The Revival of Chineseness as a Cultural Identity in Malaysia

Abstract

The revival of ethnic culture in the current globalizing world challenges the anthropologists and sociologists to study the multicultural societies. This phenomenon appears in urban areas of multicultural cities and it makes the ethnic background awareness lead to be a cultural identity remaking. With an ethnohistory approach and ethnographic fieldwork in 2014, this paper provides the cultural identity making and remaking process of Chineseness in Malaysia since 1970. Chineseness has contextualized the cultural process of cultural plurality to a complexity of the multiculturalism in Malaysian society. This research paper presents a history of social process that resulted in the Chinese culture identity revived in Malaysia after the May 13, 1969 riots, and analyzes two important factors; they are Government Policy and Transnational Linkage of Chinese, shaped and illuminated the Chinese cultural identity in Malaysia. The government policy upholds the Ketuanan Melayu (Supremacy of Malay culture with affirmative action) and the Chinese descendants or Peranakan in adapting national situation, then they sought their shared traditions and memories as well as link them to transnational of Chinese culture in Asia Pacific region. The fieldwork data of 2014 show that multicultural society in Malaysia allows the Malaysia Chinese to enact their rituals, festivals, culinary shows and cultural attractions in public spaces and social media with a revival mode in which the reconstruction of ethnic identity represented as cultural productions of multicultural society.