly
linked to land and agriculture. Rural Malay population was almost
universally village folk (orang kampung), and in the local terms of kuli
(laborer), orang miskin, orang biasa and orang kaya, their point of reference

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 75

Table 13
Average Labor Time Spent by Children and Adults in
Household and Income-Earning Activities
Sungai Jawa, 1979

Household Income Work

Land Strata Chores Farm Work Wage Labor Total

Landless
Children (22) 1.64 0.35 0.65 2.64
Adults (24) 2.57 0.67 5.04 8.28

Totals 4.21 1.02 5.69 10.92

Landpoor
Children (34) 1.33 0.33 0.70 2.36
Adults (42) 2.84 0.88 4.03 7.75

Totals 4.17 1.21 4.73 10.11

Small
Children (22) 1.61 0.72 0.24 2.57
Adults (52) 3.00 1.62 3.20 7.82
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Totals 4.61 2.34 3.44 10.39

Rich
Children (13) 1.22 0.87 0.01 2.10
Adults (36) 2.86 2.42 2.30 7.58

Totals 4.08 3.29 2.31 9.68

was land tenure and the wealth derived therefrom. Since differentia-
tion within village society was limited, the term “orang kaya” was
almost exclusively reserved for the small class of aristocratic retain-
ers at the sultan’s palace. Despite the introduction of private property
under the colonial system, the rakyat continued to view the sultan as
the suzerain of Tanah Melayu (Malay lands).

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 76 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

The term “orang kaya” was also on occasion applied to non-Malays

who came into contact with village folk. The ubiquitous Chinese
trader, or an occasional Malabari shopkeeper, may be mockingly
addressed by that term. In the rural townships, Chinese and Indians
operated dry goods stores, provided credit, and marketed cash crops
gathered in from the kampung. In back country roads, village Malays
sometimes passed Tamil Indians, the majority of whom were seques-
tered in plantation barracks. Also rarely glimpsed at a distance was
the British civil servant, followed dutifully by his Eurasian or Indian
clerk on some inspection tour. To orang kampung these were all orang
luar (outsiders), whose alienness was doubled by their perceived
cultural differences from village folk.
In the postwar decades, closer integration of the district with the
national society and wider economy has expanded the range of occu-
pations and social groups which are somehow encapsulated in native
categories. Malay villagers came to see the fundamental distinction
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Coconut plucker.

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 77

A woman picks coffee beans in her garden.

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A worker tending cacao bushes.

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 78 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Food vendors at the Saturday market.

as being between self-employment and wage employment: kerja

kampung as opposed to makan gaji (“living off a salary”). These terms
are encrusted with layers of implicit meanings which define for vil-
lagers the fundamental gap between them and others; a gap which
they now consider as a matter of personal accomplishment and eth-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

nic pride, and one which it is essential to narrow. To makan gaji is

to derive steady monthly income from a white-collar job, to enjoy
lifelong employment which culminates in a pension, to be well-
situated for making contacts essential to further advancement and
prestige. In contrast, “self-employment” (kerja sendiri) means living
with the uncertainty of farm income (because of commodities prices,
the weather, aging crops), manual work under the hot sun, and hav-
ing no opportunities to forge linkages within the bureaucratic net-
work. Unskilled wage labor is not encompassed under makan gaji but
designated by specific terms such as sharecropping (bagi dua), odd-
jobbing (ambil upah), contract work (kerja kontrak/kerja borong), and
being a hired farm laborer (buroh tetap). Clearly, local terminology
recognizes clear-cut distinctions between self-employment on one’s
property, different forms of manual wage labor, and salaried work.

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 79

Why has makan gaji, preferably “kerajaan” (a shorthand way of saying

government employment), taken on such social significance in rural
society?
The expansion of local government offices in administration,
education, health, social services, religion, and development have
brought in Malay white-collar workers and families, mainly from
outside the district, to constitute a local Malay elite. While a number
of the younger bureaucrats and teachers reside in towns like Telok
Datok and Port Klang, most of the officials live in rural centers such
as Kampung Telok. Their local residence and participation in UMNO
activities and government rituals are critical in the rural production
of a bureaucratic culture.
In almost daily contact with students, teachers (guru) are highly
regarded for their learning, their kerajaan stamp, and orientation
towards national Malay society. They set local standards for aspir-
ing kampung boys and girls, the majority of whom seek career paths
out of agricultural work. Guru not only display the accoutrements
of urban lifestyle such as cars, plastic-sheathed furniture, electronic
gadgets, and expensive clothes, but they also speak in authoritative
tones about Malay problems, sprinkling their speeches with tech-
nical terms and English phrases. As the varied representatives of a
rural intelligentsia, teachers, policemen, office clerks, and party func-
tionaries furnish rural folk with workaday knowledge of the wider
society, a bureaucratic elaboration of the increasing diet of Televeshen
Malaysia and popular magazines eagerly consumed by village fami-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

lies. Situated in government offices and public institutions, guru and

official are strategic nodes in the bureaucratic system linking rural
Malays to the national society. Their technocratic image and politi-
cal contacts overshadow the customary deference accorded leading
kampung families, but with whom marriage alliances are sought to
intermesh the dual bases — salaried employment and landed wealth
— of the new Malay middle class.
Young officials coming into the district may not yet own village
resources, but by effecting marital ties with landrich families they
stand to benefit from two simultaneous processes of differentiation.
As civil servants they derive their primary source of income from
state positions, not land. Their eventual acquisition of local land prop-
erties has a different use and mode of deployment from village prac-
tice. The holdings they do come to control are not the cause of their

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 80 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

occupations but the result of external sources of income, contacts, and

prestige. Some break into local commercial activities such as cater-
ing, coffee milling, house construction, etc., because of their superior
access to government credit. Others, and these include the ketua kam-
pung, enter into covert alliances with Chinese contractors (pemborong)
who pay fat commissions and give a cut in business projects osten-
sibly won through competitive bidding. We thus see in the official
kampung elite the convergence of multiple economic and symbolic
capitals whereby fractions of urban and rural Malays can consolidate
their middle class position.
Chinese traders, building contractors, and labor recruiters are the
critical commercial networks which interface with the bureaucratic
structure channelling contracts, goods, and funds. Although there
are a few Malay grocery stores struggling to keep in the black within
kampung communities, and the occasional Indian spice-and-rice shop
in rural townships, Chinese operate businesses as different as hawk-
ing fish and vegetables, vehicle repair shops, import-export trade,
cinemas, transportation, and the construction industry. Chugging
into kampung on their scooters, Chinese traders buy and transport
farm crops, as well as provide liquid credit to their regular custom-
ers. The debt is gradually repaid by claiming price deductions on
future produce (tolak hasil). Some rich Malays also loan money in
this manner, earning a disguised interest (bunga) and thus circum-
venting the Koranic injunction against taking interest. Except for the
major capitalists who enjoy special arrangements with Malay offi-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

cials, most Chinese retailers are tightly knit ino their own exclusive
networks and have little noncommerical contact with people outside
the trading class.
Other non-Malays in the district are connected with the major cap-
italist industries. The estate managers and technical staff are socially
and spatially K.L.-centered, some travelling by helicopter, others by
cars, at least once a week to escape plantation doldrums. The profes-
sional, supervisory, and even clerical workers at the local FTZ daily
take the highway back and forth to towns in the Klang Valley. In their
wake, the slow eddies of plantation life swirl around a residue Tamil
labor force. Other ex-plantation Tamil workers, either laid off or vol-
untarily resigning, are squatter-cum-laborers on Chinese and Indian
holdings. Their daily lives are still conducted in the green shadows
of tree crops, on the periphery of Malay kampung, plantations, and

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 81

rural townships. Gradually, Tamil men and women are appearing as

laborers in the Chinese pemborong’s work crews. They have trickled
out of the plantations to join Malays in the informal labor market.
Since the 1960s, some Malay boys and girls can escape this fate
through education. The guru, as gatekeepers to officialdom, have
guided a steady flow of bright children into urban schools on spe-
cial government scholarships. Some of these kampung students,
having graduated from teachers’ colleges or universities, choose to
remain in K.L. or have been sent as civil servants to other states in
the country. Remittances from these transplanted professionals are
rare and usually come on Hari Raya, the post-Ramadan celebrations
when town-dwelling Malays make their annual pilgrimage back to
the villages (balik kampung). The maintenance of networks between
town and country provides younger siblings with urban bases (usu-
ally the home of a married older sister) if they seek further educa-
tion or wage employment in towns like Shah Alam, Sungai Way, or
K.L. Contacts with kampungfolk also keep the migrants abreast of
village land sales. A few professionals have returned to their home
villages in the mukim and have begun to play an important role in
local politics. Although the majority of rural men and women will
never reach even the lower rungs of the state bureaucracy, most
realize the strategic benefits of kerajaan and compete even for jobs as
gardeners and peons in some government or UMNO office.
The drawing off of kampung Malays into the Klang Valley and beyond
has been greatest at the level of wage laborers. The first postwar influx
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

of Malays from the district occurred in the 1960s, when industrializa-

tion in the Klang Valley drew off mainly male migrants to work in Port
Klang, as well as in private and public enterprises. Decreasing access
to kampung land and declining productivity of smallholding com-
pelled villagers to seek off-farm wage work on a more regular basis
than before. Some of the migrants have since settled in town, becoming
part of the nascent Malay urban working class. However, the major-
ity of unskilled workers continue to commute daily on motorbikes,
buses, and trucks to urban and plantation jobs (travelling some 10 to 35
miles). Others join labor gangs and have become absorbed into migra-
tion circuits which connect many kampung with work projects else-
where in Malaysia and even overseas. The draining off of rural labor
by manufacturing, construction, and transportation industries is paral-
leled, on a small scale, by the resettlement of villagers on government

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 82 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

land development schemes in different parts of the country. About fifty

families from Sungai Jawa have left the area to become pioneer farmers
in government FELDA6 land schemes.
In my survey of 242 households in Sungai Jawa, over two-thirds
of all adult (17 years and older) working men are casual and perma-
nent laborers working as road crews, dockworkers, and construction
laborers (see Table 14). Whether they work within the district or out-
side, all of them have their home bases, usually attached to a small
holding, in the village. Some older men work on the kebun in the
morning and seek casual wage jobs in the afternoon. Others leave
their wives and children to tend the gardens and may be gone with
labor gangs for weeks or months on end. Still other younger, better-
educated men who have landed skilled jobs in Klang Valley com-
mute to work daily and take care of their cash crops on weekends.
A young married man may hold three or more jobs, as dockworker,
marketing agent, and weekend farmer; carrying village produce on
his motorbike, he drops them off at the Klang market on his trip to
the harbor. Employment at Port Klang is highly desired by most vil-
lage men because one can progress through the ranks and enjoy all
the benefits of a government job. Access to jobs is jealously guarded
by patron-client networks controlled by the older permanent work-
ers. Some village men work as “casual” cargo handlers for many
years before they gain access to “permanent” employment. These
are terms in which kampung men explain their constant attempts to
negotiate their way into a strategic position within the port system.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

The outflow of male workers has been joined by rural women since
the early 1970s. In Sungai Jawa, the majority of working adult women
(70 percent of the total) are wage workers either in factories or agricul-
ture (Table 14). Most are young unmarried women living with their
parents who commute daily to work in the local FTZ (a distance of
about five miles). Rural women seldom commute long distances to
work; those who are employed in industries in Shah Alam, Petaling
Jaya, or even Port Klang stay with relatives or in rooming houses in
town, returning on some weekends. Thus, Table 14 shows that of the
525 working adults (17 years and older) in my sample, 76 percent of
the men and 78 percent of the women are engaged in casual, factory,
and state employment outside the kampung, but they return daily,
weekly, and at longer intervals to village households. In other words,
the working population whose primary occupation remains cash

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 Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal 83

Table 14
Primary Occupations of Men and Women,
One-Third of Total Population, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Occupation Men Women Total

Farm operator 54 23 77
Kampung professional 3 3 6
Peddler 13 7 20
Entrepreneur (market agent, 11 2 13
store or business operator)
Landlord 3 2 5
Sharecropper 10 4 14
Casual laborer (day, contract) 111 41 152
Shop assistant 6 8 14
Factory worker (steady & temporary) 42 70 112
Steady wage-worker 77 0 77
(government & port)
Government employee 28 7 35
(clerk, teacher, official)

Totals 358 167 525

*Kampung professionals such as Malay spirit-healer (bomoh) and midwife (bidan).
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

cropping has been reduced to about 15 percent, a fact disguised by the

garden appearance of many Malay villages.
In this situation of downward mobility, a localized version of the
widespread proletarianization of rural Malays, we see a curious
inversion of kampung symbolic structure. Whereas in the recent past,
only kuli (manual laborer) status was shameful, among the younger
generation today, the term tani (farmer) has also taken on a pejora-
tive gloss. Indeed, household strategizing on the basis of control over
family labor is fast becoming an outdated practice. Parents attempt
instead to enforce some collectivization of children’s wage earnings,
but they are more successful with daughters than with sons, as we
shall see in the next chapter. The overwhelming majority aspire to
makan gaji (earn a salary) and are willing to be pekerja kilang (“factory

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 84 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

worker,” a status viewed as a mixture of manual and white-collar

elements) or even unemployed while waiting to receive the bureau-
cratic ticket to kerajaan.
The reproduction problematic remains: bureaucratic culture and
the mystification of makan gaji are increasingly out of tune with the
realities of downward mobility for the many and upward strategiz-
ing by the favored few. Production and reproduction of bureaucratic
discourse in the domains of education, public agencies, government
officers, and UMNO gatherings both mystify and discipline local
aspirations. Dissonance between official images and the distribution
of chances, though muffled, becomes louder as one moves closer
to the ground of everyday life. The structure of demand for rural
labor, increasingly selective on the basis of gender and skill-grade,
channels parental attempts to place sons and daughters on divergent
educational and occupational pathways; few parents expect, or even
want, their children to grow up to be tani.
Kampung culture is fundamentally decentered, and the ongoing
subdivision of holdings has converted many kebun into mere hous-
ing lots. For the laboring poor, staking their houses on a kampung
plot is the final claim to a security which rarely exists in their spatial-
social dispersal as wage laborers. The cultural and structural recon-
figuration of relationships between parents and children, brothers
and sisters, male and female is fraught with new needs and conflicts.
As it will be shown, the social reproduction of the reconstituted kam-
pung society, now firmly situated in the circuit of capitalist develop-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ment, is more discontinuous than one may assume.

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 Chapter 5

Domestic Relations:
The Reconfiguration of Family Life

Sungai Jawa at dusk: women stroll over to neighbors’ homes, sit in

cozy circles imbibing coffee and gossip while keeping an occasional
eye on the “tele,” which is turned on to an Islamic choir program
(nasyid) or “Charlie’s Angels.” Infants in sarong hammocks dangle
from the rafters and men commiserate on the stairs as children chase
after a ball in the lengthening shadows.
Noraini is the mother of eight children. Every Friday evening rela-
tives and friends, children in tow, gather in her house. Under her hus-
band’s guidance, young children recite the Koran. A daughter-in-law,
visiting niece, or some other young woman frees her from household
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

chores to sit with her guests. At one such gathering, Noraini was
nursing a feverish granddaughter when her 16–year–old son flung
himself into her lap and cajoled her for money. He was the family
athlete and had recently sprained his ankle. Earlier that day he had
picked two gallon-drums of coffee cherries for the inflated “wage”
of M$10 and was asking for M$20 more to buy a pair of track shoes.
Shifting her granddaughter onto one lap, Noraini rubbed her son’s
ankle while indulgently negotiating his request. She was the main
character in an evening drama of women and children; her hus-
band had an occasional walk-on part. Daughters brought refresh-
ments and confided worries, while sons lolled on mats, now and
then addressing a comment or question to her. Most family affairs
and problems of extended kin are talked over and settled in such
matrifocal gatherings.
85

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 86 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

In this chapter, we look at changing relations and sentiments in

the domestic domain as children are streamed into secular educa-
tion and diverging career paths. I begin by discussing family power
relations and gender images prior to the widespread participation
of kampung daughters in wage employment. Next, the experiences
of boys and girls in school are related to their differential integra-
tion into the wage market. The changing sense of obligation between
children and parents is revealed in a series of cases on household
budgetting. Conflict as much as cooperation ensues as kampung life
quickens to the ring of the cash register and time is no longer embed-
ded in social relations.

Families, Spirits, and Other Familiars

Although in Islamic life, men are considered more impor-
tant, for example, in tracing descent, the influence of the
mother is greater (within the family).
Kadi, Telok Datok

Kampungfolk understand their culture in terms of a localized world

view encompassing both adat (customary sayings and practices) and
Islamic principles.1 These are historically produced concepts which
take on different meanings in particular social contexts.2 Under
Islamic injunction, Malay parents are morally obliged (wajib) to pro-
vide for their children up to the age of fifteen. The moral obligations
of children to support their parents is unemphasized and more often
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

enforced according to adat. Thus, customary practice instills in the

youngest daughter (often born when her mother was in her early for-
ties) a special emotional attachment to her parents which will ensure
her caring for them in old age. Similarly, although Islamic principles
vest formal authority in the father, adat enforces dependence on
women and the maintenance of kin relations through womenfolk. It
is in the spiritual realm that Islam and adat have come into severe con-
flict in recent years. Exposed to Middle-Eastern and Pakistani Islamic
trends, Malay-Muslim intellectuals would like to expunge beliefs in
spirits, sorcery, and animistic rituals from Malay culture. Neverthe-
less, villagers continue to be influenced by “non-Islamic” but indig-
enous Malay values and practices. Despite pious public denials,
tensions between Islamic rules, adat, and social conduct repeatedly
break through in the course of daily life. Intolerable contradictions

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 87

are produced when these belief systems, abruptly challenged by

changing social relationships, have to be modified and reinterpreted
to contend with the seduction of alternative worldviews.
In ordinary kampung society, Malays believe that men enjoy moral
superiority over women because men embody more reason and self-
knowledge (akal) than women, who are overly influenced by carnal
desires (hawa nafsu). Young unmarried women are situated at the
juncture of these authority structures built upon age and gender
hierarchies: male honor hinges upon protecting the doubly junior
status of pubescent girls. Whereas young unmarried men (bujang)
are encouraged to assert their independence and roam near and far,
their female counterparts are carefully trained to concern themselves
with activities directly tied to family needs. Furthermore, their nego-
tiation through adolescence is considered one fraught with danger to
their own person and the honor of their male kin. Thus, constrained
by decorum and clothing to be shy (malu) and pliant in nature and
body (lemah lembut), nubile girls are further hedged-in by rules which
prohibit them from wandering into “dangerous” spaces.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

A three-generation family.

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 88 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Customary taboos circumscribing movements are understood as

necessary protective measures since young women are believed to
be particularly weak in spiritual essence (lemah semangat), a condi-
tion which makes women susceptible to irrational and disruptive
behaviour. Young girls venturing out alone after twilight attract
spirits, (jinn and hantu) dwelling in rocks and trees, which exude
an evil odor. Trespassing into forbidden places can incite possession
of young women by angry spirits (kena hantu). Only ritual interven-
tion by male spirit-healers (bomoh) can exorcise the devil and restore
spiritual balance in the victim. In recent years, villagers claim a
decline in the influence of spirits because the clearing of bushes
and widening of kampung paths (by “development” projects) have
“spiritually cleansed” their community. Besides, the intelligentsia’s
reinterpretations of Islam have cast shame on spirit-beliefs and the
bomoh. In any case, such ideas remain powerful in the social moni-
toring of young virgins. Fearful (takut) of strangers and unfamiliar
surroundings, young girls are socialized to accept the moral cus-
tody of father, brother, and other male kin.
Malay-Islamic practice governing marital relationship also places
the wife under the shelter and moral authority of the husband. As
long as they remain married to each other, the husband is required
by Muslim marriage law to be totally responsible for his wife’s
maintenance (bagi nafkah) — shelter, food and clothing — and for the
children they bear together. This custom formally frees the married
woman, no matter how well-off, from the obligation of financially
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

supporting the family. She can retain her own earnings from farm
and wage employment as private wealth. In many cases, however,
the wife’s savings are used in family emergencies. More critically,
her nest egg is insurance against destitution after divorce, when the
ex-husband relinquishes responsibility for his former wife and chil-
dren. Thus, in Malay-Islamic ideals, the moral authority of men over
unmarried daughter, sister, and wife is rooted in male responsibil-
ity for the subsistence needs of the family. Male superiority is fur-
ther enhanced by widespread beliefs in the spiritual vulnerability of
women.
Cultural mechanisms for circumscribing female movement and
power seldom constrain older women, especially those who have
had many children and are past menopause. Whereas the blossoming
young woman is bounded by various taboos, the middle-aged woman

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 89

enjoys an increasing informal authority within the domestic domain

and among her kin. Adat recognizes the mother-child bond as more
fundamental than formal descent through the father. For instance, a
woman’s children by different husbands, legally of different descent,
are considered adik-beradik susu — “milk siblings” who remain with
their mother upon divorce. Relatives with whom one has greatest
contact and mutual dependence are likely to be from the mother’s
side of the family. And as mentioned before, the migrant worker or
student commonly elects to “squat” (tumpang) with a female rela-
tive, seldom a male one. This dependence on and social influence of
the mature woman is reflected in her free movement within village
circles and further afield. Middle-aged women frequently visit each
other’s houses, go marketing, or travel alone to the kebun. They gather
in groups to prepare major feasts and, spicing their gossip with sexual
innuendos and the occasional acid comment, direct younger relatives
in various tasks. In their own houses, older women are not constrained
by sexual modesty and may go about their housework bare-breasted.
The grandmother is widely considered the ultimate source of wisdom
and comfort in many families.
Whereas the aging woman is respected and often cherished, the
sexually fertile woman is both dominated and feared — threatened
by divorce, while threatening in certain situations to wreak havoc
upon the family. Such male fears are prefigured in the seductive form
of the female hantu. Women who die in childbirth are transmogrified
into the langsuir ravening after the blood of pregnant women and
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

their newly born infants. Failing to give life in her human form, the
female hantu takes life. Her stillborn daughter (pontianak) is changed
into a beautiful apparition who tempts unsuspecting men into mar-
riage. She represents the threats posed by a single but previously
married woman (janda: widow or divorcée). Malays consider the
janda a sexually experienced flirt who seeks to lure unmarried men
into liaisons or entangle happily married men in her schemes. Wid-
owed or divorced, the janda is unlike the virginal daughter, sister, or
wife; she is not under the moral-legal authority of any male kin, and
only answerable to the Islamic judge (kadi).
This cultural construction of family relations is rooted in the his-
torically produced interactions between Islam and Malay adat in
a peasant economy. Everyday relations of production are closely
interwoven into a formal structure of male authority and cultural

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 90 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

mechanisms for the graduated domination of womenfolk. Malay

notions of male prerogatives and values of male responsibility
toward women are most easily expressed in the control of young,
unmarried women, referred to as budak-budak (children/virgins),
while single, previously married women are most able to challenge
male authority. But kampung society is in the midst of changing social
relationships which both dissolve and reconstitute bonds between
parents and children, male and female. As girls enter mass educa-
tion and prepare for off-farm wage work, household pressures on
their economic support have given virgins the latent powers previ-
ously associated with the janda.

Boys and Girls: Schooling for Success

The progressive integration of Malay kampung communities into
the wider society — through the expanded bureaucracy, spread of
mass communications, near-universal education, and the general-
ization of wage employment — is turning young people, the pemuda
(youths) more than the pemudi (young unmarried women), away
from village livelihood. In everyday life, the preparation of school-
children for blue- and white-collar jobs, together with the selective
pressures of the labor market, have loosened the involvement of
kampung children in agriculture.
Prior to the 1970s, before the large-scale entry of rural Malay chil-
dren into secondary education, boys and girls in mukim Telok had
participated on a daily or regular basis in work on the homestead.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

The life histories of adults who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s show
that most children from all levels of village society ended primary
schooling at Standard Six.3 Many girls were sent by their parents for
special Islamic instructions or did not attend school at all.4 The expec-
tation was that the youngsters were part of the family economy, and
they were instructed to become good farmers like their parents. Chil-
dren from age five onwards could distinguish between red (ripe) and
green (unripe) coffee and were sometimes helpful in picking the cher-
ries from the low-slung branches. Older children, especially those
over twelve years who had finished Standard Six, followed their par-
ents in their daily rounds of tapping rubber, digging ditches, gather-
ing coffee, and miscellaneous oddjobs. Around the house, little girls
did cooking, washing, and took care of younger siblings. Children
seldom dreamed of a future different from their parents’ way of life.

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 91

In Kampung Telok, the administrative seat of the mukim, the families

of civil servants were already retaining their children longer in school
to increase their chances of obtaining government jobs. However, it
was not until the mid-1960s that the first boys from Sungai Jawa were
sent off to English secondary education in Port Klang. Noraini’s hus-
band Nawab tells me that when their son Yacob prepared to attend an
urban Christian mission school, his neighbours warned that the boy
would be turned by English education against his own Islamic faith
and kampung origin. Yacob did not disappoint his parents. After grad-
uating from teachers’ college, he returned to help his parents rebuild
their house. He is teaching in a sawah village in Tanjong Karang. To
village parents, Yacob has become a model for children to do well in
school and qualify for salaried jobs.
From the early 1970s, as “development” programs and propaganda
began to pervade the countryside, kampung parents have become anx-
ious to keep their children, especially boys, in school as long as they
can pass examinations and win government scholarships. Within the
mukim, there are four primary schools which provide secular educa-
tion and five village schoolrooms for Islamic instruction. Whereas sec-
ular education at the primary level is free, Malay children who attend
Arab Islamic schools pay a small fee. Boys and girls in the two edu-
cational streams are distinguished by their uniforms. In the secular
schools, boys wear shorts and girls wear uniforms based on the Cath-
olic schools’ pinafore. In the Islamic schools, girls dress in white head-
scarves and blue sarongs (which have the odd effect of making them
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

look like small nuns). Boys also wear sarung instead of trousers.
The primary school in Sungai Jawa is the largest in the subdistrict.
In 1979, there were 550 girls and 556 boys, most of whom came from
the village itself, the rest from surrounding Malay communities.5
Girls have generally done better than boys. Even very young girls are
socialized to be obedient and to comport themselves demurely. These
qualities have given them a good start in primary education, com-
pared with boys who are not ready to take school lessons seriously. In
my repeated visits to the school, boys were observed to be more spon-
taneous in the classroom and on the school fields, for schooling has
not yet curbed their spirit of exploration and playfulness. Girls are
generally more restrained, presenting a cool and neat contrast as they
watch from the shadows of trees and verandah the sweaty play of
boys. In one class room, I observed the tendency of the male teacher

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 92 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Village schoolchildren on the playing field.

to turn most of his attention to the boys’ side of the room, thus elicit-
ing most of the responses from there. Girls are usually bent over their
desks in work and seldom volunteer answers to questions. A few girls
are made leaders of classroom projects because of their responsibility
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in carrying out orders.

In recent years, girls have been catching up and perhaps overtak-
ing boys in gaining government scholarships for secondary educa-
tion. The headmaster tells me that girl pupils are “more clever, clean,
obedient, and dedicated ... and also more fearful of teachers” than
boys. A male teacher6 elaborates, “According to Malay custom, girls
are expected to follow instructions.” The girls are so obedient, the
teacher continues, that the FTZ factories are glad to have them when
they fail to pass Form Three or Form Five.
In 1972, about a year after the FTZ was established, a coeducational
secondary school was opened in Kampung Telok, thus making it pos-
sible for a larger number of village children to proceed on to second-
ary education. Previously, the nearest secondary schools, many of

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 93

them operated by Christian missionaries for non-Malay students, were

over 12 miles away in towns or in K.L. The influx of rural children
to the new secondary school in Kampung Telok is also prompted by
government supplies of text books and other materials, in addition to
scholarships for a number of children in secondary school. It is becom-
ing routine for above-average Malay children to receive scholarships
to national universities and even for further education abroad. Never-
theless, village parents complain that the government is increasingly
concentrating educational benefits for Malays in the “less-developed”
states on the East Coast, and one can no longer assume that local bright
students will receive government scholarships through college. The
immediate effect of state sponsorship of rural Malay education is that
the percentage of children from the local primary school who go on to
secondary education increased from under 70 percent before 1972 to
over 95 percent after 1973. Most of them proceed to secular secondary
schools in towns, and about one-quarter enroll in Islamic institutions
(Sekolah Arab). Those who receive scholarships are sent to the best sec-
ondary schools (mainly Christian institutions) in the capital.
The cream of the Standard Six crop thus culled off, the Telok sec-
ondary school is left with local students who are gradually sloughed
off through nationally certified exams held at the Form Three and
Form Five levels. In 1979, only 53 percent of the students passed
Form Three and 29 percent passed Form Five. Students sit for Form
Three when they are 16 years old or thereabout, an age when they can
be legally employed. Those who obtain a grade “A,” mainly boys, are
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

sent off to vocational and technical schools in preparation for indus-

tial employment.
Compared to their good performance in primary school, the wide-
spread failure of girls in the Form Three examination is symptomatic
of a larger social reality. A few girls did so exceptionally well in sec-
ondary school as to be nominated as top students in 1977 and 1978.
In the past years, some female students have received grants to pur-
sue Form Six or attend teachers’ colleges elsewhere in the country.
For most girls, however, Form Three is the end of their school career.
Social recognition of this fact is manifested in the new custom of
school trips to the local FTZ after students have sat for their Form
Three exams. Conveniently enough, many girls work as temporary
operators while waiting for the results; those who fail, as well as many

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 94 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

who pass, stay on as factory hands. The factories take in as produc-

tion workers female graduates of Standard Six, Form Three, and Form
Five. One factory considers Standard Six graduates the best assem-
bly workers, since Form Five graduates seem more discontented with
work conditions and may persist in looking for better employment
opportunities elsewhere.
Thus, although all village girls and boys enroll in school at age
seven, they drop out of school at different stages during their child-
hood and adolescence. More girls than boys end school at age twelve
because they are needed to help with household chores and childcare
at home. This is particularly the case for girls from poor families,
since their parents spend more time on the road seeking wage work.
Frequently, girls who drop out after Standard Six are the eldest in the
family, i.e., daughters who have been given greater domestic respon-
sibilities, and at a younger age, than most village girls. Eldest daugh-
ters often continue in this role of taking over housework and caring
for their younger siblings until they get married. It is the younger
sisters who are allowed to continue longer in school and/or end up
as factory workers.
Ever since the large-scale entry of boys and girls into secondary
education, few kampung adolescents engage in farm work during
their nonschool hours. Some parents try to enforce regular work
contributions from their children, especially the boys, by taking
them to the kebun on weekends and school holidays. Even then,
boys and girls only work intermittently in the gardens. The majority
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

of parents, thinking how important education is to their children’s

future, seldom insist on their children’s help on the farm. Those
children who demonstrate some promise in their schoolwork are
exempt from farmwork altogether. But whereas schoolgirls are still
required to perform housework, boys spend most of their free time
in ball games, scouting, and other extracurricular school activities.
Parents complain that schooling not only takes children away from
kampung work but that its associated activities and trappings are an
additional drain on family resources.
Pemuda who fail the Form Three or Form Five certificate examinations
are usually left in village society, living in their parents’ homes, work-
ing as plantation laborers, factory workers, or simply waiting around
for work more commensurate with their education. For instance,
Fol is a 20-year–old man who left school after Form Three. After

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 95

a year’s training in mechanics, Fol has had eight different jobs in

different urban-based companies. He worked, in rapid succession, in
an air-conditioning plant, plastics works, wood workshop, chocolate
company (followed by one year of unemployment, when he occa-
sionally helped his father on the farm), a biscuit factory, mechanics
workshop, and boiler works. The length of his tenure in these jobs
ranged from one day to three months. In most cases, his salary was
M$150 to M$165 per month, a sum he found did not compensate for
the night shifts and the daily two-hour bus commute. Despite his
checkered job history, Fol is bright and ambitious, though frequently
discouraged. He often consulted his friends about openings for office
boys in government departments. Factory employment, he said, “is
inadequate remuneration for one getting on in age, because of the
threat of being thrown out by the factory.” Only government employ-
ment makes sense because it “provides guarantee for the future . . .
it is permanent employment. The government cannot throw us out.”
When I pointed out that he was overqualified to be a peon he said
it was “no sweat” since his strategy was to first get a foot through
the government door. During the interview, a friend piped in to say
that he considered himself very lucky to be working as a gardener
in a government institution, even though his salary was only M$190
a month. Friends already employed in the lower echelons of state
agencies are critical connections for funnelling these school leavers
out of factory jobs, and/or unemployment, into public industries.
Nevertheless, access to the labor market for pemuda is in general less
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

limited in scope and in opportunities than it is for pemudi who have

received the same education.
Just as rural boys are getting serious about academic work in sec-
ondary school, girls, in a reversal from their former position in pri-
mary school, begin to slip in their academic performance. Pemudi in
their early adolescence are expected to take on more work responsi-
bilities at home and in maintaining interhousehold relations. Their
gradually increasing participation in these socially reproductive activ-
ities interferes with their work in school. Girls of twelve and older, at
an age when most begin secondary school, are expected to do the daily
laundry, help prepare lunch and dinner, and take care of younger sib-
lings, especially if there is no older sister at home. As the girls grow
older, they often take over most domestic duties from their moth-
ers, who gradually play a supplementary role in cooking, cleaning,

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 96 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

and childcare. It is the expectation and practice for middle-aged

women who have daughters, or daughters-in-law, to semiretire from
household chores and become more directly involved in matters
affecting the wider community. Young women also spend a consid-
erable amount of time serving neighbors, friends, and relatives who
constantly drop by in the informal way of kampung life.
Village families, especially those still firmly involved with cash
cropping, are active participants in social networks built upon
dyadic relations of reciprocity. The services of young women, gra-
ciously performed, are crucial in sustaining these interhousehold
bonds, since they are activated primarily through sharing childcare,
domestic tasks, and the constant exchange of cooked food. In the
event of a wedding, for instance, the host family would request help
from neighbors and friends (both female and male) in the prepara-
tion of different meals and general festival activities which can last
for three consecutive days. Female help in housework and childcare
is also transmitted in institutionalized form through child adoption.
For instance, when Noraini took to bed with a severe gastric pain,
she sent for two adopted daughters (actually her nieces) to take over
the housework. One daughter had married out, two were employed
in factory work, and the last one was too young to do housework on
her own. The two adopted daughters were sisters sitting for their
Form Three exams the following month, but they were not unhappy
to be asked to help out for a couple of weeks. Never very keen on
school, they did not expect to pass the coming examination. In gen-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

eral, young women between the ages of 16 and 24 carry the burden
of daily housework and extra-domestic obligations, so that they are
more busy throughout the day than persons in other age groups.
Besides their increasing domestic responsibilities, adolescent
girls growing into adult female roles begin to turn their thoughts to
romance and marriage, thoughts prompted in part by magazines,
television, and movies. Pemudi taking the bus to secondary school
sometimes ride off in the direction of Port Klang, where they spend
their time wandering around movie houses and shopping complexes
imbibing “urban culture.” Brighter girl students are not immune to
the perceived attractions of early marriage and homemaking. For
instance in 1977, the most promising student at Telok secondary school
obtained a “C” grade in her Form Five certificate; she was then plan-
ning to get married. In a significant shift from past attitudes, village

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 97

parents prefer their daughters not marry straight out of school now
that there are factory jobs close to home and daughters can be induced
to earn an extra source of income. However, there are parents who
send their daughters for a brief spell in Arab schools, which are said to
produce good wives and mothers. Whether their daughter is educated
in secular or religious school, wage earning or just doing housework,
parents find it difficult to turn down a marriage proposal if the suitor
is well-off (see Chapter 6).
Some girls drop out of secondary school because they lack the right
combination of subjects to pass the certificate examinations. In the
vast majority of cases, three subjects offered — carpentry, agriculture,
and domestic science — are not taken by girls because their parents
consider the first two “masculine” subjects, while the third (intro-
duced into the curriculum especially for female students) is consid-
ered unnecessary since village girls are already proficient in cooking
and all aspects of housework and childcare, learnt at the mother’s
knee. Finally, but not least, the presence of the FTZ just down the
road from the school exerts an indirect influence on the poor per-
formance of female students in secondary education. Many girls,
already weakened in their resolve to do well in school, see in the FTZ
the answer to their immediate future outside the school gates. This
is especially the case for girls from poor families, who feel obliged to
leave school early and to help supplement the household budget.
Since the large-scale entry of teenage girls into secondary school
and factory employment, the only reduction in their family responsi-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

bilities is in farm work. Young women working in the factories refuse

to pick coffee altogether; their mothers or hired female laborers per-
form this kampung activity. Nevertheless, daughters engaged in fac-
tory work cannot escape their share of domestic chores. Young women
returning home from the night shift, too overwrought to sleep, often
do the laundry and cook the day’s meal before retiring. In total, factory
women exceed by 3.5 hours the daily labor time of ordinary village
women not engaged in regular wage work. As we shall see below, the
special pressures on these young women not only exact a toll but also
undermine the structure of male authority within the family.
It can be seen that the divergent experiences of pemuda and pemudi
in secondary education, their different responsibilities in the domes-
tic domain, and the increasing market demand for their labor power
channel them into alternate career paths. In particular, the market use

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 98 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

A factory woman doing the day’s laundry before going to work.

Credit: International Development Research Centre, Ottawa

of kampung women as a primary source of labor for low-skilled, dead-

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

end jobs reinforces their tendency not to complete secondary school.

Parents, who normally depend on daughters to perform most domes-
tic tasks, also begin to see in them a source of supplementary cash earn-
ings. Daughters are urged to enter the industrial labor market as early
as possible because once married, they can no longer be depended
upon for financial contributions. The majority of village women stop
factory work upon marriage and can rarely be expected to contribute
to their family of origin. Kampung parents therefore pin their long-term
hopes on academically inclined sons who may land a government job
and from whom parents can rightly make claims of support whenever
necessary. In practice, the movement into education, and villagers’ dif-
ferential expectations of their sons and daughters — shaped in part by
the selective market use of male and female labor — bring about the
realignment of parent-child relationships which weaken considerably
parental power to make children conform to Malay-Islamic ideals.

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 99

In the changing social and market context, daughters, as supplemen-

tary income-earners par excellence, are placed under special pressures
in relation to domestic practices of mobility. At the very least, as more
reliable contributors to the family budget than their brothers, they keep
their families afloat in a situation of threatened downward mobility.
But these women are neither classic proletarians nor classic victims; the
rerooting of their labor power in capitalist structures poses an unmis-
takable challenge to domestic male authority, a challenge negotiated
and deflected through appeals to emotional bonds and sentiments.

Daughters and Sons: Cooperation and Conflict

Following Islamic rules, women must under all circum-
stances, be subordinated to men. . . . [However] in [Sungai
Jawa] girls have much freedom to pursue higher education.
Even before there were factories, women were already free
to work in the kebun. Now, they have more freedom —
walking around at night, making friends by themselves,
etc. Older folks oppose [such conduct] but the government
enjoins us not to beat the children. Daughters are allowed to
work in factories because this is the age of inflation. Parents
want them to help support the family, develop the country,
advance industry so that foreigners will want to invest capi-
tal [here]. . . . [Besides, daughters are permitted to work in
factories because] parents also want their children to have
experiences. The modern outfits of the young women also
contribute to this age of inflation.
Father of factory daughters, and
a regular listener to radio broadcasts.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Today there are many young men like [my son]. Maybe
they no longer care for their parents like people did in the
old days.
Mother of factory man
Talking about the meanings of money, its acquisition, pooling, and
expenditure in Sungai Jawa, one notices too an inflation of sexual
images. The commoditization of family relationships within the vil-
lage household has linked female sexuality to strategies of mobil-
ity and mediation of class values. Here, I present some case studies
of domestic arrangements which in demonstrating the increasing
importance of female wages to family budget also capture the ascen-
dency of mother-daughter relationships and the parallel decline of
male power over daughter and sister.
In Sungai Jawa, the entry of pemuda and pemudi into wage employ-
ment does not automatically result in their handing over all their

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 100 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

earnings to their parents, even when they continue to live at home

and eat with the rest of the family. In the late 1930s, Rosemary Firth
observed that among the Malay fisherfolk on the Kelantan coast, the
predominance of small households belied the fact that separate eat-
ing and budgetting arrangements existed under one roof (1966: 17).
The Malay expressions makan suku and makan sekali refer to sepa-
rate budgetting in the first instance and to joint arrangement in the
second. In makan suku, the staple rice was purchased separately,
while there was limited pooling of other resources. Firth’s examples
of household budgetary arrangement indicate that members indi-
vidually acquired income from diverse sources; e.g., a man derived
income from fishing, his wife from making mats and nets, his mother
from her sawah fields, and his son as a busdriver (ibid. 18–21). We
may therefore argue, although Firth did not explicitly acknowledge
this, that the retention of individually acquired income by household
members7 constituted resistance to the collectivization of resources
not obtained from joint production activities organized by the house-
hold head.
Such is the emerging trend in contemporary Sungai Jawa house-
holds. Earlier, I mentioned the control of resources by the parents
who deployed their children’s labor power in the kampung economy.
The only exception to the pooling of family incomes was a household
where the husband used his farm earnings to support the family,
while the wife kept her own earnings as private savings. However,
as the majority of households come to depend on a multiplicity of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

incomes, economic individuation within the household has increased

correspondingly: members variously engaged in wage work may
volunteer, sometimes under duress, to pool their earnings for joint
consumption. My cases of household budgetting reveal that patterns
of giving and taking are increasingly divided along generational and
gender lines.
Frequently, the contributions of unmarried sons and daughters
hinge upon their perceptions of family needs — i.e., whether these
were adequately met by farm income — and the presence of younger
siblings at home. I present two examples of sibling solidarity, one in
alliance with, the other against, the parents:

Case A. This nuclear family consisted of a middle-aged couple and

their five unmarried children. The separate properties of husband and

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 101

wife, which came to 2.5 acres, provided the main source (pokok belanja)
for family expenses. The husband also brought in M$125 per month
as a rubber tapper. The three older children were wage workers: the
son a stevedore and the two daughters factory workers at the Telok
FTZ and Shah Alam. The mother was very effective in obtaining a
total of M$150 from the working children each month, as well as their
contibution towards the purchase of expensive items. She explained:

Children and parents must discuss together before making a

purchase. We must cooperate so that whether it is a good or
bad purchase, we share the responsibility equally. Whether
light or heavy, we carry the burden together.

A few weeks after these words, her 20-year–old daughter (a worker

at the local FTZ) was arrested together with a Tamil foreman in a
motel and charged by the Islamic Department with “illicit sexual
intimacy” (khalwat). Her mother paid the fine and gave the girl a
thrashing, followed by an order to change her job to another fac-
tory. This scandal has not suspended practical sense, the daughter’s
employment status, nor her support of the family.

Case B. In this example, a second marriage by the mother put an end to

support by her working children. Fauziah was a 43-year–old widow in
Tanjong Karang who held in trust six acres of land, half in sawah, half
in coconut-cocoa, for her five children. In her early widowhood, she
worked the land with the help of laborers while her children attended
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

school. When her elder daughter became a factory worker in Sungai

Way, she rented out her plots to tenants, retaining only her one-acre
pesaka (inherited property) on which the family house stood. Her oldest
son soon started teaching primary school in Jalan Klang Lama, and
both working brother and sister remitted money home each month to
Fauziah and the three younger children, one girl and two boys.
Two years later, Fauziah married a 64-year–old widower in Sungai
Jawa, about 30 miles from her village. She attempted to divide her
time between the two communities, leaving her teenage children to
care for the household in Tanjong Karang. Her new husband had no
property of his own but was holding his late wife’s small property
in trust for their adopted daughter.8 He was often short on cash and
depended upon Fauziah to bring rice from her farm. She even bought
a television set for his house, justifying this to her children on the

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 102 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

grounds that their own house was not fitted with electrical lines.
Meanwhile, her new husband complained that “going back and forth
like newlyweds” was made more difficult because he did not feel
comfortable in “the children’s father’s house.”
Not surprisingly, the two older children decided to stop giving
their mother money. Fauziah’s older daughter said, rather pointedly,
“Let father feed mother.” She and her brother handed money over to
their younger sister for schooling and kitchen expenses. In another
bold departure from past norms, the factory woman brought her boy-
friend, a smalltown school teacher, to spend the night in her mother’s
house when the older couple were visiting. Ultimately, it was dis-
creet pressures brought by the village headman which compelled the
young lovers to stop this practice and bring forward their wedding
date. Such incidents prompted Fauziah’s husband to settle his affairs
in Sungai Jawa and buy a house in Tanjong Karang, where he was
born and still had kinsmen. It is probable that the two households
will remain separate even after the older couple have relocated per-
manently to Tanjong Karang.
These two cases show that even when unmarried children become
wage workers, the father is still expected to provide for the bulk of
his family’s needs. In case A, the mother carefully managed relations
with the children to ensure a steady cash flow. In case B, the work-
ing children resisted supporting the remarried mother and saw their
main responsibility as toward younger siblings still in school. The
following examples illustrate that sibling solidarity is not always
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

present, especially when brothers feel that their employment situ-

ation does not permit them to share their earnings. It falls upon
their working sisters to meet various claims from parents and other
household members.

Case C. The divergent expectations of sons and daughters in this

household show that where the family is well-endowed with land,
the education of sons is encouraged and no claims are made on their
earnings. During the course of their marriage, the industrious and
frugal parents have acquired nine acres of land to add to the husband’s
one-acre pesaka. They had eight unmarried children ages ten to 24
years living at home. By kampung standards, the two elder sons earned
substantial salaries, one as a teacher trainee (M$800 per month),
the other a factory technician (M$500 per month). Neither brother

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 103

contributed to the family budget, even though a third brother had

been accepted as a scholarship candidate at the National University
but required a monthly subsidy of M$100. In fact, the father had set up
a bank account for the educational expenses of his sons; he expected
that the two younger boys would also go on to higher education and
qualify as civil servants. His expectations for his daughters were more
modest; the two elder ones had ended school at Form Three and were
soon married off (the second one to Yacob). The youngest girl was
doing poorly in school.
The two working sons kept most of their own earnings. They had
bought motorbikes on credit in order to commute to work. Together,
they purchased a set of formica-topped furniture, a stereo system,
and a television set. Occasionally, they bought candies and imported
fruits for their younger siblings. The father justified his sons’ reten-
tion of their earnings because in his view the young men needed to
save for wedding expenses (wang hantaran) and their future houses,
although neither man was at that time planning to get married soon.
Noncontribution by working sons, almost unheard of among work-
ing daughters, was tolerated because of their white-collar jobs, which
enhanced the privileged status of all young men in Malay families.

Case D. In this example, three generations participated variously to

care for an 80-year–old widower, a member of the village committee
in Sungai Jawa. Unlike his peers, this old man was poor, living on
his late wife’s half-acre plot with his youngest daughter, age 28 and
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

unmarried, and two granddaughters (ages 20 and 13). Daughter

and older granddaughter were factory workers who contributed
some M$100 each month for kitchen goods which the old man
purchased on credit (a privilege granted him as a JKK member) from
the corner Malabari store. The fathers of both granddaughters had
settled outside the village on FELDA land schemes. The father of the
younger girl remitted M$80 per month for her support. In addition,
the old man also received monthly sums of about M$30 from two
other married sons living nearby in houses built on their mother’s
land. In 1957, the old man had bought his own two-acre kebun in
another village, but he was not able to plant it with oil palm until
the early 1970s, when his daughter started working in the factory.
Her cash contributions and a son’s labor on the land have finally
produced a small income from the maturing tree crop.

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 104 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Thus this old man received a total monthly income of M$240 from
six different sources, most of which went to food expenses. He also
managed to save about $30 each year to buy fertilizers at subsidized
prices (as a JKK member, he had prior access to the limited supply)
for his palm holding. But it was the daily physical and emotional care
of his daughter and granddaughters which assured the old man a
good, though spare, standard of living. The small contributions from
his sons must be seen in the light of his developing property which
would produce sizeable earnings as the palms mature fully. He had
six sons but because of land poverty three had moved out of the vil-
lage and the remaining three (all married men with children) work
as laborers at Port Klang. When time approaches for the partition of
their parents’ property, it is not uncommon for sons who have left to
give up their rightful shares to those who remained in the kampung.
It seems likely, therefore, that the two sons who were making mon-
etary gifts to the old man were also strengthening their future claims
on his property; one of them was also a sharecropper on the land.

Case E. Other old folk are not so well-cared for, and sons do not
necessarily contribute to their upkeep simply because they own
property. An old woman had a half-acre plot from her late husband,
while her second husband held a 1.25 acre pesaka. Sparsely covered
with aging coffee bushes and coconut trees, their kebun produced
very low yields. To supply her kitchen, the woman coaxed vegetables
from a clayey soil. Nevertheless, the couple and their working
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

son still needed to spend at least M$120 per month at the village
store. They sometimes received cooked meals from her married
son and daughter (by the first marriage), but the old woman was
disappointed that the son living at home refused to make a regular
cash contribution to family expenses. She commented that he was
not unusual, adding perhaps that kampung children no longer cared
for their parents as in the old days.
Indeed, the 24-year–old son was unlike pemuda of earlier genera-
tions. He had failed Form Three and started work at 18 in a saw mill.
He used his savings to buy himself a radio and bed (most kampung
Malays slept on mats). At the time of my interview, he was working
at a shoe factory at Port Klang, making only M$150 a month. He had
recently bought a motorbike for M$1,800 but had paid up only M$700.
Occasionally, he slipped his mother M$10 bills, but when she asked

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 105

for more, he asked, “Who pays for the motorbike?” He also refused
to work on the land which would one day be his, complaining that
he needed to rest on weekends. Instead, he “cruised” around on his
motorbike.9 Thus, the generation gap in this family has been accentu-
ated by kampung-bandar (rural-urban) differences in cultural values.
The parents expected that in their old age their son would help them
on the land, as in the idealized but fairly accurate picture of the recent
past. The young man, entering the labor market at the bottom of the
ladder, experienced frustration at the growing distance between his
meager earnings and his acquired needs as a moden (“modern”) urban
worker.
These three cases demonstrate that when young men are engaged
in wage employment, they often resist making a regular contribu-
tion to the family budget because of their privileged status at home,
adequate family income from the farm, and/or their perceived need
for more personal expenses than their working sisters. The final
examples reveal that young men discontented with their job pros-
pects have greater opportunities to take their time looking for the
“right” job because working sisters can easily be persuaded, by the
mother, to provide a steady cash flow.
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A teenager comforts his cousin recovering from circumcision.

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 106 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Case F. Noraini and Nawab’s household provides a fine example

of how increasing dependence on daughters’ earnings strengthens
daughter-mother bonds while the unemployed son, though tolerated,
becomes a focus of grievances. Nawab had lost his pesaka in prewar
business ventures and now earned his living as a fruit peddler.
His profits paid for daily household expenses while income from
Noraini’s small pesaka she kept as savings against rainy days. The
oldest son Yacob had bought a one-acre plot in Sungai Jawa which he
let his father use for raising annual cash crops. He also contributed
rice on his monthly visits home.
There were seven children living at home (from ages 11 to 25) of
whom four were still in school. Two older daughters worked in elec-
tronics factories and every month handed over a portion of their pay-
checks to Noraini. The 20-year–old son has not held a job since he
graduated from an English-medium secondary school. Although the
family enjoyed an adequate level of living, there was constant pressure
to get him to apply for a position at a government office. Proud of his
command of English and participation in local politics, his parents and
relatives believed that he would easily obtain employment as an offi-
cial (pegawai), thereby “earning thousands and thousands of ringgit.”
The young man’s ambition to write television dramas was considered
a pipe dream, much as they admired the awards his poems had won in
media-sponsored competitions. For the past three years, while he wrote
songs and organized village pantomimes, his sister had been balancing
factory employment with household chores. She complained:
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

The males often do not want to listen to their parents’ advice,

and so parents do not have much hope in them. . . . Boys only
know how to eat.

Her brother’s stubborn resistance to the bureaucratic straitjacket

prevailed even when he was offered a job at the District Office.
Nursing his sense of freedom, he occasionally chose to pick up cash
cleaning cargo ships. However, it gradually dawned on him that the
kampung appeared to have no place for a Chekhov; after I left the vil-
lage, he wrote to say that he had put on a tie to work for the National
Electrical Board.

Case G. In this final example, the earnings of working daughters

sustained daily family needs while the mother again handled the

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 107

finances. The household consisted of a middle-aged couple, their

two younger sons (18 years and older), and a daughter (by the man’s
previous marriage), 39 years old and never married. The couple
together owned two acres of cash crops, while the wife controlled
an additional plot which she held in trust for her four children by a
previous marriage. The husband referred to his wife as “the bank,”
since she handled all incomes from the kebun and contributions
from her stepdaughter and two daughters who had recently moved
out after marriage. The stepdaughter had become a tailor after her
own mother died in order to support her father. She still made a
monthly contribution of M$200 and, together with her stepsisters,
had purchased the formica furniture suite and television set, de
rigueur for families with any pretentions of upward mobility. The
parents did not chip in for these consumer items because, as the
father explained, “They are the ones making money.”
Meanwhile, neither brother, both out of school for a couple of years,
was looking for a job because work in the kampung was not desired,
while urban-based jobs would not be tolerable without their own
means of transportation, which they had yet to acquire.10 It appeared
unlikely that the stepsister, who provided the lion’s share of daily
expenses, would ever marry and move out; her unmarried status
was the basis for the continued well-being of the household, despite
her brothers’ unemployed idleness.
The cases of household arrangements reflect changing patterns
of domestic relationships and pooling of resources as more families
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

come to depend on incomes derived not from joint production effort

on the land but from the wage employment of individual members.
Although only a few cases have been selected for presentation here,
they and participation-observation in the district over a period of
time permit the delineation of a number of trends concerning the
changing dynamic of domestic relations.
In the generalization of commodity relations, the kampung father
loses control over the children’s labor while the mother, through her
domestic influence over daughters, gains some control over their
earnings for household expenses. The above sets of examples illus-
trate, respectively, (1) sibling solidarity in the sharing of earnings,
(2) sons can and often do resist sharing their earnings, and (3) sons
may remain unemployed indefinitely while sisters become regular
cash contributors. They all demonstrate, in varying degrees, the

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 108 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

growing centrality of working daughters in sustaining daily relation-

ships of reproduction and the consequent strengthening of mother-
daughter ties vis-à-vis men in the family.
Whereas the special pressures on daughters to make cash contri-
butions and perform house chores represent a new intensified kind
of physical and emotional draining, the new dependence on their
earnings provides daughters/sisters with critical leverage to realign
domestic power relations. This relative autonomy is strengthened
because parents feel that they can, for the time being, rely less on sons
kept longer in school (training for bureaucratic careers) or out of the
labor market by opportunities not commensurate with their qualifica-
tions or aspirations. The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-
brother relationships is displayed in refusal of money to parents who
remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital
sex, power over younger siblings who ask for money, and decisions
to hand earnings over to the mother. While the edifice of male author-
ity is maintained, male honor is in a fundamental sense undermined
as the father’s farm income steadily declines, unemployed brothers
accept doles from working sisters, and the household budget derives
increasingly from female wages. In many cases, it is the mother who
prods daughters to begin factory work, who extracts their regular
contributions, punishes but tolerates their sexual adventures, and
persuades them to delay marriage. In effect, the employment status
of working daughters has loosened many from father-brother control,
connecting them instead to male power institutionalized in bureau-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

cratic systems external to the keluarga (see Part III).

The Fractured Day

Haste is seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical
ambition.
Pierre Bourdieu (1963: 72)

Time is now currency; it is not passed but spent.

E.P. Thompson (1967: 61)

Before we take leave of the workaday domestic scene, it is appro-

priate to mention that the individuation of domestic activities has
been accompanied by a new apprehension and experience of time.
Up until recently, Malay notions of work and its integration into
everyday life were rooted in a precapitalist time-sense geared to

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 109

internal promptings and the cycle of social activities. When asked

how long a certain activity will take, old men, drawing on their han-
drolled tobacco, may reply with nonchalance, “Ah, two, three (etc.)
cigars’ time.” As the leisurely pace of kampung life ebbs and flows
according to the dictates of capitalist relations of production, some
villagers have responded more readily than others. However, on hot
afternoons, the villager espied from shady verandahs cycling ear-
nestly to his kebun may be mocked as “beaten by his familiar-ghost”
(dipukul toyol) to “plant capital” (tanam modal) while others take their
customary nap. Locally, time is still perceived as a social-ordered
rhythm, and the transgression of implicit time codes is a transgres-
sion of social rules.
In Sungai Jawa, resistance to the new urgency of “development”
is registered in the malicious pleasure friends and relatives take in
the misfortunes of those driven by the clock. A fine example of the
latter are Ahmad and Edah, an enterprising couple indefatigable in
their pursuit of alternative earnings (besides cash cropping). Ahmad
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Men gather at a communal house-raising event.

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 110 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Distributing leftovers from a feast.

worked as a marketing agent and barber, while Edah grew vege-

tables for sale. Through the years, they had somehow managed to
accumulate capital to add four acres to his small pesaka. For a couple
approaching middle age, they were also unusual in having only two
school-age children; Ahmad is reported to have said that having more
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

children “would cost money.” Their steady acquisition of wealth

excited more than envy, since time-thrift held both back from acts of
sociability. Instead of pitching in at a house-construction event or the
preparation of a slametan (ritual meal), the couple often arrived late
clutching some store-bought item as their contribution. Frequently,
their children were torn from games with their peers and sent home
to attend to studies. Neighbors whispered that their obsession with
time was the work of the familiar toyol they had secretly raised to
filch money from neighbors. Turning tables on his masters, the mis-
chevious toyol drove them even harder to produce more wealth.
Besides, people pointed to the contrasting appearance of the couple
as evidence of the toyol’s handiwork.11 Edah looked weather-beaten,
and her heavy figure was a contrast to Ahmad, who was fair, slim
and always neatly-clad in batik shirts, like urban Malays.

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 111

Much to their satisfaction, neighbors were soon presented with an

incident which confirmed their suspicions that something was amiss
in the tight schedule of this couple. For some time, idle youths clus-
tering at village junctions had noticed that after closing his barber
shop for the day, Ahmad stopped at another house on his way home.
One evening, led by the son of a JKK member, the youths burst in
and caught Ahmad locked in an embrace with the mistress of the
house. The youths sternly warned Ahmad to stop his trysts, and
social pressure was reinforced by broadcasting the scandal. Inflicted
by shame, Edah offered to choose a second wife for Ahmad, but he
declined. Since the incident, Edah has spent less time in the kebun
and more on her appearance. At Hari Raya, she attended a slametan
at a kinswoman’s home wearing makeup and freshly minted curls.
Looking relaxed and proud, Ahmad pointed out to me that his wife
had a “maxi” (dress) on. The unfortunate event shows that not only
is the loose time-sense inextricably bound to the various claims of
social obligation but that leisurely pace is a mark of decorum. The
man in a hurry surely has something to hide, and many an outsider,
from colonial officials to development officers, have complained of,
and given in to, the kampung sense of leisurely time.
From the individual perspective, the cycle of the daily activities
was up until recently framed and balanced by the symmetry of
Islamic prayers, a cyclical time joined to inner compulsions. Personal
promptings and the task-orientation of rural work, rather than exter-
nal impositions, guided passage through the day. Critically, kampung
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

folk expected to work at their own volition, and any joint project was
carried out with a minimum of supervision or rigid schedule. Old
and young men have often claimed that they prefered to remain cul-
tivators or unemployed rather than laborers to be “bossed” around
by someone else. This complaint is not unknown among young
women who, among all age-gender categories, are usually the only
ones supervised, if at all, in their daily chores.
Before the recent restructuring of domestic activities by school and
factory clocks, chores on the farm and in the kitchen were woven
into the flow of social life. Although women’s work was more con-
tinual than the sporadic work of men, the former played an impor-
tant and frequently decisive role in determining the what and when
of their duties. Young girls developed a sense of self-worth from
their daily chores, the fine performance of which was a desirable

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 112 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

quality of human relations, not an economic transaction. Nubile

women were individually identified by their preparation of the pop-
ular chilli-and-anchovies condiment, by their aesthetically pleasing
and yet economical performance of chores, or by their special way
with children. In their daily round of work activities, all but young
girls were usually free of female supervision and almost never under
male guidance. When women came together for child-minding or
feast-preparation, individuals carried out their preferred activities,
pounding chillies here, stirring the beef rendang there, with no pre-
scribed role or task. Slow stretches of dull routine were lightened by
songs and jokes, often at the expense of the absent males. Besides, the
larger rhythm of endless hot days, varied only by the monsoon, was
intermittently broken by unexpected visits, rainstorms, the cycle of
slametan meals, religious celebrations, and the fasting month which
precluded the mechanical patterning of work characteristic of indus-
trialized societies.
But, almost imperceptibly, a new regularity has settled into the
irregular flows of village life. Young women are at the frontlines in
confronting capitalist time, at school, factory and in the home. Bureau-
cratic and school schedules have fractured the week into workdays
and weekends, accommodating the Islamic calendar by making
allowances for long lunch breaks and half-days on Friday. It is how-
ever the factory clock which bites more deeply into the textures of
kampung life.
At the Telok FTZ, young female workers ages 16 to 24 are clocked-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in daily for eight consecutive hours, rigidly varied by two 15-minute

breaks and a half-hour lunch. Every fortnight, production workers
are placed on a different work shift, which radically alters their accus-
tomed experience of day, night, and month, as attested to by missed
sleep and menstrual cycles. Placed under continual male supervision,
the meaning of work is reduced to repetitive time-motion manipula-
tions, and factory operators have little sense of the entire production
process and how the microcomponents they assemble are fitted into
the larger scheme of manufactured things and social relationships
(see Part III). After a day of physical and emotional stress in the fac-
tory, the young women return to eat, sleep, and perform household
chores out of step with others in the family. Industrial discipline now
structures the rhythm of home life, fracturing daily experiences into
“work” and “leisure.” Many women talk about the time “lost to the

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 Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life 113

factory” as they try to wrest “free time” from housework for “spend-
ing time” in lost sleep or in the diversions of the consumer market.
Since these young women continue to attend to domestic and social
demands for their help, their time-thrift is not commented upon nor
criticized. Factory women not only learn to balance this dual burden
but also grapple with the sense of lost autonomy in work. Six or
more years of schooling have failed to dampen their spirits, and they
confront pervasive regimentation in their work life as a continuing
personal, domestic, and social crisis (see below).
In this chapter, I have considered the changing meanings of
“household,” gender, and proletarianization in Sungai Jawa by dis-
cussing the restructuring of domestic relationships before and after
national penetration by national agencies and late capitalist enter-
prises. As the rural household becomes more integrated into bureau-
cratic structures and different labor markets, the form and content
of domestic relations are reconstituted in culturally specific ways.
The general movement of boys and girls into mass education pro-
duces a labor reserve for modern enterprises, while for the upwardly
mobile, schooling provides an internal channel to the state system.
The selective pressures of labor markets and divergent expectations
of children have made young single women the pivot of domestic
strategies of mobility.
As female sexuality becomes linked to class formation, young
women find in their wage-earning role this paradoxical dilemma:
the labor power which enables them to challenge male authority at
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

home is also the means whereby they are subjected to intense capital-
ist discipline. The daughter/sister as factory woman is a new cultural
configuration conditioned by the cash nexus within and outside the
rural family. As temporary wage workers harnessed to family aspira-
tions, young women experience a new alienation from work as well
as from their families. In many ways, they are working and marrying
out of cycles with old and reassuring norms of conduct and matura-
tion. These contradictions are multiplied as more come to experience
a janda-like freedom but yet remain formally of junior status within
their families (as daughters/virgins), the labor market (as semiskilled
workers), and society at large. In the next chapter, we will see how
some village women seek to reconcile their contradictory status in the
customary option of marriage.

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 Chapter 6

Marriage Strategies:
Negotiating the Future
Some of [the men’s] talk is mocking, because in their view, perhaps, our
work here [in the factory] gives us too much freedom, as for instance,
always going out at night, “dating” with “boyfriend”. . . Ah, maybe they
like [factory women]. They only talk, but they pick factory women too. . . .
For instance, in my family, my brother himself has never talked badly
about me; now, he is marrying a woman who works at the factory too.
An unmarried factory woman

Marriage and the departure of children represent the ruptures and

uneasy reconciliations of family relations between generations. The
ways courtship and marriage are effected, however, are intimately
connected to other systems of exchange and alliance in the wider soci-
ety. In this chapter, I intend to show that marriage strategies — values,
interests, and practices dictating the choice of spouses — have evolved
in relation to changing Malay society and political economy. While
improvisation has marked marriage customs in Sungai Jawa from
the early days, in the late 1970s young women and men exhibited a
striking sense of self in their matrimonial choices and negotiations.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Personal aspirations and acquired interests can be more various than

social practice, and few parties to the matrimonial game are fully
satisfied with the negotiated contract, even within an expanding
marriage economy. Family conflict, broken betrothals, divorces and
the unwedded condition are the loose ends and ragged edges of the
kampung society in transition.
For too long, anthropologists have been beholden to the concept
of “development cycle of the domestic group,” a process which is
assumed to unfold inevitably according to prescribed cultural norms.1
In an elaboration of this view, Pierre Bourdieu maintains that mar-
riage strategies are the “socio-logical” outcomes of preexisting struc-
tural principles (1977: 58–70). This essentially static model of social
reproduction is curiously disguised by an analytical dependence on

115

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 116 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

the explication of marital strategies and maneuvers within a maze of

given rules. However, by exposing hidden mechanisms which adjust
practice to social structure, Bourdieu allows the possibility for indi-
vidual innovation and the varied implications capital — symbolic
and economic, invested and intended — can have for marriage
strategies.
In the following account of courtship and marriage in Sungai Jawa,
I maintain that among Malay villagers, changing self-identity, as
much as the desire to ensure or advance social position, conditions
the form and goal of marriage strategies. Family relations are taken
as a set of cultural practices, an open-ended process (not “a cycle”)
through which members attempt to resolve contradictions born of
feelings, material interests, and contingencies in particular historical
circumstances. By means of case studies on courtship and marriage, I
hope to illuminate the mechanisms whereby cultural practices reme-
diated class values in matrimonial arrangements as Sungai Jawa grew
from a pioneer settlement into the now commercialized hinterland of
industrial development. Over the course of sixty years, manpower
and landed wealth have been superseded by varied forms of capi-
tal in determining the repertoire of choices in the marriage market.
Furthermore, the changing perspectives of young working women
and men reveal their contrasting images of sexuality and options of
marrying and not marrying.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Marriage Strategies of Earlier Generations

Among early male immigrants in Sungai Jawa, the critical question
was not whether to marry, but when. According to old informants,
some time after the turn of the century, two Javanese brothers applied
to the colonial land office for the right to clear a river junction for
settlement by immigrants from Central Java. By 1910, one hundred
Javanese families and two Chinese stores constituted the growing
settlement. Chinese river traders departing from Port Klang wended
through the swamps in small boats, buying village crops, selling
provisions, and forwarding credit. As Javanese men arrived in the
settlement, they were immediately recruited by relatives, friends,
and contractors to clear the jungle and establish holdings of food and
cash crops.

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 117

It was not until after 1920 that villagers were permitted by the
land office to grow the lucrative crop, rubber. Even then, they were
penalized by land taxes: M$12 on a rubber lot (five acres) compared
to M$3 for a lot planted with kampung trees. The gradual spread of
rubber cultivation both drew more Javanese immigrants and pulled
the settlement out of the backwaters. A schoolroom had been set
up almost from the start to provide boys with Islamic instruction.
By 1927 sufficient people and cash had trickled in to support the
construction of a mosque in the heart of the kampung. When Sungai
Jawa was linked by a cart track to the main road a few years later,
the settlement, now splintered into twelve hamlets, had gravitated
away from the riverbank towards the interior rubber country of the
colonial economy.
In the frontier conditions, the active recruitment of male relatives
and friends produced a skewed sex ratio within the community.
Marriage for most male immigrants was further delayed because
upon arrival they had to work off debts incurred on the way over
before applying for a land grant to make a kebun and build a house.
Only then were they considered eligible suitors for the limited num-
ber of nubile girls among the settler families. Furthermore, bache-
lors thinking of marriage had to leave the village and earn wages in
plantations, perhaps making 50 cents per day. According to custom-
ary practice, bridewealth was in two parts: payment for wedding
expenses (wang hantaran) and a gift of cash or gold (wang mas) to the
bride, as required by the Islamic marriage contract (akad nikah).2 An
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

engagement ring was left to the discretion of the suitor. Marriage

for some men was further postponed because they pursued Islamic
studies, locally or further afield, while supporting themselves as
wage laborers. From the 1920s onwards, an Islamic boarding school
(madrasah) set up by a kijaji in Sungai Jawa also attracted young Java-
nese immigrants from other parts of the Peninsula. According to a
village elder, most men were not ready to marry until they had prop-
erty in land and house: “How could they have provided for a family
otherwise?”
In contrast, girls in their adolescence and even childhood were
married off by their parents hoping to attract energetic young men
into their network. For instance, the stepson of a village founder
married a 15-year-old girl in 1921. He was 23, had property and

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 118 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

connections, while she was already a divorcée. Forced into mar-

riage with an older relative when she was ten, she was subsequently
divorced for refusing to consumate the union. At her second wed-
ding, the groom gave M$60 in hantaran and M$22 as a bridal gift.
He had earned the money digging ditches in a British plantation.
In the local cashpoor economy, no other items were exchanged
between groom and bride. She received household items and per-
haps new batik from her parents. In a few cases, however, fami-
lies rich in kebun but not in sons made over their daughter’s pesaka
upon her marriage, thereby having the pick of eager suitors. Com-
petition among immigrant men in the marriage market was fur-
ther intensified when the colonial government gradually banned
alienation of jungle land and restricted rubber cultivation among
kampung folk.
The place of pesaka in the marriage contract sometimes set the tone
of emotional life. In one case, a man married his late wife’s widowed
sister in order to keep the sisters’ pesaka intact, thereby maximizing
the land area at his disposal. His second wife accepted the propo-
sition but refused to work on the holding after marriage, despite
his chiding. The significance of property in structuring the conju-
gal bond is brought home in another example where the wife was
not only the propertyholder but 30 years her husband’s junior. After
twenty years or more of married life, she said, “He is only squatting
here.” Cheated of his pesaka by a brother, her husband came into the
marriage without property and fathered three children. A feeble man
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

now in his seventies, he also considered himself a squatter on his

wife’s land, unable to contribute labor.
For many women then, early marriage, wide age difference
between husband and wife, and ease of divorce often resulted in
two or more successive unions and children by different husbands.
Older men and women who had married more than once usually
claim that divorce was precipitated when their spouses developed
a strong attraction to someone else. In one example, the husband
noted that since his wife was the culprit, he denied her her right-
ful half-share of their jointly acquired property. However, he later
bequeathed that property to the son they had together. Although
incidents of divorce, abandonment, or death in a woman’s married
life were not uncommon, early generations of women in Sungai

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 119

Jawa had many children. In my sample of 37 women aged 55 years

and older — i.e., who married and had children before the war —
the average number of children was 6.5, spaced throughout the
reproductive life. Gradually, natural increase and immigration con-
tributed to population growth which, together with the operation
of Islamic inheritance rules, progressively reduced the land-person
ratio in each successive generation.
By the war years, sorcery accusations highlighted the intensified
competition among men for scarce nubile girls and scarce land.
Adolescent girls who were to receive pesaka at marriage became
the targets of marriage proposals, frequently rejected by parents
waiting to receive the “right” match. Thwarted in their marriage
strategies, disappointed suitors were often suspected of employing
dukun (sorcerers) to inflict madness on the hapless maiden. In what
follows, Noraini’s mother, Natajah, relates her family story. Framed
by avowals of contemporary Islamic disbelief in spirits, her account
tells us that black magic on the heels of disappointed love had to be
undone by other sorcerers and other lovers, sometimes found in the
same man.
In 1943, Natajah was a 34-year-old widow who controlled 13
acres of cash crops left by her late husband, himself a dukun. Her
elder girls, Norma and Noraini, were beautiful adolescents, much
sought after by young and middle-aged men. Norma had had four
suitors by age thirteen, when she showed signs of being a victim
of black magic. She urinated constantly and was physically weak.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Natajah employed a dukun who dug under their house to recover

an effigy bristling with pins, believed to have been planted by a
rejected lover. The destruction of the doll apparently cured Norma
who soon after married and was given her share of the pesaka. After
the birth of her first child, her husband struck her on the temple
for speaking to another man. Natajah took her to the kadi and
demanded a divorce. Norma remarried and had three children by
her second husband. Her health gradually worsened and she died,
purportedly of the same illness inflicted by black magic many years
previously.
Noraini herself became vulnerable to sorcery attacks after Nata-
jah had turned down three proposals for her hand. One magic spell
cast to induce madness misfired and struck her younger brother.

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 120 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Babbling incoherently, he took to scaling house posts and prancing

on the roof. Natajah rehired the same dukun who had treated Norma
to cure her son. Nawab, the dukun’s apprentice stepson, set eyes on
Noraini, asked for her hand, and was accepted. As Natajah explains,
“He was clever at his work.”
While black magic was directed towards destroying another
man’s potency (through the desired wife), other Malays discov-
ered in trade the more potent alchemy for investment to wealth. In
the quickening postwar years, some marital unions were effected
with an eye to the market system. Take, for instance, the case of
a villager who had made money processing and selling coconut
and coffee during the 1930s and 1940s. He had acquired 15 acres of
prime coffee gardens. In 1950, he arranged the marriage of his only
daughter to a student at the madrasah, handing over a portion of the
pesaka and jewelry to the young couple. The young man, who later
became Haji (henceforth, Hj.)3 Amir, was recruited into his father-
in-law’s coffee business and eventually took over the enterprise. In
another example, Hj. Hadith rose from selling scrap rubber to land
speculation after a second marriage. In the early 1950s, he divorced
his first wife to marry a Chinese woman, who also divorced her
squatter husband and converted to Islam. As business partners,
they operate the largest Malay rubber company and credit busi-
ness in the mukim. They also own provision stores, boardinghouses
for factory workers, and rural and urban real estate. He is always
referred to as “Rich Man (Orang Kaya) Hj. Hadith” and is perhaps
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

the wealthiest self-made Malay in the subdistrict (i.e., after some

politicians).
We see then that up until recently, matrimonial strategies were
in the hands of bachelors and the parents of nubile daughters. In
the pioneer community where manpower and land were key to the
good life, marriage was potentially a strategy of upward mobility for
poor immigrant men. To parents, a daughter’s well-made marriage
could strengthen their economic position and ensure the transmis-
sion of social status. The skewed distribution of single men to nubile
girls, and as time went on, of available land resources to population,
generated intense competition for wives. On the one hand, sorcery
attacks directed at would-be brides represented a symbolic protest
which both divided and unified laboring men in the difficult task

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 121

of social reproduction; on the other hand, girls forced into marriage

at an early age gradually gained the right of self-determination in
arranging later marital unions. As we shall see below, in the expand-
ing post-independence economy, young unmarried women came to
enjoy greater opportunities not only to enter the marital game but
also to bear the consequences on their own.

Marriage Strategies and the Commodity Logic

From the late 1970s onwards, the expanding rural economy has
had ripple effects on the marriage circuits of young women and
men born and bred in Sungai Jawa. In the new political economy
where bumiputra-ism carries great weight in national life, decen-
dants of Javanese immigrants have begun to occasionally wed not
only Minangkabau, Mandailing, and Batak, but also indigenous
Malays, although the preference remains spouses of Javanese
ancestry. In public discourse, Sungai Jawa folk claim bumiputra sta-
tus, but in private conversations, they insist on their “Javanese”
difference from other ethnic Malays.4 Widespread awareness of the
political, social, and economic implications of the national bumipu-
tra identity has also encouraged marital alliances which cut across
urban-rural, salaried-farmer divisions. In the discussion below,
marital strategies within the expanded arena raise the following
questions:
a. Where are spaces for maneuver opening up?
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

b. What are the stakes for the contenders?

c. What kinds of tactics for negotiation and interruption come
into play?
d. What are the varied cultural forms which ensue in the marriage
market?
In addition, although customary institutions and family interests
constitute structuring forces in matrimony matters, nubile women and
men are increasingly individuated in their perceptions, emotions, and
conduct in courtship and marriage. Bourdieu has demonstrated that
human action is not just reflex of structure but can also be the source
of change within structural principles (1977). Here, I prefer to treat
personal achievements (acquired values and practices) not merely as
the external inscriptions of received social order but also as the

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 122 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

inventive tactics which challenge and sometimes outplay received

structures of domination (see de Certeau 1984). The following cases
of matrimony, listed according to the divergent strategies of dif-
ferent social categories, will illustrate how conflicting values and
improvisations continually rework cultural forms in the making of
a marriage.

The Upwardly Mobile: Alliances and Accidents

For the well-off folk in Sungai Jawa, marriage as a rite of passage
and the precipitating event of family dispersal has become the occa-
sion to establish social connections further into the widening politi-
cal economy. The marriage of the eldest daughter in particular hinges
upon the establishment of ties with upwardly mobile men who would
consolidate the family social position even as it embarks on the phase
of dissolution. Sequestered by family and education from uncouth vil-
lage contact, daughters of the well-to-do are magnets to the regions’
eligible men. Competition for rich girls’ hands is further narrowed by
demanding expensive bridewealth from ambitious but poor would-
be suitors. What is perhaps more interesting is the degree of poise
and level-headedness displayed by young women in their marriage
affairs.

Case A. By their fifties, Hj. Amir and his wife had become one of the
most well-to-do couples in Sungai Jawa. They were “comfortable”
because they owned some of the best coffee gardens around. In 1971,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

they went on the hajj and upon their return were granted their desire
to have a son. After that, Hj. Amir retired from farm supervision to
devote himself to religious study. Their house was elegant, raised
above a well-swept compound surrounded by spice trees and
flowering bushes. The family, however, was rather disliked by
villagers for holding themselves aloof from social intercourse with
all but a few select families.
There were four daughters. The eldest, Salmah, spent a few months
in factory work, but after her father pulled a few strings, she got a
typing position in a UMNO branch office. It was said that his party
loyalty also helped secure scholarships for two other daughters, one
to attend an Islamic college, the other a secondary school in K.L. Sal-
mah did not get married until she was almost twenty-six, a rather
late age for village women, but it was not for want of suitors. Her first

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 123

suitor was a Batak driving instructor from an ordinary village family.

It took four attempts before Salmah’s family agreed to the proposal.
Soon after, the Batak man suddenly broke off the engagement in
order to marry Hj. Hadith’s eldest daughter.
The young man was enticed by Hj. Hadith’s offer of capital to pur-
chase 15 acres, which the young couple planned to plant with rubber
and oil palm. Hj. Hadith’s daughter received a two-acre pesaka as
house-plot, as well as funds to build a suburban-type bungalow. In
addition, they received a monthly subsidy of about M$1,000 in rents
received from Hj. Hadith’s 16 rooming houses in Klang. To set up the
young man in business, Hj. Hadith extended capital for the purchase
of a petrol pump station.
When Salmah’s mother recalled her broken engagement, she item-
ized the Batak’s newly acquired capital and said that it had been
their loss. However, Salmah got to keep the engagement ring. Her
second suitor was the son of the kampung kijaji, a Form Three gradu-
ate at the local school. Given his father’s esteemed status, Hj. Amir
and wife could not very well turn down this proposal. After the
engagement, Salmah suggested that he join the police force. Upon
hearing this, the kijaji was grieviously wounded, having hoped his
son would become an Islamic teacher. Some time later, in a departure
from customary practice, the suitor took Salmah for a drive and told
her he intended to make a hantaran of M$700.5 She replied that these
days payments were normally in the thousands. The engagement
was thus ended.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Salmah was the only village woman I knew who have had two
broken engagements and yet continued to receive marriage offers.
In early 1979, an ex-classmate who had since become a policeman
proposed and was accepted. Her mother explained that although he
was sunburned and less handsome than previous suitors, he would
soon be promoted to police corporal; his father had also been in the
police force.6
As marriage negotiations proceeded, Salmah’s parents rather
uncouthly, in the opinion of other villagers, asked for a bridewealth of
M$1,500. It was rumored that the actual amount handed over might
have been M$2,100. In contrast to prewar practices, the exchange of
nuptial gifts has become a conspicuous custom in village weddings,
but the scale of gift-giving in Salmah’s case was exceptional. She
received fifteen trays of expensive clothing and accessories for the

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 124 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

engagement and five more sets of gifts at the marriage ceremony. A

smaller stream of gifts was sent to the groom’s house. In prepara-
tion for the wedding day, Hj. Amir renovated his kitchen and built
a new outhouse to be fitted with urban facilities. On the morning of
her wedding, Salmah insisted on going to a Chinese beauty parlor in
Klang. Heavy traffic delayed her return for more than an hour while
the groom and his party waited anxiously in a neighbour’s house.
Threats to break off the wedding had been voiced when Salmah
finally arrived in a taxi. Her humiliated father wrenched open the car
door and tore at her hair. Relatives quickly interceded, thereby ending
spectators’ enjoyment of this undignified display of passion. Wiping
away tears, Salmah and her intended participated in the “sitting-in-
state” wedding ceremony (bersanding) while a cloud of excited gossip
swirled around them. The next day, the couple flew off to Singapore
for a honeymoon, an uncustomary climax to a Malay wedding. After
one month’s stay with her parents, Salmah decided to rent a house in
K.L., which was midpoint between her job and her husband’s in two
separate towns.
The marriages of Salmah and Hj. Hadith’s daughter illustrate the
careful strategies of rich parents whose daughters were expected to
be won by enterprising young men who would one day be dominant
in the local political and economic arenas. Seducton by capital, bick-
ering over the bridewealth, and the inflation of gift exchanges reveal
the extent to which marital contracts have become commodified.
Salmah was actively involved in arranging her own marriage and,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

somehow unrestrained by customary practice, managed to express,

in her tastes and goal, a new kind of sexuality.

Case B. This example provides an interesting contrast, because it is the

village groom who gains an urban, more successful spouse. Kamal
was a 28-year-old librarian in a secondary school. He frequently met
with Sharifah, a 23-year-old trainee teacher from Klang, after her
evening classes ended. One night they were spied upon by colleagues
who threatened to beat them up for illicit sexual intimacy (khalwat)
and turn them over to the state Islamic Department. After a long
discussion, the two decided to make amends for their indiscretion by
marrying quickly. Sharifah’s brother agreed to have the wedding in
his house in Klang, while a small party was held in Kamal’s home on
his birthday, which rather conveniently fell in the following month.

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 125

Rumors claimed that Sharifah was pregnant and that her parents
had demanded M$2,100 in hantaran because she was a teacher.

Case C. Another way whereby a marriage may be brought forward

is illustrated by the case of Hamzah and his wife who had seven
daughters but no son. Between them they had three acres of coconut
and rubber, and two heads of cattle. Hamzah was a guard in a Port
Klang warehouse; in the peak coffee season, he also worked as a
marketing agent. His eldest daughter had married a dockworker
two years earlier. He complained to me that it was difficult to have a
family of girls, since his wife had to care for the holding and animals
without male help.
The second daughter, Mahani, had completed Form Five and
spent three months working in a Klang furniture factory when
she received her third offer of marriage. The suitor was an ustaz
(Islamic teacher in government employment). Mahani’s mother
felt that Mahani was “still a child.” However, by noting that the
ustaz was already attracted to her daughter, she implied that
she could not put up a resistance to the match. She declared that
although the family benefitted from Mahani’s wages, the job was
really not suitable for her delicate health; perhaps marriage would
be a good change for her. More to the point, Hamzah pressured
Mahani to accept the ustaz’s offer, on the grounds that the man
was a state employee and already the owner of a brick house in a
nearby town.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

At the engagement, the mother, less eager than her husband to lose
her daughter, requested that they wait two years before marrying.
Soon after the ceremony, however, the ustaz began sending wedding
gifts, including materials for the trousseau. He also pressed for the
date of the wedding. He then offered a hantaran of M$1,500 without
any negotiation on the part of Mahani’s parents — “It is not proper
to ask; our child is not a commodity” — and it clinched the deal; the
wedding took place a few months later. Soon after Mahani moved
out, her younger sister failed her Form Three examination and started
working in an FTZ factory. Without the expectation of this fortuitous
mix of events, it was unlikely that Mahani would have married so
soon after starting to work. Mahani’s beauty attracted a “good”
marriage offer which might otherwise not have been extended to an
ordinary village family.

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 126 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Case D. This last example highlights, among other themes, the threat
upclassing marital strategies can pose to the joint property and income
arrangements of families faced with the impending departure of a son
or daughter. The story revolves around Susi, an attractive 24-year-old
clerk at the Telok school who daily cycled past the general provision
store operated by Mahmud, a 39-year-old bachelor (and Nawab’s
stepbrother). Mahmud lived with his mother, Nana, a younger
brother, and a sister who had an infant son (her husband was a soldier
stationed in another state). When Nana was widowed, her stepson
Nawab raised the children, initiating the two teenage boys into the
shopkeeping business. As young men, the brothers bought their own
village stores. Over the years, profits from the business went into
kampung land, so that the combined family property amounted to
20 acres of cash crops and two shops. In early 1979, Mahmud acquired
a house which he rented to migrant factory workers, keeping the extra
income for himself. He was ready to get married.
Mahmud had failed in three previous attempts at the matrimonial
game. The opinion of his mother and younger sister was very influ-
ential in his marital attempts. With the passing years, Nawab and
Noraini worried about his ever getting married and having heirs to
his considerable assets. The family lived so modestly that perhaps
few villagers realized the extent of their wealth. Then Mahmud
approached Susi’s parents and asked for her hand. Her family was
landless, squatting on a Chinese holding where the father worked as a
rubber trapper. Three unmarried daughters in their twenties brought
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in additional earnings. Susi’s earnings formed the largest portion of

household income. Her father offered instead his eldest daughter, a
29-year-old domestic help in Tanjong Karang. Mahmud demurred
on account of her age and appearance. Offended, Susi’s father was
said to have complained to neighbors, “Who is this Mahmud; does
he have land, house, and property to ask for my daughter?” From
Mahmud, he demanded a detailed account of his assets. Seeing a
potential threat to their joint family interests, Nana and her daughter
persuaded Mahmud to retract his marriage offer.
Over the next year, Susi wrote to Mahmud but received no reply;
he told a female cousin that he did not want to “reopen old wounds.”
Word drifted in that on many afternoons, in the company of female
friends, Susi would burst into crying fits. Not long after, a contingent
of these sympathetic women came to Noraini to report Susi’s distress.

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 127

Nawab and Noraini thereby felt Susi “had shown her true feelings,”
and if nothing was done about the situation, she could very well
lose her mind. They sent for her and asked how much hantaran she
would expect in marriage. Wisely, she did not reply. Convinced of
her sincerity, Nawab and Noraini persuaded Nana and her daughter
that Mahmud should ask for Susi’s hand again, pointing out that
she should not be blamed for her father’s insolent demands. Susi’s
mother also dropped by the Nawab household; her husband, she
said, was possessive of his daughters and had not kept up with mod-
ern times.
Gaining confidence from the momentum of events, Susi told her
father that if he continued to oppose the match, she would “go sleep
in Mahmud’s house.”7 Meanwhile, Nawab cautioned that in order
to squelch unpleasant rumors, the marriage should be arranged as
soon as possible. He suggested Mahmud make a hantaran of M$1,200
to show the public that he was not getting married under duress.
Thus, we see the convergence of two sets of strategies: Susi’s use of
female intermediaries and the threat of madness, and the Nawab-
Noraini interest in getting Mahmud married to produce heirs for his
property.
Nevertheless, the deep resentment and felt threat to Nana and her
daughter lingered on, to break out on the wedding day itself. At the
bersanding ceremony, Mahmud’s sister went up to the seated couple
ostensibly to saalam Susi, but instead she pushed her to the floor. In
the fearful confusion that followed, Nawab grabbed the sister, Noraini
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

comforted Susi while Mahmud’s younger brother saalamed her. The

bridal party departed in haste and the remaining women cried in
shame. The incident put the final stamp on the rift between Mahmud
and his mother and sister. He moved with his bride into his new
house, thereby initiating the economic separation they had feared.
Although I began by talking about daughters as prizes to be won
in the marital game, these examples suggest that the opposite view
can also be maintained. Women — the would-be bride, female rela-
tives and friends — played active roles in figuring out the stakes in
a particular match, maneuvered in spheres inaccessible to men, and,
in the process, redefined the forms of marital strategies and arrange-
ments. Who was choosing whom, one may ask? Obviously, the
wage earning status of young women has been critical in the degree
of self-possession they displayed vis-à-vis potential husbands and

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 128 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Factory workers “sitting-in-state” at the wedding.

authoritarian fathers. The reader may protest that these are biased
cases drawn from well-to-do families; however, the following exam-
ples of marriage strategies among poor village folk should balance
out these accounts.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Marrying Your Own Kind: The Working Poor

For an increasing number of kampung families, the marital stakes
are not professional credentials, property, or business, but wage
earnings. In the interest of pooling incomes, parents may attempt
to arrest the departure of working children by delaying their mar-
riage. The fact that parents often fail in this endeavor is evidence of
the changing status of young wage workers within the family and in
the marriage market. In selecting a spouse, the emphasis is less on
accumulation of assets than on pinning down a provider.

Case A. Adnan was twenty-nine years old, the eldest of seven children
of a farm laborer. For the past five years, he had worked in a car

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 129

assembly plant in Shah Alam, where he also found a job for a younger
brother. Two sisters worked in the Telok FTZ. Their combined
contributions permitted a more tolerable standard of livelihood than
could otherwise be expected from the father’s tiny farm.
Two years earlier, Adnan had met his intended, a factory worker
in Kuala Selangor; they had since been saving for marriage. As it
was a “love inspired” match, Adnan had proposed marriage before
his parents were told to make formal contacts. On their own, the
couple agreed on a bridewealth by calculating the cost of a bed and
bureau. He remarked, “With the price of things today, what can
you buy with M$500? I figure that whatever she wants to buy, I will
be needing too.” Adnan was equivocal about his wife’s work after
marriage. She had indicated an interest in continuing her work in a
timber yard, at least until the first child arrived. He commented, “It’s
her own affair.”
For the wedding feast, Adnan spent M$500, and his father contrib-
uted M$1,000 and slaughtered one of his bulls. The contributions of
guests, in cash amounts of M$1 to M$20 (in addition to gifts of rice,
firewood, and cooked and raw food), added up to M$2,120. If we
subtract the estimated value of the cow (M$500), the “gain” of the
feast-giving was M$620. This Adnan’s father would use to repair the
house and for miscellaneous household expenses.8 In the absence of
such interhousehold dependence, the replacement of obligations by
commodities can make the wedding a daunting experience for par-
ents, as we shall see in the next example.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Case B. Ramli was a 21-year-old laborer living with his married

sister in Klang when he decided to marry another factory worker.
His father, Anwar, encouraged him to return to Sungai Jawa for
the wedding. A rubber-tapper, Anwar had married Muslimah from
another village after Ramli’s mother died. Muslimah brought in a
one-acre pesaka, raised Ramli and his sister, and had eight children of
her own. Neither Ramli nor his sister remitted money to the family,
even though their siblings were still young dependents.
Ramli’s urban residence and interests determined the form of
his nuptial celebration. His father paid M$600 for expenses which
included rented chairs, tent, and the fee for a hired singer. Anwar
also slaughtered an old bull. After the wedding, Ramli and his bride

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 130 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

returned to Klang, leaving the parents to clean up. It was a disap-

pointing show; few neighbors and friends turned up to help, and
guest contributions amounted to only M$1,100, which, if the parents
figured in the value of the bull, just equalled their initial expenditure.
When Muslimah started to complain, I pointed out that perhaps they
had made a gain, since the bull was too old to sell. She retorted:
If this wasn’t so, what could have been done? Kampung people
are not all rich. If we did not have our own bull, things would
have been really difficult. When we spend on others and not
on ourselves, everything gets used up. . . . and I did not even
get to keep the gifts. Raising children, you simply accept the
difficulties that come with it. What to do? Only Allah knows
[my problems]!
Ramli had married earlier than she had hoped, extinguishing her
hope that he would help his younger siblings through school. Mus-
limah had recruited neighbors to help with wedding preparations,
but Ramli’s friends from town had not pitched in, arriving merely
to enjoy the festivity. Even worse, instead of making cash contribu-
tions to the parents who were giving the feast, these young people
bought consumer items for the bridal couple, in the Western man-
ner. Thus, Muslimah felt those gifts should have been handed over
to her. This episode captures the form of cultural change associated
with migrant wage work; not only do parents sometimes lose control
over their children’s labor and the timing of their marriage, but eco-
nomic individuation also extends to the realm of resource mobiliza-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tion, thereby concentrating resources more narrowly in the hands of

the wage worker.

Case C. This story indicates that migrant work also enables young
women to be less concerned about parental wishes. Safuah seemed
an unlikely candidate for handling her own marital affairs. According
to her elder sister, she was a normal child until her second year in
primary school. One day, urinating at an ant hill, she was possessed
by a male spirit. Ever since, her “masculinity” was expressed in
conduct such as dislike of housework, boyish restlessness, rough talk,
and lack of interest in “female” things. She sat in class with a blank
expression and would walk through thick undergrowth on her way
home. At the end of the year, she dropped out of school but was “very
clever” at reading and writing on her own. When she was sixteen,

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 131

she began corresponding with a male pen pal she picked from a
magazine. In late 1979, her sister failed Form Three and had begun
working in a sardine factory in Klang. Although her wage was only
M$120 per month, the sister was able to spend some money on
dresses, shopping, and the movies. Safuah told her parents that she
too would like to have her own money, and in January she began
work in the same factory. Apparently, neither sister gave her parents
money, although they lived and ate at home.
Now eighteen, Safuah arranged to meet her pen pal outside her fac-
tory. He was a 30-year-old divorcé who worked as a barber in a store
front. He rented a room with his brother, a laborer. Early in March,
Safuah did not come home for four days, causing her parents great
anxiety. When she returned, she said that her “boyfriend” had taken
her to Tanjong Karang to meet his mother, who was led to believe that
they were already man and wife. Safuah had used up her savings of
M$50 on bus fares and on fruits for the old lady. She did not enjoy her
stay because she feared the woman and did not have enough to eat.
Her parents, considering her “one screw loose” (“three-cornered,” in
the local parlance), did not beat her, but her father warned her about
getting pregnant. The next day, they arranged the Islamic marriage
rite, inviting relatives and neighbors to witness the event.
The groom was deemed not an upstart and therefore acceptable.
However, he was too poor to give hantaran, and the newlyweds simply
moved into his bare, rented room. A few days later, they were arrested
in a raid by officials of the Islamic Department. They were briefly appre-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

hended for khalwat until a relative arrived with the marriage certificate.
After all this excitement, Safuah’s father said he had not opposed the
match because the couple had already chosen each other and been inti-
mate. If he had tried to stop them from seeing each other, they might
have run away. The only thing to do was to legitimize the relationship
immediately. “Young people these days, you know. . . .”
Remarrying: A Woman on Her Own
Since divorces and remarriages have always been as common as
shotgun marriages in Sungai Jawa, it is appropriate to discuss the
strategies of divorced women left fending for themselves and their
children. Over the past decade, the noncontribution of mainte-
nance (nafkah) by husbands has been cited by the district kadi as the
major cause of divorces in the region (see Table 15). The increasing

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 132 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

influence of this factor in marital breakups is attributed to the

irregular employment or migrant work which are the sources of
livelihood of so many men. Deprived of sufficient financial sup-
port, more women have petitioned for divorce through their
guardians.9 Upon divorce, the former wife receives cash support
for three months (in order to secure paternity claims if she is found
to be pregnant in that duration). After that period, aid from her
former spouse is totally at his discretion. In the majority of cases,
divorced women receive no further support, and they have to draw
upon savings and depend on parental help to raise children, who
usually remain with their mother after divorce. In attempting to
attract partners who would help raise their children, divorced and
widowed women are both helped and handicapped by their janda
image of seduction.

Table 15
Causes of Malay Divorces by Percentage Each Year,
Kuala Langat, 1969–79

Year 1969 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79
Number of divorces 46 51 56 53 62 51 78 72 59 91 76
Nonmaintenance
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by husband 40 35 30 45 45 25 43 44 45 40 45
Incompatibility 30 35 40 35 30 35 35 30 30 25 15
Interference
by family 10 15 20 5 5 15 10 6 10 30 10
Extramarital
relations:*
Husband 10 7 5 10 10 10 5 10 10 3 10
Wife 5 5 5 5 7 5 2 5 3 2 15
Other reasons** 5 3 — — 3 10 5 5 2 — 5
Source: Adapted from Kadi Mohammad Shari b. Ismail, Pejabat Islam,
Sungai Jawa.
*This category mainly included cases in which the party had developed a strong
attraction to a person other than the spouse.
**Included impotence, sterility, nonconsumation of marriage, husband’s desire to
take another wife, husband’s drug addition.

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 133

Case A. When Minah was thirty-one years old, her husband died,
leaving her to raise two girls. The older daughter, Ju, was considered
“dumb” (bodoh). Minah held in trust her late husband’s one-acre
plot, but as a Batak who had married into Sungai Jawa, she had to
eke out a living practically alone. She not only had to contend with
loneliness but also with slurs from women jealously guarding their
husbands. Three years later she received a marriage proposal from
a landless estate worker. Sukor was a few years younger and had
never been married. Minah could not bring herself to accept his offer
until he “promised to take care of the children.” After marriage,
Sukor moved into her late husband’s house and took care of the
property. The couple began to work as a team of rubber tappers and
in five years had saved money to buy a small plot in another village.
Meanwhile, Minah had two more girls.
When the palms on the new holding matured, Sukor forced Ju,
who had turned twenty-one, to marry a 45-year-old divorcé from his
home village. Sukor felt it was time for Ju to marry out, especially
when her younger sister, a bright girl of thirteen (but whose school
career was ended), could take over most of the housework and child-
care. The hantaran of M$200 (it would have been less had she not been
a virgin) was spent on a feast for ten, and Ju did not even receive a
new sarung. After the nikah, she just followed her husband home,
without any ceremony. The marriage lasted one month; following a
series of fights, Ju took the bus home. Both Sukor and Minah seemed
to have accepted this turn of events and Ju slipped back into her for-
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mer role of housekeeping, intending never to marry again.

Case B. In this example, the young woman’s marriage, divorce, and

remarriage are also episodes in a story of wider cultural change and
conflict. Hawa was seventeen when she decided to marry a Banjarese
soldier and follow him to British bases in Singapore, where they lived
for five years. When her husband was discharged and had found a job in
a newspaper office in K.L., they returned to Sungai Jawa with their two
young daughters. Every day, Hawa’s husband commuted to work in
his car, but he forbade her to leave the house or mix with neighborhood
women. In her view, he had been influenced by British army life: he
frequently wore white shorts like “white men” and expected her to be
showered and dressed when he returned home. Gradually, she found
out that he kept a mistress in the city. After a fight, he divorced her.

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 134 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Hawa moved back with her parents, receiving a monthly allow-

ance of M$30 from her former husband. He had married his mistress,
but Hawa heard that he was seeing other women. She added that
his sister was similarly inconstant; she had been married six times.
Hawa felt that her husband had not behaved like a kampung man.
Instead of caring for his family, he had tried to confine her to the
house (“like white men do their wives”) and cheated on her. After
the divorce, he dropped by occasionally and (“showing that he still
has some sense”) has recently decided to raise the monthly allow-
ance for the growing chidren.
After her divorce, Hawa worked in an iron pipe factory, where
she met her current husband, Suib. She exaggerated the number
of her children to test his affection. Undeterred, he visited Sungai
Jawa and presented a ring to her parents (“as if I were marrying
for the first time”). They were married within two months, with
“no courtship, no going to the movies, love letters, or romance.”
Suib left his old job and sought a better-paying one. He was from
Perak, where his divorced mother still lived, but did not want
to uproot Hawa and her children from Sungai Jawa. He planned
to work in the Trengganu oil fields, returning for monthly visits.
After a son was born, Hawa joined a party of coffee pickers to
bring in more cash. She also went on the pill. Hawa was contented
with her new married life in the kampung and had no regrets about
leaving the urban, more affuent life she had known with her first
husband.
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I turn now to the relatively new option of delayed marriages for

young women and consider how that possibility is linked to their
working status and sexuality.

Delayed Marriages and Sexual Images

For increasing numbers of young women, city lights, wage employ-
ment, and educational credentials suggest the options of delayed
marriage, which for so long has been the privilege of men. Age at
first marriage is steadily increasing for young women, whether
employed in wage work or not, to an average of 22 years. By postpon-
ing marriage in order to serve family interests, working daughters also
discover the means to evade male domination in kinship and mar-
riage. As the examples above have shown, single working women can

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 135

and have deflected pressures from their families and asserted their
own individuality in consumer behavior and choice of spouse.
Young women’s perceptions of self, and of men, are increasingly
refracted through the prism of the cash register. Daughters from well-
to-do families are clear-eyed about emotions and personal interests
when marriage has become the key to their social mobility. Daughters
of poor families also evince self-reflection in their handling of relation-
ships with parents, lovers, and husbands. Competition for male atten-
tion is shifting over to the realm of commoditized images, and the
marital contract itself is gradually symbolized by market exchange.
As the commodity logic comes to dictate taste, structure conjugal
expectations, and dissolve customary obligations, young women, as
much as men, are agents in renegotiating their futures in marriage.
The slippage in male ability to conform daughter/sister to male
expectations has introduced a dynamic ambivalence in male percep-
tions of women. An unemployed youth made the caustic observation
that factory women dress up to disguise their kampung-origin, but the
effect of their cosmetic efforts was to caricature their country ways.
Nevertheless, the single working woman or female college student
who has some urban experience is regarded with a mixture of fas-
cination and hostility by young rural men. This ambivalence pivots
on their contradictory expectations of wife and sister/girlfriend. In
their wives, young men seek the customary ideal of the subservient
woman, recently recast as the modern housewife in magazines, t.v.
dramas, and the lifestyle of the bureaucratic elite. However, young
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

rural men are simultaneously drawn to the new working women.

Their freedom, as expressed in commoditized image and conduct,
makes for exciting dating partners. At the same time, the economic
autonomy and widening horizon of young women also threaten
male power in the home, as many young men with working sisters
know too well. Thus, a factory woman can tolerate male mockery,
knowing that it disguises both fear and attraction; her own brother
is marrying a factory worker like herself.
The truly ambitious young woman, not factory operator or clerk,
but bound for college, seldom feels such emotional ease about her
marriageability. Natajah’s granddaughter Katijah symbolizes the ten-
sions engendered in young rural women caught up in developmental
and cultural change. In her adolescence, Katijah was a very nervous
girl who took to wandering around on her own. She quarreled

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 136 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

constantly with her mother, a very unusual situation in kampung

families. For two years, she was placed in the care of Noraini and
Nawab (who still covertly practiced sorcery). Katijah was a bright
student and her future was decided for her when she received a
scholarship to an urban teachers’ college. There her disorientation
was resolved by immediately plunging into the dakwah movement.
She wore a veil and robes even on her visits home, presenting a stark
contrast to the sarung and semitransparent jackets of village women,
and the dresses and “Wrangler” outfits of factory workers. When I
asked Natajah the meaning of Katijah’s shrouded appearance, she
said that it was a sign of her status as an educated Muslim woman.
Natajah had been convinced that her granddaughter’s unusual tem-
perament was a residual effect of the sorcery attack launched at, but
deflected from, Noraini years ago; now, she maintains, Katijah has
been cured by Islamic revivalism.
Katijah is in her early twenties and is attempting to reconcile her
wishes for both a career and marriage. Her mother insists that she
does cooking and cleaning on her visits from college, but Katijah
seems doubtful whether this customary practice would attract a
marriage proposal. Despite her veil, which she sometimes manipu-
lates to display her nape, she has cultivated a joking, even flirtatious
relationship with her male relatives. Unlike less academically quali-
fied village women, Katijah’s hand has never been asked for. She is
versed in the Koran but occasionally reads Western “romance sto-
ries” to improve her English.
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Every year, weddings are held during the school vacation. As vil-
lage elders spend cash and energy on matrimonial ceremonies, they
observe that there is more conspicuous consumption, less hands will-
ing to help, more urban visitors, and new rites (“fashion show,” “pop
band”) to accommodate. The bride who is demurely led through
the various rituals has probably displayed self-determination in the
selection of not only the groom but also of wedding outfits, house-
hold items, and postmarital residence. Parents intervene in the mar-
riage of their children to secure wealth or social position, but the
market has expanded young people’s room for maneuver in their
own interests. In particular, young women, alternately quiescent and
assertive, manipulate symbolic and economic capitals to forward
their personal agendas. Increasingly a labor reserve for the wider
economy, kampung women play a bigger role in adjusting customary

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 Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future 137

matrimonial practices to personal wishes and variations in individ-

ual life trajectories. We now turn to the experiences of these young
women in transnational companies which, by employing their labor
power, have reconstituted their very sense of self as women and as a
nascent proletariat.
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 Part III

Neophyte Factory Women in Late

Capitalism
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 Chapter 7

The Modern Corporation:

Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy

Why are Malay women periodically possessed by spirits on the

shopfloor of transnational corporations? Both Western educated and
Islamic fundamentalist Malays had expected the disappearance of
spirit beliefs when peasants began streaming into “free trade zones”
and city life. What do episodic spirit visitations to modern factories
disclose about the experiences of young peasant women assembling
microchips? Does the “fetishization of evil” in the form of satan rep-
resent a mode of critique of capitalist relations, as Taussig has argued
in his study of Columbian plantation workers? Or do spirit posses-
sions represent cultural protests against acts of dehumanization?
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Caught between noncapitalist morality and capitalist relations, do

Malay factory women alternate between compliance, self-regulation,
and daily acts of defiance on the shopfloor?
To answer these questions, I will first discuss the role of Malaysian
state institutions in (1) promoting export-industrialization as the means
for integrating rural Malays in the capitalist system, and (2) the intro-
duction, via transnational companies, of labor-intensive manufacturing
into Kuala Langat, thereby changing the form and meaning of work
for rural Malays. Their felt experiences, interpretations, and changing
sense of subjectivity in the context of industrial work relations will be
discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.

141

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 142 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Capitalist Discipline and Cultural Discourse

Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exer-
cise of control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature
of it which makes it specifically rational.
Max Weber (1964: 339)

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of

power in negative terms. . . . In fact power produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and ritu-
als of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be
gained of him belong to this production.
Michel Foucault (1979: 194)

In the late twentieth century, capitalist discipline introduced into

industrializing societies involves a combination of labor discipline and
different modes of control based on schemes of discourse/practice
which reconstitute the subjectivity and countertactics of the subjected.
For Marx, power in capitalist societies is ultimately wielded by capi-
talists over the laboring population. In daily relations of production,
labor discipline is enforced by different organizational techniques which
objectify the worker by separating intellectual and manual labor (1974:
327–424). Weber sees a threefold division of oppressive power in modern
bureaucratic societies. Rational-legal techniques govern the deployment
of power through the state, structures of legitimate authority, and large-
scale bureaucratic organizations (1964: 337–341). In the late 1970s, Fou-
cault directed our attention to productive (rather than repressive) power,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

not located in institutions but circulating through networks of social

relationships. In his view, “disciplinary societies” are characterized by
schemes of disciplinary techniques (“technologies of power”) which act
upon the body and reconstitute subjectivity through knowledge/power
systems (1979, 1979a, 1980). His analysis thereby casts light on those grey
zones of contested terrains and self-preserves in everyday life.
Foucauldian concepts are directly relevant in delineating the modes
of domination within high-technology factories. By refusing to sepa-
rate practice from discourse (cf. the Marxian divorce of action from
ideology), Foucauldian analysis identifies and exposes the power
effects of knowledge/power on individuals, their reconstitution, and
self-management. In social systems mediated by technology, such
as transnational corporations, coercion is enforced not only through
labor relations but also through corporate discursive regulation of

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 143

work performance, comportment within and outside the factory

premises, and the workers’ sense of self. When one rejects the notion
that capital-labor relations have an overdetermining logic, it becomes
necessary to discover how discourse/practice colonizes not only dif-
ferent domains of everyday life but also the scattered, fragmentary
acts of rebellion by subjugated people.

The State, Export-Industrialization, and Cultural Models

The rapid expansion of light manufacturing industries in Penin-
sular Malaysia since 1970 has been the consequence of a deliberate
government policy in response to growing rural discontent.1 The
postindependence coalition government, headed by the UMNO
party and buttressed by a carefully balanced multiethnic ruling
group, continued to manage the export-oriented plantation economy
still dominated by foreign investors.
In May 1969, violent communal riotings in the cities brought to
national attention the economic plight of rural Malays. Population
growth, falling commodity prices, and land concentration by the
emergent class of Malay civil servants in rural society have contrib-
uted to an increasing incidence of landlessness and general poverty.
Government statistics showed that since 1957, rural Malays have
progressively lost their village land at the rate of about 10,000 fami-
lies each year.2 As many rural Malays became poorer, wealth dispar-
ity increased within the Malay community itself. Rural discontent
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

spilled over in the communal riotings which state officials astutely

recognized as antigovernmental protests. Following suspension of
Parliament, the UMNO government introduced the New Economic
Policy (NEP) in 1971 as the basis for restructuring the political econ-
omy. The NEP is aimed at the
progressive transformation of the country’s racially compart-
mentalized economic system into one in which the composition
of Malaysian society is visibly reflected in its countryside and
towns, firms and factories, shops and offices (Third Malaysia
Plan, 1976: 9).
The centerpiece of this pembangunan program was “export-oriented
industrialization” as the combined solution to basic problems of land-
lessness, rural underemployment, and growing political disaffectation
as outmigration by young Malays increased.3 In the industrial belt

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 144 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

along the Klang Valley, migrant youths contributed to the urban unem-
ployed and squatter population. Government training programs, trans-
portation, and heavy industries absorbed those who were scholastically
qualified. Many of the migrants had failed Form Three or Five; never-
theless, the expectations raised by their education caused migrants to
take their time looking for jobs considered more commensurate with
their qualifications (Blake 1975).
By the end of the decade, these migrants had added to the rapid
growth (at the rate of 4.5 percent per year) of Kuala Lumpur and the
estimated 40 percent of city households living below the poverty level.4
Joining the stagnant pool of the unemployed, many migrants lived in

Table 16
Peninsular Malaysia:
Distribution of Total Labor Force by Industry, 1970–80

1970 1975 1980

Total labor force 3.3m 3.9m 5.4m

Industry (by percent)

Agriculture, forestry,
fishing 53.5 49.3 40.6
Mining and quarrying 2.6 2.2 2.0
Manufacturing 8.7 10.1 16.0
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Construction 2.7 2.9 5.2

Transportation,
communications 4.0 4.6 *
Wholesale & retail trade 11.4 12.6 23.5
Banking, insurance,
real estate 0.8 0.8 *
Public administration,
education, health, defense 12.0 13.0 13.2
Other services 3.7 3.9 *

Totals 100 100 100

Sources: The Third Malaysia Plan 1975–80, 1976: 140; Far Eastern Economic
Review, Asia 1981 Yearbook: 194.
*Included in “Wholesale and retail trade.”

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 145

crowded rooms. Some picked up cash in petty crimes and drug ped-
dling. One report noted that it was “almost impossible to talk about
the migration of youths from rural areas to the city without touching
on the drug problem.” Others sought incomes as self-appointed car
attendants (jaga kereta boys) or food vendors, or worked at odd jobs. In
1979, the majority of those who registered with the Selangor job place-
ment office were between 15 and 24 years old, most of whom had at
least lower secondary education.5
Although local academics and policymakers called for greater rural
development effort to stem the rural-urban migration,6 the Malay-
sian Home Affairs Minister asserted that the “urban drift” was “a
deliberate . . . societal engineering strategy” within the framework
of the NEP. He pointed out that the countryside was the “only . . .
major reservoir” of labor power left for “economic modernization.”
Since the goal of the NEP was to “reshuffle the racial composition of
the rural sector,” the outmigration of Malays was in keeping with
government policy.7
Between 1970 and 1980, a decade during which the labor force in
agriculture declined from 53 to 41 percent of the total working popu-
lation, the government established 59 industrial estates throughout
the Peninsula. Nine of these were “free trade zones” (FTZs) for the
location of the manufacturing subsidiaries of transnational compa-
nies. These foreign-controlled factories came to generate the larg-
est number of low wage manufacturing jobs, primarily for Malay
women. Rural outmigration continued unabated, only now increas-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ingly constituted by young peasant women. They contributed to the

growth in the manufacturing labor force which doubled from 8 to 16
percent by the end of the decade (see Table 16).
Thus, the integration of Malaysian female labor into global produc-
tion systems was facilitated by changing corporate strategies, especially
after the “oil crisis” of the early 1970s. To escape mounting labor costs
at home and gain market access abroad, transnational corporations
headquartered in Japan, the United States, and Western Europe began
to scatter labor-intensive production processes throughout the third
world. As a favored locale for transnational companies, Malaysia has
hundreds of foreign industries manufacturing garments, foodstuffs,
and electronics components, facilitating the large-scale entry of kam-
pung women into industrial employment. In 1970, there were no more
than one thousand Malay female migrants in manufacturing industries;

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 146 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

by the end of the decade, they constituted some 80,000 members of the
industrial force, over one-half of whom were employed in electronics
assembly factories (Jamilah Ariffin 1980). The most common image of
the new working class Malay woman is in fact “Minah letrik” (the local
equivalent of “hot stuff”).
These female members of the nascent Malay proletariat represent
a fairly well-educated labor reserve, often overqualified for the semi-
skilled manual jobs offered by the transnational firms. A 1977 survey
of Malay women workers in 120 factories located throughout the
Peninsula reveals that almost one-half had lower secondary educa-
tion, and one-quarter had prematriculation qualifications. Many had
aspired to become clerks, trainee nurses, and teachers, but having
failed to gain entry into white-collar jobs, were absorbed, along with
a few illiterates, into the expanded pool of semiskilled labor.8
Different organs of the state apparatus thus facilitate the integra-
tion of Malaysian economy and labor into the global operations of
transnational capital. Export-oriented manufacturing subsidiaries of
foreign companies were attracted by fine locations of physical facili-
ties and infrastructural linkages to ports, as well as generous tax
exemptions (up to ten years), minimum customs fees, and unham-
pered transfers of profits and capital. The main condition required of
these large-scale industries was at least 40 percent bumiputra (Malay)
representation in their work forces. Firms were urged to invite
Malaysian shareholders, but this was not a binding requirement. In
the domestic arena, other government institutions engaged in the
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

political disciplining of the newly constituted Malay working class.

Drawing upon cultural, political, and economic discourse/practices,
different state agencies courted foreign interests while regulating the
labor responses to industrial discipline. Thus, the 1976 investment
brochure, Malaysia: Your Profit Centre in Asia, provided legal guaran-
tees for labor quiescence:
Adequate legislation in industrial relations ensures the main-
tenance of industrial peace and harmony, thereby guaran-
teeing the smooth operation of production without undue
disruptions.9
In practice, this labor legislation, both by omission and by imple-
mentation, favored transnational factories over Malaysian workers
in at least two ways:

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 147

1) by facilitating the “runaway” companies in their selective use

of the local population as a labor reserve to be attracted and dis-
charged according to world market conditions, and
2) through bureaucratic expansion, counter large-scale resistance
from below.
Government labor laws, by not setting a legal minimum to the
wage rate nor correcting the sexual imbalance in wage levels, created
a situation in which transnational corporations could lower produc-
tion costs by employing a female-dominated labor force. Wages paid
to female operators in the electronics industry are further varied by
urban/rural locations. In a rural district like Kuala Langat, wages
offered by electronics companies were not significantly higher than
those in agro-based industries (see Table 17). It was clear to many
female operators that factory wages were in general smaller than
those paid in the lower-echelon white-collar jobs for which they had
the necessary qualifications.
Electronics companies also attempted to limit the employment
tenure of their female workers to the short span of their life cycle
when they were most capable of intensive labor. Most operators were

Table 17
Average Wage Rates in Selected Industries for
Manual Laborers in Selangor, 1976
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Daily Rated Wages

Industry Male Female

Textiles M$ 3.05 M$ 2.43

Rubber products 3.85 2.88
Plywood 4.20 3.87
Sawmill 4.26 4.30
Chemical products 4.20 3.87
Machinery & parts 4.67 3.64
Electronics assembly 3.50 3.10
firms, Kuala Langat
(starting wage)
Sources: Selangor State Development Corporation, 1976: 22; fieldnotes.

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 148 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

young women ages 16 to 25 years, mainly single. In this connection,

government legislation for the protection of pregnant workers has
had the unintended effect of reinforcing corporate policy to discour-
age married women from applying. Workers who got married while
on the job could remain; however, they were often given counseling
on family planning.
The rapid exhaustion of the operators — owing to high production
targets and work rates, three-shift cycles, frequent overtime, and con-
tinual surveillance (see below) — also causes most of them to leave of
their own accord after three to four years. An increasing number of
Malay female workers in urban-based factories, however, are choosing
to remain on the job for longer durations. Since many can no longer
adjust to kampung life, factory jobs have become one of the few means
of cash earning for female migrants, especially divorcées with chil-
dren to support. It is common practice for electronics workers aspiring
to escape the dead-end employment to apply repeatedly for job open-
ings in the state bureaucracy. A woman worker at the Sungai Way FTZ
was reported to have said, “If I could get an office job I would ‘split’
from this place. There is no future here. There are thousands of us and
only a few promotions.”10 This weak structural integration of women
into the industrial labor market, a situation fostered by corporate strat-
egy, is frequently cited by male supremacist and capitalist pronounce-
ments to justify the low wages of female workers.
The high turnover of female operators in electronics firms (5–6
percent every month in some enterprises), operating in tandem
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

with corporate pressures against long-term employment, disrupted

attempts at union organization. Contrary to widespread belief, labor
laws allowed union formation in the so-called “pioneer industries.”
However, in practice, this ruling has not produced unions of elec-
tronics workers because amendments to the labor code severely
restricted labor organization. For instance, workers with less than
three years of employment in their industry cannot participate in
unions, and strikes to force management acceptance of unions were
forbidden. Other “management functions” which deal with pro-
motions, transfers, and layoffs are not subjected to collective bar-
gaining. The most direct obstruction to the formation of a union by
electronics workers is the refusal of the Registrar of Trade Unions to
recognize their membership under the national Electrical Industry
Workers Union.11

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 149

Even for the older, existing male-dominated unions (representing

one-quarter of the country’s work force), restrictions on organized
activities have progressively worsened. Between 1963 and 1973, the
number of work days taken in strikes declined from over 305,000 days
to 40,000, even as workers involved in these strikes increased four-
fold.12 In late 1979, a job action of employees of the Malaysian Airline
System (MAS) ended in the imprisonment of 23 unionists without
trial, under the Internal Security Act. New rulings were introduced to
restrict contacts with overseas and international labor organizations
which had offered support in the labor dispute. The overall effect of
the proliferation of labor regulations on the newly generated female
industrial workers is to deliver them, with little legal defense within
their work situation, to the disposal of international capital.
The need to supply foreign companies with a continuous flow
of rural women and men entailed not only a tightening up of legal
rights but also a reorganization of Malay workers’ understanding of
socio-cultural change. As a nascent Malay proletariat accumulated
in the cities, the state public relations organ introduced the “Look
East” policy. In 1982, the Prime Minister declared that Japan rather
than the West should be the model for future Malaysian society:
It is true [the Japanese] are not very religious, but their cultural
values are akin to the kind of morals and ethics we have or
would like to have in this country . . . in the philosophy they
have . . . profit is not everything. The welfare of their employ-
ees is important.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

This emphasis on cultural values rather than technological expertise

presented a moral imagery to validate the new labor relations and win
Malay-Muslim support for a program in which Japanese companies
are a major presence. In the face of radical Islamic insistence on the
priority of “spiritual” over industrial development,13 government offi-
cials claimed that this cultural vision of development would ensure
Malay racial success, while being acceptable to both Muslim and non-
Muslim citizens. At an ulama’s conference, an official from the Minis-
try of Education argued that the goal of the “Look East” policy was
to urge Muslims to follow the attitude and work ethics of a
successful race as long as it does not contravene Islamic ideals
and principles . . . we have to show [the working people] the
achievements made by others. In this context, the Japanese and
the Koreans are the best examples.

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 150 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

He further charged that 26 years after independence, Malay workers’

lack of “work commitments” had left them far behind non-Malays,
especially in the economic field.14 An official slogan, “Efficient,
Clean, and Trustworthy,” was coined to link desired labor habits
with loyalty to enterprise and country. This ideological construction
of labor relations and national development wove around areas of
potential dissent, strategically integrating perceived shared values,
now in Japanese culture, now in Islam, into a cultural configuration
for the management of the nascent Malay working class. Instead of
using technology as a neutral arbiter between capital and labor,15 this
cultural model is couched in the vocabulary of moral responsibility
and the welfare needs of the laboring poor.
Thus, embedded in multiple foci of power, the Malaysian state
simultaneously courts foreign investors while disciplining, com-
pensating, and manipulating Malay factions in different classes to
facilitate the process of industrial transformation. Contrary to per-
spectives which assume lower-class resistance to state policies in the
transition to industrial capitalism (e.g., interpretations influenced
by Thompson 1963), I maintain that the Malaysian state, like many
third world governments, utilized various strategies, increasingly
enhanced by electronic technology, to regulate the integration of
the laboring poor into the changing political economy. This is not to
discount the many forms of revolts from below; but they cannot be
assumed to be directed at capitalism or the state structure. Further-
more, as UMNO machinations have shown, political disciplining of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

discontented elements often involves the recruitment of individual

leaders from popular resistant movements into the state apparatus
itself. We will now turn to the modes of discipline exercised within
the modern factory system.

Japanese Corporations in Kuala Langat

As part of its “rural industrialization” program, the Selangor State
Development Corporation (SSDC) in the early 1970s set up a 50-acre
free trade zone just outside Telok township in Kuala Langat. The FTZ
was shared by three Japanese companies, two semiconductor assem-
bly plants, which I will call Electronics Japan Inc. (EJI) and Electron-
ics Nippon Inc. (ENI, the smaller of the two), and a manufacturer of
musical movement components (MUZ). Initially, it was hoped that

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 151

the Telok FTZ, with its lower land rates, would attract subsidiaries
of transnational corporations otherwise locating in the Klang Valley.
However, after Shah Alam had been established as the Selangor state
capital, officials channelled foreign investments to the new town. The
local FTZ thus remained small-scale, employing a total of approxi-
mately 2,000 workers. Nevertheless, for the local kampungfolk, it
represented qualitative changes in their experience of work and its
meanings for young women.
For the majority of workers, transition from being a peasant woman
to a factory hand entailed two basic changes: (a) a shift from a flexible
work situation to the hierarchical structure of industrial production,
and (b) transition from autonomy in the work process to the oppres-
sive compulsion of labor discipline. The qualitative changes were
experienced in relation to the self and to other workers, as well as to
work within social relations organized by the factories, and between
the industrial system and local communities.

Nimble Fingers, Slow Wit

The organization of modern industrial structures has been analyzed
in terms of the systems’ peculiar advantage to late-developing econo-
mies and as characteristic forms of historically produced development
strategies.16 Eschewing Marxist claims that capitalist relations of pro-
duction are governed by an internal logic, the critical questions to be
asked are: Why is female labor preferred? What are the implications of
a global production system in which relations of gender and of race
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

are critical for the expansion of economic and symbolic capital?

The three Japanese factories are similarly organized according to an
extreme separation of mental and manual labor greatly facilitated by
the deployment of electronics technology. An overwhelming major-
ity of their employees — 85 percent — were female. Altogether, 80
percent were female operators drawn from surrounding villages and
beyond. EJI had the largest work force (1,030 members). Among the
826 female operators, almost 70 percent were Malay; the remainder
were equally divided between Chinese and Indians (see Table 18). The
other electronics firm, ENI, had 530 operators, while MUZ employed
232 factory hands, again overwhelmingly female and predominantly
kampung Malay. From the perspective of the local communities,
Sungai Jawa had about 400 young women working in the FTZ; 60 per-
cent of them were employed in EJI alone, constituting one-third of its

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 152 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

semiskilled labor force. Young women and men from other villages in
the district and beyond rented rooms in Sungai Jawa, or in Kampung
Melur, which was located between the former and the FTZ. Since this
pool of rural women, as low-skilled labor, was easily expanded, and
expendable, the factories could keep their wages low and yet still be
supplied with a continual flow of female school-leavers each year.
At the electronics and micromachinery plants, management’s
definition of semiskilled operations as biologically suited to “the
oriental girl” in effect required Malay peasant women to adopt
such “feminine” traits. A Malaysian investment brochure provided
the blurb:
Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who,
therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to
contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line
than the oriental girl? [emphasis added]17

Corporate policies have been quick to embroider on this tale of

nimble fingers and slow wit. In ENI, the Japanese engineer asserted
that
females [are] better to concentrate [on] routine work [which
may be] compared to knitting, generally speaking. . . . young
girls [are] preferable to do the fine job than older persons, that
is because of eyesight.18

At EJI, the Malay personnel manager stated candidly:

Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

[The] assembly of components is a tedious job . . . [with] min-

iaturized components we feel that females are more dexterous
and more patient than males.

Thus, fast fingers, fine eyesight, the passivity to withstand low-

skilled, unstimulating work are said to be the biological attributes
unique to “oriential” women. In MUZ, the micromachine factory
which produced over a million microcomponents each month, a
Chinese engineer extended the biological logic by linking purported
gender differences to variations in efficiency by sex and age:
You cannot expect a man to do very fine work for eight hours
[at a stretch]. Our work is designed for females . . . if we employ
men, within one or two months they’d run away . . . Girls [sic]
under thirty are easier to train and easier to adapt to the job
function.

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 153

The Japanese financial manager was closer to the bottom line:

Each initial work is very simple . . . if we employ female work-
ers [it is] enough. . . . Also cost of female labor [is] cheaper than
male labor in Malaysia, not so in Japan.19 . . . If we have male
assembly workers, they cannot survive. . . . Fresh female labor,
after some training, is highly efficient.
By seeking young kampung women, the factories benefited not only
from the low labor costs, but also from the fact that they could
“improve” upon teenage girls already socialized and schooled to be
diligent and obedient.

Recruiting Rural Women

The recruitment of these women for industrial work was not a
problem because of their relative oversupply and the eagerness of
peasants, village elders, and local institutions to send otherwise
non-cash-earning village women to the FTZ. To employ skilled per-
sonnel, like technicians and managers, the corporations generally
relied on the district and labor offices. For female factory hands, the
firms depended on local village committees to announce the factory
recruitment drives. Moreover, girls who had failed Form Three were
urged by parents to register their names at the factories, which con-
sequently always had a list of waiting applicants. Managers at the
three factories reported no problems in getting the labor they needed,
even if an immediate intake of one to three hundred female operators
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

was required. The personnel manager at EJI noted that every year
the Telok secondary school “churns out workers.” His counterpart at
ENI commented that whenever he advertised for 20 operators, about
one hundred women would apply. As the factory intake gradually
slowed down, new recruits were obtained by internal notifications to
existing workers to bring in their friends and relatives. Unlike urban-
based industrial estates, which relied on agents sent to the rural
districts to recruit Malay women (Jamilah Ariffin 1980), the Telok
factories had easy and immediate access to low-grade female labor.
The steady supply of village women as factory hands enabled the
firms to be selective in their use of this labor pool. In their employ-
ment policies, the three factories shared similar requirements in their
demand for female labor: young single women between sixteen and
twenty-four years old who had at least primary education, were from

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 154 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

poor families, and lived within 20 miles of the FTZ. Besides cost con-
siderations, young women were demanded because they represented
fresh and diligent labor. In particular, their eyes could withstand
intensive use of microscopes employed in the wiring, bonding, and
mounting processes of electronics assemblywork.20 At ENI, which
tended to attract From Three graduates, the chief engineer cautioned
that “the highly educated person is very hard to control.” He noted
that there were low resignation rates for Standard Six graduates —
“they went to work for a long time . . . [and] are usually from poor
families which need support.” The MUZ personnel manager agreed
with this assessment, pointing out that “richer operators can leave at
any time . . . (We also look for) good behavior.”
Corporate policies preferred their female operators to be “fresh”
and single. It was generally believed that married workers had fam-
ily commitments which distracted from their factory work. EJI con-
ducted an in-factory survey comparing the performance rate of young
single women (ages 16 to 24) and married women (ages 25 to 28). It
was found that the former could daily assemble an average of 1,400
more components than the latter in the most labor-intensive sections
(bonding and mounting). The supervisor commented, “It was very
clear that married ladies cannot handle microscope jobs.” What was
not explicitly mentioned was that married women required peri-
odic pregnancy leave and pay, and were usually reluctant to work
night shifts. Besides, married women, who had generally been in the
job longer than single women, had accumulated more wage incre-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ments over the years, thereby adding to the cost of labor. Since little
skill was acquired in assembly work, it was no loss to the factory to
replace an “old” operator with a fresh one who could be trained in
two weeks to assemble component parts or mind the machines.
Finally, the companies required their female operators (but not
other employees) to live near the FTZ so that they could be easily
available for overtime work and within the social control of village-
folk, institutions, and factories. All three firms subsidized 30–50 per-
cent of bus transportation for their workers. Those who lived too far
away would require higher subsidies and the long commute reduced
corporate flexibility in requiring workers to work overtime, usually
at little advance notice. The firms also preferred the young women to
reside with families rather than rent rooms on their own. The majority
of operators in fact lived with their parents, but a minority who came

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 155

from villages further away either boarded with kinsmen or rented

rooms. Thus, the majority of operators came to reside in kampung
houses on the outskirts of the FTZ.

Ethnic Hierarchy, Gender Inequality

Within the factories, control over the workers was effected through
relations of production, Taylorist methods21 and overlapping schemes
of disciplinary techniques for producing docile bodies and modes of
gender/ethnic domination.
Electronics technology itself facilitated the extreme separation of
mental and physical tasks so characteristic of the division of labor
within the electronics industry. Following Marx, Burawoy (1979)
argues that the labor process under capitalism has its own internal
logic and that industrial behavior cannot be explained in terms of cul-
tural attitudes or orientations. However, I intend to demonstrate that
the subjugation of labor to capital in modern factories does not pro-
ceed according to a pre-determined logic. The organization of capi-
talist production is embedded in and transformed through cultural
discourse/practices. Furthermore, relations of production cannot be
self-determining when played out through multiple forms of power.
In their system of labor relations, the modern factories in kampung
society incorporated modes of domination based on technical exper-
tise, ethnicity, and gender. The organization of work in EJI, which
was more extensive and complex than in the other two firms, will be
analyzed in some detail as an example of how transnational institu-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tions are locally mediated by preexisting cultural constructions of

inequality.
EJI was the subsidiary of a major Japanese corporation which has
distributed production and marketing agencies all over the world,
including Malaysia. In the Telok FTZ, the local factory produced two
semiconducting products — transistors and capacitors — widely used
in communications systems. The internal organization of production
was divided into five major occupational categories, defined by tech-
nical expertise and earnings, and given further rigidity by interpene-
trating structures based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, and age (see
Table 18). At the top, the managing director and “professional” managers
(including five engineers) of vertical subdivisions — manufacturing
(two systems), production planning, and finance/accounting —
were Japanese. The other two subdivisions, administration and

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 156 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Table 18
Distribution of EJI Employees by
Ethnicity, Gender, and Earnings, 1979

Occupational Ethnicity* Gender Total Salary

Rank J M C I Men Women Workers Scale

Management
Professional 10 0 0 0 10 0 10 $ 1,500–4,000
Nonprofessional 0 2 2 1 5 0 5 $ 800–1,080

Technical and
Supervisory
Engineer, foreman,
supervisor 0 14 32 6 50 2 52 $ 785–895

Clerical staff
Clerk, typist 0 17 19 7 11 32 43 $ 345–480

Service worker
Phone operator, driver,
guard, gardener 0 15 0 3 16 2 18 $ 225–290

Factory workers
Skilled—technician,
chargehand 0 56 21 19 71 25 96 $ 275–400
Unskilled—operator $ 3.75–4.80(M)
(daily rates) 0 460 48 74 5 577 582 $ 3.50–4.00(F)
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Temporary operator 0 135 37 52 0 224 224 $ 3.10

Totals 10 699 159 162 168 862 1,030 —

*J: Japanese; M: Malay; C: Chinese; I: Indian.

equipment maintenance, were headed by two Malays in the former

and two Chinese and one Indian in the latter (see also Diagram 1).
In the “Technical and Supervisory” category, the management was
unable to allot employees according to the specific ethnic distribu-
tion, primarily because there were few Malay engineers in the coun-
try — and they, in any case, preferred government employment.
Instead, Japanese engineers supervised three Chinese assistants. The

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 Diagram 1
Work Organization and Occupation Ranks in EJI,
Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979
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 158 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Japanese director of finance accounted for the ethnic composition

at the upper corporate levels with the observation, “Japanese and
Chinese are good for finance, the Malays for administration.” Since
the majority of employees were young Malay women in the bottom
stratum of factory hierarchy, there seemed little choice but for the
management to employ a Malay personnel manager and administra-
tor to supervise the factory hands.
In 1976, disgruntled Malay (male) employees made allegation to
the Malay paper Suara Mederka (Dec. 14, 1976) that no bumiputra were
employed as foremen or supervisors in EJI; they also charged that
salary differences were evident among members of different ethnic
groups. EJI responded to the charges by pointing out that salary dif-
ferences within the same occupational rank were due to the lower
qualifications and probational status of Malay employees. To squelch
the disturbing rumors, a Malay foreman was promptly promoted to
assistant supervisor. The accusations of ethnic-color discriminations
voiced by a few Malay men in lower technical ranks were supported
by local politicians, who routinely urged the factories to give pref-
erence to local Malays in filling all levels of production and super-
visory positions. However, the local school practice of transferring
bright students for further training out of the district meant that
few remaining students had qualifications for upper level positions.
Those taken in and given on-the-job training felt frustration at lower
wages and their subordination to supervisors of a different ethnic or
national origin. Their poor grasp of English was an additional fac-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tor, since it was the lingua franca among the multiethnic, technical
and managerial staff. Furthermore, Malay men found it unaccept-
able to work in semiskilled assembly work, since this category had
been defined as “female.” For instance, another immediate response
of the EJI management to discontent was to promote three of the ten
male operators to junior technician positions. Of the remaining, six
promptly resigned, and only one continued as the factory hand per-
forming “male” tasks such as packing and carrying crates.
Continual pressures for attaining maximum production levels often
generated conflicts between subdivisions which, dominated by lead-
ers of different ethnic origins, lent an ethnic tone to work disputes.
In the transistor manufacturing section, conflicts often arose over the
differing approaches of production managers versus engineers, i.e.,
between increasing productivity through labor relations and maxi-

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 159

mizing productivity through technical efficiency. Whenever machines

broke down, engineers made technical adjustments which held up
production, thus preventing shopfloor supervisors from attaining
high output levels. For falling off production targets, the latter were
penalized in their merit increments. Thus, whenever disputes devel-
oped between Chinese engineers and production supervisors, the
more vocal of whom were Malay, Japanese managers stepped in.
The management arbitrated tensions which, through its differential
pressures on separate subdivisions, it had built into the industrial
organization.
On the shopfloor, unrelenting pressures for high production
rates also generated conflicts between supervisors and technicians.
According to the Malay personnel manager, some Malay technicians
misinterpret the work pressure by [non-Malay] supervisors
as racial discrimination when it is really just the need to reach
production targets.
It was his task to handle such misunderstandings at monthly meet-
ings of the multiethnic supervisory and technical staff. A Malay tech-
nician told me about the possibility of separating work frustrations
from perception of ethnic hostility:
My supervisors are Chinese. I feel that their relations with
Malays are good. Sometimes we Malays also treat them the
same way, there is really nothing [problematic between us]. . . .
Right now I have problems with the material . . . imported from
Japan . . . but actually the material is not too good . . . This month
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

we have had a lot more defects. Probably they [the management]

are angry, but we pretend not to know . . . Sometimes they are
always scolding us — foremen, supervisors, technicians — they
berate everyone.22
Not unexpectedly, the demands for high production levels placed
by the management on supervisors also shaped the labor relations
among supervisors, foremen, and female operators. Diagram 2 rep-
resents the actual distribution of workers, by ethnicity and gender, in
the microassembly lines of the EJI transistor division in 1979. Women
workers, including chargehands and lineleaders, were massed below
male supervisory/technical staff. On the shopfloor, the highest rank
attainable by female workers was that of “chargehand” (assistant to
foreman), but there were only 25 such positions for the 800 operators.

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 160 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Diagram 2
Ethnic and Gender Distribution in the Transistor Assembly
Section in EJI, Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979

Key: F: female; where gender not indicated, male personnel

J: Japanese; M: Malay; C: Chinese; I: Indian

One Malay woman had qualified for the post of technician, but she
declined to accept it as the only female in that job category.
Within the electronics enterprises, a dual employment policy was
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

commonly practiced to provide management with even greater flex-

ibility in channelling, adding, or reducing semiskilled female labor.23
Thus, at EJI, one-quarter of the total shopfloor labor force was made
up of temporary factory hands on six-month contracts (see Table 18).
Although these temporary workers, after the two week training
period, were practically similar to regular operators, the imposed
contracts enabled the management to pay them lower fixed wages
and to release them at any time without the benefit of the three-month
wage packet paid to ordinary departing workers. Besides, tempo-
rary workers were often laid off before their three-month period was
up, only to be rehired at the same daily rate whenever demands for
electronics products increased again. In effect, they constituted the
female labor reserve par excellence produced by modern industries
competing in the highly volatile international market.24

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 161

Given the rapid transformation within the industry, the employ-

ment situation described above was itself undergoing change even
as I was conducting research. Making long-range calculations, the
EJI management decided to convert most of the production pro-
cesses in both the manufacturing of transistors and capacitors to full
automation. In April 1979, the labor-intensive sections — mounting,
bonding, and molding — were gradually being automated so that
the work force of 500 was reduced to 200. A number were transferred
to the capacitor plant, while others, the temporary workers, were let
go. The remaining workers were switched from intensive assembly
work to tending two machines each and working three shifts instead
of two, as they had previously. Productivity per worker was stepped
up as the total output of transistors rose from nine to thirteen mil-
lion components per month. The Japanese manager confided that
in the future, there would be a slight increase in the recruitment of
skilled male workers, while the number of female workers would be
reduced through “natural attrition.”
The finance director explained that automation was increasingly a
saving even in Malaysia, where labor was cheap. He pointed out that
when manpower was used, material wastage was high. For instance,
machines were better at quality control than human beings, who also
took more time and used more space. He expected that future fac-
tory hands would just tend machines. The stepped-up pace of work
induced by automation was matched by a 90 percent increase in
daily wage, but at the same time, previous production cash allow-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ances were cut back, so that workers did not see a significant differ-
ence in their paychecks. The director concluded, “The time will come
in Malaysia when we cannot rely on manual labor.”
The production system at ENI was similar to that of EJI, but on a
smaller scale and with less automated procedures. Thirteen Japanese
expatriates dominated the management positions; on the shopfloor,
three male supervisors and twelve foremen controlled 530 operators
manufacturing semiconductors. This factory was the most controlled
in terms of the spatial distribution of operators in a highly clinical
setting, with supervisors watching them through glass partitions.
Thus, besides Taylorist techniques which rigidly enforced control
through the repetitive performance of decomposed tasks, surveil-
lance as a modern form of power was pervasive within the electron-
ics environment.

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 162 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

At MUZ, the hierarchical work structure was still heavily depen-

dent upon female manual labor. There were two metalworking divi-
sions, one for producing vibrating plates, the other for assembling
micromusical movements. Operators working with vibrating plates
were placed in individual booths, and their tuning of the plates pro-
duced eerie and piercing sounds in the otherwise silent workshop.
For this additional stress, they were paid more (M$4.15 to M$7.50/
day) than operators who assembled the movements (M$3.50/day).
There were altogether 232 female workers, predominantly Malay, in
both divisions. Having delineated the overlapping schemes of con-
trol in these corporations, we can now look at how labor relations,
machine pacing, and surveillance were experienced by the neophyte
factory workers.

Power Relations on the Shopfloor

I maintain that in modern industrial institutions circulating
discourse/practices produce and reproduce, in daily conditions,
cultural concepts of male domination and female subordina-
tion which are infused into and became the “common sense” of
power relations.25 The work organization situated and utilized
operators for optimal technical efficiency and surveillance. Tay-
lorist methods set the pace and governed repeated, mechanical
actions, but it fell on foremen to ensure compliance with the ulti-
mate rule: attainment of the highest production targets by indi-
vidual operators within each eight-hour shift. Such control did
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

not go unchallenged.
Corporate managements in the Telok FTZ report that levels attained
by Malaysian factory women consistently compared favorably to
those of Japanese workers. The locale for the lowest production costs
of musical movements in the world, a MUZ official reported, was
Malaysia. Because of the high costs of machines, as compared to labor,
the director said that there were no plans in the immediate future
for automation at MUZ. Labor-intensive production in Malaysia, for
instance, was more profitable than the fully-automated plant in Japan.
Productivity at MUZ was measured by a controlling chart based on
standard time and special targets of 100 percent efficiency for the units
produced. Lost time, including visits to the locker room, was also cal-
culated into the standard time allotted for specific tasks. Workers were
sometimes rotated, as in musical chairs, to discover which job best

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 163

suited their ability to achieve high production goals. Similarly, soon

after ENI began operation, the Japanese director was pleasantly sur-
prised when Malay operators who had been on the job for only two
and a half months were tested:
[T]he running rate of skillfulness of ENI Malaysia is higher
than that of Japan; [this is] beyond our expectations (factory
document, 1977).
Thus, the Malaysian subsidiary was more profitable than the parent
plant in Japan, aided by the fact that Malaysian-manufactured com-
ponents gained easier entry into American and European markets
than Japanese goods. A Japanese engineer in the firm provided a
further cultural explanation for higher labor productivity in Japa-
nese firms abroad. In recent years, he said, Japanese workers had
become scarce and were “not so good” as their predecessors. They
were “too American in culture, ideas, way of life . . . some of them
did not want to stick to one company.” Nevertheless, despite the
high production rates in Malaysian subsidiaries, Japanese corporate
managers felt that in order to compete successfully with American
enterprises they had to continually upgrade the production targets
of Malaysian workers. Using the family analogy, another manager
commented:
Parents do not say that they are satisfied with their children;
every time parents hope for more from their children.
It fell to the foremen to enforce such endless expectations on female
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

operators. In all three companies, each foreman was placed in charge

of ten to forty operators in each production section. In explaining his
function to me, the director of ENI described the foreman as “the
head of . . . family members.” A glance back at Diagram 2 shows
that the foreman led a pyramidal distribution of female workers,
the chain of command passing from him to the chargehand, line-
leader, and rows of operators at the bottom. Foremen were also in
charge of two to seven male technicians, depending on particular
production sections. The work team in fact suggested the Japanese
peasant household — ie — a thick nexus of claims and obligations, a
miniature gender hierarchy, and coordination of group interests.26 To
implement production goals, foremen relied heavily on their charge-
hands to deal directly with operators. Noraini’s daughter, who was
a lineleader at EJI, described her role:

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 164 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

I hate it if I get ordered to do this, do that; I don’t like it. The

foremen, they give this job, that job, and even before my task
is done they say do that, do this, and before that is ready, they
say do some other work. At times I tell the operators and they
get angry too because of the repeated orders. . . . It’s like pass
order. [The foremen] instruct the chargehand, the chargehand
tells us lineleaders, after that the lineleaders inform the opera-
tors. My friends [the operators] sometimes get angry because
of the endless orders to work fast. . . . Sometimes . . . I try not to
[give instructions] immediately, but in slow motion, while I am
talking to them; this way, it is not direct.
After EJI had begun to automate some of its production processes,
the pace of work increased greatly, as did the responsibility of indi-
vidual workers. One overtaxed factory hand complained:
With automation, our production target is increased further and
we feel even worse than before; more tired, more exhausted
. . . more attention is required for watching the machine. Previ-
ously, [I worked with] one machine but now that I am a checker,
ah, I watch over five machine. For the operators there are now
two machine for each to tend; in the past, one machine, one
person.
Not only were female workers under increasing work pressures, but
they resisted the extreme discipline it would require of them and their
co-workers. Thus at EJI, a Malay woman had been trained for the posi-
tion of foreman, but she was said by the supervisor to lack the nec-
essary “leadership qualities,” such as the ability to give and stick by
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

decisions, to be authoritative so that male technicians would comply,

and to have a “fierce” demeanor so that the operators would take their
instructions seriously. Lurking in this male supremacist description
was the implicit acknowledgement of Malay women’s reluctance, if
not refusal, to be employed as the vehicle for submitting others to fac-
tory discipline. When female workers in different ranks were friends
or relatives who had grown up together, it became doubly stressful
for higher-rank female workers to articulate power relations vis-à-
vis their “sisters.” Many operators who had qualified for the jobs of
chargehand or lineleader turned down promotion for this very reason,
despite the higher wages offered. They preferred to work as operators
doing overtime to earn the wage difference.
Male authority and power were seen as necessary qualities in super-
vising female workers. Although most Malay factory women were

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 165

“very obedient and hardworking types,” it was considered necessary

in all three factories for foremen to be very strict with them. At MUZ,
the engineer assistant and head of the in-house union described the
female operators whose interests he supposedly represented:
Obedience covers all; [it makes them] easier to control. But they
are emotional — they cry when errors are pointed out — the
threat [is felt] there. Some [however] yell at you.
At ENI, a female office worker noted that when foremen scolded
the operators, the latter were not allowed to respond, but had to be
“very polite.” She had observed an incident in which an operator
had forgotten to punch her time card and stood there for half an
hour explaining to her foreman why she forgot. Besides the fear
they felt for certain foremen, operators were also reluctant to voice
their grievances because of the threat of further penalization, such
as being fired. Crying sometimes seemed the only way to seek relief
from being reprimanded and to obtain pardon.
The foremen, who were not uniformly strict and harsh with opera-
tors, were themselves under continual pressures to implement high
production goals, depending on market conditions. One EJI foreman
told me that even after the introduction of automation, it was pos-
sible to
still improve productivity in certain processes . . . [I will] try
to set a target calculated up to a maximum capability of [the]
machinery. Sometimes [I] have to push workers beyond maxi-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

mum when demand is good — directive from [the] top.

The felt oppression is expressed by one operator as a form of
trickery:
What do the workers want? We don’t want to be shackled as if
we were forced to work. If we are being tricked then we must
do the work, but if we are not, then don’t force us. Sometimes
they pressurize us if production falls. [We are] forced to go beyond
the target. It is the management that forces us . . .
Nevertheless, it was in the daily exercise of power relations
between female workers and foremen which, because emotion-laden
and infused with ambivalence, was key to enforcing work discipline.
Central to the foremen’s domination was the authority to determine
which individual workers qualified for special rewards or micropun-
ishments on a daily basis. In all three firms, the low wages operated

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 166 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

as a powerful stimulant on the operators to produce above average

output and take on more unpleasant tasks, for which they were given
cash allowances. When asked why she worked overtime, the line-
leader quoted above explained that she felt “cheated” (rugi) if she did
not work on Sundays, when wages were 50 percent more than regular
daily payments, in addition to her six-day work week. Special “incen-
tive allowances” were given at both EJI and ENI to workers when-
ever they took the night shift (an additional M$1.50 to a daily average
of M$3.50 to M$4 in 1979). “Efficiency allowances” were awarded to
those operators whose production output went beyond the calcu-
lated average. These allowances were allotted on the basis of daily
production charts kept on individual workers either by themselves or
by a lineleader, and then adjusted by foremen after consultation with
chargehands. These cash awards, finely graded into increments of a
few cents per day, were given to operators who might almost double
the average daily output. In EJI, for example, before automation was
introduced, some operators in the bonding section could assemble
6,000 components per shift, compared to the average of 3,200. Thus,
the “efficiency” allowances greatly increased the productivity of the
workers, who were then awarded with minimal wage increases of
M$1 to M$40 per month.
Cash rewards were also paid for particularly stressful tasks, such
as the use of microscopes in the electronics factories and the tuning of
plates in the micromachine plant. For production processes involving
microscope use, fresh recruits were routinely used so that by the time
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

their eyesight had deteriorated in a couple of years, they would be

replaced by new operators. A few might continue at the same tasks,
wearing prescription glasses, or be transferred to other tasks; others
resigned because their physical capacity for the work had been lit-
erally used up. At EJI, out of the original batch of 300 microscope
workers recruited in 1975, only 30 were still thus employed after four
years. Foremen and supervisors not only determined the meting of
allowances on a daily basis, but they also made recommendatons for
“merit” and “attendance” awards given at the end of the year.
Such relations based on daily interactions and meeting “common”
goals induced a sense of family feeling. The operator cited above
felt conflict between resisting management pressures and imple-
menting foremen’s orders. She obeyed foremen because “they knew
our problems,” not like “people who sit in the office.” Furthermore,

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 167

there was a sense that their relationship with the foremen could be
negotiated:
Sometimes we let the foremen know that we do not like to be
forced, we have empathy, we know our duty. We must perform
our duty well, if everything is fine, but if the machine is not
good how can we work properly? We have been gathered here
in the same place so let us all be considered the same way — one
company. We in one section consider ourselves as one family . . .
because we are more closely connected to [our foreman].
By citing “family” (keluarga), “empathic feeling” (timbang rasa), and
their own sense of duty (tugas), women workers appealed to the fore-
man’s humanitarian values as a means of softening his control.27
Often, appeals to family sentiments were ineffective against contin-
ual monitoring of work schedules, work time, and work records. Fac-
tory hands in EJI and ENI could be dismissed for being absent for more
than two consecutive days. Few operators had ever lost their jobs this
way, although during the festival season, there was a greater incidence
of one-day absenteesim. A description of the operators’ work schedule
imparts the stress they felt in riding the industrial treadmill. At ENI,
workers in the bonding and mounting sections alternated between
two shifts: from 6:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. and from 2:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.
Those in other production sections had to work three shifts every two
weeks, taking the night shift from 10:30 P.M. to 6:30 A.M. In the latter
case, even after the Sunday rest, workers did not have enough time to
adjust their bodies and eating pattern properly for the next (morning)
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

shift. They had to wake up at 4:30 A.M. and catch the bus at some dis-
tance from the kampung. If they missed the factory bus, they had to wait
for public transportation which brought them to work an hour late, a
situation that earned a scolding and loss in daily wage. Women work-
ers who asked for medical leave could be rudely questioned by some
foremen making humiliating innuendos about their social activities.
Besides continual work pressure, the most stressful daily experi-
ence for operators was to be monitored by a few overzealous fore-
men. During the night shift, for instance, some operators might sneak
away to the locker room to take naps and thus earn a reprimand
from foremen. Beyond such clear breaking of rules, however, some
foremen were anxious to confine operators to the work-bench by
carefully screening requests for permission to go to the toilet, the fac-
tory clinic, or to the prayer room (surau).28 Government regulations

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 168 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

gave Muslim workers the right to break for prayers (at five inter-
vals distributed throughout the working day), but most operators
limited themselves to one obeisance at sundown, taking about 15
minutes between work shifts. Others might decide to ask permis-
sion to leave the workbench more frequently — right in the middle
of production — to pray. This loss of time the factory management
had to tolerate.
In addition to time transgressions, operators chafed at factory
regulations requiring special overalls and footwear. One of them saw
restrictions on movement and clothing as yet another form of control.
It would be nice working here if the foremen, managers, all the staff
members and clerks understand that the workers are not under
their control. Hm, there is a great deal of control. . . . Once my
friend, she wanted to go and pray, she was wearing her house
slippers, [but the foreman] would not allow that, she had to wear
[regulation] shoes there too. This is called “control” too, isn’t it?
Another operator complained that the factory overalls were too tight,
but they were not allowed to unbutton a little even though they had
Malay clothing underneath. Furthermore, they had to change their
shoes before entering the workshop. She considered such dress regu-
lations as part of the general “tight discipline” in the factory and said
that the workers needed more “liberal” rules.
This change from village social contexts, in which women were
seldom monitored by someone in their work but enjoyed self-deter-
mination in setting the pace of their daily activities, was traumatic.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Since the Malay baju kurong was a loose and flowing tunic and sar-
ung, usually worn with sandals or Chinese clogs, the tight factory
overalls and heavy rubber shoes both extended and represented the
workers’ sense of being controlled in body and movement.
Factory discipline, when strictly enforced, also suppressed the
spontaneous friendliness of Malay women who, though initially
shy, were quick to display affectionate interest in friends and co-
workers. Thus, one immediate influence on the tenor of their daily
lives was whether their foremen treated them warmly and kindly
or were too distant. Very few operators confessed to disliking their
foreman on the basis of his (non-Malay) ethnicity; they based their
judgements on his humanitarian treatment of female workers, which
they opposed to heavy-handed control. One woman described her
Malay foreman as follows:

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 169

[He] controls more than others. He does not wish to be friendly

even with us operators. That is really his attitude. Yes, he con-
trols more [than other foremen]; for instance, whatever oper-
ators do, it angers him. . . . If, for instance, we become tired
during the night shift, other foremen will just let us be as long
as the operators have done their work. He isn’t like this, he
really watches us. If we gossip, he glares. Sometimes, if he is
standing behind us . . . he will not let us get up even once . . . He
does not talk with operators, he is not like other foremen.
However, daily interactions with foremen also engendered roman-
tic interests in the young women workers lacking previous exposures
to nonkin male company. Attraction usually developed because they
felt that certain foremen, sometimes Chinese or Indian, were kindly
towards them. The supervisor claimed that he told foremen to treat all
female workers “equally, but a few fall in love.” Such favoritism was
strongly discouraged by operators (other than the smitten ones) who
argued that “dating” behavior was not “proper,” especially between
Muslim women and non-Muslim men. Some years earlier, a Chinese
foreman had converted to Islam to marry a Malay operator, but it was
one rare exception to the tendency for such romances to be terminated
because of strong social pressures exerted by co-workers. Although
they criticized such liaisons in terms of Malay-Islamic practices, oper-
ators were in fact also resisting unequal treatment on the shopfloor.
Other forms of kampung mechanisms reconstituted in the factory
included the customary prestige of male status and female defer-
ence to male authority. At EJI, for instance, two female foremen cho-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

sen for their technical qualifications were ineffective because male

technicians had little confidence in their authority. Male instructions,
even when given by unreasonable foremen, were obeyed, although
not without covert resentment. While Malay women were conscien-
tious and docile in their work, they disliked being overtly controlled,
scolded, or threatened. Thus, kindly foremen who played their role
more akin to “father” or “brother” could win the workers’ compli-
ance and loyalty, and foster a comfortable “family” atmosphere in
the midst of rigid control. A Chinese supervisor told me that in his
dealings with operators
force [is] not so important as understanding of subordination
. . . Mutual understanding and respect [are] very important for
[the] leader’s control.

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 170 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

He added that it was important to encourage the workers daily and

to compliment them on their handiwork.

The Family Way: Managing Maidens and Morality

Corporate management went beyond supervising work rou-
tines into overseeing morals of daily social relationships. In its
general treatment of the female labor force, the Japanese company
in mukim Telok was careful to insert its organization into the local
social matrix, taking into consideration the network of relation-
ships workers maintained in kampung society. The male-dominated
industrial system overlapped, to an important extent, the structure
of unequal relations in local communities. “Traditional authority”29
in the rural Malay system was vested in Islamic or political leaders
over ordinary folk (whose loyalty they engaged); in parents over
children; in elders over juniors; and in men over women. As men-
tioned above, the deference village women showed men was more
an ideal than a fact of everyday life. However, the junior status of
young nubile women (commonly referred to as budak budak, the
term for “maidens” as well as “children”) made them more sus-
ceptible to male authority. Thus, corporate pronouncements about
the factory as “one big family” concerned for the “welfare” of the
workers were directed as much at their village elders. The manipu-
lation of emotions by appeals to morality was an important dimen-
sion of corporate coercion.
In MUZ, large framed posters proclaimed the “company philoso-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

phy”:
to create one big family,
to train workers,
to increase loyalty to company,
country and fellow workers.
At EJI, the “one happy family” working together was not stirred by
calls for loyalty to country but by rules spelled out in a little book
referred to, rather inappropriately, as “The Bible.”
It was the ENI personnel manager who tapped local cultural senti-
ments and family norms with particular savoir-faire. A smooth Kelan-
tanese with the air of an enlightened bureaucrat, he explained that
his firm was “more Eastern in nature” than the other companies.
There were no social gatherings or parties held on factory premises
which might encourage the mixing of male and female workers. The

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 171

company was located in a “kampung area where the outlook of the

people [was] too religious, old-fashioned.” He admitted, though,
that his factory had no time for social functions. Citing press reports
about factory women being “too free” and the few cases of prosti-
tution reported in urban-based FTZs elsewhere in the country, he
spelled out his firm’s policy:
We do not want to go against Malay culture, and Japanese cul-
ture too . . . We are entrusted by the parents to give the girls
good employment, not otherwise. This is a family system; we
are responsible for the girls inside and outside the factory. If
the girls get sick, for example, we send them home by private
cars. . . . Of course the workers are not too happy — “too much
control,” they complain. But we say the big “Yes” here. Parents
are very happy and we never receive any phone calls or let-
ters from parents calling for their daughters’ resignation — like
other companies [do].
Indeed, this social control was so effective that the monthly turnover
was no more than two percent, compared to four percent at MUZ
and six percent at EJI.
Corporate attempts to adhere closely to local norms and mores,
calculated to reassure parents and to “make everyone happy,” did
not quite conceal unhappy working conditions. For instance, factory
policies safeguarding workers’ welfare’ and ‘benefits’ (i.e. produc-
tion allowances) were no protection against a ham-fisted response to
workers’ grievances. In MUZ, soon after production began in 1976,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

a Chinese supervisor who supported work action to demand higher

wages was dismissed. A small multiethnic group of female workers
went on strike to protest his dismissal. They also attempted to pre-
vent other workers — the majority of whom did not understand the
action or know the issues — from working. The strike dragged on for
a couple of weeks, until the MUZ management prevailed upon the
ketua kampung of Sungai Jawa and the penghulu to talk to the work-
ers. These community leaders warned the workers that if they con-
tinued striking, they would lose their jobs and the factory would
have to close down. The strike was thus ended, without reinstating
the supervisor.
By 1979, MUZ had a union which was recognized by the state regis-
trar because it could be affiliated to the federation of Metal Industries
Employees Union. However, the Japanese director commented that

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 172 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

the “connection [was] not so effective.” In fact, he explained, the MUZ

union operated like company unions in Japan, which settled their
problems through internal consultation with corporate managers. The
Malay personnel manager said candidly:
We recognize the union in order to make them [the workers]
happy . . . [we] increase efforts on welfare, benefits. We bring
them to a point away from the wage focus — otherwise, heaven
will be the only limit to wage demands . . . we create a happy
family environment.
The union leader, who was also an assistant engineer, agreed. His
job at the factory was to design “controlling processes” (using Tay-
lorist methods) directed at increasing the productivity of the work-
ers. The role of the union, in his view, was to
look after the welfare of the workers,
work hand-in-hand with the recreation club,
promote relations with the management —
we swim or sink together
[with an embarassed laugh].
He said that the management considered basic facilities like a can-
teen as “welfare” services. The “recreation club” had been set up for
workers to participate in sports, parlor games, and singing. There
was a “pop” band supplied with electric organ, guitars, drums, and
saxophone by the firm. Perhaps, not unexpectedly,
the workers are not so outspoken; [there is only] a bit of opin-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ion, no counter-proposal to what the management decides

[about recreational activities].
This was the situation in a union with ten elected representatives,
two of whom were females representing women workers who con-
stituted 80 percent of the labor force. It could be because Malay
women workers were seldom interested in the so-called “recre-
ational activities” (which appealed almost exclusively to urban-bred
and male employees) but were more concerned with improving
their low wages. The major part of the operators’ complaints dealt
with poor wages, and, in early 1979, when the management decided
to consider a new wage scale, there were fewer complaints at union
meetings. Nevertheless, the union leader reiterated that the role of
the union was “as an intermediary between workers and the man-
agement . . . as a watchdog, for both sides.”

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 173

In the other two firms, electronics workers had not yet succeeded
in forming unions, nor had they really been shown how to do so. In
addition to the registrar’s refusal to recognize unions set up by elec-
tronics workers, the latter had to contend with corporate tactics. In
1978, workers at EJI demonstrated for company recognition of their
union. The strike went on for a few weeks but ended without obtain-
ing its goal. Striking workers were not sacked but forfeited their
wages for missing work. They were, however, given a feast at the
annual year-end party for raising production levels. A technician told
me of his attempts to get outside support:
Concerning the union, I had spoken with ——— and was
straightforward and clear with her at the time when she was the
Minister of Culture . . . but I myself still do not understand [what
unionization involves]. But if I already knew, then I would surely
set one up, whichever way . . . I feel a union is like a ‘social group,’
we can take one action against the management. I feel that this
is a right.
Instead of even an in-house union, the company itself had set up
a “Joint Consultative Committee” (JCC) in 1976, made up of eleven
“elected” employees (i.e., heads of work sections) and three manag-
ers. The JCC managed to meet once every three to four months and
fell into disuse after one year. The personnel manager said that this
was because workers had no confidence in their leaders. A different
view was given by a foreman: the JCC was “like a puppet” which
did not have any of its requests fulfilled. It “died” when the manage-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ment did not call for reelections the next year.

The firm came up with yet another “better” alternative, the per-
sonnel manager pointed out. Each work section was to have its own
“employees’ monthly meeting” and then send an elected emissary to
meet with the management. Operator representatives were to meet
with the personnel manager separately from foremen and supervi-
sors, who had their own meetings. Such meetings operated in effect
as a “grievance procedure system” to pass all complaints to the top
management. In response, the managing director circulated memos
which were also pinned up on notice boards. Group leaders were
required to poll their workers for reactions to plans and report back
to the management. The final decision was taken at the top and
implemented by the section leaders.30 An operator who represented
her section said that most shopfloor leaders reported that workers

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 174 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

wanted higher wages, but this vote was “overruled” at the meet-
ings. They also requested two pairs of regulation shoes and over-
alls, but the personnel manager made vague promises contingent
upon further increases in production output. These monthly meet-
ings thus basically operated as a surveillance vehicle through which
discontent could be turned into account, workers “normalized” and
spurred on to greater effort.

Corporate strategies regulating operators’ emotions and conduct

importantly involved social relations with the kampung communi-
ties from which they hailed. Rather than encouraging individuating
attitudes among the first-time workers, as some Western firms have
done,31 the local Japanese factories sought to uphold social obliga-
tions which still bound the workers to their rural households. This
reworking of local communal values not only helped to reinforce the
discipline of workers on the shopfloor but also to preserve the condi-
tions in which rural parents continue to send their daughters to the
factories for cash earnings. Although the three companies in Telok
were in competition with each other, there was “unofficial coordina-
tion in the field of public relations.” Managers in the different firms
checked with each other over donations to local events like school
sports-day, the Boy Scouts Movement, Prophet Mohammad’s birth-
day celebrations, Farmers’ Fair, and the like. One factory contributed
over M$1,000 each year to events at the village, mukim, and district
levels. A corporate official noted that this was a “social obligation”
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

because “our people being from the kampung are not well-off.” The
firms had tried to deflect fund appeals from outside the district, urg-
ing the penghulu to call off some of the pressure.

What did such attention to rural society produce in terms of sym-

bolic capital? As the following will demonstrate, the social standing
of corporate managers was enhanced in the eyes of village elders,
whose moral support could be depended on for the social control of
their working daughters. The ENI personnel manager, an ex-army
officer in his early fifties, presented himself as “foster father” (bapa
angkat) to the operators whom he referred to as “budak budak” (chil-
dren/maidens). In place of a union, monthly invitations were sent
to parents of thirty operators to spend an afternoon at the company.
Usually, half the parents came, sometimes after travelling a long dis-
tance. These parents’ assemblies were intended, he told me, to

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 175

acquaint the parents with the working hours, the factory proce-
dure of overtime . . . so that parents will know when to expect
their daughters to return from work . . . [and] to educate the
parents who do not know this is a mass specialized production
system.
A common parental complaint had been the mandatory night shift,
which meant that their daughters had to walk to and wait at the bus
stop in the dark before and after work. Some parents requested that
factory buses pick the women up from their village homes. Another
worry was the amount of time working daughters spent in activities
outside home, under the pretext of working “overtime.” The man-
ager patiently explained that if operators were retained because of
overtime, those in the morning shift would be delayed for two hours,
while workers in the afternoon schedule (which let out at 10:30 P.M.)
would be asked to arrive for work two hours earlier. Bus drivers were
ordered to take female workers home within the hour of release, and
parents could check their daughters’ overtime forms. This “coop-
eration” the management extended to parents in monitoring their
daughters’ movements between home and factory reassured village
folk that ENI managers were indeed bapa angkat concerned about the
moral protection of their “wards.”
Parents’ meetings had perhaps more critical uses for the manage-
ment. At one meeting I attended, the rural folk arrived, dazed after a
hot trip, and were ushered into the cool conference room where they
fell into an awed silence. The personnel manager handed out color-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ful pamphlets on his company (in both English and Malay), while
delivering a public relations pitch. After explaining the factory work
and bus schedules, he said he hoped their “discussion” (it had been
a monologue) would be a “dialogue.” This was received in baffled
silence since villagers were not accustomed to bureaucratic Malay lib-
erally sprinkled with American clichés. He wanted to know whether
the workers had any problems at home, whether they complained
about problems at work but were too “bashful” (malu) to let factory
personnel know. He reassured the parents that their “female chil-
dren” (budak budak perumpuan) cried easily and would surely confess
problems to their mothers and fathers. However, he was practically
their bapa angkat, so if the parents would “cooperate,” let them tell
him the complaints of the children. The sole response was a father
from Banting who wanted to know about medical care for workers.

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 176 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Through a glass, darkly.

Credit: International Development Research Centre, Social Sciences Division, Ottawa

There were no further questions, and the manager asserted that

opportunities for promotion at his factory were better than in gov-
ernment service, that the operators had more allowances than even
clerks (failing to mention that the former’s wages were much lower
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

and that miniscule allowances required additional labor input). The

parents were then shown a film on the international operations of
the corporation.
In the final half hour, they were taken for a view of the shopfloor,
which they observed from behind glass panels. Here, the parents
asked many questions concerning the work their daughters did.
They were finally ushered back to the meeting room and served cur-
ried puffs, potato chips, and soda water. It was clear that the visit
had been a success, for the parents were suitably impressed by the
factory and by the fact that a high-ranking Malay official had put
himself at their “service.” Seduced by an in-factory view most rural
folk would never have, the parents unwittingly played a part in the
surveillance scheme, thereby adding their own moral weight to these
controlling processes based on knowledge.

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 The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy 177

Corporate disciplinary techniques involved not only the surveil-

lance but also the encoding of Malay female sexuality, in work,
movement, and residence. ENI tried to group outstation workers in
the same cluster of rooming houses (mainly in Kampung Melur).
The personnel manager said he felt responsibility for the young
women from distant villages: “since they are exposed to dangers,
we have to look after them.” Operators employed at the other two
firms also rented rooms, but usually it was their landladies who
acted as self-appointed custodians, mediating between the workers
and the kampung residents. Most of the boarders were from villages
in the southern half of the district. They commonly sent from M$30
to M$50 home each month. Sometimes, these migrant workers had
to borrow money from their supervisors to pay the rent. Four to six
boarders would share a single-bedroom house for about M$40 a
month. Others took two-room houses for twice as much rent. Since,
in addition to remittances, they had to purchase their own food,
migrant workers were seldom able to save. Operators living with
their parents displayed envy and even hostility toward the outsta-
tion workers who were said to have more “free time” (from house-
work) and to escape from customary family control. However, these
migrant workers were sometimes visited by parents who had failed
to receive the monthly check. So even workers “living on their own”
were subjected to some of the constraints of kampung and family life,
a situation which the factories were comfortable with. This partial
incorporation of female migrants into the local villages checked pub-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

lic opinion quick to comment on their “immoral” conduct and the

“disorganizing” effects of rural industrialization. While corporate
managements might have been genuinely concerned about the wel-
fare of migrant workers, these social arrangements enhanced corpo-
rate regulation of its female labor force beyond the factory gates.
The modern corporation in Kuala Langat thus introduced a whole
network of power relations which operate in different local situa-
tions: state agencies, unions, corporate structures, industrial work-
shops, factory meetings, kampung groups, and village households.
Whereas other studies of the labor process in late capitalism focus on
the subjugation of labor to capital, stressing the centrality of Taylorist
techniques and the divorce between mental and physical labor (e.g.,
Braverman 1974), I have looked at the multiplicity of overlapping dis-
ciplinary techniques which produce biological objects, docile bodies,

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 178 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

and sexualized subjects in in transnational companies. In the indus-

trialization of the Malaysian economy, relations of domination and
subordination based on gender, more than ethnicity, became consis-
tently salient in different spheres of daily activity. With government
backing at the national level, and by their delicate reconstitution of
kampung institutions and values locally, Japanese corporate man-
agements effectively curtailed the workers’ potential for organized
action. We must therefore question notions about an inherent logic in
capitalist relations and labor resistance, as well as assumptions about
class “self-making” (Thompson 1963). My reservations about reifica-
tion will be made clear as we finally turn to the contradictory images,
spirit visitations, and sporadic tactics of resistance as Malay peas-
ant women were constituted as the first generation of an industrial
labor force.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Chapter 8

Neophyte Factory Women

and the Negative Image
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming

A visitor to large Malaysian towns will be struck by scenes of

factory women not common even ten years ago. Streams of uni-
formly clad young women, looking rather like schoolgirls, can be
observed eddying around bus stops, food vendors, or outside FTZ
gates. In the evening, dressed in more colorful Malay or Western
clothes, these neophyte factory workers may be seen on their way
home to squatter lodgings, shopping at marketplaces, or wander-
ing around downtown. A running commentary often follows in
their wake. Shop assistants, passers-by, and street urchins may
cheerfully greet them with “minah karan” (“high voltage Minah,” a
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

variation of “Minah letrik”), “kaki enjoy” (“pleasure-seekers”), and,

sometimes, more insultingly, “perumpuan jahat” (“bad women/
prostitutes”). Not only people in the streets but the Malaysian press,
politicians, administrators, educators, and Islamic groups have all
raised key moral issues in a cacophony of critical commentaries
about women of the nascent Malay working class. I maintain that
this explosion of sexual discourses, counterpointed by the voices
of factory women, are produced out of conflicting modes of con-
trol exercised by dominant groups deeply ambivalent about social
change in Malay society.
Other descriptions of the Malay female industrial force in Malay-
sia have focused on the issue of exploitation in transnational indus-
tries (Linda Lim 1978; Grossman 1979; Munster 1980), the problems
of migration (Jamilah Ariffin 1980), and the role of spirit possession
179

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 180 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

episodes in the industrial setting (Ackerman 1979; Ackerman and

Lee 1981). This chapter brings some coherence to these apparently
divergent themes by discussing how Malay factory women in
coastal Selangor and Penang experienced, interpreted, and reacted
to capitalist relations which constrained them at work while promis-
ing social emancipation.
To discover the changing sense of subjectivity in the proletarian
situation, the Marxist notion of false consciousness no longer suf-
fices. James Scott has pointed out that resistance by subjugated pop-
ulations often has its basis not in class interests but rather in a “moral
economy” under siege (1976). My concern here is not to give greater
weight to one view or the other, but in fact to demonstrate the power
effects of discursive practices which encode and construct power
relations in shifting domains of everyday life. As Foucault’s works
have shown, cultural concepts are not the mere epiphenomena of
class power or cultural values but are constituting knowledge/
power systems producing the “truths” whereby we live our lives.
Feminist analysis often errs in merely showing up the male bias
of “ideological” constructs without attending to the daily produc-
tion and reproduction of relationships according to “given” male-
supremacist principles.1 In other words, authoritative languages and
the ideas they construct do not merely “reflect” material relation-
ships but constitute our very experience of reality. Thus, Raymond
Williams urges Marxists to consider hegemonic language as “practi-
cal consciousness,” “constitutive activity” involved in the material
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

production of “Truth” (1977).

Taking an oblique stance to this metadebate, my intention here is
to discuss the social experiences of Malay factory women in terms
of the cultural constitution of a specific “class sexuality”2 and the
kinds of “truth” asserted by different groups in the political arena.
I will begin by explicating how Malaysian industrialization has
been accompanied by a variety of discursive practices about the
individual and the population which increasingly shape and give
intelligibility to different domains of social life. The process of sub-
jectivization induced by these sexual discourses will be considered
in terms of self-regulation and resistance tactics, as factory women
attempt to construct a new configuration of morality and identity
in their own terms.

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 181

Sexual Metaphors and Social Control

Since 1970, the media, radio, and Televeshen Malaysia, which are
controlled by the state, have played an increasing role in focusing
attention on young Malay women and have provided the frame of
reference for public discussion of their new status. Newspaper arti-
cles popularized familiarity with appellations coined in the streets,
describing the apparent proclivities of Malay working women for
activities such as jolli kaki (seeking fun) and jolli duit (having fun with
money). Women who seek Western-type recreation in bars and night-
clubs were referred to as “kaki disco.” In particular, the emphasis
on “electric” (a triple pun on the women’s industrial product, their
imputed personality, and the bright city lights they supposedly seek)
and “feet” (kaki) implied the unhampered (bebas) freedom associated
with footloose behavior and more than a suggestion of “streetwalker”
(kaki also implies the sidewalk — “five-foot-way”: kaki lima). By reit-
erating such negative images and playing on “jolly” and “enjoy,” the
media and public developed the image of Malay factory women as
pleasure-seekers and spendthrifts pursuing Western modes of con-
sumer culture.
Indeed, many factory women, especially those working in urban-
based FTZs, acquired eye-catching outfits and spent their off-hours
shopping and going to the movies. However, conspicuous con-
sumption and participation in a Western youth culture were most
prevalent among young middle-class professionals and univer-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

sity students, but the press has chosen to highlight such activities
among working class Malay women. An operator from Sungai Jawa
commented with some bitterness that the public considered fac-
tory women on the same low level as streetwalkers. She pointed
out that office workers were also known to be “immoral” (tak ada
moral-lah), but the public “raised itself above those who work in fac-
tories because they did not have [high academic] qualifications.”
By riveting public attention on the female workers’ consumption,
the press trivialized women’s work and helped divert discontent
over their weak market position into the manageable channels of a
“youth culture.”
The mass circulating press, radio, and t.v. talk shows also oper-
ated as a vehicle for public officials and politicians to make
pronouncements on Malay working class women, amplifying events

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 182 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

which tarnished their reputation. From 1976 onwards, newspaper

reports intermittently carried stories about factory women in the
Penang Island Bayan Lepas FTZ, said to service soldiers and tour-
ists, under such headlines as “Factory Girls in Sex Racket.”3 In early
1979, The Star proclaimed in its front page “It is not fair to associate
all factory girls with immorality.”4 Factory women featured in the
story were from maintained peasant villages working in the FTZ.
They rented rooms in local kampung and were watched over by the
village elders so that they would not “fall prey to any city play-
boy.” As the oldest and largest FTZ in the country (twenty transna-
tional firms employed some 18,000 workers), the Bayan Lepas FTZ
has developed a reputation for sexually permissive female work-
ers. Factory women were dubbed factory-specific nicknames such
as “micro-syaitan” (“micro-devils”) for operators at Microsystems,
and “night-sales” or “nasi sejok” (“cold rice”: “cold” goods) for those
working at National Semiconductors. Malay women in other FTZs
were also described as “preyed upon” and “tricked” into prostitu-
tion. An Ipoh industrial estate has earned the label of “the Malaysian
Haadyai,” after the famous Thai red-light border town frequented
by Malaysian men.5
The alarm raised over the perceived threat of Malay factory
women asserting social independence, thus casting doubts on offi-
cial Islamic culture, has prompted state officials to call for greater
control of women in the growing Malay working class. In 1980, the
then deputy prime minister noted that rural women who worked in
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

factories were said to become “less religious and have loose morals.”
As a champion of the export-industrialization program, he advised
that the solution to the problems was not to blame the factories but
for people to guide the “young girls” to “the right path.”6 The pub-
lic association between Malay factory women and “immorality” had
become such a national issue that further state action was required to
quell the fears of Malay parents back in the kampung. In the next year,
the Welfare Minister called for orientation programs to be set up by
kampung youth associations to prepare village women for urban life
so that they would not fall into the “trap” and “discard their tradi-
tional values” in town.7
The academic community stepped in to define the problem of
“immorality” among Malay factory women as the outcome of “rural-
urban migration” and Westernized urban culture rather than industrial

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 183

employment. This “sarung-to-jean movement,” the vice chancellor of

Universiti Malaya argued, resulted in problems of urban living which
could be alleviated by providing counseling, recreational, and educa-
tional facilities. “Lack of recreation,” he says, “leads to untoward pat-
terns of behavior.”8 He headed a huge foreign-funded project to study
the social welfare needs (dormitories, transportation, and mosques) of
Malay factory women in cities (non-Malay working women were not
part of the target population). Thus, through the expansion of what
Foucault called “bio-power,” new administrative and regulatory mech-
anisms, in addition to social discourses, came to problematize the sexu-
ality of Malay working women: their relative economic freedom was
linked with the irresponsible use of that freedom to indulge in an orgy
of pleasure-seeking activities. Greater public control came to be exerted
over their “leisure” time (which in actuality was very limited), while
simultaneously diverting attention from the harsh realities of their
“working” time.
Islamic groups aligned with and against the state have joined
the debate over the changing status of young Malay women. State
Islamic offices, like other governmental agencies, tended to direct
attention towards the perceived misuse of “free time” by industrial
women, whereas Islamic revivalists (dakwah) movements were more
concerned with questions of defining appropriate spiritual and social
boundaries. Since the early 1970s, the NEP has brought thousands of
young rural Malays into urban factories and educational institutions,
feeding and increasing the rate of cultural change. Malays educated
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

abroad returned with a new commitment to fundamentalist inter-

pretations of Islam and its centrality in defining not only the political
economy but also gender roles in Malaysia. This new Malay intel-
ligentsia, fired with religious fervor over official corruptions and the
goals of pembangunan, increased the vigilance of state Islamic institu-
tions in monitoring the deportment of young Muslim women.
To the young Malay women, the subject of all this scrutiny, official
Islam, as represented by state religious offices, was experienced as
a legal system which dealt with marriage, divorce, inheritance, and
religious offenses. Since the “moral” status of Malay working women
had become suspect, there was a tightening of religious surveillance of
sexual conduct. More frequent raids were reported in the poor lodg-
ings and cheap hotels inhabited by workers and the semiemployed.
As the examples of some women from Sungai Jawa had shown, under

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 184 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

current official reading of Islamic offenses, Muslims may be arrested

for khalwat, or “close proximity” between a man and a woman who
were neither immediate relatives nor married to each other. Offenders
caught in situations suggestive of sexual intimacy (but not in flagrante
delicto) were fined or jailed for a few months; the sentences varied
from state to state. Muslims could also be arrested for zinah, i.e., illicit
sexual intercourse, which was more severely punished.
Although theoretically there was general surveillance of the entire
Malay population, the understaffed religious offices seemed to have
turned their attention to areas where Malay factory women were con-
centrated. Factory women seen walking around at night were some-
times threated with arrest for khalwat by men who were not members
of Islamic offices.9 Both parties arrested in an incident were punished,
but sometimes the female partner was given the heavier sentence.
When the culprits were too poor to pay both fines (M$1,000 or more
each), the payment was sometimes made jointly to release the male
offender so that he could return to work while the female offender
served the jail sentence.10 The religious authority became one of the
more critical agencies disciplining the social conduct of working
Malays, subjecting women to greater sanctions than men.
Malays in the dakwah movement — “a politically informed resur-
gence” (Kessler 1980) — were mainly disaffected students and intel-
lectuals more concerned with the inculcation of Islamic-Malay ascetic
values than punishing those who deviated from principles of moral
behavior. For many of the educated younger generations, especially
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

members of the dominant dakwah group ABIM (Angkatan Belia Islam

Malaysia: Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement),11 Islamic revitaliza-
tion provided a means for reaffirming kampung values (Kessler 1980)
and of “striving (perjuangan) for religious truth” (Nagata 1981: 414)
in the alienating Western urban environment. Others joined Islamic
sects like Darul Arqam and Jamaat Tabligh, which offered alterna-
tive versions of an Islamic society they would like to see installed in
Malaysia.12 Different dakwah groups demanded, among other things,
a new model of Malay womanhood.
The modern, religiously-enlightened Malay woman was defined in
opposition to what was considered capitalist and derivative of West-
ern individualist and materialist culture. Through a radical reinterpre-
tation of the Koran and Sunah, the revivalists called upon Muslims,
but especially Muslim women, to abstain from Western forms of

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 185

behavior like drinking alcohol, driving cars, and watching television

and movies (regarded as the major vehicles for transmitting undesir-
able foreign values). Instead, women were encouraged to veil them-
selves modestly, observe the segregation of the sexes, undertake
community services, and engage in serious Koranic studies. Although
few, if any, of the Malay factory women (as compared to office work-
ers) donned Arabic robes in voluntary purdah, the dakwah movement
has struck a responsive chord in many young women who wished to
be recognized as morally upright Muslims engaged in honest hard
work (kerja halal). They saw in Islamic resurgence an assertion of pride
in Malay-Muslim culture and an affirmation of its fundamental val-
ues in opposition to foreign consumer culture. For instance, the wide-
spread influence of foreign advertising and the promotion of beauty
contests in American electronics companies have promoted Western
images of feminine passivity and consumption (see Grossman 1979).
The Consumer Association in Penang found in a recent survey that fac-
tory women appeared to spend more money on clothes and cosmetics
than on nutritious food (Gay 1983). Assailed by contradictory, unflat-
tering representations of themselves, factory women often sought in
Islam guidance self-regulation to comply with work discipline and to
inculcate an ascetic attitude towards life. An operator in EJI revealed
the anguish caused by bad publicity, and her innocent complicity in
greater social control:
I feel that society views us with contempt because we are fac-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tory workers. Factory women sometimes associate in an unre-

strained (bebas) manner, as when men and women talk among
themselves, hmm, outside [the home] and released from the
custody of the parents (kongkongan ibubapa). . . . Society only
knows how to criticize (caci) but does not know the signifi-
cance of our work in the factory. . . . What ought to be done is
to set up religious classes . . . to give warning (bimbangan) to
factory workers, and then to set up rules against unrestrained
interaction (kebebasan) among workers within and without the
factories. This is in order to increase discipline. Most of us read
the newspapers. [Let them] explain the problems of us factory
workers to the public.
As might be expected, Malay working class youths were less easily
cowed. Radical criticisms of transnational corporations by intellec-
tual leaders of ABIM have provided worker-members the elements
of a political idiom to articulate their experience of “exploitasi” in the

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 186 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

production process. A Malay technician at EJI, who had joined ABIM

when he was at a vocational school in Kuala Lumpur, saw through
the management strategy of giving annual dinners to workers as a
means to “ease their hearts” and make them “forget” basic issues
like wages and work conditions. He claimed that as a member of
ABIM he was not “blinded” (buta), like kampung folk, by the dis-
guised intentions of corporate management.
I know my own feelings [of being manipulated], I know the feel-
ing of other [workers]. . . . Therefore, I am sort of in revolt behind
their [i.e., management’s] back.
He argued that there was no “one road” to solving the problems faced
by Malay factory women who were badly underpaid and “stamped”
with a degrading image. He rejected the university chancellor’s pro-
posal to build dormitories near FTZs. “I feel that to tie them up like
this . . . is not the democratic road. We cannot tie them up . . . it is not
practical.” Such statements by working class Malay women and men
reflected attempts to formulate social arrangements which would
link Islamic ideals of chaste, honest work, and relative gender equal-
ity with democratic notions, based on an alternative subjectivity.

The Kampung and the World

The young coconut is bored by a squirrel. [Nyiur ditebuk tupai]
Malay proverb
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

In rural Selangor, Malay women employed in the Telok FTZ, together

with their parents, rejected the commoditized image of factory women
as illegitimate and an affront to Muslim womanhood. The image of
“factory girls [as] synonymous with good time girls”13 assailed kampung
morality and expectations of female loyalty to family interests. Village
factory women struggled with simultaneous efforts to be true to family
claims on the one hand, and to claim new rights as workers on the other.
Such conflicting claims were not usually resolved in favor of individual-
ism as a crucial part of their self-image.
Factory employment gave the young rural women a measure of
economic independence from personal subordination at home but
simultaneously intensified their contractual dependence on men in
the industrial hierarchy. Thus, many factory women felt their unfree-
dom more at the threshold of economic emancipation. Even as they

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 187

became integrated within a rigidly unequal system of work rela-

tionships never before encountered in Malay peasant society, their
non-work activities increasingly came under the surveillance of a
censuring public.
In fact, local Japanese corporations, by reworking indigenous
institutions of familial and village cooperation into production rela-
tions, have socialized rural Malay women as an industrial labor force
in ways which won the approval and implicit cooperation of rural
society. Furthermore, the induced docility of factory women sprang
from a practical assessment of their insecure position within the
labor market and their powerlessness to change it. Eric Hobsbawm’s
description of the induction of European peasants into industrial
capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century will find an echo in the
kampung:
(T)he workers themselves provided their employers with a solu-
tion to the problem of labour management; by and large they
liked to work, and their expectations were remarkably modest
. . . [they] came from an environment where hard labour was
the criterion of a person’s worth and wives were chosen not
for their looks but for their work-potential. . . . In brief, though
naturally not insensitive to the difference between lower and
higher wages, they were engaged in human life rather than in
an economic transaction (1977: 260–61).
Malaysian novelist Shahnon Ahmad, perhaps a stranger to Marx-
ist writings, wrote of weather-beaten young women in Malay rice
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

villages, “Men did not look for beauty when they asked for a wife”
(1972: 71). In mukim Telok, factory women were still very much
bound by their noncapitalist sense of work relations and obligations
to family claims.
The overlap between family and factory interests in keeping young
working women in a socially subordinate position impressed on the
factory women a hierarchical image of society. Moreover, the ever-
present charge of nonkampung and “unIslamic” behaviour operated
as a powerful sanction against activities which could be construed
as violations of local norms of male-female, child-parent relations.
Islamic resurgence among the Malay intelligentsia, and general pub-
lic surveillance, made factory women “increasingly aware of their
duty to guard and uplift their public image,” as a social welfare offi-
cer urged.14

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 188 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Thus, Engel’s assertion that the first condition for the liberation
of women was their entry into public industry (1972: 137–38) not-
withstanding, there was less individuation among factory women
in Sungai Jawa and surrounding villages than one might expect.
The majority conformed to kampung norms of male authority, female
modesty, and maintenance of obligations to one’s family and com-
munity. In their daily lives, as previous chapters have shown, factory
women adhered to what constituted “proper behavior” in kampung
and Malay-Muslim terms. They voiced approval of “punishment”
for those who deviated from the norm. Within the factories, opera-
tors themselves were a force for cultural conformity, bringing pres-
sures to bear on those women seen to flout Malay-Muslim norms. To
their more conservative sisters, workers unrestrained (bebas) in their
handling of money and social intercourse were seen as responsible
for tarnishing the collective image of Malay factory women, bring-
ing shame (malu) to their community and disgrace to Islamic wom-
anhood. It bears repeating that such self-regulation sprang as much
from private resentment as imposed conformity; in certain situa-
tions, peer pressure also constituted tactics of resistance to unequal
treatment on the shopfloor.
All the operators I asked agreed that they considered themselves
members of a single family at their workbenches; all were ready to
help each other out. People often stopped their own work (at some
cost to their wages) to help neophytes who had trouble assembling
microchips or understanding orders. As one explained:
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Those of us who work in this factory, if we are in the same sec-

tion, we are like brothers and sisters. Ah, we get along together,
no problem.
Another said she considered her foreman to be like a parent (orang tua
saya), even though he was Chinese, because he took the place of her
father at work, and she respected him. As mentioned earlier this sense
of family was responsible for work teams attaining high production
levels, even when workers felt resentment at management demands.
Family-like relations went beyond cooperation in work; the opera-
tors felt a collective responsibility to criticize co-workers perceived
to deviate from common group interests while pursuing their own
individualistic interests. When asked what values operators might
or might not share in common, a worker replied:

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 189

(T)here are those who like a sosial life, and those who do not.
[Those who are] bebas like to do their work in their own way.
Some of the workers are like this. There are others who, follow-
ing our elders, do not like to be sosial, do not like to mix freely
with men. Sometimes, those who are sosial do not do their work
correctly. They play at work because what they really want is to
be free to move around. Yes, they can be cooperative [at work]
but outside the kampung they just want to go places, near and
far. In the factory, they follow others; outside, they do not.
The term “sosial” had entered Malay parlance to refer to young
unmarried women and men who freely mix with each other, quite con-
trary to kampung adat, which expected informal segregation between
single members of different sexes. Thus, the word was a slang term
not applied to villagers of other age groups, who were usually quite
sociable, as required by custom. Factory women who were sosial (i.e.,
unhampered by convention or bebas) were seen to be less hardwork-
ing, careless about their work, seeking self-gratification, and unre-
strained by parental guidance. Another operator elaborated:
(O)ur values and theirs are entirely different. . . they want bebas
values, do not want to be tied down. They do not want to be
shackled (berkongkong kongkong) so that they can go out and
be bebaslah. The wages they receive they keep for themselves,
only occasionally do they contribute to their families. It would
be better if their earnings are for their families, that way, they
will not bring disaster to their families, do something that will
bring them shame.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Factory women were particularly vigilant in regulating relations

among men and women who met in the workplace. “Dating,” a West-
ern practice in which a man selected out a woman to spend time alone
together, was particularly censured when it involved a Malay opera-
tor and non-Malay foreman. A developing romance inevitably pro-
duced a krisis situation as gossip flew through the ranks. Not only did
such sosial association tax kampung notions of sex segregation, it was a
violation of Islamic injunctions against liaisons with non-Muslims.
In 1979, a Chinese foreman at EJI took a Malay operator out for Chi-
nese New Year. After spending the night in Malacca, they returned to
her village and he was threatened by local youths. Her parents told
them to leave him alone. The next evening, four to five youths attacked
him outside the factory gates. In the words of the Malay supervi-
sor, he was “left half-dead and [was] unconscious for three days.”

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 190 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

He required some stitches on his forehead but intended to return to

work after a few days. When she heard the news, the operator cried
and visited him in the hospital. She believed that the attackers were
not from her village, otherwise her kumpung folk would know their
identities. She insisted that they had gone to Malacca with her par-
ents’ permission. According to rumors, all villagers, except her par-
ents, were angry about the dating because (1) the man was Chinese
and not a Muslim, (2) they did not know if the couple intended to get
married, and (3) they went outstation together without having been
married to each other. The supervisor commented that if her parents
had announced that the couple were engaged the attack would not
have taken place.
The anxiety this incident produced among co-workers is revealed
in the following statement:
When such an unfortunate incident occurs, we all help . . . the
other workers scold the operator. They reprimand her for mak-
ing this mistake. If she wanted just to be friendly, then she
shouldn’t have allowed it to develop into a conflict involving
someone of a different race. [This is because] if she goes out
with a non-Malay people will not look kindly upon it. This
was why they beat him up. If she had dated her own people,
it would have been alright, but she should not do it too often,
because if she does it frequently, it is not nice, is it? [Going out]
with non-Malays, once, twice is alright but if one does it regu-
larly, say four, five times, then people will say doesn’t she know
how to conduct herself? [We operators] have only scolded her
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

and told her not to do this again.

Another factory woman said that co-workers usually advised inter-
ethnic couples to forget their romantic interest in each other. It was
not a matter of feelings, she emphasized, but of social relations. Since
kampung elders would oppose marriage to “outsiders” (orang asing),
it would be difficult to maintain such relationships.
Special attention from foremen also generated competition, how-
ever covert, among operators. Their moralistic tones and censuring
statements were fraught with the effort of upholding noncapitalist
values and yet poisoned with secretly nurtured envy of the bebas
women. Women from other villages who rented rooms near the FTZ
were considered to be the most sosial. They were perceived to have
too much free time from housework and had no one to control their
movements. A worker from Sungai Jawa remarked:

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 191

I think that the workers who are bebas, I believe most of them
live in rented rooms, not with their families. It is possible that
this is one reason why they are not guided or restrained by
their families. Because of this, they feel bebas. Most of the [local]
workers do not want to be bebaslah, they are true Malays who
have been properly brought up by their parents.
Generally, migrant female workers were viewed by others as “not
wanting to follow kampung ways,” their general conduct frequently
described as “not Malay” (bukan Melayu).
Social independence displayed by some factory women was per-
ceived by the majority not only as a violation of local norms but a
road to personal disaster. Those women who want too much kebe-
basan (unseeming liberty), who wanted to do things their own way, it
was thought, would inevitably fall victim to unscrupulous men. Such
women, it was remarked, were “so free that they had no thought for
their families.” They followed “whatever their hearts desired” and
ended up “damaging themselves” (merosakkan diri sendiri), i.e., preg-
nant and abandoned. To most factory women, the charge of being
“too bebas” or “too sosial,” when they only sought freedom of move-
ment outside the kampung, was loaded with the implicit meaning
of looking for illicit sexual activities. Gossip became such a power-
ful mode of social control that the women themselves, by criticizing
others perceived to be more bebas while idealizing chastity, enforced
their own lack of emancipation, despite their ability to earn money
of their own.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Not surprisingly, positive attempts at constructing their own gender

identity depended on a cult of purity and self-sacrifice. Many neophyte
factory women in Sungai Jawa identified with an intensified Islamic
asceticism (advocated by dakwah members) which not only incorpo-
rated kampung emphasis on daughters’ loyalty and moral virtue but
also a new kind of sexual repression not inherent in earlier genera-
tions. Since the women’s new self-esteem was based on their wage
contributions as unmarried daughters, many postponed marriage to
fulfill such familial expectations, thus prolonging their junior status to
their parents and to male authority. In Sungai Jawa, the average age at
first marriage for women increased from 19 to 22 years between 1976
and 1980, when many village women began working in the FTZ.
Postponement of marriage introduced new problems of controlling
adult daughters and guarding their virtue. Malays acknowledge

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 192 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

sexual drives and provide cultural means for their adequate satisf-
action in daily life. Up until recently, parents arranged early mar-
riages for sons and daughters for (among other things) the legitimate
management of sexual needs (see Banks 1982: 88–90). When marriage
was delayed for women, their sexuality became more susceptible to
individual control; greater social discipline was considered neces-
sary to reduce this threat to male authority. Thus, the self-esteem and
self-image of rural factory women became inextricably tied to pro-
longed junior status, increased Islamic chastity, and the rejection of
social emancipation promised by wage employment. Many working
women continued to share the kampung and Malay vision of society
which was Islam-informed, dominated by men, and in which women
could not seek social autonomy. When asked about the distribution
of authority within her factory, an operator replied:
I think all [authority positions are filled by] men, only the charge-
hands and lineleaders are female. I feel that this [arrangement] is
just normal. . . . This I feel is really because we are women and
so must follow the orders of a man. In the house, this depends
on persons concerned, but outside the house, in the factory,
then we better obey [men’s] orders, whatever they say. Because
they are men and also their [work] rank is higher than ours. We
are only ordinary operators. If we have female foremen or female
supervisors, we will also have to follow their orders.
Another worker did not see any flexibility in male-female power
balance within the family, although she too saw the possibility of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

women gaining authority positions in the industrial system.

In Malay society, men ought to be at the top. Father has more
authority (kuasa) than mother because he is male. This is as it
should be. It is not surprising that at the workplace/factory
all the persons in authority are men. If women get promoted
along with men in the factory, then it is fine. In the house, it is
not possible that women have authority, because really men are
the ones with power. . . . In the home, whenever there are prob-
lems, women are inadequate, they cannot think deeply, like
men. Women are always hasty, they cry. Men try to think, to
rise above the problem. Thus, in other families, things are also
like this. Women today may have the same experiences as men
but in the home men ought to have more authority, because
this is an Islamic law.

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 Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image 193

Drawing on Islamic notions of women being more endowed with

passion and men with rationality, this young woman’s perceptions
were constituted by dakwah views on domestic power arrangements,
at a point when Islamic and social authorities were insisting on pater-
nalistic control just as working women threatened to undermine it
within the family rather than in society at large. .

Almost all factory women I interviewed felt that the Malaysian

public denigrated them. Pointing to the link between their “immoral”
image and weak market position, another worker protested:
(T)he chances for employment in this country are still limited.
In our country, we Malaysian women need greater security in
our livelihood so that there will be no occasion . . . to work
like street-walkers (macam pelacur). Such opportunities can be
greatly broadened since right now [our chances for work] are
limited. The jobs available are still limited compared to those
available to men. Also currently women who are employed are
very few and so they tend give priority to housework because
employment with the government [greatly desired by women]
is still restricted.
This statement, made by a Form Five graduate in the Telok FTZ,
more accurately pinpointed the problems of Malay working women
than the sensationalist coverage in the media.
It did not occur to any factory woman to question the overall
male-dominated systems in the household, factory, religion, and
wider society. They wished for an improvement in their economic
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

position but not a social emancipation in which they would share

power with men in general. However, the absence of an alternative
view of society did not mean that women workers were not engaged
in constituting their own subjectivity or in occational acts of defi-
ance in different fields of power relations. These did not constitute
“class consciousness.” The next chapter will consider their tactics of
resistance, a new vocabulary of protest and self-consciousness which
sporadically disrupted the surface of daily social conformity.

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 Chapter 9

Spirits of Resistance

We now turn to the off-stage voices of factory women, the self-

perceptions which have emerged, partly in reaction to the external
caricatures of their status, but mainly out of their own felt experiences
as wage workers in changing Malay society. I have argued that in a
society undergoing capitalist transformation, it is necessary not only
to decipher the dominant gender motifs which have become the sym-
bols of relations of domination and subordination, but also to discover,
in everyday choices and practices, how ordinary women and men live
and refashion their own images and culture. Disparate statements,
new gestures, and untypical episodes will be used to demonstrate
how concepts of gender and sexuality became transmuted through
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

the new experiences of the emergent Malay working class.

The contradictory experiences of Malay factory women indicate
that we need to reformulate the relationships among class, resistance,
and consciousness. Frederick Engels rather hastily asserted that the
first condition for the liberation of women from their oppressed status
was to bring the whole female sex into public industry (1972: 137–38).
As the previous chapter has shown, the first condition of women’s
induction into industry was subjection to increased external control.
This is not to deny that wage employment has also had gradual, cor-
rosive effects on the extraeconomic relationships which continued
to bind workers to their families and community. In Telok, it was
the particular insertion of Japanese industrial organization into the
kampung milieu which has preserved female compliance with male
authority and slowed individuation from the fabric of rural society.
195

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 196 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Ronald Dore has remarked elsewhere that the Japanese factory system
“enhances enterprise consciousness; it also . . . does less to develop
individualism” (1973: 215). Of course, extrafactory influences can
undo corporate restraints of self-expression.
For the village adolescent girl working in a Japanese factory,
her meager earnings became a means to venture further afield, to
explore and acquire a shifting, partial view of the widening social
universe. New relationships, ideas, and images imparted a fresh
self-consciousness and promptings to greater individual determina-
tion in thought and behavior. Assertion of individual versus family
interests has its source in a new subjectivity constituted as much by
educational practice, state agencies, and the media as by the labor
process. In the factories, consciousness of mistreatment as human
beings (manusia) by particular foremen or the management (majikan)
was partial and discontinuous; there was no coherent articulation of
exploitation in class or even feminist terms. At the most, one may
say that the following instances of individualistic conduct, acts of
defiance, and violent incidents were scattered tactics to define and
protect one’s moral status; as such they confronted the dehuman-
izing aspects embedded within capitalist relations of production. At
issue is not a conscious attack on commodity relations but rather the
self-constitution of a new identity rooted in human dignity.

A New Subjectivity
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

In Sungai Jawa, the most acceptable form of self-assertion among

factory women was their control of savings, i.e., after family contri-
butions had been deducted from their wages. Out of the 35 workers
I interviewed at length, two-thirds came from families with five to
nine siblings still at home. By routinely contributing half or more of
their monthly wage packet, these working daughters gained a mea-
sure of self-esteem which made the low wages somewhat more toler-
able. One young woman gave a practical assessment of her economic
situation.
Factory workers regard the work they hold not to be of high rank.
But although factory work is low status, they help their families
if they can. So they feel a little satisfaction — but not much.
Another woman worked out the family budget in which she and her
brother paid for vegetables and other foodstuffs while their father

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 Spirits of Resistance 197

bought the rice. She said that such an arrangement could be “consid-
ered fair” (jadi kira adillah juga).
Yet another operator chafed at her low wages and complained that
her co-workers did not have the proper perspective with which to
compare their earnings or situation with conditions in urban-based
factories. She commented:
(T)he workers, they cannot differentiate between the section in
which they work and other divisions. Thus, the party above
[i.e., the management] likes their ignorance and they work as
if they are imprisoned (kena kongkong). As we Malays say, “like
a frog beneath the coconut shell,” they don’t know about other
things.
A few factory women were concerned not with looking for better
conditions in factory work but viewed their wages as a means to
improve their technical qualifications in order to compete for better
jobs. Seventy percent of the interviewed workers had Form Three to
Form Six certificates; one-third were using a portion of their factory
earnings to pay for typing or academic classes which they attended
after the factory shift. These classes were based in urban institutions,
usually in Klang, and the commuting involved additional expenses.
Most of the operators aspired to permanent careers in government
service, stating that they would not stop work even if they got mar-
ried and had children, because civil employment was well-paid and
secure. Some factory workers had voiced interest in becoming police-
women, and one, in becoming a nightclub singer or firefighter.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

For most adolescent girls in the kampung, looking for a steady job
has become the rule once they left or dropped out of school. Earlier
generations of young women had fewer years of schooling, married
in their teens, and only worked intermittently for wages in village
smallholdings or estates. With the introduction of mass education,
better communications, and establishment of the factories, village
girls wanted to seek their own employment and earn their own
income of their own accord and not just under family pressure. For
instance, an 18-year-old woman from the rice district of Sabak Ber-
nam had left a large family of girls to stay with her married sister in
Sungai Jawa in order to work in the FTZ. When asked why the pub-
lic looked askance at outstation factory women, she answered:
Maybe village people regard female workers as less than sweet
(kurang manis) because a nice woman in their view stays in the

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 198 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

house. But because in this era women and men are of the same
status (sama taraf) then we also want to seek experiences like
men, in earning a living, looking for a job. . . .
Seeking work for their own economic interest also meant facing the
uncertainty of their market situation, compared to the relative secu-
rity of peasant families who could make a living off their own land.
When asked whether her economic situation could be considered
better than her parents’, a factory woman replied:
I feel that [comparing] myself with my parents, their work situ-
ation is better. Since I work in the private sector, the manage-
ment at whatever time . . . can throw me out (bolih membuangkan
saya) . . . but in their work, my parents are self-employed and
there is no one who can prevent them [from working].

Another woman noted, however, that it was nevertheless preferable

that there was factory employment for women, since it was increas-
ingly difficult for men to find work in the kampung. Although rural
women sought in factory employment a source of independent
wealth, in practice, their low wages, the unavoidable claims of their
families, and insecurity of employment did not provide a sufficient
basis for economic independence.
For the majority of factory women then, their modest savings were
employed as a means of compensation for hard work, low wages,
and family support. Shopping expeditions after payday, when kam-
pung women to go into town, were consumption activities to make
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

up for long hours lost to the factory. “Leisure” became detached

from “work” as the rhythm of their lives changed. A village woman
described her joyful splurge in town.
After getting my wage I straight away go to Klang to jolli jolli.
I go to the movies and walk around. I buy knickknacks for the
house, and sometimes I buy clothes.

“Making jolly with money” (jolli duit) was also part of the overall
attempt by some rural women to change their status from ascribed
(kampung) to attributional. In their excursions into towns and farther
places, young village women were exposed to an alternative status
system based on the attributes of an urban-based, Westernized cul-
ture. Some working women demonstrated this alternative status
largely defined by consumption and “presentation of self” (Goffman
1959). They went into town in their Malay baju kurong and returned

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 Spirits of Resistance 199

in mini-skirts or tight T-shirts and jeans. Whereas in the recent past

the painted face was a mark of prostitution, regular visits by “Avon
ladies” to even remote villages have increased kampung cosmetic
sales fourfold in two years.1 Village women were said to be willing
to spend a great deal to achieve the “Electric Look.” Such a code of
dressing may be construed as simply consumerism, an attempt to
ape urban “youth culture.” However, it was also a deliberate mecha-
nism to distance themselves from the kampung community and seek
acceptance in the urban milieu. For some women, such inventive
presentation of self also challenged kampung definition of male and
female sexuality. A village woman observed with some hostility:
(I)t is not nice the way [some factory women] attempt to imi-
tate male style. Like, they want to be rugged. For instance, men
wear “Wrangler,” they want to follow suite . . . some of them
straight away take on the attributes of men in their clothing,
they forget their sex. If they are already very bebas they forget
that they themselves are women.
Indeed, kampung women increasingly sought rights previously lim-
ited to men. Almost all factory women chose their potential spouses
either directly, through correspondence, or by accepting a suitor’s
overtures. This autonomy was directly based on their earning power,
since increasingly, village women were expected to save and con-
tribute towards their own wedding expenses and bridal furnishings.
Most village parents have given up arranging marital unions for
their children, although “go-betweens” were still hired to formalize
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

matches privately initiated by the couple itself. In a few cases, espe-

cially when the family had no male head, the young women simply
announced to their mothers that they were getting engaged. Some
mothers were even unaware of their daughters’ courtship and simply
went along with their personal arrangements for marriage. A village
mother told me that young women could meet potential husbands
all over the place — in the factories, in towns, on their way to work
— and there was no possible way, nor inclination, on the part of the
parents to monitor their daughters’ social contacts with men. Most
young women I interviewed would not let their parents pick their
future spouses, the usual retort being “What if I don’t like him?”
Such self-determination and ability to resist parental authority
increased young women’s awareness of control over a personal life
separate from that of the family. One heard numerous cases of young

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 200 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

working women running away from home to escape intolerable

domestic situations. For instance, a 21-year-old operator from Banting
was ordered by her mother to marry a well-off man in his forties. She
told me that she rejected the match and planned to resign from ENI
and go stay with her married sister in Kuala Lumpur. A 19-year-old
woman confided to the factory nurse that she had been involved in
an incestuous relationship with her widowed father for three years.
The negative result of her pregnancy test was a source of relief to the
factory medical staff since they were uncertain about what to do with
the case. Subsequently, the woman took her own decision and sought
refuge with her maternal grandmother in town. Even with limited
economic independence, village women demonstrated an emerging
sense of personal responsibility in dealing with the consequences of
their action, thereby challenging kampung notions about the helpless-
ness of budak budak.
As Chapter 6 has shown, individuation in economic matters, atti-
tudes, and conduct has led a small but growing number of rural
women to bypass kampung conventions and cross different social
boundaries on their own. While “illicit” love between single people
or persons not married to each other has always been part of vil-
lage society, we may say with some confidence that “dating” prac-
tices have become more common with the large-scale participation
of young women and men in wage employment. What has changed
is that affairs between single persons, which in former times usually
culminated in marriage, now have less certain outcomes as village
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

elders lose their ability to enforce social norms over an increasingly

mobile and dispersed population. Since the opening of the FTZ, four
cases of abortions have been reported among unmarried factory
women in the area. A woman from Sungai Jawa had her illegitimate
child in the home of a married sister and then gave the infant up
for adoption in another village. Other unwed factory women who
became pregnant had abortions outside the mukim, and thereafter
sought employment in other villages and towns. Female relatives
provided sympathy and material support to help these women
begin life anew.2
In venturing beyond the socially confined circumstances of kam-
pung life, factory women also came into increasing daily contact
with other Malaysians. Talking about her workplace, an operator
disclosed her widening social horizon:

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 Spirits of Resistance 201

(T)here I have friends from Pahang, Trengganu all from far

away. . . . For instance, if they come from Negri Sembilan, I come
to know their customs and traditions . . . the way of life in their
state.
Other young women began to associate, for the first time in their
lives, with non-Malays as co-workers and friends.
(W)e get to mix widely with peoples other than Malays — Indi-
ans, Chinese and other who are not Malaysians. My thinking
has already changed little by little as I get to know their man-
nerisms, their ways. Previously, before we had experience,
when we were not yet bebas, we did not get to know their ways,
but now little by little we are learning about other races.
The proletarianization of rural Malays and increasing daily associ-
ation with workers of other ethnic identities do not inevitably lead to
a political movement which would replace ethnic hostility with class
consciousness, as some scholars have claimed (Zawawi and Shahril
1983). The structuring of social relations and class interests along
ethnic lines by industry, state agencies, and groups founded on com-
munal interests would continue to constitute the “reality” whereby
ordinary people conducted their lives and achieved practical con-
sciousness. In the Telok industrial system, which by economic calcu-
lation and political expediency was a miniature replica of the wider
ethnic and gender divided society, conflicts produced by unequal
relations of production often took on ethnic tones.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Unleased Spirits: The World Decentered

The basis [of capitalist society] is that a relation between
people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a
“phantom objectivity,” an autonomy so strictly rational and
all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental
nature: the relation between people.
Lukács (1982: 83)

As capitalist development reworks the basis of social relations,

the changing sense of personhood and of things is most intensively
experienced in the realm of production. However, consciousness of
injustice and being treated “like things” among neophyte factory
women was partial, discontinuous, and seldom articulated. Sporadic
forms of protest, both overt and covert, were not so much informed

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 202 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

by a specific class consciousness as by the felt violation of one’s

fundamental humanity.
As elsewhere in the Peninsula, the self-definition of Malay peasants
in Telok was still overlaid with noncapitalist native status categories,
primarily extraeconomic, which still prevailed in contexts increas-
ingly defined by capitalist relations.3 Self-definition among rural
Malays was at once localized and universal: orang kampung versus
orang asing (villagefolk versus outsiders); orang Islam and the legal
term bumiputra vis-à-vis orang asing (in the sense of persons outside
the Islamic-Malay community). This social consciousness, as Hob-
sbawm has commented about noncapitalist cultures, was simultane-
ously lilliputian and global; it often went beyond any consciousness
of “classness” among agrarian peoples (1971: 10). As I have argued
in preceding chapters, peasant adherence to noncapitalist worldview
has been used to advantage by capitalist enterprises both to enhance
control and disguise commodity relations. However, the noncapital-
ist universe can also furnish rural people with a moral critique of
the dehumanizing aspects of market relations.4 In Telok, culturally-
specific forms of protest and retaliation in the corporate arena were
directed ultimately not at “capital” but at the transgression of local
boundaries governing proper human relations and moral justice. A
young woman from Sungai Jawa disclosed her sense of having been
tricked into working under unjust conditions by the management:
For instance, . . . sometimes . . . they want us to raise produc-
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

tion. This is what we sometimes contest (bantahlah). The work-

ers want just treatment (keadilan), as for instance, in relation to
wages and other matters. We feel that in this situation there
are many [issues] to dispute (bertengkar) over with the manage-
ment — because we have to work three shifts and when the
midnight shift arrives we feel sort of drowsy and yet have to use
the microscope, and with our wages so low we feel as though we
have been tricked or forced (seolah macam dipaksa).

This is why we ask for justice because we have to use the

microscope. . . . Justice because sometimes they exhaust us very
much as if they do not think that we too are human beings
(manusia) . . . so that from time to time we must protest, that
they should not rap (menutuk) us too much.
Most factory operators, less outspoken, nevertheless felt the same
sense of having been taken. They resorted to indirect resistance which

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 Spirits of Resistance 203

was culturally consistent with their subordinate female status. Capi-

talizing on beliefs in their emotional instability and susceptibility to
male power, factory women reacted in expected ways to intolerable
demands. Crying was a common response to verbal abuse which
could deflect disciplinary action. Some operators who could not keep
up with repeated orders to attain high production targets deliber-
ately slowed down their normal pace of work, became careless in the
assembly of components, or simply lost their temper. In their resis-
tance to being treated like things, mounting work pressures (tekanan),
and harsh (keras) foremen, workers often cultivated an unconcerned,
uncomprehending (tidak apa) attitude towards orders and the technical
details of production. A common tactic was to make excuses to leave
the shopfloor by citing “female problems” which had to be attended
to in the locker room. Alternately, they sought release to adjourn to the
prayer room, confronting foremen who tried to limit prayer time. Thus,
cultural conformity and covert resistance fed on each other as factory
women in daily life fought for and held on to a residual space for the
preservation of human dignity. However, the locker room and prayer
room, as refuge from work discipline and surveillance, were also the
places in which operators were seized upon by vengeful spirits.
The rural Malay universe is still inhabited by spirits which move
easily between human and nonhuman domains. Thus, familiar spir-
its such as toyol help their masters reap wealth out of thin air, while
the pontianak birth demon threatens the life of newly born infants.
Another group consists of possessing spirits which are associated
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

with special places marking the boundary between human and natu-
ral worlds. These include (1) aboriginal (Negrito) and animal spirits
inhabiting old burial grounds, strangely shaped rocks, hills, or trees;
(2) holy men or well-known ancestors (datuk) dwelling in sacred
abodes (kramat), such as grave sites and natural objects; and (3) syaitan
(evil spirits) of Islamic origin. Malays believe that women lacking in
spiritual vigilance become possessed by angry spirits (kena hantu)
when the victims wander unsuspectingly onto the sacred dwelling
places of spirits. In his study of spirit seances in Kelantan villages,
Clive Kessler observes that middle-aged women were particularly
susceptible to spirit affliction, possibly because of their vulnerable
social status at this phase of their life cycle (1977). Susan Ackerman
maintains that in rural Malacca threats of spirit possession operate as
a sanction against self-assertion on the part of young Malay women

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 204 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

engaged in industrial work (1979: 13). Over the past decade, spirit
possession episodes have proliferated among the young Malay
women who flock in the thousands to urban institutions. Newspa-
per reports of the sudden spate of “mass hysteria” among young
Malay women in boarding schools and modern factories have inter-
preted their causes in terms of “examination tension,” “the stresses of
urban living,” “superstitious beliefs,” and, less frequently, “mount-
ing pressures” which induced “worries” (keciwa) among female
operators.5

The Management View of “Mass Hysteria”

The late 1970s produced a flurry of newspaper reports on “mass
hysteria” in free trade zones.6 In 1975, forty Malay operators were
seized by spirits in a large American electronics plant based in Sun-
gai Way. A second large-scale incident in 1978 involved some 120
operators in the microscope sections. The factory had to be shut
down for three days and a spirit-healer (bomoh) was hired to slaugh-
ter a goat on the premises. The American director wondered how
he was to explain to corporate headquarters that “8,000 hours of
production were lost because someone saw a ghost.”7 In late 1978,
a Penang-based American microelectronics factory was disrupted
for three consecutive days when fifteen women became afflicted by
spirit possession. A factory personnel officer told reporters.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Some girls started sobbing and screaming hysterically and

when it seemed like spreading, the other workers in the pro-
duction line were immediately ushered out. . . . It is a common
belief among workers that the factory is “dirty” and supposed
to be haunted by a datuk.8
The victims were given injectable sedatives while hundreds of other
female workers were sent home. A bomoh was called to ritually cleanse
the factory premises, but workers’ demands for a feast (kenduri)
elicited no response. A few days after the incident, I interviewed
some workers about “filth” (kotor) in the factory. They pointed out
that the production floor and canteen areas were “very clean,” but
factory toilets were “filthy” in two senses: pollution by soiled sani-
tary napkins and by evil spirits. In recounting the incident, a worker
remembered that a piercing scream from one corner of the shop-
floor was quickly followed by cries from other benches as women

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 Spirits of Resistance 205

struggled against spirits trying to possess them. They would struggle

so hard that sometimes ten supervisors could not control one afflicted
worker who would shout “Go away!” Most spirit incidents were also
linked to the appearance of datuk apparitions, sometimes headless,
gesticulating angrily at the operators. A third example occurred in
1980 when spirits afflicted 21 women workers in a Japanese factory
based in Pontian, Kelantan. As they were being taken to ambulances,
some victims screamed, “I will kill you, let me go!”9
In Kuala Langat, spirit possession incidents among Malay factory
women reiterated themes of filth, angry spirits, fierce struggles, and
rites of exorcism. Interviews with factory managers and workers
reveal contrasting interpretations of the episodes: biomedical causes
versus pollution-violation imagery. At ENI, the personnel manager
said that the first spirit affliction occurred five months after the fac-
tory began operation in 1976. Thereafter,
we had our counter-measure. I think this is a method of how
you give initial education to the workers, how you take care of
the medical welfare of the workers. The worker who is weak,
comes in without breakfast, lacking sleep, then she will see
ghosts!
Those who have had two previous experiences of affliction were dis-
missed for “security reasons.” Village elders protested, claiming that
ghosts in the factory were responsible for the women’s condition.
The manager agreed but pointed out that these “hysterical, mental
types” may hurt themselves when they flailed against the machines,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

risking electrocution. In his view, “hysteria” is a symptom of the

women’s rural-urban transition. “They move from home idleness to
factory discipline. The ghosts disturb only the new girls.” In contrast
to managers in other firms who operated on the “basis of feelings,”
he used a “psychological approach” to deal with recurrent spirit visi-
tations:
You cannot dispel kampung beliefs. Now and then we call the
bomoh to come, every six months or so, to [waving his hand
vaguely] pray, walk around. Then we take pictures of the bomoh
in the factory and hang up the pictures. Somehow, the workers
seeing these pictures feel safe, [seeing] that the place has been
exorcised.
Similarly, whenever a new section of the factory has been constructed,
the bomoh is sent for to sprinkle holy water, thereby assuring workers

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 206 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

that the place is rid of ghosts. Furthermore, the factory nurse period-
ically toured the shopfloor to encourage female workers to talk over
their problems with the “industrial relations assistant.” Complaints
of “pain in the chest” (sakit dada) meant that the workers were emo-
tionally upset and should be allowed to go to the clinic. The nurse
also recommended that spirit possession victims be sent home for a
day or two on medical leave. However, neither she nor the industrial
relations assistant was consulted about the policy to sack workers
after their third affliction. She noted:
It is an experience working with a Japanese company; they do
not consult women. To tell you the truth, they don’t care about
the problem except that it should go away.
EJI also commenced operations in a spate of spirit possession
incidents. The production supervisor told me that in the following
year, a well-known bomoh and his retinue were invited to the factory
surau where they read the yasin prayer over a basin of “pure water.”
Those who have been visited by the devil drank from it and washed
their faces, a healing ritual which made them immune to future
spirit attacks. A kenduri of saffron rice and curry chicken was served
to managers and officers, but not a single operator (or victim) was
invited. A month after the ritual, spirit attacks resumed, but involv-
ing smaller numbers (one or two) of women in each incident. The
bomoh claimed that the hantu controlling the factory site was “very
kind”; he merely showed himself but did not disturb people. Now
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spirit attacks occurred only once a month. Last year, the supervisor
sent home a possessed woman who was all rigid, with eyes turned
inwards. She had put up a terrific struggle. Since the nurse could not
do anything to help, the victim was given special leave of up to a
week, to be healed by the bomoh in her home village. The supervisor
admitted, “I think that hysteria is related to the job in some cases.”
He explained that workers in the microscope sections were usually
the ones to kena hantu, and maybe they should not begin work doing
those tasks. However, he quickly offered other possible interpreta-
tions. There was one victim whose broken engagement had incurred
her mother’s wrath; at work she cired and talked to herself, saying
“I am not to be blamed, not me!” Another worker, seized by posses-
sion, screamed, “Send me home, send me home!” Apparently, her
mother had taken all her earnings. What do the spirit attacks really
mean to factory workers themselves?

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 Spirits of Resistance 207

In Their Own Voices

I wish to discover, in the vocabulary of spirit possession, the
unconscious beginnings of an idiom of protest against labor disci-
pline and male control in the modern industrial situation. Spirit visi-
tations to both foreign and local factories with sizeable numbers of
young Malay female workers engender devil images which dramati-
cally reveal the contradictions between Malay and capitalist ways of
apprehending the human condition. I.M. Lewis has suggested that
women’s spirit possession episodes are “thinly disguised protest . . .
against the dominant sex.” By “capitalizing on their distress,” the
victims of spirit possession called public attention to their subordi-
nate position and sought to alleviate it (1971: 31, 85). In the following
cases, spirit imageries reveal not only a mode of unconscious retali-
ation against male authority but fundamentally a sense of disloca-
tion in human relations and a need for greater spiritual vigilance in
domains reconstituted by capitalist relations of production.
An ENI operator described one incident which occurred in May 1979:
It was the afternoon shift, at about nine o’clock. All was
quiet. Suddenly, [the victim] started sobbing, laughed and then
shrieked. She flailed at the machine . . . she was violent, she
fought as the foreman and technician pulled her away. Alto-
gether, three operators were afflicted. . . . The supervisor and
foremen took them to the clinic and told the driver to send
them home. . . .
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She did not know what happened . . . she saw a hantu, a

were-tiger. Only she saw it, and she started screaming. . . . The
foremen would not let us talk with her for fear of recurrence.
She was possessed, maybe because she was spiritually weak.
She was not spiritually vigilant so that when she saw the hantu
she was instantly afraid and screamed. Usually, the hantu likes
people who are spiritually weak, yes. People say that the work-
place is haunted by the hantu who dwells below . . . well, this
used to be all jungle, it was a burial ground before the factory
was built. The devil disturbs those who have weak constitution
. . . [therefore] one should guard against being easily startled,
or afraid.
In a separate interview, another female worker told me what hap-
pened after the “penyakit histeria” (hysteria affliction) broke out:
The work section was not shut down, we had to continue work-
ing. Whenever it happened, the other workers felt frightened.

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 208 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

A bomoh divining the cause of a young woman’s affliction.

They were not allowed to look because [the management]

feared contagion. They would not permit us to leave. When an
incident breaks out, we have to move away. . . . At ten o’clock
they called the bomoh to come . . . because he knew that the
hantu had already entered the woman’s body. He came in and
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scattered flour all over area where the incident broke out. He
recited prayers over [holy] water. He sprinkled water on places
touched by the hantu. . . . The bomoh chanted incantations (jam-
pi jampi) chasing the hantu away. He then gave some medicine
to the afflicted . . . He also entered the clinic, jampi jampi.

[After their recovery, the victims] never talk about [their afflic-
tion] because they don’t remember . . . like insane people, they
don’t remember their experiences. Maybe the hantu is still
working on their madness, maybe because their experiences
have not been stilled, or maybe yet their souls are now dis-
turbed (jiwa terganggu).
Other interviews elicited the same images: the erection of the FTZ on
the burial grounds of aboriginal groups; disturbed earth and grave
spirits swarming through the factory premises, weretigers roaming

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 Spirits of Resistance 209

the shopfloor. Women not spiritually vigilant were possessed by the

hantu. The bomoh was hastily summoned to perform exorcist rites.
Recovering victims suffered from amnesia, their souls not properly
healed. A woman told me about her aunt’s fright in the EJI prayer
room.
She was in the middle of praying when she fainted because she
said . . . her head suddenly spun and something pounced on
her from behind.
Furthermore:
Workers saw “things” appear when they went to the toilet.
Once, when a woman entered the toilet she saw a tall figure in
the midst of licking sanitary towels [“Modess” supplied in the
cabinet]. It had a long tongue, and those sanitary towels . . .
cannot be used anymore.
These vivid images of harassment by spirits on the factory floor and
places of “refuge” like the prayer room and toilets are symbolic con-
figurations of the violation, chaos, and draining of one’s essence. Per-
vasive threats of possession induced the need for vigilance, looking
behind one’s back and over the shoulder to guard one’s body and
soul against violation. The bomoh has become a fixture of transna-
tional production operations in Malaysia; however, his slaughter of
chickens or goats on factory premises has been insufficient to placate
the unleashed, avenging spirits of a world torn asunder.
A medical model is increasingly replacing native interpretations of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

spirit attacks. Using terms like penyakit histeria, some operators have
come to accept scientific explanations of these events, as offered by
the management. Thus, one operator mused:
They say they saw hantu, but I don’t know. . . . I believe that
maybe they . . . when they come to work, they did not fill their
stomachs, they were not full so that they felt hungry. But they
were not brave enough to say so.
The male technician gave an even more alien reading of the women’s
afflictions, as much to convince the anthropologist as himself.
I think that this [is caused by] a feeling of complex, that
maybe inferiority complex is pressing them down, their spirit,
so that this can be called an illness of the spirit (penyakit
jiwa), conflict jiwa, emotional conflict. Sometimes, they see an

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 210 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

old man, in black shrouds, they say, in their microscopes,

they say. . . . I myself don’t know how. They see hantu in dif-
ferent places. . . . Some time ago an emergency incident like
this occurred in a boarding school. The victim fainted. Then
she became very strong like a strongman or a strong girl. It
required ten or twenty persons to handle her. . . .
If indeed spirit possession episodes provided female workers the
guise to launch attacks on male staff members, they certainly never
came close to challenging male authority on the factory floor or else-
where. In effect, the enactment of “ritualised rebellion” (Gluckman
1958) by Malay women in modern factories did not directly confront
the real cause of their distress, and instead, by operating as a safety
valve, tended to reinforce existing unequal relations which are fur-
ther legitimized by scientific notions of female maladjustment. A
woman in ENI talked sadly about her friend, dual victim of spirits
and industrial discrimination:
At the time the management wanted to throw her out, to end
her work, she cried. She did ask to be reinstated, but she has
had three [episodes] already . . . I think that whether it was
right or not [to expell her] depends [on the circumstances],
because she has already worked here for a long time; now that
she has been thrown out she does not know what she can do,
you know.
In circumstances calling for the denial of oppressive conditions,
some operators slipped into the vacuous state induced by popular
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music. Malay, Hindustani, and Chinese tunes, adjusted to a sooth-

ing level, alternating by the hour, were piped into the shopfloor. It
helped them forget their bodily aches or the work they were doing
because they were borne along in daydreams. Others cultivated a
spiritual vigilance through performing more prayers, to shield them-
selves against attacks by malevolent spirits.

More direct tactics have emerged for silent renegotiations of rules

on the shopfloor. Some operators, without the guise of spirit posses-
sion, have undertaken deliberate but surreptitious attacks on fac-
tory equipment. Such machine wrecking is to be differentiated from
the preunion tradition of early English labor movements which by
publicly attacking factory property, engaged in “collective bargain-
ing by riot” (Hobsbawm 1964: 6–7).10 In the Telok FTZ, the sub-
versive acts were spontaneous, carried out by individual workers

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 Spirits of Resistance 211

independently of each other. When production targets seemed

unbearable, or a foreman had been especially harsh, operators reg-
istered their private vengeance by damaging the very components
that they had painstakingly assembled. Others stalled the machines
and thus interrupted production. The cumulative effect of countless
subversive acts, as evidenced in thousands of defective components
at the end of the month, constituted an anonymous protest against
mounting work pressures rather than a collective action with spe-
cific demands on the management. The Malay technician quoted
above explained this subterranean resistance.
There is certainly a lot of discipline . . . but when there is too
much discipline, . . . it is not good. Because of this the operators,
with their small wages, will always contest. They often break the
machines in ways that are not apparent. . . . Sometimes they dam-
age the products . . . This is something entirely up to the individ-
ual operator, [an action taken] on their own. I feel that it is indeed
proper that they do this because their wages are small and we
cannot blame them. Blaming operator is nothing [sic] because . . . if
they have problems they are not about to tell anyone. Because
others will not listen to their complaints . . . Because they do not
have a union. I cannot [propose wage increases on their behalf]
because if you value yourself you want to get promotion if you
can, and so we can’t talk about this [to the management]. Thus,
all that I do is behind the scenes. Because if one cares about one’s
future, one’s career, then one is forced to keep quiet. Thus, even
if one sympathizes with the operator (simpati dengan operator),
one is not brave enough to speak up.
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In the absence of a union, covert revolts sometimes developed into

acts of retaliation against factory men, the intimate supervisors as
well as tormentors of operators in daily life. Factory women on occa-
sion manipulated their kinsmen’s sense of honor by gossiping and
crying about mistreatment in the FTZ. In 1976, an Indian foreman
was set upon, “beaten and badly hurt on the face and stomach by
an unknown gang,” according to EJI records. A Malay assistant fore-
man coming to his aid was also beaten up. According to an informal
questioning of workers, the foreman deserved punishment because
he refused workers their 15 minute breaks, insulted them about per-
sonal matters, followed women into the locker room, and threatened
to terminate their employment whenever he felt necessary. He became
blacklisted among village youths. In spite of the incident, the foreman

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 212 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

was retained and told to modify his conduct. Of the operators he had
terrorized, only one resigned in protest. I have already mentioned the
Chinese foreman who was beaten up for dating an operator. Another
Chinese foreman said that this was only part of the story. All male
supervisors in the factory, he claimed, had been privately warned by
Malay youths that reports of their mistreatment of women workers
would invite physical retaliation. Operators pointed fingers at fore-
men who were said to restrict their rights to pray, to move about
on the shopfloor, or who pressed them too hard to attain high pro-
duction targets. Kampung youths, in the tradition of enforcing rough
justice and settling scores, were ready to make covert attacks on the
blacklisted factory men. Possibly, in the case of the Chinese foreman,
his romance with a Malay worker marked him out as a scapegoat
to be used as warning to all male factory staff. There had been at
least two other incidents of nocturnal attacks on male workers —
none of local origin — outside the FTZ gates. Rural youths not only
empathized with the women’s harassment in the workplace, they
were also resentful of these outsiders, both non-Malays and Malays,
placed in daily contact with nubile Malay women.
The policing of rural society by young men focused on deviant social
behavior, particularly when “outsiders” were involved. Kampung
elders gave tacit approval to such activities, including attacks on out-
side men who were perceived to be infringing on local territory and
young women. Any untoward behavior, such as frequent visits to the
home of an unmarried woman, could be considered as “dishonoring”
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

her reputation. Such an intrusion was to be redressed by youths wav-

ing staves to warn off the culprit, ripping up his bicycle/motorcycle
tires, or giving him a thrashing. This kampung mode of enforcing social
norms has come to constitute the shadowy side of rural relations with
“strangers” at the FTZ. The two mukim policemen usually feigned
igornance of such violent incidents since they were regarded as within
the province of kampung leaders. Factory managers too avoided direct
confrontation over the incidents, preferring to negotiate privately
with local headmen and policemen over possible measures to reduce
attacks against factory men. For their part, the “protection” village
youths extended to working women compensated for their reduced
sense of “honor,” intangible values in effect purchased by female earn-
ings which helped sustain rural livelihood.

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 Spirits of Resistance 213

The lamentations of possession victims decry the dislocations

experienced by peasants in an industrializing world. The issue is
not one of “false consciousness” or everyday forms of resistance
which may culminate in large-scale rebellion. In the factories set up
by transnational corporations, the constitution of new subjectivities
unavoidably calls forth countertactics which proceed against neither
capitalism nor the state. The spirit imageries of filth and violation
speak out against male oppression as well as a deep sense of moral
decentering, insisting on an ancient equality rooted in common
(ungendered) humanity. Where self-regulation failed, the inscription
of microprotests on damaged microchips constituted an anonymous
resistance against the relentless demands of the industrial system.
These nomadic tactics, operating in diverse fields of power, speak
not of class revolt but only of the local situation.
The syaitan hovers over the passage of Malay peasants from a moral
economy to an economy of commodities. Inducted into production
systems where principles of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly
are the cybernetics of control, Malay women have emigrated to the
state of twentieth century homelessness. In constructing substitute
homes and new identities, Malay working classes may recreate a col-
lective consciousness which will transcend particularistic, kampung
bonds.
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 Chapter 10

Conclusion

As I made ready to leave the field, my ears registered something odd in

the kampung lingo which had become overly familiar. The daily talk of
young women and men, who had learned to read and write but not how
to speak English, was liberally sprinkled with “I” and “you” in place
of “aku” and “kau” or “kamu.”These could be read as linguistic signs
of complicity by rural Malays in their own domination by an English-
speaking world. Indeed, rural folk noted that English was spoken by the
guru, and pegawai, even the sultan; it was the medium of a new prestige
which had finally come within the reach of the kampung- born and bred.
And yet, their “I”s and “you”s embedded in Malay speech bespoke a
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

concentrated self-consciousness, an assertion of individuality within the

modulated and self-effacing discourse of villagers. Whereas some vil-
lage women only found in spirit possession a preconscious vocabulary
denied them in everyday life, other rural women and men discovered in
phrases of American English the means to fashion new linguistic forms
which altered their relations with each other and with the world.
In this cultural drama enacted in a corner of the Malay Peninsula,
I have drawn on the archives and participated in fieldwork, using
my ears as much as my eyes, to capture some of the disruptions and
contradictory forces at work in Kuala Langat and beyond. I eschewed
explanations of cultural change determined by an overriding logic
others have sought in “modernization” or “the capitalist mode of pro-
duction.” I also refrained from making coherent “the native’s point
of view,” since there are many different kinds of “natives” and I had
215

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 216 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

contact with only a few hundred. These presented a diversity of opin-

ions and views, all historically constituted and varying by ethnicity,
class, gender, and exposure to alien cultural elements. In capturing
some of the discontinuities of experience in cultural change, and the
multifoci of contestation in an industrializing society, I aimed to break
with conventional ethnographic practice and to produce a partial pic-
ture of changes within a segment of Malay society, not to claim to have
represented the “Truth.” It is incomplete, fraught with ambiguity and
shifting perceptions, the way life is experienced by people who live
outside ethnographic texts.
My aim has been to place human interest at the center of the eth-
nographic endeavor. Specifically, I sought to learn how some rural
women and men have struggled to understand their experiences of
changing relations of domination and subordination in the Malay
Peninsula from British intervention onwards. I began by looking at
the incorporation of Malay cultivators into a world capitalist sys-
tem, but came to question whether changing relations of production
constitute a privileged category in our understanding of cultural
change and people’s sense of themselves in a particular society.
As my writing unfolded, it became clear that I was looking at the
complex and shifting series of power relations which have come to
shape everyday existence, both for the informants and the anthro-
pologist, in the late twentieth century. We are enmeshed in different
but overlapping fields of power, using different cultural strategies
in interpreting local conditions and our places in the world. Can
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

anthropologists and other social scientists continue to hide behind

apparently “scientific” or “naive” claims to “objective” representa-
tions? The microrelations of departments, in controlling the content
of journals, conferences, and other academic institutions, continue
to reproduce “anthropology” according to established frameworks
(from functionalism to political economy), while screening out “ille-
gitimate” forms of ethnographic descriptions which question their
authorized representation logic. June Nash’s We Eat the Mines and
the Mines Eat Us and Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity
Fetishism in South America are rare ethnographic attempts to explore
cultural change generated in encounters between local and global
conditions (Rabinow 1985: 12). My task in this book has been to hew
closely to the views of a subjected people, which both incorporate
and challenge imposed Western categories of rationality.

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 Conclusion 217

It has become fashionable in recent years to handle power in terms

of given unities and oppositions: monopoly of power versus the
powerless, domination versus resistance, exploitation versus pro-
test. Anthropologists have yet to find descriptive forms, beyond
“naive” functionalism or imputed “false consciousness,” to consider
people’s complicity in, and transformation of, their own domination.
This has been a study of how rural Malays engaged in cultural con-
structions and reconstructions within the capitalist transformation
of their society. Their tactics of resistance, retaliation, and negotia-
tion shifted according to the institution of successive modes of disci-
pline in production systems and other areas of life. Their ideological
understanding of changes in local society centered around a making
and remaking of self and of social conditions at different phases of
integration within the world system.
In Chapter 2, I discussed how British colonial administration
involved not only the introduction of new relations of production
and exchange but also novel constructions of Malay identity in
relation to subsistence agriculture, land, and the wider society. My
gleanings of archival records revealed that rural Malays in coastal
Selangor resisted agrarian policies which discouraged cash cropping
on village lands. Malay village households made the transition to
commodity production, evolving multi-occupational strategies to
cope with the vicissitudes of the world market system within which
they were now embedded. Except for a small group of civil servants,
few were able to accumulate wealth to increase social differentiation
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

within village society.

In Part II, the critical role of the post-independence state in the
reconstructions of social life provided the context for my discussion of
changing agrarian relations and the emergence of a Malay proletariat
in Kuala Langat. Chapter 3 mapped out the contours of a new tropi-
cal economy based on small holdings, plantations, and the ‘free trade
zones’ served by a fine communications network, which variously
embodied contemporary forms of domination by capital and the state.
The expanded structures of administrative offices and political parties
not only sustained and reproduced new relations of control but also
reformulated local expectations about Malay culture, social mobility,
ethnic and gender identities. Political discourse on Malay pembangu-
nan, together with bureaucratic mechanisms for selective individual
upward mobility, provided cultural justification of the social order.

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 218 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

Thus, ideological domination operated not necessarily as a coherent

system of statements issued from above, but rather through a com-
plex series of mechanisms whereby meaning was coded and mobi-
lized in the daily activities of kampung folk: in development projects,
school programs, welfare services, party politicking, and religious
practice. The dominated were generally in complicity with the appro-
priation of the fruits of their labor; there was no inevitable resistance
from below, informed by an apparent logic of struggle against capital-
ism or the state. For the nascent Malay proletariat, problems of land
hunger, official corruption, and unequal distribution of the spoils of
“development” did not undercut state legitimacy, and demands for
justice were couched in personalized terms, within the field of local
power relations. Through varied policies deployed in the name of
“development,” the meanings of female sexuality were defined and
redefined in terms of discipline of the body in the factory and social
control of the body politic.
Under conditions of new linkages to the state bureaucracy, ex-
panded labor markets, population growth, and mass education, rural
households increasingly sought in cash farming and wage labor the
necessary means of survival. In Chapter 4, I discussed why old forms
of household strategizing — through the deployment of family labor in
agriculture — were no longer salient in a wage labor economy. Statisti-
cal measures of household land access, composition, and time budget
were selectively used as approximations of a fluid social situation. For
instance, large households which might have been taken as evidence
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

of the use of child labor revealed divergent patterns of resource shar-

ing upon closer investigation, with children as often as not economic
dependents rather than contributors to the household budget. Quan-
titative data on households captured a process of land dispossession
among village Malays who allocated increasing amounts of time to
wage employment. Data on occupational distribution indicated the
significance of bureaucratic structures and political party organiza-
tion as institutional channels for maneuvering within a situation of
class differentiation. The new rural middle class — officials, teachers,
and professionals — were now tied more closely to national, political,
economic, and social circles than to village society. As rural society
became firmly woven into the circuit of capital production, more kam-
pung kebun were reduced to housing lots for a migratory labor force
fanning across the country and overseas.

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 Conclusion 219

The changing structure of family life and new sexual images as

illuminated by family relations and romances formed the subject
of Chapters 5 and 6. The introduction of mass education for village
children and the selective demands of wage labor markets came to
condition parental expectations for their sons and daughters. As
the rhythm of kampung life became regulated by the school bell and
factory clock, teenage girls were increasingly pressured to drop out
of secondary school to earn factory wages for their households. In
contrast, adolescent boys were encouraged to pursue their academic
careers in the hope of landing jobs in the white-collar professions.
This divergence in roles between boys and girls affected domestic
relations of consumption and increased economic individuation
within as well as among households. Social differentiation fed envy
of economically successful villagers who were seen as going against
the cooperative ethos of kampung life, now irretrievably fractured
into “work” and “leisure.”
This decentering of rural Malay society was manifested in the
marked emphasis on individual interests and the acquisition of sym-
bolic capital by the young in matrimonial negotiations. Marriage strat-
egies became increasingly conditioned by the wage earning capacity of
a potential spouse, acquired tastes, and an expanded marriage circle.
For what was negotiated were not merely relations among villagers
but social relationships in a wider field which could facilitate upward
mobility. In many cases, the changing roles of young village women
made delayed marriages a new option, and their images as factory
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

women, exciting dates, and old maids were generated out of their
changing position in the labor market and a break with the custom-
ary life cycles of village women. For their families, and village men,
these young women displayed an uncomfortable degree of poise in
negotiating their own future; their sexuality came to be perceived as a
threat to social norms at home and within kampung society.
In Part III, this theme of the making, breaking, and remaking of
cultural images and practices was pursued within spheres kampung
women were drawn into as members of a nascent industrial force. In
Chapter 7, I described how the Malaysian state operated as a coordi-
nator of different structures of power: foreign corporate investments
were linked to the state apparatuses for the ideological domination
and political disciplining of the new Malay working classes. Draw-
ing on Foucault’s insights, I discussed novel power configurations in

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 220 Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline

domains such as the family, factory, kampung, and state institutions

which reconstructed the meanings of Malay female gender and sexu-
ality. In Japanese factories, the experiences of Malay women workers
could be understood in terms of their use as “instruments of labor,”
as well as reconstitution by discursive practices as sexualized sub-
jects. Discipline was exercised not only through work relations but
also through surveillance and the cooperation of village elders in
managing the maidens and their morality. Assailed by public doubts
over their virtue, village-based factory women internalized these dis-
parate disciplinary schemes, engaging in self- and other-monitoring
on the shopfloor, in kampung society, and within the wider society.
Through a discussion of the conflicting gender images and dis-
courses generated in the wake of Malay proletarianization, I illumi-
nated in Chapter 8 the processes whereby factory women, subjected
both to factory surveillance and the public gaze, were controlled by
“invisible” power relations. While different groups fought for hege-
monic domination in terms of cultural authenticity, Malay factory
women were consistently delegitimized as falling off from “tradi-
tional” standards of conduct and morality. One response among fac-
tory women to this “symbolic violence” was their call for greater
social vigilance and “moral purity.” The painted countenances of
other working women represented assertions of individuality as
well as concealed the “hidden injuries” of class.
The eruptions of spirit possession episodes in transnational com-
panies disclosed the anguish, resistance, and cultural struggle of
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

some neophyte female workers. In Chapter 9, I traced the dialectic

between their spirits of resistance and the enforced discipline of a
working class in the making. Caught up in the problematics of labor
and the problematics of self, resistance within the institutional con-
straints of capitalist production called forth images of social disloca-
tion, draining of their essence, and violation of their humanity. Their
sexuality has been mapped out as an arena of contestation; it could,
alternatively, become the means of gender domination, the basis of a
self-defining identity, and a challenge to male domination in differ-
ent social domains. The hantu symbolism, shifting in and out of their
consciousness, spoke not of an ideology of class struggle but of the
right to be treated as human beings. Spirit attacks were indirect retali-
ations against coercion and demands for justice in personal terms
within the industrial milieu. My ethnographic descriptions attest

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 Conclusion 221

to the deconstructions and reconstructions of gender in the shifting

webs of agency and domination within the family, the labor system,
Islam, and the wider society. Malay factory women were in the pro-
cess of reformulating a class sexuality. Their struggles to pose new
questions and redefine the meaning of morality represented a quest
for self-determination against agencies of power and capital which
treat human beings like raw resources, disposable instruments, and
fractured sensibilities.
An anthropology for the late twentieth century would attend to
such human struggles for morality in their own terms and in the
constitution of their own subjectivities. In our quest to illuminate
human engagements with the problems of modern life, we cannot
ignore the negotiated realities of third world peoples caught up in
international flows of practices and meanings (Hannerz 1985). Their
marginal voices and cultural inventiveness are not so much an index
of an increasing repertoire of choices as a skepticism of inherited
thought, a laboring with morality. Women are engaged in daily bat-
tles within relations between the powerful and the weak, a struc-
tural contestation which has often, but not inevitably, been culturally
constructed as a gender dichotomy. In the modern age, new forms
of domination are increasingly embodied in the social relations of
science and technology which organize knowledge and production
systems. The divergent voices and innovative practices of subjected
peoples disrupt such cultural reconstructions of non-Western societ-
ies. By listening to polyphonic tones challenging dominant themes,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

and attending to lives conducted in shadowy recesses as well as

under the spotlight, anthropologists can disclose myriad aspects of
our modern condition.

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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Notes

Preface
1. “Malay” refers to persons of Malay-Muslim identity in Peninsular
Malaysia, including immigrants from other parts of the Malay-Indonesian
archipelago who have been assimilated into the dominant indigenous
group. Malay identity is defined in the Federal Constitution of Malaysia.
Since the late 1960s, the term “bumiputra” (“sons-of-the-soil”) has been
applied to denote Malay-Muslims who are collectively guaranteed a share
of the national wealth (Siddique 1981). The local populations in this study
are mainly Malays of Javanese descent in Kuala Langat.
2. Throughout this study, “Malaysia” is used to refer to only the Peninsu-
lar segment of the country (i.e., West Malaysia).
3. i.e., different claims to “truth” about working Malay women and what
their sexuality may mean to social order.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction
1. For further elaborations beyond this book, see Aihwa Ong, “The Pro-
duction of Possession: Spirits and the Multinationational Corporation in
Malaysia” American Ethnologist 15(1):28–42; Aihwa Ong, “Japanese Factories,
Malay Women: Industrialization and Sexual Metaphors in West Malaysia,”
in Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, eds. J. Atkinson and
S. Errington, 385–442. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990; Aihwa Ong,
“State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in
Malaysia,” in Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in South-
east Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, 159–194. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995.
2. Just to mention a few: Diane Wolf 1992; Mary Beth Mills 1999; Carla
Freeman 2000; Leslie Salzinger 2003; Pun Ngai, 2005.
3. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transna-
tionality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999; and Neoliberalism as

223

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 224 Notes

Exception: Mutations in Sovereignty and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2006.
Aiwha Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology,
Politics and Ethics as Anthropoligical Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2005.

Chapter 1
1. Thus E.P. Thompson’s much-quoted model of class as a “self-making”
cultural formation (1963), although commendable for returning to laboring
classes their own history, has perhaps overlooked the structured nature of
responses by subjects who are also the objects of historical processes.
2. In an arresting piece on English labor history, “Time, Work Discipline
and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), E.P. Thompson documents the arduous
processes involved in transforming an agrarian population into industrial
laborers.

Chapter 2
1. A process of family dispersal and settlement rather in the manner of
shifting agriculturalists for whom tolerable population-land ratio, rather than
rigid adherence to descent rules, dictated postmarital residence. For an analo-
gous example, see Derek Freeman’s ethnographic study of the Ibans (1970).
2. See Michael Adas (1981) for a comparative discussion of flight as a cus-
tomary mode of peasant response to intolerable state expropriation and vio-
lence in precolonial and postcolonial Southeast Asian societies.
3. Between 1874 and 1895, direct British rule was introduced into the
west coast states of Selangor, Perak, Negri Sembilan, and, on the east coast,
Pahang. These “protected” Malay States signed treaties admitting “advice”
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

dispensed by British Residents in each state but giving the crown no juris-
diction in their territories. While in theory the British Resident was restricted
to supervising the collection of revenues and general administration outside
of “Malay religion and custom,” he came to acquire all executive and legisla-
tive powers in the name of the sultan. The latter, handsomely pensioned off
and elevated to the ceremonial role of symbolising Malay unity, became in
effect a British client. For a detailed description of the Residential System in
the Malay States, see Sadka (1968), Chapters 6 and 7, and also refer to Ralph
Emerson’s trenchant exposure of British “direct” and “indirect” rule in the
Malay Peninsula (1964).
4. This is perhaps an underestimation. Nevertheless, under the “stabi-
lized” conditions of British rule, the Malay population doubled in the next
four years, mainly through encouraging settlement by Malay immigrants
from Sumatra, Borneo, and Java. Sadka reports that by 1886 two-thirds
of the Malay population in Selangor consisted of “natives of Netherlands
India” (1968: 327–328). For a breakdown of the population in the first census

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 Notes 225

taken in 1891, see Table 1. In that year, Selangor had 26,578 Malays (Dodge
1980: 463) but 75,000 Chinese who flooded tin mining camps as the industry
and trade expanded rapidly under British control (Jackson 1964: 45–51).
5. The British tax collector stationed in the old royal seat of Kuala Langat
reported his plan to increase the Malay population in Selangor:
The neighbourhood of Jugra I propose to populate with ‘orang dagang’
[traders] and for this purpose suggest the appointment of Haji Tahir
as headman . . . I would recommend that [he] receives a regular sal-
ary as Immigration agent and be assisted with loans to enable him to
make advances to new settlers . . . [I advise] the appointment of a duly
authorised agent at Malacca who would meet all steamers arriving
from the Dutch territory and by paying the debts of those who are
looking for work induce them to come to Selangor (SSF 2546/1886).
6. In 1898, the Malay States under direct British rule were constituted as
the “Federated Malay States,” in contrast to other states under indirect British
administration — the “Unfederated Malay States.”
7. See Kernial Sandhu for a historical demography study of the recruit-
ment and employment of Indian immigrants in the Malayan plantation
economy (1969).
8. For a recent account of the colonial plantation economy in Deli, North
Sumatra, see Ann Stoler’s social historical study of confrontations between
imported Javanese workers and Dutch estate management (1985).
9. E.P. Thompson (1963) and M. Lazonick (1976) have discussed British
upper class perceptions of the “lower orders” in eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
tury England in unsurprisingly similar terms with regard to their lack of moral
rectitude and work discipline. The Methodist Church and mass education
became strategic institutions for socializing the laboring classes to the require-
ments of industrial capitalism.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

10. See for instance, Lim T.G.’s (1974) account of peasant protests against
colonial discriminatory limits imposed on smallholding rubber production rel-
ative to plantations during the years of slumps in the rubber market. Another
example of the new social history is Shahril Talib (1983). For an exemplar eth-
nography of colonialism, see Vincent’s fine account of Ugandan “history from
the bottom up” (1982).
11. See AR K. Lgt. 135/36. In the early 1930s, hundreds of immigrants from
Java and Banjarmasin were provided with land titles, subsidies, and seeds to
develop sawah lands out of jungle and swamp in the coastal districts north
of Kuala Langat. Many kampung were founded in this manner by immigrant
gangs and ex-contract laborers whom colonial officers thought were more
experienced rice growers than local Malays (SAR 1938: 124).
12. Michael Swift, doing fieldwork among Minangkabau peasants in Negri
Sembilan during the early 1950s, observed that the economic activities of
these sawah-rubber cultivators were in large part governed by the rise and
fall of world market prices for rubber (1965).

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 226 Notes

13. “Free” Javanese immigrants were recruited by earler settlers who

founded villages by developing holdings and applying for land grants
through their leaders. Since the pioneer kampung frequently required addi-
tional manpower, settlers sent for friends and relatives, offering free travel
and lodging in return for two years of coolie labor. After their contract expired,
the immigrants worked as rubber tappers or weeding coolies and attempted
to occupy land on temporary occupation licenses. Alternately, they cultivated
and tended the undeveloped holdings of landowners in return for half-share.
Only after they had their own holdings of rubber, coconut, and minor crops
did they marry or bring their families over (AR K. Lgt. 386/35). Thus many
kampung in Kuala Langat developed distinctive cultural identities because of
recruitment from home villages in the Netherlands East Indies, the practice of
village endogamy, and limited market exchanges (AR K. Lgt. 135/46). Social
intercourse with local Malays was rather limited and often marked by mutual
hostility, a situation which still persists in symbolic practices, language use,
and ethnic endogamy among Javanese villagers throughout the district.
14. Resistance to government policy included covert activities in the Res-
ervations. In Kuala Langat, many villagers broke colonial regulations against
leasing their holdings to non–Malays, thus gaining access to external sources
of funds. New settlers illegally sold their land titles to Chinese, under the
pretext of exorbitant three-year leases, and then left the district (AR K. Lgt.
349/21; K. Lgt. 192/23; SSF 3530/27). Other immigrants borrowed money
from Chettiars and mortgaged their holdings. In 1921, the Assistant Resident
of Selangor reported to the FMS administration that he had received numer-
ous petitions signed by village heads, concerning the “financial embarrass-
ment of the poorer classes” who had mortgaged their lands to Chettiars and
were threatened with bankruptcy. The official claimed that in the majority of
cases, the settlers were “speculators or spendthrifts” and that “cases of genu-
ine hardship [were] in the minority” (SSF2073/21).
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter 3
1. Following communal riots in May 1969, in which many youths from
Kuala Langat took part, the Malaysian Government introduced the New
Economic Policy (NEP) which emphasized massive institutional changes to
increase wealth held by the Malay population as a whole vis-à-vis the other
two ethnic groups.
2. These fenced-in industrial estates, also known as “export-processing
zones” in the Philippines, are usually so situated in parts of developing
countries so as to be best served by the national transportation and com-
munications systems. Governments competing to attract the subsidiaries of
transnational corporations site their FTZs in the outskirts of cities, at the
nodes of road, rail, and air transportation lines, for the rapid exit of manu-
factured products and sustained inflow of rural labor. These zones are thus
geographically “free” as well as “free” of most taxes and duties. In a basic

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 Notes 227

sense, the FTZ is “an alien territory within a national territory” (Tsuchiya
1977), more integrated in the international networks of Japanese, American,
and West European corporations than in the local economies.
3. Since the late 1960s, thousands of illegal Javanese and Sumatran immi-
grants have been flowing into the Malaysian Peninsula, their small crafts
easily penetrating the long and permeable coastline. They blend into hun-
dreds of kampung, many founded by earlier immigant Malays, where they
constitute a cheap source of labor reserve for the plantation industry increas-
ingly beset by rising labor costs. A large number of them has also moved into
the urban centers and married local Malays.
4. Upon the death of the father, who usually has the larger property, it
is common practice for his widow to hold his land in trust, using proceeds
from the holding to raise the children. Grown, married sons are usually
given informal access to their parents’ holdings, especially for house-sites.
Formal partition of the land rarely takes place so long as one parent is still
alive.
5. During the late 1950s the land office had opened up remaining for-
est reserves in the mukim in order to make grants of three-quarter acre lots
to families from Sungai Jawa, the largest village in the district. The kam-
pung also provided land for local ex-service men who had signed up during
the Emergency. However, some of those who had been awarded land titles
could not afford to pay the premium and instead sold their shares to rich vil-
lagers and civil servants from Kampung Telok. They employed the original
titleholders as regular laborers (buroh tetap) to prepare the land and cultivate
permanent crops. In 1978, the Selangor government announced that 18,000
acres would be opened under its “green revolution” program. Each district
would receive about 200 acres for distribution; “the landless would be given
priority” (New Straits Times, June 25, 1978).
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

6. All currency is given in the Malaysian ringgit, which is also symbol-

ized by M $. In the 1979–80 duration of my research, the value of the ringgit
was M $ 2.22 to U.S. $ 1.
7. New Straits Times, Sept. 28, 1981.
8. New Straits Times, Oct. 5, 1979; see also Nadi Insan, 1979: 18–23.
9. New Straits Times, Mar. 8, 1979.
10. See, e.g., New Straits Times, Jan. 7, 1982.
11. For an initial discussion of the brokerage role of kampung leaders, see
S. Husin Ali (1975). Other scholars have noted that the expansion of political
party systems into rural Southeast Asian countries has reinforced pre-existing
patronage networks in the asymmetrical exchange of government resources
for votes (Scott 1977; Kessler 1978: 141–142). Shamsul A. Baharuddin pro-
vides an incisive account of “the politics of poverty eradication” in post-NEP
rural Malay society in which politicians and officials deploy development
funds and contracts to secure loyalty to UMNO, as well as to line their own
pockets (1983).

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 228 Notes

12. The current number of immigrants from the Indonesian and Philip-
pines islands to Malaysia is estimated at 430,000. About 37% of them are
employed in the plantation sector and 16% engaged in manufacturing
industries. See Far Eastern Economic Review, April 20, 1984, p. 106–111.
13. The “popular history” model of laboring class action in the context of
capitalist transformation, as most brilliantly developed by E.P. Thompson
(1963), is not applicable to many peripheral capitalist societies. Although
many Marxist scholars will be disappointed, in Malaysia at least, there are
historical and political limits to the forging of “a working class culture”
among the Malay laboring populations.

Chapter 4
1. The household census of 242 households covered approximately one-
third of the total population in Sungai Jawa, a Malay Reservation. I conducted
over one-third of the survey, while two local assistants completed the rest.
Scheduled interviews elicited information on domestic membership, orga-
nization, family history, property, occupations, and budget arrangements.
This census provided a statistical profile of the community and operated as
a check on data gathered by other methods, such as participant observation
and case studies.
A small sample of forty households was selected on the basis of differen-
tial land access (landless, landpoor, small, and rich) and willingness on the
part of members to impart further information. This sample provided infor-
mation for time budget studies and a survey of nutritional information.
2. A small but increasing number of time-allocation studies conducted
among Asian peasantries has shown that child labor is not uniformly or
necessarily of economic value to all rural parents. See, e.g., Mueller (1976)
on Taiwanese farm families, and das Gupta (1978) on a North Indian case.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Recently, White called for the need to go beyond purely quantitative mea-
sures of child labor, urging attention be paid to the subordination of children
and their possible evasion of control (1981).
3. Forty households with children ages six years and above were chosen
for the recording of daily events. Since cash cropping villagers (excepting
rice growers) in Malaysia experience negligible seasonal changes in their
agricultural tasks, the time-allocation survey was conducted over a period of
only six months, including Ramadan and school holidays, in order to obtain
as accurate a measure as possible of the daily activities which reflected the
rhythm of work and leisure in Sungai Jawa.
Each household member aged six and above was interviewed about his/
her activities on the previous day, from rising to going to bed, one day each
week, for six consecutive months. Since village life was much influenced
by the clock — for example, timing of school lessons, factory schedules,
and the Islamic calls for prayer — the informant’s recall of time spent in
different activities was relatively accurate. The various types of work and

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 Notes 229

nonwork activities in which villagers engaged in the normal course of a day

are grouped under three rubrics in the tables: household maintenance, farm
work, and wage labor. The average amount of daily time (in hours) allocated
by each age-sex group — girl, boy (between six and sixteen years), woman,
man (seventeen years and above) — was calculated by dividing total time
alloted by number of informants in that particular group. Thus, the time
units given in the tables do not reflect the average time actually expended in
a particular task on a “normal day.” Rageswari Balakrishna helped conduct
the time survey after establishing a fine rapport with the informants. I have
no doubt that the data is as accurate as it is socially tolerable to gather.
4. The value of labor power “is the means of subsistence necessary for the
maintenance of the labourer.” Thus, “the sum of the means of subsistence
necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means neces-
sary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children” (Marx 1974: 171–172).
5. A pseudonym. All individuals mentioned in this study are given
pseudonyms to protect their privacy.
6. The Federal Land Development Authority is a government agency to
settle hundreds of thousands of landpoor Malay families in land-lots newly
cleared from the jungle. The families are provided with cash crops and basic
housing needs, and are required to repay loans on their holdings from the
sale of their crops.

Chapter 5
1. Local Malay cultures in different parts of the country vary according
to their adherence to certain sets of customary practices and in their absorp-
tion of Islamic principles. For contrasting case studies before and after
the Second World War, see Raymond Firth, Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant
Economy (1966); Rosemary Firth, Housekeeping Among Malay Peasants (1966);
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Michael Swift, Malay Peasant Society in Jelebu (1965); and David Banks’ Malay
Kinship (1982).
2. By taking “the native’s point of view,” Clifford Geertz (1979) empha-
sized how symbols operate as vehicles of culture within a particular concep-
tual structure. In his Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1979), Paul Rabinow
discloses his ethnographic experience as a “dialogic construction” in which
informants played a critical and acknowledged role. For another approach
which would look beyond native reification of their given cultural catego-
ries to an analysis of the interactions between historically conditioned ideas
and social phenomena, see Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetish-
ism in South America (1980).
3. The secular education system is built upon the British model. The
pre-university system is divided into a primary school education, graded
from Standard (Std.) One through Six, and a secondary school, which is
internally-ranked from Form One through Form Six (Lower and Upper
levels). Children take their first nationally certified examination at the end of

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 230 Notes

Standard Six. Secondary school students sit for three sets of nationally certi-
fied examinations: at the end of Forms Three, Five, and Upper Six.
4. In 1911, a schoolroom was established in Sungai Jawa to instruct village
boys in the Koran and in writing the Jawi script and romanized Malay. The
Malay teachers were paid by the colonial government to also give instruc-
tions in arithmetic, geography, and vegetable gardening, subjects considered
adequate from boys who would grow up to be farmers. Girls were gradually
admitted to the village school, which also operated as a temporary clinic
and dispensary. By independence, approximately one-third of the 400 pupils
were female, and they were mainly taught classes in hygiene and sewing.
Each year, a handful of children sat for the Standard Six examination. Only
one or two boys from the village were chosen to go on to the Kuala Kangsar
College, Perak, a prestigious school for training upper-class Malays for the
British Civil Service (Source: village school records).
5. Tamil and Chinese children in the district attend other schools, where
their own languages, and sometimes English, are taught.
6. In 1979, there were altogether 32 teachers, including the headmaster,
in the primary school. Of these, 11 were female teachers. All but one teacher
were Malay, and 12 lived in local villages, the rest commuting from town.
7. Benjamin White reports a similar pattern of household resource sharing
among Javanese peasants. He notes “a general though not necessarily total
pooling” of resources among members, “since the individuals concerned
might retain separate control of different forms of wealth” (1976: 217–218).
8. They had no natural children of their own. During her lifetime, his late
wife had neglected to make a will transferring her property to their adopted
child. If Islamic law of inheritance were allowed to proceed unmodified, the
property would be divided among her surviving siblings, three sisters. (She
had no brothers, otherwise they would have been the first claimants after
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

her natural children.) However, the sisters agreed that after having the land
transferred to their names they would will the property over to the adopted
daughter, whom they felt should rightfully inherit. The daughter had mar-
ried a petty trader and was then living in Shah Alam.
9. He was not alone in being influenced by American programs shown
on Televeshen Malaysia. American slang words and media personalities were
well-known among villagers, including parents, the vast majority of whom
could not speak American or other versions of English.
10. Most men commuting to work in urban centers like Port Klang, Shah
Alam, Sungai Way, and Kuala Lumpur used motorbikes. Unless desperately
in need of a job, young men refused to take the public transportation, which,
in any case, was often not on schedule and very slow. Thus, young educated
men starting urban employment insist on first saving for a motorbike, which
has also become a powerful symbol of modern masculine identity.
11. In fact, the local nickname of Sungai Jawa was “Kampung Toyol,” an
index of its enviable reputation as a community of enterprising villagers

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 Notes 231

who undoubtedly trafficked in spirits. Indeed, in the abangan world of Java-

nese peasantry (from which the founders of Sungai Jawa derived), Geertz
notes that the mischief-making of tujuls or “spirit children” helped to make
men rich quickly (1964: 16–17). In his view, the slametan and spirit beliefs of
the abangan represented “the triumph of culture over nature, human and
nonhuman” (ibid., 28).

Chapter 6
1. The study of family development in agrarian societies began with
A. V. Chayanov’s construct of household behavior among Russian peasants
in the 1920s. He suggested that the biological basis of the family determined
its composition at different phases of development, and in thus affecting its
producer-consumer ratio was responsible for varying levels of labor produc-
tivity and of consumer demands (Thorner 1966: 57–60). Anthropologists elabo-
rated upon the concept of domestic cyclical process. Meyer Fortes’s notion of
“the developmental cycle of the domestic group” (1970) showed that previ-
ously abstracted family “types” (based on descent and residential patterns of
African lineages), were in actuality successive phases in the “developmental
cycle” of a single general family form in the society concerned (1958: 3). In
his view, “political-jural institutions” interacted with physiological changes
in the “family cycle” to precipitate structural changes in prescribed cultural
ways. Although Chayanov was concerned with variations in household labor
productivity, and Fortes with variations in family structure, their use of the
domestic group as the unit of analysis assumed an inevitable unfolding of the
family process according to the biological imperative, without considering how
external relationships (beyond abstracted cultural norms), might have affected
the developmental process. See Jack Goody (1973) for a note on Fortes’s work.
2. The wang mas was set by the religious authority and usually involved
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

a very small sum, compared to wang hantaran, since wedding expenses were
used to furnish a bridal suite, pay the imam (marriage official) a small fee,
and provide a wedding feast. The guests made cash contributions that helped
defray the cost of the feast, which in the prewar years were small affairs involv-
ing immediate relatives and friends. In marriages to janda, i.e., nonvirgins, the
bridewealth was minimal and the wedding meal even more modest.
3. A Haji is a man who has performed the hajj to Mecca. The female
equivalent is Hajjah. The village has had a tradition of men — and to a lesser
extent, women — performing the pilgrimage in old age. In the past decade,
cash income has enabled the well-off and well-placed to undertake the trip
in middle age or even earlier. Some haji make a second pilgrimage, which
they hope will become a spiritual farewell from earthly life.
4. This dual ethnic identity is reflected in daily language; the majority
of villagers in Sungai Jawa are bilingual, preferring to use the Javanese
dialect when speaking to one another. Among the younger school-going
generations, this habit has not taken hold; instead, boys and girls merely

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 232 Notes

understand the dialect but use the national language Malay (Bahasa Kebang-
saan) in daily speech. Except when dealing with Chinese and Japanese, my
daily conversations with village folk, officials, and Tamil workers were all
conducted in the Bahasa.
5. As we shall see below, actual marriage negotiations concerning bride-
wealth are conducted by the parents and their representatives, not the
engaged couple themselves.
6. The popularity of policemen as husbands among rural women
stemmed from their practical recognition that although no high educational
qualifications were necessary, the police force was the fastest route to eco-
nomic security, political power, and high social status for men of kampung
origins. Since the Emergency, villagers have been well-acquainted with the
benefits of such government employment, especially the regular paycheck
and the pension.
7. According to Islamic law, women over eighteen years of age could
not get married without parental consent unless (1) a wali (guardian) had
been appointed by state authorities in place of her blood kinsmen (e.g., as
in the case of the marriage of Malay women of Chinese ancestry adopted in
infancy), or (2) she was caught in flagrante delicto, in which case the kadia cts
as wali. However, the resolution of individual cases may not be as clear-cut
as this statement may imply. I am grateful to William Roff for drawing my
attention to this point.
8. Raymond Firth reports that the Kelantanese Malays used credit pro-
duced by feasting to purchase capital like boats and nets (Firth 1974: 178–182).
In Sungai Jawa, such windfalls can perhaps be invested in livestock but are
too limited to purchase desired capital like a motorbike or land. They are nev-
ertheless a significant form of credit internally generated within the village
community.
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

9. Discussions about Malay marriages and divorces at the national level

have recently identified a possible contributing factor linked to growing
female wage employment. There is the suggestion that the Islamic require-
ment that husbands are totally responsible for the maintenance of wife and
children has met with some resistance when working wives refuse to make
cash contributions to the family budget. At the local level, it was not possible
to get men to support this view, possibly because it impinges on Islamic
rules and their own sense of masculine identity.

Chapter 7
1. See The Third Malaysia Plan, 1975–80 (1976) for the government pro-
gram of large-scale state intervention into the rural and urban sectors of
the Malaysian economy. Lim Mah Hui (1985) has made a careful study of
how state-sponsored programs since 1972 have been directed towards the
growth of Malay capital, greatly benefiting individual members of the politi-
cal elite at the expense of the emergent Malay petty bourgeois class.

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 Notes 233

2. Treasury Economic Report, (1975: 100). The Federal Land Development

Authority (FELDA) schemes settled about 31,000 Malay families in cleared
jungle reserves between 1957 and 1976, but this number constituted just
a fraction of the Malay population which increased by 2.5 million within
the same period. In 1975, state officials estimated that the incidence of
poverty — defined as living below the standards of good nutritional health
and the satisfaction of basic needs — included over 50 percent of rural
households (Third Malaysia Plan, 1976: 72).
3. For statistics on rural unemployment and the mass urban migration of
Malay youths, especially 15- to 19-year-olds, see Third Malaysia Plan (1976:
26, 141).
4. That is, about 400,000 in a total population of over one million. See
Sunday Mail, Sept. 16, 1979.
5. New Straits Times, Oct. 14, 1979.
6. In a 1967–68 household census, 17 percent of the Peninsula agricul-
tural work force (excluding unpaid family labor) worked less than 25 hours
a week (Blake 1975: 184). This figure decreased to about 9.6 percent by 1974,
after the introduction of “Green Revolution” programs, especially in the
rice-growing areas of Kedah and Perak. Double-cropping and mechaniz-
ing of rice production contributed both to short periods of increased labor
demands and the mass outmigration of rural youths (Third Malaysia Plan,
1976: 26).
7. Sunday Mail, Dec. 2, 1979. See Lim Mah Hui (1980) for his assessment
of the implications of these “state capitalist” strategies for ethnic and class
politics in Malaysia.
8. See Jamilah Ariffin (1980). For additional, scattered reports on Malay
factory workers in Malaysia and Singapore, see also von der Mehren (1973);
Linda Lim (1978); Rachel Grossman (1979); Susan Ackerman (1979); Susan
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Ackerman & Raymond Lee (1981); and Ann-Marie Munster (1980).

9. Federal Industrial Development Authority, 1976: 11.
10. New Straits Times, Aug. 31, 1979.
11. See Linda Lim (1978); Southeast Asia Chronicle, April 1980, pp. 11–13.
12. That is, from 17,200 to 64,000. See Hasan & Sundaram (1980).
13. In recent years, a fiery group of young ulama had established a strong-
hold in the underdeveloped East Coast states, from which they issued
demands for the “implementation of an Islamic Economic System.” See
Asiaweek, Dec. 17, 1982.
14. New Straits Times, Dec. 8, 1983.
15. See Maier (1970), for the roles Taylorism and Fordism played in vali-
dating a new class image, acceptable to bourgeois and social democracy in
post–World War I industrial reconstruction of Western Europe.
16. See Dore (1973), for an example of the first view, and Burawoy (1979),
for the second.

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 234 Notes

17. FIDA 1975. See Haraway (1984), for political questions about “sex,
race, and class as scientific objects” constituted in structures of domination
developed since the nineteenth century.
18. In 1979, I spent two months interviewing the managerial and supervi-
sory staff of all three factories in the Telok FTZ. The management of EJI was
the most forthcoming in this exercise. Interviews on their work force, pro-
duction processes, and corporate policies were mainly conducted in English;
occasionally, Malay and Hokkien were used.
19. This statement is misleading. In 1975, Japanese women comprised
some 50 percent of the total labor force in Japan. Even with the same edu-
cational background as men, women by the age of 35 earned less than one
half of men’s wages. Moreover, since women cannot be considered part of
the permanent labor force, men are the beneficiaries of lifetime employ-
ment provided only in large-scale enterprises (Cook & Hayashi 1980: 1–14;
Matsutomo 1981: 62).
20. In 1979–80, the basic production processes in semiconductor manu-
facturing transferred to Malaysia by electronics industries included the
following steps: selection of pellets, pin insertion, mounting, bonding,
molding of components, and quality control testing and packaging. The
first four processes required continual use of the microscope for the intri-
cate wiring and assembly of the microcomponents. In the mounting sec-
tion, an operator was expected to process an average of 2,500 microchips
per day, although some workers reached a target of 4,600. In the bonding
section, operators assembled between 3,200 and 6,000 pieces in the eight
hour daily shift.
21. See Braverman 1974, Chapter 4, for a discussion of the development of
Taylorist “scientific management” in American industries. In his view, Tay-
lorism achieved its goal of adapting labor to capital needs through (1) the
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

progressive deskilling of the labor force, and (2) the extreme fragmentation
and control of successive steps of the production process.
22. The interview, like all others, was conducted in Malay. Whenever an
English term was used, it is italicized in the quote. Altogether, I conducted
35 structured interviews with female operators and some male technicians
in their homes. The interviewees were chosen on the basis of their willing-
ness to be interviewed, and they included workers from EJI (16), ENI (17)
and MUZ (2).
23. Such employment practices were also evident among American elec-
tronics companies based in Penang.
24. Not unexpectedly, the only other area of female-dominated activity in
the corporation is the typist pool, which came under the administrative divi-
sion. Most of these jobs, particularly those in finance, accounting, and pub-
lic relations work, were filled by outstation Chinese women. A few Malay
women took typing classes after their factory shift to compete for these jobs
from the outside, but only a mere handful were successful.

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 Notes 235

25. Thus, it is misleading to claim that in societies undergoing rapid capi-

talist development, preexisting “traditional patriarchy” is “at the bottom of
women’s subjection to imperialist exploitation” (Lim 1983: 78–79, 86). Fur-
thermore, it remains questionable whether capitalist relations of production
are “progressive” or necessarily produce “liberation from patriarchy” (ibid.
84–89) a process which in any case cannot be measured by employment
opportunities alone.
26. See Chie Nakane (1967), for a succinct analysis of the Japanese peasant
household, the “frame” of which she maintains has been reproduced within
modern Japanese corporate life.
27. See Zawawi and Shahril (1983), for a discussion of how Malay male
workers in plantations resist the harsh treatment of supervisors by using
tactics which range from emotional persuasion to physical attacks.
28. A government requirement for all large enterprises with a sizeable
Muslim labor force was the setting aside of a prayer room and the right of
Muslim workers to perform prayers during work hours.
29. Max Weber defined “traditional authority” in two senses: (1) “personal
authority” of an individual “which he enjoys by virtue of his traditional
status,” and (2) “the sanctity of the order and attendant powers of control as
they have been handed down from the past” (1964: 341).
30. This system should not be confused with the Japanese collective deci-
sion making process called ringi sei, whereby decisions were arrived at after
the discussion, approval/disapproval of each segment of the corporate hier-
archy. This long, drawn out process involved no single clear-cut authority
or responsibility for the decisions made. In EJI, the “grievance procedure”
merely mimicked the ringi sei in collectivizing complaints from the shop-
floor without involving the lower ranks in decision making.
31. For a discussion of contrasting management disciplinary techniques
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

between Japanese and American companies located in Malaysia, see Ong

(1984).

Chapter 8
1. For instance, Linda Lim (1978) and Patricia Kelly (1980) have discussed
processes of market segmentation whereby third world women are subor-
dinated in the new international division of labor. However, they tend to
reduce “patriarchal” or male-supremacist notions to cultural ephiphenom-
ena which could be used by capitalist enterprises to justify or enhance the
subjugation of labor to capital.
2. As Mark Poster has pointed out, Foucault’s own discourse on the his-
tory of “sexual politics” does not offer a basis to consider sexuality in a given
society except within a general framework. The different sexual practices of
social groups cannot simply be explained on the basis of a totalizing view of
discourse (1984: 136).

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 236 Notes

3. The Star, May 19, 1978.

4. The Star, Feb. 16, 1979.
5. New Straits Times, Feb. 16, 1979.
6. The Star, April 4, 1980.
7. New Straits Times, Oct. 17, 1981.
8. The Malay Mail, June 14, 1982.
9. New Straits Times, Aug. 30, 1979.
10. See also Strange 1981: 23–26.
11. ABIM leaders were mainly graduates of local universities —
Universiti Malaya, Universiti Kebangsaan, and the MARA Institute of
Technology — and their recruitment drives had penetrated the civil service,
police, military, professional organizations, and schools. In 1982, the ABIM
leader Anwar Ibrahim “defected” to the government by accepting one of the
five vice-presidencies of the UMNO party. Since this political maneuver by
its most charismatic leader, ABIM has lost some of its moral fervor and sense
of direction as a major political force critical of government policies.
12. See Nagata (1981: 416–423); Far Eastern Economic Review, Mar. 3, 1983.
For other interpretations of the dakwah movement in Malaysia in the late
1970s, see Lyon (1979); Kessler (1980).
13. New Straits Times, Dec. 2, 1979.
14. See footnote 13 above.

Chapter 9
1. Sunday Mail, Jan. 27, 1980.
2. Jamilah Ariffin notes that newspaper reports of abandoned infants
outside urban FTZs indicated the inability of unwed factory women to cope
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

with critical life situations (1980: 56). These factory women in cities probably
did not have easy access to female kin, the basic source of emotional and
social support in rural society.
3. For a description of the indigenous status classificatory system in the
Malay states, see Gullick (1958) and Milner (1982). Social rank and pres-
tige were derived from the political system based on the sultanate. In Telok,
the traditional strata of raja, orang besar, and rakyat; were still regarded as
culturally salient even though the traditional prestige system has been
restructured and emasculated under British colonial rule and modern state
formation. For instance, the term orang besar applied to surviving members
of aristocratic families has been bestowed on contemporary power holders
of “common origins”: civil servants and elected representatives who consti-
tute the upper stratum of rural society (A. Kahar Bador 1973).
4. See e.g., Wolf (1969); Scott (1976); Nash (1979); Taussig (1980).
5. For a report on “hysteria-exam blues link,” see New Straits Times,
Oct. 23, 1981.

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 Notes 237

6. For media interpretations of “mass hysteria” among factory women

see Asiaweek, Aug. 4, 1978; Sunday Echo, Nov. 27, 1978; Mimbar Sosialis, June/
July 1978.
7. See Linda Lim (1978) for one view of this incident.
8. Sunday Echo, November 27, 1978.
9. New Straits Times, Sept. 26, 1980.
10. However, in their motivations the Malay workers were comparable to
the Luddites in that it was not the machines per se which they objected to,
but the new relations of production of which the machines were part (see
Hobsbawm 1964: 11).
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 Glossary

MALAY WORDS USED IN TEXT*

adat customary sayings, practices and law
adik-beradik siblings
akad nikah marriage contract
akal intelligence, logic
bagi dua arrangement whereby owner and tenant each holds
half-share in product of land or livestock capital
bagi nafkah under Islamic practice, maintenance — shelter, food,
clothing — paid in cash and kind by husband to wife
Bahasa Kebangsaan National Language of Malaysia, i.e., Malay
baju kurong loose tunic and sarong worn by Malay girls and
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

women
bantah argue, dispute, contest
bapa angkat foster father
bebas at liberty; not restrained in speech and behavior
bidan Malay village midwife
bomoh Malay spirit-healer
budak budak children; also maidens
bujang unmarried man or woman
bumiputra “sons-of-the-soil,” legal definition of Malay-Muslims
who enjoy special rights under the Malaysian constitution
bunga “flower,” euphemism for disguised interest on investment

239

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 240 Glossary

buroh kasar manual (unskilled) laborer; buroh tetap — laborer

hired to work on a piece of property
caci criticise, scold, abuse
dakwah proselytizing activities carried out by Islamic revivalists;
the advocates and movements associated with these activities
datuk grandfather; honorary title for a man of high status;
ancestral male spirit associated with a sacred place
dukun synonym for bomoh, but with suggestion of black magic
practice; i.e., sorcerer
guru teacher
Haji A Muslim man who has performed the hajj
Hajjah A Muslim woman who has performed the hajj
hantu spirits, often harmful to human beings, associated with a
place, animal, or deceased person
hawa nafsu passion, carnal desires
janda widow, divorcée; woman who has no husband due to his
death or a divorce
jual tenaga sell labor power; engage in wage labor
kadi judge in Muslim courts and affairs
kaki foot; kaki lima — “five-foot-way” or sidewalk; with
negative symbolic connotations such as: jolli kaki — footloose
behavior, having a swinging time; shaking legs, not working;
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

kaki arak — alcoholic

kampung village; ketua kampung — village headman
keadilan justice, fairness
kebebasan lack of customary restraint; unseemly independence
kebun garden; used here for a commerical crop holding or an
estate under one hundred acres
keluarga family, parents, and children; in a wider sense, category
of relatives descended from the same ancestor
kenduri feast, usually marking rite-of-passage ceremony or
religious occasion
kerajaan government; body of civil servants

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 Glossary 241

keras harsh, unyielding behavior and language

kerja work; in village discourse, the term was used to mean
employment with steady income; it includes: kerja kampung —
employment in the village; kerja kontrak contract work; kerja
sendiri — self-employment
khalwat spatial seclusion of a man and a woman not married to
each other; a situation which may be construed as evidence of
illicit sexual intimacy
kongkongan shackles; to be held in captivity
kotor dirty, obscene; also used as noun — filth
kramat sacred abode of spirit
kuasa authority; power
kuli manual laborer; unskilled worker
langsuir whinnying banshee that attacks pregnant women
lemah semangat weak spiritual constitution
madrasah school set up by kijaji for Koranic instruction
majikan management of a company
makan eat; consume; makan gaji — make a living from earning
wages; makan sekali — eat together, to have a joint budget;
makan suku — eat separately, even though living under the
same roof
malu shy, shameful; shame
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

mandur foreman, overseer of labor gang

manusia human being; humanity
mukim subdistrict; smallest administrative unit, headed by a
penghulu
orang human being; people, persons in general;
orang asing — aliens; orang asli — native, aboriginal
people; orang besar — big men, i.e., aristocratic
leaders in indigenous political systems;
orang biasa — commoner, ordinary people;
orang dagang — traders; orang Islam — Muslims;
Islamic people; orang kampung — villagefolk;
orang kaya — rich people; orang luar — aliens,
outsiders; orang miskin — poor folk;

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 242 Glossary

orang sederhana — ordinary people, i.e., those who

consider themselves in middling circumstances;
orang susah — people who have difficulty in
making a living.
pegawai officer, executive in a government office or private
enterprise
pembangunan development, especially economic development
pemborong labor contractor
pemuda young man; generally unmarried youths;
Pemuda UMNO — UMNO Youth Faction
pemudi young unmarried woman
penghulu lowest government administrator, in charge of the
mukim
penyakit histeria hysteria affliction
penyakit jiwa spiritual illness
pesaka inheritance, usually landed inheritance
pinangan marriage proposal
pokok belanja main source for covering daily expenses
pontianak female demon which harasses women in childbirth
rakyat citizens; people
Ramadan fasting month in Islamic calendar
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ringgit Malaysian dollar, valued at US 45 cents in 1979

rugi losing, to be cheated of gain
rumah tangga household
salaam peace salutation, greetings
sawah wet rice field
sekolah school
slametan ritual feast seeking peaceful negotiation of some
stressful passage in everyday life, e.g., childbirth
sosial Malay version of “social”; in local parlance, unrestrained
relations between single men and women
sultan Muslim ruler of a state
surau Islamic prayer room or house

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 Glossary 243

syaitan Satan, the Evil One

takut fearful, anxiously respectful
tanah land, earth; tanah hidup — live land, i.e. cultivated and
used for living; tanah mati — dead land, i.e. uncultivated land;
tanah modal — landed wealth or capital; tanah pesaka —
landed inheritance
tanam modal to “plant capital”, such as investing in land
tani farmer; peasant
tekanan pressure, oppression
tidak apa “it doesn’t matter”; an unconcerned, unhurried attitude
timbang rasa sympathy
toyol mischievous spirit raised by owner to steal on his behalf
tugas responsibility, duty
tukang tebus labor contractor
tumpang to “squat”, i.e., lodge temporarily with relative or
friend; also to squat on someone’s land as a hired laborer
ulama learned Islamic scholar who engages in Koranic instruction
and proselytizing
ustaz Islamic teacher trained at government-sponsored institutions
wajib duty-bound or obligatory practice
wakil rakyat people’s representative, member of Parliament
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

wali Islamic guardian of bride, usually her father

wang hantaran Cash payments by groom for wedding expenses;
hantaran for short
wang mas cash or gold payment from groom to bride as part of
the marital exchange
wanita women; female; Wanita UMNO — women’s faction of the
UMNO
zinah illicit sexual intercourse

* The spelling follows the common system adopted by Malaysia and The Republic of
Indonesia. Some words were defined by consulting the dictionary Kamus
Lengkap, by Awang Sudjai Hairul and Yusoff Khan. Petaling Jaya, Malaysia:
Pustaka Zaman Sdn Bhd., 1977.

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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Bibliography

OFFICIAL COLONIAL RECORDS

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Federated Malay States, Annual Report (FMSAR), 1900
Federation of Malaya Annual Reports (FMAR), 1950–55
Selangor Annual Reports (SAR), 1932–1938, 1948
Selangor Secretariat Files (SSF), 1886–1912

MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

Kuala Lumpur
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Department of Statistics. 1972.

Community Groups.
Federal Industrial Development Authority (FIDA). 1975.
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Jabatan Pertanian Selangor. 1966, 1978.
Laporan Tahunan.
Ministry of Finance. 1975, 1976.
Treasury Economic Reports.
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 246 Bibliography

Selangor State Development Corporation (SSDC). 1976.

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In Friends, Followers and Factions, edited by S.W. Schmidt et al.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shahnon Ahmad. 1972.
No Harvest but a Thorn (Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan). Translated by
Adibah Amin, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press [org.
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 Bibliography 255

Shahril Talib. 1983.

“Voices from the Kelantan Desa 1900–1940.” Modern Asian
Studies, 17(2): 177–195.
Shamsul A. Baharuddin. 1983.
“The Politics of Poverty Eradication: The Implementation of
Development Projects in a Malayan District.” Pacific Affairs, 56:
455–476.
Siddique, Sharon. 1981.
“Some Aspects of Malay-Muslim Ethnicity in Peninsular Malay-
sia.” Journal of Contemporary Southeast Asia, 3(1): 76–87.
Stoler, Ann L. 1985.
Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–
1979. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Strange, Heather. 1981.
Rural Malay Women from Tradition to Transition. New York: Praeger.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1981.
“Culture in a Netbag: The Manufacture of a Subdiscipline in
Anthropology,” Man, (n.s.) 16: 665–88.
Swift, Michael. 1965.
Malay Peasant Society in Jelebu. New York: Humanities Press.
———. 1967.
“Economic Concentration and Malay Peasant Society.” In Social
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T. Shamsul Bahrin. 1967.
“The Pattern of Indonesian Migration and Settlement in Malaya.”
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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Taussig, Michael. 1980.
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press.
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 256 Bibliography

Tsuchiya Takeo. 1967.

“Introduction.” In Free Trade Zones and Industrialization of Asia.
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Vincent, Joan. 1982.
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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Bibliography 257

NEWSPAPERS AND NEWS JOURNALS

Asiaweek (Hong Kong)
Berita Harian (Kuala Lumpur)
Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong)
The Malay Mail (Kuala Lumpur)
Mimbar Sosialis (Kuala Lumpur)
Nadi Insan (Kuala Lumpur)
New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur)
Southeast Asia Chronicle (Berkeley, Ca., United States)
The Star (Kuala Lumpur)
Suara Melayu (Kuala Lumpur)
Sunday Echo (Penang)
Sunday Mail (Penang)
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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 Index

ABIM (Islamic Youth Movement Bumiputra (“sons-of-the-soil”)

of Malaysia), 184–86; leaders in, status, 121, 146, 223n.1
235n.11; member of, 186. See also Burawoy, Michael (sociologist): on
Dakwah the logic of capitalist relations, 8,
Ackerman, Susan (anthropologist), 155. See also Capitalist discipline
180, 203 Bureaucratic culture, Malay: and
Adat, 86, 89 laboring poor, 7; and production
American English, 79, 175, 215, of values, 5; and redefinition
230n.9 of group identity, 3; and school
Anthropology: interpretive, 2, system, 54; and social policies, 48,
215–216; problem of reification, 49, 55, 79, 84; and social repro-
229n.2; representations of truth, duction, 5; system, 79. See also
216; of third world societies, 221 Civil servants; Kerajaan; Schools;
UMNO
Banjarese, 17
Banting, 38, 200 Capitalism: global xv-xx, 5, 145, 146;
Bauer, Peter (economist), 29, 30 and indigenous capital accumula-
Becker, Gary (economist), 62 tion 30; and labor reserve of, 169;
Bird, Isabella (Late 19th century and proletarianization, 15; recon-
traveller in the Malay Peninsula), stitution of kampung society, 84;
12, 15 and time, 111; and toyol imagery,
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Bomoh (spirit-healer), 88, 204–208. 110; world system of, 15, 25, 33,
See also Spirit possession 74, 216. See also Capitalist disci-
Boserup, Ester (economist), 23 pline; Class formation; Colonial
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 108, 116, 121 rule; Labor; Labor relations; Land;
Bourgeoisie, Malay, 47. See also Peasants; Proletarianization; State
Class; Civil servants Capitalist discipline: and cultural
Boys: and education, 57, 79, 81, 86, discourse, 142–43; definition of,
90–99; and kampung work, 67; labor 1–2, 4–5; use of gender and race,
time allocation, 65; socialization of, 151, 154; and the state, 146. See
91. See also Youths also Burawoy; Capitalism; Dis-
Braverman, Harry (sociologist), courses; Foucault; Labor; Labor
234n.21 Relations; Marx; Politics; State;
British East India Company, 14 Weber
Brooklands Estate, 47 Capitalist “mode of production,”
Budak budak (children/maidens). See 3, 215
Factory women Carey Island, 42

259

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 260 Index

Cash cropping, 15, 21, 24–28, 29, 41, Coffee smallholdings, 24, 41
63, 83. See also Peasants Colonial rule, British: adminis-
Chayanov, A. V., 62, 230n.1 tration, 11, 224n.3; and capital
Chettiar money-lenders, 19 approriation, 15; and children,
Children: average labor time alloca- 26–27; and concept of “Malay
tion, 65; dispersal from home, 70; yeomanry,” 18–21, 33; and com-
in household economy, 26, 27, modification of agriculture, 15,
62, 66, 75, 94; “value of,” 62, 66, 18–34; and commodification
68. See also Boys; Girls; Family; of land, 18–21; and constitu-
Household tion of subject populations, 22;
Chinese: dock workers, 32; labor construction of Malay ethnic
contractors, 42, 80; land pur- identity, 20–21; and “divide
chase by, 46; immigrants, 15, 28; and rule,” 16; and gender rela-
merchants and traders, 25, 27, 39, tions, 23; and image of “Malay
76, 80; plantation workers, 32; indolence,” 15, 21–23, 33; and
planters, 19; relocation to “New immigrant labor, 15–18; Malay
Villages,” 43; squatters, 38, 47; peasants under, 15–24; and
and tin-mining, 14, 21 women, 27. See also Peasants;
Civil servants (Malay): and bureau- Sultanate system
cratic culture, 49; and Chinese Consumer Association of Penang,
businessmen, 80; under colonial- 185
ism, 29, 30, 34; and corruption, 51; Corporate culture: biological con-
land concentration by, 43, 44–46, struction of gender, 152; demand
143; and job allocation, 81; as role for young women, 154; and disci-
models in village society, 135; plinary mechanisms, 8; and fam-
and students’ aspirations, 55, 106; ily ideology, 162–63, 170–78; and
sought in marriage, 79; in Telok, “grievance procedure system,”
39. See also Bureaucratic culture; 173, 235n.30; and kampung elders,
Class; Pembangunan; UMNO; State 174–78; reconstituting kampung
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Class: access to the state system and values, 169, 170–71; representa-
labor markets, 57–58; aspirations tion of women as children, 137,
and social mobility, 6; conscious- 170–71, 174–75; view of “mass
ness, 180, 193, 201, 202; cultural hysteria,” 204–206; and young,
perceptions of, 74–79; emergent, single women, 154. See also
in kampung society, 74–84; and Discourses; Electronics factories;
female sexuality, 113, 180, 235n.2; Factory women
identification as ethnic status, 7; Cultural, the: change, 2-3, 216; as
resistance, 150, 178, 220; sources construction and reconstruction
of livelihood, 60–61; new middle, of meaning, 3–5, 219; definition
79. See also Civil servants; Peas- of, 2–3; oppositional forms,
ants; Proletarianization 185; 186–193; dialectic between
Clifford, Hugh (British colonial resistance and discipline, 9–10,
official), 15, 122 220. See also Discourses; Factory
Coconut smallholders, 24–26, 41. Women; Gender; Labor Relations;
See also Cash cropping Sexuality

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 Index 261

Dakwah: antagonism to family processes, 233n.20; competi-

planning, 53; as anti-government tion with American enterprises,
movement, 183–84; and laboring 163; difference from Western
poor, 7; member of, 136; and companies, 174; division of labor
spirit beliefs, 141; view of Islamic by ethnicity and race, 155–62;
womanhood, 184–85. See also and Islamic worship, 167–68;
ABIM and kampung elders, 174–78,
Daughters: cash contributions to 187; in Kuala Langat, 150; as
family, 65-66, 70-71, 83, 100–08; network of power relations,
and sons, 6; and domestic respon- 177; preference for female labor,
sibilities, 94; and education/occu- 151; reconstitution of kampung
pational paths, 84; and domestic values, 169, 170–71; recruitment
duties, 94, 95–96, 112; in electronics of rural women, 153–55; relations
factories, 191, 105; and inheritance, with Malay villages, 174; spirit
44; and male power at home, 8, possession in, 205–10; use of
108; parents’ expectations of, 83, family ideology, 162–63; 170–78;
98, 102; and sons, 6, 84, 99–108. and typists, 234n.24. See also
See also Corporate culture; Factory Corporate culture; ENI; EJI; FTZ;
women; Family, Parent-child MUZ; Labor Relations.
relationship, Mother-daughter ties, Electronics Japan Incorporated (EJI):
Household budgetting, Siblings allowances in, 166; attacks on fore-
de Certeau, Michel (sociologist), 122 men from, 211; automation in, 161,
Dialectical analysis, 1–2 165; dual employment policy of,
Discourses: corporate, on familial 160; female foremen in 169; female
relations, 170–71, 174–75; operators in, 151, 160; grounds for
corporate, on gender differences, dismissal, 167; JCC in, 173; operator
152–55, 162; pembangunan (devel- calls for more discipline in, 185;
opment), 48, 49–51, 55, 149–50, organization of production by eth-
218; divergent, on female sexual- nicity, gender and earnings, 155–60;
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

ity, 8, 108, 220; public, on factory “philosophy” of, 170; and pushing
women and morality, 195–213; workers 165; strike at, 173; in Telok
oppositional, by factory women, FTZ, 150; treatment of spirit pos-
195–213. See also Cultural, the; session victims, 206; and worker
Factory Women; Dakwah,; EJI; resistance, 164. See also Electronics
ENI; Foucault; MUZ factories
District officer: colonial, 18, 19; in “Emergency, the” (communist insur-
Kuala Langat, 49 gency, 1948–60), 31–33, 38, 43
Divorce: causes of, 131–34. See also Employment status; bonded worker
Marriage (wong tebusan), 17; contract worker
Dore, Ronald (sociologist), 196 (kerja kontrak) 78; factory worker
Dukun (sorcerer): 119, 120. See also (pekerja kilang) 55, 83, 95; govern-
Sorecery ment worker (kerajaan), 55, 79,
84, 95; hired farm laborer (buroh
Electronics Factories, Japanese: tetap), 78; labor contractor (tukang
change in production tebus), 17; labor gang leader

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 262 Index

(mandur), 42; laborer (kuli), 55; low marriages, 191–92; and demand
status labor, 83; migrant worker, for humanitarian treatment, 167,
81; oddjobbing (ambil upah), 186, 196, 202, 213, 220; and dual
78; peasant (tani), 84; post-war employment policy, 160; and
occupational system, 76, 78–79; employment in electronics indus-
self-employed (kerja sendiri), 78; try, 141–48; and experience of
sharecropping (bagi-dua), 78; wage new power relations, 7; and fac-
worker (makan gaji), 78, 84. See also tory work schedule, 111–112; and
Factory Women; Labor; Peasants feeling of being bodily controlled,
Engels, Frederick, 187, 195 168, 189, 197; and global produc-
Electronics Nippon Incorporated tion systems, 145; and hostility
(ENI): allowances in, 166; to bebas women, 188; “illicit love”
“Eastern” philosophy of, 170–71; and pregnancy, 191, 199–200,
use of family ideology, 163–65; 236n.2; and kampung expecta-
female operators in, 151; grounds tions of 186; as labor reserve for
for dismissal, 117; nurse in, 200, industry, 136, 146; and liaisons
206; and outstation workers, 177; with non-Muslims, 169, 189;
parents meetings in, 175–76; and machine wrecking, 210–11,
personnel relations in, 174–75; 236n.10; and need for spiritual
organization of production in, vigilance, 207; and new eco-
161; productivity rates attained, nomic power, 107; oppositional
163; recruitment of rural women culture and class sexualilty, 185,
by, 154; in Telok FTZ, 150; treat- 186–93, 195–213; outstation, 177;
ment of spirit possession victims, peer pressure of, 190–91; protest
205–206, 210; work shifts in, 167. against labor relations, 165–69,
See also Electronics factories 206, 202–03; and prostitution, 171, 182,
210; work shifts in, 167. 193; public censure and negative
Export-Industrialization: to images, 146, 181–86; recruitment
integrate Malays into capitalist by electronics industry, 153–55;
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

enterprises, 141, 143–50; cultural and rejection of social emanci-

models of, 149–50. See also Pem- pation, 192; representation as
bangunan children, 137, 170–71, 174–75; self-
determination by, 199–200, 221;
Factory women: and abortion, 200; self-esteem of, 191; as sexualized
acceptance of male authority, personalities, 8; social conscious-
192; and bebas image, 185, 188, ness of, 196–203, 213; and spirit
189, 190, 191; and call for Islamic possession, 7, 204–210; treated
ascetism, 191, 192; and capitalist “like things” 201; as urban
production, 151–53; and charge of migrants, 145–46; and vocabu-
unIslamic behavior, 187; conflict lary of possession, 207–210; and
between family claims and Western images and consumer-
social emancipation, 186, 188–89; ism, 181, 183, 185, 198–99. See also
and construction of new class Cultural, the; Discourses, Gender;
sexuality, 185, 186–93, 221; and Labor Relations; Women
cost of labor power, 153; dakwah Family: adat in conflict with Islam,
views of, 184–85; and delayed 86–87; and the cash nexus, 99,

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 Index 263

107; cooperation and conflict 152, 162–64; class sexuality and

in, 96; definition of, 58; father’s oppositional culture, 185, 186–93,
role in, 86, 88; janda, as threat to, 195–213; commoditized, 135;
89; matrifocal, 85; as model of contradictory images of, 181–86;
work relations, 163–65; 170–78; corporate represenations of
188; nuclear, 69; as open-ended women as children, 137, 170–71,
process, 116; relations of con- 174–75; as cultural constructs,
sumption, 71; stem-, 71, 72–73; 4, 220–221; dakwah views on,
significance of bonds with female 184–85; and devil images, 204–10;
relatives, 89. See also Household; and disciplinary techniques, 8;
Mother-daughter bond; Parent- and domesticity, 94, 95–96; 111;
child relationship expressed in clothing, 123–24,
Family planning: men’s resistance 135, 136, 168, 179, 181, 183, 185,
to, 53; dakwah hostility to, 53; use 198–99; expression at weddings,
of the pill, 134 136; janda image, 89, 132; kampung
Farmer’s Bank (Bank Pertanian), 51 notions about, 86–89; reserve
Federal Land Development Author- army of labor, xvii-xix, 84;
ity (FELDA), 82, 103, 228n.6, “masculine” image of, 130; and
232n.2 male perceptions of, 135; modern
Federated Malay States (FMS), 16, housewife image, 135; redefini-
21, 224n.6 tions of, 3; and relations of domi-
Feminism, American, 4, 180 nation and subordination, 195;
Firth, Raymond (anthropologist), relations under colonialism, 23;
23, 232n.8 resistance to male constructions
Firth, Rosemary (anthropologist), 100 of, 164; Western images of, 185
Fortes, Meyer (anthropololgist), Girls: and education, 57, 79, 81, 86,
230n.1 90–99; and factory employment,
Foucault, Michel: on “analytics,” 97; and failure in examinations,
xv, “bio-politics,” 51, 183; on 93; in kampung work, 67; and
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

disciplinary techniques, 3, labor time allocation, 65–66; and

141; on “knowledge-power,” housework, 94, 95; socialization
xvii,“governmentality,” 48; on of, 91; as students, 92, 96. See also
reconstitution of sexuality, xix, Factory women; Family; House-
8; on “truth” effects of modern hold; Women
power, 3–4, 180 Gluckman, Max (anthropologist), 20
Free Trade Zone (FTZ): in Bayan Goffman, Erving (sociologist), 198
Lepas, Penang, 182; definition of, Government. See Kerajaan; State
226n.2; and female migrants, 145; “Green revolution program,” 45
urban-based, 181–82, 197; and tax Grossman, Rachel (economist), 180
exemptions, 146. See also Telok Gullick, J. M. (anthropologist),
FTZ 13, 14
Guru (teacher): view of girl
Geertz, Clifford, 2, 229n.2 students, 92; and land concen-
Gender, female: bebas imagery, tration, 46; male, 91–92; as role
185, 189, 191; biological con- model, 79, 135; and students,
cepts of, in corporate policies, 55, 81, 106. See also Bureaucratic

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 264 Index

culture; Civil Servants; State; Immigrant labor: Chinese and

UNMO Indian, 15–16; Malays, 17, 24,
227n.12. See also Indians, Javanese
Hannerz, Ulf (anthropologist), 221 Indians: Chettiar money lenders,
Hantu (devil): in factories, 204–10, 19; as immigrants, 15–16, 17, 28;
220; female, 89; symbolism of Malabari merchants, 39, 76;
social change, 1, 9. See also Spirit relocation of, in “the
possession; Spirits; Taussig Emergency,” 43. See also Tamil
Hari Raya, 81 plantation workers
Harrisons and Crosfield (plantation Industrialization: impact on
company), 42 kampung life, 40; Malaysian,
Hawa nafsu (carnal desires). See 3; rural, 150. See also Export-
Women industrialization; Labor; Labor
Hegemony: versus class conscious- relations; State
ness, 201. See also Williams Internal Security Act, 149
Hobsbawm, Eric: on “collective Islam: ascetism, 50; and Depart-
bargaining by riot,” 210; on ment of Religious Affairs, 131,
European peasants, 187; on social 183–84; and family planning, 53;
consciousness of peasants, 202 ideals and work ethic, 149–150;
Household: access to land, 44; and and illicit sex (khalwat), 101;
child labor, 65–68; before colonial- inheritance rules governed by,
ism, 13–14; under colonialism, 33, 43, 44, 226n.4, 230n.8; and
23–28; composition and pooling of kerja halal (honest work), 185, 186;
resources in, 68–73; deployment of religious teachers of, 51. See also
labor by, 61–68; dispersal of chil- Adat, Kadi; Khalwat; Madrasah:
dren by, 70; with grandchildren, Schools; Ustaz
72; by land access, 59; link to labor
markets, 59; by size, 69; stem-, Japanese workers: compared to
71–72; strategies, in economic Malay workers, 149, 163, 233n.19
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

crises, 24–34; limits of strategiz- Jamilah Ariffin (economist), 153, 180

ing, 60–61, 63, 67; with women in Janda, 89. See also Family
cash-earning activities, 26, 27–28. Javanese: dual ethnic identity,
See also Family; Household bud- 231n.4; founding of Sungai Jawa,
getting: Household census; Labor 117–18; immigrants, 16, 17, 19, 28,
time allocation; Peasants 225n.13, 226n.3; workers, 32. See
Household budgetting: case studies also Immigrant labor
of, 100–108; joint (makan sekali), 100; Jawatan Kuasa Kampung (JKK): defi-
separate (makan sukuu), 100. See nition of 39, 45; member of, 103,
also Family; Household; Siblings 104, 110
Household census: by land access, Joint Consultative Committee
59; methodology of, 227n.1; (JCC), 173
by primary occupation of
household head, 60; of Sungai Kadi: on causes of divorce,
Jawa, 58; by social strata, 59. 137; role in divorce, 119;
See also Household; Labor time and janda, 89. See also Divorce;
allocation Marriage

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 Index 265

Kampung: in capitalist circuit, 84; 146–47; power, deployment by

ethos of cooperation, 110, 219; villagers, 58–68; and female
leaders of, 80, 227n.11; symbolism migrants, 81, 82, 145–46; reserve,
of, 57; notion about work, 111 for industries and plantations, 39,
Kampung Melur, 152 42; time, expended on farm and
Kampung Telok, 39, 45, 49, 91 wage work, 63–64, 73–74; and
Kebun, 37. See also Cash cropping; unions, 148–49, 171: and wage
Peasants rates in Kuala Langat, 147–48. See
Kelly, Maria Patricia Fernendez, also Employment; Labor Process;
(anthropologist), 235n.1 Labor Relations; Electronic
KEMAS (Community Development factories
Program), 52 Labor process under capitalism:
Kerajaan (government): bureaucratic Marx and Burawoy on, 155; in
expansion in rural society, 38, transition from peasant cash
48–49, 79; and goals of students, cropping, 7, 151; and use of
55. See also Bureaucratic culture; women workers, xv-xx, 151–53.
Civil servants; Pembangunan; State See also Braverman; Burawoy;
Kessler, Clive S. (anthropologist), Foucault, Marx; Weber
184, 203 Labor relations: allowances and
Khalwat: among factory workers, micropunishments, 165–66; and
101, 131; among white collar concept of gender inequality, 162,
workers, 1241 raids linked with, 164; daily negotiations of, 167;
101, 131, 184. See also Islam; and ethnic hostilities, 158–60; on
Factory women the shopfloor, 162–70; and resis-
Kijaji, 118, 123. See also Islam tance to capitalist discipline, 211;
Klang (or Port Klang), 39, 46, 49, 71, and workers treated like things,
79, 81, 82, 91, 104, 124, 125, 130, 164, 196, 201–202. See also Capi-
131, 197, 198 talist discipline; Employment;
Klang Valley, 43, 39, 81, 82, 144 Electronics factories; Factory
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Kuala Langat: acreage under women; Labor process; Labor

cash crops, 41; changing rural time allocation
society in, 37–38; income from Labor time allocation: by children
smallholdings, 41; industries in, and adults, 75; by girls and boys,
141; links to the Federal govern- 65; in kampung society, 61–68; and
ment, 48; rubber and coconut leisure, 112; by men and women,
smallholders in, 24–28; secondary 64; for Peninsular Malaysia,
crops in, 42–43; as “showpiece of 232n.6; and proletarianization,
development,” 55; social differ- 73–74; survey methodology, 63,
entiation in, 63; wages in, 147. See 228n.3. See also Household;
also Kampung Telok; Peasants Peasants
Kuala Lumpur (K.L.), 38, 80, 81, Ladang, 37
122, 133, 144, 200 Land: and absentee landlordism,
Kumpulan Perangsang Selangor, 47 30–31: commodification of, under
colonialism, 18–21; commodifica-
Labor: force, by industry in Penin- tion of, and household access,
sular Malaysia, 144; legislations, 5–6; concentration of, by civil

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 266 Index

servants, 43, 44, 45, 143; dispos- Mamdani, Mohammad

session of, among peasants, 218; (sociologist), 62
fragmentation of, 44, 60; hunger Marriage: age at, 118, 134; and
(lapar tanah), 43–48; and inheri- beauty, 125; and choice of spouse,
tance of, 58; lottery for, 45; Malay 116; and competition for wives,
classification of, 14; and opening 121; delayed, 134–37; 191–92;
up of forest reserves, 226n.5; divorce and remarriage by
peasant access to, 43; registration women, 131–34; and husband’s
of, under colonialism, 18; rising authority over wife, 88; and hus-
values of, in Telok, 46; squatting band’s resistance to maintenance,
on, 45. See also “Green revolution 232n.9; by Islamic contract (akad
program;” Peasants; nikah), 117, 231n.7; janda as threat
Proletarianization to, 132; Malay-Chinese, 120; to
Land-person ratio: reduction over non-Malays, 190 and paternity
time, 119; and competition for claims, 132; strategies and
wives, 120–21 commodity logic, 121–34, 135;
Lenin, Illych: on agrarian capitalism strategies of earlier generations,
in Russia, 5 117–21; of the upwardly mobile,
Lewis, Ioan M. (anthropologist), 207 122–28; women’s intervention
Lim, Linda (economist), 180, in arrangements of, 127; of the
234n.25; 235n.1 working poor, 127–31 See also
Lim Mah Hui (sociologist), 232n.2, Divorce; Men; Women; Wedding
233n.7 Marx, Karl: on labor process, 155;
Lim Tech Ghee (historian), 20, 21, on labor power, 228n.4
23, 29, 225n.10 Media, the: and social control,
Lukács, George: on “phantom 181–82
objectivity,” 210 Men: and akal, 87; and janda, 89;
labor time allocation of, 64; and
Madness: inflicted through sorcery, moral authority over women, 88;
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

119; threat of, 127. See also Spirit as pemuda, 87, 90; and perceptions
possession of working women, 135; primary
Malacca, 189, 190, 203 occupations of, 83; as suitors,
Malay business: shopkeeping, 126; 119, 122
See also Peasants Minangkabau, 17, 121
Malay culture: variations in, 229n.1 Minge-Kalman/Minge-Klevana,
Malay population: in Selangor, 18 Wanda (anthropologist), 73–74
Malay Reservations Enactment: in Mobility, social: downward, 6, 83, 84,
Selangor, 20–22. See also Colonial 143; mediated through marriage,
rule 115–16, 121; upward, through
Malay identity: definition used in education, 54, 56; upward,
this text, 223n.1; colonial defini- through marriage, 122–28
tion of, 20, 21; kampung defini- Modernization theory, 3, 215
tions of, 202, 231n.4, 236n.3. See Mother-daughter bond: strength-
also Bumiputra status ening of, 107. See also Family;
Malaysian ringgit: value in 1979–80, Household budgetting;
227n.6 Parent-child relationship

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 Index 267

Mukim Telok, 37, 45, 91, 92, 93, and poverty, 143; protest against
195, 202 colonial policies, 28–34; reconstitu-
MUZ (Musical Movements tion as petty commodity produc-
Factory): female operators in, 151; ers, 23–28; resistance to colonial
organization of production and policies, 28–34, 225n.14; resistance
wage rates, 162; “philosophy” of, against eviction, 46, 47; self-defini-
170; productivity rates, 162; recre- tion of, 202, 236n.3; incipient social
ational activities in, 172; recruit- differentiation of, 28–35; “social
ment of rural women by, 154; engineering” of, 39–40, 145; as
in Telok FTZ, 150; treatment of urban migrants, 144–46. See also
women workers, 165; union and Family: Household; Household
strike at, 171–72. See also Electron- Census: Kampung
ics factories Pemuda. See Boys; Men; Youths
Pemudi. See Girls; Factory women;
Nagata, Judith (anthropologist), 184 Women
Nash, June (anthropologist), 216 Pesaka (inherited land property):
Netherlands East Indies, 16 brought into marriage, 128;
New Economic Policy, 39, 49, 143 definition of, 58; transmission at
“New Home Economics,” 61–62. See children’s marriage, 118, 119, 123
also Labor time allocation Pembangunan (development):
Oil palm: crop acreage 25, 41; defined, 48; funds and UMNO,
cultivation, 40, 43 50–51, ideology of, 48, 54, 149–50,
183, 218. See also Civil servants;
Parent-child relationship: and child dakwah; State, the; UMNO
labor, 68; claims on daughter’s Petaling Jaya, 82
wages, 83; divergent expectations Plantation: definition of, 37;
of son and daughter, 98, 105, 102; Chinese, 38; European 38, 42; staff
restructured, 6, 98, 107. See also and workers, 80; system, 40, 42
Family; Factory women; House- “Plural society,” 16
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

hold; Household budgetting; Policemen, 123, 212, 231n.6

Mother-daughter bond Political parties, 51, 52. See also PAS;
Partai Islam Se Malaysia (PAS), 48, UMNO
50 Proletarianization: and agrarian
Patron-client networks, 45, 82 capitalism, 5; in cities, 143–150;
Peasants, Malay: on eve of British and class consciousness, 180, 193,
Intervention, 12–15; and com- 201, 202; and domestic life, 112;
modification of agriculture, and downward mobility, 6, 83–84,
18–34; colonial definition of, 20, 99; and labor time allocation,
21; under colonialism, 15–34; in 61–68, 73–74; and “Look East
economic crises, 24–34; image of Policy,” 149, 150; Malay, 58, 83,
indolence, 15, 21–23, 33; image of 182, 185–86. See also Employment;
yeomanry, 18–21, 33; of immigrant Labor: Land; Peasants
origin, 24, 23, 33; as labor reserve
for plantations, 42; native social Quantitative analysis: limitations
categories of, 58–59, 74–79; and of, 58; and proletarianization, 218.
population growth, 18, 43, 53–54: See also Labor time allocation

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 268 Index

Residential system, 15, 224n.3 168, 179, 181, 183, 185, 198–99:
Rubber: boom in, 29; companies, contradictory representations of,
19, 225n.14; crop acreage, 25, 41; 8; as discipline and female sexual-
government curtailment of pro- ity, xi-xii, xvi 53; as effects of
duction, 26, 33; and indigenous capitalist control, 8, 113; corporate
capital accumulation, 30; prices discourse on, 152, 168, 170–71,
of, 24–28; smallholder resistance, 174, 177–78; as cultural construct,
29; as smallholding crop, 24–28; 4-5: dakwah view of, 136, 184–85,
and social differentiation in 53; and delayed marriage, 134;
kampung society, 28–34; Stevenson as key image of cultural change,
Restriction Scheme, 29. See also 4; and oppositional culture, 185,
Cash cropping: Peasants 186–93, 195–213; public discourse
Rural-urban transition: and genera- on, 181–86; and wedding images,
tion gap, 105; and “mass hyste- 124. See also Discourse; Electronics
ria,” 205; migrant circuits in, 81; factories; Factory women: Gender
and restructuring of political Shah Alam, 81, 82, 105
economy, 39–40, 144–46; statistics Shahnon Ahmad (novelist), 36, 187
of, 232n.3; and links to urban- Shamsul A. Bahruddin (anthropolo-
based classes, 57–58, 81, 82; and gist), 277n.11
view of academics, 182–83. See Siblings: cooperation and conflict
also Factory Women; Peasants; among, 99–108; and inheritance
Proletarianization; Schools rules, 43–44: as model of work
relations, 188; changing relations
S. Husin Ali (anthropologist), 28, 58 among, 7, 107; solidarity among,
S. Hussein Alatas (sociologist), 22 81, 100, 102, 107. See also Daughters;
Sadka, Emily (historian), 13, 16 Family; Household budgetting
Schools: adult education, 52; Slametan, 110
Arab-Islamic, 91, 97; and bureau- Sons: and cash contributions to
cratic values, 54, 55; examinations family, 71, 100, 107; planning
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

in, 94, 97; failure of girl students, for education and occupation,
93; government scholarships, 55, 84; and inheritance, 44; parents’
92, 93, 122, 136; madrasah (Islamic expectations of, 98, 102; unem-
boarding), 118, 120; primary, 51, ployment of, 107. See also Boys;
91, 229n.4; qualifications and Family; Household budgetting;
job-seeking, 144; secondary, 91, Parent-child relationship; Youths
93; and social policies, 51–56; Sorcery: accusation of, 119; and ill-
and streaming of boys and girls, ness, 120, 136. See also Dukun
54–55. See also Boys; Girls Spirit possession: in factory
Scott, James (political scientist), 2, women’s words, 207–10; inci-
6, 180 dents of, 204–210, 220; images of
Selangor, 12, 16, 19, 25, 147 filth, 209, 213; management fear
Selangor State Development Corpo- of contagion, 208; medical model
ration (SSDC), 150 of, 209–10; viewed as “mass hys-
Sexuality: as arena of contestation, teria,” 204–206; as protest, 7–8,
220; class, 180, 234n.2; expressed 205, 206, 207, 210; and need for
in clothing, 123–24, 135, 136, spiritual vigilance, 207, 209; and

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 Index 269

urban migration, 204, 205. See also Taylorism: defined, 234n.21; and
Factory women; Spirits class ideology, 233n.15; and labor
Spirits: beliefs and industrialization, process, 161, 162, 172
141; datuk, 203, 205; djinn and Technology and social control, 142
hantu, 88; langsuir, 89; pontianak, Televeshen Malaysia, 79, 181, 230n.9
89, 203; syaitan, 203, 213; toyol, Telok Datuk, 38, 46, 79
203, 230n.11. See also Hantu; Spirit Telok FTZ: female workers at, 54,
possession 63, 82, 112, 129, 153, 186, 190, 193,
Squatters: on private and state 197, 200; and female students,
lands, 45; resistance to eviction, 92–93, 97; and “rural indus-
46–47; urban, 144. See also Land; trialization,” 39, 40, 48, 51, 80,
Peasants; State 150–51; productivity rates at, 162;
State, the: and bureaucratic capital- machine-wrecking at, 210; violent
ism, 43–48; countering resistance incidents in, 212
from below, 5, 6, 9, 147, 150; Temporary Occupation Licenses
and export-industrialization, (TOLs), 47
143–50; and ideology of pemban- Third Malaysia Plan, 143
gunan, 149–50; and industrial Thompson, Edward P., 108, 178, 223n.1
discipline, 146; and kampung Time: and capitalist production,
families, 55; as multiple-foci of 111, 112; control of, in facto-
power, 150, 219; and political ries, 167–68; fracturing the day,
party domination, 51, 52; peas- 108–112, 183; new sense of in
ant resistance to, 28–34, 46, 47; kampung society, 86, 110. See also
and political disciplining, 5, 7, Labor time allocation
150; and rural discontent, 143;
and societal engineering, 145; UMNO (United Malays National
squatter resistance to, 46, 47; Organization), contracts, 51, 122;
and women workers, 52. See election tactics, 50; and “fence-
also Bureaucratic culture; Civil sitting” youths, 51; in mukim
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

servants; Kerajaan; UMNO Telok, 38, 39, 48–51, 79; Pemuda,

Stevenson Restriction Scheme, 29 48, 51; and social policies, 48,
Strathern, Marilyn (anthropologist), 4 51–54; and village women, 52–54;
Sultanate system, 13–14, 16, 18, 75, Wanita, 49, 52, 54. See also
236n.3 Bureaucratic culture
Sungai Way, 81, 204 Use values and exchange values, 24
Surau (prayer room) in factories, Ustaz, 125
167, 209
Swettenham, Frank (colonial “Value of children” model,
official), 16, 22 62, 66, 68. See also Labor time
allocation
Tamil plantation workers, 31, 42, 76, Violent incidents; attacks on factory
80–81. See also Indians men, 189–90, 211–12; communal
Tanjong Karang, 91, 101, 102, 126, rioting, 143
131
Taussig, Michael (anthropologist), Wang hantaran. See Marriage;
1, 3, 8, 141, 216 Wedding

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 270 Index

Weber, Max: on discipline, xvii, on 90, 94–95; primary occupations

knowledge as basis of bureau- of, 82, 83; and role in marriage
cratic control, 142; on “traditional arrangements, 127; and role in
authority,” 234n.29 population growth, 53–54; and
Wedding: bersanding (sitting-in- UMNO 52–54; unmarried, 40,
state), 124; expenses paid by 82, 90, 96; young, and house-
the groom (wang hantaran) 103, work, 94, 95–96, 97, 111, 190;
117, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133; gifts, young, and romance, 96; young,
124, 125; wang mas (bridal gift of and school dropout, 97; young,
gold), 117, 118. See also Factory and longest work day, 67. See
women; Marriage also Girls; Gender; Factory
White, Benjamin N. (anthropolo- Women; Sexuality
gist), 6, 62 Wong tebusan. See Employment
Williams, Raymond: on
“Hegemony,” 3, 180; on Youth culture, 181, 185. See also
received concepts, 4 Youths
Wolf, Eric, 2 Youths, kampung: access to labor
Women: access to labor market, markets, 95; policing rural
95, 98–99; and carnal desire society, 212; restless and hostile,
(hawa nafsu), 87; as college stu- 50; and UMNO, 51; view of fac-
dent, 135–36; in cottage indus- tory women, 95. See also Pemuda;
tries, 27; and family planning, Schools; UMNO; Youth culture
53; and KEMAS, 52; in landless
households, 63; married, fertil- Zawawi Ibrahim and Shahril Talib
ity rates of, 119; middle age and (anthropologist and historian),
older, 88; and peasant produc- 201, 234n.27
tion, 23, 26, 28, 52; as pemudi, Zinah, 184
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition : Factory Women in Malaysia, State University of New
York Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=3407268.
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Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition : Factory Women in Malaysia, State University of New
York Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=3407268.
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 ANTHROPOLOGY

In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and
Capitalist Discipline has become a classic in the fields of anthropology, la-
bor, gender and globalization studies. Based on intensive fieldwork, the book
captures a moment of profound transformation for rural Muslim women even
as their labor helped launch Malaysia’s rise as a tiger economy. Aihwa Ong’s
analysis of the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences that roiled the lives of
working women has inspired later generations of feminist ethnographers in
their study of power, resistance, religious upheavals, and subject formation
in the industrial periphery. With a critical introduction by anthropologist Carla
Freeman, this new edition upholds an exemplary model of anthropological in-
quiry into cultural modes of resistance to the ideology, discipline, and workings
of global capitalism.

“This work … remains powerful for its refusal to over-simplify the complexities of
export industrialization as a model for economic development, and for its demon-
stration of the intimate dialectics of culture, economy, gender, religion, and class,
and the meaningfulness of place amid the swirling forces of global capitalism …
[It] opened up many of the questions that should continue to inspire our analyses
of globalization today. Indeed, these questions are equally compelling for the
reader returning to this work after twenty years and for the reader new to this
text and to the intriguing and complex puzzles of globalization.”
— from the Introduction by Carla Freeman
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her many books include Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnational-
ity and Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty.

A volume in the SUNY series in the Anthropology of Work

June C. Nash, editor

State University of
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu

Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition : Factory Women in Malaysia, State University of New
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