Obscenity in publications against Malaysia’s culture and belief

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Despite modernization and development, the Asian community has yet to give up on their traditional values, and have remained anachronistically stable (Fung, 2000). In other words, in the eyes of a westerner, an Asian is seen to possess a backward and retrogressive mind. Fung (2000) also adds that the Islamic tradition in Malaysia suppresses women’s participation, thus entrenching the patriarchal tradition, which then employs different manifestations of feminist values between the Asian and western context. With the employment of such conservative values in Malaysia, laws and regulations of any publications are existent, and are to be abided in order to avoid obscenity, or harmful and indecent content (Azmi, 2004).

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The article ‘Malaysia ‘bans’ Peter Mayle book Where did I come from?’, which was published in the BBC News on the 21^st of February 2012, talks about a British author, Peter Mayle, whose book had been ordered to be banned by the Malaysian officials. Apparently, the book consisted of harmful content that is seen as a threat to the public morals, with claims of having the capability to “corrupt people’s minds”. It is apparent that Malaysia, a country of the Islamic faith, upholds its strict rules and regulations, and will take no chances of publishing anything that is of association with sex and religion.

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Walsh (2006) suggests that in order to build interaction between readers, it is necessary to understand the social and cultural context beforehand. Thus, western publishers are to co-operate and respect a country’s culture and belief to produce a book that is suited to a country of traditional values like Malaysia. Schriver (1997) too, agrees that a reader’s interaction and interpretation is based upon their values and beliefs. Therefore, publishers of any sort ought to consider if their materials afflicts a country’s beliefs and culture to avoid cases like Peter Mayle’s from happening again.

References

Azmi, IM 2004, Content Regulation in Malaysia: Unleashing Missiles on Dangerous Web Sites, Journal of Information, Law, and Technology, viewed 8 June 2012,<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2004_3/azmi>.

Fung, A 2000, ‘Feminist Philosophy and Cultural Representation in the Asian Context’, International Communication Gazette, [e-journal], vol. 62, no.2, pp. 153-165, Available through: SAGE journals online [Accessed 8 June 2012].

Schriver, K.A. 1997, Dynamics in document design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, USA.

Walsh, M. 2006, "'Textual Shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts", Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-27.