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

46 MICHAEL PINCHES
2 In Asia itself, this expression is most closely associated with political leaders Lee
Kuan Yew (Singapore) and Mohamed Mahathir (Malaysia), but it is also an
expression popular among Western journalists, for example Sheridan (1998). For
critical discussion see Rodan et al. (1996).
3 One instance of this is Yoshihara (1988). For a critical account of this literature see
Rutten (1994). See also McVey’s (1992b) discussion and Pinches (1996).
4 Though it may be argued, in reference to the idea of ‘great traditions’, that the shift
here is to an acknowledgement of multiple Cultures, rather than cultures, the
opposition of civilisation to barbarity is relatively absent in the recent literature on
Asia.
5 Kahn’s (1991, 1992) response to some of the foregoing problems is to limit his
concerns to the self-conscious construction of cultures by middle classes and
intellectuals. This perspective is used to revealing effect in his work on the Malay
middle classes, and parallels the ‘culture builders’ orientation found in Frykman and
Lofgren (1987). The drawback in Kahn’s effective abandonment of the culture
concepts as an analytical device is that it tends to privilege the practices of the
privileged.
6 Anthropological analysis has been particularly weak in dealing with culturally
variegated class societies. However, it might be observed that as Cultural Studies has
shifted from its Marxist origins under the influence of postmodernist thought, the
question of social structure has receded in favour of an identity politics that is largely
removed from the idea of the material.
7 The same could be said of my own contribution to the first volume in this series
(Pinches 1996).
8 There are almost no socio-cultural accounts of privileged classes or status groups in
industrialising Asia, but see Kahn (1991, 1992).
9 See for example Chakrabarty (1989).
10 But most of these have focused on subaltern or subordinate groups, providing only
limited treatment of the cultural life of the bourgeoisie and middle classes. But see
Abercrombie et al. 1980, 1990; Wilentz 1985.
11 In this general sense the term embraces distinctions of a formally ‘ascribed’ nature,
as in the codified rankings of feudal Europe or pre-colonial Java (Geertz 1976:227—60),
and of the formally more open, ‘achieved’ kind, usually associated with capitalist
societies, involving, for example, prestige rankings based on occupation, education,
income and consumption patterns.
12 See also Austin (1981) on the value of the status concept for class analysis.
13 In many respects these developments build on what Weber described as the strategy
of social closure (see Parkin 1974).
14 Recent examples on the middle classes and bourgeoisie in Europe and the United
States include Blumin (1989), Crossick and Haupt (1995), and Marcus and Hall
(1992). One of the few detailed ethnographic accounts based in Asia is Vogel (1963).
15 This latter account explicitly focuses on the theoretical question of cultural
boundaries (see also Lamont and Fournier 1992), and is directly comparable to
Bourdieu’s study. Its main ethnographic weakness is that there is very little about
those classes in relation to which the upper middle class defines itself.
16 As is evident in the first volume in the New Rich in Asia series (Robison and
Goodman 1996a), along with other literature on the region (for example, Deyo 1987;
Hewison et al. 1993), the political-economic structures and processes, through which