Malay race
Encyclopedia
The concept of a Malay race was proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
(1752–1840), and classified as the brown race
. Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous complexity of classifying races. The concept of a "Malay race" differs with that of the ethnic Malays centered around Malaysian Malay Peninsula
and parts of the Indonesia
n island of Sumatra
.
The term Malay race, was commonly used in the late 19th century and early 20th century. These peoples occupy an area that is generally coextensive with the area dominated by Austronesian peoples. The Malayan race are Austronesian people
, though some used to claim they were a subrace of the Mongolian race
.
With new scientific evidence presented by HUGO (Human Genome Organization) through genetic studies of the Asian races, the facts points to a single Asian migration from the South East Asian regions (which is predominantly populated by Austronesian races) travelling northwards and slowly populating East Asia (China, Korea and Japan) instead of the other way around as usually depicted.
ruling class of the Srivijaya
Kingdom, who were from South West region of India (known as Malainadu) speaking Tamil
a Dravidian dialect named from Ancient times from Malaya Mountains
where it originated (The Malayali. This is evidenced by the Balinese Kshatriya's
, who claim ancestral origin from south west Indian region Kshatriya casts(the Bunts
and the Nairs). Some historian promote that the word Melayu derives from the Tamil
term Malaiur translated as "land of mountains" - which is erroneous since Sanskrit nor any other Prakrit
has a similar word in context. During the time of the first unification Kingdom
of the region, locals may have identified with the rulers and started to refer themselves as such, so when the European colonists first arrived they must have proclaimed themselves Malayu or any such phonetically similar variant.
It is interesting to note that the Malays were once referred as "Kun-lun people" in various Chinese records. Kunlun
was originally referring to a fabled mountain range that was believed to span parts of Tibet
and India
. It was used by the Chinese as reference to black, wavy-haired barbarians of the mountains and jungles from the remote part of geographically known world. The Viets, Champas and Khmers were called Kunlun people by the Chinese before the term being applied to the Malays or more accurately Austronesians as a whole. In 750, Jianzhen
(688-765) noticed the presence of many "Brahmans, Persians
and Kunluns in Canton". The Book of Tang
reported that "every year, Kunlun merchants come in their ships with valuable goods to trade with the Chinese".
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 native inhabitants of the Marianas
, the Philippines
, the Malukus
, Sundas
, Indochina
, as well as Pacific Islands such as Tahiti
ans. He considered a Tahitian skull he had received to be the missing link; showing the transition between the "primary" race, the Caucasians, and the "degenerate" race, the Negroids.
Blumenbach writes:
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.
After a period of generations being classified in these groups, individual identity formed around the concept of bangsa Melayu (Malay race). For younger generations of people, they saw it as providing a unity and solidarity against the colonial powers, and non-Malay immigrants. The Malaysian nation was later formed with the bangsa Melayu having the central and defining position within the country.
, many Filipino
s consider the term "Malay" to refer to the indigenous population of the country as well as the indigenous population of neighboring countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. This misconception is due in part to American anthropologists H. Otley Beyer
who proposed that the Filipinos were actually Malays who migrated from Malaysia and Indonesia. This idea was in turn propagated by Filipino historians and is still taught in many schools. However, the prevalent consensus among contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists actually proposes the reverse; namely that the ancestors of the Austronesian people
of Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia had originally migrated south and west from the Philippines during the prehistoric period from an origin in Taiwan
. This prevalent consensus is however being challenged by new findings from HUGO which shows that East Asian migration went from south to north. Hence the Philippines, was peopled from the south, and so did China, Japan and Korea. A study done by HUGO showed that the continent was likely populated primarily through a single migration event from the south. Note, however, that the Taiwan hypothesis is mainly based on linguistic and partly archaeological evidence, and says nothing about genes or the oldest migrations to East Asia and the initial peopling of the area, only about the migration that led to the spread of the Austronesian languages
. Therefore, there is no contradiction.
, the racial classification "Malay race" was introduced in the early twentieth century into the anti-miscegenation laws
of a number of western US states. Anti-miscegenation laws were state law
s that prohibited marriage between European American
s and African American
s and in some states also other non-whites. After an influx of Filipino immigrants, these existing laws were amended in a number of western states to prohibit marriage between Caucasians and Filipinos, who were designated as members of the Malay race, and a number of Southern states committed to racial segregation
followed suit. Eventually 9 states (Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming) explicitly prohibited marriage between Caucasians and Asians. In California, there was some confusion over whether pre-existing state laws prohibiting marriage between whites and "Mongolians
" also prohibited marriage between whites and Filipinos. A 1933 Supreme Court of California
case Roldan v. Los Angeles County concluded that such marriages were legal as Filipinos were members of the "Malay race" and were not enumerated in the list of races for whom marriage with whites was illegal. The California legislature soon after amended the laws to extend the prohibition against interracial marriage to whites and Filipinos.
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.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, physiologist and anthropologist, one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history, whose teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to classification of what he called human races, of which he determined...
(1752–1840), and classified as the brown race
Brown people
Brown people or brown race is a political, racial, ethnic, societal, and cultural classification, similar to black people and white people. Like these, it is a metaphor for race based on human skin color, reflecting the fact that there are shades of skin colour intermediate between "Mediterranean" ...
. Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous complexity of classifying races. The concept of a "Malay race" differs with that of the ethnic Malays centered around Malaysian Malay Peninsula
Peninsular Malaysia
Peninsular Malaysia , also known as West Malaysia , is the part of Malaysia which lies on the Malay Peninsula. Its area is . It shares a land border with Thailand in the north. To the south is the island of Singapore. Across the Strait of Malacca to the west lies the island of Sumatra...
and parts of the Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
n island of Sumatra
Sumatra
Sumatra is an island in western Indonesia, westernmost of the Sunda Islands. It is the largest island entirely in Indonesia , and the sixth largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 with a population of 50,365,538...
.
The term Malay race, was commonly used in the late 19th century and early 20th century. These peoples occupy an area that is generally coextensive with the area dominated by Austronesian peoples. The Malayan race are Austronesian people
Austronesian people
The Austronesian-speaking peoples are various populations in Oceania and Southeast Asia that speak languages of the Austronesian family. They include Taiwanese aborigines; the majority ethnic groups of East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Madagascar, Micronesia, and Polynesia,...
, though some used to claim they were a subrace of the Mongolian race
Mongoloid race
Mongoloid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as epicanthic fold and shovel-shaped incisors and other physical traits common in East Asia, the Americas and the Arctic...
.
With new scientific evidence presented by HUGO (Human Genome Organization) through genetic studies of the Asian races, the facts points to a single Asian migration from the South East Asian regions (which is predominantly populated by Austronesian races) travelling northwards and slowly populating East Asia (China, Korea and Japan) instead of the other way around as usually depicted.
Origins
The Etymology of Malay or Melayu goes back to the 7th century and is derived from what the KshatriyaKshatriya
*For the Bollywood film of the same name see Kshatriya Kshatriya or Kashtriya, meaning warrior, is one of the four varnas in Hinduism...
ruling class of the Srivijaya
Srivijaya
Srivijaya was a powerful ancient thalassocratic Malay empire based on the island of Sumatra, modern day Indonesia, which influenced much of Southeast Asia. The earliest solid proof of its existence dates from the 7th century; a Chinese monk, I-Tsing, wrote that he visited Srivijaya in 671 for 6...
Kingdom, who were from South West region of India (known as Malainadu) speaking Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
a Dravidian dialect named from Ancient times from Malaya Mountains
Malaya Mountains
The Malaya Mountains were a range of mountains that were mentioned in the Matsya Purana, the Kurma Purana, and the epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata...
where it originated (The Malayali. This is evidenced by the Balinese Kshatriya's
Balinese Kshatriya
Balinese Kshatriya is a Hindu Kshatriya community which exists in the island of Bali in Indonesia. During the second half of the sixth century, Bali had a strong Kshatriya ruling dynasty. The rulers were mostly indigenous Balinese with some Indian blood. These clans mostly belonged to the...
, who claim ancestral origin from south west Indian region Kshatriya casts(the Bunts
Bunt (community)
Bunt , previously spelled Bant, are a community of erstwhile nobility, feudatory and gentry from the region of Tulu Nadu in the south west of India which comprises the districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada in the Indian state of Karnataka and Kasaragod taluk of Kerala...
and the Nairs). Some historian promote that the word Melayu derives from the Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
term Malaiur translated as "land of mountains" - which is erroneous since Sanskrit nor any other Prakrit
Prakrit
Prakrit is the name for a group of Middle Indic, Indo-Aryan languages, derived from Old Indic dialects. The word itself has a flexible definition, being defined sometimes as, "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", or "vernacular", in contrast to the literary and religious...
has a similar word in context. During the time of the first unification Kingdom
Srivijaya
Srivijaya was a powerful ancient thalassocratic Malay empire based on the island of Sumatra, modern day Indonesia, which influenced much of Southeast Asia. The earliest solid proof of its existence dates from the 7th century; a Chinese monk, I-Tsing, wrote that he visited Srivijaya in 671 for 6...
of the region, locals may have identified with the rulers and started to refer themselves as such, so when the European colonists first arrived they must have proclaimed themselves Malayu or any such phonetically similar variant.
It is interesting to note that the Malays were once referred as "Kun-lun people" in various Chinese records. Kunlun
Kunlun Mountains
The Kunlun Mountains are one of the longest mountain chains in Asia, extending more than 3,000 km. In the broadest sense, it forms the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau south of the Tarim Basin and the Gansu Corridor and continues east south of the Wei River to end at the North China Plain.The...
was originally referring to a fabled mountain range that was believed to span parts of Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. It was used by the Chinese as reference to black, wavy-haired barbarians of the mountains and jungles from the remote part of geographically known world. The Viets, Champas and Khmers were called Kunlun people by the Chinese before the term being applied to the Malays or more accurately Austronesians as a whole. In 750, Jianzhen
Jianzhen
Jianzhen was a Chinese monk who helped to propagate Buddhism in Japan. In the eleven years from 743 to 754, Jianzhen attempted to visit Japan some six times.-Life:...
(688-765) noticed the presence of many "Brahmans, Persians
Persian people
The Persian people are part of the Iranian peoples who speak the modern Persian language and closely akin Iranian dialects and languages. The origin of the ethnic Iranian/Persian peoples are traced to the Ancient Iranian peoples, who were part of the ancient Indo-Iranians and themselves part of...
and Kunluns in Canton". The Book of Tang
Book of Tang
The Book of Tang , Jiu Tangshu or the Old Book of Tang is the first classic work about the Tang Dynasty. The book began when Gaozu of Later Jin ordered its commencement in 941...
reported that "every year, Kunlun merchants come in their ships with valuable goods to trade with the Chinese".
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
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
(white), Ethiopian (black), Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
(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 native inhabitants of the Marianas
Mariana Islands
The Mariana Islands are an arc-shaped archipelago made up by the summits of 15 volcanic mountains in the north-western Pacific Ocean between the 12th and 21st parallels north and along the 145th meridian east...
, the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
, the Malukus
Maluku Islands
The Maluku Islands are an archipelago that is part of Indonesia, and part of the larger Maritime Southeast Asia region. Tectonically they are located on the Halmahera Plate within the Molucca Sea Collision Zone...
, Sundas
Sunda Islands
The Sunda Islands are a group of islands that form part of the Malay archipelago.They are further divided into the Greater Sunda Islands and the Lesser Sunda Islands.-Administration:...
, Indochina
Indochina
The Indochinese peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly southwest of China, and east of India. The name has its origins in the French, Indochine, as a combination of the names of "China" and "India", and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory...
, as well as Pacific Islands such as Tahiti
Tahiti
Tahiti is the largest island in the Windward group of French Polynesia, located in the archipelago of the Society Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. It is the economic, cultural and political centre of French Polynesia. The island was formed from volcanic activity and is high and mountainous...
ans. He considered a Tahitian skull he had 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 RomanticRomanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
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 (Filipino) 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.After a period of generations being classified in these groups, individual identity formed around the concept of bangsa Melayu (Malay race). For younger generations of people, they saw it as providing a unity and solidarity against the colonial powers, and non-Malay immigrants. The Malaysian nation was later formed with the bangsa Melayu having the central and defining position within the country.
Philippine context
In the PhilippinesPhilippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
, many Filipino
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
s consider the term "Malay" to refer to the indigenous population of the country as well as the indigenous population of neighboring countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. This misconception is due in part to American anthropologists H. Otley Beyer
H. Otley Beyer
Henry Otley Beyer was an American anthropologist, who spent most of his adult life in the Philippines teaching Filipinos and other scholars about Philippine indigenous culture...
who proposed that the Filipinos were actually Malays who migrated from Malaysia and Indonesia. This idea was in turn propagated by Filipino historians and is still taught in many schools. However, the prevalent consensus among contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists actually proposes the reverse; namely that the ancestors of the Austronesian people
Austronesian people
The Austronesian-speaking peoples are various populations in Oceania and Southeast Asia that speak languages of the Austronesian family. They include Taiwanese aborigines; the majority ethnic groups of East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Madagascar, Micronesia, and Polynesia,...
of Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia had originally migrated south and west from the Philippines during the prehistoric period from an origin in Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
. This prevalent consensus is however being challenged by new findings from HUGO which shows that East Asian migration went from south to north. Hence the Philippines, was peopled from the south, and so did China, Japan and Korea. A study done by HUGO showed that the continent was likely populated primarily through a single migration event from the south. Note, however, that the Taiwan hypothesis is mainly based on linguistic and partly archaeological evidence, and says nothing about genes or the oldest migrations to East Asia and the initial peopling of the area, only about the migration that led to the spread of the Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
. Therefore, there is no contradiction.
United States context
In the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the racial classification "Malay race" was introduced in the early twentieth century into the anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...
of a number of western US states. Anti-miscegenation laws were state law
State law
In the United States, state law is the law of each separate U.S. state, as passed by the state legislature and adjudicated by state courts. It exists in parallel, and sometimes in conflict with, United States federal law. These disputes are often resolved by the federal courts.-See also:*List of U.S...
s that prohibited marriage between European American
European American
A European American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the original peoples of Europe...
s and African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s and in some states also other non-whites. After an influx of Filipino immigrants, these existing laws were amended in a number of western states to prohibit marriage between Caucasians and Filipinos, who were designated as members of the Malay race, and a number of Southern states committed to racial segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
followed suit. Eventually 9 states (Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming) explicitly prohibited marriage between Caucasians and Asians. In California, there was some confusion over whether pre-existing state laws prohibiting marriage between whites and "Mongolians
Mongoloid race
Mongoloid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as epicanthic fold and shovel-shaped incisors and other physical traits common in East Asia, the Americas and the Arctic...
" also prohibited marriage between whites and Filipinos. A 1933 Supreme Court of California
Supreme Court of California
The Supreme Court of California is the highest state court in California. It is headquartered in San Francisco and regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Its decisions are binding on all other California state courts.-Composition:...
case Roldan v. Los Angeles County concluded that such marriages were legal as Filipinos were members of the "Malay race" and were not enumerated in the list of races for whom marriage with whites was illegal. The California legislature soon after amended the laws to extend the prohibition against interracial marriage to whites and Filipinos.
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
Loving v. Virginia
Loving v. Virginia, , was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v...
and therefore repealed.