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

THE MAKING OF THE PHILIPINES’ NEW RICH 281
salaried positions in capitalist enterprise. However, middle-class incomes are
generally low in comparison with other countries in the region (Crouch 1985:32;
FEER, 28 August 1997:56). This has prompted large numbers of highly qualified
Filipinos to find work overseas, both in salaried middle-class occupations, but also
in domestic labour and other manual positions. Nevertheless, middle-class incomes
are also highly varied, and over the past decade, in particular, new layers of
salaried managers and professionals have risen to positions of prosperity. These
relatively highly paid positions have multiplied on the strength of an expansion in
corporate capital, both foreign and local, and, in the latter case especially, on the
basis of the increased professionalisation of company management. They have
also multiplied through the growth of smaller companies in such areas as
computer services and advertising. The incomes and social standing of the newrich
middle class rest heavily on their educational credentials and the prestige of
the universities they attended. Those who have studied overseas, or at one of the
select local universities, gravitate much more easily to the most senior, wellremunerated
positions. The high disposable income of many salaried managers
and professionals today is partly a consequence of them marrying late, marrying
each other and having few children.
An important feature of the new rich in the Philippines is the absence of a clear
divide between the salaried new middle class and the new capitalist entrepreneurs.
Increasing numbers of salaried professionals have established highly successful
businesses. In some cases they have left their salaried positions behind; in other
cases, for instance among a number of academics and architects I am familiar with,
they have successfully maintained both activities. Many women have built up
prosperous small-or medium-sized businesses in partnership with their salaried
husbands, some of whom join their wives if the business becomes the more
lucrative income source.
How have the above changes been represented in the Philippines; what cultural
dynamics have they entailed; and in what ways have the new rich challenged the
hegemony of the old? The principal reference point for the cultural construction of
the new rich has been the identity and reputation of those described as the old elite
or landed oligarchy. Notwithstanding the above-mentioned shifts that have taken
place among those who have descended from this elite, they have continued to be
identified–by themselves and by others–in much the same way as were their
ancestors, that is as a quasi-nobility. This elite emerged from the Spanish era as a
powerful class of landlords and educated intellectuals (ilustrados) (Wickberg 1964;
Constantino 1978:115—28). During the American colonial period in the first half of
the twentieth century, they consolidated their privileged standing, and widened it
into the formal political sphere. A number of intersecting ideological principles are
entailed in the identity that grew around this elite. While some members are
identified as the descendants of Malay Filipinos who made up the early native
principalia (Spanish colonial bureaucracy), the elite, as a whole, is more generally
identified as being mestizo. 8 A small minority are identified as Spanish-Filipino.