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

192 CULTURAL TENSIONS IN RURAL INDONESIA
‘the new rich’. These people have successfully taken advantage of the new
opportunity provided by the opening up of the economy in the mid-1970s. Since
the 1980s they have been able to invest in capital goods, and to expose publicly their
new patterns of consumption.
During the last twenty years in Indonesia, there has been a dramatic increase in
state intervention in village affairs. Many of the new rich are village-based state
clients. Through a strategy of ‘civilian patronage’ the Indonesian government has
recruited nearly all local notables and leaders into state functions. Sariendah has
178 official positions in 18 state-related formal associations (Antlöv 1995:50—8).
These leaders-cum-state-clients are expected to be loyal to the government and to
promote extension programmes and state directives faithfully. In exchange, they
get privileged access to credit schemes and government programmes, and the
ideological support of higher authorities in their search for increased wealth and
power. They make up a large share of the new rich.
The rise of the rural OKB and state officials in Indonesia is only secondarily a
result of market forces: first and foremost they have been empowered by the New
Order to be loyal state representatives and brokers between the local government
and higher authorities. Access to the market and wealth have followed naturally
from this. The access to property and bureaucracy has allowed certain individuals
to carve out a new middle-class identity. In Thailand the middle class is
ideologically constructed by its role in the democratisation movement, while in
Malaysia it has been as the Malay element within a complex cultural/ethnic
mosaic (see Shamsul and Ockey, this volume). The middle class in Indonesia is
also culturally constructed: they are the ideological champions of the New Order.
Again, this is nothing new. In the 1950s the indigenous middle class was mobilised
within the so-called Benteng programme to ‘Indonesianise’ the Chinese-dominated
economy. Today, given that the Chinese entrepreneurs have close connections
with the government, many of the new rich are dependent on the Chinese for their
wealth.
Before 1965 it was difficult for the rich to spend their income on building
personal wealth. The two decades 1945—65 were characterised by intense political
activity. A myriad of political parties competed for power. Members of village
councils were elected by the village population, and local power-holders had to vie
for votes and invest in village loyalties. Attempts by the village elite to introduce
labour-saving devices and monopolise power were successfully combated by the
poor. Landowners could not withdraw from their local responsibilities without
running the risk of being socially ostracised.
This political setting changed radically in 1965, when Suharto ascended to power.
With a policy that Wertheim (1969) has called ‘betting on the strong’, Suharto
introduced a new trickle-down modernisation programme, in which village-based
state clients played a central role. By involving them in agricultural intensification
and small-scale industrial development, it was hoped that Indonesia would become
a developed nation. Accompanying this opening up of the economy was a closing
down of politics. Control of administrative offices, the hierarchical organisation of