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

A.B.SHAMSUL 89
THE MALAY NEW RIGH: POPULAR IDEAS AND
ANALYTICAL ELABORATIONS
There are at least two ways of looking at the new rich in the Malaysian context;
first, from the academic viewpoint and, second, from the popular perspective.
While they are not mutually exclusive, they have to be treated as equally
important. What is obvious though is the fact that there seems to be a ‘time-cumintellectual
lag’ between the two perspectives. The new rich have long been
popularly recognised as a significant social phenomenon and hence have been the
subject of lively public discourse. Only recently has academia begun to generate its
own focused discourse on the new rich, a subject which had been discussed
previously under a variety of broader sociological themes.
Let us start by examining briefly what has happened in the academic sphere in
Malaysia. In the first volume of The New Rich in Asia, Kahn (1996:49—75) presents
a concise and sophisticated interpretive overview of the kind of empirical and
conceptual challenges confronting any attempt to analyse the emergence of
Malaysia’s middle class, but amazingly avoids, as he says at the end of his chapter,
‘the question of what I mean by middle classes’ (1996:71). Yet earlier in the chapter
he unwittingly provides one answer by drawing attention to the failure of social
scientists studying Malaysia ‘to clarify the use of the concept in Malaysian
conditions, or to assess its impact on the taken-for-granted contours of Malaysian
society’ (1996:49).
It could be argued that the ‘elusiveness’ of the ‘new rich’ concept has
discouraged Malaysianists, both local and foreign, from tackling the concept head
on. Like Kahn, many Malaysianists have taken an indirect approach, subsuming
the discussion of topics such as the middle class under broader and more general
themes or concepts like ‘class, ethnicity, diversity’ (for example, Chandra Muzaffar
1984; Kahn 1992a), ‘modernity, subalternity and identity’ (Idrus 1981; Kahn 1991,
1994; Kessler 1992), ‘modernity and agrarian transformation’ (Shamsul 1986;
Stivens et al. 1994), ‘matriliny and modernity’ (Stivens 1996), ‘gender and social
change’ (Stivens 1994, 1996; Wazir Karim 1990), ‘religion and modernisation’
(Ong 1995; Shamsul 1995b, 1997b) and the like. In the light of this, Kahn’s (1996:
49) disappointment over the ‘outpouring of studies of peasants, factory women,
ethnicity and Islam…[with]…the growth of the middle class…largely ignored’ is both
misplaced and premature.
Based on his survey of the Malaysian situation, Kahn seems to suggest quite a
different interpretation of what constitutes the new rich to that outlined by Robison
and Goodman (1996:1—16). The latter suggest that the ‘new rich’ has two main
components, namely, the middle class and the bourgeoisie, not unlike the way the
recently coined term Melayu Baru is meant and used in Malaysia. As understood
in both the official and popular sense, the term Melayu Baru refers to Malays who
are the para tokoh korporat, or the ‘corporate figure-players’ (read ‘the
bourgeoisie’), as well as the golongan usahawan dan eksekutif, or the
‘entrepreneurs and executives group’ (read ‘the middle class’). But Kahn uses the