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

8 MICHAEL PINCHES
inclination to reductionism (Williams 1977; Larrain 1986; Grossberg and Nelson
1988).
In the inclusive position, class differences may be acknowledged, but are seen to
be lost in the deadening embrace of mass society or consumer capitalism, or are
largely subsumed under pervasive national cultures or great cultural epochs, like
modernity, or postmodernity (see Marcuse 1968; Jay 1984; Featherstone 1991;
MacCannell and MacCannell 1993; Slater 1997). I return to aspects of this
literature below.
The social relational position, which I wish to develop here, contains elements of
both of the above. In the Marxist tradition, this position sees class as having an
elementary economic component. But here class cultures are not so much directly
traced to economic conditions as to the social relations through which people,
differentially located by these conditions, constitute each other socially and
culturally through the practices of daily life. For social historians, like Thompson
(1968) and Genovese (1976), the key element to these relations is struggle.
Relational approaches to class and culture owe much to Gramsci (Hall et al. 1978;
Mouffe 1979), as is evident in the number of recent studies that work within the
rubric of hegemony and resistance (O’Hanlon 1989; Rebel 1989; Kurtz 1996). 10 It
is at this point, as Bocock (1986:83—102) argues, that there is significant
convergence with Weber.
Arguably the Weberian concept that is missing, but implicit, in the accounts of
developing class communities, class consciousness and class struggle in the work
of writers like Thompson and Genovese, is that of status honour. This concept,
combined with structural understandings of class, in both the Marxist and
Weberian traditions, is invaluable in exploring the cultural constructions of Asia’s
new rich. For Weber, status honour denotes a ‘specific style of life’ (Gerth and Mills
1970:187), associated with the exclusive possession of particular material, political
and symbolic resources, according to which groups and individuals are stratified or
differentially located in relation to each other (Gerth and Mills 1970:186—8, 190—1;
Turner 1988:4—7). 11 Thus classes, defined either in terms of production relations,
after Marx, or in terms of market capacity, after Weber, may or may not become
status groups.
Contrary to the way in which status honour has been used by many writers–as
an alternative to class analysis–there are two important ways in which the concept
compliments, and indeed enriches, the tradition founded in Marx. 12 It does this,
first, by addressing the symbolic, moral and stylistic ways in which shared
structural class positions may translate into social groups and practices. And it
should be remembered that Weber specifically identifies the possession of property
and the performance of ‘common physical labour’ as two qualities which ‘in the
long run’ or ‘quite generally’ are recognised for ‘status qualification’ or
‘disqualification’ (Gerth and Mills 1970:187, 191). Moreover, in reference to the
middle classes, which, among Marxists, continue to evade unambiguous structural
definition (Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Robison and Goodman 1996b), an
understanding of the processes of status formation through the shared symbols of