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

6 MICHAEL PINCHES
Of course there are other traditions of analysis in these disciplines, and in the
study of transformation in Asia, most notably political economy, the analytical
perspective adopted in the first two volumes of this series. It is hardly surprising, in
light of the above-mentioned criticisms of the culture concept and the simplistic
way in which writers like Simone and Feraru continue to use it, that many political
economists, like Robison and Goodman (1996a) and Rodan (1996), either ignore
cultural analysis or else cast their own modes of analysis in opposition to it. The
arguments presented in this volume suggest that they throw the baby out with the
bathwater: first, in sidestepping the questions of identity construction and related
issues that have been crucial to the making of Asia’s new rich; second, in not
exploring far enough the hegemonic shifts that have accompanied the emergence of
the new rich in Asia; and third, in not dealing reflexively with their own class
constructions of the new rich. 7
The perspective adopted in this volume does not assume the primacy of cultural
explanation, and rejects any attempt to encapsulate the region as a whole, or
individual countries within it, by reference to a particular culture. Nor does it adopt
the view that cultural constructions are mere epiphenomena of base economic or
political processes. Indeed, a central argument in the volume is that a cultural
understanding of the new rich is integral to an analysis of these processes. Though
individual contributions vary, the overall perspective is a dialectical one, which
locates the construction or maintenance of belief, value and meaning, in reference
to questions of power and inequality, in a context of shifting social, political and
economic relations. According to this view, the cultural realm is a realm of
variance, tension, contestation, ambiguity and fluidity, into which social actors are
thrust, through which they may pursue advantage, and in which they may be
subjugated. At each of these points the realm of meanings and symbols is crucial,
not just in dialectical relation to political-economic structures, but also in dialectical
relation to human agency. Thus, on the one hand we need to consider how people
create and convey meaning through symbols, yet on the other, how these
meanings and symbols may become embedded in habitual practice, orientations
and institutions which appear to assume a life of their own, conditioning the way in
which people think and behave. What has to be established here are the power
structures and social relations through which meanings and symbols are generated,
circulated and consumed. In addressing this last point, Hannerz (1992) thus
describes culture as ‘the social organisation of meaning’.
The first place to begin then is to ask what positions do the new rich occupy in
the class structures of Asian societies? The answer to this question in the first
volume of the series (Robison and Goodman 1996a) focuses on the emergence of
a heterogeneous layer of capitalists, and salaried professionals, managers,
administrators and technicians who have risen into these positions, and thus into
new wealth, through the growth of capitalist enterprise and related state agencies
in their particular countries. In that volume, and in the second, the political
character of the new rich is also explored with reference to their attachments to the