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

HANS ANTLÖV 195
wonder how he can afford it. And they also wonder how he manages to work in
Bandung, run the shop, and act as Golkar chairman, all at the same time.
To be OKB, or new rich, is not only a matter of income. It is also related to
cultural tastes and attitude. The term ‘OKB' in itself is somewhat derogatory and
tells of a villager who does not really belong to the community or who does not
conform to village values. And this is true of many of the new rich. In lifestyle and
values, they set themselves off from others. ‘OKB’ is not used to characterise the
traditional elite or those villagers who, over generations or decades, have gained
enough income to live a comfortable life. An understanding of the OKB must
therefore recognise the way people conceptualise their social character: as frugal,
pretentious and secluded (which was exactly what neighbours thought of Sunarya).
The OKB are sometimes called the kaget kaya, the ‘confounded rich’, because they
do not have the social competence, sensitivity or basic savoir faire to manage their
riches: sensing, for example, that it is enough with one car, not three, or that one must
invite neighbours, and not only peers, to village celebrations.
This is not to say that the values of the OKB and other exponents of modernity
are not taking root. People call the times of today zaman duit, the Age of Money.
Economic ventures are pursued to maximise individual profits. Wealth is
accumulated and invested for further profit. Money is needed to pay school fees, to
commute to work, to get a sick-leave letter from the hamlet chairman and to get a
son or daughter through high school. In the New Order, people must live up to
what is expected of them as Indonesian citizens: bring education to their children
and health-care to the family. The obligations of a responsible citizen put pressure
on people to have a regular income, and to be hard-working, loyal employees. A
good description of petty businessmen in Jakarta is provided by Murai, who
argues that they are: ‘hard put to keep up appearances as modern salary men and
to meet the costs of their children’s education…the demands of their jobs require
that they even…dine in first-class restaurants when necessary to fulfill business and
social obligations. But to scrape together the money to do so they eat lunch for 100
rupiah at street stalls’ (Murai 1994:37). This is also the theme of several recent
Indonesian films.
If one wants to be a good New Order citizen, one should be self-reliant and
competent, escaping the inward-looking ‘traditional’ lifestyle. Some poor villagers
are now embarrassed to ask help from neighbours because they fear that a
request will be turned down, and they will consequently ‘lose face’. Indeed, some
moderen households hesitate to offer help to neighbours with the cynical argument
that the poor have themselves to blame for their poverty. The social mechanisms
that once used to support poor households (such as labour exchanges and public
harvests) have all but disappeared in the face of a rapidly growing population and
more commercial approaches to work. In a comparative article on agrarian
transformation in Thailand and Java, Gillian Hart (1989:35) argues that social and
religious relations of patronage, which might mitigate conflict and resentment
against inequality, ‘are notably absent in Java’.