Between frontiers: The formation and marginalization of a borderland Malay community in southwestern Sarawak, Malaysia, 1870s-1990s

By examining the one-hundred-year history of a Sarawak Malay society adjacent to the Sarawak (Malaysia)-Kalimantan (Indonesia) border in western Borneo, this thesis aims to discuss the marginality of frontier Malay peasants, their displacement and their exclusion from the nation and the state system. It is written as a historical ethnography of a community on the periphery of the state's control of territory. By focusing on the impact of political power play for over a century at the borderland, I examine the process of economic and cultural dislocation of the peasantry. I give particular attention to the change and persistence In elements of socio-cultural expression of the hinterland Malays in the context of the invention of "Sarawak Malay" as an ethnic category, the impact of modern market forces, and the consolidation of state power.This study analyzes how facets of social marginalization are interrelated. The social dislocation of the Malay population on the border is explored in three contexts the economic, the ethnic, and the national. They are subject to selective influence from state and global processes, which are filtered and skewed by the fact of their geographical locale. The coastal Malays in question were first excluded from cash crop production within a segmented agricultural production system created by the Brooke family's colonial regime. Their exclusion from capitalist agriculture led to further differentiation within the Malay ethnic category and the class structure This economically marginalized population on the fringe of state territory then became culturally stigmatized being pushed to the outer rim of the ethnic category "Sarawak Malay". The formation of the newly independent nation-states, namely, the Federation of Malaysia and the Republic of Indonesia, further exacerbated their marginality in the domain of nationality and citizenship.The basic premise of this study is that the emergence of political and economic center-periphery relationship under a state system with a fixed territoriality is a prime factor in creating a culturally invalidated and disempowered peasant class. While the discussion is grounded in a particular example from the frontier region in western Borneo, the issue is general, and my argument is intended to raise questions for the comparative analysis of peripheral capitalism, state formation, and class and ethnic configurations under colonial and post-colonial polities.