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

SINGAPORE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 139
Table 5.1 Average proportion of expenditure spent on cooked food, by household size
Source: Dept of Statistics (1979:31, table 25); Dept of Statistics (1984:112, table 83); Dept of
Statistics (1989:23, table 11).
Ironically, the apparent homogenisation in the routines of everyday life of the
overwhelming majority also brings into high relief existing inequalities that demand
attention and comparisons. For example, private apartments, houses-on-the
ground and cars are coveted objects and are displayed as icons of success against
the sea of dependants on public housing and public transportation. As we shall
show later, every Singaporean has either to resign himself or herself to the position
of never-to-possess such goods or to compete aggressively for them, often at the
expense of other aspects of social and material life.
The significance and consequence of differences within a society that is
apparently homogeneous are also observable in primary-and secondary-school
education. In contrast to the ubiquitous neighbourhood schools, there emerged a
number of ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ schools which, although aided by
government grants similarly to the others, have greater freedom to raise school
fees, determine curriculums, develop facilities and select students. There is a
scramble for enrolling children in the kindergartens which are feeders to these
schools at both primary and secondary levels. 2
The competitions for positional goods, such as private housing and school
placement for children, constitute the lines that broadly divide social classes, and in
particular subdivide the middle class, in an increasingly stratified Singapore. This
chapter is concerned with this emerging stratification structure and the cultural
expressions of the new middle class.
In emphasising the relatively homogenised daily life of the overwhelming
majority of the population in the public-housing estate and the competition for
positional goods as significations of the emerging class structure, we are
consciously displacing ‘ethnicity’ as a variable in our current analysis. This
analytical displacement deserves some comment. In raising the class dimension,
our intention is precisely to provide an alternative to the conventional, thus
dominant and indeed most obvious and convenient, view that Singapore society is
divided along ethnic lines, comprising Chinese, Malays and Indians. The prevailing
rhetoric of multi-ethnic Singapore argues that each ethnic group is integrated
vertically, with the poor and rich of each group bound by a shared ‘traditional
culture’. Furthermore, this rhetoric argues that the similarity in culture among
members of the three ethnic groups is more significant, substantively and