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

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 43
comfortable lifestyles of ‘order, social convention, sobriety and dullness’
(Wallerstein 1988:92). According to Pilbeam (1990:3), the bourgeois of this era
‘would not be king or labourer, but he might be a state official, a man of letters, a
professional, merchant, banker, industrialist or academic’.
While the meanings of these two terms continue to be debated, their usage in
particular schools of academic writing has become more refined and narrow, in
part reflecting a certain crystallisation of the social forces to which they refer,
but often, more tellingly, the desire to produce concepts of analytical rigour rather
than descriptive accuracy. Thus, in contemporary political economy, the terms
‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘middle class’ are defined structurally, positioning actors
differentially through their varied relations to the means of production. In this
tradition, the two terms are now distinguished, the bourgeoisie referring to those
who own capital, the middle class to salaried managers, the self-employed or
others similarly defined. 49
The danger is that it is often forgotten in this kind of writing that the terms
‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘middle class’ are cultural constructs as well as analytical
concepts. While their refinement in the academic literature may produce sharper
analytical tools, this same process also eliminates the range and ambiguity of
meaning that are produced both through academic reflection and popular
discourse. In looking at the terms ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘middle class’ as cultural
constructions, it is their varied, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory everyday
meanings that assume greatest significance, and communicate most directly the
experience of class. What is striking about the early popular representations of
bourgeoisie and middle class in western Europe is their similarity to the labels and
cultural constructions of the new rich that have emerged in industrialising Asia. As
is evident from the above, there are important differences, concerning, in particular,
the changed global circumstances in which these labels and constructions have
arisen, but in both cases it has been in a context of capitalist transformation.
CONCLUSION
The task of this volume, and others in the series, is to develop an understanding of
Asia’s new rich and the role they are playing in shaping particular societies in Asia,
as well as the region as a whole. Part of this understanding comes with the
recognition that the new rich comprise mainly capitalists and salaried managers or
professionals, whose very positions and success evidence the capitalist
transformation that is taking place through most of the region. That the success of
a great many of the new rich has been heavily dependent upon the state and
foreign capital is also indicative of the key role the latter two forces have played in
this transformation. Thus, many of the characteristics of the new rich are to be
understood in reference to the structures of change and political-economic
organisation entailed in contemporary capitalist development, and to the various
ways in which they have unfolded in particular countries and localities.