Article in Sociology · August 000 doi: 10. 1177/S0038038500000304 citations 37 reads 5,200 author

Husin Ali has to leave his house in a hurry to fetch his own family from the hospital. He

has been expecting his sister to come at any moment to assist with his family, but he has

waited as long as he could. He wonders whether to leave his front door unlocked or to

leave the key with his next-door Chinese neighbour. What will Husin Ali do?

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Table 1

Percentage of Respondents Who Expected a Predominantly Ethnic Preference in 

12 Situations

Husin Ali

Tang Seng Seng

Situation

Malay Chinese

Malay Chinese

Zoo trip (EPvStatus)

74

41

57

66

Child adoption (EPvStatus)

67

34

70

82

Wedding invitation (EPvStatus)

62

16

36

35

Shopping (EPvMoney)

47

16

28

14

Renting house (EPvMoney)

31

10

2

4

Marriage (EPvPersOblign)

28

14

80

69

Child minder (EPvMoney)

23

10

30

17

Support boss (EPvPersOblign)

20

39

32

25

Wedding party (EPvPersOblign)

18

1 

1

0

Child’s playmate (EPvPersOblign)

14

3

11

9

Playmate home (EPvPersOblign)

6

1

4

1

House key (EPvMoney)

0

0

2

1

---

1.

Leave the front door unlocked

2.

Leave the key with his next-door Chinese neighbour

3.

Other

The answers showed that ethnic preference counted for more when choosing a

playmate for a child on a family trip to the zoo, and probably reached a peak in

situations defined as those of political competition between Malays and Chinese-

Malaysians.

Just as there is a scale of situations, so the findings could have been analysed to

compile a scale of attitudes. Some men and women will have tended, in all their

responses, to value ethnic association more highly than other respondents. One

characteristic of the armed conflicts described in surveys like Brogan’s is the

influence of activists who present association with co-ethnics (or ‘ethnic purity’) as a

supreme value. They refuse to engage in any ‘trade-off ’ in negotiations, insisting that

they are ‘not for sale’. These are the mobilisers. Among those whom they seek to

mobilise there are many ‘free-riders’, individuals who profess similar aspirations but

would sooner not have to make any sacrifice themselves. As a result there are

situations which the mobilisers insist should be defined as requiring ethnic

alignment, but which others define in terms of status, money or personal obligation.

There can be disagreements over the definition of situations. The Petalingjaya

research compared the expectations of male and female subjects and assessed the

possible influence of family ties by asking respondents how they thought Husin Ali’s

mother would wish him to act in the situations studied. Other persons, either

ideological mobilisers or members of a peer group, can impose their definition of a

situation upon a person contemplating an exit option, and can sometimes conscript

him or her to a movement about which he or she feels ambivalent.

The research technique could have been used to measure the priority attached to

the fulfilment of religious obligations when balanced against secular inclinations. It

could also have been used to compare the strength of a shared inclination to align

with co-ethnics with a shared inclination to align with co-nationals or with co-

believers. Respondents could have been asked to predict how Husin Ali would

choose between alternatives involving Chinese-Malaysians and Indonesian immi-

grant workers. A question could have been drafted about the employment at a

cheaper rate of someone with an Indonesian-sounding name that could have

provided an indication of the significance attributed to differences of nationality.

Since there are many cultural and linguistic continuities between Malays and

Indonesians the ethnic/national comparison might have been seen as less clear-cut

by Malay than ethnic Chinese respondents and the question might have evoked

different responses from them. Nevertheless, this sort of technique offers possibi-

lities for investigating the multidimensionality of group relations in a more

systematic manner.

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Interaction

In calculating the possible benefits of collective action, a major consideration

must be the likely response of other groups affected by such action. The most

dramatic example of ethnic conflict in Malaysia has been the riot which occurred

after Chinese Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur demonstrated their joy over the 1969

election results. Had they been more aware of the possible consequences of their

action they might have behaved differently. One factor in the diminution of conflict

may be an improvement in the parties’ abilities to identify the matters over which

compromise may be possible. An important factor in the escalation of conflict is that

as the parties become more separate, this ability declines and each side expects only

hostile responses from the other.

Table 1 is therefore interesting for the differences it shows between columns 1 and

2 on the one hand, and 3 and 4 on the other. Taking a difference of 10 percentage

points as significant, it can be seen that the Chinese underestimated the strength of

Malay ethnic preference in nine situations and overestimated it in one. The Malays

underestimated the strength of Chinese ethnic preference in one situation and

overestimated it in four. In the first three situations the Chinese respondents believed

that a representative Malay fellow-citizen would be less influenced by considerations

of social status relative to shared ethnicity than the Malay respondents believed,

sometimes by a large margin. They seriously underestimated ethnic preference as an

influence on Malay behaviour in the context of shopping, which is of some

importance given the number of Chinese shopkeepers selling to Malay customers.

They underestimated the reluctance of Malays to rent their houses temporarily to

Chinese tenants, a reluctance which may stem from Malay religious beliefs and ideas

of pollution which have no counterpart in Chinese beliefs. The one situation in

which they overestimated the strength of Malay ethnic preference was in predicting

whether Husin Ali’s ethnic preference would outweigh any feeling of personal

obligation to his boss when others were trying to have him ousted in favour of a

Malay. Maybe their overestimation was influenced by fear because the risks to them

in these circumstances are so great.

Malay predictions of how Tang Seng Seng would react in similar situations were

much closer to Chinese predictions. It is possible that Malays may have projected

their own sentiments of ethnic preference onto Chinese reactions regarding a

mother’s advice about a marriage partner, about shopping and about employing a

child-minder from the other group. They underestimated ethnic preference when it

came to the adoption of a child, possibly because for some Malays bringing up the

child as a Muslim would be more important than ethnic origin. It is sometimes said

that members of a subordinated group learn to predict the likely reactions of

members of the superordinate group because these reactions can be important to

those who are at the receiving end. In Malaysia ethnic Chinese are politically

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subordinated to the Malays and as business people they need to take account of the

tastes of their Malay customers. Nevertheless, the generalisation seems not to hold in

the present case, where Malays predict Chinese reactions better than Chinese predict

Malay reactions.

The processes of mobilisation and bargaining between opposed parties are made

up of common elements, whether they occur at the local or the national level, though

the institutional structures which limit the possible outcomes can be very different.

Nevertheless, it is often easier to identify these processes by examining what happens

in local communities. F. G. Bailey (1996) has described his puzzlement over the

change in a small Croatian town studied by anthropologists. In 1983 the people

presented themselves as an amiable ethnic mix of Croats, Muslims, Serbs and a few

Slovenes, intermarried, intermingled in the workplace, sharing neighbourhoods and

neighbourliness, aware of ethnic differences and ready to joke about them, but

apparently uninfluenced by ethnic prejudice. Before ten years had passed men were

away fighting in one or another army; marriages had broken; households had been

dispersed as members fled to whatever they claimed to be an ethnic homeland, or to

refugee camps. Bailey did not understand, in the empathetic sense of that word, how

good-natured neighbours could so quickly and so thoroughly be turned into

demonised adversaries. So he re-examined from this standpoint notes from his

fieldwork about forty years earlier in the Indian state of Orissa. There had been a

dispute between caste groups (or jatis) in the village of Bisipara where almost

everyone was either a brahmin, a warrior, a distiller, a herdsman, a potter, a washer-

man or a weaver, and there was no exit option.

The weavers were untouchables. They knew that with the passing of the Temple

Entry Act in 1947 it had become an offence to bar Hindus from temples on the

grounds of untouchability and decided to assert their new right. They notified the

local police headquarters that on the occasion of a particular festival they would, as

usual, take their offerings to a temple, but this time they would, like the clean castes,

take them into the forechamber. The clean castes mounted a guard to prevent their

doing so. The police arrived. Bailey believes that the police advised the weavers to

seek a remedy through the courts and would have said that were there any more

reports of trouble two constables would be stationed in the village. The clean castes

punished the weavers by ceasing to employ them as musicians on festive occasions,

but the case did not go to court and the previous pattern of relations was restored.

Bailey interprets the strategy of the weavers as one of calculation in their choice

of a particular temple, a peaceful protest, and in not pursuing legal action. They

invited oversight of their dispute, but they did not press for intervention. Everyone

knew that if a police unit were to be billeted on the village it would be a collective

punishment. By demonstrating a capacity to press a shared interest they had

presumably gained an enhanced self-respect at the price of a small material loss. To

explain why the residents of Bisipara ‘did not behave like Serbs and Croats and

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Muslims or like the Hutu and Tutsi’ Bailey described the multidimensionality of

relations in the village and the interdependence of the groups. This was a necessary

preliminary to his conclusion that ‘the main answer’ to his question was that ‘all

those concerned … were accustomed to counting the cost’ of their actions (1996:156).

They knew that if they performed services for others then others would perform

services for them. They knew enough about their community to be able to calculate

fairly accurately, and to know when to stop. The title of his book contends that civil

society was facilitated by the villagers’ indifference to caste distinctions in some

circumstances, and that to this extent they had domesticated the group prejudices

(which he counts as ethnic).

By 1994 relations had changed. Members of unclean castes had been murdered

because one of them had entered a temple. The change probably reflected a

reduction in the village’s relative isolation from the outside world. In the incident

described by Bailey insiders invited outside attention; two outsiders who came to

Bisipara to tell the villagers that it was unlawful to treat weavers less favourably made

little impression upon daily life. Just as in some circumstances there is an exit option,

so a reduction in isolation opens a vulnerability to the entry of influences that upset

the equilibrium. According to many reports, the Hindus and Muslims in Ayodha had

been able to co-exist without overt conflict until political mobilisers from elsewhere

appeared on the scene. Ethnic preferences can be changed by the eloquence of

mobilisers or by the messages of the mass media. Commentators agree that the

highly selective use of television and radio to disseminate misleading accounts of the

conduct of the groups in the former Yugoslavia did much to cause its break-up, while

the influence of the radio in the Rwandan genocide has been widely acknowledged.