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

SINGAPORE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 145
attainment than their fathers (Quah et al. 1991:210). This generalised upward
mobility has brought about corresponding changes in consumption patterns across
generations.
This is best illustrated by a typical three-generation extended family. Between
the grandparents’ and parents’ generations, Singapore has been transformed
physically from a city with a deteriorating and overpopulated urban core, fringed
by squatters in impermanent structures, to one with nothing but modern high-rise
commercial and residential structures, which follow breathlessly major trends in
international architectural design. This physical transformation is itself indicative
of the generalised improvements in material life for the entire population in terms
of sustained employment, health and social security. If improvements between
these two generations had been confined to basic needs and attendant social and
psychological stabilities in daily life, further improvements into the third generation
transforms Singapore to a palpable consumer society.
This consumer society is played out most explicitly among those who are aged
from their mid-teens to their mid-twenties. This is a period in which consumerism
as a way of life can be exercised with greatest impunity because one is adult
enough to make independent consumer choices, although often with the financial
indulgence of parents, but too young for the responsibilities of adulthood, when the
anxieties of cars and houses close in. It is indeed a decade-long window of
consumption.
The body has become the locus of consumption of this age stratum, with emphasis
on clothes and other accessories of self-adornment. This is evident across social
classes, each with its own ‘style’. Among the lesser-educated twenty-somethings,
gold is still the rage: gold watches, gold pens, gold-plated lighters, chunky gold
bracelets and rings, and gold-plated hand-phones. In contrast, for tertiary-educated
young professionals, understatement to the point of self-effacement is the rule;
display of ‘taste’ is largely through prominent designer labels which they wear
proudly, giving rise to the colloquial term of ‘branded’ good. They are the ‘walking
mannequins’ of mass-marketed designer-labelled goods.
Teenagers, extending to university students, are equally inscribed with ‘brand’
consciousness–Armani jeans, DKNY blouses, Esprit dresses and Dr Marten’s
shoes. As the group that is least subjected to the need to appear ‘respectable’, and
who are most exposed to international music and television–which constitutes an
image bank from which they draw–they tend to attempt a sense of being ‘funky’
through the sartorial language of ‘American street fashion’. It is in this apparent
mimicry that the cultural-moral criticism of youths is to be located.
In addition to simple moral criticism of being materialistic and spendthrift,
teenagers are also criticised, not only by parents but also by the PAP government,
as being ‘Westernised’, invoking a simplistically and dichotomously constituted
cultural-moral discourse of ‘decadent West/wholesome East (Asia)’. Thus, the
‘aping’ of American funk is read as symptomatic of the ‘cultural confusion’ of youth,
who are seen to have lost their cultural bearings and identity as Asians. However,
consistent with the postmodernist injunction that identity is configured and