AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia's Multinationals

Author: Root, Robin

Source: History and Anthropology, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2006 , pp. 73-90(18)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

In Malaysia, bangsa, a term blending race and ethnicity, structures modes of social and political-economic organization that reflexively challenge and reinforce the significance of race, not just to the country's three main groups but to the construction of risk as well. Tracing this reflexivity, the author bridges a historical rendering of Malaysia's colonial-capitalist incorporation with an ethnographic unpacking of its social artifacts: notions of space, place and race that confer on factories a high-risk label for HIV/AIDS. It traces how multinational corporations, as landscapes of multiracial modernity, are both the quixotic trophies of Malaysia's global integration and a source of social dread. Risk is ethnographically shown to be more a sociohistoric dynamic than a statistical probability, reflecting ideas of racial individuation and ideals of social stability and cultural immiscibility anchored in colonial governance structures of nineteenth-century Malaya and operative in contemporary Malaysia.

Keywords: Risk; Colonialism; Gender; Race; Landscape

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757200500401283

Publication date: 2006-03-01

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