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

KEN YOUNG 77
upmarket development of a new residential town built by large capitalists nearby
on the site of a former rubber plantation. The new town, Bumi Serpong Damai, 22
is only accessible to the more affluent elements of the middle classes. The
residents do not readily mix with either the office-workers or the farmers from
Suralaya. I was told in Suralaya that locals were concerned not just about the
exclusivity of Bumi Serpong Damai; they were also worried about the new town
being flooded by wealthy emigrant Chinese. ‘One does not hear Bahasa Indonesia
spoken among them’, I was told.
Again, considerations of ethnic differences rise along with strong inter-class
differences. It is worth noting, in this respect, that there are people of Chinese
descent living in Suralaya itself, families of traders who had settled there several
generations ago. They regard themselves as not different from other villagers
(apart from being Christian in a large Muslim community), and the common feeling
is that they (the Chinese) are: ‘sama-sama orang sini juga (they are also
Suralayanese)’ (Sobary 1991:50—1). Thus, although one can observe expressions of
ethnic resentment directed at the exclusive expensive estate with its high
proportion of Chinese residents, the simplistic association of wealth and
Chineseness is not borne out. The tensions and accommodations between the
residential groups are too complex to be represented in this way.
This case draws our attention to a number of things. Like shopping malls,
middle-class estate developments vary considerably, and it is only the most
opulent that achieve the kind of closure of affluent lifestyles referred to above. The
range of malls and estates in fact service different though overlapping publics.
They are sites of practices in everyday living that express, construct and
consolidate the reality and consciousness of social differentiation in the new cities
of Southeast Asia. And in that process, broader social currents of ethnicity,
religious and linguistic difference find expression too. They are among the strategic
sites for the construction of individual and social identity.
Giddens (1991) stresses the centrality of lifestyle choices of this kind for the
construction of narratives of identity. Consumption and lifestyle are central
because of certain postulates that Giddens advances about ‘late modernity’. He
observes that: ‘in conditions of high modernity, we all not only follow lifestyles, but
in an important sense are forced to do so–we have no choice but to choose’
(Giddens 1991:81). He characterises these conditions as ‘post-traditional’, meaning,
amongst other things, that in a globalised late capitalist environment, there has
been an inevitable breakdown of the capacity of the major institutions of society to
sustain unitary normative models of identity for its members. This has real
implications for the nation-building projects of states like those in Indonesia,
Singapore and Malaysia, which in part animates the efforts of governments to
influence identity formation. 23 Yet to the extent that authors like Giddens (1991) and
Castells (1996, 1997) are correct about the redundant role of state institutions, 24
how far do their analyses extend in Southeast Asia?