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

developed through a series of status oppositions centred around such ideas as
development, ethnicity, nationalism, merit and taste.
In the second chapter Ken Young looks at the importance of consumption as the
chief means by which the new rich in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore
create new identities for themselves. While outlining the structural conditions that
prefigure the emergence of the new rich in these four societies, Young draws
attention to the new roles, social positions and lifestyles in which the new rich find
themselves, and for which they are being resocialised. He argues that this takes
place through the practices of everyday life at such sites as workplaces, schools,
shopping malls and residential neighbourhoods, the last two of which he deals with
in some detail. While the new rich may be structurally heterogeneous, they have a
common capacity for discretionary spending which they use to mark themselves
off from others socially. The most important unifying force among them is to be
found in their new forms of consumption and public display, derived largely from
international middle-class fashion. Shopping malls, in particular, present the new
rich with an opportunity both to learn and display a style of life appropriate to their
new material circumstances. New residential estates serve a similar function, but
offer the new rich greater opportunity for social exclusivity. In developing this
argument, Young expressly rejects the common cultural stereotyping of the new
rich as predominantly ethnic Chinese. While this may appear to be statistically true,
Chinese ethnicity is not the pre-eminent mode of identification among the new rich,
nor is its meaning uniform. In noting the commonly apolitical character of the new
rich, Young also argues against the stereotype that defines them in terms of their
political agency.
In Chapter 3, A.B.Shamsul examines the historical trajectory of popular,
academic and official conceptualisations of the Malay new rich, in particular the
shift from the popular term Orang Kaya Baru (new rich person) to the statesponsored
expression Melayu Baru (new Malay). Though the dominant
understanding is positive, there are also elements of a subaltern discourse in which
both terms are rendered negatively. While acknowledging the importance of global
and regional political-economic processes to the formation of the Malay new rich,
Shamsul argues that their emergence also needs to be understood in terms of local
cultural politics. Thus the Malay new rich are shown to have come into existence
as an end product of the pursuit of Malay nationalism, first formulated in the 1920s
in response to British colonialism and the presence of a large, economically
powerful, Chinese immigrant community. On the one hand, the Malay new rich are
neo-liberal in their economic perspectives and share close economic and
professional relations with local Chinese capitalists; on the other, they have been a
major force behind the resurgence of Islam in Malaysia. Thus, Shamsul argues,
the emergence of the Malay new rich is as much about the pursuit of tradition as it
is about the arrival of modernity.
In the fourth chapter, also on Malaysia, Wendy Smith draws attention to the
importance of understanding the micro-processes through which the new rich have
been shaped, and to the workplace as the arena in which many of these processes
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