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The Anthropology of Remembering and Memory as Ethnography: Reflections on a Fishing Village and Firth’s Malay Fishermen
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Abstract:
The Malay peasantry in peninsular Malaysia has been the subject of fieldwork and ethnographic research by both colonial and local anthropologists. Raymond Firth’s Malay fishermen, based on fieldwork in Perupok, a fishing community in Kelantan, stands as an early and now classic example of the genre. I was born some seven years after Firth’s first fieldwork in another east coast Malay fishing village, Kampung Che Wan, Kijal, in Terengganu. This article is about my own process of remembering the ethnographic details of my home village, thinking like an anthropologist over the period of a lifetime. While this is essentially an exercise in comparative ethnography, I suggest that such remembering represents variants of both collective memory and individual memory. The method of recall comprises various snippets of collected memory in the form of a discontinuous flow of selective ethnographic soundscapes and visualscapes, empowered by both a reflexive and critical anthropological gaze. It also entails a constant juxtaposition between the insider – outsider roles: the ‘emic’ and the ‘etic’ positioning on the part of the anthropologist But remembering itself is ultimately part of a historical and political project, an indigenising research project It is not part of a misplaced nostalgia that accommodates an old, worn-out colonial anthropological design aimed at preserving an ‘unchanging society’. Nor should remembering be understood an act ‘to reinforce the system in place, never to transform it’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 21). Rather remembering is considered a form of agency, which empowers local imaginings and is a mediator of social change, transformation and identity.
Description:
Date:
2020
Authors:
Zawawi Ibrahim
Publisher:
Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
