According to Md. Salleh Yaspat (in Malaysian World View edited by Mohd Taib Osman. Mohd Taib Osman) the Traditional Malay Cosmology can be visualized as in the above diagram, whose key is is as follows: 1. Dunia: inhabited by Man, animals, plants, objects, spirits; 2. Pusat Tasik Pauh Janggi: inhabited by Nagas, Jins, Garudas; 3. Padang Jauh dan Puncak Gunung: inhabited by Giants, jins; 4. Pulau Buah: inhabited by Ancestral spirits; 5. Kayangan: inhabited by Dewa, Perman; 6. Dasar Laut: inhabited by Raja Lebis.
In December 2019, I did a Koboi Performance for Percha Art Space in Lumut after which I left for Vancouver. I will now return to Malaysia in August this year (2023) and, to mark my return, I am working towards another Koboi Performance, the details of which will be announced shortly.
Keling Maya: Post-traditional Media, Malaysian Cyberspace and Me, presented at the Aliran Semasa Symposium, 2013, at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
In a paper titled Beyond Art History* presented at the Singapore Art Museum in 1995, I called for an approach to contemporary art in Southeast Asia that went beyond the historical approaches of chronology, stylistics and teleology. Given the persistence of traditional and sacred art forms, in the face of the disruptions and displacements of colonialism, I suggested that the study of contemporary art in the region should emphasize metaphysical and social approaches over conventional art history. Then, in Vancouver, I convened the New Forms Festival conferences of 2004 and 2005 which addressed,the relationship between culture and technology in local and global contexts. These conferences were premised on a post-traditional media theory which is represented in the diagram diagram above and outlined in the text that follows.
As the 19th Century became the 20th, it seemed that the pre-modern or traditional world was being erased and replaced by the modernity. The birth and passage of this modernist view are represented in the timeline above as the Modern Worldview. Then, there was the arrival of the Postmodern Worldview, in which modernism was deconstructed, decentered and retrospectively devalued. This moment is marked, after architectural historian Charles Jencks, by the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in 1972. Postmodern fragmentation and reorientation was accelerated by the arrival of the ubiquitous and instantaneous communications of the World Wide Web.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens challenges the view that postmodernism constitutes a break from the modernism in his assertion that is is simply a tertiary development of modernism. He suggests that ‘postmodern’ is a misnomer for ‘late modern’ and posits that both categories are properly subsumed in his Post-traditional Worldview (1). While I concur with Giddens’ conflation of the postmodern and the modern, I reject his truppeting of the ‘end of tradition.’ I also oppose his characterization of tradition as being merely superstition and irrationality, something that modern society is fortunate to be released from. In my own Post-traditional Worldview (2), there is a more nuanced understanding of the ‘modern moment.’ For me, it the start of an era in which it is no longer possible to hold an insular and self-satisfied view of one’s own tradition. My ‘post-tradition’ indexes a plurality of traditions that are cognisant of each other.
I suggest that this new self-aware and relativistic sense of tradition emerged due to the sudden acceleration in the exposure of traditional peoples to the material cultures of others around the turn of the century. This heightened awareness of others occurred in the context of the integrative communication flows of colonial economies, as well as the emerging representational technology of the Cinematographie. This new post-traditional condition was first hidden behind the edifice of the modernism/ postmodernism complex. I argue that it took the startling events of 9/11 to reveal this reality, retrospectively, and the present theory is presented as part of the effort to share this vision. The destruction of the Twin Towers at the dawning of the 21st Century, marks the convulsive realization that the hubris of modernism had been just that, a Western imperialist gloss on a vibrant, even violent, post-traditional world. Indeed, a plurality of traditions have survived modernism and have re-surfaced, rhizome-like, as an array of neo-traditionalisms and fundamentalisms, reducing the once transcendent modernism to being just another tradition in the mix.
This post-traditional theory was first presented in an unpublished paper presented at the New Forms Festival conference in 2004. A summary appears in the Convener’s introduction** to the conference programme. It offers a transhistorical or ahistorical framework within which to integrate traditional, particularly sacred, paradigms with the contemporary discourses around representational and communications technologies.
* Niranjan Rajah, “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm: From Distinct National Modernisms to an Integrated Regional Arena for Art,” 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art. (Singapore: ASEAN COCI [Singapore Art Museum], 2002), 26–37.
**Niranjan Rajah, “Convener’s Passe-Partout: Developing Discursive Protocols for Media Arts in Post-Traditional Scenario” (Vancouver: New Forms Media Society, 2004), 22.
Keling Maya: Post-traditional Media, Malaysian Cyberspace and Me, presented at the Aliran Semasa Symposium, 2013, at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
Diagram by Niranjan Rajah combining the Malayy ontologies as described by Md. Salleh Yaspar and Anker Rentse.
According to Taib Osman, in the Malay cosmology, 1. Dunia is inhabited by Man, animals, plants, objects, spirits; 2. Pusat Tasik Pauh Janggi is inhabited by Nagas, Jins, Garudas; 3. Kayangan is inhabited by Dewa, Perman; 4. Dasar Laut is inhabited by Raja Lebis. Further, according to Anker Rentse, Syurga sits above the Pokok Pauh Janggi, while Neraka lies below it. It is from below the Dasar Laut, from hell’s boiling-pot or the kawah nufaka, that rises the swirl of the Pusat Tasek. A gigantic hole between the roots causes the ocean water to disappear into the boiling-pot. A dragon guards this hole that serves as the pintu Neraka. Its body also blocks the hole, preventing the ocean from running dry. In the Pusat Tasek an account is kept of the good and the bad deeds of every human being in the world.
There are many separatist organizations fighting battles for sovereignty in our world of nation states. While the methods many of these groups use include acts of terror, whether or not a given group is a terrorist organization in a given jurisdiction, at a given time, is simply a matter of legal definition. In Malaysia, possibly due to the combination of the pro Elam sentiments of Malaysian Tamils and the complexity of our communal politics, the LTTE was not so designated during the course of the Elam conflict which ended in 2009. It was only in 2014 that Malaysia finally designated the LTTE a terrorist organization. Technically speaking, regardless of emotional, political or moral considerations, this designation can not be disputed. There is, however, one very pertinent question that can be asked – Does this terrorist organization – the LTTE, even exist!
The Tamil separatist struggle ended with the decimation and the dissolution of the LTTE. The utter destruction of this organization was confirmed in a European Court of Justice ruling that stated that the LTTE should be removed from the EU’s terrorism list as there was no evidence of a risk of attacks after its military defeat in 2009. In this light, the cases of the 12 Malaysian Indians, charged with supporting the LTTE, might turn an ontological question – can it ‘be’ a crime to support a criminal organization that has ceased to ‘be’? … beginning to look like a Monty Python Norwegian Blue! … the Dead Parrot sketch no? … more in On being a Malaysian Tamil 4
The Koboi Project 
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