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

42 MICHAEL PINCHES
been occupational data that would have supported retention of the term in
accordance with its past usage, the apparent significance of its reappearance
seems to be that it reflected more the perception of a newly powerful social force
than a mere statistical increase in particular occupations. The second point is that
the term ‘middle class’ has been at the centre of increasing discursive elaboration
in Thailand, such that it variously denotes prestigious occupations, high educational
attainment, high income levels, affluent consumer lifestyles and democratic
political practices, all of them represented as transformative of Thai culture and
society, but none of them neatly coincident with the others.
In Chapter 6 on Indonesia, Heryanto refers to the increasingly used term kelas
menengah, an apparent literal translation from the English ‘middle class’, noting its
centrality to local discourse on the new rich. Though much less common,
bourgeoisie is a term that is also increasingly used in Asia, in some cases adapted
into popular language, as in the expression burgis, commonly used in the
Philippines (Pinches). There are also terms of indigenous origin that come closer
to the English expression ‘new rich’, and that have become increasingly important
to everyday conversation. The most obvious case seems to be the abbreviation
OKB, widely used in Indonesia and Malaysia, which stands for Orang Kaya Baru,
or ‘new rich person’ (Shamsul, Antlöv). Shamsul traces its first emergence as an
everyday Malay expression to the 1950s, and its original reference to those
indigenous Malays who rose to positions of wealth independently of high ascriptive
office. While the term has positive high-status connotations in some quarters, it is
also used pejoratively by many peasants and workers in Indonesia and Malaysia,
both in denoting envy and moral condemnation (Antlöv, Shamsul). The officially
sanctioned term Melayu Baru, which in Malaysia has, to some extent, replaced the
popular expression OKB, translates as ‘new Malay’. Like OKB, it denotes new
wealth, but now this quality is subsumed under an identity that is ethno-nationalist.
With the Melayu Baru we witness a cultural construction of the new rich that is
present in other ways throughout Asia, namely one that distinguishes both locally
and globally.
Both the value and limitation of words like those that are used to identify the new
rich are that they classify within a world of continuity. On the one hand they signify
that which is remarkable and important, on the other they do so through the
artificiality of boundaries. When the terms ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ were
popularised in industrialising Europe, they represented an attempt to apprehend
and label the emergence of powerful new social forces which challenged the feudal
order of estates and aristocratic authority. The two terms were commonly used
interchangeably, and were invested with a shifting range of meanings, both moral
and descriptive, reflecting something of the elusiveness and complexity of the
phenomenon at hand, as well as the different social vantage points from which it
was experienced. Morally, the terms ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘middle class’ conveyed
feelings of respect and contempt, of honour and scorn, suggesting ‘solid citizen’, as
well as mediocrity (Williams 1976:38; Wallerstein 1988:92). Descriptively, they
referred to people who were ‘neither lord nor peasant’, who were ‘well-off’, living