Working In Daylight: The Politics of Christian Experience and the Colonial Encounter in Malaysian Borneo

Abstract

This thesis offers an ethnographic account of the social complexity that emerges in the wake of the colonial encounter, as well as an exploration of the ways in which religious faith provides a platform for affective empowerment when negotiating postcolonial modernity. Attitudes toward religion have played a formative role in the process of Malaysia's nation-state building. When seeking education, employment, loans and a host of other state services in this modern democracy, the religion a person belongs to can influence their level of access. Over the following chapters, I analyse the cultural and political effects of religious identification and experience in Malaysia, providing examples of how the officious cataloguing of dynamic and interrelated belief systems has bolstered economic inequality by legitimising a pro-Malay agenda, while further inscribing a variety of normative expectations and limitations onto the Malaysian public. Employing a methodology that blends semiotics with affect theory, postcolonial theory, Decoloniality, the philosophy of language, critical theory, and the anthropology of Christianity, my approach delves into the ethnography of northern Borneo, drawing on nineteen months of fieldwork in the region, to paint a picture of what life is like for the Christian Dusun community in Sabah's agricultural district of Ranau. By 'working in daylight,' my participants are able to find a way of negotiating the bureaucratic and spiritual authorities that enchant their postcolonial world and the ensuing modernity it promises.