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Victor A. Friedman: FROM THE BALKANS TO BAHASA: COMPARATIVE ...
It is generally overlooked that West European colonial discourses of ‘race’
in Southeast Asia were also deployed in Southeast Europe (and the rest of Europe)
in classifying people according to what today we call ethnicity. Shamsul
(1999, 2000) has argued that these colonial discourses were crucial in the formation
of ‘Malayness’ and ‘Chineseness’ as contrasting identities in the history of
Malaysia. At the same time, however, these same discourses were being used to
define the ‘races’ of Europe (cf. for example, the “Map of the Races of Europe”
published in the December 1918 National Geographic Magazine). The idea that
‘race’ and ‘people’ could be used interchangeably reflects the quasi-biological basis
of the romantic nationalism that is the source of many of today’s ‘identities’.
Particularly worthy of note here, in comparing Southeast Europe and Southeast
Asia, is the modern Malay deployment of a contrast between kaum ‘race’ and
bangsa ‘nation’ (also ‘national’). In Ottoman Turkish as well, qavm was used
for ‘people’ or ‘race’ and millet for ‘nation [defined on the basis of religion]’ (cf.
Friedman and Dankoff 1991). In his famous statement of the separateness of
the Macedonians from other Slavs, Pulevski (1875: 49) uses kavm as the Turkish
translation of narod. 25 Moreover, in the Turkish version of the statement he
writes both makedonlular kavmdir ‘the Macedonians are a people/nation’ and
her kim makedonyada jaşarsa makedonlu anilr (=anılır) ‘everyone who lives
in Macedonia is called a Macedonian’. Here Pulevski was arguably attempting
to articulate a distinction between ethnic and civic identity (cf. Brubaker 2004:
132-146). As Brown (2010: 823-824) makes clear, race was the category used for
classifying peoples at Ellis Island. Moreover, those who declared themselves as
Macedonian had their declarations changed to Bulgarian, Serbian, or Greek since
the Christians who are more linguistically conservative. In both cases, Malay was associated with
power, but in Maluku it was European colonial power, while in Kalimantan Barat it was Malay Islamic
proselytism. In Kalimantan Barat, those who resisted conversion to Islam remained animist
and have more recently converted to Christianity. This history raises questions about the connection
between conversion to Islam and linguistic maintenance or shift in the Balkans. We know that both
occurred, but unfortunately we do not have the kinds of records that would enable us to reconstruct
details and causation. More recently, however, the association of Islam with Albanian or Turkish
in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece is associated with shift away from Slavic (and, at times, Romani
and Aromanian) in the face of Christian dominance. Nonetheless, the differential examples
from Indonesia are suggestive. Among Roms in particular, the progress of evangelical Christianity
among formerly Muslim populations in the Balkans requires study in terms of language maintenance
versus shift.
25 In the Albanian translation, he uses njeraz, literally ‘persons’ for what in modern Albanian would
be popull ‘people’ or komb ‘nation’. This reflects the fact that the terminology of national identity
was not yet fixed in any of these languages during the nineteenth century, when, e.g., colloquial
Slavic texts glossed millet with narod, the point being that the former term was more familiar to
the general public.
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