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

4 MICHAEL PINCHES
century Europe are limited or inadequate in dealing with contemporary Asia, than
that they have also been limited or inadequate in dealing with the West. Indeed,
some writers in the West have recently disputed the general empirical and
conceptual validity of class (Pakulski and Waters 1996; Lee and Turner 1996).
Yet, as will be argued in this and other chapters of this book, class differences and
relations, however problematic they may be conceptually and analytically, are
fundamental to an understanding of the cultural construction of Asia’s new rich.
In assessing the East/West cultural divide, which has been so important in the
identity construction of the new rich in Asia, it is also necessary to look critically at
the particular concept of culture upon which it is based: like the sociological concept
of class, it too has its origins in Western academic discourse. There have been two
principal conceptions of the term ‘culture’ (Williams 1981:10—14; Jenks 1993), both
of them used in commentaries on Asia. The earlier concept uses culture as a
synonym for civilisation, or what is sometimes called high culture; its opposite
being that which is seen to be uncivilised, vulgar and backward. This
understanding rests both on a sociological distinction, which posits the coexistence
of a people who are civilised and a people who are not, and a historical trajectory of
progress from a state of barbarity to one of civilisation. It is this latter idea that is
embedded in early modernisation theory which posits a historical shift from
tradition to modernity.
The second principal conception of culture, elaborated most fully in the
discipline of anthropology, refers not to culture in the singular, as a state of civility
or refinement, but to cultures in the plural, as the ways of life or symbolic universes
that characterise different societies or peoples. With the Asian economic miracle’,
there seems to have been a paradigm shift from culture to cultures. 4 Thus,
traditions in Asia are no longer seen as inferior or historically frozen antecedents of
European modernity; rather they are now cultural traditions that rank alongside
the cultural traditions of Europe, coexistent but separate and essentially different.
The relativism and multiplicity evident in this understanding of culture clearly
reverberate with present popular representations of Asia in the West, and with the
general growth of ethnic and cultural self-consciousness (Smith 1981; Kahn 1995),
but by no means is there consensus. Anthropologists have long debated the
concept of culture. Indeed, with the emergence of cultural studies and postmodern
theory, the debate over culture has become more far-reaching, and is arguably the
most central to contemporary social thought (see Rosaldo 1989; Keesing 1990;
Hannerz 1992; Nelson et al. 1992; Featherstone 1990, 1995; Jenks 1993; Chaney
1994; Dirks et al. 1994; Kahn 1995).
Four criticisms of the concept of multiple cultures are of particular significance to
our concern with the new rich of Asia. First, many versions of this model of culture,
particularly those which emphasise socialisation or culture as learned behaviour.
have difficulty acknowledging or theorising human agency. Secondly, culture as a
bounded way of life, or system of symbols and meanings, fails to deal adequately with
social change and historical process. Thirdly, humans do not live in clearly
bounded groups with clearly bounded ways of life, or clearly bounded values and