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

32 MICHAEL PINCHES
The most immediate way in which the new rich of Asia are constituted through
consumption is in relation to other layers of people within their own societies: the
‘old rich’, workers, peasants and less prosperous elements among the middle
classes. The members of old-established elites throughout the region are well
known for their titles, family reputations, political dynasties, landholdings and
businesses. They are also known for their often lavish lifestyles, their consumption
of prestigious goods and services, and, sometimes, their philanthropy and
patronage of the arts. Over recent decades their standing has been challenged by
many apparently anonymous figures, whose consumer spending power rivals and
even surpasses their own. Previously, these established elites could deal with small
numbers of new rich by granting them titles or incorporating them through
marriage, but old modes of asserting privilege have been undermined, if not swept
aside. 38 As large numbers of newly rich people have emerged, as ideologies of
meritocracy displace those of ascription, within, and to a limited extent across,
ethnic boundaries, and as social prestige is increasingly mediated through the
market, so has commodity consumption become more central to the construction
of social identity. More and more, consumer items operate as the principal
signifiers of standing and achievement. While these characteristics mark the
arrival of the new rich at the upper reaches of society, they also mark their departure
from those groups located in the lower and middle layers, as well as the status
disparities that are opening up among the new rich themselves.
Elsewhere, in periods and places of rapid capitalist expansion, where significant
numbers of people from the middle or lower ranks have risen to become newly
prosperous industrialists or professionals, there has often been an explosion in
status claims made on the basis of conspicuous consumption. Such a period and
place was late nineteenth-century North America, the subject of Veblen’s (1979)
classic study, which documents the elaborate status strategies of ‘conspicuous
consumption’, ‘conspicuous leisure’ and ‘pecuniary emulation’ on the part of
America’s newly risen ‘leisure class’. According to Veblen, the very act of
possessing wealth had come to be seen as meritorious and conferring of honour
(1979:29). Thus, the newly rich of North America displayed their wealth in order to
win public recognition and prestige, and, in so doing, to elevate themselves above
others. In order to maintain a position of social exclusivity, they had to
demonstrate their continued ability to spend, and so they generated new fashions
in order to keep at bay others of lesser means, who may have been able to emulate
their earlier forms of display.
Similar processes seem to be at work in Asia today. Thus, as Young’s chapter
suggests, a key way in which the new rich in some parts of Asia distinguish
themselves from the majority of the population comes by way of their possessing a
‘discretionary income’ and the consumer goods which they purchase with it. As
some of the quotations at the beginning of this section indicate, the positional
goods that separate the new rich from the less advantaged seem to be almost
universal: late model cars, expensive dwellings, designer-label clothes, mobile
phones and so on. Thus, one of the key ways in which the new Thai middle class