Gender and the interplay of rural and urban: A Malaysian case

Abstract

This chapter argues for the significance of gender relations in thinking about the evolution of the relationships between the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’. Examining the decline over the last few decades of the local economy of the state district of Rembau, in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, it proposes a number of ways in which gender relations are important for understanding the articulations of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in the ongoing processes of this decline. Much of the writing on Malay ‘rural’ dwellers has tended to essentialise the rural/urban divide: this chapter suggests, however, that the history of the area can only be understood within a model that conceives of a long-standing interplay between the increasingly blurred entities, rural and urban, especially given villagers’ long histories of intermittent ‘migrant’ wage and salaried work. The piece looks at the central place that gender occupies within a number of key points of articulation between these entities: these include village production, the continuous, long-term circulation of people between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and the kinship and family linkages that have constituted both important economic flows and a multisited domestic sphere. It ends with a discussion of the place of adat perpatih – matrilineal ‘customary law’ – within cultural constructions of the disappearing rural.