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

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collective identity and sociality that offers its own rewards, and which is coming to
represent a distinctive middle-class way of life.
In Chapter 9, Jim Ockey deals with the varied ways in which the Thai new rich
are represented as middle-class in academic and political discourse. He argues
that, both sociologically and conceptually, there is not one middle class but a
number: the white-collar middle class, the educated middle class and the consumer
middle class, measured respectively in terms of occupational categories,
educational credentials and patterns of consumption. Ockey notes that each of
these middle classes is defined according to objective structural criteria. In
addition, he says, there are two other middle classes, identified according to the
criteria of action or consciousness. The first, characterised in terms of a particular
lifestyle constructed through commodity consumption and advertising, is most
directly associated with the ‘consumer middle class’. The second, characterised in
terms of democratic activism and political influence, is founded on a particular
interpretation of popular urban uprisings as ‘middle-class’. This latter construction,
which ignores working-class participation in popular uprisings, is principally the
self-serving creation of educated intellectuals. In Thailand the general term ‘middleclass’
is applied to all of these categories and modes of behaviour. Yet Ockey
argues that while there is some overlap between them, there is also significant
variation. While much discursive energy has been devoted to the cultural
construction of a Thai middle class, it has not produced nor converged around a
clearly delineated social entity.
In India, as in Thailand and a number of other countries in the region, the new
rich are popularly represented as the middle class. Over the past two decades
much attention has focused on the burgeoning Indian middle class, equating it not
just with increasing prosperity in India, but also with the processes of economic
liberalisation and global consumerism. In Chapter 10, Salim Lakha traces the
growing number of Indian capitalist entrepreneurs and educated middle-class
professionals in relation to state-sponsored development programmes and the
globalised movement of capital and professional labour. He argues that there has
now come into being a new rich middle class whose identity is both global and, at
the same time, rooted in India. He focuses, in particular, on the cultural role of
diasporic Indians in the formation of this global Indian middle class, both as the
bearers of outside knowledge and experience, and as the carriers of such things as
Indian religious nationalism and caste or communal identities. The peculiar tension
between global and local that characterises this new rich middle class is what
distinguishes it from other classes in India, including other segments of a more
broadly defined middle class.
In the final chapter, on the Philippines, I examine the emergence of the new rich
as a social and cultural phenomenon that largely needs to be understood in a
context of regional and domestic contestation over national and dominant class
identities. The chapter deals with two principal representations that have
developed around the new rich. The first concerns a rhetoric of entrepreneurship
which variously celebrates the ideas of liberal democracy, Filipino-Chinese ethnicity