The “Malay World” is here defined narrowly, and in an historically responsive manner, to refer to the areas currently or formerly falling under kerajaan Melayu, the rule of a Malay king (Milner 1982). It does not refer to insular Southeast Asia at large, and certainly not to the Austronesian-speaking world as a whole – both of which are usages of “Malay World” that have crept into scholarly discourse in the last decade. In this sense, the Malay World (Alam Melayu) refers to the various Malay kingdoms and their attendant hinterlands that have existed or still exist along the coasts of Borneo, the east coast of Sumatra, and on the Malay Peninsula. My title has three components: “being”, “tribal”, and “Malay World”, each of which needs further discussion.

BEING TRIBAL

With the word “being” I mean to indicate not the passive condition of a whole group of people, but the active agency of individuals. Too often, tribespeople – to use an amended version of Sahlins's term “tribesmen” (1968) – have been characterized as total collectivities rather than as people. How many of us, following the quaint English idiom reserved just for “tribes”, still refer to the Nuers as “the Nuer”? Why is it that “the Nuer are …”, with its missing plural marker -s, does not jar the ear, when the phrase “the American are …” certainly does? Tribespeople, however, do not follow the dictates of some collective inborn drive: they engage severally in a culturally mediated social strateg y, whether out of choice or under geographical or political constraint. “Tribal” thus refers not to some sort of “ethnic” category, but to particular socio-political circumstances of life, which (like all such circumstances) demand to be understood in terms of their specific histories and with constant acknowledgement of the people's own agency. “We need to problematize the notion of community: we need to stop talking of the community as a unitary subject and to analyse axes of contestation within it” (Alexander & Alexander, in this volume).