WAZIR JAHAN KARIM

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WAZIR JAHAN KARIM

Academic History

Wazir Jahan Karim is an economic anthropologist and obtained her first degree in Social Sciences from the University of Singapore (now NUS), Master’s in Economic Anthropology (1972) and Doctorate in Anthropology (1977) at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, University of London. She specialises in the economics of inequality and development and has worked extensively on religion, environment, alternative medicine,women and minorities. She has in later years, focused on public policy, social spending and developmental research on poverty in Malaysia and Southeast Asia . Her research areas have been the mangrove rainforests and rural coastal Malaysia. She has also conducted research in Java and the cities of Oslo, London and Arakawa-ku on the margins of Tokyo.

She has authored and edited several books on minorities on Islam and women including Ma’Betise’ Concepts of Living Things (1981) (Athlone Press: London; Berg 2004), Emotions of Culture: A Malay Perspective (1991) (Oxford University Press: Singapore), Women and Culture: between Malay Adat and Islam (1992) (Westview Press: Boulder), ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Developing Southeast Asia (1995)(Berg Publishers: Oxford 2004), Gendered Fields: Women, Men and Ethnography (with D. Bell and P. Caplan) ( Routledge: London 1994). Cultural Minorities of Peninsular Malaysia (Academy of Social Sciences, Toyota Foundation 2002) (co-edited with Mohd Razha Rashid.) Her contributions to chapters in books and referred articles in journals number more than seventy. Among her public lectures are “Patriarchy Fatigue and Asian Matriarchs” (Institute of Anthropology, University of Oslo, 1991), “Gender and Empowerment” (The Wertheim Lecture Series, University of Amsterdam, 1996) and “Islam and America: A Wartime Story” (Andrew’s Chair, Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa , 2004).

In 1977, she was awarded the Raymond Firth Award from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences for the best ethnographic research, thesis and essay, which she shared with Prof Olivia Harris and was consequently invited to publish her thesis with LSE, entitled ‘Ma Betise’ Concepts of Living Things Since than, she has extended her research to issues of poverty, economic development and policy. For her outstanding achievements in these critical fields of Social Sciences, she has been awarded several fellowships and visiting professorships. Among the awards she has received for academic excellence include the Ford Foundation Fellowship (1974-1975); Commonwealth Fellowship (1975-1977); the Fulbright Fellowship {1984} British Academy Fellowship {1990}; University of Oslo Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Anthropology [1991]; the Anthropology Senior Professorship at a Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (1995-1996) ,Visiting Professorship at the Department of Malay Studies and Centre for Women Studies, University of Wellington (1998 ). She was also Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology in University of Kent at Canterbury (2001), Visiting Professor (Andrew’s Chair) at the Centre for Asian Studies, University of Hawaii (2003), Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University (2006) and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia-Europe Institute, University of Malaya in 2007. She sits on several advisory and editorial boards, including The National Women’s Advisory Council, Malaysia, Penang Heritage Trust (Advisor for Muslim Heritage) and the Editorial Board of Rethinking Globalisation (Routledge) In 1999, she was awarded the Rotary Gold Medal for most outstanding scholar in the Social Sciences in Malaysia and in 2004, was conferred the Anugerah Sanggung for Outstanding International Scholar by Universiti Sains Malaysia. In 2007, she received the Maal Hijrah award for Outstanding Educationist (Malay Society of Penang or Pemenang) and was conferred the Darjah Setia Pingat Negeri (D.S.P.N.) which carries the title of Dato’ in 2007.

The Formation of the first Gender Research Programme in a Malaysian University

Her seminal work on a cultural minority, the Ma’ Betise’ preceded her work on women and gender. She is the first Malaysian women to live with the Orang Asli indigenous minorities where she experienced the limits of physical and socio-psychological endurance of destitution .The threat of living in a fragile ecology, subject to deforestation, acquisition and compulsory resettlement was captured in her theory of ‘ oscillatory binarisms’ which expressed their dilemma of killing plants and animals which were their ancestors .Most of her writings on the Orang Asli or indigenous minorities express the contradictions and inconsistencies between macro economic policies and grass-roots implementation development , assimilation and religious conversion. She is internationally renowned for her works in promoting indigenous knowledge as a timeless living heritage. She is also the first Malaysian to undertaken research on the intellectual property rights of Malaysia’s indigenous people and to propose the patenting of their designs and works of art and sculptor. She co-authored and co-edited a reader, Cultural Minorities of Peninsular Malaysia- Survivals of Indigenous Heritage co-published by Toyota Foundation and the Academy of Social Sciences which provides a review of her latest work on the Orang Asli, published with some of the best international names in this field of Orang Asli research.

In 1978, she joined Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang as a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and was immediately asked to head an international project on “Women and Children in Development”. This project popularly known as KANITA (based on two Malay words, Wanita or “women” and Kanak-kanak or children”) was initiated by UNICEF in line with their objectives to develop holistic approaches to poverty alleviation, by developing educational policies for networks of families and neighborhoods in the most impoverished rural areas of Malaysia. The idea was that if mothers and young women were research into their own problems, they would find sustainable solutions to poverty. Through participatory action research, a climate of active engagement in the needs and interests of children emerged. They saw their future through the success of their children. The village women who participated in the project learned to use their limited literary skills to advocate for better infrastructure-they wrote letters of complaint to development authorities to complete water and electricity installation plants, held meetings and discussions on priority village projects, most of which were income-generating and negotiated for pre-schools and better educational opportunities for their children. Wazir Jahan successfully put together a committed team of ten researchers and activists from Malaysia, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Canada and sixty undergraduates to develop a comprehensive network of action and policy related programmes in the rural areas of Kedah, Malaysia. Reports, diaries, workshop papers and publications under this project amount to approximately a hundred and can be found in Women’s Resource Centres, public libraries and the National Archives in Malaysia. It still remains the most comprehensive collection of papers on action and community research on women and children undertaken by any public university in Malaysia. Many of Wazir’s books, chapters and articles on gender, culture and Islam published internationally, are based on her field studies in the KANITA areas in Kedah and in new field areas in Seberang Perai, Penang which she later developed in the late 1980’s.

Her second book entitled “Women and Culture: Between Malay Adat and Islam (Westview: Boulder : 1991) is an analysis of gender, family and community structures of relationships and values among Malay Muslim women undergoing rapid social transformation by two opposing forces, urbanisation and Islamic fundamentalism. Books which she co-authored and co-edited with D. Bell and P. Caplan, Gendered Fields: Women, Men, Ethnography (Routledge: London , 1993) and Male and Female in Developing Southeast Asia (Berg: Oxford, 1995) focus on the theoretical and methodological debates in approaches of indigenous feminism and knowledge and the relevance of understanding bilateral values of human society in promoting equitable and just relations between men and women and people and the State. As Convenor of KANITA at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Wazir Jahan was the first social scientist and gender specialist to hold a forum and seminar, supported by the Ford Foundation, on “The Appointment of Women Judges in the Syariah Courts in Malaysia” in 1989, a proposal which was then seen as controversial but which a decade later ,was taken up by several Islamic based women organisations in Malaysia like Sisters in Islam. In 2004-2005, the National Advisory Council for the Integration of Women in Development (now The National Advisory Council for Women’s Development) pushed for the appointment of women judges in Syariah Courts. This proposal was finally adopted and instituted by the Malaysian Government through the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development in 2005.

Wazir is one of the first Asian social scientist to advocate indigenous feminism, that Malay and Nusantara women are the most important transmitters of inherited knowledge and social networks, now redefined as ‘social capital’. She revitalised the importance of Malay ‘adat’ in her writings and argued that ‘adat’ was complimentary and not contradictory to Islam. At the height of Islamic revivalist movements , attempts were made to eliminate sources of knowledge of Malay culture on the family and society rendering youth, women and men with no social anchorage or foundation to extend their influence in society. Her works led many others to see women as activists and the champions of vibrant cultural institutions which were complimentary to modernity . Hence women were ‘social stabilisers’ – ‘equalisers’ of transformation and change.

The Establishment of the Gender Development Research Centre

In 1991 and thirteen years after the KANITA project was launched, Wazir Jahan took on the difficult task in convincing both academicians and university administrators that Gender and Women Studies had an important contribution to make in the Social Sciences in relation to the development of new methodological and theoretical insights into power relations and structures, economic productivity , globalisation, cultural conservation and many other critical issues important to Malaysia’s quest to be an international hub of higher education and intellectual activity . With support from gender-sensitive colleagues, the university agreed to the formation of a modest research unit entitled the Women and Human Resource Studies Unit, to be formed within the School of Social Sciences with no budget and one administrative assistant. A course on “Women in Society” eventually renamed “Women and Empowerment” was introduced in the School of Social Sciences and gradually other courses in Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Communications began to include issues of women in society.

These courses also introduced indigenous perspectives on women in Asia, a theoretical focal point of KANITA’s research. During these years, she successfully brought in many national and international grants and organised a series of seminars, workshops and conferences which highlighted the important contribution of women to knowledge on sustainable development and environmental conservation .Her proposals for the upgrading of the Unit into a research and development centre was twice turned down by the Board of Studies of the School of Social Sciences amidst criticism that it was irrelevant to the growth of the School and university and that she was building ‘empires’ in the university. The emphasis on science and technological based research also clouded her efforts to fortify interest in a social science based centre of excellence.

Finally in 2001, ten years later and twenty-three years after the conception of KANITA, her continued efforts with a few loyal colleagues, many of whom were men, to bring recognition to Gender Studies paid off and her proposals were given the green light .In January 2001 , KANITA was upgraded into the Women’s Development Research Centre, a move which coincided with the development of the Ministry of Women and Family Development in Malaysia .Wazir Jahan was one of the key academics consulted by Dato’ Seri Sharizat Jalil , former Minister of Women, Family and Development on the formation of the Ministry. Dato’ Seri Sharizat related the vision of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed, that such a Ministry could only happen if women ‘took care of the family and children’ and did not abandon these institutions in the quest for social justice. The small group that attended the brain-storming wanted the Ministry to be the Ministry of ‘Women and Justice’. Later, the Minister held several brain-storming sessions with key women academicians, lawyers and activists before drafting the terms of reference. At this stage only two other public universities, University of Malaya and Universiti Putra Malaysia, had successfully introduced Gender Studies and gender based research in undergraduate and graduate studies making KANITA the first formal centre for gender research and graduate studies in Malaysia. Currently a more ready climate of acceptance of Gender Studies has encouraged such programmess to be formed in public universities in Malaysia but KANITA is always remembered as a historic icon in the struggle within the academe to transform old mindsets and institute engendered approaches in the democratisation of knowledge. It was ironical that when the Senate approved of the Centre, the Vice-Chancellor told her, ‘Now you women can take care of them-the men I mean’.

In the course of her last few years serving in a public university, Wazir Jahan may be remembered for breaking many rigid barriers to disciplines and ideas provoking younger academics to think beyond the boundaries of their discipline and to unite under the consensual framework of “engendering knowledge – the path to academic democratisation”. She successfully introduced post-graduate studies in gender and supervised young scholars who bridged anthropology, sociology, development studies, linguistics, mass communications, education and the health sciences to conduct interdisciplinary research. These inter and multi-disciplinary perspectives advanced their research capacity in applied methodologies. She also initiated international links with universities through collaborative workshops, seminars, research and publications, In 2003/4, Wazir Jahan was invited to the Andrew’s Chair in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is the first Asian woman invited to this Chair. She delivered several lectures on Islam, Gender and Violence and presented the Andrew’s Lecture on “Islam and America” on the day America announced the war with Iraq. For her contributions, she was invited to be a member of the TODA Council for Peace and Policy. She left Universiti Sains Malaysia in 2004 and in the same year was awarded the Anugerah Sanggung for best international scholar .

Her outstanding career in public office not only created waves in the local academe but brought internationalisation to a public university at an early age when universities were still being guided by policies of designing programmes for career advancement rather than leadership and character development. Her efforts to engender knowledge and research created gender sensitive undergraduates and graduates who also became sensitive to issues of social justice and equality. She was not only a teacher and leader in her field but mentor to many who were drawn to her ‘first woman’ experiences; first to live with an endangered indigenous minority group in the harsh mangrove rain forests in Malaysia, first to develop an interdisciplinary field in ‘Gender Studies’, founder of the Gender Studies Association, The Southeast Asian Association of Gender Studies (SAMA), first Asian woman to deliver a feminist lecture, ‘Gender and Empowerment’ in the CASA Wertheim Lectures , first Asian woman to hold the Asian Studies Chair and deliver the Andrew Lecture at the Univ. of Hawaii and many other ‘ firsts’ made her mentoring a unique experience This also subjected her to much critical scrutiny. She was a progressive Muslim woman who challenged many established ideas of leadership and scholarship which were based on a genre of established though conservative Asian norms, acceptable to the majority of men and resisted by a minority of women. She gained silent admiration for her work but was subject to much official censure from those who were challenged by her extraordinary commitment .She has been labeled a ‘radical feminist’ although her ‘radicalism’ stems only for a concern for minorities and the minority status of women in many Asian societies.

Since 2004, Wazir has continued her research interests on gender, globalisation and poverty through the Academy of Socio-Economic Research and Analysis (ASERA), a non-profit research based institution which she founded and through various fellowships and grants. The Academy focuses on research and analysis of economic development, poverty and gender and is dedicated to the advancement of economic justice in global society.

Some quotations on women for which she is remembered:

“All Kings, Statesmen and Scholars were born by women

A reverse trend is unlikely” [ W. Jahan (2003) on the Establishment of the Women’s Dev. Research Centre/KANITA 2001)]

“A Man know three possessions

My horse, my Sword, my Woman

A woman also knows three

Our Family, our People, our Nation” ( W Jahan .2000, on the Establishment of the Penang Chapter PPSEAWA)

“ New knowledge is power but power is only powerful if it empowers others to seek new knowledge” ( W. Jahan 2001, On Life-long Learning , U of Malaya)

From the Poverty of Knowledge to Environmental Poverty

Wazir is the first woman to conduct anthropological research on the Orang Asli (indigenous minorities) and to live in the mangrove rainforests with the Ma’ Betisek (popularly known as the Mah Meri) on Carey Island, off the west coast of Malaysia. Her book, Ma’ Betisek Concepts of Living Things (Athlone ; 1981; Berg 2004) is an example of how ‘ground theory’ (indigenous theoretical discourses) can advance our understanding of universalisms in social dialectics .She shows how thought processes which are seemingly contradictory inconsistent and isolated are connected in a cyclical chain of rational explanations about things which happen in time and space. Indeed, it is an early contribution to a cognitive analysis of poverty in an imbalanced ecological system- a critique of Levi-Strauss’s structuralist discourse on binarisms as fundamental structures of human language and culture. By showing how human relationships to plants and animals are constructed over different time and space constructs , ideas of opposition in the state of hunger and the need to eat ( to hunt ) and illness and the remorse of killing (to be hunted ) highlight the trauma of endangered communities living in hostile environments . Destitute communities which are encroached upon by outsiders, develop such ideas about living things to express cognitive immediacy (the concern for now ) and to secure coherence in their lives.

This anthropological experience of people who ‘brave poverty’ by giving it another name compelled her to reject the neo-colonial traditions of participant observation and objectification in anthropology and her writings actively discuss the dilemmas of indigenous anthropologists who invariably marginalise indigenous people as ‘data’ for an influential global readership . Discussions on contradictions in representation appear in her co-edited volume with Diane Bell and Pat Caplan , Gendered Fields: Women, Men, Ethnography ( Routledge: 1994) , her chapter, ‘Anthropology Without Tears’ in Henrietta Moore’s edited volume on The Future of Anthropological Knowledge (Routledge: 1996) and her inaugural lecture, ‘Do Not Forget Us: The Intellectual in Indigenous Anthropology’ (1997) .These form a theoretical sequel of the ideas in her Ma’ Betisek book that anthropological theory should address the politics of knowledge building and be concerned with knowledge transference and reciprocity- it should be humanistic, compassionate and empowering for indigenous people, if not for reasons of their poverty but for providing relevance and meaning to people who have contributed the substantial material on which anthropology is grounded .

In her writings on gender, she again brings out the contributions of Malay and other indigenous women to the theory of local knowledge and shows through social historical analysis how spheres of power of women in adat (culture) and men in Islam demonstrate the growing politics of devaluing indigenous women’s knowledge in modern Muslim society. As gender relations are increasingly constructed through Islam , women circumvent a growing patriarchal order by extensive participation in education, health, alternative medicine and entrepreneurship and empower themselves through practical secularism . Knowledge is engendered and the genders gain strength in different spheres but continue to debate the authenticity of universal truths of faith which render men the advantage of exclusivity in interpretation. Wazir pioneered Gender Studies and research in Malaysia from as early as 1978 at a time when gender research in Malaysia was an unknown field of investigation. Her books, Women and Culture: Between Malay Adat and Islam (Westview 1992) and her edited volume, Male and Female in Developing Southeast Asia (Berg:1995) are among the first central studies of Southeast Asian bilateralism which supports the idea that women-centred networks although informal and popular, challenge the growing formalised patriarchy of Malay society in Islam and support the more democratic and egalitarian institutions of Malay-Nusantara adat culture. It is her commitment to ground theory and discourse analysis which elevates her work on gender and minorities above other mainstream scholars in Asian social sciences. It is this interest which also pushed her, on the conclusion of a Ford Foundation study on ‘Women Living Under Syariah Law in Malaysia’(1989) to pioneer the campaign for the appointment of women judges in Syariah courts in Malaysia, to empower Muslim women , both as victims of male-centred knowledge and as keepers of justice. Her arguments on ground theory as committed to equality and justice in most cultures which are bilateral and matri-focal seems to suggest that despite the prevalence of formalist faith and jural traditions which ignore ideas of social equality, women will find channels through popular cognitive processes , to negotiate the boundaries of leadership and exclusivity.

In most of her studies on gender, Wazir opens fresh new perspectives on Southeast Asian and South Asian women-centred knowledge (1991); reproduction and production as interrelated institutions of empowerment (1984;1991;1992) gendered hierarchies and women’s multiplicity (1996) and more recently the relationship between networks, social and human capital She probes into the economic and political dimensions of competition between men and women to reveal fundamental differences in the way men think about women and women about themselves and how gendered discourses are cognitive contestations over the control of knowledge. Whether culture is about representations of power and supports those who promote certain kinds of knowledge to empower or marginalise- the cognitive contestations between formal and popular discourses influences thought and action. In a sense, it can be said that she supports the democratisation of knowledge, to endorse and empower the voices of people who are silenced. Without them there will be no reason to justify the structures and forms of knowledge which enable certain people to define the rules of civility and human ‘goodness’. Unlike most writers of post-colonial discourses, Wazir seems to believe that intellectual delusions of this kind are embedded in all kinds of relationships and colonial and post-colonial representations are only one of a kind (2003). What eventually gets adopted, proposed or disseminated as the ‘best kind’ whether in syllabi, faith, laws, texts and so on, depends on those people in advantageous positions to recommend and it is unlikely that it has anything to do with universal wisdoms of undiscovered truths.

She is now working on work, migration and social spending, where she advocates the development of productive welfarism through a greater allocation of national budgets on social capital to advance human capital in developing countries. This research was developed while she was a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2006) and later advanced while she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia-Europe Institute , University of Malaya (2007).

Works Cited

(1981 ) Ma’ Betisek Concepts of Living Things, London, New Jersey: Athlone ; Berg 2004

(1884) “Malay Wives and Midwives”, in Social Science and Medicine 18(22), 159-166

(1987) “The Status of Malay Women in Malaysia: From Culture to Islam and Industrialization”, in International Journal of the Family”, 17 (1), 41-45

(1992) Women and Culture: Between Malay Adat and Islam, Boulder: Westview

(1993) Gendered Fields: Women, Men, Ethnography (with D. Bell and P. Caplan), and London: Routledge

(1995) Male and Female in Developing Southeast Asia, Oxford: Berg

(1996) “Anthropology without Tears: How a “Local” sees the “Local” and the “Global”, in H. Moore ed. The Future of Anthropological Knowledge”, London: Routledge

(1996) Gender and Empowerment Wertheim Lecture Series, CASA, U. of Amsterdam

(1997) Do Not Forget Us: The Intellectual in Indigenous Anthropology Inaugural Professorial Lecture, Penang: Universiti Sains Malaysia

(2003) “Islam and America”, Andrew’s Lecture Series, U. of Hawaii, Manoa, in J. of Peace and Policy, TODA Institute, 8, 40-45

Full list of Publications available from her website, www.wazirjahan.net