Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago

Chapter 4: Marketplaces

98 Being Malay in Indonesia 98 4 Marketplaces “Malays are not very good at commerce.” This myth was subscribed to by virtually everyone I met in the Riau Islands. Malays themselves attested to it and non-Malays were quick to use it to underscore their own contributions to the economy. From a historical perspective, such a pronouncement is certainly surprising — as the cosmopolitan trading class of many of Southeast Asia’s major port cities had, historically, always been classified as Malay (Reid 1988b: 7). Moreover, given that one of the justifications for Riau Islands Province was to restore status and dignity to the region’s hitherto marginalised Malays, it also raised a set of political conundrums. Should the Riau Archipelago’s Malays be the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies such as those implemented under Malaysia’s New Economic Policy? Were government attempts to foster a business mindset among young Malays effective or a waste of money? Could Malays ever be trained to succeed as entrepreneurs or should the state just offer subsidies to alleviate their poverty? These were questions that elicited vigorous and often vitriolic debate. Malays’ supposed “economic problem” pushed at the limits of integrationist models of Malayness by articulating a fundamental cultural difference between Malays and others, doing so in ways that gave little incentive to be assimilated into “Malayness”. Yet the multiculturalist alternative was rife with competing claims of whose interests should be prioritised by the new provincial administration. Malays felt embittered that immigrant groups had assumed economic dominance. Non-Malays felt that they deserved extra rights and recognition for their hard work: faced with the prospect of discriminatory measures being taken against them, they felt unappreciated Marketplaces 99 and aggrieved. Malays’ apparent difficulty with commerce thus lay at the heart of a situation that led to many Riau Islanders, both Malay and non-Malay, feeling “out of place” in their province. My interlocutors often said they hoped my anthropological study would either inform, or better still resolve, the question of who should be prioritised for government assistance. Some hoped that I would be able to identify an effective way to help the Malays learn how to be better at business. Others were convinced my research would confirm that Malay values were fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. What nobody expected me to discover was that Malays were actually thriving as traders and entrepreneurs. Whilst living in Tanjung Pinang, I encountered scores of Malay businesses which appeared to be extremely successful. Their owners worked hard and their businesses enjoyed good turnover and profit margins. This was not an idiosyncratic finding. Wee (1988: 205–6) also recorded a strong trading ethic amongst Riau Malays during her fieldwork in the 1970s, noting that they regularly traded goods in Singapore, Jambi and Tanjung Pinang, using “just about any means available to keep their petty entrepreneurship going”. Yet any attempt I made to suggest that Malays could be commercially successful was met with disbelief or even angry denial. Several people dismissed my evidence as “impossible”. One woman went so far as to warn me that if I wrote such a thing in my PhD thesis I would certainly fail because “everyone knows” that Malays are inept when it comes to commerce. Perhaps the angriest response came from a 15-year-old Malay schoolgirl whom I met at a seminar dedicated to “improving the Malay work ethic”: Look Nick, maybe a few Malays have a government job or a business, but you just have to look at the marketplace (pasar) in this town. Where are the Malays? There are shops there and they are all run by Minangkabau, or Javanese, or Chinese, no Malays at all. That is a fact. I know there are some Javanese and others who also lack a work ethic but if you look at the reality, that is a fact and it’s a big problem. You say you are here as a researcher — you must have seen this in your research! In light of such remarks, the phenomenon that requires explanation is not the economic marginalisation of Malays but why it is taken as a fact despite seemingly compelling evidence to the contrary. There are two dimensions to my argument. First, the ambiguities and 100 Being Malay in Indonesia slipperiness of Malay identity conspire to generate a widely shared cultural memory of the 20th century in which the economic marginalisation of Malays is both overstated and...