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

296 MICHAEL PINCHES
The new rich want to be identified with the old rich and therefore imitate
their ways. But the old rich are snobbish to the new rich and protect their
clannish circles.
(Highly educated public servant)
Two major points stand out in these statements. The first is that the new rich and
old rich are constructed as cultural opposites, one in deprecatory terms, the other,
often only by implication, in terms that are complementary. While the old rich are
reserved, refined and constrained, the new rich are ostentatious, vulgar and
insatiable. While the old rich have family pedigree, the new rich have none. While
the new rich are self-seeking instrumentalists, the old rich display paternal care and
social responsibility. In the case of the Chinese new rich, an additional opposition is
sometimes drawn between the old elite who are represented as implicitly
synonymous with Philippine national identity, and the Chinese who are aliens with
loyalties that lie elsewhere. The second point is that the new rich are presented as
wanting to be like the old rich: they recognise the latter’s superior possessions,
lifestyle and respectability and want a share in them. Thus the new rich are seen as
posing a threat to the exclusive social standing of the old rich, but also to the world
of high culture and dynastic family traditions that only the old rich and established
intelligentsia understand, and know how to maintain. Particular derision is
reserved for those new rich whose efforts to emulate old wealth have gone as far
as assuming the quasi-noble appellations Don and Doña for themselves or their
ancestors.
In short, the new rich and old rich are ideal hegemonic constructs that are selfserving
to most of those who invoke them: principally the people who identify with
the old rich or the established intelligentsia. 35 They are constructs that are
mobilised to legitimise and preserve old privilege, just at that moment when it is
most under threat from new layers of people with as much, if not more, material
wealth and a reputation for entrepreneurial prowess to go with it. But some of the
above quotations also posit the existence of an elite culture into which the new rich
may be incorporated with time and training. Already people who come from
educated, professional backgrounds, and whose circumstances can be described as
newly rich, are often excepted, or except themselves, from the new-rich caricature
above. Some others are described as taking the necessary steps to respectability
by undergoing etiquette training, by surrounding themselves with cultivated
professionals, or by sending their children to prestigious schools and universities
associated with the old elite. Academics I spoke to in Manila’s most exclusive
university, Ateneo, noted, for example, that there had been a substantial increase in
Filipino-Chinese students, and that many of them were now studying arts and
humanities, as distinct from the engineering and economics courses with which
they were most often identified. And, like the leading families from the old elite, a
number of the Taipans have set up their own philanthropic foundations whose
reach extends across ethnic boundaries. It also appears that there are increasing
numbers of second-generation newly rich marrying into old rich families, though