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Cultural Contestations
Meditating Identities in a Changing Malaysian Society

Edited by Zawawi Ibrahim
September 1998
ASEAN Academic Press
ISBN: 1-901919-04-8
204 pages, 5 3/4" x 8 3/4"
$79.50 Hardcover

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This book combines fresh and critical perspectives into the analysis of the Malaysian nation-state and its postcolonial social transformation. In contrast to the conventional approach, it investigates development as a process of cultural contestation in which new social meanings or identities are continuously being constituted, renegotiated and reconstructed, involving the state, institutions, classes and other groups of social actors. It therefore recognizes meditating identities as a crucial process in the whole phenomenon of the emergence, consolidation and sustainability of the modern nation-state. This collection, written by leading Malaysianists and Malaysian scholars from the disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, political science and literature, for the first time, brings together both theoretical and empirical focus into the above discourse.



Politics; Sociology