Anthropological Analysis

There have been many discussions and contributions to the idea of how Asian anthropology and anthropologists have managed to contest to Eurocentric knowledge, resulting in bringing fresh new ideas to the anthropological practice; done through methods of postmodernist ethnography. A reason why Asian anthropology brings fresh new ideas is firstly because of the involvement of local anthropologists that belong to the indigenous group to participate in knowledge production and secondly, on local and Asian anthropologists have managed to involve different voices, which aims to have a more true representation of the subjects in their anthropological writings. Where as before, in Western discourse and classical ethnography, there is the idea of a

For example, in Brunei, a lot of traditional games and practices are endangered to being extinct. This is because there is lack of initiation and exposure to maintain these practices to be passed down to generations. Also, most youth nowadays are very fluent in English than being in Malay, as being fluent in Malay is sometimes seen as “too traditional”. With reference to one of the projects written by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), “revitalization initiatives in languages encompass education, broadcasting, publishing, and community-based programmes” (p147). This notion suggests the importance of re-strengthening and revitalizing language and culture to prevent in them being

As a Fillipino reformer and thinker, Jose Rizal seeked to bring back and acknowledge the Phillipines before the colonialism by Spain. He believes that colonial Spanish writers gave a false picture of the Phillipines, as it ecclesiastic stories were often associated with ‘devils, miracles, apparitions, etc’ which contributed to most historical representation of the Phillipines (Alatas, 2001 p52). Therefore, he argues that these histories are a result of biased and irrational writing, of which were false. In regard to the contribution of Syed Hussein Alatas, Syed Farid Alatas wrote about his contributions to Asian anthropology that contested on Western discourses; such as the political philosophy of Raffle (1971) and the myth of Malay, Javanese and Filipino laziness