Migrant Subjectivities and Narratives of the Kampung in Malaysia

Abstract

Kampung figures prominently in a structure of feeling that contrasts rural and urban in Malaysia. While rural to urban migration and urbanization have proceeded apace in Malaysia, the kampung continues to play an important role in the lives of the country's Malay community and in Malaysia's national cultural geography. This article examines the place of the kampung in that cultural geography as it is related in the narratives of return migrants to the kampung of Sungai Siputeh in northern peninsular Malaysia. The article argues that return migrants are existentially engaged in fashioning their own lives in relationship to this discourse as they move between rural and urban spaces. Moreover, within rural Malaysia, their narratives shape the cultural geography of rural subjects. Anthropologists are abandoning villages in Southeast Asia and around the world. Although village-level fieldwork continues to be the archetype (or at least stereotype) of socio-cultural anthropological investiga