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

130 WENDY A.SMITH
students, only a life of school lessons, homework, religious observances and the
pressure to succeed. It was a very artificial lifestyle and the young people were
deprived of the stabilising influences of warm family relationships in their
adolescent years. These schools became a fertile ground for Muslim
fundamentalism (Shamsul 1995), and there were even outbreaks of mass hysteria
of the type found among Malaysian female industrial workers in the non-unionised
semiconductor factories. Here workers are highly regimented and there are no
formal avenues of protest (Ong 1987).
Thus we find that Malay middle-class culture in the post NEP era is often a
mixture of what would seem to be paradoxically juxtaposed elements:
fundamentalist piety and extreme materialism–the need to demonstrate status
with expensive consumer items. The importance of performing the pilgrimage to
Mecca for middle-class Malay couples in their thirties can be understood in this
context.
With this background of being bumiputera graduates and having themselves
experienced hardship during their schooling and a degree of social dislocation from
their parents’ social world, the new graduates had lost the thread of the patronclient
village-style relationships maintained by older-generation Malays like Sanusi.
They had become more individualist in their status orientations, demonstrating
status with material possessions alone rather than combining this with a show of
patronage to those less fortunate than themselves. In other words, they were
becoming middle-class in the isolationist sense typical of the middle-class nuclear
family in mature middle-class Western societies. They would not have observed
first-hand the hardship experienced by the workers as squatters in the illegal
kampungs on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s, before these workers
began to have income levels sufficient to purchase low-cost terrace houses in the
1980s. Even if they knew about the hardships of the workers’ lives, they would not
have reason to care since their success was an individual achievement, created by
scholarships provided by the state and their own hard work, not by parents or
wealthy relatives. This gave them a one-dimensional confidence and, with it, a
degree of arrogance, the arrogance of those who are not really sure of themselves.
They were obligated to the state, not to an individual patron, for their position, so
they had no role model of patronage. Furthermore, any large act of generosity would
jeopardise their ability to fund their own children’s future (so much more expensive
in terms of paid tuition, other activities and mandatory brand-name gym shoes
costing $200 a pair, than the kampung childhood they had experienced).
Because the new graduates did not seem to care about the workers, it was said
that the Japanese were able to use them from the 1980s onwards in support of
policies which disadvantaged the workers in the name of productivity. Examples of
this were the removal of male general workers from the packing room, leaving the
ageing women packers to carry the heavy boxes formerly carried by the young male
workers; the reduction of overtime, on which many workers depended to pay their
motorbike loans, their housing loans and other hire purchase arrangements and so
on. As Sanusi explained, there was no way the new graduates could envisage the