Focuses on Malaysia's four Prime Ministers as nation-builders, observing that each one of them when he became Prime Minister was transformed from being the head of the Malay party, UMNO, to that of the leader of a multi-ethnic nation. Each began his political career as an exclusivist Malay nationalist but became an inclusivist.

How do class, ethnicity, gender, and politics interact? In what ways do they constitute everyday life among ethnic minorities? In "Getting By," Donald M. Nonini draws on three decades of research in the region of Penang state in northern West Malaysia, mainly in the city of Bukit Mertajam, to provide an ethnographic and historical account of the cultural politics of class conflict and state formation among Malaysians of Chinese descent. Countering triumphalist accounts of the capitalist Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, Nonini shows that the Chinese of Penang (as elsewhere) are riven by deep class divisions and that class issues and identities are omnipresent in everyday life. Nor are the common features of "Chinese culture" in Malaysia manifestations of some unchanging cultural essence. Rather, his long immersion in the city shows, they are the results of an interaction between Chinese-Malaysian practices in daily life and the processes of state formation—in particular, the ways in which Kuala Lumpur has defined different categories of citizens. Nonini's ethnography is based on semistructured interviews; participant observation of events, informal gatherings, and meetings; a commercial census; intensive reading of Chinese-language and English-language newspapers; the study of local Chinese-language sources; contemporary government archives; and numerous exchanges with residents.

This book is the first monograph to provide an in-depth and multifaceted study of the processes of ethnicization and identity construction in Malaysia, from the colonial period until the present. In his analysis, the author takes multiple layers of ethnicization into account and shows how these have shaped Malaysia’s socio-political system and society in different ways. Moving beyond a center-focused, top-down-oriented perception of identity politics, this work highlights on the one hand the role and position of a multitude of actors - from grassroots level to mainstream politics - who contribute to the persistence of ethnicization in Malaysia in numerous ways. On the other hand, it also shows where and under which circumstances possibilities for transethnic cooperation arise. A multi-disciplinary approach, substantiated by empirical data based on qualitative and quantitative methodologies, provides a perspective that moves beyond stereotypical narrations of Malaysia as being constituted by mainly three separate, homogenous groups. At the same time, this book gives a detailed and comprehensive account of political and historical developments and constitutes a rich resource for any Malaysia-related research. While the focus of this publication lies on Malaysia, the concept of manifestations and implementations of ethnicization provides an analytical framework that can also be applied in the study of ethnicization and identity construction elsewhere in the region and beyond.

Amidst the Chinese-Malay conflict in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, sixteen-year-old Melati must overcome prejudice, violence, and her own OCD to find her way back to her mother.

The Malay-language term for the indigenous minority peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, “Orang Asli”, covers at least 19 culturally and linguistically distinct subgroups. This volume is a comprehensive survey of current understandings of Malaysia’s Orang Asli communities (including contributions from scholars within the Orang Asli community), looking at language, archaeology, history, religion and issues of education, health and social change, as well as questions of land rights and control of resources. Until about 1960 most Orang Asli lived in small camps and villages in the coastal and interior forests, or in isolated rural areas, and made their living by various combinations of hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and trading forest products. By the end of the century, logging, economic development projects such as oil palm plantations, and resettlement programmes have displaced many Orang Asli communities and disrupted long-established social and cultural practices. The chapters in the present volume show Orang Asli responses to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing world. The authors also highlight the importance of Orang Asli studies for the anthropological understanding of small-scale indigenous societies in general.

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.