How do class, ethnicity, gender, and politics interact? In what ways do they constitute everyday life among ethnic minorities? In "Getting By," Donald M. Nonini draws on three decades of research in the region of Penang state in northern West Malaysia, mainly in the city of Bukit Mertajam, to provide an ethnographic and historical account of the cultural politics of class conflict and state formation among Malaysians of Chinese descent.

Introduction: A Historical Ethnography of Class and State FormationChapter 1. Counterinsurgency, Silences, Forgetting, 1946-69Part I. Development (1969-85)Preface: Colonial Residues and "Development"Chapter 2. "Boom Town in the Making," 1978-80Chapter 3. "Getting By": The Arts of Deception and the "Typical Chinese"Chapter 4. Banalities of the Urban: Hegemony or State Predation?Chapter 5. Class Dismissed!Chapter 6. Men in Motion: The Dialectics of "Disputatiousness" and "Rice-Eating Money"Chapter 7. Chinese Society as "A Sheet of Loose Sand": Elite Arguments and Class Discipline in a Postcolonial EraPart II. Globalization (1985-97)Preface: Going GlobalChapter 8. Subsumption and Encompassment: Class, State Formation, and Production of Urban Space, 1980-97Chapter 9. Covert Global: Exit, Alternative Sovereignties, and Being StuckChapter 10. "Walking On Two Roads" and "Jumping Airplanes"Epilogue: 1997-2007Appendix: A Profile of Economic "Domination"?NotesReferencesIndex