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

40 MICHAEL PINCHES
developed collectively in particular places: at worksites, housing estates, golf clubs,
bars, shopping centres so on. Although the new rich often live unusually private
lives (Smith), these places may also engender relations of interdependence and
class sociability. Indeed, within a social world that is circumscribed by differences
in lifestyle and consumer status, there may be little choice but to use these markers
as instrumental devices in building social relations. Playing golf, for instance, may
simply be a lifestyle statement, but it may also be a useful career strategy (Smith,
Pinches). This point is brought out clearly in Buckley’s study (Chapter 8) of the
Chinese new rich in Beijing who use ‘calcu lated extravagance’ and expensive giftexchange
rituals in order to establish interpersonal business networks and a
reputation for honour and trustworthiness. In this case ostentation is integral to
staying rich and becoming richer, but it also circumscribes a moral world of
collective solidarity.
While the lifestyles and business interests of the new rich may be engendering
new norms and moralities of intraclass conduct, they also seem to be associated
with the development of sharper, more impersonal inter-class cleavages. In spite of
persistent characterisations of Asia as a place of ubiquitous patronage, paternalism
and personalistic social ties (for example, Pye 1985), a number of studies of
capitalist and class transformation in the region suggest a changing and more
complex picture. 47 For example, while the corporation examined in Smith’s study
(Chapter 4) may have cultivated an ethos of paternalism, personalised bonds of
patronage centred on the old Malay junior managers appear to have been giving
way with the emergence of a new layer of Malay managers, distanced from their
villages and from factory workers. Their lifestyles–centred on religious piety and
privatised consumption–seem to separate them altogether from dealings with the
working class, and it is apparent that they prefer it that way. The new rich in
Antlöv’s study (Chapter 7) continue to reside in their home village–their livelihood
and status are dependent on it–but other villagers complain that they have socially
withdrawn and no longer fulfil their communal obligations. Encouraged by the
Indonesian government, a key function these new rich see themselves performing
is not that of generous patron, but of local role model, whose wealth accumulation
and private consumption should inspire other villages along the path to modernity
and affluence. Similarly, though conspicuous consumption may be a vehicle for gift
exchange among new-rich peers in China, its effect and apparent intention, in
relation to less privileged classes, is to communicate superiority and exclusion.
The symbolic struggles over national identity and cultural capital that have been
dealt with in this section have concerned privileged classes in the Asian region, and
have focused, in particular, on the relationships between the new rich and old rich,
and between different layers of new rich. A more complete account of the cultural
construction of the new rich would look more closely at the ways in which they are
seen and represented among the working classes and peasantries. As Shamsul
argues in Chapter 3, this question has been largely overlooked in academic
discourse. Some people from these classes may look upon the new rich as
embodiments of national pride, or as meritorious individuals. However, as