Joel Kahn and an intercultural interpretation of Southeast Asian modernity

Joel Simmons Kahn, an American anthropologist, long resident in the UK and then Australia, who had carried out research in Southeast Asia for over four decades, passed away on 1 May 2017. He left behind a distinctive body of intercultural scholarship that is marked by an insistence on the inseparability and equality of Southeast Asian and Western thought and social–cultural experiences. His work explores the continuities, breaks, and contradictions within and across each of these expansive worlds, showing omitted narratives to be no less constitutive of the modern. By doing so, Joel’s brand of intercultural scholarship provides a way out of the problem of incommensurability toward a multi-directional anthropology that recognizes the imbrication of multiple universes of meanings and logics in a world where the center cannot hold.

Joel was my PhD supervisor. It was under his supervision at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, that I became a student of anthropology. Joel’s theoretical openness and commitment to close the wide gaps of misunderstandings between Southeast Asian modern thought and action and those of the West have inspired my own work. As an anthropologist located in and studying a sub-region like Southeast Asia, the question of entwinement and differences between Southeast Asian and Western social–cultural and intellectual narratives has equally informed my work (Goh, 2002, 2011). The problem of intractable differences has plagued the field of Southeast Asian studies. Quests to jettison Eurocentrism and bring discrete Southeast Asian socio-cultural and ideational worlds to global attention have pretty much defined the field way even before the Orientalist critique when debates were couched in older fashioned terms such as Asia-centric or indigenous versus Euro-centric discourses. Yet almost half a century into the Orientalist critique, critical debates have remained deeply divided over the resolution of relativism and universalism in the adjudication of radical differences between the East and the West. Given the dearth of critical options at our historical juncture, the conviction to showcase alternative critical arsenals and reasoning arising from, and responsive to, complex realities in Southeast Asia has only heightened. Yet, the insistence on intractable Asian differences has merely entrenched rather than lessen gaps in critical divides over the insolvability of relativism and universalism in resolving radical differences. Against this context, I find Joel’s reconciliation of relativist–universalist tensions, and the related struggle over (in)commensurability, useful in opening up new grounds to view Southeast Asia and the world, or as a matter of fact, insider and outsider perspectives as coeval, simultaneous, and interdependent.

In what follows, I shall provide an interpretation of Joel’s intellectual trajectory as a means to delineate the value of his approach that treats modern differences as products of coeval intercultural interactions, breaking away from unidirectional, hierarchical, and relativist understandings of modernity. It is impossible to do justice to Joel’s comprehensive and sophisticated conceptualizations. My aim is only to outline some of the ethico-political contexts and sensibilities that engendered and directed his intercultural inquiry by examining his contributions to three strands of scholarship central to anthropological debates over modernity, that is the relationship of peasant economy to modern social formations, the constitutive role of cultural difference in the making of modernity, and modern religiosity. As I will show, Joel’s engagement with these debates marks the development and consolidation of his thinking on modernity and an ethic to bring into critical review anthropology and critical theory to bring Southeast Asian and Western thought and experiential worlds into critical dialogue in order to reconstruct intercultural conceptions of modernity. As I show, this ethic of insisting on commensurability, interdependency, simultaneity between the East and the West was right there in Joel’s early scholarship ¹ on the articulations of political-economy in the world system before even his engagement with “modernity.” In closing, I draw on my own research on everyday expressions of “mindful” politics in contesting ethno-religious bigotries in Malaysia to further raise the question of intercultural translatability and political action.

Formative years: Encounters with peasant economy

For the first decade or so of his career, Joel was best recognized for critiques of world system theory and for Marxist/capital-centric approaches to the understanding of peasant economic modernization in Southeast Asia. Joel’s initial anthropological research was among the Minangkabau peasantry, first in Sumatra, Indonesia, during the early 1970s, and subsequently, in Negri Sembilan, Malaysia, during the mid-1970s as he joined his partner, fellow anthropologist Maila Stivens, on her PhD fieldwork there. ²

Joel’s thinking was in part energized and shaped by the intellectual climate of the time. His early career coincided with a time when the scientific status of anthropology, particularly currents associated with structural functionalism, was increasingly called into question. Based in London after completing his PhD at the London School of Economics, Joel was then part of a collective of young anthropologists who were critically engaged with a Marxist revival in thought, critiquing mainstream anthropology for its a-historicity and rootedness in structural functionalism. This collective, which included Maila Stivens, a key influence, and Josep Llobera, established Critique of Anthropology (in 1974) to serve as a forum for critical discussions. Joel and Josep Llobera (1981) subsequently co-edited an influential volume, The Anthropology of Pre-capitalist Societies, which took stock of debates generated by this journal.

Joel’s early writings on Minangkabau peasantry paved the way for concrete understandings of capitalist development in societies in the “periphery.” These writings comprised his first book, Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World Economy (Kahn, 1980), based on his doctoral work, as well as several articles. These works show that despite significant capitalist transformations in Indonesian and Malaysian rural economies, productivity and social economic relations at the household and village levels could not be fully characterized as capitalist, nor could the dynamics of economic change be understood in terms of categories derived either from Western economic theory or classical and neo-Marxist mode of production theories. Generic critical anthropological categories such as “peasantry,” “the domestic mode of production,” and “pre-capitalist relations of production” are all unhelpful in explicating Minangkabau peasant economic formations. Instead, the peculiar nature of Minangkabau productivity is better explained by tracing how economic rationality is shaped by the processes of social differentiation as well the relationship between peasants and the national economy. In light of these discoveries, Joel argued that anthropological and economic concepts must be understood as products of concrete historical contexts and interactions. Using his findings, Joel challenged two major relevant works of that time, that is Clifford Geertz’s Agricultural Involution (Kahn, 1985) – the then defining work of Indonesian agrarian economy – and of 19th century German economic thought showing how both these cutting-edge ideas were not produced in a vacuum but were in fact themselves products as well as producers of cultural otherness (Kahn, 1990). Inevitably, Joel’s ethnographic convictions led him to challenge the limits of Marxist analysis on three major grounds: first, a failure to recognize historical processes; second, a totalizing tendency to define “difference” through a predetermined narrative of capitalist development that relegates all alternative formations as somehow falling short; and, finally, an untenable economic reductionism given that economic, social–cultural, and political processes are functionally analogous to each other. By writing against sweeping generalizations of capitalist transformations that fail to account for differences in developing societies, Joel’s work on Minangkabau peasantry enriches understandings of concrete historical experiences of peasant economic developments.

Southeast Asian and Western modernity: Theoretical formulation

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Joel was compelled to conceive his ethnographic project in Indonesia and Malaysia as an anthropology of modernity as these societies experienced rapid modernization. Divergent experiences of Malaysian and Indonesian modernity had led Joel to argue for a need to see modernity as a global process engendering diverse types of social configurations of modernity. This phase of engagement with regional modern narratives marks the most productive and innovative period of Joel’s career. It was also from this phase onwards that his ideas on the simultaneity, mutuality, and interdependency between (Southeast) Asian and European/Western modern formations and ideas became ever more cogent and louder. His writings from this period exert enormous influence on our understanding of the structural and discursive global interlinkages since the 16th century that integrated and transformed Southeast Asian and Western experiences of modernity. Joel’s first task was to dis-embed Southeast Asian modern narratives from this integrated historical matrix. This was followed by a juxtaposition of Southeast Asian narratives against dominant (Western) conceptions of modernity so as to reinstate their supposed specificities as no less constitutive of the modern, hence complicating and diversifying conceptions of modernity.

Joel began by examining Minangkabau colonial modernity; he later shifted to study postcolonial modernity in Malaysia and wider Southeast Asia. In multiple works (Kahn, 1993, 1998; Kahn and Loh Kok Wah, 1992), he argued that “Western” and local meanings and experiences of the modern are implicated in the formation of each other. In other words, Southeast Asian modern formations and meanings are fundamentally intercultural in nature. His archival and ethnographic findings point to how modern cognitive, economic, and social–cultural formations in Southeast Asia are products of complex, and sometimes contentious, responses to colonial/Western ideas, policies, and practices at the formal and everyday levels that implicate both European/colonial and local actors ranging from scholars, to government agents, to bureaucrats, to elites, to ordinary citizens. By revealing the intercultural nature of Southeast Asian modern narratives, Joel’s work dispels unidirectional and hierarchical methods of comparison. Instead, Southeast Asian specificities of the modern as we see below throw into relief the shortcomings as well as the biased nature of normative Western conceptual foundations of modernity.

Southeast Asian experiences constitute only one end of the spectrum of local modern histories and Joel soon turned to examine the missing end, that of Western modernity, in two subsequent books: Culture, Multiculture, Postculture (1995) and Modernity and Exclusion (2001a). Focusing on Euro-American modernism at the turn of the 20th century, these works are remarkably interdisciplinary and draw on theories and methods from disciplines such as literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and art history, as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. Indeed, Joel wrote about how much he enjoyed this phase of experimentation in what he considered to be a “time-out” from his anthropological career. These books trace the persistence of a suppressed expressivist yearning for alterity and diversity in Euro-American modernism. Joel discerned an expressivist vein in a wide variety of discourses: post-Enlightenment liberal ideals, European textual accounts of “other” cultures, multiculturalism in major American cities, and popular notions of cultural difference in global culture. Findings point to the inherently multicultural nature of Western modernity, constituted by tensions between techno-instrumental rationality and what he calls “expressivism” (a term he borrowed from Charles Taylor (1989)). Joel shows how by the turn of the 20th century, expressivist ideals, particularly those related to human emancipation and the temporal anteriority of “others,” had replaced earlier 19th century civilizational discourses in much of Western Europe and urban areas of the United States. Interestingly, expressivist ideas were found among both advocates and opponents of the colonial empire. This expressivist impulse for alterity continued on into the early 20th century and the interwar years, shaping the deeply multicultural character of urban life, artistic practices, and popular culture in metropolitan centers of Western Europe and United States of America. Joel argues that an expressivist impulse remains in the identity and cultural politics of difference in contemporary global culture. That Western modernity is always accompanied by an underside suggests that alterity is also found within the West and not merely outside the West.

Joel’s combined explorations of Southeast Asian and Western modernity lend to his theorization of modernity as a single continuous historical process that has been plural and global from its onset in the 16th century. In his piece “Culture and modernities,” for example, he proposes that “we would nonetheless never reach a point in the history of modernity – however we define it and no matter to which historical period we seek to trace its emergence – when Asia was not already present within it” (Kahn, 2008: 353). Inevitably, such a conclusion casts doubt on the proposals made by cultural and postcolonial theorists to escape from the shackles of Western modernity and knowledge in the search for cultural authenticity/alterity. Joel reflected on this problematic of escaping from modern Western knowledge categories in much of his writings (see Kahn, 2001b). According to Joel’s arguments, as modernity is a coeval and irreducibly diverse process, all modern formations and ideas would inevitably be entwined and coeval with each other. Furthermore, Joel points out that, philosophically speaking, an escape from our knowledge categories is impossible as we can only fathom the unknown by contrasting it with the world we know. Hence, rather than seeking to escape from Western knowledge, the project of cultural authenticity/alterity should instead bring different knowledges into conversation in order to open up possibilities to change the very terms and logics upon which we categorize the world.

New millennium: Spiritual–temporal alterities

As Joel returned to Southeast Asian research in the first decade of the new millennium, Malaysian and Indonesian societies appeared to be in the grip of ethno-religious tensions and narrow, racialized nationalist discourses. Joel’s next work, The Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World (2006), represents an attempt to provide an account of the emergence and embedding of a particular nationalist narrative of Malay peoplehood from an earlier transient, migratory era in the 19th century – at the height of colonial modernity in Southeast Asia. Combining historical, ethnographic, and textual methodologies, this work traces the conjoint development of narrow as well as open/cosmopolitan narratives of cultural difference from the 19th to the early 20th centuries at the frontier regions of a much wider Malay world, stretching from insular Southeast Asia to the Mekong Delta in mainland Southeast Asia. It shows how a narrow Islamic reformism which had reared its head in the Malay world at the turn of the 20th century was effectively held back by cosmopolitan outlooks on life, religion, community, and cultural difference shaped by an open ecumenism of Jawi Watan (Jawi homeland). The Jawi/Malay people saw themselves as simultaneous members of a worldwide community of Muslim ummah. Joel’s crafting of a cosmopolitan past is an attempt at reinstating this inclusive narrative as part and parcel of a Malay sense of peoplehood. While the recovery of a harmonious past risks criticisms of nostalgia and impracticability, it is however clear that Joel’s intention in this work lies less in offering a solution than in providing political and epistemological resources from history for engaging with present forces of conservatism.

I turn next to Joel’s last work on religiosity, which I consider the most radical phase of his thinking, where he sought to bring secular-rational and sacred/“irrational” viewpoints together in order to expand social-scientific theory and method. In doing so, he challenged the limits of Western secular-critical logics of comprehending the world. In this last work, Joel came closest to addressing axial age debates as he explored the “spiritual” foundations of Asian knowledge by bringing into comparison intercultural comprehensions of Asian religions from two temporal eras of global anxieties, that is post-Second World War and today.

Understanding modern religiosity: Postsecular humanism

Joel’s last book, Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics and Reformers (2015), is perhaps the most provocative of his writings as it confronts the heart of ethical and methodological questions on the understanding of irreducible or unmediated forms of modern religious difference. Taking the persistence of religious fervor and the willingness of people to die and kill for religion as grounds to take modern religiosity seriously beyond mere social–political constructions, this book forces a consideration of experiential and contemplative methodologies beyond circumscribed social scientific epistemologies as a means to engage directly with claims of religious otherness outside secular-critical-rationality.

In line with Joel’s interdisciplinary and intercultural commitments, this work brings interwar Western Gnostic and Indonesian Sufi ideas and methodologies into conversation with debates on the “sacred” in the natural and social sciences. The comparisons reveal that both the “theological” and scientific intellectual projects share a striking similarity in aspiring after universality, that is both these projects seek to build a knowledge of the world and an understanding of humans’ place in it that transcends history. Nonetheless, they differ sharply in terms of their methodologies.

The natural and social sciences share a common inability to engage directly with supernatural claims in and on their own terms. There is a tendency to “bracket” out these aspects by explaining them in either social–political, cultural, linguistic, psychological, performative, bodily, or even neurological terms. Joel argues that such analyses are, however, problematic on at least three grounds. First, they merely render rational meanings to the “irrational” leaving the difference at stake unknown. Second, they put into question the democratic nature of our scientific projects as the knowledge produced is only meaningful to the researcher but not to the practitioners. Finally, the rational-critical knowledge categories applied to understanding religious otherness are themselves steeped in (Western) theological meanings, making the refusal to engage seriously with the religiosity of others ironical if not hypocritical.

Given such limitations, Joel suggests that it may benefit social scientists to open themselves to other ways of engaging otherness beyond the boundaries of secular-critical-rational frameworks. In other words, that secular/rational and sacred/“irrational” epistemologies can be brought into conversation. It is in this spirit that Joel turns to interwar Gnosticism, a disdained but available Western intellectual resource for understanding Indonesian Sufi beliefs and practices. For Joel, interwar Gnosticism provides an example of an inter-religious project that is situated in both Western worldviews as well as Asian ones whereby the knowledge produced speaks of and to both the worlds of the researcher and the studied. Joel argues that the experiential and contemplative methodologies adopted by both Gnostics and Sufis are promising in facilitating cross-religious understanding and embracement. In contrast to abstract reasoning in the social sciences, Gnostic and Sufi ways of knowing are at once ideational and practical. Central to their knowing is also living where there is an intentional impulse to seek openings into “unseen” or even “impossible” worlds in order to bring about encounters and understandings of the “sacred” from within the self or for the self to become at one with these unseen worlds.

While religious modes of knowing are often treated with disdain for their esoteric and a-political nature, Joel shows that their experiential and contemplative orders of knowing provide us with grounded direct engagements with totally alien forms of metaphysical and ontological claims. They provide us with an alternative logic of the complementarity of differences whereby different ideational and ontological worlds are seen to be mutually constitutive and interrelated, offering us a completely contrasting logic to narrow, dualistic Western Enlightenment thinking. Far from apolitical, Joel shows that these sacred forms of knowledge are characterized by the quest for openness, responsibility for others, nonviolence, and respect for the natural world – ideas which are much needed in the contemporary world.

The distinctive set of strategies adopted by Kahn on an insistence to bring Southeast Asian and Western religious worlds into critical dialogue, that opens up a multiplicity of viewpoints, shedding light on correspondences as well as unexpected interlinkages across seemingly incommensurable difference, is a useful one. Joel’s suggestion on the possibility for all cultures/society to find resources within their own cultural and intellectual backgrounds to grasp otherness has inspired me to look for such avenues in my own research on resistance of ethno-religious bigotries in contemporary Malaysia. Everyday resistant politics in face of a deeply bifurcated public sphere over rising Islamic conservatism in recent Malaysia, I find, provides other creative resolutions of incompatible differences.

Intercultural possibilities from Southeast Asia? Ethical resistance

Since the new millennium, deep political divisions arising from a dis-embedded Islamic conservatism in the enmeshment between Malaysian ethno-religious nationalism and global Islamism have severely debilitated political opposition, putting into question the future direction of radical politics in Malaysia. This sacralization of politics has made strange bed-fellows of people who otherwise have little in common as they band together to defend or oppose Islamization. The quarrels over Islamization have generated endless political stalemates alongside protracted street protests and violence on both sides of the divide. What is disconcerting is that both sides are equally dogmatic and unable to reconcile differences in their imaginaries of Malaysian public life. What is sinister is that this political bifurcation over Islam falls in tune with statist rhetoric of placing Islamic and Western conceptions of human rights, justice, and freedom in binary opposition. Criticisms of Islam are quickly flattened as proxies of Western designs and rejected. Even when nuances from Western critical categories are articulated, they are glossed over and misunderstood. This incapacitation of resistance suggests that radical resistance will need to change course and seek alternative strategies that can mobilize common concerns to struggle for a convivial, just and hopeful Malaysian future.

Yet from impossibilities also grow new possibilities. As Joel’s study has pointed out, there are always available cultural and intellectual resources that facilitate cross-cultural understandings within particular societies. It is a matter of looking at the right places. Indeed, the bigotry and futility in a highly charged Malaysian public sphere have pushed ordinary Malaysians to seek alternative political expressions outside the normative realm of civil society. Political critique has increasingly turned to new subterranean and everyday spaces in the form of a quiet spread of alternative Islamic imaginaries in an affront to dominant conceptions. Here, resistance has turned to spiritual and cultural ethical traditions as well as simple human compassion as resources to recover shared civic dimensions of ethnic interchanges and conviviality to overthrow bigoted religious discourses. For instance, there has been a revivalism of Sufism, conceived as a set of mystical practices emphasizing the personal, humanistic, fluid, and compassionate dimensions of Islam. As such Sufism has become a site to defy the narrow brand of dominant Islam (e.g. see Abdul Hamid, 1999). In a previous study, I have shown how an urban revival of a local Muslim guardian spirit, the keramat, which incorporates syncretic mixture of Islam, Hindu-Buddhist, Sinic, and animistic cosmologies, offers another example of spiritual resistance against Islamic orthodoxy (Goh, 2012).

More recently, my research has focused on creative resistance in artistic practices and citizenry initiatives in Malaysia. These configurations involve curious “political” actors and alliances: urban dwellers, artists, cultural activists, and concerned citizens. Occurring away from a highly charged public sphere, these innovations stimulate new and open ways of interrogating, expressing, blurring, and minimizing ethno-religious differences. Importantly, their alternative ethno-religious representations – which are either directly expressed or find their way into cyber networks – strike powerful cords with, and are easily understood by, fellow Malaysians who are cognizant of these humane, less judgmental, more tolerant, and fluid understandings of Islam with historical roots in Malaysia and the Southeast Asian region. Let me just take one case in point.

I refer to a citizenry initiative that appears to re-inscribe new national mind-sets in the context of rising ethno-religious conflicts in the new millennium by turning to institutional, historical, and spatial resources to recover intercultural imaginations so as to break down the walls of ethno-religious differences and create new convivial possibilities. This is Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia (SABM) which seeks to foster inter-ethno-religious dialogue and instill the spirit of “One People, One Nation” in Malaysia in combating ethno-religious fanaticism. SABM is a loose coalition of “like-minded” people which was established in 2007 in response to a passionate article written by a young Malaysian, entitled, “Break the shackles of ‘Tribal Think’” posted in a popular Malaysian blog which sparked off earnest discussions over the internet. ³ This loose coalition is not the usual social movement. It has both virtual and real presence. It has a Charter – and among its commitments are:

a) to Engender a National Mindset to think and act first and foremost as Malaysians; and b) to engage the Hearts and Minds of our people to rise above the social constructs and divisive forces of ethnicity, faith, colour, class or gender.

Its website invites contributions, opinions, and photos from ordinary Malaysians on everyday history, stories of past, present, and future and in the process builds up an archive of alternative Malaysian narratives on social life, history, outlooks on ethnicity and religion, and so on. Membership is loose if not ambiguous, and members are described on its website as: “… citizen volunteers, commoners, faceless perhaps but not spineless. We are non-partisan. We come from diverse backgrounds, we have different temperaments, different shapes and sizes and we are of different ages. Different, yet the same no less.”

Clearly the intercultural ideals of this coalition are its force. This coalition is kept alive as “members” organize Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia Neighborhood Get-togethers. To date, SABM has chapters in the majority of Malaysian cities and with an overseas chapter in Melbourne, Australia. One of their projects is the “One People, One Nation” Country Wide Road-Show, launched in 2009, to promote inter-faith dialogue and discussions over the Malaysian Federal Constitution.

Indeed for the inaugural launch of this roadshow, SABM used a little known but significant historical building located in Georgetown, Penang, The Hu Yew Seah, or literally the “League of Helping Friends” is a cultural literary Association established 1914 ⁴ during an era of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism in (Southeast) Asia that has been noted by Joel as well as various other scholars (e.g. see Harper and Amrith, 2012; Kahn, 2006; Shiraishi, 1990; Siegel, 1997). The choice to use the Hu Yew Seah as the launching pad was no accident as this club has an inspirational social–cultural history not commonly known to Malaysians. While the Hu Yew Seah is only known today by a sleek and minimalist elegant building associated with the Art Décor Style that stands in the heart of Georgetown, Penang, this Association has a history that is charged with inspirational intercultural imaginings. To many younger Malaysians, the Hu Yew Seah is no more than a recreational club for its members. Indeed a visit to the building today tells little about its glorious history. However, a small marble plaque mounted on a wall in the main hall of the building provides a clue to its splendid past. The plaque marks the foundational stone laid by Nobel laureate poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore who inaugurated the building on 14 August 1927 (Yeoh, 1996: 17). This plaque is a tell-tale sign of Hu Yew Seah’s status as cultural-literary Association at the forefront of social–cultural life in Penang during the early decades of 1920s.

Although founding members were linked to Tung Meng Hooi – an underground resistance movement by the Chinese nationalist revolution, Dr Sun Yat Sen (Khoo, 1993: 123) ⁵ – the Association quickly developed into an organization concerned about local belonging and community-building. The name of Hu Yew Seah is derived from a phrase from the Confucian Analects which states that, “The superior man associates with his friends by means of literary studies and pursuits, and by this friendship helps his own virtue” (Choo and Lim, 1966: 88). In an age prior to Focauldian thought, the Association’s motto was “Knowledge is Power” (Goh, 2013: 48). Although membership was opened to the Chinese community, honorary membership was opened to other ethnic groups. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s – at a time when local society was beginning to forge a sense of local identity in the fight against the colonial government – the Hu Yew Seah was a center of intellectual and social activity and public debates in the lively port city of Georgetown.

In line with the spirit of the time, the pursuits of the Hu Yew Seah displayed an openness to learn from outside ideas and reflexivity of self and one’s own cultural traditions (Goh, 2013: 47–52). Tradition such as language and literature was not a hindrance but viewed as necessary knowledge for progress. The desire for knowledge and new ideas was translated into efforts to go beyond oneself, to transform oneself and one’s old ways of life by gaining knowledge about language, culture, and society and reflecting upon one’s relationship with others and wider society. This spirit of cultural openness was expressed in a popular discussion group called “Lost Souls” that was established by the Association. The appeal of this discussion group was so strong that several participants travelled regularly from nearby states in order to attend the meetings. Indeed “Lost Souls” itself conveys the spirit of a deep desire to search for meanings of humanity. The desire for knowledge and new ideas was translated into efforts to go beyond oneself, to transform oneself and one’s old ways of life by gaining knowledge about language, tradition, culture, and society and reflecting upon one’s relationship with others and wider society. To be new during this era of cosmopolitanism was a quest to learn how not to be one’s self – a sharp contrast to the preoccupation with how to arrive at ethno-religious distinctions or authenticity in current Malaysian nationalist imaginations.

As an Association responsive to socio-cultural imperatives of its time, Hu Yew Seah quickly became a serious patron of education by the 1930s. ⁶ In anticipation of Malaysia’s impending Independence, the Hu Yew Seah further carved itself a role in the fervor to build a national community. In 1956, a year before Malaysia’s Independence, the Association established a Malay Night School with the aim of offering national language classes to Malaysians from all walks of life. With Independence, the Hu Yew Seah swiftly changed its membership rules (Hu Yew Seah, 1966: 8). By 1962 membership was opened to all races to reflect the multi-racial spirit of the newly independent Malaysia. The Association actively expanded its national language night school. Some 23,000 Malaysians were said to have studied in Hu Yew Seah’s night school, making it the “biggest private national language school in the country” (Lim, 1996: 4). By the 1970s, the Association focused solely on promoting the learning of the national language and appeared to have given up on its role as a social–cultural transformative agent. Nonetheless, Hu Yew Seah’s role as national language promoter became redundant by the 1980s as by then most Malaysians were conversant in Malay. Without any alternate vision and purpose, the Hu Yew Seah declined into what it is today – a mere private recreational club for a predominantly English-speaking Chinese middle class in Penang.

The critical visions about self, others, and community advocated by the Hu Yew Seah, its rise and fall as a cultural-literary association, from between the 1920s and the 1980s, provide important lessons and resources to think about the future of Malaysian society. There is no better contrast to bigoted ethno-religious imaginaries in contemporary Malaysia than the open-minded intercultural past aspired by Hu Yew Seah from the turn of the 20th century until at least the heyday of Malaysia’s Independence. In using this little known historic building to launch its nation-wide initiative, SABM was reinstating past practices of progressive, open and forward-looking visions of the self, collective, and cultural identities in face of insular, closed, chauvinistic, and backward frameworks of Malaysian identifications today. The launch of this event helped turn the now private space into a civic space as youths, religious leaders, lawyers, film makers, human rights activists, and other civil society actors congregated there and freely debated on various thorny issues plaguing Malaysian society. The discussions covered a range of subjects such as inter-faith dialogue, ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy), crisis of the nation, as well as current disputes over the interpretations of the Federal Constitution and Malaysian history. The virtual coverage of this event in new social media helped commemorate and spread the forgotten institutional history of intercultural conviviality beyond the circle of participants.

In sum, SABM’s initiatives point to a new public sphere that is quietly in the making in Malaysia today. This new public sphere revolves around the recovery of suppressed or forgotten narratives of open and convivial identifications of the self, other, and community outside of state discourses to forge a politics of respect, mutuality, and unity among Malaysians. This alternative public sphere is created by turning to institutional, historical, and spatial resources to recover intercultural, convivial, and open understandings of self and humanity so as to combat narrow ethno-religious identifications in Malaysia. Everyday pursuits of intercultural logics and creative modes to transcend and rethink strident ethno-religious differences in Malaysia such as the efforts of SABM provide us with concrete grounds to understand the generation of dialogical spaces whereby amiable understandings across ethno-cultural divides are conjured to challenge official ethno-religious categorizations. SABM’s efforts suggest that in a society where ethno-religious bigotries have invaded private identities and eradicated meaningful public debate, the seeds of revolutionary change may have to first take root in people’s everyday mindful self-transformations and the convivial spaces produced. Such endeavors to bring into audibility and visibility past convivial practices as means of dismantling exclusionary identity imaginings are comparable to efforts of finding shared universals across religious incommensurability by the Interwar Gnostics studied by Joel.

Closing: More than an anthropologist of Southeast Asia

The picture of Joel’s trajectory of thought suggests a gradual evolution in his writings from a secular to a postsecular humanist orientation. Starting from studying peasant economy in Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1970s, Joel expanded his interests to colonial and postcolonial modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia from the 1980s onwards, studying the interconnections between political-economic development, nationalism, and ethno-religious and identity transformations. His enduring quest was to critically compare Southeast Asian and Western experiences of modernity while writing against the limits of radical thinking in anthropology, in particular, and critical, cultural, and postcolonial theories, in general. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that this preoccupation would lead Joel to examine Euro-American modernism, which he did in the late 1990s, before returning to the Southeast Asian region in the first decade of the new millennium to research Malay cosmopolitanism and Asian religiosity.

From his insistence on always bringing Southeast Asian and Western thought and experiential worlds into critical comparison, he built a brand of intercultural scholarship that provides a way out of relativism and critical predetermination that hold back true knowledge transformations. In particular, his last work on modern religiosity opens up a logic of the complementarity of differences as well as experiential and contemplative methodologies, contributing to the recognition of a diversity of categories and logics of being that structure modern cultural projects in a decentered world.

It is unlikely that the antimony of singularity/interconnectedness and multiplicity/disjointedness in the conceptualization of modernity will be resolved any time soon. Nonetheless, Joel’s abiding commitment to bring Southeast Asian and Western narratives of modernity into critical relation serves as an inspiration for us to pursue genuinely intercultural brands of knowledge that can bear on the challenges and crises of global modernity in the 21st century. By insisting that irreducibly different worlds of ideas and practices are interconnected to each other and must be brought into conversation so as to rectify power hierarchies and transform knowledge foundations across expansive, uneven, and emergent fields of discourse, Joel’s scholarship contributes to free us from the cages of modern epistemology and cultural exceptionalism that blinds us to the simultaneity and interdependency of irreducibly different social–cultural realities and rationalities. In a multipolar and uncertain age, anthropologists must endeavor to speak across spatially located ethical divides, bringing converging and contrasting critical outlooks together for mutual competition and enrichment of intercultural understandings of modern cultural diversity and human fulfillment without reinventing the place of power either in the West, Southeast Asia, or anywhere else.