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The Dialectics of "Disputatiousness" and "Rice‐Eating Money": Class Confrontation and Gendered Imaginaries among Chinese Men in West Malaysia
Author(s) -
ini Donald M.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1999.26.1.47
Subject(s) - ethnography , gender studies , mobilities , diaspora , sociology , marxist philosophy , ethnic group , embodied cognition , politics , political science , anthropology , law , artificial intelligence , computer science
Chinese owners of Malaysian truck transport firms characterized Chinese drivers in 1979‐80 labor disputes as "disputatious," "cheating," and making "rice‐eating money." They presented themselves as a stigmatized, besieged, ethnic‐trading minority. My later fieldwork from 1985‐92 revealed that drivers used an embodied pedagogy of learning through labor to critique owners' accounts and their own exploitation, even though as "crude" men they shared with "mannered" owners male‐specific mobilities vis‐à‐vis Chinese women. Reflections on these fieldwork findings challenge prevailing discursive and post‐Marxist turns within ethnography. [diaspora Chinese, Southeast Asia, strategic totalization, embodied pedagogies, class analysis, gender, ethnic politics]