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

environment of greater wealth and urban cosmopolitanism. The response of some
Muslim groups in Indonesia provides instances of this (Heryanto, this volume;
Mahasin 1990).
The experience of industrial transformation is very new, the new rich
are themselves recently arrived, and global integration is very uneven. These are
also societies with a strong sense of their own cultural heritages, and memories of
the humiliations of the colonial era. Like their governments, most are apprehensive
about the consequences of social fragmentation. The context is markedly different
to the societies that best fit Giddens’s account of high modernity. Nevertheless, the
concern of the argument in this chapter has not been about the influence of major
social institutions in shaping identity, but about the seemingly ideologically neutral
world of consumption and lifestyle. The practices that become habitualised in this
arena also shape identity to a remarkable degree, and their influence is greatest
where major institutions are losing their power to do so. As I suggest, there are
strong institutions in civil society that may continue to be very influential in some of
these countries. The institutions that are most strongly challenged in the present
globalised era are those of the state. The current brutal spectacle of the IMF (and
financial markets) imposing reforms that no domestic force could contemplate (for
example, stripping financial privileges from the Suharto family, the attempts to
‘veto’ Dr B.J.Habbie’s nomination for vice-president) bears out the reality of loss of
sovereignty and loss of policy discretion for contemporary states everywhere
(Castells 1997: ch. 5; Strange 1996; Horsman and Marshall 1994; Ohmae 1995).
Whether globalisation can erode the normative influence of major social
institutions to the same degree in Southeast Asia remains to be seen. To varying
degrees, most governments have had a paternalistic orientation towards their
citizens. The lifestyles of the new rich shake them loose from these controls, even
if in an apparently apolitical fashion. One should not be surprised if this creates a
certain anxiety among their rulers.
NOTES
KEN YOUNG 79
1 Giddens (1991:81) understands ‘lifestyles’ as: ‘sets of actions chosen by individuals to
give material form to their particular narrative of self-identity’.
2 The more practical reason for this choice is, of course, that I have conducted field
studies in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and have investigated Thailand closely
from secondary sources. They are a useful guide to more general Southeast Asian
trends.
3 Provided we recognise that ‘the new rich’ is a term that marks out a range of social
groups for investigation, rather than precisely identifying in advance a tightly specified
group, the term has definite heuristic utility. It is useful for a number of reasons
identified by the editor, including the fact that it is: ‘conceptually open…thus [raising]
questions of political, economic and cultural identity in a way which, for instance, a
single class designation would not’ (Pinches 1995:1).