ABSTRACT
Kinship in Indonesia-Malaysia relations tends to be located, accurately or otherwise, in the notion of Malay-Muslim blood brotherhood often espoused by political leaders and emphasized to a certain extent in scholarship on the Indo-Malay Archipelago. Conceptualizing affinity between Indonesia and Malaysia, however, is a rather more delicate task than at first appears, and academic discussions arguably give rise to more controversies than unanimity of opinion. While there is little doubt that ethnocultural considerations have an impact on the conduct of politics, the interface between the two will nevertheless have to be carefully drawn out from a complex conceptual maze. This is especially so with regard to the subject matter at hand, for the cultural and ethnic correspondence that some would suggest defines Indo-Malay identity obtains alongside very diverse and complex social-political phenomena that temper not only the contiguous identity of the Indo-Malay world, but the very existence of Indonesia and Malaysia as unitary nation-states in their own right. Certainly, scholars are well aware that the ‘national’ identities upon which these modern states are built are in fact agglomerations of diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic groupings, each with its own particularistic character and history.1 It is bearing these considerations in mind that this chapter sets forth to explore the historiography of kinship in the Indo-Malay world. This chapter sets out the premises not only for the grounds upon which the kinship factor between Indonesia and Malaysia can be and has been built by its proponents, but also for the conceptual and practical problems one encounters in the process of defining the kinship factor in Indo-Malay history.
