Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Maznah Binti Mohamad, Departments of Malay Studies and Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This presentation deals with what I call a “conjunctural” episode of dispossession that occurred from 1948-1952 in British colonial Malaya, and that had resonances that persisted through the late 1970s-1980s when I undertook fieldwork on the founding of a workers “society” in the town of Bukit Mertajam in Penang state, Malaysia. What made The Emergency in Malaya during the years 1948-1953 a conjunctural episode of dispossession is that it occurred on multiple political scales – the imperial, the colonial, the regional – all of which need to be understood in order to explain the specific antecedents that framed and led up to the founding of the North Malaysian Lori Drivers Association in 1978, and its subsequent role in labor unrest in the truck transport industry of Malaysia over the next two years. Anthropologists have recently turned to the study of the politics of scale, and this presentation, which seeks to situate the local and regional processes studied by ethnography within the broader contexts which shape these processes, seeks to make a contribution to this broader dialogue about the relationships between ethnographic research and scale.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Donald M. Nonini is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research specializations within anthropology are in urban anthropology, political anthropology, comparative study of the urban commons, and the study of social movements. He is the author of two books on Malaysia, the most recent being “Getting By”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015). He also recently edited Companion to Urban Anthropology (Wiley Blackwell 2014), which he hopes will help shift the field to a new paradigm in urban anthropology. In addition to his research interests on Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, he has a secondary interest in race relations and social movements in the US South, and has co-authored Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007). In all these processes, he is interested in thinking creatively about processes and strategies by which scale is produced. While at ARI he hopes to further his comparative research on two topics: urban restructuring around gentrification in Asian cities, and food provisioning systems and practices in Asian cities.

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