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Ethnic group versus race? Asian perspectives

Bernard Formoso
Traduction de Yvonne van der Does (Office of International Scientific Visibility - IdEx Université Côte d’Azur)
Cet article est une traduction de :
Ethnie versus race ? Mises en perspective asiatiques [fr]

Résumé

Most Asian languages, even today, do not make a distinction between “ethnic group” and “race.” Furthermore, the term most used to translate the concept of “race” has a much broader semantic field with fewer connotations than in the West. This article supports this observation through a comparative analysis of Pāli/Sanskrit, Putonghua (Standard Mandarin), Thai, and Indonesian. The lessons drawn from this comparison shed new light on Western xenology as it has developed in the modern era, highlighting the tensions and confusions between academic and popular representations of otherness, and between identity ascriptions based on race or ethnicity.

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Introduction

1The terminological distinction between “race” and “ethnic group” in modern Western thought, and the many attempts to theorize this difference in the natural and social sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are not reflected in most Asian languages. The dynamics of colonial domination introduced by Europeans in Asia do not appear to have left a significant impact on “xenology”—defined as the semantic structuring of otherness—as represented in the vernacular languages of this vast region, home to more than half of the worlds population. This article explores some of these xenological constructs. The aim is not only to understand what they reveal regarding the dynamics of otherness in Asian societies, but also, in return, to gain a better grasp of the conceptual structuring of the social world that prevailed in Western science from the eighteenth century until the end of the Second World War. At that time, humanity was divided, on the one hand, into “races” based on bio-morphotypic criteria and, on the other hand, into cultural species: “ethnic groups,” the first category dominating the second.

2To compare similar societal configurations of human categories in the West and in the East, we will only examine the systems for representing otherness used by Asian societies that have been organized into states for a very long time. India, China, Siam (which became Thailand in 1939), and the states of the Indonesian archipelago examined here, are literate societies that developed their own writing systems and possess a rich, ancient literary heritage. This makes it possible to investigate in great historical depth the vernacular systems for expressing otherness, and thus to identify any changes in their construction over time. Lastly, these civilizations, far from being isolated, have maintained commercial and cultural relations with one another for millennia.

  • 1 See Horace G. Quaritch Wales, The Making of Greater India. A Study in Southeast Asian Culture Chang (...)
  • 2 See Georges Coedès, Les États hindouisés dIndochine et dIndonésie, Paris, Editions De Boccard, 19 (...)
  • 3 On intermarriages with local elites, see D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, London, Macmill (...)
  • 4 In most cases, Europes first contacts with the elites of China and the Indochinese peninsula were (...)
  • 5 A societys ontology is the way it conceptualizes “the human being in the world.”

3As early as the fourth century AD, exchanges between India and Southeast Asia led to the establishment of the first Indianized states on the Indochinese peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago. Indian acculturation in political, religious and linguistic matters was so significant that some Orientalists have referred to Southeast Asia as Greater India1 or “Outer India” (“Inde extérieure”).2 From the first century AD onward, India also spread its influence to China and, more broadly, to the Far East (Japan and Korea) through the dissemination of Buddhism. As for China, its impact on Southeast Asia took the more direct form of waves of settlement by minority groups driven to the Indochinese peninsula by the colonizing advance of the Han, by territorial conquests (such as the annexation of Tonkin by the Middle Kingdom from 111 BC to 939 AD), and by the Sinicization of local elites through intermarriage with locally-established Chinese merchants.3 The Asian societies examined here established relations with the West, which gradually expanded starting in the sixteenth century4 and especially during the nineteenth century, when the British, French and Dutch progressively took control of India and all of Southeast Asia—with the exception of Siam—and, along with other Western nations, obtained concessions along Chinas coast. However, these relations with the West were forced upon regional rulers rather than initiated by them. European colonization imposed its political and administrative order, but it also provoked forms of resistance by local cosmologies and ontologies5 to the acculturative ambitions of the West, resistance that was reflected in representations and beliefs, as will be examined below.

  • 6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are original.

4In the context of the conquest of a large part of the planet by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, a distinction arose between the biological determinants associated with the concept of race and the cultural conditioning through education or population mixing associated with the social dynamics of ethnic groups or nations. This distinction was introduced by authors such as Ernest Renan (theorist of the nation) and Georges Vacher de Lapouge who coined the term “ethnic group” to describe a community of language and culture, in contrast to race which was based on a community of blood, though it is difficult to compare these two concepts. Renan, in particular, defended the idea that Europes rich civilizations which spearheaded human progress and thus legitimized the colonization of the rest of the world were the result of ongoing mixing of populations and cultural exchanges throughout Europes history, which had uniquely neutralized racial determinants, regarded by him as a factor of inertia. Going even further, he considered race and nation to be antithetical, with the nation representing the most complete form of civilization. In his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques [General History and Comparative System of Semitic Languages] (1855: 895), he wrote: “As much as the principle of nations is just and legitimate, the principle of the primordial right of races is narrow and a major threat to true progress.”6

5Although ethnology, introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, remained, for a time, captive to the racial cosmology developed in the mid-eighteenth century by naturalists Carl von Linné and Georges Buffon, it nonetheless placed the study of the cultural activities of human societies at the heart of its discipline. The Durkheimian school added to this perspective the attempt to discover the fundamental rules of social life shared by all representatives of the human species, in opposition to the irreducible divisions between biosocial “species” established by racialist thinking. The tension between these two positionsthe primacy given to innate characteristics over those acquiredillustrates the nature/culture dualism that Philippe Descola rightly presents as one of the primary characteristics of modern Western ontology. This worldview emerged in the fifteenth century before establishing itself as the dominant Euro-American mode of being-in-the-world,” which he describes as “naturalistic” (2005: 124-146). This ontology seems to have had a weaker impact in Asia, outside the specific fields of science and technology, where it remains a foundational principle.

Otherness in a self-contained cosmology: the Indian case

  • 7 Other terms also express this concept derivatively, such as kula (gathering or collection), got (...)

6The main Sanskrit root used to translate the Western concept of “race” in contemporary Indian texts is jāti (जाति).7 Depending on the context, jāti can mean (according to Stchoupak, Nitti and Renous French-Sanskrit Dictionary (1987 [1932] 262)), “birth,” “form of existence,” “rank determined by birth,” “family,” “caste,” “species,” or “specific character.” In the Hindu system of thought, this is the basic word used to classify social categories. It overlaps with the semantic field of the French concept of “race,” defined in Le Petit Robert dictionary as “a family considered in the sequence of its generations and the continuity of its characters” (1977: 1589). In both languages, it mainly refers to conditions of birth and family. Moreover, the concepts of race and jāti, in the usual sense of “caste,” are the principal means of classifying people according to an ideology based on a fantasy of internal purity which upholds a hierarchical order of the social world centered on endogamy and, more broadly, on the avoidance of contact with members of other categories of the same nature, considered “inferior.”

7However, in India, the concept of jāti also refers to ethnic groups when used in the compound jātiya samuh (जातीय समूह), which can be most accurately translated as group (samuh) founded by birth (jātiya). In other words, by using jāti, the Indian system of thought emphasizes the idea of status and identity determined by conditions of birth, and this status and identity can be associated with family, clan, caste, or ethnic group. This idea, later adopted by the primordialist theory of ethnicity, does not distinguish characteristics transmitted by heredity from those acquired from the social environment. Moreover, contrary to Western thought, it does not consider filiation as the main determinant of personal identity. According to the karmic law of Hindu soteriology, a person’s status at birth and subsequent existence are the result of all the actions, virtuous or otherwise, accomplished in previous lives. The accumulation of individual karmas forms a collective karma that influences the destiny of the world. Hence the need for castes to be linked to one another in a well-regulated socio-cosmic system, by virtue of a law that sustains all beings and all things, which Hindu philosophy calls dharma.

  • 8 Hence the fact that India is considered the exclusive place where karma can be accomplished, and is (...)
  • 9 The Dharmaśāstra, or Teaching of the Law is a collection of Sanskrit texts concerning good conduc (...)

8Regard or disregard for dharma determines the boundarysupposedly as tight as the caste barrierbetween Bharata (भारत), the land of the Aryans, which is India, a world-in-itself and the only place suitable for rituals and soteriological activities,8 and the outlying lands populated by outsiders, the Mleccha people (म्लेच्छा). According to Wilhelm Halfbass (1988: 175), this term, which appears in Sanskrit texts from the eighth century BC and the Brahmana period, refers to foreigners who are not part of the religious, social, and linguistic community of the Aryans. Contact with these unclean barbarians is forbidden. Throughout the history of the Hindus, relations with other populations have thus been imposed on them rather than sought by them. Wilhelm Halfbass reports that according to the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, the people of Bharata should not travel to “the ends of the world,” where they might encounter “evil, sin and death” (Halfbass, 1988: 179). Dharmaśāstra and Mīmāṃsā9 teachers often repeat these warnings and prohibitions. They warn against learning the language of the Mleccha people, conversing with them, and visiting their countries. Members of the lower, non-Aryan order of śūdra, the servants, are not as tightly bound by these prohibitions against contact with foreigners.

9While the Indians produced a biosocial classification of their entire civilization based on the caste system, they did not organize all of humanity into a system comparable to the Linnaean distinction between white, black, yellow, and red races, which, as we know, served colonial objectives of classification, hierarchization, and domination. The term mleccha which refers indiscriminately to all non-Aryans, indicates their relative lack of interest in outsiders to their own world, In Sanskrit, the more descriptive word yavana (यवनाः) refers to specific groups of foreigners. It is believed to be an adaptation into Sanskrit of the Persian term yauna which referred to the Ionians, encountered through the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC). It subsequently came to designate the non-Hindu populations who had been living for centuries on the immediate margins of, or within, Bharata, notably Muslim Indians from the eighth century AD onward. However, these yavana foreigners were included in the dharmic cosmology and notably in the dharmajāti, the rules of the castes. In mythological accounts, particularly in Dharmaśāstra texts, they are considered either fallen members of the kṣatriya (warrior caste), or descendants of kṣatriya fathers and śūdra mothers (Halfbass 1988: 177). Another category of foreigners from within are the caṇḍāla, but these people fully belong to the dharmic system.

10This brief incursion into the Hindu conceptual universe reveals a xenology based on a self-contained cosmology, associated with a caste system, a dharmic ideology, and a karmic soteriology limited to a specific space: the Indian Bharata. Beyond its borders, contact with other forms of humanity is forbidden because it presents the risk of defilement, loss of identity, and ultimately the degradation of the Hindu cosmic being. As for contemporary Chinese society, while it is based on secularized conceptions, it is similar to India in its minimal representation of otherness outside its own world.

Otherness in a self-contained cosmology: the Chinese case

11In Chinese, the concept of race is expressed by the ideogram zhŏng (), which refers to the categorization of beings and things in general. Dictionaries translate it as species, breed, stock, race, or seed in the sense of a plant seed variety. For example, the expression “all sorts of things” is translated as zhǒng gè yàng de dōngxi (各样的东西), while wheat seed is xiǎomài zhǒng (小麦) and yellow race” is huáng zhǒngzú (种族). Several meanings of the Chinese zhŏng include the idea of the reproduction of specific characteristics, whether intergenerational in the case of living organisms, or serial in the case of objects, which overlaps semantically with the Western concept of race.

12In Chinese, the concept of race in its social dimension can also be expressed by the ideogram  (), usually combined in everyday language with zhŏng in the compound zhŏngzú (种族). The term has several meanings: depending on the context, it can mean family, clan, race, or nationality in the sense of ethnicity. It is included in the modern concept of mínzú (民族), which Chinese nationalists borrowed from their Japanese counterparts in the early twentieth century. According to Joël Thoraval (1999: 45-46), the term has come to refer to different things over time, ranging from race to the nation-state. Today, it is used equally for a nation or an ethnic group. Thoraval explains that in 1962 the Chinese Communist Party, anxious to affirm the unity of the nations ethnocultural components, decided to use the same word to designate both the Chinese nationZhōnghuá mínzú (中华民族)and the 56 nationalities within it. The Hànzú (汉族), the dominant Han ethnolinguistic group, thus coexists in China with 55 minority nationalities, the shǎoshù mínzú (少数民族).

  • 10 As confirmed by the current treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs.

13The Chinese Communist government was eager to claim that all the nation’s cultural components were treated equally, even though, in practice, attempts by certain minority nationalities to assert their identity were fiercely repressed.10 The use of a single term for both the nation and its ethno-cultural components served the official ideology of unity in diversity, because it broke with the long-standing contempt for non-Han minorities. Until 1949, the Han had described China’s ethnic minorities as barbarians, referring to them as mán (蛮), fān (番),  (夷), or  (胡), depending on the region. This ethnocentric vision of otherness was only slightly nuanced by scholars and officials who distinguished between “cooked barbarians (zhǔ shú de - 煮熟的), meaning those assimilated into Han civilization, and those described as raw (yuánshǐ - 原始). Westerners belonged to the latter category. Even Ma Duanlin (1245-1322), the great encyclopedist of the Yuan dynasty, who was unusually open-minded for his time, used these terms to describe China’s minority peoples, and was the first to suggest that an ethnographic census of these minorities should be conducted (Ma-Touan-Lin 1883).

14Several lessons can be drawn from this review of the terms used by the Chinese to categorize humanity. First, the compound zhŏngzú is the closest equivalent to the Western notion of race, as it conveys an essentialized mode of classification that combines biological properties, social filiation and inherited cultural behaviors. In the twentieth century, this group of meanings was also expressed by the concept of mínzú. Even though in 1962 it was redefined as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s unification strategy to describe both the Chinese nation-state and its constituent peoples—in other words to describe both political and cultural categories—the term continues to blur the distinction between supposedly innate and acquired characteristics, if only because it remains based on the root zú.

15The concept of mínzú, applied exclusively to China, also reflects a deeply Sinocentric vision of humanity, which is evident in the word the Chinese use for their country: Zhōngguó (中国), which means country at the center [of the world]. In contrast to the Chinese, people who are foreign to the civilizational space of the middle countrythe wàiguó rén (外国人)are viewed as barbarians and ultimately of little interest. A clear indication of this inward-looking attitude is the unusual fate of ethnology in China. Before the Communist era, local ethnologists already focused their studies exclusively on societies within the Chinese world. Shortly after coming to power, the Communist government banned the emerging field of ethnology and replaced it with a discipline devoted solely to the study of shǎoshù mínzú, the minority “nationalities of the Chinese world. As noted by Joël Thoraval (1999: 47), this inward focus also stems from the fact that the Chinese have traditionally defined their identity less in contrast to other forms of humanity than in relation to their ancestors. This relationship is anchored in a place of origin and is called jīguān (鸡冠), meaning observance of the foundations.

Southeast Asian perspectives

  • 11 The Thai people were Indianized, at the conceptual level, by treatises written in Pāli, the languag (...)
  • 12 One example of the use of châ:t in the sense of nation, is the expression “to betray your country (...)

16As mentioned above, for almost two millennia, Southeast Asian state societies have been nourished by Chinese cultural influences, but also—and above all—by Indian influences that have spread through Brahmanic cults (Shaivite and Vaishnavite), followed by Buddhism, both in the Indochinese peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago. The Thai language reflects this influence well. The concept of race is expressed by several words or combinations of words, all based on terms borrowed from Pāli/Sanskrit.11 The word most frequently used since the end of the nineteenth century, when it was introduced into Thai usage, is chýa:châ:t (เชื้อชาติ). It combines the word chýa: (เชื้อ), which Mary Haas’ Thai-English Students Dictionary (1964: 153) translates as family lineage, and the word châ:t (ชาติ), which is the Thai transcription of the Pāli/Sanskrit jāti, which as explained above means birth, form of existence, family, or caste, depending on the context. Mary Haas’ dictionary translates chýa:châ:t as race, but also as nationality, although in everyday language, the concept of citizenship is expressed by another word based on the Indian jāti, namely sanchâ:t (สัณชาติ), where san expresses the idea of law and, in this case, constitution.12

17In Thai, chýa:châ:t means both racial identity and ethnic identity. In other words, it does not distinguish between references to race, ethnic group, or even nation. Nor does it differentiate between the concepts of race and people, all of which can be rendered by the term chonchâ:t (ชนชาติ), which combines chon (people”) and the Thai transcription of the Indian jāti. The same ambiguity between race and ethnic group is found in the concept of phàwphan (ผ่าพันธุ), a polysemous term that means race, tribe, or ethnic group depending on the context. It combines phàw used to classify identical things (or beings) (Haas 1964: 347), with phan, an adaptation into Thai of the Pāli/Sanskrit word paṅkti (पंक्ति), which depending on the context, means lineage, group, society, or troop (Stchoupak, Nitti and Renou 1987: 396). This root, when combined with jāti, forms the Thai word used exclusively to designate ethnic groups: châ:t phan (ชาติพันธุ).

18Although Thai society borrowed the concept of jāti from India and is highly hierarchical, it did not adopt the caste system. The idea of social purity leading to the avoidance or exclusion of inferiors and foreigners is not common in Thailand. On the contrary, the Thai conquerors of the thirteenth century intermarried extensively with speakers of local Mon-Khmer languages, to such an extent that todays Thai population has been shaped by centuries of intermixing—a process that continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants settled in Siam. In the twenty-first century, people of mixed Chinese and Thai descent account for over 6% of the countrys 71.7 million population (as of 2022). Another indication of this relative openness to otherness is the positive connotation of the term khὲ:k (แขก), which refers both to the guest and to the foreigner from South Asia (India, Pakistan), Southeast Asia, or the Arabian Peninsula.

19While the caste system itself was not adopted along with the word jāti, the same cannot be said for samsāra, the Indian philosophy of the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth. The concept of karma, introduced by Buddhism, lies at the heart of the Thai conception of individual destiny and is closely tied to the role of filiation in the construction of both individual and collective identities. Filial piety holds a central place in the Thai value system, and from a historical perspective, Buddhism was able to take root in local culture largely because ancestors play an important role in its beliefs and rituals.

20Buddhism, particularly its doctrinal and soteriological aspects, is fundamental to Thai identity. The concept of culture, for example, is expressed in Thai by the word wátthanátham (วัฒนธรรม), which literally means progress (wátthaná) of the dharma (tham), with dharma here referring specifically to Buddhist teaching. In Thai xenology, Buddhist faith is a major criterion of civilization, confirming the essential role of religion in shaping Thai identity. The expressions commonly used to convey the idea of being civilized distinguish Buddhist Thais from the rest of humanity. Among these are the Anglicism siwilai (สิวิไลซ็) and ha:rajá chon (อารยชน) which literally translates as Aryan, once again borrowed from Indian cosmocentrism. Thai people perceive themselves as the most accomplished form of humanity, if we judge by the concepts they use, and do not fundamentally think of other members of the human species in racial terms, but rather according to their degree of geographical and civilizational proximity.

21This leads to a categorization of otherness organized into concentric circles. The first circle, closest to the Thai center of civilization, includes the small minority [tribal] groups (klùm chumchon nɔ:j - กลุ่มชุมชน นอ้ย) living in the hills. They are identified by the highly pejorative generic term khâ: (ข้า), a lexical reference to the slave trade to which they were historically subjected and the inferior status that resulted. Depending on the context, the word means servant, dependent, or slave.

22The second, wider concentric circle consists of members of Asian, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern state societies, with whom the Thai people have maintained commercial, cultural, and diplomatic relations since the earliest periods of their history. These foreigners are considered worthy of respect because their civilization is seen as comparable to Thai civilization. They are divided into two main categories: the khon cì:n (Chinese) and the khὲ:k, as mentioned above, a term that applies equally to Indians, Persians, Arabs, and Malays.

23Finally, the widest and most distant circle, both geographically and culturally, includes all groups associated with the Western world. The Thai hold ambivalent feelings toward these foreigners: a mixture of admiration for their technological advancements and high standard of living, and contempt for their perceived materialism and lack of refinement. These distant foreigners are referred to by the generic term faràŋ, a contraction of faràŋsè:t (French - ฝรั่งเศส), because it was through the French that Siam established its first diplomatic relations with Europe at the end of the seventeenth century.

24Like Thai, Indonesian uses a single word, bangsa, to express the concepts of “race,” “ethnic group,” “people,” and even “nation,” which European languages tend to distinguish or even oppose semantically. The Indonesian bangsa derives from the Pāli/Sanskrit word vaṃsá (“family,” “lineage,” or “dynasty”). Pierre Labrousse, in his Dictionnaire indonésien-français (1984: 64), gives several meanings for the term bangsa. In its original sense, it refers specifically to a noble lineage, an aristocratic family, or a dynasty. For example, the term for “royal family” is bangsa raja, while aristocracy is kebangsawanan (from Sanskrit vaṃśāvali).

25In a second, more contemporary usage, bangsa refers broadly to categories of all kinds. Depending on the context, it can mean “human group,” “race,” or “ethnic group” (often in combination with suku, which means “group” in Malay), but also more generally “species,” “genus,” “type,” or “kind.” In Indonesian, “black race” is translated as bangsa negro; ilmu bangsa-bangsa refers to the science (ilmu) of ethnology; while a person may also say, saya bukan bangsa romantic, “I’m not the romantic type.”

26Finally, a third meaning of bangsa is “people,” or “nation.” The phrase “Indonesian nation” is translated as bangsa indonesia, and the concept of “nationality” as kebangsaan. As these varied usages show, the term bangsa, either alone or through its derivatives, serves as a linguistic Swiss army knife to identify a wide range of social categories in Indonesian.

27However, there is a specific term in Indonesian—ras—borrowed from Dutch, that designates a group defined biologically by the uniqueness and continuity of its characteristics. Yet this term is mainly used for types of domestic animals and is less frequently applied to the human species (Soemargono and Labrousse 1969: 218).

28Another Indonesian word used to translate the Western notion of race is kaum, derived from the Arabic qawm (قَوْم). In Indonesian, it has two meanings: it can express either the idea of clan or family, or that of group, class, or social category. For example, Kaum modal refers to capitalists, and kaum hawa or kaum wanita refers to womenfolk in the sense of a social category (Labrousse 1984: 362). The idea of race appears only in the derived term perkauman which, depending on the context, can mean racism, or communitarianism. Its usage illustrates how Asian languages generally treat as semantically equivalent the concepts of race, ethnic group, and group belonging associated with these social categories.

  • 13 These correspond to the entire archipelago apart from the three most densely populated islands—Java (...)
  • 14 This is a composite word that combines the Malay lexeme orang and the qualifier asli derived from t (...)

29Indonesian xenology is difficult to describe, given the extraordinary cultural diversity of the immense Indonesian archipelago and its 922 inhabited islands. The residents of Java—the island most documented historically and also most densely populated, accounting in 2022 for more than half of Indonesia’s 275.5 million inhabitants—, consider themselves distinct from the other peoples of the archipelago, who live primarily from slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and gathering in the outer islands (pulau luar).13 For Javanese residents, these groups belong to the category of orang asli. The meaning of this term is highly ambiguous. Those described as orang asli14 are often subject to negative stereotypes that stigmatize them as native, primitive, or savage. In contrast, and in a Rousseauist vein, some contemporary Malay and Indonesian thinkers associate orang asli with ideas of “purity, authenticity, truth, and antiquity.

30On another level, the citizens of bangsa Indonesia—the Indonesian nation—distinguish themselves from orang asing, or foreigners. The term asing has several meanings: alien, foreign,” or “strange” (Labrousse 1984: 43). However, among these foreign peoples, some are perceived as more familiar than others, as Anthony Reid (1999) and Denys Lombard (2004) have shown, notably those whose states and traders have maintained long-standing relations with the Indianized kingdoms and later the sultanates of Java over nearly two millennia. These included the Chinese Empire, the Khmer Empire of Angkor, the Siamese of Ayutthaya, the Malay Sultanates, and the Chams of the Peninsula, along with merchants from India, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

31Considering that the elites of these societies held lavish court ceremonies and developed a craftsmanship comparable to their own, the Javanese treated them with respect—even admiration—as representative of halus (refined”) civilizations. By contrast, the Javanese elite formed a very low opinion of the Europeans they first encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Historian Romain Bertrand (2011: 375-398) explains that Europeans, represented locally by low-class Portuguese and Dutch adventurer-mercenaries, were perceived as kasar, crude, impolite, profit-seeking, unscrupulous, undisciplined, and a threat to the socio-cosmic order maintained by Malay and Indonesian rulers through elaborate court rituals, as well documented by Clifford Geertz in his book Negara (1980).

32Since then, the opposition between halus and kasar has remained the primary criterion for distinguishing refined, civilized people from those considered less so—or not at all. In the Javanese view, this last group includes, to varying degrees, Westerners, but also some populations of the Indonesian archipelago described as orang asli.

33In the representational system of these Eastern societies, the distinction between bio-morphological and cultural characteristics does not appear to be meaningful. These two modes of identification are subsumed under broader systems of reference associated with filiation, hereditary lineage, or position within a socio-cosmic framework that separates humanity from a variety of infra-human groups considered less significant. This explains why the peoples outside their framework are grouped into the same undifferentiated category. No reference to biology appears in the Hindu and Buddhist soteriologies of karma, for example, which even today provide the keys to understanding individual and collective existence for Indian Hindus, and for believers in the Buddhist societies of Indochina. Characteristics such as being born black or white, of low or high status, rich or poor, healthy in body and mind or disabled are not irrevocable. They can be altered in proportion to an individual’s moral accomplishments, which determine one’s karmic destiny.

34Similarly, while medical science equates death with the end of an individual’s existence, belief systems in China, Siam, and the Malay world maintain that the spirit of the deceased continues to exist in an invisible dimension of the world. Consequently, it is essential for the well-being and future of both the living and their ancestors to maintain post-mortem filial relationships between parents and children. In this worldview, alongside the categorical ascriptions that define one’s identity (lineage, ethnicity, denominational group), individuals can influence their destiny through constantly renewed religious practices (such as offerings to ancestors or monks in a Buddhist context). These practices are expected to have a direct impact on the individual’s future existence and identity.

35If there is a form of essentialism in these Eastern systems of thought, it seems to be embedded in a collective “being-in-the-world” defined by a small number of criteria and by an atemporal world. For the Javanese, it means being halus, and for the Hindu, it means belonging to Bharata, the exclusive social space where dharma and karma can be fulfilled. In Chinese ontology, it means belonging to the self-proclaimed embodiment of civilized humanity and thus being at the center of the world. The Asian examples provided in this article therefore reveal the highly relative nature of the division of humanity into races and ethnic groups, a classification that Western scientific knowledge has long regarded as universally applicable.

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Notes

1 See Horace G. Quaritch Wales, The Making of Greater India. A Study in Southeast Asian Culture Change, London, Bernard Quaritch, 1951.

2 See Georges Coedès, Les États hindouisés dIndochine et dIndonésie, Paris, Editions De Boccard, 1964. In this book, the author also refers to the Indonesian archipelago as “Insulinde.”

3 On intermarriages with local elites, see D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, London, Macmillan & Co; 1955, or in the more particular case of Thailand, W. Skinner, A Study of Chinese Community Leadership in Bangkok. Together with an Historical Survey of Chinese Society in Thailand, Ithaca, Cornell University PhD Dissertation, 1954. In the case of Siam, Rama I, the founder of todays Chakri dynasty, who reigned from 1782 to 1809, was the son of a Siamese aristocrat father and a Sino-Thai mother.

4 In most cases, Europes first contacts with the elites of China and the Indochinese peninsula were made by missionaries rather than merchants, despite the widespread fame of Marco Polos tribulations. Portuguese missionaries began evangelizing Vietnam as early as 1527. The Jesuits settled in China in 1582. In 1651, one of them, Alexandre de Rhodes, was instrumental in developing quốc ngữ, the romanized transcription of the Vietnamese language, which was later adopted by Vietnamese nationalists. The Jesuits also initiated the first embassy exchanges between Louis XIVs France and the Kingdom of Siam (1680-1685). Transactions between Europe and the Austronesian populations of the Indonesian peninsula and archipelago, on the other hand, were initiated by traders and mercenaries. Albuquerques capture of Melaka in 1511 gave the Portuguese control of the spice trade for almost a century. Later, from 1619 and the founding of Batavia, this trade was taken over by the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie - VOC).

5 A societys ontology is the way it conceptualizes “the human being in the world.”

6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are original.

7 Other terms also express this concept derivatively, such as kula (gathering or collection), gotra (hereditary lineage), kṛṣṭi (which combined with various compounds expresses the idea of the human species in general, Aryan tribes or the people living in a country), or anvaya (continuation).

8 Hence the fact that India is considered the exclusive place where karma can be accomplished, and is named accordingly kharma bhumih (कर्मभूमिः), literally the land of karma.

9 The Dharmaśāstra, or Teaching of the Law is a collection of Sanskrit texts concerning good conduct, the laws to be observed and the relationships between the castes. The most widely known teachings of these Dharmaśāstra are the Laws of Manu. Mīmāṃsā are Hindu laws pertaining to Vedic rituals, which also include commentaries on the Vedas.

10 As confirmed by the current treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs.

11 The Thai people were Indianized, at the conceptual level, by treatises written in Pāli, the language of Theravada Buddhist texts.

12 One example of the use of châ:t in the sense of nation, is the expression “to betray your country, which in Thai is khă:j châ:t, literally to sell one’s country.”

13 These correspond to the entire archipelago apart from the three most densely populated islands—Java, Bali and Lombok—which are called pulau dalam, the inner islands. About this distinction, see Clifford Geertz (1963: 12-13).

14 This is a composite word that combines the Malay lexeme orang and the qualifier asli derived from the Arabic root ‘asl (أرومة) meaning origin.

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Bernard Formoso, « Ethnic group versus race? Asian perspectives »Appartenances & Altérités [En ligne], 7 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2025, consulté le 06 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alterites/2029 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/156lu

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Bernard Formoso

Professeur d’anthropologie émérite à l’Université Montpellier Paul Valéry, membre de l’UMR Savoirs ENvironnement Sociétés (SENS, UMPV - IRD - CIRAD).

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