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

66 CONSUMPTION AND SELF-DEFINITION
Chinese life and the processes of the localisation of the community in
Singapore life.
(Kwok 1994:31)
State and privately sponsored interpretations of the Chinese tradition (such as the
museum of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore) will be unavoidably particu larised
in the absence of central institutions of cultural reproduction in China itself
(McLaren 1994). As Kwok (1994:30) sums up:
the landscape of modernity in the world and in Singapore has fundamentally
changed. In the case of Chinese modernity, there was a massive
transformation in the meaning of Chineseness. Chinese identity was
traditionally rooted in a symbolic cosmos, a ritual life that was standardised
by the imperial state and localised everywhere that the Chinese found
themselves–even, I would argue, in Singapore. But the early twentieth
century saw the forces of modern rationalism and scientism penetrating
throughout the non-Western world; in time the traditional symbolic universe
became more and more implausible. At the same time, there developed a
new definition of Chineseness grounded in nationalism, severing its
rootedness in the traditional cultural or religious system.
Kwok’s fine essay (1994) offers a historical account of the vicissitudes of Chinese
identity in Singapore during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He points to
the loss of the old symbolic universe in China itself where, to quote Cohen (1991:
133), being Chinese ‘no longer involves commonly accepted cultural standards;
existentially, however, being Chinese is far more problematic, for now it is as much
a quest as it is a condition’.
In Singapore, the fact that the ethnic majority is Chinese (around 76 per cent of
the population) 10 could lead to the misleading impression that the values of this
apparently unitary ethnic group would assume a certain ‘naturalness’ in society as
a whole. That is even more so given the recent entrenchment of the role of
communitarianism (Chua 1995: ch. 9) in this multiracial society. That impression
disguises the reality that many important lines of social cleavage cut across these
community boundaries. At the time of independence, the Chinese population was
stratified internally between a political and economic elite of English-speaking (and
disproportionately Christian) ethnic Chinese and a larger Chinese working class
whose household languages were various southern Chinese tongues (Hokkien,
Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese and others). To some extent this
cleavage persists today. However, beginning in the period of the union with Malaysia,
steps were taken by the government, primarily through the public housing system
(Chua 1995: ch. 6) and the education system (Tham 1989; Tremewan 1994: chs 4,
5), to break the strength of the older (mainly working-class) language-based
communities. The bilingual education policy favoured English as the shared
language. Community second languages of Malay and Tamil matched the language