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

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 39
relations within the societies of Asia. Poor-worker neighbourhoods in many cities
throughout the region continue to be bulldozed, not only on legal or bureaucratic
grounds, but because the privileged classes consider them unsightly and offensive
to their sensibilities. 46 While there is significant social mobility at the middle and
upper levels of society, the new rich themselves are widely variegated. Despite
their attempts at cultivating sophistication and refinement, a great many will
continue to be looked upon by those in more privileged positions as lacking these
qualities.
Clearly not all new rich are able or inclined to study, or have their children
study, at elite institutions at home or abroad. Nor are they equally able to avail
themselves of sought-after professional culture specialists. Many new rich have to
cultivate their tastes by relying instead on some of the more informal methods
noted earlier. And in doing so, they have to negotiate a plethora of shops, lifestyle
magazines and television programmes that are not only various, but also
commonly stratified by market researchers, advertisers and business operators, in
such a way as to attract some consumers and repel others (Young). Even items of
‘tribal’ or ‘peasant’ material culture that have become popular symbols of national
identity among elites and middle classes in the region are commonly ordered by
similar taste codes as are other commodities: the most ‘tasteful’, rare and
expensive items coming from specialist dealers; the more common, cheaper and
less ‘tasteful’ items coming from popular craft and department stores. Some
measure of the symbolic codes and status distinctions at stake here is given in
Kahn’s remark on the Mini Malaysia theme park in Malacca: ‘Expecting a
tasteless Malaysian Disneyland, we were surprised to find an elegant layout of
traditional Malay houses’ (1992:169), the implication being that other sectors of the
Malay middle class may not have been so fortunate in their quest for
respectability.
One of the attractions of Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital and distinction is
that he extends these concepts to practices that might not ordinarily be seen as
being about taste or aesthetics. For example, a principle which seems to be an
important part of cultural capital and social distinction in Singapore concerns not
so much the question of taste for particular consumer items, as a question of restraint
and timing. Promoted by the government, and set against a backdrop of shared
poverty and insecurity, this principle, described by Yao (1996), centres on the
virtue of being able to time the acquisition of prestigious consumer items with
particular moments in the trajectory of upward social mobility, when they are
‘deserved’. Just as the accusation of ostentation may be used to exclude many new
rich from entry into the cultural world of those with established privilege, so too
may the virtue of timing and restraint be used by some new rich as a principle for
excluding others–perhaps the ‘anxiety-laden’ described by Chua and Tan–from
entry into their world of consumer propriety.
The consumer markers used to identify different layers of new rich as distinctive
social categories are also important in the cultural construction of social groups
and interpersonal networks among the new rich, whose lifestyles are commonly