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

26 MICHAEL PINCHES
The second is the massive growth in the production of consumer goods, and the
associated development of what is commonly referred to as consumer culture
(Tomlinson 1990; Featherstone 1991; Slater 1997). The connection between these
two shifts is not only to be found in the economic or structural logic of capitalism,
and the cultural intermediary role of many within the new middle class in the
design and dissemination of consumer images (Featherstone 1991: 43—6), but it is
also evident in the unfolding politics of identity and status attribution. The massive
growth in luxury consumer goods and the associated development of fashion and
marketing of lifestyle have focused heavily on members of the new middle class
and their capacity to spend, generating at the same time a plethora of consumer
images for the wider population (Featherstone 1991:108—9; Betz 1992). They have
also focused heavily on women: both as reproducers responsible for home-making,
where most private consumption takes place, and as the prime subjects and
objects of desire (Bocock 1993:95—6; Slater 1997:55—8). The enormous growth of
the fashion industry in clothing, cosmetics and accessories, along with the
industries in domestic appliances and home decoration, has particularly targeted
women as consumers. 32
On the one hand, the widening commitment to a life fabricated through
commodities evidences the deepening hold that capitalist production has over people
everywhere. On the other, an increasing body of literature argues that
consumerism, rather than production, has become the principal arena in which
social relations and identities are constructed. For some, the sheer variety and
massive replication of consumer items and lifestyle images currently on offer have
created new possibilities for identity construction that remove old social
boundaries, generating in their absence an atomised sea of postmodern individual
consumers, shifting more or less at will within a plurality of arbitrarily defined
fashion communities (Fiske 1989; Finkelstein 1996). While the intensity of
contemporary consumerism and the way in which it tends to colonise desire (see
Heryanto) are undeniable, much of this literature errs in denying or neglecting the
fundamental links between consumption and class or status inequalities
(Featherstone 1991:16—20; MacCannell and MacCannell 1993; Crompton 1996).
For all its complexity and fluidity, contemporary consumption patterns continue to
evidence the playing out of class and status relations through differences in
spending power and cultural capital. Notwithstanding the increased possibility of
misreading status markers, or of individuals successfully assuming symbolic
identities associated with different classes or status groups, gross differences in
wealth and cultured identity–evident, for example, in speech, demeanour, gait and
confidence–continue to assume a powerful significance in the construction of
social boundaries (Bourdieu 1989:21, see below).
The following discussion, along with the other chapters that make up this
volume, attest to the crucial role played by consumption in the cultural
constructions of Asia’s new rich. As will be shown, the collective identities and
symbolic distinctions that arise through the practices of consumption are crucial to
the making of class, ethnic and international status relations.