somewhat different way, Malay economic migrants to Malaysia have been disappointed
to discover a kind of informal hierarchy amongst the ‘Malays’which
gives them a generally lower status than that of established peninsular Malays.
The fraternal communities, however, had at least two responses to the selfassurance
of the external homeland. The first, mainly found amongst the Inner
Mongols, was to present themselves as the frontline in the defense of the common
culture of their ethnie. Because they faced the practical pressures of assimilation,
they could claim as a victory every day that their culture survived,
and they could contrast their struggle with the apparently easier existence of the
external homeland. They saw themselves as suffering to preserve the purity of
the external homeland, as a kind of cultural buffer zone. This argument could
perhaps best be seen as a riposte to the external ‘homeland’ claims that the fraternal
communities had lost their culture.
The second and more powerful response by fraternal communities was to differentiate
themselves from the external homeland, to construct their identity as
something different One of the most important means of achieving this differentiation
was to point to arguments contradicting the notion that the external
homelands are the main custodians of the culture of their ethnie. In some cases,
the fraternal communities could present themselves as embodying the best or
the most original elements of their culture. Because of the historical pattern of
imperial expansion, the ethnically based survivor states tended to be located in
more remote regions, on the edge of the desert or the jungle. The claim of these
regions to preserve their culture in an authentic and pure form could be countered
by a perception that they were backward and unsophisticated.42Although
the last great center of Malay culture, the city of Melaka, lay on the Malay
Peninsula, its still more glorious predecessor, Srivijaya, was located in southern
Sumatra and provided a basis for local Malay feelings of superiority. Or the
fraternal communities might point out ways in which the external homeland had
actually gone further than fraternal communities in abandoning its traditional
culture. This argument was especially easy to make in Mongolia because during
the Soviet era the traditional Mongolian script was abandoned in independent
Mongolia in favor of Cyrillic characters, whereas Mongols in Inner Mongolia
continued to use the old script. Something similar applied amongst the
Lao of Thailand’s northeast. In independent Laos there was a determined effort
to simplify Lao orthography to bring it closer to everyday pronunciation.