The Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah: Encounters, Mobilities, and Histories Along the Malaysian-Thai border

Preface

ix the Buddha on Mecca’s Verandah is about enCounters. it is as much an ethnographic account of a marginal community as it is a story about powerful cultural institutions, cartographies, histories, and global connections. The narrative is set somewhere between 2001 and 2002 in a small Thai Buddhist village in Malaysia’s northeasternmost state of Kelantan, but it both carries forth into the present and entangles itself with an ancient and sometimes troublesome history. Delving into this terrain of ephemeral moments, I explore how comings and goings across locales near and far, past and present, real and surreal, banal and extraordinary can help us think about the way subjecthood and marginality are recognized, realized, and interpreted in the hinterlands of nation states. The encounters I write about occurred in and around the village of Ban Bor On. My Thai mother grew up in the nearby market town of Bandar Tumpat and I have been visiting Ban Bor On since 1979.Doing anthropological fieldwork among friends, relations, and strangers was thus an exercise in reflexivity for me.1 Many of the encounters that I write about and that are so crucial in framing identity politics in the village and the state are hidden from the prying eyes of non-intimates. These are often of a more personal and sometimes secretive nature, appearing only in the less perceivable realms of intimate moments—“the shadow side of fieldwork” as Annette Leibing and Athena McLean (2007) call it. The movements that form the ethnographic text in this book comprise not only physical travels along the settlement ’s potholed roads and sandy bicycle tracks but also dreams, events, narratives, fears, and other emotions. As with the vignettes of common American experiences that Kathleen Stewart (2007) mulls over, the experience of being Thai and Buddhist in Malay Muslim-majority Kelantan is located in a series of disjointed and messy moments. One’s identity—one’s Thainess—is never static. It revels in its ambiguity. The more one tries to rigidly define the boundaries of Thainess in Kelantan, the more one exposes oneself to the gaps inherent in its meaning. Preface x / PrefaCe Encounters forge and destroy the boundaries that seem to enclose their mobile subjects. Boundaries and the movements that flow across them have been central themes in many social scientific treatises since the nineteenth century. In his 1864 historical work, The Ancient City, de Coulanges suggested that the practices of everyday life and the memories they contained were instrumental in demarcating the parameters and sacred geographies of early Roman urbanism . Subsequent works by Durkheim and Mauss (1903), Evans-Pritchard (1940), Edmund Leach (1954), and Fredrik Barth (1969) have variously discussed the ways boundaries as space are produced through a culture’s engagements with flows of people, economics, ecologies, and power. More recent discussions on mobility and spatial practices have focused on the trickier issues of displacement , circulation, memory, transnationalism, hybridity, and uncertainty (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Auge 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Clifford 1997; Ho 2006; Tsing 1993; Ong 1999; Matory 2005; Green 2005; Tagliacozzo 2001, 2005). It was within this interstitial and shifting zone of traveling people, ideas, symbols, meanings, images, objects, and landscapes that people negotiated their social and historical identities. In the afterword to Feld and Basso’s edited volume (1996), Clifford Geertz reminded the reader of the need to continue gazing at boundaries in order to reflect on the movements that cross and contest them (262). Boundaries , whatever their form, always matter. They have been—and will continue to be—“part of the classical conceptual tool-kit of social scientists” (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 167). This book is about the politics of social and collective identification along a Southeast Asian frontier. Renato Rosaldo, in Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia (2003), observed that social, cultural, and political marginalizations have, at their core, the tense binary divide between the boundaries of the metropolitan state and its hinterlands. Minorities and other so-called marginal communities inhabit the gaps of national sovereignty and struggle to define themselves in light of the state’s obsession with a “coercive conformity” (7). In their quest to define the parameters of subjecthood, individuals reflect on political citizenship in colorful “cultural” ways, ranging from acceptance to nonchalance and outright resistance. Kelantanese Thai visions of cultural agency result from their experiences of locatedness between diverse boundaries. These are lively sites of encounter and engagement from which definitions of self, other, nation, culture, core, and periphery emerge (Gupta and...