Patricia Sloane-White’s research while affiliated with University of Delaware and other places

Gerhard Hoffstaedter conducted anthropological fieldwork in Shah Alam and Kota Bharu, Malaysia, two geographically and economically disparate but primarily Muslim-majority cities. These locations are just two of the many sites of conflict and contestation in this ambitious study on contemporary Malaysian identity politics, which simmer, and sometimes threaten to boil over in a nation characterized by a complex and increasingly troubled mix of ethnic, cultural, class-based, religious, and political factions. The people of Shah Alam and Kota Bharu are characters in a high-level and high-stakes political drama that Hoffstaedter portrays as centered elsewhere, in the federal (and sometimes state) governments and involving their elite agents. The citizenry of Malaysia are victims of what he identifies as ‘politicide’—the silencing, policing and limiting of their sovereignty. Much of the book focuses on the strategies of dissimulation employed by the government and widening ruptures in a mul

:This article demonstrates how sharia, the source for developing products in Malaysia's Islamic economy, has also emerged in some Malaysian businesses as a form of corporate culture, reconfiguring workplace identities and social relations. It takes the form of what I call "corporate sharia", a set of ideas consciously and deliberately shaped by executives who seek to build corporations based on the rules for commerce and management contained within the Qur'an and Hadith. Corporate leaders also fashion what I call "personnel sharia" — "human resources" rules to ensure that employees exhibit the ethical values and moral principles set by their superiors. As such, the "Islamic workplace" becomes shariai-zed, where the piety and Islamic subjectivities of personnel are shaped, monitored, and enforced, not left to individual, personal choice.

This article seeks to explain Malaysia's remarkable political stability over more than 50 years. We offer a macro-level analysis of Malaysia's rentier-based economy and a micro-level analysis of a political-corporate network of elite Malays as key factors. We argue that the Malay elite, by securing access to abundant rent, has designed, mobilized, and strengthened the state's institutions at its discretion, in a way that provides broad redistribution while strengthening its own role. In contrast to James Scott's theory on resistance against the elite, we argue that Malaysia's elite generates collaboration and co-optation; these are the “weapons of the strong.”

BaxstromRichard, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. vii + 283pp. £49.50. - Volume 36 Issue 3 - Patricia Sloane-White

Since NEP, the ethno-political measure of Malay progress has emphasised Malay capital ownership, leading social scientists who study the Malay middle class to focus almost exclusively on what this article calls the ‘two poles of consumption and dependency’. This ethnography suggests that certain middle-class Malays use a different calculus to mark out their place in contemporary Malay life. It argues that these Malays portray themselves not only in terms of material and entrepreneurial success, but through their frequent experiences of failure. To them, failure becomes, paradoxically, a virtue that can establish their moral and Islamic distance from the Malays they characterise as the ‘indolent’ poor and the ‘politicking’ rich.

Chinese Minority in a Malay State: The Case of Terengganu in Malaysia. By Chee-BengTan. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002. xiv, 162 pp. $19.00 (paper). - Volume 64 Issue 1 - Patricia Sloane-White

This paper examines the experience and nature of local and international tourism newly undertaken by members of the Malay urban middle class studied between 1993 and 1998. It argues that middle-class Malays view recreational travel not merely as a form of leisure-based consumption and a marker of class membership, but as a means to understand, define, and valorize the projects of their emergent Malay-Muslim social and economic class. Influenced by a consciously "Islamic" perspective that travel expands knowledge of the world and an individual's capacity to engage more fully in it, Malays justify leisure travel as a form of edification. Malays in the urban middle class also use travel to align themselves with modern national interests, defining travel as a means by which they seek globalized entrepreneurial opportunities and venture partners. In so doing, leisure travel can be defended as a form of "work" in the project of national development, further underscoring Muslim tenets that devalue leisure as nonproductive. Finally, middle-class Malays use local and translocal travel in Southeast Asia to distinguish themselves from (and critique) the "backwards" lower classes. As such, tourism for the "newly rich" Malay can be understood as a distinctly Malay cultural process in which middle-class Malays articulate forms of local and global belonging and social difference.

Looking for Money: Capitalism and Modernity in an Orang Asli Village. By Gomes Alberto G.. Subang Jaya, Malaysia: Center for Orang Asli Concerns; and Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press, 2004. xix, 236 pp. Photographs, maps, and illustrations. $19.95 (paper). - Volume 65 Issue 3 - Patricia Sloane-White