Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia

Michael Pinches, Michael Pinches

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134642144
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios étnicos

The Asian financial crisis has distracted attention from the realities of a growing affluent class in Asia. this latest volume in the New Rich in Asia series the authors examine the cultural reconfiguration, consumer behaviour, economic success and cultural status of the new rich.
Case studies from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, India and China paint a picture of the real significance of the affluent classes and their effect on national, ethnic and religious restructuring.

1
Cultural relations, class and the new rich of Asia

Michael Pinches

INTRODUCTION

Now, where Japan has succeeded is being duplicated by other East Asian countries. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have amassed enormous trade surpluses… All five of these East Asian countries have embraced Western capitalism… Most of their people are dressed in Western suits; many of them speak English; a good portion of them travel, study, and do business abroad. In their outward appearance these East Asian nouveaux riches are Westernized. Yet behind this facade the people of these countries pursue a way of life that remains essentially Oriental. They prefer to eat Oriental food, observe lunar-calendar-based national festivities, place the family at the center of their social and economic relationships, practise ancestor worship, emphasize frugality in life, maintain a strong devotion to education, and accept Confucianism as the essence of their common culture.

(Tai 1989b:1—2)

Hung-chao Tai’s characterisation of Asia’s new rich echoes a powerful orthodoxy which is evident in the views of many business people, politicians, journalists and academics, both within and outside the Asian region. It suggests three things about the new rich of Asia: that they are superficially Western, essentially Oriental, and represent the majority of the population. While economic growth has brought material betterment and the trappings of Western affluence, Asians, according to this view, remain fundamentally rooted in a world of unchanging Oriental culture. Although few would accept the view that most Asians are newly rich, there is broad agreement, among those who espouse the sort of culturalist paradigm found in Tai’s writing, that the cultures and ethnic groups of Asia differ fundamentally from those in the West, and that they are more or less uniform and unchanging, no matter what the social inequalities or class structures within. The most common general assertion along these lines is that where Western cultures are individualistic and conflict-ridden, Asian cultures are communitarian, familyoriented and more or less harmonious.¹

While the quotation from Tai, like much of the recent literature on economic development in Asia, is specifically concerned with Confucianism, it reverberates with a more general view that the region as a whole, its growth and its newly rich, must be understood primarily in terms of the uniqueness of Asian Values.² This book is not directly concerned with debating the source of the socalled Asian economic miracle. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the cultural constructions of its main protagonists and beneficiaries–the newly rich. The kind of culturalist account found in the above quotation from Tai is one of the most influential of these constructions. Although its explanatory merit must be seriously questioned, there is no doubt as to its wide rhetorical power.

However, there is a second popular cultural construction of Asia’s new rich, partially articulated in the middle sentences of the quotation from Tai, but then effectively dismissed. This construction pictures the new rich of Asia as rampant consumers of luxury goods, caught up in the global whirl of changing fashion, at once seduced by, and now leaders of, a world of consumerism dominated by lifestyle images of the affluent West. On the face of it, these two constructions–one of Oriental essentialism, the other of Western universalism–seem diametrically opposed.

This chapter attempts to explore and theorise these cultural constructions of the new rich in Asia. It draws on both the published literature as well as the other chapters that make up this volume. In the first section, I look critically at the concept of culture that underpins the commonly invoked binary divide between East and West. Yet I argue that a cultural understanding of Asia’s new rich is vital, and a necessary corrective to the narrow political-economic approaches that have often been employed in this area. In advancing an approach that combines cultural and political-economic modes of analysis, I conclude the section by outlining a social relational perspective on culture, class and social differentiation. The second section examines the changing configurations of class and status in Asia, and is particularly concerned with tracing the status transformation of the capitalist from pariah to hero. The third section describes and analyses the Oriental, ethnic and ethno-nationalist representations of wealth production and the new rich in contemporary Asia. Its explanatory focus centres on the identity politics of international status relations, and their consequences for domestic class relations. The fourth and fifth sections examine the representation of Asia’s new rich as high-status consumers, also with reference to international and domestic class relations. The sixth section deals with the cultural labelling of the new rich in Asia. This is followed by a conclusion which draws together the main arguments.

CULTURE, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CLASS

The binary cultural divide between East and West that is expressed in the opening quotation from Tai has a long heritage and continues to inform the way in which large sections of humanity imagine each other. What is most interesting about this perspective is its persistence, despite ample evidence and numerous studies, that demonstrate: first, the wide cultural variance in both Asia and the West; secondly, the interconnected processes of cultural change and globalisation in which all societies are to differing degrees caught up; and thirdly, the significant tensions centred on class and status differences that are present throughout Asia as well as the West. These points are demonstrated throughout this book.

The East/West cultural distinction rests on a dualism that, for a long time, has informed the literature on social change and industrialisation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This concerns the relationship between Europe and its Other, the former colonies that make up most of the so-called Third World (Said 1978; Barker et al. 1985; Bhabha 1994). One influential paradigm, associated with 1960s’ modernisation theory, is that which distinguished between the ‘modern’ cultures of the West and ‘traditional’ cultures of the ‘Third World’. More recently, discussions have been concerned with differences between the European industrial revolution and the industrial transformation that has been taking place in Asia over the last few decades. Much of this discussion bears a strong resemblance to modernisation theory, the difference now being that Asia’s traditions are seen to be propelling it forward rather than backward, as was asserted in the earlier model.

Where the earlier model looked for embryonic Western social and cultural elements as a sign of development, today these elements are often looked upon as superficial, or, in Tai’s words, as a ‘facade’. Thus proponents of this culturalist paradigm now tend to look sceptically upon the use, in Asian contexts, of a social theory developed in the context of industrialising Europe (Pye 1985: 7—10). Some are especially concerned about the use of class theory, and the adoption of such concepts as ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’, which are thought to carry with them too much Eurocentric cultural baggage. This problem is evident in a large body of literature which argues that Asian capitalists and, indeed, Asian capitalism are somehow spurious because they do not conform to an idealised model based on the European experience.³

Undoubtedly there are significant dangers in superimposing on contemporary Asian societies concepts and ideal types that were developed in nineteenth-century Europe. Even apart from variant socio-cultural milieux, the passing of the colonial era and marked differences in technology, communications, corporate organisation and global political relations, all make the contemporary industrialisation of Asia different to that of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe. Yet there are also significant commonalities. First, capitalist transformation in both periods and regions has entailed the generalised production of commodities and the rise of owners of capital to positions of social prominence. Secondly, even if there may be significant historical differences between the two periods, there are important shared contemporary experiences founded in a global political economy that is no longer so constrained by spatial considerations (Harvey 1989; Sassen 1991). Thirdly, concepts like class that have arisen in the West continue to be debated and qualified. It may be less the case that analytical concepts developed in nineteenth-century Europe are limited or inadequate in dealing with contemporary Asia, than that they have also been limited or inadequate in dealing with the West. Indeed, some writers in the West have recently disputed the general empirical and conceptual validity of class (Pakulski and Waters 1996; Lee and Turner 1996). Yet, as will be argued in this and other chapters of this book, class differences and relations, however problematic they may be conceptually and analytically, are fundamental to an understanding of the cultural construction of Asia’s new rich.

In assessing the East/West cultural divide, which has been so important in the identity construction of the new rich in Asia, it is also necessary to look critically at the particular concept of culture upon which it is based: like the sociological concept of class, it too has its origins in Western academic discourse. There have been two principal conceptions of the term ‘culture’ (Williams 1981:10—14; Jenks 1993), both of them used in commentaries on Asia. The earlier concept uses culture as a synonym for civilisation, or what is sometimes called high culture; its opposite being that which is seen to be uncivilised, vulgar and backward. This understanding rests both on a sociological distinction, which posits the coexistence of a people who are civilised and a people who are not, and a historical trajectory of progress from a state of barbarity to one of civilisation. It is this latter idea that is embedded in early modernisation theory which posits a historical shift from tradition to modernity.

The second principal conception of culture, elaborated most fully in the discipline of anthropology, refers not to culture in the singular, as a state of civility or refinement, but to cultures in the plural, as the ways of life or symbolic universes that characterise different societies or peoples. With the Asian economic miracle’, there seems to have been a paradigm shift from culture to cultures.⁴ Thus, traditions in Asia are no longer seen as inferior or historically frozen antecedents of European modernity; rather they are now cultural traditions that rank alongside the cultural traditions of Europe, coexistent but separate and essentially different.

The relativism and multiplicity evident in this understanding of culture clearly reverberate with present popular representations of Asia in the West, and with the general growth of ethnic and cultural self-consciousness (Smith 1981; Kahn 1995), but by no means is there consensus. Anthropologists have long debated the concept of culture. Indeed, with the emergence of cultural studies and postmodern theory, the debate over culture has become more far-reaching, and is arguably the most central to contemporary social thought (see Rosaldo 1989; Keesing 1990; Hannerz 1992; Nelson et al. 1992; Featherstone 1990, 1995; Jenks 1993; Chaney 1994; Dirks et al. 1994; Kahn 1995).

Four criticisms of the concept of multiple cultures are of particular significance to our concern with the new rich of Asia. First, many versions of this model of culture, particularly those which emphasise socialisation or culture as learned behaviour. have difficulty acknowledging or theorising human agency. Secondly, culture as a bounded way of life, or system of symbols and meanings, fails to deal adequately with social change and historical process. Thirdly, humans do not live in clearly bounded groups with clearly bounded ways of life, or clearly bounded values and predispositions. If they ever did, this is no longer the case, and one is particularly hard-pressed maintaining this model of culture in a context of increasing globalisation of economic and political forces. Fourthly, this model of culture has a limited capacity to deal with social differentiation or social structure, where this entails contention or dissent (Hall 1980; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Sider 1986; Austin-Broos 1987; O’Hanlon 1989; Keesing 1990, 1991; Hannerz 1992; Dirks et al. 1994).

Because of conceptual difficulties with overly inclusive ‘way of life’ definitions, the culture concept is now most fruitfully limited to the sphere of symbols and meanings (Keesing 1974). However, the danger with this usage, is that it becomes reified or disembodied from the material world of lived social experience, as is evident in the Geertzian tradition (Keesing 1990; Roseberry 1991), and in some streams of postmodern thought which conceive of a world of cultural constructions virtually independent of agency or political-economic structure (Ulin 1991; Jenks 1993:136—50). One attempt to deal with this problem of symbols and meanings, and the parallel danger of materialist reductionism, is to transcend both spheres with concepts such as ‘practice’ (Bourdieu 1977). Another attempt, adopted in this chapter, is to conceive of the relationship between the two spheres as a broadly dialectical one, whose path is historical and largely indeterminant (Murphy 1972; Keesing 1974:94).

While there is still no consensus on the meaning of culture, the above criticisms have been widely acknowledged in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, and are variably built into the contemporary use of the culture concept in these disciplinary areas.⁵ Moreover, in these disciplines, the culture concept is now often deliberately linked with other analytical concepts. Through the development of cultural studies, in particular, power relations and social differentiation have been made integral to much contemporary cultural analysis (Turner 1990; During 1993; Dirks et al. 1994; Kurtz 1996; Grossberg 1996).⁶ Indeed, arguably the best cultural analysis is that which contributes to our understanding of power and social differentiation.

Today, it is in political science, management theory and among a few born-again economists that culture has taken on its most ossified and simplistic form. Particularly prominent in these disciplines is an equation of culture with behaviourism, normative determinism and changeless monolithic custom. Unfortunately, these disciplines have dominated public and academic debate on the place of culture in industrialisation and development in Asia. For example, in a recent political science text on political and economic change in the Asian Pacific region, Simone and Feraru (1995) describe culture as ‘a taken for granted… constant’ made up of ‘habits (customs), values, beliefs, and attitudes we inherit’. They then counterpose this to ideologies which are ‘self-conscious patterns of ideas and images that redefine human beings’ relationships’, and proceed to explore the relationship between Asia and the West in terms of Asia having cultures and the West having ideologies (Simone and Feraru 1995: 213—14).

Of course there are other traditions of analysis in these disciplines, and in the study of transformation in Asia, most notably political economy, the analytical perspective adopted in the first two volumes of this series. It is hardly surprising, in light of the above-mentioned criticisms of the culture concept and the simplistic way in which writers like Simone and Feraru continue to use it, that many political economists, like Robison and Goodman (1996a) and Rodan (1996), either ignore cultural analysis or else cast their own modes of analysis in opposition to it. The arguments presented in this volume suggest that they throw the baby out with the bathwater: first, in sidestepping the questions of identity construction and related issues that have been crucial to the making of Asia’s new rich; second, in not exploring far enough the hegemonic shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the new rich in Asia; and third, in not dealing reflexively with their own class constructions of the new rich.⁷

The perspective adopted in this volume does not assume the primacy of cultural explanation, and rejects any attempt to encapsulate the region as a whole, or individual countries within it, by reference to a particular culture. Nor does it adopt the view that cultural constructions are mere epiphenomena of base economic or political processes. Indeed, a central argument in the volume is that a cultural understanding of the new rich is integral to an analysis of these processes. Though individual contributions vary, the overall perspective is a dialectical one, which locates the construction or maintenance of belief, value and meaning, in reference to questions of power and inequality, in a context of shifting social, political and economic relations. According to this view, the cultural realm is a realm of variance, tension, contestation, ambiguity and fluidity, into which social actors are thrust, through which they may pursue advantage, and in which they may be subjugated. At each of these points the realm of meanings and symbols is crucial, not just in dialectical relation to political-economic structures, but also ...