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

THE MAKING OF THE PHILIPINES’ NEW RICH 293
While increased levels of consumption have come to stand for a growing sense
of national achievement, consumption is also highly stratified and constitutes a
major vehicle through which differences in social standing and prestige are
asserted and perceived. Though the growth of shopping malls, for instance, reflects
an overall increase in spending power, particular malls also tend to be oriented to
different income groups. To varying degrees, such distinctions are also evident in
the interior spatial configuration of shops and leisure areas. Furthermore,
particular malls, and the spaces and shops within them, have commonly become
associated with different status identities. What is new in this is not the fact of
social differentiation, but rather the multiple layering of consumption between those
who are considered rich and poor. The testimony to this, and to the importance of
consumption in popular consciousness, is the fact that the alphabetical categories
(A–E), which had their origins in market research, are now widely used in Manila
and other urban centres as the main language for designating status and class
division. Although ‘middle class’ is also increasingly used as a term of social
identification, many people in the middle and upper echelons of Philippine society,
in particular, identify themselves and others by using the alphabetical labels. Not
only are specific shops, restaurants and fashion stores commonly labelled with
these letters, but so too are their customers. And while the largest malls still attract
a cross-section of people, some shoppers claim that they are able to differentiate
others into the five alphabetical categories simply by looking at their attire, their
purchases, the company they keep and the way they carry themselves.
These distinguishing practices have also developed in reference to the variety of
new housing estates and condominiums that have mushroomed around Manila
and Cebu City, and in relation to the upwardly mobile, who demonstrate their newfound
social respectability by changing house and residential suburb. Until a
decade ago, the most common language of social stratification simply distinguished
between rich and poor, or burgis (bourgeois) and masa (masses), with only limited
reference to a middle class (see Turner 1995). As the emergence of an alphabetical
status language indicates, there is now a popular perception, in urban areas at
least, that there are new and substantial layers of people in between, that their
collective existence is becoming more important, and that their identities are to be
discovered primarily in their consumer practices and capacities. 32 And, along with
these observations, there is also the perception of new opportunities for social
mobility.
Though many of the people in these middle categories might be described as
newly rich relative to their own backgrounds, those I spoke to in the upper
echelons reserved that term for people they believed had entered the A or B
‘classes’. A number also saw the new rich as being defined by the acquisition of
key positional goods. One businessman and academic, whose views typified this
perspective, suggested that in order to gain recognition as having ‘made it’, one had
to have a BMW or Volvo, a condominium, a cellular phone, an American Express
Gold card and membership of a golf club. He added that these possessions were
like having sergeant’s stripes. Others I spoke to included annual overseas holidays