Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia
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Chinese characters certainly have symbolic power and magical power in Chinese culture, but they do not stand in the same relationship to vernaculars that an alphabetic system does. What are we to make of the claim that the pre-modern Sinitic states were somehow proto-nationalist? Reid is too good a scholar not to understand that this was an elite form of nationalism, and it is true that the state made attempts to create linguistic uniformity and ritual uniformity. But it is very important to remember that, even in late imperial times, the elite was but a tiny fraction of the Chinese population, and there has to be a major question mark over the degree to which cultural uniformity was really possible.
Even today, and even if we restrict ourselves to simply Chinese languages, China is almost as diverse as Europe. What was unique in the Sinitic states was the attempt to propagate uniformity via the learning of neo-Confucian texts such as the book by Zhu Xi of the Sung Dynasty on family rites. The overwhelming majority of Chinese could not read; popular knowledge of these rites was dependent on their propagation by local literati and officials. It was one of the great insights of the anthropologist Barbara Ward to recognise that this propagation was a problem, and so her final and unfinished work was on, for example, the role of Chinese opera in spreading Chinese culture.
Another anthropologist, Woody Watson, claimed in several seminal articles that cultural diversity was mediated by a state commitment to ritual orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Others have pointed out the ways in which both ethnic Chinese and minorities adopted state practices but gave them different meanings.
Melissa Brown has written the use of ancestral tablets as memorials on the part of people in Hubei province who do not believe that these tablets contain souls; that is, the cultural form is adopted but not the content. And, while opera may be a means of cultural propaganda, it could also be a source of heterodox discourses.
Donald Sutton has suggested that mid-Ming opera troupes were spreading Buddhist ideas about how to deal with the dead that stood in opposition to Confucian orthodoxy 1. My point is not to measure their success but rather to say that in China the idea of a standard, central and bounded civilisation was spread, even though the nature of its content was never agreed by all 2.
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This idea or ideology certainly made China unique, especially as it entered the world of modern nationalism. Compared with Southeast Asian kingdoms, Indian kingdoms or European kingdoms, China was not burdened by caste or caste-like assumptions, although in practice class and stratification within the bureaucracy would occasionally assert such distinctions. The reality of social hierarchy among other things ensured that the ideological model of cultural uniformity could never be fulfilled.
Only an assumption of social equality and its concomitant democracy could fulfil that model, and that fulfilment would only come with modern nationalism. This is also true in Southeast Asia. One chapter-length tour de force follows another as Reid presents an eye-opening account of the origins of the Melayu , makes his case for the particular nature of Acehnese ethnie nationalism, and draws on immense research and keen personal observation to trace the evolving positions of Batak identity in Indonesia and Kadazan-Dusun identity in Sabah and in Malaysia more broadly.
In all, Imperial Alchemy offers a superb riposte to Eurocentric theorising on nationalism, and it will help shift the point of gravity in the debate over nationalism towards Asia. Finally, Reid proposes that we are entering a post-national world in which, appropriately, our future has been foretold in Southeast Asia. In conditions of globalisation the territorial state is no longer the focus of passionate commitment, he says,. As advanced economies become more multi-cultural, they curiously converge from the opposite direction with plural polities such as those in Southeast Asia.
Is the pluralism of Southeast Asia pre-modern or post-modern?
Imperial alchemy: Nationalism and political identity in southeast asia
Comparative claims about Chinese vs. Southeast Asian civilization are easily made; actual studies of the law and bureaucracy under feudalism in any one state or province are hard, and tend to transform the attitudes of the scholars who undertake them. I shudder to think that James C. Scott is now luring Southeast Asian studies back into another decade of grandiose abstractions. Your email address will not be published. Federal-State Relations in Sabah, Malaysia: The Berjaya Administration, China-Malaysia Relations and Foreign Policy.
A History of Modern Indonesia. The State and the Transnational Politics of Migrants: A Study of the Chins and the Acehnese in Malaysia. Historical Dictionary of Indonesia. A History of the Vietnamese. Identity and the State in Malaysia. Local Cultures and the New Asia: A History of Southeast Asia.
Identity Politics and Elections in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Review of Imperial Alchemy - New Mandala
The Expedition to Borneo of H. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy. A History of Modern Burma.
The Population of Malaysia. Globalization in Southeast Asia. Tales of Old Batavia. Oral History in Southeast Asia. Women of the Kakawin World. World War One in Southeast Asia. Political Change and Territoriality in Indonesia. Merdeka and the Morning Star. Colonial Cambodia's 'Bad Frenchmen'. A Millennium of Cultural Contact. The Territories of Indonesia. Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia.
Armed Forces and Insurgents in Modern Asia.
Review of Imperial Alchemy
Ros Mahwati Ahmad Zakaria. A Colonial Economy in Crisis. Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia.
The New Cambridge History of Islam: The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific. How to write a great review.
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