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

KEN YOUNG 75
neighbourhood and workplace. It is not a well-integrated aspect of a class lifestyle.
The cultural behaviours appropriate to the mall may be executed with precision
and even with ease, but the meanings attached to them can be somewhat
dislocated. The language has been learnt with degrees of fluency, but it is still
rather too much a foreign language; foreign, not primarily in the sense of being
from outside the country, but from a world of class experience that is unfamiliar.
Still, the constant impression I have from people in Jakarta and elsewhere is that
this doesn’t matter too much. The important thing for most is to have a part in the
modern world.
To this point, much of what can be observed in Jakarta will hold for other cities
in other parts of Asia, after allowing for some variations in historical and cultural
experience. These are familiar variations on what takes place in many societies
where consumption plays a key part in establishing cultural differentiation and
thereby marking out, claiming and defining social position. Consumption is linked
to other key regions of social life such as work, education, neighbourhood, and
forms of association in constituting one’s social identity. It is not merely a utilitarian
part of material reproduction of one’s self. It is a symbolically charged part of the
activities that reproduce one’s selfhood, one’s identity, since it belongs among the
most significant distinctions that contribute to the differential definition of both
individuals and social groups (Friedman 1994).
FROM CONSUMPTION TO LIFESTYLES:
HOUSING ESTATES
In 1995, I studied a number of residential estates in Jakarta; estates with names
such as Lippo City, Taman Kebun Jeruk, Permata Hijau, Sunrise Gardens, Green
Garden. The naming of estates seeks to associate the area with the good life, or
the serenity of a lost rural past (nostalgia again), or with the proprietor (Lippo), or
prestige and prosperity, or international sophistication (the use of English names),
or combinations of these. The naming strategies bear interesting resemblances to
those used in Penang (see Goh 1996) or comparable developments I have
observed in Johore Baru, Malaysia. In Penang, developers have chosen names like
Bella Vista, Belle Vue, Arcadia, Sri Emas, Desa Mas, Fortune Heights and so on
(Goh 1996). By contrast with malls, which attract a wide selection of people, the
new residential estates achieve much greater internal homogeneity. There are
grades of wealth and status within the residential estates, but these are slight
compared to those that separate the people who can afford to live in them and the
people who cannot. These estates deserve mention, however, for a number of
reasons. The first of these is that, for a significant proportion of the social groups
we are calling ‘the new rich’, the consolidation of a distinct consciousness is not
built around one institution or arena of social behaviour such as the mall, but
around a fairly comprehensive way of life.
Schooling, transportation, recreation and many other domestic routines are
integrated through the facilities provided in neighbourhoods of this kind.