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

28 MICHAEL PINCHES
We must emphasise the common ground between the well-off and the
less well-off… If affluent Singaporeans flaunt their success and
deliberately distinquish themselves from others less well-off by the way
they dress, the lifestyles they lead, the overseas holidays they take, this
will lead to unhappiness and resentment.
(Lee Kuan Yew, Financial Review, 3 October 1995)
[T]here is also an ugly face of the new rich, one that is becoming
increasingly common in boardrooms, in airport lounges and on golf
courses in most countries of the region. They are extravagantly
dressed, conspicuous consumers and frenetic users of mobile
telephones. Some appear to have modelled their manners on
unpleasant characters in American TV soapies. A senior Australian
diplomat in South-East Asia describes them as ‘venal’.
(The West Australian, 11 February 1994)
The representation of Asia’s new rich as the West’s Oriental Other is one of two
opposed stereotypes. The second represents the new rich of Asia as Westernised
or globalised yuppies preoccupied with the same consumer items that are
associated with their counterparts in places like Australia, the United States and
Britain: expensive late-model cars, mobile phones, fashionable nightclubs, designer
clothes, gourmet food, tasteful art objects, membership of exclusive golf or health
clubs, overseas holidays and shopping excursions, and palatial houses or
condominiums. On the face of it, the glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines, which
have proliferated in most countries in the region, are indistinguishable from such
magazines in the West, except perhaps for the language in which they are written
and the predominant ethnic appearance of their models.
There is an interesting contrast here. As producers of wealth, Asia’s new rich
are most often represented as the West’s Oriental Other; as consumers of wealth
it is as if there was virtually no distinction, and that what there is, is rapidly
diminishing. Undoubtedly part of the reason for this opposition centres on the
political and industrial relations implications of Asian Values explanations of
productive growth, and the commercial implications of supposing a universal
consumer market. 33 The consumer stereotype of Asia’s new rich reflects a more
general commentary on the nature of globalisation, concerned with the
international movement of consumer goods, and the projection of advertising and
lifestyle images through a mass media that has become more and more freeranging
(Featherstone 1991; Barnet and Cavanagh 1995; Young, Lakha). Several
chapters in this volume evidence the enormous growth in the consumption of these
goods and images in Asia, and highlight the extent to which they have been
integral to the making of the region’s new rich.
In this section, I first consider the meanings of new-rich consumption within the
context of global and international status relations, in particular between East and