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

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 11
and the cultural organisation of social relations. Not only are the new rich the
possessors of new wealth; their emergence represents a substantial regional shift
in the ways of making wealth, of being wealthy and of attributing prestige.
Though the new rich capitalists and salaried professionals have their
antecedents earlier in twentieth-century Asia (see, for example, Bergère
1986; Lakha 1988), their present numbers and, more significantly, their social,
political and cultural influence, far exceeds the power they assumed in the past. 19
This is perhaps most evident in the prestige the new rich of Asia are now accorded
in the upper reaches of society, both at home and abroad. Indeed, they are
commonly represented within their countries, as well as outside, as the heroes of
the ‘Asian Miracle’. 20 Over the past three decades, the positions assumed by Asia’s
new rich have become increasingly hegemonic, though not uncontested, as a
number of chapters in this volume indicate (especially Antlöv’s). Historically, the
present era represents a watershed, not only in the economic and industrial
transformation of many societies in Asia, but also in their systems of social and
cultural order.
In most of contemporary Asia, the eminence attributed to successful capitalists
among the privileged classes and in the mass media contrasts dramatically with
the lowly placement of merchants and artisans–their closest counterparts–in the
status hierarchies that dominated most of Asia well into the twentieth century. In
the agrarian societies of China and India, under the great traditions of
Confucianism and Hinduism, the roles of merchant and artisan were identified as
demeaning or servile and formally codified towards the bottom of the ideal status
hierarchy of occupation and social position (Fairbank 1994:55, 100, 108; Dumont
1972:106; Evans 1993). 21 While the Confucianist order of East Asia and Vietnam
formally provided for the social mobility of men into the ruling state bureaucracy, it
was through scholarship, land acquisition and intermarriage rather than moneymaking
entrepreneurial skills (Fairbank 1994:180; Osborne 1985:39). Elsewhere, in
what are present-day India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, highest social
honour was formally attributed through the birthright of kingship, caste and
nobility. In all of these systems, highest social rank was variously acted out,
celebrated and confirmed through sumptuary laws, refined courtly etiquette and
elaborate ceremonial display (Palmier 1960; Dumont 1972; Steinberg et al. 1975:
59—86; Geertz 1976:227—60; Osborne 1985:38—53). Direct engagement in economic
pursuits or mundane material production, while underpinning this exclusive world
of power and privilege, was also its cultural antithesis. The economic power of
those who assumed positions of cultural eminence was made possible through
their political or spiritual authority, embedded in the institutions of the tributary
state, from the sultanates of the Indo-Malay world, to the dynastic states of imperial
China (Fairbank 1968; Steinberg et al. 1975:30—6; Osborne 1985:16—35).
While these socio-cultural arrangements generally held sway, they were also, to
varying degrees, threatened and compromised by the independent economic
power of merchants, despite their formally low status. Indeed, in practice, the
tributary or patrimonial systems that prevailed through most of the region relied