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

14 MICHAEL PINCHES
perceived as the races or ethnic groups responsible for and associated with it. The
attainment of political independence in the years following the end of the Second
World War consolidated ethno-nationalism in the institutions of the state, and as a
principal ideology through which dominant classes maintained hegemony. Again
this tended to confirm the largely pariah status of independent merchants or
capitalists belonging to minority ethnic groups, notwithstanding the instrumental
alliances made between politicians, senior civil servants and members of these
groups.
Formal political independence proved to be a limited and passing phase in the
pursuit of nationhood. Left unresolved were the experience of economic
disadvantage and the associated national or racial stigmatisation that had come
with colonialism and continued through subsequent decades of political
independence. In the context of a more closely integrated global community of
nations, dominated by the West, this problem became increasingly severe. Hence,
throughout the region, national elites, politicians and intellectuals have been
propelled towards the pursuit of ‘national development’, drawing variously on
ideologies of free-market capitalism, communism and ethno-nationalist
essentialism. For the past half-century, the pursuit of national development has
been the most powerful discourse guiding political and economic life in the region.
Though its content has varied widely, reflecting the particular histories of
individual peoples and nations, its direction has had to be charted in the context of
an increasingly integrated global political economy, dominated by large
transnational corporations with their origins in the West and Japan (on the latter,
see Smith).
Small numbers of moderately successful capitalists, mainly from backgrounds in
commerce, had emerged in many countries in the region, commonly through state
protection under import substitution policies. But the spectacular economic growth
of the so-called ‘Asian Miracle’ is a phenomenon of the 1970s-1990s, and has seen
the emergence of many highly successful capitalists, some of whom have founded
enterprises that have become large international conglomerates (McVey 1992a;
Robison and Goodman 1996a). 22 Of crucial significance has been the fact that,
over this time, the various political quests for national development in Asia have
intensified in a context of global economic restructuring. This has involved a
substantial relocation of industrial manufacture from the West into East and
Southeast Asia, through the agency of transnational corporations seeking out
cheaper and more controllable sources of labour, increasingly via subcontracting
or other post-Fordist arrangements (Harvey 1989; Deyo 1997; Hutchison and
Brown, forthcoming). 23 Related growth in services and the domestic consumer
market has combined to make Asia the world’s most economically dynamic region
for most of the 1980s and 1990s. However, this growth has also been uneven, as
some countries with earlier-or faster-growing economies have shifted away from
cheap labour areas of production into more highly skilled areas, while others have
taken over their former mantle. Through these processes, and the increasing