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

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are focused. Based on a study of the Japanese company Iroha (Malaysia), Smith
highlights and analyses the important distinctions that have emerged among the
Malay new rich in terms of state and corporate patronage, lifestyle differences,
village, ethnic and class affiliations. These differences variously centre on the
impact of the Japanese system of management, and on the Mahathir regime’s New
Economic Policy. While all Malays working for Iroha enjoy new wealth, sociocultural
distinctions have opened up between four groups: senior managers from
the old Malay middle class; veteran junior managers from peasant origins, who
have risen up through the company; educated junior managers, also from peasant
origins, who have benefited from state scholarships; and workers, who enjoy
greater spending power than they had in their home villages. Smith documents and
explains the varied ways in which these groups have assumed distinctive social
and cultural identities.
Singapore has been transformed over three generations from a society that was
more or less homogeneously poor to one in which nearly everyone can be
described as newly rich. Relative both to their own pasts and to other peoples in
the region, Singaporeans are encouraged by their politicians to see themselves as
high achievers. Moreover, heavy state spending on goods of collective
consumption often evokes images of a nation that is now uniformly middle-class. In
Chapter 5, Chua Beng Huat and Tan Joo Ean reject this image, along with the
other common representation of Singapore as a society founded on ethnic
distinction. Instead, they argue that Singapore has become an increasingly
stratified society, in which social distinctions and private aspirations revolve
around the idea of meritocracy, measured principally through differing levels of
private consumption, in particular the possession of a car and private house.
According to Chua and Tan, this general preoccupation exceeds any overt concern
with or involvement in political matters, and accounts for the absence of a
distinctive working-class consciousness in Singapore. Yet among the middle class,
they suggest, there is an important distinction between the contented and the
anxiety-laden. They argue further that the richest Singaporeans are notable for
their inconspicuous consumption, in part because of their ‘transnationalised’
identities, and because of attempts by the state to contain the potentially disruptive
effects of growing wealth disparities.
In the sixth chapter, Ariel Heryanto traces the origins of the Indonesian new rich
to the economic boom of the three decades to 1997, but he expressly rejects any
attempt to reduce their emerging cultural identity to economic forces alone. In
particular, he draws attention to the increasing preoccupation with lifestyle and
consumption, both on the part of the new rich themselves, but also among the
general populace. In large part this can be understood as an outcome of the need to
establish a new hegemonic order for the emergent bourgeoisie, in the face of an
older nationalist/populist political culture that was hostile to capitalism, foreigners
and the West. This could be sustained while the rich were predominantly
Caucasian or Chinese, but the growing number of rich or middle-class indigenous
Indonesians, commonly allied with wealthy ethnic Chinese, created a new need to