Nations-in-renewal and the political production of ethnicity: with references to Malaysia

This paper argues that ethnicity results from prolonged political cohesive success. All ethnicities can point to a past whether mythological or historical or probably both, when they were politically and culturally influential. They may think of it as a period of unity, but most importantly, it was...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ooi , Kee Beng
Format: Article
Published: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2002
Online Access:http://journalarticle.ukm.my/1715/
http://www.ukm.my/sari/index.html
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Summary:This paper argues that ethnicity results from prolonged political cohesive success. All ethnicities can point to a past whether mythological or historical or probably both, when they were politically and culturally influential. They may think of it as a period of unity, but most importantly, it was in fact their discursive genesis. Seen in its contemporary context, nation-building is thus a process within which an ethnic identity reform, if not a new ethnicity, takes place. Primordiality is not a tenable notion. Together with bodily features and discursive habits, landscapes provide a base for group identification. New monuments function therefore as new landscapes inhabited by an emerging ethnicity. Malaysia serves here as the main empirical reference