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  • Taming the Wild:Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya
  • Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Sandra Khor Manickam
Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. 384 pp. ISBN: 978-9971-69-832-4

Sandra Khor Manickam’s book explores the history of the term ‘indigenous’ and ‘aboriginal’ in colonial Malaya. Indigenous populations in Malaya have not been the focus of much study, which makes this book a timely contribution. Manickam strikingly begins the book with Malaysia’s ex-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s controversial response in 2011 to the question posted on his blog on whether the Orang Asli (literally, Original People) had been on the Malay Peninsula before the Malays. By replying ‘(t)hey could be,’ Manickam argues that Mahathir effectively cast doubt on the ‘well-established anthropological position’ that the Orang Asli were truly indigenous (p. 1). Her subsequent chapters complicate this anthropological position as she expertly demonstrates racial categories were continually set and reset during the colonial period. In fact, scholarship remained highly speculative right up till 1957 when the focus of this book ends. [End Page 167]

In order to highlight the unstable and dynamic category of ‘indigenous’ in colonial Malaya, Manickam relies mainly on the works of East India Company (EIC) officials such as Stamford Raffles, William Marsden, John Anderson, John Crawfurd, and Orientalist scholar John Leyden as well as their successors in the British colonial service such as T. J. Newbold, Hugh Clifford, R. O. Winstedt and James Richardson Logan. She also refers extensively to back issues of colonial publications such as Journal of the Straits/Malayan/Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia. Up till the 1820s, the Malays were thought to be indigenous peoples of the Peninsula by East India Company officials. In the early decades of the nineteenth century as the EIC expanded their control over the Malacca Strait, a separate group, no less diverse than the Malays, emerged as the more authentically indigenous. The group remained invisible to EIC officials for some time and their main interlocutors were mostly Malays who relayed information on the indigenous peoples they came in contact with. These Malays even facilitated meetings between indigenous peoples and British scholar-bureaucrats (p. 41). Here, readers can glimpse how the Malays perceived the indigenous peoples, albeit mediated through these British scholar-bureaucrats who disagreed about the origins of the Malays. William Marsden seemed to have arbitrarily changed his mind about the Malays being indigenous and native inhabitants of the Peninsula though they were indigenous to the archipelago, having originated from Palembang. Later, Raffles and Crawfurd distinguished the indigenous peoples even more from the Malays. Under the threat of the usurping Siamese forces in the 1820s, however, the Malays were again regarded as indigenous by John Anderson along with indigenous peoples in order to stave off Siamese influence (p. 36). Hence, the Malays had the right to rule the peninsula, he argues. Anderson was also responsible for introducing the new category of Orang Sakei or Sakai that came to dominate writing on indigenous peoples for the next century at least as a catch-all term for aborigines in Malaya of all origins. Yet, the following chapter proves that the term Sakai had multiple meanings in the Malay world. It was a term that was embedded in relations of personal dependence within complex social hierarchies centred around Malay rulers (p. 51). Indeed, one of the major achievements of Manickam’s book is that terms such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘Sakai’ were used differently in various contexts throughout the colonial period.

Manickam succeeds in showing that anthropological research was very much intertwined with racial hierarchies during the colonial period. She convincingly argues that anthropology in Malaya was very much tied up with colonial efforts to control populations. Her book deftly details how ‘highly localized conceptualizations of aborigines, as well as governmental needs and global anthropological trends, contributed to the many-layered racial discourse on aborigines during the colonial period’ (p. 159). However, she is quick to point out that anthropology, despite being commonly thought to be the handmaiden of colonialism, had less of an impact in Malaya than in African territories.

Manickam’s book could be one of...

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