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

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Consumption, social differentiation and
self-definition of the new rich in
industrialising Southeast Asia
Ken Young
INTRODUCTION
Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation are changing the face of Southeast Asia.
Established scholarly paradigms of economy, society and culture are becoming
less reliable because these societies are changing so rapidly. The very substantial
growth of new bourgeois and middle-class groups is one of the most significant of
these changes.
In seeking answers to questions about the political and cultural influence of these
new groups, it is natural to look to the current writings of indigenous intellectuals, or
the prescriptions of influential political and religious leaders. However much such
intellectual discourses might formalise, or seek to influence, the outlooks of the new
rich, a more secure basis of these people’s sense of their place in society is built
around their day-to-day social experience. This experience fosters the growth of
lasting predispositions grounded in mundane behaviour, in the practices of
everyday life. Behaviour of this kind can be observed in familiar institutions such
as the home, workplace, school, mosque or cinema–and in numerous urban
shopping malls. In such locales, the new rich display their fluent employment of the
behavioural codes of a middle-class ‘lifestyle’, but at the same time, unobtrusively,
they also show that they possess the values, social orientations and distinctions
that mark their group out from other parts of society.
In this chapter I argue that consumption behaviour, learned and perfected in the
ubiquitous shopping malls in the major cities of the region, contributes significantly
to identity construction and social differentiation. The mundane, apolitical
character of consumption practices disguises the key contribution they make to a
broader integrated pattern of behaviour that not only fulfils the practical ends of
everyday life for the new rich, but also gives material form to their ‘particular
narratives of self-identity’ (Giddens 1991:81). Together, these habitual behavioural
patterns constitute a ‘lifestyle’ (Giddens 1991; Castells 1997). 1 I do not attempt here
to characterise the entirety of that lifestyle. However, to illustrate the connections
between consumption, lifestyle and social differentiation, I look briefly at the
development of housing estates in Jakarta.