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

36 MICHAEL PINCHES
bourgeoisie, Veblen’s account of America’s leisure class in the 1890s, and
Lamont’s (1992) of the American upper middle class a century later, suggest the
continued predominance in the United States of an ethos concerned less with the
cultivated manner of consumption than with the volume of wealth and the capacity
to accumulate it. While the French case suggests something of a capitalist society
founded slowly, and within a formerly aristocratic cultural milieu, the case of the
United States starts with economic capital and seems to celebrate, more than
anything else, the speed with which individuals accumulate it. Yet Bourdieu’s
reference to a new era of ‘hedonistic consumption’ in France concurs with a picture
of contemporary consumerism that may have had its origins in the United States,
but which has become increasingly global.
In industrialising Asia today we see a number of the above elements. As noted
already, the social standing of the new rich, and of those they have left behind, is
measured largely by their different levels of material wealth. In addition, there is a
strong impetus to reward the new rich with high standing as the leaders and
heroes of national development, in part because of their divergence from the old
rich, who are often associated with national poverty and backwardness (Lakha,
Pinches). Thus the old rich in Asia do not stand as the unambiguous guardians of
high honour in the way they appear to in Bourdieu’s France.
However, taste and style clearly matter to the new rich. Not only are the new
rich commonly demeaned for their alleged vulgarity and ostentation, but many also
go to great pains to acquire sophistication and refinement, if not for themselves,
then at least for their children. They work at this in a number of ways, one of which
is through formal education. Not only have the majority of new rich acquired
higher levels of formal education than their parents’ generation, but many are also
more inclined than their parents to provide their children with something beyond
technical or vocational training. In the Philippines, for example, many new-rich
Filipino-Chinese families are now sending their children to prestigious universities
to study arts and humanities (Pinches). Many new rich also work on their taste and
presentation of self by using the services of cultural specialists, like interior
decorators, architects, beauticians, grooming consultants and gallery operators.
Many more, notably those of lesser means, attempt to cultivate themselves more
informally, through selective reading, television viewing and window shopping. As
Young argues in Chapter 2, the cultivation of a new aesthetic language commonly
takes place in the informal contexts of everyday life, perhaps most notably in
shopping malls, where it is not only possible to study the taste codes embedded in
the goods on display, and to consult the salespeople who are knowledgeable in
these codes, but also to use the mall as a venue in which to practise one’s newly
cultured identity. The cultivation of a fashionable or sophisticated self may even be
an explicit requirement of employment. Companies in Singapore, for example,
spend millions of dollars annually on training courses in grooming and etiquette for
their young professional employees. 44
What are the aesthetic codes by which the new rich are evaluated and to which
many of them aspire, and where do they come from? The answers to these