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

48 MICHAEL PINCHES
30 Attempts to gain new wealth through such practices seem to be quite widespread. In
Korea, for example, Kendell (1996) notes that most shamanistic rituals, once held
primarily in response to life-threatening illnesses, are now held for the purposes of
becoming rich. In Thailand, several new Buddhist movements, oriented towards
business people and the new middle class, have come into being in Bangkok.
Organised around the lifestyle constraints, dispositions and insecurities of the city’s
entrepreneurs and professionals, these movements have gained large followings. One
cult to become popular in the 1990s centred on the mother goddess Kuan Yin, whom
business people identify as the ‘goddess of trade’ (Pasuk and Baker 1996:127—33).
31 On this last point see Kahn (1995).
32 Some of these matters are taken up in the Asian context in Sen and Stivens (1998).
33 Thus the work discipline, corporate harmony and low-wage regimes that are said to
characterise Asian workers are commonly invoked by politicians and capitalists in
the West as a means of controlling or dismembering their own working classes.
Conversely, the impetus to expand markets is well suited by the proposition that the
world is made up of keen, predictable consumers.
34 According to Wakao: ‘It is often remarked that although Japan has become an
economic superpower, the Japanese people do not feel affluent…in comparison with
the lives of comparatively affluent people in the West What we lack in our daily lives
is the fragrance of a culture mellowed and refined over the years. This is what I mean
by class’(1989:30).
35 As recent work in this area indicates, commodity consumption might best be
understood as an elaborate means through which the individual and collective self is
constructed, and, to that extent, its meanings are quite idiosyncratic and contextspecific
(Friedman 1994). Ironically though, some of this literature (for example, Fiske
1989:32—7) seems to move from rejecting the idea that consumer goods
have universal meaning, to positing the idea of the autonomous universal consumer
subject.
36 My thanks to Joanna Tan for pointing out to me this and a number of other
examples.
37 At one stage Malaysia’s prime minister, Dr Mahathir, considered setting up a system
of morality summer camps for the nation’s youth on the grounds that economic growth
had been associated with their moral corruption through the growing emulation of
Western consumer lifestyles (The West Australian, 8 February 1997).
38 In China and parts of Indochina, of course, this had occurred earlier, in a far more
radical way.
39 Salim Lakha, personal communication.
40 For an excellent exploratory article on the cultural identities of the nouveaux riches in
contemporary eastern Europe, see Sampson (1994).
41 Here there appears to be an unresolved tension in Bourdieu’s account between one
model which supposes separate class taste communities, and another which assumes
the hegemony of legitimate (bourgeois) taste. Indeed, Bourdieu’s propositions on
proletarian taste are the least convincing aspects of his argument
42 In his discussion of the symbolic struggles between and within classes, Bourdieu’s
account draws heavily on Weber’s concepts of status and social closure. See also
Lamont and Lareau (1988) and Jenkins (1992:128—51).
43 Though it may be argued that the old rich who set the tone for the American bourgeoisie
were based in western Europe.