Suchergebnisse

On 25 October 2020, Malaysian King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah declined to declare a National Emergency, despite Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin's urging that such an emergency was necessary in the face of an intensifying "Third Wave" of COVID-19 transmission. In a media statement relaying the decision, His Majesty reminded Malaysia's politicians to "stop all politicking that might disrupt the stability of the national government." Analysts and followers of Malaysian politics are watching these emerging national-level developments closely, in so far as they signal potentially rough political waters for Budget 2021, or may be taken as signs of "politicking" or attempts at democratic subversion by the ruling coalition. This article offers a complementary perspective to these national-scale dynamics by turning to more regional developments in Sabah – the state currently most affected by the "Third Wave" sweeping across Malaysia. Much attention was paid to Sabah in September 2020 during the run-up to its state election, when the uneasy, Muhyiddin-led Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS) alliance ousted the incumbent Warisan Plus coalition. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to Sabah's post-election landscape. Basic questions remain about how COVID-19 and Movement Control Orders have impacted everyday life in Sabah, or how these issues relate to longer-term issues, namely undocumented immigrants.

Drawing on fieldwork data and preliminary material from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute GIS project, this article analyzes one such "road to Tawau." First, it offers a brief history of two different cross-border flows to Sabah, with special reference to the routes of ethnically Bugis Indonesians who constitute the vast majority of Indonesian migrants in the state. Second, it highlights one widely-known clandestine route on Sebatik Island, where Indonesia and Malaysia share a land border that divides the island cleanly in half. Finally, it describes how a proposal to build a wall intended to disrupt clandestine movement along this route is unrealistic, and fails to take into account certain realities about migrant movement and Sabah's porous borders. It also suggests how emerging efforts to police this particular "road to Tawau" reflect broader transnational concerns about ongoing developments in the southern Philippines.

In Indonesia's Riau Islands Province - a place envisioned as a distinctly 'Malay Province' upon its legal formation in 2002 - ethnic Malays are the proud heirs and custodians of a rich legacy associated with a once-sprawling Malay empire that stretched across present-day transnational borders from Indonesia, to Singapore, to Malaysia. Malays of Bugis descent have long played a disproportionately central role in the history (and the historiography or 'history-telling') of the region that now encompasses Indonesia's Riau Islands Province. While steadfastly 'Malay', members of this community readily acknowledge that their ethnically Bugis roots maintain an enduring historical and ideological salience in their everyday lives. However, transregional economic trends and rapid sociodemographic shift shaped by ongoing migration flows have led to feelings of 'marginalization' (peminggiran) among the islands' Malay-Bugis community. This has led them to claim that they are being gradually pushed to the literal and figurative 'edges' of social life in the Riau Islands Province. Fears that a one-time ethnic 'majority is becoming a minority' (mayoritas menjadi minoritas) have fuelled feelings of inter-ethnic resentment, and have shaped provincial government policies geared toward the 'preservation' of Malay custom. While international focus continues to centre on Indonesia's Chinese-pribumi divide as diagnostic of Indonesian inter-ethnic and religious relations on edge, a grounded assessment of ethnicity in the Riau islands offers an alternative perspective on these important issues.

AbstractThe identification of socioculturally important "keywords" remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of "keyword projects" as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key "words" emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer‐grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally "key" within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of "rapport," it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond "keyword talk" to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about "keyness" itself.

This article uses the Belt and Road Initiative to theorize the relation between intensity and infrastructure. It makes two theoretical claims. First, intensive flows simultaneously reveal and give rise to infrastructural formations. Second, infrastructural formations functionally re-channel the intensities that reveal or give rise to them in the first place. The article introduces the notion of aquatectonics to explore the confluence between intensive flows and infrastructural formations in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. It argues that an account of this flows–formations nexus is necessary for understanding China's infrastructural aspirations, while enabling broader, potentially planetary considerations of the 'old' intensive roots of putatively 'new' infrastructural formations.

How do everyday acts of policing hinge upon the contrastive evaluation of sensible intensities? This article examines how various attunements toward regimes of sensible intensities shape the policing of borders and bodies in a place where questions of the "sovereign" and identifications of the "illegal" are semiotically and politically up for grabs: the Indonesia-Malaysia borderlands. In two expository sketches, it examines the various ways in which the Indonesia-Malaysia border is policed as a virtual threshold between people and places considered to be "more-or-less the same."