Parliament of Cats: Democracy, Organizational Work and Mutual Felinity in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

Parliament of Cats examines the organizational work of RUMAH, a creative hub and youth advocacy organization in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Based on long-term participatory fieldwork the thesis depicts their organizational efforts and the way these efforts interface with political complications and realities of the Malaysian democratic regime. Alternating between experimental extended ethnographic interludes and conventional ethnographic chapters the thesis builds an analysis across four themes by delving into the Kuchingite figure of the cat as expressive of political conditions, human behavior and activist tactics in turn to examine how this idiomatic mode of approaching and understanding politics might inform scholarly discourses on democracy. Through the leitmotif of felinity as employed by young kuchingites to describe and lead political and social behaviour thesis builds a fundamental critique of key conceptions in the scholarship on democracy by counterposing feline situational grace and cunning with decontextualized ideal type categorializations of democracy.

By engaging intimately and conscientiously with RUMAHS's activists and their work the idiomatic political workings of Kuching and Malaysia come to function as the ethnographic illustrations of the profound limitations and Euroamerican biases of neoplatonic conceptions of democracy as an ideal. Building on this extended demonstration of democracy scholarship's limitations the thesis grounds a different theorization of democracy in a complex combination of structural and ethnographic analysis. Parliament of cats suggest we think of democracy as a socially and historically contingent formation of power, legitimacy, and governance whose
characteristics, effects, and contingencies can be approached through the experiences, actions, and concerns of the people subject to it. Thus, Sarawak and Malaysia emerge as full participants in democracy as it really exists, inequities, irrationalities and all, rather than aspirants to a Euroamerican tradition, aiming at but never quite attaining just governance in a self-consciously Euroamerican mold.