Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes a case study of the Harvest Festival in Sabah, Malaysia, analysing its celebration as a site of a struggle between an ethnic minority, the Kadazan, and the state over the definition of the role the ethnic culture should play within the project of national unit and nation building of this multi-ethnic country.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an anthropological analysis of the annual Harvest Festival (Pesta Kaamatan) of the Bornean State of Sabah, Malaysia, focussing on two main celebrations, one organised by the Malaysian federal authorities and one by the most important local cultural association, both of which took place in May 2006.

The paper argues that the celebrations, and the ethnic symbolic markers they display, most of which can be considered 'invented traditions' elaborated from the selection of objectified traditional elements, constitute a primary site of struggle between the central state and members of a minority ethnic group, the Kadazan, over the definition of the role the ethnic culture should play in the national culture.

While the central state used the celebration, and its televised broadcast, to advance its project of creating a national culture and identity going beyond ethnic differences, the ethnic elites used the celebration to re-affirm the centrality of certain ethnic cultural traits and the right of the minority to their own cultural specificity, following an established tradition of 'ethno-nationalism'. Many ordinary Kadazan rejected the appropriation and instrumentalisation of their ethnic culture by both elites, and of its commodification by commercial sponsors, contrapposing a 'lived culture', constituted by the festive and everyday practices carried out within their villages.

The analysis of these events constitute an essential step in the attempt to clarify how identities emerge from the crystallisation of both essential symbols used in collective mobilisation and of lived experience constituted by practices shared within certain groups.