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

HANS ANTLÖV 191
growing population. In the densely populated areas of Java and the central plain of
Thailand, I find it difficult to draw a clear distinction between urban and rural
communities: at times Java feels like a giant suburb (to Jakarta? Singapore?
Tokyo?). Again, this does not mean that everyone is urban and modern. People
remain in the countryside, even many of the new rich, and the socio-cultural setting
affects the ways they can adopt and present their new morality. Changes are
localised, in as much as they take on local shapes and forms that cannot be
interpreted simply as a process of global convergence. It is in the local settings that
we might find some of the more interesting processes of globalisation occurring. In
a sense, the new rich do not conform to our sociological understanding of them. 2
The whole idea of an increasingly homogeneous social class with converging
patterns of consumption, cultural tastes and political preferences is put to shame in
light of real practices.
Savage et al. (1992) distinguish three assets that allow the middle class to
establish a separate class identity: property, bureaucracy and culture. Property is
the wealth that gives rise to capitalist class formation; bureaucratic assets allow the
middle class to control the labour of subordinates and to secure a place for
themselves through hierarchical bureaucratic positions; culture becomes
exploitative when one’s own cultural tastes are made legitimate and other lifestyles
are discredited. Mutually antagonistic classes are formed as each group attempts
to legitimise its own culture. As we will see, these assets are of varying value in
contemporary Indonesia: the cultural assets are relatively speaking less significant,
while bureaucratic assets are the most important.
THE RURAL NEW RICH IN THEIR CONTEXT
In the following section I will discuss the positions, assets and tensions that
characterise the rural new rich in a Sundanese village in West Java, here called
Sariendah, which I have visited regularly since 1986. Sariendah has been
integrated into an international market since the early 1930s when textile mills
were set up in the neighbouring town of Majalaya. Close to half of Sariendah’s
population travel daily the seven kilometres to the weaving factories in Majalaya.
With its 7,000 people occupying two square kilometres, Sariendah is not your
typical closed corporate peasant community. It is rather a good representative of
the new semi-urban villages that are emerging in Indonesia (and elsewhere in Asia)
with economic and population growth. Peasants in Sariendah have successfully
adopted the green revolution and programmes of economic diversification, but
villagers still maintain in many ways a moral community based on intimacy and
social order.
The people with whom we will be concerned in this chapter make up an
expanding group of villagers who have enjoyed radically improved living
stan dards, and who are trying to break away from the intimate social order of
their locality. These are the people who have embraced most vigorously a new
socalled moderen lifestyle. Neighbours call them orang kaya baru, or simply OKB,