Rites of Belonging

Jean DeBernardi

Department of Anthropology

The University of Alberta

Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity, and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community (Stanford University Press, 2004)

In this monograph, I investigate Chinese religious culture under both colonialism and ethnic nationalism, combining history and ethnography in order to explore the dialectic between structure and event. In nineteenth century Penang, this diasporic community localized and defended their cultural practices in the British Straits Settlements. The descendants of these early immigrants continue to defend Chinese language and culture in the modern state in which they now are a large ethnic minority. I seek to consider the ideology and practice of Chinese popular religious culture on its own terms (including its mystical, occult dimensions) at the same time that I investigate the ways that Penang Chinese (including both politicians and ritual masters) have localized, revitalized, reformed, modernized, and reinvented it.

I began archival research for this project in 1991 as a Luce Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University, and continued that research in archives in London and Singapore with research grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies. A grant from the Canada Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Center in 1993 to conduct a "Policy Study" on the status of minority groups in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand gave me the opportunity to explore the Malaysian government's approach to managing its multiracial, multicultural society, and in particular the government's approach to creating a national culture based on Malay culture, and the program of affirmative action for Malays that has been in place since 1970.

Previous publications on related topics include:

1994 "Historical Allusion and the Defense of Identity: Malaysian Chinese Popular Religion," in Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia, edited by Helen Hardacre, Charles Keyes, and Laurel Kendall. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press:117-140 [R].

1993 "Epilogue: Ritual Process Reconsidered," in "Secret Societies" Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Early Modern China and Southeast Asia, edited by David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhues. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Press:212-233 [R].

1992 "Space and Time in Chinese Religious Culture," History of Religions 31(3):247-268 [R].

1984 "The Hungry Ghosts Festival: A Convergence of Religion and Politics in the Chinese Community of Penang, Malaysia," Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 12(1):25-34 [R].