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

legitimate wealth. Anti-Chinese sentiments were being phased out of New
Order political rhetoric and capitalism is being redefined as consistent with the
state ideology of Pancasila. Leading business figures sought to establish their
nationalist and cultural credentials through such activities as public poetry recitals
and declarations of their willingness to help the needy. According to Heryanto, the
legitimacy of the new rich as big-spending consumers rests heavily on the fact that
Indonesian national identity is itself being redefined through the appropriation and
thus subversion of things Western. Even the ascendancy of Islam among the new
rich works through their consumer lifestyles. Yet there is no consensus on the
meaning of national identity, and Heryanto observes that the conspicuous
consumption associated with the new rich continues to arouse moral
condemnation from some quarters, critical of its Western origins.
Similar points also arise in Chapter 7 where Hans Antlöv examines the
contradictory character of the new rich in the west Javanese village of Sariendah.
He disputes the argument that the new rich constitute an unambiguous force for
modernisation, arguing that while they increasingly pursue a life of privatised
consumer comfort, they choose to do so as members of a close-knit village
community. In part, this choice arises because of the dependence of most new rich
on state privileges, which in turn depend on their promoting state developmental
programmes and political consent within the village. The contradictory character
of the village new rich in part rests on the different roles they perform on behalf of
the state: as political and economic brokers between state agencies and the
community, and as role models of modernity, expressed in their private
accumulation of wealth and consumer lifestyle. While ordinary villagers are
themselves largely dependent on ‘modern’ factory employment and green
revolution technology, they invoke a ‘traditional’ discourse in their criticisms of
these tensions in the behaviour of the new rich.
Like Antlöv’s chapter, Chris Buckley’s on China (Chapter 8) traces the sources
of wealth of many of Beijing’s new rich to the position they occupy or occupied
within the state, and to the way in which they have turned this to private material
advantage. The most prominent and numerous are well-credentialled party
members associated with bureaucratic authority and/or professional expertise, in
particular those who have moved from such positions into business . While some
have risen from small businesses and lower occupational backgrounds, an
inordinate number have parents with backgrounds similar to their own. In a context
of an uncertain market and capricious bureaucracy, access to capital depends
crucially on the generation of, and participation in, mutual help networks made up
of people from like backgrounds. The patterns of trust and reputation that are
central to the operation of these networks are in turn played out through particular
modes of gift-giving and status signification centred on conspicuous consumption.
The literature which simply describes this conspicuous consumption, usually
critically, generally ignores or trivialises the social processes that lie behind it.
Furthermore, while there is an important instrumental dimension to the individual
practices associated with this, what is generated too is a particular form of
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