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

30 MICHAEL PINCHES
television sets. These statistics have come to stand not just as a quantitative
empirical record, but, more fundamentally, as a statement of asymmetrical social
and cultural distinction, in which the West is cast as developed, and Asia as
backward.
Decades of five-and ten-year plans, of nationalist developmental rhetoric and of
regimes legitimising their authoritarianism with the promise of modernity testify to
the enormous symbolic, as well as material, power embedded in the desire to
dissolve this distinction. The increasing levels of industrialisation and material
affluence, and the emergence of a substantial layer of people who can be described
as newly rich, have meant that many nations in Asia have achieved, or are
achieving, this dissolution. The conspicuous consumption often associated with
Asia’s new rich is thus, in large part, oriented to a Western audience, as well as to
a collective subjective experience of past disadvantage. In a sense then, the cultural
construction of Asia’s new rich, most obviously expressed in their heightened
consumption, is as national and regional ambassadors before a Western audience,
both real and imagined. However, the dissolution of the old distinction has not
involved a simple process of Westernisation, cultural convergence or capitalist
absorption, even though there may be aspects of all of these. Rather, the relationship
between East and West is being redefined in ways advantageous to the East. The
leading personages in this redefinition are Asia’s new rich. In Chapter 6, for example,
Heryanto argues that in Indonesia Western cultural forms are becoming less
authoritative, and more the subject of creative, often playful, indigenisation.
Not only are differential meanings attributed to identical consumer items, in
reference to changing East/West power relations, but there has also been a
deliberate promotion of ethno-national symbols as a selling point in many forms of
consumption in Asia. Bangkok may be home to California Ville, but it also has new
housing estates with names like Nichada, Thani, Laddawan and Chaiyapreuk,
which are said to have been drawn from a tradition of Thai fantasy (Pasuk and
Baker 1996:121). And Manila, like all other major cities in the region, may have its
McDonald’s and KFC, but some of the most popular restaurants among the new
rich have names that invoke local village traditions (Pinches). Moreover, the
meaning and even the substance of food from international chains like McDonald’s
are, in large part, determined locally (Heryanto, Lakha). Similarly, while American
films and variety programmes on international cable television are patronised by
the new rich, so too, and often more frequently, are local films and programmes
(Pasuk and Baker 1996:123—5; Lakha). In some cases, particular imported consumer
goods may be rejected because they fail to comply with local moral or linguistic
codes, as in the poor sales in Singapore of the Nissan Bluebird, which some
attribute to the fact that numerous examples of consumer practices among the
wealthy of Asia that the name sounds like the Hokkien expression for the male sex
organ. 36 There are constitute an assertion of local cultural preferences, in some
cases explicitly concerned with the theme of national identity. This is evident in the
recent upsurge in the construction of national theme parks (Kahn 1992; Acciaioli