The Dead, Place/Space, and Social Activism: Constructing the Nationscape in Historic Melaka

Abstract

In Malaysia under state-led economic restructuring, government interventions in cultural heritage landscapes reflect divergent priorities between local place-based conservation interests and forces of political and economic restructuring at broader spatial scales. I examine a major land-use conflict, between economic development interests and a grass-roots preservation movement with links to the national opposition party, to assess how preservation activists mobilised place-based constructions of cultural identity and representations of state nationalism to halt development plans for a historic landscape, These issues arc examined by negotiating the relationship between locally based cultures of place, and political and economic forces seeking to appropriate space, in a piece of historic land in Melaka, Malaysia. I work through two lines of approach. The theoretical framework applies Lefebvre's work on spatial processes and spatial categories to conceptualise the significance of the historic landscape, and utilises Merrifield's reading of Lefebvre to write between the place—space dualism. A social construction approach is adopted to demonstrate how people actively create meaning about place in space, and work out the dialectic of preservationist intervention between local and state-level land-use goals. The social construction approach shows how cultural identity may be place based, and therefore the basis of a powerful localised social movement. Through the movement generated by this debate, a monumental traditional Chinese burial ground became local park and ‘nationscape’, a site-specific distillation of half a millenium of Malaysian history.