Patricia Sloane-White

Why Malays Travel: Middle-Class Tourism and the Creation of Social Difference and Global Belonging

AbstractThis paper examines the experience and nature of local and international tourism newly undertaken by members of the Malay urban middle class studied between 1993 and 1998. It argues that middle-class Malays view recreational travel not merely as a form of leisure-based consumption and a marker of class membership, but as a means to understand, define, and valorize the projects of their emergent Malay-Muslim social and economic class. Influenced by a consciously “Islamic” perspective that travel expands knowledge of the world and an individual’s capacity to engage more fully in it, Malays justify leisure travel as a form of edification. Malays in the urban middle class also use travel to align themselves with modern national interests, defining travel as a means by which they seek globalized entre-preneurial opportunities and venture partners. In so doing, leisure travel can be defended as a form of “work” in the project of national development, further underscoring Muslim tenets that devalue leisure as nonproductive. Finally, middle-class Malays use local and translocal travel in Southeast Asia to distinguish themselves from (and critique) the “backwards” lower classes. As such, tourism for the “newly rich” Malay can be understood as a distinctly Malay cultural process in which middle-class Malays articulate forms of local and global belonging and social difference.

In the heady, full-speed-ahead years between 1992 and the economic downturn of 1997 and 1998, I studied, observed, and lived among Malaysia’s bumiputera1 elites in Kuala Lumpur. My anthropological field research focused on the privileged lifestyles, identities, careers, networks, ventures, and corporate culture of the Malay men and

1 The term means “sons of the soil” and is used to refer to the native Malay ethnic group and distinguish it from the Chinese, Indian, and other ethnic groups of Malaysia.

Crossroads, Vol. 18:2. ISSN: 0741-2037. © 2007 Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University. All rights reserved.

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women who were the primary beneficiaries of the New Economic Policy (NEP). NEP was a multiethnic policy aimed at overall poverty reduction, social restructuring, and the creation of what the govern-ment called “national unity” among Malaysia’s Malay, Chinese, and Indian citizenry. In actuality, NEP—spanning 1970 to 1990—was a highly interventionist economic and affirmative action program directed at the Malay-Muslim ethnic group. Its policies and strat-egies provided the state with the means to help the Malays take greater control over the nation’s economic resources, and to do so in the name of national stability and national economic development.

My friends and respondents were as much “children of NEP” as they were highly informed children of an increasingly global-ized world. Born in the 1950s and 1960s,2 they were educated on government funds in America, Europe, Australia, and Malaysia’s universities and institutes and now, as private sector entrepre-neurs and business owners, they were recipients of favorable loan and assistance programs to build Malay capital ownership and economic participation. By the early 1990s, as Malaysia’s economy continued to grow at double-digit rates, they were also increasingly well-positioned and financially secure—a confident, professional, white-collar, middle and upper-middle class buying up houses in the new housing estates in and around Kuala Lumpur, investing in the share market in specially allocated quotas of bumiputera and Chinese companies, importing foreign cars, reserving land in rural areas and around the kampung (village) settings of their childhoods with plans for their retirement retreats, and newly networked via technology to the Malaysian multimedia supercorridor. They were also on the move, performing the pilgrimage to Mecca, visiting chil-dren attending school abroad, traveling to Asian and world markets for international business conventions and trade shows, and to local, translocal, and global destinations as tourists. It is specifically the last example of this group’s activities—recreational travel and tour-

2 My respondents generally were children of civil servant fathers who had benefited from an earlier program of “Malay uplifting” when the British brought young men into government service as clerks and office workers.

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ism—and its novelty, intent, and meaning—that will be the focus of this essay. Many of the lifestyle and consumption choices of the bumiputera privileged class have been studied, but aside from Malay pilgrimages to Mecca (Kadir 1997; McDonnell 1990), its travel and tourism behavior has received little attention. Travel and tourism for leisure, business, personal edification, or prestige was a relatively new phenomenon among the Malay middle classes in the 1990s. Although many of my friends and respondents had been educated overseas and had perhaps traveled for a time while studying, the trips they had made then were brief and usually limited to visiting other students in nearby universities. Certainly trips to Mecca were not a new phenomenon. But by the 1990s, a new kind of travel had emerged in the lives of the business-minded enterprising men and women I knew. This was the recreational trip, imbued with new social meanings and complex value.3 The practice of travel as leisure, made possible by a set of recent changes including increased capital accumulation and a new consumerist orientation in middle-class Malay life, was increasingly common.

Studying new Asian ‘materialisms’Malay social class and its material choices were first studied by colonial-era observers (e.g., Gullick 1987) and later by a handful of social scientists, perhaps most notably B. A. R. Mokhzani (1965), A. Kahar Bador (1973), and Khasnor Johan (1984); see also Scott (1968). But it is only very recently, coinciding with global awareness of the “Asian Miracle” economies, that close attention has been given to the convergence, in the Asian setting, of “class” and “consumption.” In fact, one had only to look at the covers of business magazines in the

3 Malays report having made recreational trips long before the 1990s. Many of my respondents who lived near or in Johor recalled day trips to Singapore, trips that usually involved shopping for specialty items less readily available in Malaysia. Certainly traveling to see friends and family was a very well-established pattern by the mid-twentieth century for affluent Malays, especially in civil servant families with cars—a phenomenon reported to me by respondents who fit a profile of colonial-era privilege. I contend that the kind of travel I am reporting was of a different and novel category, as established by the kind of local and global social meaning and value it was granted.

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Asia Pacific region in the 1990s to know how closely these themes had merged; Asiaweek, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and other magazines frequently focused on such phenomena as “the consumer revolution” and the rise in middle-class credit card debt in Asia. In the social sciences, this coincided with a new literature on the emer-gence of a non-Western middle class, with a particular focus on consumption, both global and local in style, as one of the key cultural dynamics of class formation (Liechty 2002). Often, however, analy-ses focused almost wholly on the sheer materiality of the “global.” The “new rich in Asia,” as portrayed in the often-cited collection of essays edited by Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman (1996)—the volume is tellingly subtitled “Mobile phones, McDonald’s and Middle-Class Revolution”—was frequently described in terms of sta-tus-driven consumers engaged in feverish Western-style competitive and conspicuous consumption, with a focus on shopping, fashion, and dining. Asia’s new middle classes were often represented as con-sumer “automatons” mindlessly imitating the West as they played out their dependent place in the larger class relations of the increas-ingly globalized world (Watson 1997, 2000). So crucial was the notion that emulative consumption was at the heart of Asia’s transforma-tion, it has been argued that the West’s very fascination with the “miracle economies” of what it located on an imagined “Pacific Rim” was itself a kind of post-Orientalist mirage created by the West to identify with co-opted Asians engaged in frenzied consumerism in economies increasingly enriched by Western export-driven indus-tries (Cumings 1998).

Malay materialismsOther perspectives on the emergence of the new middle classes of East and Southeast Asia argued that while the consumption behavior of Asia’s new elites was Western in style, its motivations were locally generated (see e.g., Stivens 1998) and locally gendered (Stivens 1994). Thus Asian consumption reflected Asian dynam-ics, as the capitalist state, composed of political elites, aligned the middle classes to its ideologies and interests (Blanc 1997; Ong 1997).

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Indeed, the characterization of the middle-class lifestyle as a material “reward” in exchange for political loyalty is particularly common in Malaysia, where it is often argued that middle-class status is “granted” and “manufactured” by the state in return for patron-age (Kahn 1991; Gomez and Jomo 1997; Abdul Rahman Embong 1999, 2002). Participating in government-sponsored “invented tra-ditions” (Kahn 1992) and culturally revisionistic ones (Kahn 1997), or imitating the elite and urbanized class-based behaviors of their patrons (Guinness 1992:142–3), middle-class Malays are generally presented as consumers of an essentially narrow and meaningless Malaysianized shopping mall “culture.” Several scholars see mid-dle-class consumption in Malaysia as a particularly potent symbol of group ascendancy in the highly ethnicized and politicized Malaysian setting (Chia 1997).4 James Jesudason (1997) points to the power of consumption in establishing social class in Malaysia; in his view, Malaysian society is particularly consumerist because it essentially has nothing else to do, prevented from participating in civil society by the authoritarian state. We are left, then, with an analysis of mid-dle-class Malay consumption that says little more than “I am what I shop,” or perhaps, “I shop because I am.”

What consumption ‘tells’While varied, perspectives on the emergence of the Malay middle class share a common characteristic: they fail to examine (and see no point in examining) the discursive nature, meaning, content, or purpose of consumption choices and activities undertaken by the middle classes. Consumption, long considered a conspicuous sign (Veblen 1899) of the Western middle classes, is here merely a middle-class way of spending money. Those who buy and spend therefore demonstrate their middle-class identity, aligning their individual or group inter-

4 My respondents often claimed that they wanted to acquire material possessions so that it was evident that Malays had indeed become the equals to the presumably wealthier Malaysian Chinese. As such, they claimed their “buying” power was really an ethnic equalizer. Christina Blanc (1997) notes a similar phenomenon in Thailand, where “Chineseness” of wealth has higher social value than traditional Thai forms of wealth display.

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ests to global and local forms of power. But consumption choices, I argue, are more than superficial signifiers of wealth, class, status, or political affiliation. They can be “performative,” “narrative,” and can “tell people” (Liechty 2002); they “process” identities (Douglas and Isherwood 1979); they can be “invidious,” as Thorstein Veblen pointed out more than a century ago (1899). Choices made with money allow us to interpret the deeper meanings of how a social group is caught up, as Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington state following Bourdieu, “in the social and cultural work of creating new forms of distinction” (1999:8). But it is surely not our privilege alone to say what those meanings are. Malays, too, have things to “tell” about their distinc-tive lifestyles that have not been attended to in studies of their new middle-class choices. While observers outside and inside Malaysia were critiquing the superficiality of Malay consumption styles in the 1990s, in the Malay political arena another definition of the Malay middle class was emerging, drawing attention away from consump-tion. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was uncomfortable with the notion of the Malay middle class being identified in material terms; these characteristics would have been redolent of an NEP “handout” or “subsidy mentality,” which he insisted did not exist in Malaysia (Mahathir Mohamad 1970, 1991). Instead, in the 1990s, Mahathir val-orized that population of people who were defined by government ministers and business leaders in the post-NEP era as Melayu baru or “new Malays.” “New Malays” were identified as people committed to and participating in the modern project of social and economic development of all Malays, a kind of status group who represented all of the goals NEP was intended to achieve. “New Malays” were portrayed as ambitious, worldly, and professional yet morally and socially attuned to the needs and welfare of the Malay ethnic group. Elsewhere I have described the Mahathir-era development project as one in which capitalist modernization was represented to Malays in terms of traditional values, incorporating Malay ideals of morality, social harmony, and Islamic precepts (Sloane 1999). Here, I will sug-gest that the Malay middle classes used these ideas to grant meaning

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and legitimacy to their new consumption choices. To them “buying and spending” did not define them as the middle class; performing the economic and moral duties and obligations of “new Malays” did. “New Malays” may have been consumers—and they admitted they were (see note 5)—but they were also, according to the spirit of the times, somehow consuming “Asian-style.” They were altruistically putting the interests of the nation before the self, consuming in such a way that it could uplift both Malaysia and their ethnic group, and finally, as it were, “retelling” the Malay meaning of their engagement with “retailing.”5 I contend that we can find this meaning in one kind of consumption behavior that became more frequent in the 1990s, the relatively novel Malay experience of recreational or leisure travel. Because a new kind of travel—the recreational trip—had emerged in the lives of the business-minded, enterprising men and women I knew, travel was an important theme in my four years of research on the middle class in Malaysia. By the late 1990s, Malays were not just spending time away from work visiting family and friends during the holidays (for a description of the nature of balik kampung [returning home or to the village], see Sloane 1999). Malay families now were also taking day trips to such locations as the sea-side, theme parks near Kuala Lumpur such as Sunway Lagoon, and nearby waterfalls and nature sites. Others were combining family or holiday trips to their hometowns with day trips—for shopping or sightseeing—to nearby sites. My field notes also document frequent observations of overnight leisure-oriented trips made by my friends and informants as they traveled locally, translocally, and globally. I traveled on several of these journeys with my friends, to Malaysia’s new tourist locations and sometimes to more distant places, such as the Philippines and Thailand. I spoke to Malay friends just back from tourist locations in Bali, Sumatra, Java, and the Riau Islands, and to many Malay respondents who, combining business with plea-sure, attended international trade conventions in Europe and East

5 I am borrowing this felicitous phrase from an anonymous reviewer of this paper. The Malay spirit of finding moral virtue in consumption is reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s exhortation that Americans should “go shopping” after 9/11 to demonstrate their support of the American way.

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Asia.6 On several of these trips the children of my respondents were also included, but these were explicitly not trips meant for meeting children’s interests; no “family-style” amusements were sought out by the travelers. As such, while I am classifying these trips as “rec-reational” in nature, I am not including “family outings” or “family recreational trips” in this analysis. The journeys I documented were adult trips, the primary motivation of which was adult recreation, but it is precisely how “recreation” was defined by the Malays I knew that is worthy of study. “New Malay” ideas about these experiences differed significantly from Western concepts about travel. Some themes underlying the idea of the adult recreational trip may be initially summarized as follows:

1. Travel must “do” or “accomplish” something that goes beyond mere recreation.2. Travel is ideally represented as a form of “work.”3. Travel establishes the Malay traveler’s place in middle-class society. 4. Travel locates the Malay traveler between the local and the global.

Travel must ‘do’ somethingOften, visiting business contacts for lunch in a hotel in downtown Kuala Lumpur or in the nearby industrial city of Shah Alam, my respondents and I would pass by the swimming pool or the golf course, seeing tourists, primarily Westerners, in various forms of pure recreation. My closest friend, Rokiah,7 a successful real estate agency owner in Kuala Lumpur, would often comment, somewhat longingly, on how remarkable it was that people could have free time to spend on nothing more than relaxation or self-reward. But while Rokiah might have wished for time empty of purpose, it was

6 I am omitting from this essay discussion of business/pleasure trips because often these were paid for out of business budgets or even government-based funding pro-grams, such as Bank Pembangunan entrepreneurial funds, and therefore do not fit the notion of “recreational travel.” I am also omitting the observation and material col-lected on the day trips my respondents made to such places as water parks and other kinds of theme parks for the sole purpose of entertaining their children. 7 All names in this paper are pseudonyms and some biographical details about my respondents have been changed to protect their identities.

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utterly against her nature, her beliefs, and her ambitions to indulge in pure relaxation. Nonetheless, Rokiah, like all of the business peo-ple I knew, took frequent recreational trips in Malaysia, Asia, and beyond. If not for relaxation or self-reward, what, then, was a trip for? To answer that question, I will describe a series of trips I took with my Malay friends and discuss other trips that I learned about through conversations and interviews. In the early 1990s, the idea of an island “resort location” was very much on the minds of Malaysians. Mahathir was personally committed to the large-scale development of Langkawi Island, far in the north of Malaysia and across from Alor Setar, Kedah, his place of birth. As such, a sleepy, picturesque little island received massive injections of government funds to become what Mahathir touted as an all-encompassing symbol of Malaysia’s progress: a world-class resort in a lush tropical setting, with excellent accommodation and luxurious pleasures (see Bird 1989). Mahathir announced that Langkawi would be the location for an international maritime and aerospace show and within a year, eighty new hotels were planned on the small island (The Economist, December 18, 1993). Many of my Kuala Lumpur friends and contacts made their first trip to Langkawi in 1993. They wanted to see the resorts and tourist attractions. They wanted to see the new duty-free shopping mall. But all of the trips they took to Langkawi were, in their own words, part pleasure and part business. The clothing entrepreneur whose business I had studied traveled to Langkawi to see its four-star hotels and to consider the business possibilities for selling T-shirts and batik skirts and shorts in the shops. Other people I knew went to check out the recreation facili-ties: Would there be water skiing and scuba diving and could they somehow capture that business opportunity before a Chinese entre-preneur did? People I knew talked about finding local craftspeople to make carvings and artifacts, trying to imagine the kinds of tourist objects that would sell well on Langkawi. Several times I traveled with Rokiah and members of her fam-ily from her childhood home of Alor Setar to Langkawi. Once we stayed in a hotel, which seemed like an excessive expense on what

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could have been a day trip, but she and her cousin were interested in experiencing and evaluating Langkawi hospitality. Other times we stayed with her sister, whose husband worked on Langkawi in a government job. Rokiah wondered about the possibility of opening up a business center on the island. Her cousin considered the idea of bringing a branch of his Penang computer business to Langkawi. We collected T-shirts and baseball caps to bring back to enterprising friends in Kuala Lumpur, not as souvenirs, but as examples of some-thing tourists could buy. We visited the various sites on the island, while Rokiah and her cousin discussed the ways in which these places could be made more “cultural,” more interesting to the tourist, more marketable. When Rokiah’s brother-in-law, Zul, began contemplat-ing leaving his government job on Langkawi for Langkawi’s private sector, he was often the focus of these ideas, for he had already laid down a strong foundation in the Langkawi development commu-nity. Zul’s role in this emerging tourist paradise was to later take on a sinister and even tragic turn (see below), but until then, he was seen as a key to accessing Langkawi’s opportunities. But it was not only Langkawi, where many of my friends and respondents had ties or contacts, that captured their imagination. Labuan Island, off the coast of Sabah and Sarawak, was established as an international offshore financial center in 1990, and large Malaysian companies began to relocate some of their operations there. As Langkawi became increasingly imagined as an interna-tional tourist location where they might seek opportunity, people I knew in Kuala Lumpur began to talk about the ripe promises of Labuan as the next boom location. In 1994, I traveled to Labuan with a group of six Malay friends from Kuala Lumpur. We were en route from Kota Kinabalu to Cebu Island in the Philippines on an inexpensive package tour prepared by Malaysian Airlines to publicize their new direct flights to Cebu. Some of our group had seen the frequent ads on television offering the package tour; the price was so low that everyone quickly agreed

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to make the trip.8 What might have been seen as a purely pleasurable adventure—a spur-of-the-moment decision to get away, with a night in Kota Kinabalu, a free day to take the ferry to Labuan, a flight to Cebu Island, and a stay in a four-star resort hotel—began to take on the feel of a research trip. We acted like tourists on Labuan, visited its World War II cem-etery and other historical sites, wandered along a beach, and ate at a local restaurant built on stilts along the waterfront, but what we talked about, almost without stopping, was the promise of engag-ing in the tourist development of Labuan. My companions discussed how much opportunity there was on Labuan; business ideas were suggested, debated, and refined. Then we went on to Cebu Island, which they found impressive. The discussion about the enterprise of tourism became more intense: again and again the subject came up about why Malaysia lagged behind in the global tourist industry, why other Asian nations seemed to present the tourist with more “culture,” how a tourist location could be better “sold” to tourists. Gazing at a display of little carved birds and puppets, one of the travelers wondered why Malays did not produce these kinds of cultural artifacts, and even wondered if he could import them from Cebu to sell in places like Langkawi and Labuan. By the end of the trip to Cebu, the travelers were convinced that Malaysia had somehow gotten “tourism” wrong, criticizing their own country for not knowing how to package itself to tour-ists. They were dismayed by what they perceived to be the low level of tourist value-for-money that Malaysia seemed to project, and the travelers in my group were suddenly confronted with an unexpected lesson. The more places they visited, the less confidence they had about Malaysia as a global tourist destination. When returning from Bali, another group of travelers said they were “embarrassed” by the Kuala Lumpur airport, where Malaysian crafts were on display. Malaysian artifacts, they said, were less “cultural,” less “sophisti-cated,” less “desirable,” and less “valuable” as purchases. Beyond

8 The trip took place over New Year’s Day; part of its attraction was that no one lost much work time.

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that, they wondered whether Malaysia even knew how to market its cultural value. They worried that despite the powerful and positive image they had of Malaysia’s economic leadership in the region, the possibility existed that at least from a market perspective, Malaysian culture—specifically Malay culture—might somehow be inferior to Thai or Indonesian culture. Long after the Cebu trip had ended, the conversation among this group of friends continued: was Malaysia lacking in traditional cultural richness compared to other regional locations? With time, as my respondents traveled and observed more, it began to be clear that Malaysia’s cultural traditions were not impoverished, but that it merely didn’t know how to “sell” what it had. The issue wasn’t one of a better cultural heritage, but of better business ideas. They vowed that from now on, they would study how to present and sell Malaysia to tourists. They vowed that Malaysia, currently far behind in the region as a tourist location, would catch up. In these episodes and in frequent discussions about travel, one theme emerges: that for the Malays I knew, the purpose of travel could not simply be fun or recreation, it had to be purposeful. Certainly my Malay friends were enjoying themselves and admit-ted that they were, but they experienced travel as a more substantial endeavor. Traveling did not, therefore, imply merely being in a place, seeing it, eating, swimming, or shopping there, although these things could and did take place. Nor did traveling merely mean a claim to prestige, the “I went there” syndrome that motivates conspicuous consumption (although Malay travelers frequently do tell others about their trips and display the goods and souvenirs they bought). Travel was more than these things—it concerned a complex set of engagements, not the least of which was a time-consuming com-mitment to learning, studying, and questioning. In other words, to the Malays I knew, travel to resorts and holiday locations could not be characterized simply as mere consumption, for it concerned its opposite: it was, paradoxically, a process of production. What began to emerge as I traveled with my friends and talked to them about their travels was that these trips were actually work.

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Travel as a form of workThe Malay men and women I knew were uncomfortable with the notion of being idle or wasting time. The image of “wastefulness” or “idleness” is a negative one among “new Malays” and has mul-tiple meanings, both ethnic and religious. The powerful imagery of “idleness” was, in the 1990s, often captured in Mahathir’s speeches as a “mentaliti kampung” (the term implies a “backward” village mentality)—the old-fashioned Malay attitude that Mahathir had been decrying since his book The Malay Dilemma (1970). Mahathir claimed that in the past, what kept Malays backward and economi-cally underdeveloped was a kampung attitude that relegated all of life to “fate” as decreed by Allah. Kampung Malays waited for Allah to fill their bowls with rice. “Work” in the kampung, people I knew said, simply entailed waiting for the rubber to drip, or even more disparagingly, merely opening up the coconuts that fell from the trees. Mahathir, in speeches through the early 1990s, rallied against the kampung mentality as a form of laziness. Poor people, he insisted, are those who make no effort. This critique paralleled Mahathir’s warnings against the “subsidy mentality” of NEP, by which Malays might become complacent about the enormous advances provided to them during the NEP era. As “new Malays,” my contacts and friends ensured that they would never be accused of laziness, but could be characterized as hardworking, progressive, and deserving people. As such, it was partly for this reason, I think, that the Malays I knew made a conscious attempt to distinguish any of their leisure activities from pure recreation.9 Frequently, my Malay respondents told me of childhood memories of strict parents, who denied them the pleasure of going anywhere as teenagers, such as taking the bus for shopping or social-izing in coffee shops. They remembered what they had learned as children, believing still that Allah (like Mahathir) does not like idle pleasure because with it carries an irresponsibility that allows time

9 Elsewhere I have analyzed the enterprising purpose granted to activities that might have appeared to be purely leisure-based, such as playing golf and whiling away hours in food stalls (Sloane 1999); these were granted business value, seen as network-ing activities in the creation of multiple business ventures.

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for sin.10 Generally, all amusements, in the Islamic perspective, carry with them the taint of the forbidden, and could be rejected by the principle alone that they take fathers and community leaders away from their responsibilities. But there was a new layer of Islamic understanding in their choice to travel now. In working out their critique of the mentaliti kampung derided by Mahathir, they were proposing a perspective that travel could be suitably Islamic and purposeful. By using the image of the Musaffir (literally a “traveler;” sometimes the term is taken to mean a “pilgrim” en route to or from Mecca) the Malays I knew speculated that travel, rather than being wasteful or vaguely sinful, was justified in Islam and even recommended. In this sense travel is a form of learning and expands knowledge of the world and the individual’s capacity to engage more fully in it, behaviors clearly enjoined by Muhammad.11

As I lived and researched among ambitious and enterprising Malays, I began to understand the complex ways in which they were harnessing novel behaviors to their notion of Islamic belief. So, visiting four-star tourist resorts on package tours, taking in tourist attractions, and shopping for tourist artifacts—what might be dismissed as mere conspicuous consumption—could now be represented as virtuous. But this attitude was very much within the spirit of the times, the context of which was provided by Mahathir himself. Mahathir sug-gested that duty to others in the Malaysian setting—the Malaysian nation—and duty to Allah shared the same attributes of progress and

10 During the period of fieldwork, the term lepak or “hanging around” emerged as a description of the all-too-frequent image of unemployed Malay youths wandering through Kuala Lumpur shopping malls. The moral panic that arose concerning this habit made frequent use of the idea that “doing nothing” was unIslamic and sinful.11 The Qur’an suggests that wanderings in search of signs of the greatness of Allah are desirable for Muslims, and the Prophet enjoins travel “even as far as China” for purposes of learning. The Musaffir is given all kinds of rewards in this world and in heaven. He can postpone fasting and prayer, receive zakat, and should be given hospitality by all he encounters. The Muslim injunction to open the door to any visi-tor and offer him food and drink can be read as a statement on the welcome that is offered to the Musaffir. According to Kadir Din (personal communication) who drew my attention to these ideas, such privileges suggest encouragement to the traveler, not restrictions.

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economic development (cp. Adams 1998).12 To most of my respon-dents who traveled, the experience of visiting resorts and tourist destinations increasingly fit well a paradigm of purposeful action, self-improvement, and progress in the material world—the goals any good Muslim should pursue in anticipation of Judgment Day.

Travel establishes the Malay traveler’s place in middle-class societyIt was on the trip to Labuan that I first began to understand the way in which my Malay friends conducted another kind of “work” on their trips, performing not only the Islamically sanctioned work of building one’s knowledge and participating, at least at the cognitive level, in the economic development of the nation, but also the social and cultural work of class distinction. I suggest that recreational travel establishes the Malay traveler’s place in middle-class society not because it reflects the consumption style of the middle classes, but because it tells the traveler why he or she is a member of the middle class. Travel, in other words, is used invidiously (in the way Veblen said class always operates [1899]) to constitute a middle-class identity. As we sat in a coffee shop near Labuan’s sleepy port, gazing at its traditional wooden houses built on stilts above the water, the subject turned to why Labuan wasn’t yet successful. Looking at the young men hanging around, at their languor, one of my group sud-denly launched into invective. Look at them, he muttered, “They dress like pimps.” On Sabah, he said, “The Malay mentality is the worst of anywhere in Malaysia. They are complacent and stupid. They won’t work hard. They think they have enough and expect more tomorrow. They refuse to improve their lives, satisfied with shacks and dirt.” Another in the group pointed to the cluster of wooden houses in the distance. “Those are squatters,” he said deri-sively, “refusing to move from the best site at the waterfront, despite being offered government incentives.”

12 Kathleen M. Adams describes a similar “nationalistic intent” in the domestic tour-ism of Indonesians in her article “Domestic Tourism and Nation-Building in South Sulawesi.”

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“They should be kicked out,” another said, to the agreement of the rest, and continued, “We understand that we will make certain sacrifices for economic development, but they are selfish. They are simply holding us back.” The poor don’t want to change, people often told me, and if they remain poor, they only have themselves to blame. Furthermore, pov-erty itself is often a ruse, for, as one of the Labuan travelers reported, “Those squatters run all the food stalls in town. They probably make as much as RM150,000 a year13 and yet pay no taxes. That explains why they won’t move. If they do, they’ll be forced to pay up, like we do.” It is also suggested frequently by Malay businesspeople that the poor are malcontents who bring misfortune to others, preventing ambitious people from achieving success. My friends claimed that they could almost feel a “black cloud” of resentment over the Labuan town, and when we sailed back to Sabah on the ferry, they were glad to leave. This theme—of the power that poor people have to foil the projects of successful Malays—emerged vividly during a dramatic series of events that took place when my closest friend Rokiah’s brother-in-law Zul died on Langkawi. His death, and all the com-plex experiences that engaged the family I was tied most closely to in Malaysia, illuminated to me how “new Malay” ideas could become a form of social distinction, one that was thrown into sharpest relief during the excursions of Malay tourists. Two weeks before Zul’s death, he had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rapidly progressing cancer with almost certain mortality. He had been living on Langkawi for several years, and we had often seen him there, or in Alor Setar. He was, as I men-tioned above, planning to leave his government job to become a private Langkawi developer. Many people I knew had been seeking him out for access to possible ventures on Langkawi. But now, sud-denly, and shockingly, he was dead. The circumstances of his death, the family believed, were suspicious and irregular. They were con-vinced he had been cursed, and in the days before his death, he had

13 This theme, that food stall owners made as much money as they did, was common among many of my professional respondents.

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been treated by doctors and traditional Malay spirit healers, bomohs. But neither conventional nor spiritual medicine helped Zul, and he died—so quickly and so bafflingly that it seemed to confirm the fam-ily’s suspicions. Now, in Alor Setar, everyone in the family remained anxious. We were going to Langkawi to pack up Zul’s things. If a curse, in the form of a magical object that could cause death, had been placed among his things, we, too, would be vulnerable. So all of us—the immediate family, Zul’s widow and young children, cousins and curious neighbors—went back to the bomoh. He prepared small packets of betel nut and sirih leaves for us to ingest just before disem-barking to Langkawi—these were intended to protect us. Late that night, in the Alor Setar house, after the evil spirits had been summoned and dissipated and we had pocketed our charms, Salmah, Zul’s widow, told me her version of the events that led to Zul’s death. Zul’s life and death on the tourist island of Langkawi, I was to learn, was a story about class conflict.

Salmah’s story Five years ago, Mahathir decided to develop Langkawi as a pet project, symbolizing the development of all of Malaysia. He made it into a tax-free port, so that goods could be traded without taxation. He wanted development here to be quick, and we all thought Langkawi would be like Penang and Phuket combined—a place for business and tourists—where everything could happen. We came then and so did a lot of outsiders, people like us, with education and ideas. Zul was one of the leaders for a new Langkawi: a high-level civil servant, educated in America, and employed by LADA [The Langkawi Development Authority, LADA, is an organization that assists the economic and tourist development of Langkawi]. We came to live on Langkawi then, in a government house. Zul’s job was to provide Langkawi people with small loans and training. It was their chance to share in the island’s development. The people here were offered every chance to take part. But they are very

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primitive, very backwards, and rather than try to participate in the changes on Langkawi, they simply resented the new people. Zul knew that the people here were lazy and stupid. He had little hope for them. In his office, however, he did everything he could for them. They’d come to LADA and ask for a loan—to start a food stall or buy a vendor wagon—and he always said yes to them. But sometimes they just came for the money and he knew they never intended to use it well. So then he’d say no. The government was trying to help them. Zul was trying to help them. Mahathir was trying to help them. So much good could happen here on Langkawi—but really nothing changed. The place is good, but the people here are terrible, bad, and evil.

As she finished her story, Salmah was silent for a long time. “They did it to him,” she finally said. “They did it. Someone here, in this place . . . one of the backwards ones, one of the jealous ones, someone Zul said ‘no’ to.” The next day we went to Zul’s government-owned house on the main road to the beach on Langkawi, where signs of economic change and development were everywhere around us (Carsten 1997; Kalsom 2002). Hurriedly we packed up Zul and Salmah’s things. No one wanted to stay the night. It was clear to them that Langkawi, at least for the present time, was a dangerous place. As the ferry left the port that night, Rokiah, Salmah, and their brothers and sisters vowed never to return until the poor and marginal people of Langkawi had changed. In the years since Zul’s death, I have returned to it in my mind frequently. In Zul and Salmah’s story are multiple demonstrations of Malay tradition in confrontation with modernity, as well as pro-found understandings and explanations for misfortune and tragedy. But what remains most salient in Salmah’s story is its understand-ing of the nature of class conflict. Her story reflects, I think, not just the emergent sense of superiority of the Malay middle classes, but also identifies the locus where class conflict seemed most often to

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be played out—in tourist “paradises” caught in the crosshairs of national development.14 As such, the mentali kampung derided by my Malay respondents was not located in the fondly remembered kampung of their child-hood, where they often returned for family celebrations and holidays. Instead, it was the marginalized kampung in favored tourist destina-tions where “new Malays” found the greatest obstacles to progress. In the squatter towns on Labuan and in the traditional backwaters of Langkawi, the Malays I traveled with set themselves apart from (and critiqued the behaviors of) the “backward-looking” lower classes. Admiring the four-star resorts on Cebu, its attractive beaches and tourist shops, or returning from Bali or Thailand, where “every-thing was perfectly set up for tourists,” Malay middle-class travelers saw nothing there standing in the way of progress. It was this kind of tourist landscape—cleared of poverty, marginal lives, backward-ness, malfeasance, and ripe with entrepreneurial opportunity for themselves—that they envisioned for Malaysia.

Travel locates the Malay traveler between the local and the global Why, then, do Malays travel? They take package tours, visit histori-cal sites, order room service in four-star hotels, shop, eat, and now eagerly visit the local and translocal four-star resorts previously mar-keted to only global travelers. As such, they appear to have much in common with the world’s well-heeled tourists. But they diminish the consuming nature of their trips. As tourists, instead, they engage in a process of “work,” perhaps what Malays call the “study-trip.”15 Anxious about the extravagance of pure leisure and its association with idleness and sin, they use their experience of travel to deepen their engagement with and knowledge of the world as a global mar-14 See Beng-Lan Goh (2002) for a discussion of how urban real estate in Penang, Malaysia, similarly provokes both class and ethnic conflict.15 The term “study-trip” or lasbela (the word is a contraction of lawatan sambil belajar or literally “visit while learning”) resonates with meaning in Malay life, where it refers to travel undertaken by upper-level civil servants in the capacity of their jobs for edi-fication and training.

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ketplace. Not merely travel consumers, they envision themselves as producers of travel, hoping to participate in the successful develop-ment of tourist locations which are yet to flourish. Their research takes them to resorts in Thailand, Bali, and the Philippines, where they contemplate what they perceive to be a better marketing of tourism. They envision a day when local Malaysian tourist options match the richer offerings available elsewhere in Asia. But while this vision is inclusive—bringing Malaysia into the global tourist market-place—it is also exclusive, connecting only Malays like themselves to what they sense is a globally superior culture. Finally, middle-class Malays specifically use local Malaysian and translocal travel in Southeast Asia to derive new ideas that help valorize their own “for-ward-looking” modern practices and aspirations and set themselves apart from (and critique the behaviors of) “backward-looking” lower classes. In this way, urban middle-class Malays use travel to sharply define the nature and value of their emergent social identity vis-a-vis other Malays. As such, tourism for the “newly rich” Malay can be understood as more than a mere reflection of modern global or Western consumer culture or local status display, but as a distinctly Malay cultural process in which middle-class Malays articulate forms of local and global belonging and sharpen—invidiously—the boundaries of social difference. n

Patricia Sloane-White is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware. She conducted fieldwork on Malay entrepreneurship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 1992 to 1994, and earned a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford University in 1996. She conducted research in Malaysia from 1996 to 1998 on the Malay middle class and Islamic corporate culture. The author of Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (1999, Palgrave) and several forthcoming articles and book chapters on contemporary social life and social change in Malaysia, she is cur-rently engaged in field research on management culture and Islam in Malay-run corporations.

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The author presented an earlier version of this essay at Tourism in Southeast Asia: Local, Regional, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, at Ohio University, April 14–15, 2005. She wishes to thank members of her panel and conference participants for their valuable insights and comments. Sloane-White may be reached at pswhite@udel.edu.

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