Aihwa Ong - Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition

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SUNY series in the Anthropology of Work

June C. Nash, editor

Spirits of Resistance and
Capitalist Discipline

SECOND EDITION

FACTORY WOMEN IN MALAYSIA

Aihwa Ong

Introduction by Carla Freeman

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2010 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu

Production by Ryan Morris
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ong, Aihwa.

Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline : factory women in
Malaysia/Aihwa Ong. 2nd ed.

p. cm. (SUNY series in the anthropology of work)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-3354-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4384-3355-4 (pbk.: alk. paper).

1. PeasantryMalaysiaSelangor.

2. SelangorRural conditions.

3. Social changeCase studies.

4. Working classMalaysiaSelangor.

5. Women electronic industry workersMalaysiaSelangor.

6. Economic anthropologyMalaysiaSelangor. I. Title.

HD1537.M27054 2010

306.3'6095951dc22

2010004832

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents

List of Illustrations

TABLES

Malay Population in Selangor, 18911957

Crop Acreage in Selangor, 19331948

Prices Obtained by Kampung Malay Smoked Sheet Rubber, Selangor, 19321958

Ethnic and Sexual Division of Estate Workers, Selangor, 1948

Acreage Under Cash Crops in Kuala Langat, 19661978

Estimated Average Monthly Incomes from Malay Holdings, Kuala Langat, 1979

Distribution of Households by Land Access, Sungai Jawa, (Sample of One-Third of Total Population), 1979

Primary Occupations of Household Heads by Land Access, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Men and Women in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Average Daily Work Time (in Hours) by Girls and Boys in Forty Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Composition and Size of 242 Households, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Retention and Dispersal of Children 18 Years and Older in 138 Families, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Average Labor Time Spent by Children and Adults in Household and Income-Earning Activities, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Primary Occupations of Men and Women, One-Third Total Population, Sungai Jawa, 1979

Causes of Malay Divorces by Percentage Each Year, Kuala Langat, 196979

Peninsular Malaysia: Distribution of Total Labor Force by Industry, 197080

Average Wage Rates in Selected Industries for Manual Laborers in Selangor, 1976

Distribution of EJI Employees by Ethnicity, Gender, and Earnings, 1979

MAPS

Selangor: Districts, Pre-1942 Boundaries

Kuala Langat: Land Use, Towns and Transportation Lines to the Klang Valley

DIAGRAMS

Work Organization and Occupation Ranks in EJI, Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979

Ethnic and Gender Distribution in the Transistor Assembly Section in EJI, Telok Free Trade Zone, 1979

Preface

Why are Malay women workers periodically seized by spirit possession on the shopfloor of modern factories? Educated Malays regard spirit beliefs a cultural relic which, like rustic speech and gestures, should have been left in departed villages. My aim in this book is to demonstrate how spirit attacks speak to the contemporary experiences of Malay women and their families as they make the transition from peasant society to industrial production.

To discover the meanings the market economy and industrial wage labor have for Malay women, it is necessary to talk about women as historical subjects and in terms of their subjective experiences. This inquiry deals with struggles over the means and meanings of gender in the context of exchange, disjunctions, and conflicts generated by land dispossession and the subjection of peasants to new forms of control and domination.

The proliferation of new disciplinary techniques, sexual images, and episodic outbreaks of spirit possession in the industrializing milieu leads me to ask: What is the relationship between work discipline and sexuality? What contradictions in the social experiences of factory women are mediated by evil spirits? In the new constellation of power relations, what do conflicting agencies and consciousness tell us about the nature of cultural change?

Capitalist development in Malaysia engenders new forms of discipline in the everyday life of Malays, who up until recently were largely rooted in village (kampung) society and engaged in small-scale cash cropping. If discipline is taken to mean the effect of the exercise of power in the interests of capitalist production, then social control can be traced through a variety of cultural forms which enforce compliance and order within and outside economic enterprises. This inquiry will explore how changing relationships in the peasant household, village, and the global factory mediate divergent attitudes towards work and sexuality among Malays and within the wider society.

The extension of capitalist relations in Malaysia involves the simultaneous processes of agrarian transition and industrial capitalism which together are transforming Malay society in fundamental ways. In coastal Selangor, developmental change has produced not a classic proletarianization but a multiplicity of social strata. Caught in the flux of land dispossession, the majority of villagers are cast into unstable wage employment generated by the operations of transnational factories. What are the structural effects of centralized state power, on the one hand, and the decentralized operations of transnational corporation, on the other, on the nature of class power in the countryside?

The rise of a female Malay industrial force in Malaysian free trade zones is accompanied by divergent representations of female gender and sexuality in the ideological discourse of dominant political groups. Almost overnight, neophyte factory women barely out of their adolescence have become contradictory symbols in public commentaries on morality and truth. How do these conflicting images of their sexuality mediate the diverse interests of groups and classes? What do they tell us about the deployment of sexuality and hegemonic ideology?

Within the factory, working women confront industrial discipline as a manifold and wide-ranging network of overt and covert power relations. Marxists frequently assume that capitalist relations of production have an over-determined logic, based on the extreme separation of mental and physical labor, and the banishment of imaginative life from the factory floor. If that were the case, what is one to make of the production of corporate culture in transnational corporations? How are technology and cultural practices brought to bear in the production of docile bodies, and a new subjectivity in female workers?

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