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

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survey in The Nation 1994:9—10), but because they constitute a significant
proportion of the symbolic codes through which the middle classes, and the new
rich more broadly, differentiate themselves. However, as in many other modern
societies, intellectuals in Southeast Asia worry about materialistic rootlessness
(Elegant 1996a, 1996b; The Nation 1994:76) and the incursion of
international (mainly American) cultural influences. Thus, the conspicuous
consumption of the new rich has given further stimulus to localised intellectual
yearnings for normative expressions of identity and social cohesion that nostalgic
reconstructions of the past attribute to the pre-industrial world (Chua 1994a).
Secular and religious intellectuals (almost entirely of middle-class origin) are
articulating perspectives (Elegant 1996b) that attempt to give coherence and
meaning to the new world I have been describing–a situation in which old ethnic
and cultural codes have been radically redefined (often by the state), and in which
nationalist and other Utopias (but not nostalgia, see Chua 1994a) have lost part of
their unifying force. Yet, aside from these attempts to influence values, the
practices of everyday living, notably consumption practices, contribute no less
significantly to the construction of new identities.
Many, if not most, of the new rich have had to adapt to their enhanced social
status in a remarkably short time, within one or two generations, or even less. This
applies to the extremely wealthy controllers of the vast conglomerates that are at
the heart of these rapidly growing economies, as much as to the much more
numerous upwardly mobile middle classes. The psychological and cultural
adjustments that the major capitalists presumably had to make are huge if one
contemplates their relatively obscure and economically marginal beginnings in the
1950s and 1960s. 14 As all the different social elements of the new rich have
advanced themselves, they have had to learn, or to define for themselves, identities
and roles appropriate to their new status. Moreover, the patterns of growth in
Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, have
brought large numbers of people, who now work in a much wider variety of mainly
private firms, into new occupational groups and into the ranks of the middle
classes. Again, one of the striking characteristics of these groups is their newness,
the very recent entry of many people with relatively little previous direct experience
of affluence.
When large numbers of people are adjusting to new ways of life in a new or
transformed urban environment they draw upon their established cultural
repertoire to some extent. They do so in given institutional settings in which
particular models of behaviour are deemed to be prestigious. Some draw upon
older cultural models, as, for example, have senior Indonesian civil servants who
have maintained to a significant extent the traditions and cultural orientation of the
Javanese priyayi. 15 The adjustment may therefore partly involve the creation of
new forms of behaviour, and it may also in part require the newcomer to learn
from, and conform to, available models of correct behaviour. The new malls and
residential estates of Southeast Asia’s major cities are sites where middle-class
styles can be absorbed with a greater degree of creativity–though, certainly, the