Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia

by Parthiban Muniandy

This book is an ethnographic study of migrants, refugees and ‘temporary’ people in Malaysia, incorporating narratives, personal stories, and observations of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Penang. Rather than focusing on specific migrant communities or refugee ‘camps’, the book takes subaltern cosmopolitanism as its central lens to look at how different and diverse communities of non-citizen ‘ pendatang ’ (aliens) co-habit, work and live together in Malaysia. Urban centers in Malaysia offer the space for informality that allow stateless and undocumented people to seek out opportunities, while also finding ways to assimilate or even ‘disappear’ into the fabric of society. The book focuses on the notion of ‘contaminations’, rather than migration or migrants, to underscore one of the most important findings of the ethnographic study – that migrant life in Malaysia is critically integral, embedded and interwoven into the everyday life in the city - shaping and affecting all aspects of daily life from production and supply chains, food service networks, cultural and religious practices, waste and recycling work, to more intimate and private contexts such as romantic relationships, family life and sex-work. Hybridity, inter-mixing and bastardization are part and parcel of everyday urbanism in KL and Penang – these ‘contaminating elements’ challenge and disrupt categories of the ‘national’ and categories such as insider/outsider, national purity, and politically constructed divisions between ethnic and racial groups. The book thus relies upon detailed ethnographic narratives curated over a decade of study, offering students interested in fieldwork research insights into the types of engagements and commitments necessary for helping build the complex, uneasy and destabilizing knowledge that characterizes critical ethnography.

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Tom]

A kind of sequel to Muniandy's Politics of the Temporary, another interestingly experimental comic novel following the same authorial surrogate: a monstrous cartoon of a post-graduate researcher with no ideas, a kind of tourist mired in self-deceit, here found carrying around copies of the previous work to hand out to new potential research subjects, none of whom fail to be impressed. Those who left the previous book waiting for some fuller explanation of what the 'politics of the temporary' might be will sadly not find their curiosity rewarded here, nor are 'ghost lives' much addressed, despite the much greater space afforded here for nominally this sort of thing. The interview accounts of the preceding volume are here interleaved in a series of theoretical excursi, leaving behind the more rooted satire of the first volume left behind for some sendups of academic prose which feel a little boilerplate. In the best of these, our author invokes the work of six separate authors in order to justify the apparently theoretical concets of 'making space', 'the makeshift', and 'informality', all of which are here deployed in modes indistinguisable from their natural-language parsings.

There are three comic riffs of especial note: one in which our narrator protests he is "not some kind of rock-star researcher" falls a little flat: were we really to think he had the capacity for that kind of self-delusion? In a second, a proposed policy to ban migrant workers from preparing 'traditional' Malay dishes is compared, in turn, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the British hygiene laws in Calcutta, and in "perhaps the worst example" -- the phrasing there a smart little joke of its own but perhaps tipping its hand a little too much as to our narrator's obliviousness -- "the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem." In one of the book's closing moments, the narrator is filled with hope for Malaysia when a series of bystanders decide not to leave an elderly Chinese man unable to move after a bike accident; our narrator walks away, wiping tears from his face, his own responsibility to intervene entirely discharged by a surge of patriotism. For reasons I can't quite limn the evident comedy here left a sour taste in my mouth.

[Ali]

dont know much about ethnographic writing so idk how to judge whether this is good or bad work? read like a journal, with very little theoretical foundation really.

not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, i really enjoyed a lot of this book and thought the author's writing was (sometimes, not always) compelling. other times, i found the narrator's voice a bit.. strange? like why does he have to keep repeating that he pays for his informants' meals? or that he struggles in areas that have a lot of smoke like a club? or how useful it was to bring around his previous book to show people? idk why they had to be REPEATED like bro i get it

there was a lot of diversity in this book, though i think hearing from more women would've been really interesting. most of the interviewees were male workers, and the women interviewed were basically either wives (and so were ornamental to the husband's being the interviewee) or russian escorts (who genuinely exist on a very diff level than the typical migrant worker in msia). multiple times the rohingyan, indonesian, and vietnamese sex workers are mentioned, but we only get 2nd/3rd hand takes on them and no interviews which i think was a missed opportunity. still, there was enough diversity in this book to really shut down the tendency to assume homogeneity amongst migrant workers in malaysia (though i'm not sure if that was the primary intention of the book. in fact, i'm not sure what the intention of this book was at all - there was a very interesting crashout the author had at the end of chapter 3 but that didn't tell me very much, or informed the way i shouldve engaged with this book)

chapter 5 was just kinda ass?

editing in this book is pretty bad lol there were way too many typos and sometimes just like wrong words i think? i swear im pretty sure i saw a sentence ending with (cite) somewhere uni flashback ToT