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

upmarket boutiques in Singapore are deliberately designed to dissuade casual
shoppers from entering, and once in, from staying.
18 I extend my thanks to Professor Hewison for his advice and for material supplied in
researching this chapter.
19 Since the currency crisis, the amount of overdevelopment has become obvious.
Surprisingly, given the number of malls, high-rise condominiums and opulent housing
estates in Jakarta in 1996, business sources at that time (Seek 1996:52) suggested
that the market was nowhere near saturation:
Indonesia…has only 200,000 square meters of retail space for its 195 million
population according to a survey by the Indonesian retailing business
association… Currently there are 55 million Indonesians residing in major
cities, 6 million of which are of the so-called a and b class who have monthly
disposable income between Rp. 1 and 4 million (500—2000 US dollars).
Shopping malls in Jakarta and other big cities play a significant role in
developing retail business… In Indonesia, companies wishing to rent a room in
a shopping mall have to pay five years of rent in advance. Under such terms
plus the current high interest rate of about 20 per cent, it’s very hard for small
and medium retailers to enter the shopping malls.
20 I was fortunate in Jakarta to have the assistance of Mr Hanneman Samuel from
Universitas Indonesia and Swinburne University to draw my attention to many
sociological aspects of both malls and estates.
21 Shields (1992:108) notes: ‘Tribe-like but temporary groups and circles condense out
of the homogeneity of the mass… The impulse of sociality founds class coalitions at
the local, neighbourhood scale, effectual cliques and clubs: a chain reaction of
neighbourhoods, counterspaces, heteronomies, local “tribes”.’
22 ‘Bumi Serpong Damai’ means ‘the peaceful land of Serpong’.
23 Aside from their oft-stated aversion to the corrupting influences of ‘Western values’.
24 Castells argues that in the ‘network societies’ that are emerging beyond Giddens’s
‘high modernity’, dominant social institutions lose completely their capacity to define
the identity of citizens.
25 ‘The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of
the dialectal interplay of the local and the global, the more individuals are forced to
negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options–Reflexively organized lifeplanning–becomes
a central feature of the structuring of self-identity’ (Giddens 1991:
5).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
KEN YOUNG 81
Anderson, B.R.O’G. (1990) ‘Murder and Progress in Modern Siam’, New Left Review, no.
181:39—40.
Anek Laothamatas (1988) ‘Business and Politics in Thailand: New Patterns of Influence’,
Asian Survey, 28(4):451—70.
––(1992) Business Associations and the New Political Economy of Thailand, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.