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

modernity without at the same time causing social instability. We should thus
watch carefully the relationships between the new rich and ordinary people.
POSTSCRIPT
Laying the last hand on this chapter, in February 1998, Indonesia is experiencing
the worst economic and political crisis in thirty years. I believe that part of this
crisis can be understood as a consequence of the tensions described in this chapter.
During recent years, Indonesia has seen an increasingly large gap between statebacked
capitalists and those without privileged access to state resources. More
recently this has created a lack of confidence that the present system is sustainable,
which in turn has led to a political crisis. The scale might be very different from that
in Sariendah, but I would argue that some of the mechanisms are the same. Just
as in Sariendah, there is a need for social adjustments to be made between state
actors and the great majority of the Indonesian population. The cultural tensions
discussed for rural Indonesia in this chapter will become increasingly visible arenas
of struggle as new political structures are introduced.
Notes
1 For more details on this argument, see Tønnesson and Antlöv (1996). For empirical
material, see Tønnesson and Antlöv (forthcoming).
2 For a similar argument for the British middle class, see Savage et al. (1992).
3 For more on Pancasila see Antlöv (1995:37—8).
4 See Heryanto (1988).
5 Quoted from President Suharto’s 1988 Independence Day speech.
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