The Kampung and the Global Village

Abstract

It might seem paradoxical that in devaluing the Malay economic past, increasingly — in the corridors of corporate power, in evocative images portrayed by government and the media, and in the ideology of modem Malay men and women now living far from the villages and small towns of their childhoods — the framing of a highly valued Malay social past is taking form. While the kampung encompassed no past economic behaviours that could be utilized in the present, and Malay feudal society had no social behaviours applicable to modern life, the kampung, now exalted as a kind of idyllic community, has, to my informants and their political leaders, instructive power in conducting modern relationships. Its norms and values are believed to be superior to those of Western societies to which modern Malays increasingly compare themselves; moreover, in its imparadisement we can find indigenous theories of ‘Malayness’ itself.