Consuming Ethnic Identities: “Materializing” the Nation and the Minority in Sabah

Newspaper advertisements for various products have been used to promote the annual rice harvest festival, the Pesta Kaamatan, of the Kadazandusun minority group of Sabah. Robert argued that advertisements in print, as a genre, qualify commodities as embodiments and/or possessions of the nation and that their consumption is a form of appropriation by individuals of the qualities of the nation. This paper asks whether the same notion remains applicable if we replace the nation with one of its allotropes: the ethnic group. While it can be argued that there is a specific Kadazandusun community of consumers, these consumers constitute only a subgroup of the Malaysian whole, albeit one that shares specific characteristics with that whole. This situation reflects the unique form of the Malaysian nation, which presents itself as a pluralistic arrangement in which the main communities retain their cultural distinctiveness. Cultures of consumption and advertisement can be agents in “materializing” and objectifying not only the nation but also the minority ethnic groups that constitute it. Such agency marks the legal, religious and cultural precepts that limit movements between objectified categories, specifically the categories separating Muslims from non-Muslims through different practices of consumption.