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

22 MICHAEL PINCHES
the meanings of privileged social identity, but in ways that have strengthened
‘tradition’, rather than undermined it.
Malaysia and Indonesia testify to different and apparently contradictory ways in
which new-rich identities are being constructed. First, there is the impetus to draw
those with Chinese ancestry into a pan-Asian community of new rich, centred on
Confucianism and Chinese ethnicity. Second, state development strategies and
ethno-nationalist ideologies have generated substantial layers of new rich–largely
new middle class–whose identities are stridently indigenous and increasingly
Islamic. The relationship between these two new-rich identities has varied from
accommodating to volatile. Thus in Indonesia, prior to the crisis of 1997, rapid
economic growth was accompanied by an increasing acceptance of cultural
practices identified as ethnic Chinese (Heryanto), but since then Chinese
merchants, in areas outside the major cities, have borne the brunt of increasing,
apparently racist, hostility. As in Malaysia, the experience of new wealth in
Indonesia has been matched by growing Islamisation among pribumi Indonesians
(Heryanto), and it is Islam which some rioters have invoked in their confrontations
with the mainly Christian, ethnic Chinese.
While national development and the new rich have primarily been constructed
vis-à-vis the West and, in some cases, ethnic Chinese minorities, international status
contention within the region itself may also feature in these processes. In
Southeast Asia, at least some of the cultural impetus for achieving newly
industrialised status in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand came from the earlier
success of the ethnic Chinese-dominated nations. The Philippines is a particularly
instructive case, because its recent drive to new wealth arose in the context of
being widely branded the regional exception to economic growth, and of becoming
nationally identified with its lowly paid, poorly treated, overseas contract workers.
Thus, one powerful domestic rendering of the Philippines’ recent economic
growth, and of the newly rich associated with it, draws a morally loaded contrast
between its own open, democratic order and the rigid authoritarian character of
other countries in the region. As is the case elsewhere, this distinction is attributed
in part to the uniqueness of the Philippine ethnonational cultural heritage
(Pinches).
None of the above cultural constructions, centred on the making of new wealth
in Asia, is overtly class-oriented. For the most part, they are nationally or ethnically
inclusive, but within these discourses, it is the new rich who are elevated to
positions of pre-eminence and legitimised as exemplars of national or ethnic
prowess. Within these constructions, which privilege collective relations with the
Western, ethnic, or national Other, the importance of domestic class, status and
gender inequalities is ideologically obscured.
Like the Confucianist past to which it defers, modern Confucianist ideology also
divides as it embraces. Besides its simple East/West moral inversion, and its
Chinese/other Asian ethnic divide, its principal function is as a ruling ideology of
states, bureaucratic elites and newly powerful capitalist classes vis-à-vis the
broader populace of middle classes, workers and peasants. This double edge of