The Intertwining Vines of Liturgy, Ethnicity, and Nationhood: The Nativized Imaginary of the Malaysian Catholic Community

Abstract

The Intertwining Vines of Liturgy, Ethnicity, and NationhoodThe Nativized Imaginary of the Malaysian Catholic Community Shanthini Pillai (bio) The Nativized Religious Habitus Recent conficting issues with regards to the Malaysian Catholic community might have led to the questioning of allegiance to land and nation, in short nationhood. This article aims at addressing this issue, with the objective of studying the ways in which nationhood reveals itself within the Catholic community in Malaysia. The key to determining this aspect, as I argue, lies in an investigation of the cultural narratives that exist within the Catholic Church to determine the ways in which they are localized or nativized to Malaysian contexts and, consequently, stand as intimations of Catholic spirituality in harmony with the nation. The term “nativization” is often used in its sociolinguistic context and is most commonly associated with Braj Kachru and his definition of it as “the processes which create a localised linguistic identity of a variety.”1 I wish to draw on this term and recontextualize and expand its deployment to incorporate the vestiges of spiritual identity and faith among diasporic communities that, by virtue of their distinct visible ethnic markers, possess an identity, are inevitably seen as linked to another land, and yet, have, for the most part, localized and nativized their identities within the [End Page 94] country that is now home. On one level, there is undeniably a harmony and unity with the tenets of the Sacred Liturgy of Roman Catholicism. On another level, however, there is the national identity of the local church, for, as Mass is celebrated, one hears the distinct national marker in the reference to the archbishop of that individual nation, a signifier of the national identity of the local church in a journey that reaches as far back as the sixteenth century. Also relevant to this discussion are Pierre Bourdieu’s thoughts on cultural production and the habitus. According to Bourdieu, “cultural production distinguishes itself from the production of the most common objects in that it must produce not only the object in its materiality, but also the value of this object, that is, the recognition of artistic legitimacy.”2 This is also applicable to the spiritual context. Cultural productions of ecclesial communities are those that are formally recognized for their spiritual value and subsequently embedded within the cultural habitus. The habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms, is created by patterns of perception and appreciation and establishes a cultural context through which different cultural positions, such as the position of the merchant or the artist or the religious representative, achieve a distinctive set of characteristics in a given time and place. How has the cultural habitus of the Catholic community been developed from its early form when first introduced in Malaysia to its current form in the twenty-first century? My article argues that, as the Malaysian Catholic community engages with ecclesiastical doctrine within their national space the interaction with other positions determined by ethnicity, linguistic inflections, culture, and custom creates a religious habitus that mediates and influences the creation of a number of nativized Catholic cultural productions that are recognizably Malaysian in their materiality. In this way, the space of the religious habitus is continually adjusted by the religious tenets of both papal authority and national ecclesiastical vision. These realignments reveal the intertwining vines of liturgy, ethnicity, and nationhood in both global and local spaces, in the form of a globalized spiritual harmony, as the ensuing discussion will show. [End Page 95] The Global Catholic Church Many see the possibility of such adjustments to the religious habitus as largely due to the transformation of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, a seminal point in Catholic history as it created a more globalized Church that was cognizant of the intricacies of culture, faith, and spirituality in general. The extract below, from the homily of Pope Francis as he presided over Holy Mass on Pentecost Sunday in 2013 in Saint Peter’s Square, accentuates this position of the Holy See. “Ipse harmonia est. He is indeed harmony,” the Pope said. “Only the Spirit can awaken diversity, plurality and multiplicity, while at the same time building unity.”3 The Pope...