Thammasat University students interested in ASEAN history, Brunei Darussalam, sociology, comparative religion, Islamic studies, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
(Re)presenting Brunei Darussalam: A Sociology of the Everyday is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-6059-8
It is edited by Professor Lian Kwen Fee who teaches sociology at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and others.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Brunei Darussalam, a country located on the north coast of the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.
The publishers description notes:
This thoughtful and wide-ranging open access volume explores the forces and issues shaping and defining contemporary identities and everyday life in Brunei Darussalam. It is a subject that until now has received comparatively limited attention from mainstream social scientists working on Southeast Asian societies. The volume helps remedy that deficit by detailing the ways in which religion, gender, place, ethnicity, nation-state formation, migration and economic activity work their way into and reflect in the lives of ordinary Bruneians. In a first of its kind, all the lead authors of the chapter contributions are local Bruneian scholars, and the editors skilfully bring the study of Brunei into the fold of the sociology of everyday life from multiple disciplinary directions. By engaging local scholars to document everyday concerns that matter to them, the volume presents a collage of distinct but interrelated case studies that have been previously undocumented or relatively underappreciated. These interior portrayals render new angles of vision, scale and nuance to our understandings of Brunei often overlooked by mainstream inquiry. Each in its own way speaks to how structures and institutions express themselves through complex processes to influence the lives of inhabitants. Academic scholars, university students and others interested in the study of contemporary Brunei Darussalam will find this volume an invaluable resource for unravelling its diversity and textures. At the same time, it hopefully stimulates critical reflection on positionality, hierarchies of knowledge production, cultural diversity and the ways in which we approach the social science study of Brunei.
From the book’s Prologue by Professor Victor T. King of the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam:
Everyday life in Brunei has now to engage with and respond to the national ideology, Malay Islamic monarchy (Melayu Islam Beraja), and within that context issues of the construction, maintenance and adaptation of Malay identity come to the fore. The following themes are pursued in the volume: the increasing importance of Islam, Islamic law (syariah) and halal-certified food and drink products; the negotiation, tensions and accommodation between Islam and tradition embodied in custom (adat) in such areas of Malay life as wedding ceremonies and the role of female ritual specialists (pengangun); the effects of the internet and social media on young people’s identity and their perspectives on Islam; the learning process among Malay primary schoolchildren on gender and male–female characteristics and behaviour; the orientation of older Malay women to their aging and to Islam; the language use by young bilingual Bruneians, specifically the increasing intermingling of Malay and English; the position of Indonesian female domestic workers in Malay households; the transformations in the architecture, physical space and demographic composition of the material symbol and embodiment of Brunei Malay history and culture, Kampong Ayer; the role played by place and space in identity formation exemplified by notions of belonging and unbelonging in Kampong Ayer and the attitudes of Malays to homeownership, given the importance of state-owned housing in resettlement accommodation for those moving from Kampong Ayer; and the position and response of minority populations and migrant workers in Brunei to the dominant Malay Muslim culture; other case studies comprise the hybrid Chinese-Malay population, the Iban of Melilas, Belait and migrant workers residing in Kampong Ayer.
This book is most welcome. It brings Brunei into the fold of the sociology of everyday life from multiple disciplinary directions. Although the field of studies is now well established in the discipline of sociology and others, it seems to have previously eluded explicit framing in Brunei terms, which this current volume helps remedy in a judicious and rewarding way. Despite considerable research having been done in the past, there has been very little in the way of the deployment of this research in a particular direction and the provision of a degree of integration. Having read this book, I am suitably convinced that attention to everyday life in Brunei is an appropriate umbrella to cover a significant proportion of the sociological (anthropological and other social sciences) on-the-ground research that has been undertaken by students and staff at UBD. It also offers an effective framework and promising direction which has already been worked out, as I have indicated, in a substantial literature in this field of studies.
I would like to end this prologue with an observation and one which this book might help to acknowledge and promote. The history of sociological thought, as it has been taught in higher education institutions both in the West and the nonWest, has focused on certain ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, among them Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. Of course, none of them was involved in the sociology of the everyday. How could they be? However, they did use evidence from that everyday world that they could garner to develop theories of society and social change. In my view, a social philosopher who tends to be left out of consideration is Georg Simmel. He was also not a grounded researcher, but he seems to me to be firmly located in the spirit of the everyday. Donald N. Levine says of Simmel: Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago.
When we list the topics and issues which Simmel had decided to study and explain we can ascertain how close he was to realising some of the later projects in the sociology of everyday life. Importantly, he always returns to the individual and he examines the relationship between the subjective experience of the individual and what he refers to as ‘objective culture’. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)