This chapter looks at the modernizing of mothering in Malaysia, exploring the successive imaginaries of the ‘mother’ in both scholarly and political cultural production in the country, especially in the post-Independence, nation-building period. But as I shall argue, a series of uncertainties pervades any discussion of gender, women and mothering within Malaysian ‘modernity’. To work on these issues in the context of my research, first in rural and then urban Malaysia, has inevitably enmeshed me in a series of modern scholarly insecurities; these include furious debates about positionalities, the decentring of liberal humanist ideas and the scepticism of many ‘Third World’ scholars and activists about Western anthropological claims to know about and speak for its objects located beyond Euro-America.

Exploring Malay mothering

To examine ‘modern’ mothering in Malaysia, we need first to attend to the particularities of modernity in the country. As I suggest elsewhere (1994b, n.d.b), imported Eurocentric models of ‘modernization’ project ideas deriving from Western social developments directly on to analyses of Malaysia. I argue that we cannot unproblematically apply to Malaysia assumptions about a standard linear progression from ‘tradition’ to the rationalization, bureaucratization, industrialization and secularism of mainstream Western models of modernity; this is to ignore both the specificities of the development process in the country and the problems within contemporary social theory with the increasingly unstable category of modernity itself.