Abstract
Urbanism, as the term is used in this chapter, refers to a cultural milieu found throughout societies, in places both urban and rural. A common sentiment of cultural urbanism is urban cosmopolitan chauvinism—in which cities are felt to be and expressed as sites of diversity, modernity, progress, wealth, and in other ways positively valued. In contrast, the rural as urbanism’s other and rural people are cast as backward, unsophisticated, homogeneous, conservative, poor, and otherwise lacking in various ways. Through such imaginings, cultural urbanism creates subaltern rural identities. This chapter examines how such subaltern rural identities provide discursive grounds for political action and mobilization. It compares four cases—Malaysia, America, China, and Thailand. Each of these has very different cultures of urbanism and diverse political systems. Nevertheless, the politics of rural identity can be seen as playing a role in national politics—even if this role is often not made very explicit in political analysis or political discourse within each country.
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Francisco, 6–9 April 2006.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I use “race” here (rather than ethnicity) because this is the term commonly used in Malaysia (ras in Bahasa Malaysia).
- 2.
Malay, Muslim, bumiputera, pribumi, and orang kampung are all associated (used as synonyms) discursively in Mat Sabu’s speeches, for example, “[k]ita kena membantu orang kampung, orang Melayu” (we have to help orang kampung, Malay people) (Sabu 1995b).
- 3.
I use the terms, conservative and liberal, here in keeping with their American political usage, even though this usage is radically out of synch with the explicit meaning of the words themselves; conservatives have been working to radically re-form, not conserve, government structures since at least the ascendance of Reaganism in the 1980s, and liberals are much more inclined to champion both social and economic policies at odds with traditional liberal models of individual rights, for example, affirmative action, and economically rational markets, for example, social welfare and curbs on corporate activities.
- 4.
The rural-urban continuum is not a timeless Chinese cultural geography upset only with the coming of twentieth-century modernity. Rather, it is better understood as specific to the context of the predominantly agrarian orientation of the later Ming and Qing dynasties after the sudden end of the early-Ming age of exploration in 1433. The history of urbanism and structures of feeling around cities, towns, and villages is undoubtedly as complex in Chinese history as elsewhere (see Williams 1977).
- 5.
- 6.
In the rural south, another important region of political opposition to Bangkok, such opposition has centered around a subaltern Malay-Muslim identity within a Thai-Buddhist majority country.
References
Alatas, S. H. (1977). The myth of the lazy native: A study of the image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th century and its function in the ideology of colonial capitalism. London: Frank Cass.
Anek L. (1996). A tale of two democracies: Conflicting perceptions of elections and democracy in Thailand. In R. H. Taylor (Ed.), The politics of elections in Southeast Asia (pp. 201–223). New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Beck, U. (2002). The cosmopolitan society and its enemies. Theory, Culture & Society, 19(1–2), 17–44.
Berg, D. (2002). Marvelling at the wonders of the metropolis: Perceptions of seventeenth-century Chinese cities in the novel xingshi yinyuan zhuan. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 17–40). New York: Palgrave.
Chafetz, J. (2004, June 13). Heartland security. The New York Times.
DuBois, T. (2005). The sacred village: Social change and religious life in rural north China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Evans, C. (2004). IQ and politics. http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm. Accessed 18 Apr 2005.
Faure, D. (2002). What Weber did not know: Towns and economic development in Ming and Qing China. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 58–84). New York: Palgrave.
Faure, D., & Liu, T. T. (2002). Introduction. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 1–16). New York: Palgrave.
Frank, T. (2004). What’s the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Funston, J. (2004). The Mahathir years: The rural Malay heartland. In B. Welsh (Ed.), Reflections: The Mahathir years (pp. 168–176). Washington, DC: Southeast Asian Studies Program, The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.
Gao, M. C. F. (1999). Gao village: A portrait of rural life in modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Gastner, M., Shalizi, C., & Neuman, M. (2004). Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US Presidential Election. University of Michigan. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/∼crshalizi/election/. Accessed 18 Apr 2005.
Giles J. U. (2009). Class struggle between the coloured T-shirts in Thailand. Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 1(1), 76–100.
Harrison, H. (2002). Village identity in rural north China: A sense of place in the diary of Liu Dapeng. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 85–106). New York: Palgrave.
Kahn, J. S. (2006). Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Malay world. Singapore: NUS Press.
Kasian T. (2006). Toppling Thaksin. New Left Review, 39, 5–37.
Least Heat-Moon, W. (1991). PrairyErth (A deep map). London: Picador.
Lei, G. (2003). Rural taste, urban fashions: The cultural politics of rural/urban difference in contemporary China. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11(3), 613–646.
Liu, T. T. (2002). Perceptions of city and country in modern Chinese fiction in the early republican era. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 203–232). New York: Palgrave.
Lu, H. (2002). Urban superiority, modernity and local identity—A think piece on the case of Shanghai. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 126–144). New York: Palgrave.
Mahathir M. (1970). The Malay dilemma. Singapore: Times Books International.
McCargo, D. (2005). Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand. The Pacific Review, 18(4), 499–519.
Muhammad H. M. T. (1993). Melayu Baru (The New Malay). Kuala Lumpur: ITC Book Publisher.
Pattana K. (2011). From red to red: An auto-ethnography of economic and political transformation in a northeastern Thai Village. In M. J. Montesano, P. Chachavalpongpun, & A. Chongvilaivan (Eds.), Bangkok, May 2010: Perspectives on Divided Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Pejabat Perdana Menteri. (2000). Buku tahunan perangkaan Malaysia 2000 (Annual Book of Statistics Malaysia 2000). Kuala Lumpur: Office of the Prime Minister.
Potter, S. H., & Potter, J. M. (1990). China’s peasants: The anthropology of a revolution. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sabu, M. (1995a). Antara amanah dan isu tanah (Pendang, Kedah) (Between trust and the land issue). Parit Buntar (Perak, Malaysia): Al-Kautsar.
Sabu, M. (1995b). Isu tanah: Perdana Menteri mencabar Mohd Sabu (Kuala Sala, Kedah) (The land issue: The Prime Minister challenges Mohd Sabu). Parit Buntar (Perak, Malaysia): Al-Kautsar.
Sabu, M. (1995c). Kenapa UMNO hilang penyokong (Taman Melewar) (Why UMNO is losing support). Kuala Lumpur: G.G. Edar.
Thompson, E. C. (2002). Migrant subjectivities and narratives of the kampung in Malaysia. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 17(1), 52–75.
Thompson, E. C. (2003). Malay male migrants: Negotiating contested identities in Malaysia. American Ethnologist, 30(3), 418–438.
Thompson, E. C. (2004). Rural villages as socially urban spaces in Malaysia. Urban Studies, 41(12), 2357–2376.
Thompson, E. C. (2007). Unsettling absences: Urbanism in rural Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press.
Walker, A. (2008). The rural constitution and the everyday politics of elections in northern Thailand. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38(1), 84–105.
Welsh, B. (2004). Reflections: The Mahathir years. Washington, DC: Southeast Asian Studies Program, The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. London/New York: Oxford University Press.
Yan, H. (2003a). Spectralization of the rural: Reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural young women in post-Mao China. American Ethnologist, 30(4), 578–596.
Yan, H. (2003b). Neoliberal governmentality and neohumanism: Organizing suzhi/value flow through labor recruitment networks. Cultural Anthropology, 18(4), 493–523.
Zhao, S. (2002). Town and country representation as seen in temple fairs. In D. Faure & T. T. Liu (Eds.), Town and country in China: Identity and perception (pp. 41–57). New York: Palgrave.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thompson, E.C. (2013). Urban Cosmopolitan Chauvinism and the Politics of Rural Identity. In: Bunnell, T., Parthasarathy, D., Thompson, E. (eds) Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5482-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5482-9_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5481-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5482-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)