21 July 2025 – [Book Launch] Inner and Oceanic Worlds in the Making of Penang

[Book Launch] Inner and Oceanic Worlds in the Making of Penang

Speaker: Mareike Pampus
In Conversation With: Prof Emerita Dato’ Seri Dr Wazir Jahan Karim
Date & Time: Monday, 21 July 2025, 8:00 PM
Venue: Conference Hall, Penang Institute
Moderators: Prof Emerita Dato’ Seri Dr Wazir Jahan Karim & Gareth Richards

About the Book

Connected Heritages: The Inner Life of Penang in the Indian Ocean World is an innovative study of transnational and oceanic history, enriched by detailed ethnographic research. The book situates Penang—especially George Town—within fluid lateral networks, highlighting the sea’s influence on the port city’s political, economic, social, and cultural life.

It weaves deep ethnographic insight with historical narrative, immersing readers in the lived experiences of George Town’s communities—particularly the Baba Nyonya and Jawi Peranakan—and explores how historical circulations have shaped the city’s inner life.

About the Author

Mareike Pampus is a Lecturer in the Human Geography Department at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her teaching and research focus on food geographies, Indian Ocean connections, heritage studies, and (more-than-)human geography.

About the Moderators

Prof Emerita Dato’ Seri Dr Wazir Jahan Karim is a distinguished anthropologist with extensive work in women and gender studies, Orang Asli communities, food anthropology, and Muslim cultural conservation. Her recent autobiography is Feminism Undaunted (World Scientific, 2025).

Gareth Richards is a writer, editor, and bookseller. He co-edited Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives (Springer, 2021).

Event Summary

Ten years ago, young Mareike Pampus stepped foot on Penang Island to undertake research for her PhD in Anthropology on what she thought would be the topic of George Town as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But as Mareike shared with the audience that came to her talk on 21 July, 2025, at Penang Institute, her dissertation and the book that grew out of it show her gradual discovery of Penang as a site of lessons that go far beyond the 2.6 square kilometers that define George Town’s UNESCO boundaries, and that reach farther back and ahead in time than its UNESCO listing in 2008. Based in Halle-Saale in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, Mareike was in Malaysia to launch her book, Connected Heritages: The Inner Life of Penang in the Indian Ocean World, together with the Gerakbudaya Bookshop, Penang.

One lesson that Penang’s place and role in the several ‘oceanic worlds’ that surround her offers, is to illustrate that oceans are not barriers between civilizations and their gateways and entry points, but have for millenia served as zones and conduits of economic, political, and cultural connectivity, exchange, and transformations. Oceans are not merely stages for empires and nation-states, said Mareike, but active agents shaping patterns of sentiments, movements, and economic possibilities and conduits of exchanges: material exchanges of goods, bodies, and services, as well as the circulation of intangibles such as languages, religious ideas and practices, food habits, and identities.

With Gerak Budaya director Gareth Richards serving as moderator, and senior anthropologist Wazir Jahan Karim gently but ably adding her contemplations and thoughts to accentuate Mareike’s own, the audience appreciated Mareike’s insights and reflections into the many conversations and experiences that she had with Penangites over the past 10 years. Such as their habitual use of culinary metaphors – for example, the use of the varieties of ‘rojak’ to conjure the multiple layers and combinations of plurality – to conversations and questions of identity, meaning, and practices.

It did not take long for these conversations with her interlocutors to transplant from the living rooms over coffee/tea and local tidbits to the kitchens of her interlocutors, many of whom became, eventually, her close friends.

Mareike became close, especially, to members of the Peranakan Jawi and Peranakan Chinese communities in George Town, who offered glimpses of the situationality and sophistication of human beings. They may claim, at one moment, membership in one (or more) ethnicity to which they identify or are ascribed by others; but at other moments, transcend or even ‘surpass’ that identity. Such as when some Baba Nyonyas proudly claim to be “more Chinese than the Chinese”, said Mareike.

What determines cultural ‘authenticity’ and ‘quality’? asked Mareike. Is it when – using the allegory of recipes and cooking – the ‘traditional’ ingredients and utensils are strictly adhered to as if these are the indispensable absolutes of cultural practice? Or, she suggests, is a cultural product or practice ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ when it attains that high quality or standard to qualify it to be appreciated and accorded cultural pride and acclaim – regardless of what ingredients exactly went into it, where they came from, or even who produced/prepared it?

Penang is an example, Mareike showed, of the richness, wideness, and profundity of understanding and appreciation that we can reach if we break through, or complicate, the parochial categories of received wisdoms, categories, and framings. For every heritage is connected, she pointed out. Every tradition, at one point, was invented.

“Heritage is both continuity and change. Linking histories of trade, immigration with temporary forms of distinction, identity negotiation and subtle resistance to hegemonic national ideologies – these everyday practices help to submerge fixed categories and explain better who someone is in this particular moment.”