Everything about Malay Race totally explained
The concept of a
Malay race (
Malay:
Bangsa Melayu) was proposed by the German scientist
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous
complexity of classifying races. However, the term
Malay is still often used in this context, and it's the basis for Malay identity within the
Malaysian nation.
Origins
In his 1775 doctoral
dissertation titled
De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind), Blumenbach outlined four main human races by skin color, namely
Caucasian (white),
Ethiopian (black),
Native American (red), and
Mongolian (yellow).
By 1795, Blumenbach added another race called 'Malay' which he considered to be a subcategory of both the Ethiopian and Mongoloid races. The Malay race were those of a "brown color, from olive and a clear mahogany to the darkest clove or chestnut brown." Blumenbach expanded the term "Malay" to include the inhabitants of the
Marianas, the
Philippines, the
Malukus,
Sundas, as well as
Pacific Islands such as
Tahitians. He considered a Tahitian skull he'd received to be the missing link; showing the transition between the "primary" race, the Caucasians, and the "degenerate" race, the Negroids.
Blumenbach writes:
Malay variety. Tawny-coloured; hair black, soft, curly, thick and plentiful; head moderately narrowed; forehead slightly swelling; nose full, rather wide, as it were diffuse, end thick; mouth large. upper jaw somewhat prominent with the parts of the face when seen in profile, sufficiently prominent and distinct from each other. This last variety includes the islanders of the Pacific Ocean, together with the inhabitants of the Marianne, the Philippine, the Molucca and the Sunda Islands, and of the Malayan peninsula.
I wish to call it the Malay, because the majority of the men of this variety, especially those who inhabit the Indian islands close to the Malacca peninsula, as well as the Sandwich, the Society, and the Friendly Islanders, and also the Malambi of Madagascar down to the inhabitants of Easter Island, use the Malay idiom.
Colonial influences
The view of Malays held by
Thomas Stamford Raffles had a significant influence on English-speakers, lasting to the present day. He is probably the most important voice who promoted the idea of a ‘Malay’ race or nation, not limited to the
Malay ethnic group, but embracing the peoples of a large but unspecified part of the South East Asian archipelago. Raffles formed a vision of Malays as a language-based 'nation', in line with the views of the English Romantic movement at the time, and in 1809 sent a literary essay on the topic to the Asiatic Society. After he mounted an expedition to the former
Minangkabau seat of royalty in
Pagaruyung, he declared that it was the ‘the source of that power, the origin of that nation, so extensively scattered over the Eastern Archipelago’. In his later writings he moved the Malays from a nation to a race.
Malaysian context
In Malaysia, the early colonial censuses listed separate
ethnic groups, such as "Malays, Boyanese, Achinese, Javanese, Bugis, Manilamen and Siamese". The 1891 census merged these ethnic groups into the three racial categories used in modern Malaysia – Chinese, ‘Tamils and other natives of India’, and ‘Malays and other Natives of the Archipelago’. This was based upon the European view at the time that race was a biologically based scientific category. For the 1901 census, the government advised the word "race" should replace "nationality" wherever it occurs.
Many anti-miscegenation laws were gradually repealed after the Second World War, starting with California in 1948. In 1967, all remaining bans against interracial marriage were judged to be
unconstitutional by the
United States Supreme Court in
Loving v. Virginia and therefore repealed.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Malay Race'.
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