THE SEARCH FOR MALAYNESS

By Wim Derks

The research plan proposes to examine what is called `the Search for
Malayness' in Pekanbaru, the capital of the Indonesian province of Riau
(Sumatra), a town with a predominantly Malay population. This search for
Malayness is defined as a collective, multiple effort initiated in the main
by members of emerging local middle class, to construct a `modern' Malay
identity in response to a constant and often threatening flow of images,
concepts, and models of Western origin. The force of this response to an alien
cultural flow has increased tremendously in recent years and is expressed in
a rich amalgam of individual and social practices, institutions, and media of
which the research plan contains a tentative list.
The plan proposes to extend this list and investigate as comprehensively as
possible the many different ways in which a `modern' Malay identity is
constructed on the spot in present-day Pekanbaru. The multiple forms in which
the Search for Malayness is expressed - exemplified by the tentative list
mentioned above - are seen as `texts' that can be `read': they are sites
around which a constantly varying and multiple range of cultural and
ideological transactions are conducted. Their `reading' therefore will have
to continually interpolated between the `texts' themselves and the social
backgrounds by which their consumption is framed.
Finally, the research plan aims to show that the Malay identity under
constuction is a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory phenomenon.
Therefore, special attention will be given to signs of strain which can
express most clearly the heterogeneous character of the Search for Malayness
in Pekanbaru today. 

W.A.G. Derks (1956) studied Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature
at University of Nijmegen from 1975 to 1984. His M.A. thesis is entitled:
Sumbang: Incest in Indonesian Mythology'. He conducted fieldwork in Riau. In
1994 he received his PhD for a thesis entitled: 'The Feast of Story telling:
Aspects of Malay Oral Tradition.