Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

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From Orang Kaya Baru to Melayu Baru
Cultural construction of the Malay ‘new rich’
A.B.Shamsul
Does any culture seek inferiority? …We studied how non-Western
cultures alter their societies in an effort to attain equality or
superiority, but we used criteria and a framework that relegated them
to an interpretive position as the perpetual inferior.
(Tanaka 1993:ix)
In the introduction to the first volume in the series on the ‘new rich’ in Asia, editors
Robison and Goodman (1996) note that the ‘imprecise’ nature of the new rich, both
in analytical and empirical terms, concerns the ‘imprecise’ nature of the new rich
as an analytical tool (Robison and Goodman 1996:5). Indeed, this conclusion is
evident throughout the volume. Moreover, the major component concepts under the
rubric of the new rich, namely ‘the middle class’ and ‘the bourgeoisie’, suffer the
same problem of imprecision. In fact, some of the contributors go as far as to
demonstrate not only the imprecise nature of these concepts but also their
elusiveness. After some twenty pages of interpretation on the ‘growth, economic
transformation, culture and the middle classes in Malaysia’, one author declares, in
a Kafkaesque ending, that: ‘I have here avoided the question of what I mean by
“middle classes’” (Kahn 1996: 48—75).
However, Robison and Goodman do provide a general statement, regarding
those they consider the new rich in Asia as: ‘the new wealthy social groups that
have emerged from industrial change in Asia, particularly during the past two
decades’ (1996:5). They also emphasise from the outset that the main task of the
research is to provide an analysis of the new rich in contemporary Asia, defined
within the criteria and framework of academic interpretation and the ‘political
economy’ approach (Robison and Goodman 1996:xi—xii, 5—10). This could also be
understood to mean that the research, conducted by middle-class academics, is
interested only in the social group called the ‘new rich’: who they are, what they do,
how they live, how they think and what their future is in Asia. How the rest of the
society, especially those from the lower class and the peasantry, think about or
perceive the new rich would appear to be of no real consequence to this study.
Inevitably, this has resulted in the unintended exclusion of two significant factors
pertinent to the ‘cultural construction’ of the new rich in Asia: first, the changing