Ethnopolitical discourse among ordinary Malaysians: diverging accounts of “the good-old days” in discussing multiculturalism
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Richard Buttny
Richard Buttny received his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include accounts, reported speech, cultural discourses, and environmental discourses.
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Azirah Hashim
Azirah Hashim is Professor at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics and Dean of the Humanities and Ethics Research Cluster at the University of Malaya. Her research interests are in professional discourse, language contact, and language and law.Kiranjit Kaur received her PhD from the University of Maryland, USA, in Mass Communication. Her research areas include media and culture, media and gender, media ethics and public relations.
Abstract
A small group of ethnically diverse Malaysians was assembled to discuss the state of multiculturalism in Malaysia. Discursive analysis was used to get at the participants' accounting practices and constructions of multiculturalism. Participants' accounts revealed an increasing social distance between the Malays and the non-Malays, but differing assessments and explanations for such group boundaries. Participants' accounts drew on both their own experiences and on broader ethnopolitical discourses to tell their side. Participants used various voicing practices to represent or evaluate the current situation and how it became this way. Religion, especially Islam, was used as an ethnopolitical discourse and was articulated in different ways. For instance, the Malays invoked being Muslim as the primary source of identity and imagined community, while the non-Malays cited the politicization of Islam as a cause for the increasing boundary between groups. Despite these differences participants seemed willing to engage on these “sensitive issues” through criticism and defensive accounts sequences.
About the authors
Richard Buttny received his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include accounts, reported speech, cultural discourses, and environmental discourses.
Azirah Hashim is Professor at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics and Dean of the Humanities and Ethics Research Cluster at the University of Malaya. Her research interests are in professional discourse, language contact, and language and law.
Kiranjit Kaur received her PhD from the University of Maryland, USA, in Mass Communication. Her research areas include media and culture, media and gender, media ethics and public relations.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Announcement
- Masthead
- Ethnopolitical discourse among ordinary Malaysians: diverging accounts of “the good-old days” in discussing multiculturalism
- Words as weapons for mass persuasion: dysphemism in Churchill's wartime speeches
- Concession and reassertion: on a dialogic discourse pattern in conversation
- Interaction in the virtual world: an analysis of students' construal of pedagogic subject positions in a 3D virtual learning environment
- Exceptions to rules: a qualitative analysis of backward causal connectives in Dutch naturalistic discourse
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Articles in the same Issue
- Announcement
- Masthead
- Ethnopolitical discourse among ordinary Malaysians: diverging accounts of “the good-old days” in discussing multiculturalism
- Words as weapons for mass persuasion: dysphemism in Churchill's wartime speeches
- Concession and reassertion: on a dialogic discourse pattern in conversation
- Interaction in the virtual world: an analysis of students' construal of pedagogic subject positions in a 3D virtual learning environment
- Exceptions to rules: a qualitative analysis of backward causal connectives in Dutch naturalistic discourse
- Anthropomorphic grammar? Some linguistic patterns in the wildlife documentary series Life
