Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia.

• Author: Adiong, Nassef Manabilang
• Position: Book review

Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia

Edited By Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn

Singapore, Kyoto: NUS Press and Kyoto University Press, 2012, 264 pages, SGD$25.00, ISBN: 9789971695637

Modernity, as it stands in the book, refers to a theoretical set of facile tools which improve an individual's socio-political and rational life by placing importance upon his/her secular and material attributes. Questioning Modernity addresses the concept in the sense of a process and system of the social world speaking for such universalistic claims as rationality, modernization, secularization, capitalism, bureaucratization of the socio-political lifeworld, and the increasing materialism of human values. All these descriptions are in unison, each aspect relates to one another, without which there can be no mechanistic meaning to scientific and technological progress. Modernity features binaries of social differentiation, whether it refers to the secular state or faith-based societies, to free market or command economy, to public or private domains, to individuality or communal spaces, among others. With that said this Western approach to modernity has been highly challenged by postcolonial scholars, generally, because it does not widely account for the diverse modern socio-cultural experiences of communities beyond Europe and the U.S.

In the "Transnational and Boder-zone Modernities" section, three chapters offer a critique of the characterization of Southeast Asian societies as nation-states. Joel Khan argues that primordial frontiers in Asia, where economic life and nation building took place, started way before the colonial age and were significantly developed later by independent national governments. The different look of Asia's primordial societies is due to the transcending Islamic community called ummah which persists to this day. Ken Young looks at the imaginary of non-territorial ummah as the sole collective identity of Malays in Indonesia and Malaysia against the forefront of the domineering secular modern state. This transcending identity of primordial transnationalism, which is presently prevalent, continues in Yekti Maunati's chapter. Maunati documents the case of the Ulu Padas, a new ethnic community of pan-Dayak organization situated in Indonesia's Kalimantan and Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. She indicates that concerns about cultural and environmental preservations precipitated the inception of Ulu Padas via social networking...