Rural Villages as Socially Urban Spaces in Malaysia

In Malaysia, Malay kampung or villages are modernity's significant other in contemporary discourse. In contrast to this rhetoric, which reinforces a sense of rural-urban difference, this paper argues that Malay kampung are socially urban spaces, in so far as the lived experience of their residents largely conforms to characteristics of social life typically figured as 'urban'. These include socioeconomic relationships characterised by occupational stratification, consumption and production based on commodification rather than subsistence, and social interactions marked by formal and attenuated social ties as much as informal and intimate relationships. Simultaneously nostalgic and derogatory narratives of modernity and urbanism fix kampung in social memory as sites marginal to and outside urban modernity. By contrast, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that the lives of kampung residents in contemporary Malaysia are substantially and qualitatively urban.