Mandailing :: English :: Freedom from Cultural Imperialism

Cross Boundaries

Freedom from Cultural Imperialism
By Abdur-Razzaq Lubis

We find ourselves in a society, a world society, a ubiquitous global village where the mystique of "market forces" reduces the human being to a lost creature without sense of meaning or depths. It appears that "Everyone is the other and no one is himself." Man makes himself at home everywhere but then nowhere finds himself at home. Having domesticated the earth by technologising nature, man feels more alienated than before and also finds that the traditional "differences" of cultures have been destroyed in the process, making a desire for difference itself a new romanticism. Peking now looks like Denver that resembles Paris. Furniture once specific to a history is now "international" making the interior of hotel and home identical in every part of the world, to say nothing of fashion and the video programmes aired around the world. It makes every place looks the same. Structuralism dominates life and the refining of the technological programme takes on ultimate meaning. Indeed world society is unified by the technological project - one of its crucial dimensions is communications.

Meanwhile the majority of the human race has been reduced to reactive helpless consumers and using false money (the rupiah has no value in the international market!). What this means is that market forces have slowly but surely replaced public or private values. Hollywood has commercialised and exploit everything that was, while almost nowhere the rebirth and revival of the glorious past has really taken place. At the same time, the same rootless hybrid pseudo-culture is being spread world-wide by the electronic media so that music, art and literature are all identical in every place and never deeply reflect folk tradition and life in any place. The fact that the parabola is to be found even in the remotest parts of Indonesia indicates the almost complete global cultural conditioning. For that matter, ultimate domestication has set in, and the questing, fighting, transforming hero of the past is presented as video legend viewed from the safety and comfort of perpetual slavery (unpayable national debt!), renamed the New World Order.

If we think education is the key and the way out, we are deceived. We have a society in which the technical and social elite has received basically an identical education to that of the masses. The difference being purely one of complex learning in one specialized field. On top of that is the inescapable cultural dimension of a literate community all fed from the same communication grid that indoctrinates the masses - world television and radio as well as a publishing network in the hands of a few grossly undereducated and militantly pro-monetarist barons. Whole peoples have been redefined and misrepresented through a process of social engineering shaped by nationalism, augmented by the print media and subsequently the audio-visual media, population census and national education. [In the case of the Mandailings, we were redefined and misrepresented by the colonisers as Batak in Sumatra and "foreign Malays" in the Peninsula.] All this for the sake of building a nation-state, who are all now under the sway of One World State. Civilisation as we know it - which now all the squalid politicians invoke daily to justify their pragmatic surrender to the 'power that be' - is in danger of total destruction.

As such the issue of our time - the survival of human beings with individuated consciousness and communal ties is in peril. Indeed the core of the issue lies in being able to form that kind of person, refined in complete model by the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, who is lawful because he chooses to be lawful for his own health and well-being. Not law-abiding but law-confirming - an active free man or woman. This new man and new woman can only have meaning in a society which recognises as the primary motive for existence the journey of the psyche or spirit in the realisation of its human talents in this life!

Freedom then is the path to this new life. A freedom that begins with the individual confirms him in his place with his people and his language and his culture, yet by that specific location of his being there, grants him a world perspective to recognise his brothers and sisters elsewhere in their differentness and their challenge. If we are to recover the authenticity of our culture and our social exchange, and we must! we must recover the authenticity of our monetary exchange.

To breakfree from cultural imperialism as outline above, and to confirm my place with my people, my culture, my language, my tradition, my world view, my homeland and indeed my way of life, and therefore my differentness and my challenges, and to realise my full potential in this life - this to me is the quest of cultural-heritage. The recovery of my cultural identity in all its ramifications is but a first step in that direction.

Background

My ancestors migrated to the Peninsula in the 1840s in the wake of the Padri War (1816-1833) and right up to before the Japanese Occupation, my family and relatives have been making cultural pilgrimages to our homeland in Mandailing. This was before Malaysia and Indonesia came into being, whose very existence somewhat lent legitimacy to the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 which divided the archipelago into the British and Dutch spheres of influence. The migrant Mandailings in the Peninsula (some were political refugees who fled Sumatra in the 1930s) were called "Malay left" fought for Indonesia Raya but lost to conservative Malay sentiments. Many of my family members and relatives were active participants in important historical events shaping the course of what was to become "Malaysian history". Now many of them have become established and influential "Bumiputera" ("pribumi" in Indonesia) families and having "masuk Melayu" (entered the Malay fold) found comfort and acceptance with their new found racial and national identity with its "special privileges" enshrined in the Federal Constitution. We have come full circle, if you like, and the recovery of our history, cultural identity and heritage and that of our Sumatran allies and foes who came with us or otherwise - the Talu, the Rawa (in Indonesia they are called Rao), Kerinchi, Minangs, etc. - has come. I in the light of this, the author and his ever supportive wife, applied and succeeded in obtaining a Toyota Foundation grant to study the Mandailing migration to nineteenth century Peninsula Malaysia and by extension the migration of other ethnic groups from Sumatra. Establishing contact with Sumatra Heritage Trust in particular the dynamic Hasti Tarekat and eventually becoming its representative in Malaysia was the only logical thing to do. The author is also an advocate of People Against Interest-Debt (PAID Indonesia), which promotes authentic monetary exchange central to our social exchanges and cultural-heritage.