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

90 FROM ORANG KAYA BARU TO MELAYU BARA
term ‘new Malays’, or Melayu Baru, to refer only to Malays who are ‘in the
corporate sector and political elites’ (Kahn 1996:67), or ‘the bourgeoisie’ (Robison
and Goodman 1996:5), but not those in ‘the middle class(es)’, who, according to
him, are the ‘new rich’. In other words, Kahn seems to have half-understood the
term Melayu Baru as it is used in Malaysia, both in the public and academic
sphere.
In the Malaysian academic discourse, from the 1950s until the 1970s, components
of the Asian ‘new rich’, as understood by Robison and Goodman (1996: 1—15),
were each studied and analysed separately, often subsumed, under the broader
sociological themes noted above. This reflects both the nature and development of
social scientific studies on and in Malaysia as much as the prevailing social reality.
For instance, in the 1950s and early 1960s, topics related to the components within
the present-day concept ‘new rich’ were investigated under the broad topic ‘economic
development and cultural change’ (Ungku Aziz 1951, 1975; Swift 1965). From the
mid-1960s onwards they were discussed in the context of the study of social
stratification, social mobility and occupation (Husin Ali 1964; Mokhzani 1965;
Alatas 1967). Mokhzani (1965) suggested two reasons for this: first, the absence of
an academic department of sociology and anthropology in the local university
(until 1970, Malaysia had only one university: the University of Malaya) and,
secondly, the ‘cultural’ (read ‘orientalist’) orientation of past writers on Malaysian
subjects.
It was only in the 1970s, after the setting up of new universities in Malaysia, that
academic departments of anthropology and sociology were established in three of
the five universities. The academic teaching and research activities, as well as
academic discourse generated by these departments, opened up new foci of
research informed by a variety of theoretical orientations. Some of these
concerned the significance of Malaysian stratified society for the conceptualisation
of social status and rank (Abdul Kahar Bador 1967, 1970), social consciousness
and entrepreneurship (Papenoe 1970; Tham Seong Chee 1973a, 1973b, 1977;
Abdul Kahar Bador 1973), leadership (Husin Ali 1975), and the distribution of
benefits from so-called planned development projects (Tham Seong Chee 1973b;
Rudner 1994; Shamsul 1977). By the mid-1970s, the research topics had begun to
narrow, focusing on ‘new rich’-related themes, concerning middle-class bureaucrats
(Nordin Selat 1976), elite formation (Lee 1980; Scott 1978; Khasnor 1984), and
professional groups and entrepreneurs (Lee 1976; MacAndrews 1977; Mohd. Fauzi
Yaacob 1981; Shamsul 1986). In the 1980s, the focus narrowed further, dealing
with such topics as educated groups and the rise of Islamic revivalism (Zainah
Anwar 1987; Chandra Muzaffar 1987), and emerging corporate groups (Jesudason
1989; Gomez 1990; Lim Mah Hui 1985). Debates over the applicability of different
analytical concepts–like ‘plural society’, ‘class’, ‘ethnicity/race’, ‘political economy’
and ‘gender’–to dissect Malaysian society also became commonplace (Brennan
1982; Lim Mah Hui 1980; Jomo 1986; Shang 1976; Kua Kia Soong 1981). These
were followed by a series of studies on the ‘politics and poetics of identity’ (Nagata
1979; Hirschman 1986; Strauch 1981; Peletz 1993; Tan Leok Ee 1988).