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

128 WENDY A.SMITH
event served to introduce many of the local managers to the game, and some, like
Ridzuan, took it up as a career strategy thereafter.
Senior managers: patronage and ethnicity
Although patron-client relations exist in Japanese society too, it is on a more
individual level in the context of a pervasive and long-established middle-class
ethos in the society. In contemporary Japan, patron–client relations would
serve the strategic interests of individuals involved, for instance, in politics or in
business. It would thus be difficult for individual Japanese managers to understand
the obligations that middle-class Malays feel to the less-well-off in their society, not
just to their immediate kin, but to a wider circle of relatives and members of the
same village or to ‘Malays’ in general. This custom of distributing wealth from rich
to poor is reinforced by the notion of giving charity in Islam. For instance, cousins
or nieces and nephews of an urban middle-class Malay would reasonably expect
financial support with their education. Even more distant relatives would not
necessarily be turned away, especially for more temporary help, such as assistance
in receiving treatment in the urban Western-style hospital. And a Malay from one’s
kampung who came to the house asking for help would not be turned away
without some form of assistance.
However, even among the Malays, there is slowly developing the inwardly
closed focus typical of the Western middle-class nuclear family which looks after its
own members’ financial interests and social advancement to the exclusion of other
kin or members of society, except in the form of tax payments or formal donations
to charity. This is because the cash required for status consumption in one’s own
nuclear family is so much that Malay parents cannot afford to be too generous to
numerous relatives and still maintain the prevailing status symbols of the middle
class of other ethnic groups. This has been exacerbated by urban living where the
ethnic groups live together in modern housing estates and their children attend the
same schools.
The present generation of middle-class Malays, however, are still only one
generation removed from a village existence with a peasant social ethos, where
patron-client relations are a matter of honour and shame in a face-to-face
smallscale community where the boundaries of kinship and friendship are blurred.
Older Malays feel these ties more strongly. Thus Sanusi, the personnel manager,
conducted his relationships within the factory as if it were a village and practised
generalised patronage towards the Malay workers. In doing so he sometimes went
beyond the boundaries of the contractual and contextually-specific relationship
patterns typical of modern organisations.
The senior local managers who were mainly Chinese were from established
middle-class origins and were much less likely to express their ethnicity overtly in
terms of material symbols or behaviour. Because of the prohibitions on consuming
pork and alcohol for Malays, the local senior managers only got together for eating
and drinking on the occasion of a work-related event, a dinner in the general