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

44 MICHAEL PINCHES
However, I have argued that this kind of understanding of the new rich in Asia,
while necessary, is limited. What is also needed is a cultural analysis of the making
of the new rich, in reference to class and international relations. Such an analysis
focuses on the way in which power is exercised and contested through symbols
and meanings. While the new rich are positioned in the structural sense mentioned
above, they have also been positioned discursively through the construction of
symbolic boundaries which place and identify them in relation to a range of
counter identities: global, ethnic, moral, national, stylistic, religious and so on. In
this chapter I have highlighted, and attempted to analyse, the two major ways in
which the new rich have been thus identified: as Oriental producers and as global
consumers. In so doing, I have sought to problematise and explain, rather than
take at face value, those essentialist accounts which simply represent the new rich
either as a manifestation of some particular Asian tradition or as the blind
followers of some universal cultural logic of capitalist modernity.
Through the structural and symbolic transformations taking place in Asia, the
new rich have emerged not only as people with considerable wealth and corporate
or state power, but also as a powerful hegemonic force, variously identified as the
heroes of national or regional development, meritorious achievers and high-flying
consumers. As both producers and consumers of wealth, Asia’s new rich are
presented as embodying the region’s achievement of having overturned the
condition of backwardness and stigma vis-à-vis the West. Within the region, they
are also seen to have done this as the representatives of particular nations or
ethnic groups vis-à-vis other nations or ethnic groups. The symbolic power of their
construction as wealth producers rests heavily on the idea that their success is a
direct outcome of their cultural traditions, which variously distinguish them from
the West, and from other groups in Asia. Yet this construct also contains a certain
tension: on the one hand, the new rich are seen as the embodiments of particular
regional, national or ethnic identities; on the other, the honour they are seen to
have brought to these identities comes through the representation of the new rich
as successful players in the global arena of capitalist accumulation. Through the
new rich, ‘traditional’ regional, ethnic, national and religious identities are uneasily
reconstructed in terms of global capitalism. A similar tension is evident in the
construction of Asia’s new rich as global consumers. While in this case the initial
emphasis is on the globalised or Westernised nature of new-rich consumer
lifestyles, it also becomes clear that these are given distinctive meanings which
largely have to do with elevating national and local identities. This is given clearest
expression in the promotion of particular consumer goods and practices as explicit
symbols of national, ethnic or religious tradition.
The class efficacy of these constructions of the new rich lies in the very fact that
they are most overtly concerned with the redefinition and transformation of
regional, national and ethnic identities in terms of capitalist growth. Each of these
identities implicitly transcends class, but in such a way as to equate collective
sentiments and interests with the sentiments and interests of the new rich. The
hegemonic power vested in the new rich through these constructions substantially