Politique ethnoculturelle du gouvernement malaisien et ses effets sur le statut des langues et de leur enseignement dans le supérieur: réflexions sur un contexte à partir d’une expérience,

Abstract

During a mission as an external Examiner at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), I had the opportunity to question the status of languages and the representations of Western cultures, and how they influence the learning of European languages, particularly in higher education. I first analysed the new B.A. degree for French Language and Linguistics, more specifically the internal coherence between the teaching and the examinations. Secondly, I looked at the national recruiting criteria for students in Western languages.

This analysis encouraged me to better understand the whole institutional system with its hidden agenda. I therefore reflected on the ethnocutural governmental policy instituting a new categorisation of majority and minorities, being based on an inversion of domination relationship following a binary cultural opposition model. I also questioned the recomposition of the Malaysian society into ethnoclasses and its consecutive new social and economic hierarchies as well as its impact on the institutional behaviour of its actors. As a conclusion, I think that an external expertise in the field of languages must take into account the analysis of the embeddedness of educational micro-structures into socio-political macro-structures and of their interrelations. It also requires a systemic approach which integrates the historical, political, social and economic factors, in order to identify the symbolic meanings and the political challenges of these identitary redefinitions, impulsed by a State, of the indigenous We versus an ethnic Other.