Education

PhD in History

The Australian National University (ANU), Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, March 2007 - December 2010

This dissertation is a history of the construction of aboriginal races in colonial Malaya from 1783 to 1937. It seeks to understand how ideas of race took shape within anthropological and governmental thought, in the colonial context of British Malaya. In particular, I focus on the connections and disconnections between race within the two areas of anthropological thought and practice and colonial government, in order to destabilise the apparent fixity of aboriginal races. I contend that an ideological separation developed between the two spheres of government and anthropology, as exemplified through my analysis of census reports and anthropological scholarly texts. The different modes of identification of ‘tame’ and ‘wild’ Sakai (the stereotypical and shorthand terms for aborigines in Malaya) within anthropological and government thinking serve to ground my treatment of these two spheres as distinct ideological bodies that maintained different criteria for the identification of aborigines, despite overlap in the personnel and resources of both areas. Through an analysis of the tensions between governmental and anthropological imperatives in colonial Malaya, this thesis offers a history of anthropology that concentrates both on ideas of race and on the specific situations in Malaya that brought them forth, influenced them and situated them. This thesis contributes to the global discussion on the influence of colonialism on anthropology, especially in the context of the latter’s history of ideas.

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that concepts of race were imbued with varying influences that were sometimes unexpected and ran counter to the ways in which some scholars understood race. As with Sakai, who did not meet expectations of primitivity and were therefore labelled ‘tame’, ideas of race were imbued with, or perhaps ‘tamed’ by, the various anthropological and governmental contexts in Malaya. Today, race continues to be a salient feature of Malaysian and other societies because the term is continually made meaningful through the complex history of colonial Malaya and the present-day uses of race in biological, popular and legal discourses at all levels of Malaysian society and government. My emphasis on the situatedness of colonial knowledge about aborigines offers a critique of certain contemporary approaches to Orang Asli (the term for indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia today) that continue to frame them as under-developed peoples with unchanging racial essences.