Two letters published in your newspaper concerning race, ethnicity and cultural identity have come to my attention. Fatima Idris , a sensitive reader, was correct in pointing out a paradox in Jimmy Puah 's argument. The latter should be commended for his attempt to spell out the ambiguities between race and ethnicity.

Both letters raise important issues and a lack of understanding of those issues, especially race, continues to hamper the development of a Malaysian national cultural identity.

Firstly, let us look at race. The idea of biological determinism, that one is born a Chinese, Indian or Malay, has run its course. This was the same idea that was used to argue for race superiority. Recent scientific studies, especially the study of the human genome, have made clear that all human beings are of the same 'race'.

But this does not mean that we are any less Chinese, Malay or Indian. The latter are ethnic categories rather than racial ones. Hence, Fatimah's query about the products of an adoption and her discomfort at Puah's assertion about Vietnamese being never able to become Chinese. The latter was a race-based statement rather than ethnic-oriented one. Fatimah goes on to point out that one can be a Malay despite having the physical features commonly associated with ethnic Chinese. To Fatimah, ethnic identity is not innate but can be cultivated.

The idea that a 'Vietnamese can never be a Chinese' is interesting. To Puah, 'Chinese-ness' is a concrete and solid identity. I believe he means that culturally, some Vietnamese, especially in the south of that country, are ethnically Chinese. Thus his statement can be refined to read: a Vietnamese is culturally different from a Chinese because of his Vietnamese experience.

The point I am trying to make is that cultural identity is what defines ethnicity and that racial determinism muddies the waters instead of clarifying things. In this case, culture is defined as a 'way of life', the customs and practices that define a community at a particular time.

In the Malaysian context, the Malays for example, are an ethnic category that are much influenced by their physical and socio-economic contexts. The former gives rise to their physical features, the latter to their cultural identity. Hence, if Puah finds Malay identity mind-boggling because it appears so fluid, this is precisely because the Malay world was a an open society, open to different religions and cultures. Hence, the Jawi Peranakan (descendants of Indian Muslims and local women who have settled into a Malay lifestyle) are accepted as Malays.

But this also shows that the Malays are an evolving category and its most recent radical shift has been to identify with Islam, in some quarters fundamentalist Islam. To the Chinese mind, especially those who are still caught up with racial purity and other unscientific ways of thinking about ethnicity, such fluidity is regarded with great suspicion.

If Chinese identities appear more solid, it is because they spring from a bureaucratic system, originally based in Peking, centred in an imperial capital. This resulted in a cultural identity that was less permeable. Hence, Buddhism, originally from India, became 'Chinese' when coming into contact with Chinese civilisation. To use a crude analogy, the Chinese are like the Borgs in 'Star Trek', something that is highly systematic and that assimilates whatever it encounters.

But it also means that they do change as the elements they accept into their cultural system eventually influences their identity. Thus a Chinese Malaysian is different culturally from a Chinese Indonesian or a China-born Chinese because of our Malaysian experience.

Malaysia's present national predicament lies in the difficulty of fusing together all these different types of cultural identities. We have also to figure in the Indian model, which is open and often divided among different competing centres of authority. Not forgetting the other indigenous societies that make up the Malaysian fabric.

But these are not weaknesses. Rather, they are strengths. If we are to build a national cultural identity, it might be worthwhile looking at all these cultural characteristics and abandoning the outdated concept called race. That readers of this newspaper can identify such fissures in the old way of thinking bodes well for the future of this nation.