Looking Like a Culture: Moden-ity and Multiculturalism in a Malaysian Village

Abstract

One Saturday during the dry season, I took my adoptive cousins to play at our favorite riverine haunt—a low-running creek on the outskirts of the village. Cars zoomed past on the main road as we splashed about in the sun-dappled water, picking up pebbles, foliage, plastic snack packets, and—as six-year-old Davina was thrilled to discover—some long, leafy stems of bamboo that had fallen from the bank. Extracting a pole twice her height from the water, she stuck it upright in the riverbed, and circled it in a youthful parody of the offertory dance performed around the “altar” at adat gawai rituals, shrieking gleefully, “I’m following gawai!” Minutes later, she and another girl were standing to attention before the same bamboo stem—now transformed into a flagpole—belting out Negara Ku, the Malaysian national anthem.