MAHATHIR: To say that the NEP has succeeded is to be optimistic. You say it has succeeded in creating this middle-class of Malay professionals. It has not. What has happened is simply the Government makes it possible for them to survive. The economy is still basically the same. All these people depend on the Government — the Malay contractors, the Malay lawyers, the businessmen.
Now that the Government is not having a lot of projects, all of them are suffering. And they do not know what to do. Malay contractors can never get contracts other than from the Government. Perhaps it is their fault but the fact is, that is the situation. So to say that the NEP has created this permanent Malay middle class is not quite correct.
Now that the Government is cutting back, these people have reverted to being, well, the bottom rung of the middle class. A lot of them are bankrupt because they borrowed money. The NEP has only worked in the equity aspect, the nominal share aspect of wealth as characterised by PNB and so on. What we need is a genuine partnership between Malays and non-Malays, the Bumiputera and the non-Bumiputera. Then the NEP will have succeeded.
The Malays must leam how to manage, how to be thrifty. Giving money to the Malays, for them to squander, is not helping them. If you use a Malay name so that you can tender for a Government project that's not helping the Malays or anyone.
Therefore, as things go, they would need the crutch for a long time. I'm not blaming the non-Bumiputeras. I'm blaming the Bumiputeras who take the easy way out. They think that the NEP means a free gift. Once the economy slides and there are no free gifts, they're in trouble. This so-called middle class and rich Malays are all owing money to the banks. I think practically every one of them is bankrupt now.
The crutch therefore will have to remain until there is an equitable distribution of wealth. I would not like to see the crutch taken off when Malay contractors can only get contracts from the Government. Where are they to go?
(NST 1/1/1988)
Another issue on which the emergence of a middle class clearly has a bearing is that of fertility and rates of population growth. Not yet a concern in Malaysia to the extent that it is in Singapore, where falling birth and marriage rates among the middle classes have caused something of a eugenicist panic in government circles, it is nonetheless obvious that changes in the class composition of the Malaysian population as a whole, and of particular communities, will have an effect on fertility rates and hence on both overall rates of population growth, and the relative populations of different classes and ethnic groups.
According to Singapore's government, the main reason for the panic is the decline in birth rates among educated professionals, and the main explanation proffered is that educated women are taking up professional employment rather than staying home to have children. Be that as it may, quite clearly the growth of the middle class has important implications for women's position and gender relations in contemporary Malaysia. This is not to presume that women's position has been improved among the new middle classes, that is a question for research. But dearly the changes in women's employment patterns associated with the growth of this class is having an impact on gender relations, domestic structures and fertility patterns as well as on women's political participation and the discourse on gender in Malaysia. One should for example note here the prominent role played by middle class women in non-governmental organisations in general, and women's groups and Malaysia's feminist movement in particular.3
One could go on, but I think the point has been made that social scientists with an interest in social, economic, political and cultural developments in contemporary Malaysia would do well to pay more attention than they have done to the development of a growing and increasingly influential middle class.
But one might go further than this. It is possible to argue, as my title (adapted from a classic paper by the Dutch ethnologist Josselin de Jong)4 indicates, not only that we need to note the arrival of a middle class in the Malaysian social scene, but that, particularly for anthropologists, research on the middle class should be given a particularly high priority, indeed might even come to constitute the core of a new anthropology in what some choose to call the post-colonial order. For it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify — either ethically or theoretically — an anthropology which takes as its object the cultures and social organisations of others, particularly when, as so often is the case, those others are by definition subordinates in the new global order. Even notions like subalternity, designed to give voice to those whose voices have been muted by colonialism, racism, patriarchy and political oppression, are increasingly being seen to be the dying gasp of a colonial mentality in which these others need the academic even to speak for them.
And to the extent that anthropology in particular justifies its knowledge by appealing to its methods of participant observation — then what better object of study than the middle class? For here the participation is real, and not that play at participation that has traditionally been called field work.5
Be this as it may, as even this brief survey shows we need to do more than take the middle class into account. We need to go further, to consider more precisely how the growth of that class is significant and, indeed, to think more clearly about the concept itself. For against those who argue that conceptual clarification is neither possible nor desirable,6 I would suggest that considerable confusion has been generated by the conflicting, sometimes even contradictory ways in which the term has been used.
Some of these issues loom large in a recent article on the Malaysian middle class by Johan Saravanamuttu. Because this is one of the very small number of works by social scientists dealing directly with the developing middle class in Malaysia it is worth looking at briefly here.
Ethnicity, the Middle Class and the Malaysian State
Saravanamuttu's arguments are part of a growing interest in the middle classes in Southeast Asia and particularly in their potential impact on political processes. This concern must be understood against the background of two developments — on the one hand the more or less rapid economic growth in and industrialisation of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and, now apparently Indonesia as well; and on the other hand the persistance or even increase in level of State authoritarianism. This combination poses problems for traditional theories of modernisation which posit a causal link between economic "development" and the emergence of democratic institutions. Against this background, at least liberal observers have placed varying degrees of hope in the growing middle classes in these countries as potential agents for democratisation. Saravanamuttu's arguments, although they tend to be couched in a Marxist rather than liberal language, fall in squarely with the liberal optimists, arguing that the emerging Malaysian middle class shows a strong "affective orientation toward democracy" (1989: 106)7
Let us see how he reaches this conclusion. Suggesting, rightly, that the term middle class is imprecise and that it is important to clarify our usage, particularly in social circumstances which differ in fundamental ways from those prevailing in the West where the concept was first articulated, Saravanamuttu opts for a definition offered by Giddens, which characterises the middle class as possessors of educational qualifications and/or technical skills, thus contrasting them with both bourgeoisie and proletariat. We shall return to the problems with this definition in a moment.8
Saravanamuttu then moves on to explore the political behaviour of this middle class, first by taking issue with the thesis of Harold Crouch that the embourgeoisement of the Malaysian middle class — exemplified by increased rates of home ownership and ownership of consumer durables — makes this class a stabilising influence which means, presumably, that it will be unlikely to resist authoritarian trends in the Malaysian State.9 Contra Crouch, Saravanamuttu wishes to argue that the fact that the middle class is "senang" and not "susah" does not mean that they will not oppose the government. In defence of this he cites, among other things, support for opposition parties in the 1986 election (the DAP and PAS), and the role played by "middle class organisations" in advocating a "politics of democracy" in opposition to authoritarian moves by the State. Here he maintains that it was primarily middle class organisations which were behind opposition to the 1981 amendments to the Societies Act, the 1986 amendments to the Official Secrets Act, and the Operation Lalang detentions of October, 1987; as well as the protests, largely organised by the Bar Association, against the dismissal of the Chief Justice Tun Salleh Abas.
Finally, Saravanamuttu goes on to report the results of a survey carried out by a group of social scientists at Universiti Sains Malaysia in which questionnaires were mailed to a sample of "community leaders", i.e., the leaders of a variety of organisations including political parties. The results of the survey, Saravanamuttu maintains, show that by and large the middle classes are not ethnically-minded, but are more concerned with the issue of democracy.
I will focus the remainder of this paper on the issues raised by Saravanamuttu's paper not because it provides a satisfactory solution to the problems raised for researchers by the developing middle class in Malaysia, but because, first it is the only recent piece to tackle the sociological problems directly and, second, because in doing so it raises what are, I think, the key issues with which future researchers will have to grapple.
A Critical Appraisal of the Saravanamuttu Thesis
On closer examination, Saravanamuttu's paper is based on two propositions which need considerable clarification in any study of the Malaysian middle class, indeed in any analysis of and research on the modern middle class, whether in the West or Asia.. The first is that the middle class can be defined, in the singular, by what might be called its relations to the means of production (in this case skills, technical or otherwise). The second is that it is possible, in Lukacs' terms, to impute a consciousness to the middle class so denned (in this case a discourse which is at once non-ethnic and pro-democratic).
I propose to examine these issues here by, first, offering some remarks on the nature of what Saravanamuttu and others have chosen to call a middle class, and, second, by saying something about class and culture.
A Middle Class or the Middle Classes?
The discovery of middle strata, classes which appear to "stand between" capitalists and workers, is by no means unique to social theory in the late twentieth century. Moreover such a discovery has always been seen to pose a challenge to existing characterisations of modern social relations. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the history of the concept. Suffice it to say that, as most writers on the theory of the middle class have pointed out, Weber criticised
Marxism for its inadequate treatment of these strata, and in so doing formulated his alternative model of capitalist stratification based on the notions of class, status and party in part to rectify the situation (see Barbalet, 1980; Abercrombie and Urry, 1983).
But Weber was not the first to discover the middle strata and, on that basis, argue for a revision of existing orthodoxy. Indeed he inherited at least the "problem of the middle class", if not his particular solution, more or less directly from the earlier work of German economic historians (see Kahn, 1990). And if this is true of the German tradition, it is the case for nineteenth century French and Anglo-Saxon social theory as well.
The fact that the problem of the middle strata has a fairly long and established history, at least in European social thought, might lead us at least to be slightly sceptical of recent announcements of the arrival of the "new" middle classes.
Be that as it may, recent attempts to come to grips with the phenomenon of the middle class have generally attempted to answer the questions posed by Lev, namely "who exactly they are, why they are important, and what difference they actually make". Given that so much ink has been spilled in attempting to answer these questions, and that no definitive answers have yet been given, it would be presumptuous of me to claim to be able to provide any final answers here. Instead I would like only to refer to what I see to be some major difficulties in the way the "problem of the middle classes" is currently being posed, difficulties which are clearly manifest in Saravanamuttu's paper. These difficulties are perhaps most clearly manifest in the ambiguity in our usages of the term "middle class". Are we speaking of a singular or a plural phenomenon, of a middle class or of the middle classes?
There are a variety of reasons why we cannot decide exactly "who they exactly are". But two which have to do with the very way the problem has been posed appear to be particularly pertinent. These are, firstly, that there seems to be a widespread but on reflection highly questionable assumption that the middle class will in some formal sense resemble other modern classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And, secondly, there is in much of this literature, Weberian as well as Marxist, the problematic assumption that all spheres of modern life must be accounted for by reference to the logic of what Marx called capitalism or what Weber termed instrumental rationality.
The first assumption is clearly evident in Saravanamuttu's paper in the sense that he adopts a definition of the middle class as we have seen from Giddens. It will be noted that the Giddens definition, which appears in turn to borrow from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, characterises the middle class in a way which resembles directly and formally the prevailing definitions of capitalist and proletarian, i.e., by use of the ownership/non-ownership dichotomy. If capitalists own the means of production, then the middle class "owns" technical/educational qualifications. In this way the middle class is distinguished from capitalists, because it "owns" something different, and from the proletariat, because it "owns" something.
But this is problematic, for it presumes that people can be unambiguously assigned to the middle class, just as others can be assigned unambiguously to the other classes, according to its ownership of skills and non-ownership of means of production. Either they do or they do not "own" educational qualifications/technical skills; either they do or they do not own means of production. But can we really pursue this analogy between "skill" and "means of production" to the point of assuming that they are identical, or phenomena of a similar order? I think not. And simply reflecting on the diversity of people who "own" skills should be enough to indicate the inadequacies of the analogy. Although coming at the problem from a different direction, Barbalet shows quite clearly the inadequacies of such an approach, in maintaining forcefully that whatever may distinguish the middle class and the proletariat, it cannot be "ownership". While we may disagree with his conclusion, the logic of thereby assigning the middle class to the class of proletarians, seems to be impeccable. If the middle class is to be distinguished from the proletariat it cannot, as Barbelet con- | vincingly shows, be something on the basis of something analogous to class in the ownership/non-ownership sense of the term. It still seems possible to argue that all owners of the means of production share something of a structural order, and that all non-owners of means of production equally share a structural location in modern society. But the same cannot be said of "owners" of skills and/or qualifications. This conceptualisation of the middle class, far from reducing the ambiguity in the concept in fact increases it. Indeed we might go further. If class is to be understood as something stemming i from the ownership/non-ownership dichotomy, then there can be no | middle class. But here I wish simply to point out that we will never I produce conceptual clarification, much less answer the question of"who they are" by assuming that a concept of the middle class must formally resemble the concepts of capitalist and proletarian.
To those who might want to argue that the above constitutes a sterile and formalistic critique, I would point out that Saravanamuttu's use of the Giddens definition has contributed to what seems to me to be a very misleading conclusion about the "real" issues of Malaysian political process. For it will be noted that Saravanamuttu's conclusion that the Malaysian middle classes show an "affective orientation to democracy" is derived ultimately from an observation about a very selective group of middle class people. It is important to note here that the survey to which he refers, for example, was conducted among:
1) members of organisations and, 2) largely from the executive leadership of those organisations. The presumption that these people are typical of the middle class, because like all the other members of that class they are owners of skills/qualifications, is a typical example of the way one can be misled by such conceptualisation of the category "middle class".
As I have said, there is a second difficulty in much of the recent literature on the middle class, and that stems from the attempt to derive the concept more or less directly from the logic of capitalism or by using a Weberian notion of instrumental rationality. To explain what I mean by this, I would refer to the very way one influential study has posed the problem. Abercrombie and Urry began their survey of Marxist and Weberian theories of the middle class with the following question: "[W]hat is the class position of that class or classes which is or are in some sense intermediate between labour and capital?"(1983). Attempting just to make a start, therefore, one must presuppose that the definition of the modem middle classes must start by conceptualising or reconceptualising capitalist economic relations. And given their starting point it is not surprising that Abercrombie and Urry, like many other writers on the "new middle class", then go on to explain its emergence in terms of the logic of twentieth century capitalism. In particular the stress is laid on the ways modern, as opposed to nineteenth century, capitalism has generated a vastly increased need for skilled workers because of the increased extent to which science/knowledge/information is applied in the capitalist production process. As a result we are often told about the rise of a new category of workers — workers with access to skills, workers who coordinate diverse processes of production, workers who are involved in the flow of information etc. — who differ significantly from the proletariat of nineteenth century capitalism, or indeed unskilled workers in the twentieth century. It is this new class which is often equated with the "new middle class".
I do not wish to dismiss the significance of changes in production and distribution brought by technological change in the twentieth century. But I would suggest that the link posited between this economic development and the social phenomenon labelled the new middle class is not so straightforward as this argument would suggest. Again the problem is manifest in the use of the concept of middle class to characterise what is in fact a highly disparate collection of people — both now and historically.
For example, proclamations about the arrival of a capitalist new age (post-industrialism, the information society, etc.) notwithstanding, it is worthwhile asking about the extent to which this "economic revolution" is indeed all that new. Even in colonial Southeast Asia there is plenty of evidence to suggest that from the earliest years of the 20th century there was a fairly substantial body of people who were neither unskilled workers (in mines and plantations) or owners of colonial enterprise — overseers and managers, agronomists and agricultural extension officers, scientists and technologists, government employees, teachers, etc. How different were these people from the new "information workers" we currently hear so much about? And if this was true of colonial social formations, then it must have been even more the case for the "advanced" capitalist nations.
But similarly in the twentieth century, one would be hard put to argue that that group labelled "middle class" by writers like Saravana-muttu owes its existence entirely to the changing demands of capital. Whether or not some of the members of this "new middle classes" have a role in capitalist production and reproduction, the fact remains that at least a significant number of them are employed not in the private sector, but by the State, even in the West (see Abercrombie and Urry, 1983: 78). And this is equally true in the Malaysian context where the "middle class" identified by writers like Crouch and Sarava-namuttu is composed largely not of private, self-employed entrepreneurs, or middle ranking employees of private enterprises but those employed directly or indirectly by the State (this includes of course "intellectuals", at least in those parts of the world where universities are publicly-owned and/or controlled).
The emergence of a new middle class, at least in post-colonial Malaysia then, might have as much if not more to do with the emer- gence of the modern state then with capitalist development per se. Whether this is also true of the West is a question we need not deal with here.
Now it can be, and indeed has been, argued that post-colonial states in places like Malaysia are in the business of capital accumulation. This tendency to impute a capital logic to the modern state is especially evident in concepts such as "state capitalism" or in the characterisation of the Malaysian elite as a "bureaucratic bourgeoisie". And doubtless, as these terms imply, greater emphasis needs to be given to the role of states in the promotion of economic transformation than classical social theory is wont to do — deriving as it does largely from the, idealised, picture of capitalist transformation in nineteenth century Britain, driven by forces in civil society rather than the state.10
Nonetheless it would be equally misleading to produce a theory of the state which is entirely derived from the economic logic of capitalism. States, and the processes of state formation are not just about capitalism, they are in the business of power. And if this is the case, and if we are still to use the term class for a social position which derives primarily from the matrix of power relations, then the middle class may be a phenomenon of quite a different order from that of classes as commonly defined. This is less because the former have no economic basis (to the extent that the state must engage in material reproduction they quite clearly do), and more that the processes of social differentiatioJi out of which the middle class arises differ markedly from the processes of class formation under capitalism at least in nineteenth century Britain. In the latter, as Marx described it, class formation is a bipolar process. In the former the pattern is more complex, which is again why when we speak of middle class it is always ambiguous whether we are speaking in the singular or the plural. In other words, in the modern post colonial state there are a whole series of positions between the elite and the typists, each distinguished from "classes" above and "classes" below by relations in the matrix of power. And since power relations are always relative there is no reason to presume that the tendency will be towards bi-polarity, whether or not the poles are mediated by what "intermediate groups".
Indeed if those groups Saravanmuttu and others label "middle class" have political agendas, such as an "affective orientation towards democracy", then those agendas are more likely to be related to the position occupied by different segments of that highly diverse "middle class" in the matrix of power relations, and has very little to do with resisting, or supporting, the logic of capitalism.
I have argued that at least as the problem of the middle class is currently being posed, we are unlikely to find much illumination in conceptual clarity. And this stems from the tendency, on the one hand, to draw analogies between the formation of classes under capitalist relations of production and the processes which have given rise to the "middle classes"; and, on the other, the tendency to analyse the middle classes in terms of a calculus of capitalist or of instrumental rationality. The identification of these difficulties in work such as Saravanamuttu's paper on its own is insufficient to produce conceptual clarity. All I can hope is that it is a step in the right direction.
In the final section of this paper, I wish now to turn to the problem of the relationship between "class position" and "consciousness" in general, and to prognoses about the likely role of the Malaysian "middle class" in the political process in particular. To do this I shall begin by looking at the relationship between the Malaysian middle class and "culture".
Middle Class, Culture and Ethnicity
It will be recalled that Saravanamuttu has offered two conclusions about the "consciousness" of the developing Malaysian middle class:
first, as we have seen, that it tends to be democratically-oriented (and hence likely to oppose state authoritarianism), and second, that it is not going to be particularly affected by questions of ethnicity. I take this combination to mean that Saravanamuttu is suggesting that the new middle class will articulate "enlightened", universalistic discourses in contradistinction both to the state elite (which pushes authoritarian values) and other groups who may, or may not, oppose the state but which are motivated by particularistic (ethnic) concerns. This again is not, of course, a concern unique to Saravanamuttu. As we have seen there is currently a good deal of concern with the potential role of the middle class(es) in Southeast Asia for pushing democratic reform. It is, therefore, a very important issue, and we should be grateful for Saravanamuttu for raising it in the Malaysian context.
Again, however, I want to look more closely at the way this particular issue is being posed in order to point to ways in which these questions can be more rigorously dealt with. To do so, I shall offer some remarks on the nature of universalistic ("enlightened") and parti- cularistic ("ethnic") discourses, with particular relation to Malaysian realities.
The phenomenon of what is variously called race, communalism and ethnicity looms large in our images of Malaysia. And for most academic observers ethnic relations are the key to almost all aspects of Malaysian social organisation. The literature on the phenomenon is truly massive and it is not my intention to provide an overview here.11 Instead by way of introduction to what follows I want only to offer a brief remark on ethnicity and its relation to culture and the middle classes.
It is generally observed that theories of ethnicity fall between two poles, as it were, the one epitomised by Geertz's notion of "primordial loyalties", the other by Earth's view of ethnicity as a "strategy".12
At the risk of oversimplification, the former holds that ethnic identification arises directly and unproblematically from the primordial givens of an individual's cultural life — kinship, residential proximity, clanship, etc. The latter view instead problematises the relationship between ethnic identity and its cultural infrastructure by, first, asking about the conditions under which individuals choose certain markers of ethnic identity over others and, second, answering that the reasons are to be found not primarily in the cultural infrastructure at all, but in the strategic concerns of individuals (usually economic or political).13 As recent writers have pointed out, neither of these approaches is unproblematic: primordialism because by taking ethnic identity as given, it cannot deal with changing ethnic alignments, in general, and ethnic resurgence in particular; strategism because it cannot deal with the phenomenological realities of ethnicity, which are inevitably reduced to the, only apparently, more "real" substrata of economic and .political "interest". The tendency in concrete analyses of Malaysian ethnicity to combine the two approaches only makes matters worse.
I do not claim here to be able to offer an approach which succeeds in overcoming this polarity. But I would suggest that new approaches to ethnicity in contemporary Malaysia must tackle an issue which both primordialist and strategic approaches have up until now largely ignored, and that is the problem of culture. Momentary reflection is enough to suggest that both the primordialist and the strategic theories of ethnicity treat culture unproblematically, as though cultures were given to social actors, immutable phenomena beyond human comprehension and control. For primordialists, certain cultural dimensions of human existence are just that — primordial — i.e., "existing at or from the beginning, primeval, original or fundamental", to quote from the Concise Oxford Dictionary. For the "strategists" the cultural traits which go to make up given ethnic identities are equally pre-given to social actors.
But, as recent theories of culture have persuasively demonstrated, this view of culture is highly unsatisfactory for two basic reasons. First is the fact that it is impossible, particularly in the modern world, to define discrete cultures except in a totally arbitrary way. In other words there are no more other cultures out there in the world than there are other races — they both exist only in the eye of the beholder as it were.
Second, and related to this, culture is an intellectual construct. It exists, in other words, only in the mind of an observer. Since the observer is, more often that not an anthropologist or some other member of the middle class intelligentsia, then the idea of cultural diversity becomes just another way in which the middle classes choose to construct people as different, whether that difference is perceived in racial or cultural terms.
What I am getting at, therefore, is that what observers of the Malaysian scene choose to call cultural diversity is itself an ethnic discourse, i.e., the concept that Malaysians differ from each other in radically distinct ways. In this reading "cultural diversity" is a construct. It does not, therefore, have a logical priority to ethnicity. Instead ethnicity constructs cultural diversity. And, as I have suggested, it is at least a discourse partaken of by the middle class, if not in its strict sense a purely middle class discourse.
To say that ethnicity is a middle class discourse is not to suggest that no one else constructs Malaysians as diverse. Diversity is clearly there, and does not need the middle classes to discover it. But the implications of the "constructedness" of culture and, hence, cultural diversity is important for the topic at hand for two reasons.
First, we must not forget that the so-called middle class (which includes social scientists) is by no means necessarily more "enlightened" than anyone else, if by "enlightened" we understand a tendency towards humanistic universalism. For to the extent that even those "enlightened" spokespersons for the middle class, the academics, persist in constructing the world as made up of a diversity of cultures, then the middle class can be just as "ethnic" as anybody else.14 This has in fact been specifically argued for the Malaysian
middle class by Syed Husin Ali, who has suggested, contra Saravana-muttu that:
Although in its outward manifestations, inter-ethnic tension seems to be caused by non-economic, particularly cultural issues, in reality, the basic causes are economic. The wealth of the country and the key positions of political power are monopolised by a small multi-ethnic circle. Below them are the expanding groups of people, mostly from the middle class, who strive hard to break into the exclusive circle. In order to exert strong pressure, they whip up support from the majority of people by raising issues that can be most effective, — those that are ethnic or cultural. The feelings of ethnic antagonism seem to be very strong and most vocally expressed among the middle class.
(S Husin Ali, 1984: 30)
Second, it needs to be pointed out that as participants in the business of constructing cultural diversity, the middle class version of ethnic discourse, social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular, are in a unique position to study ethnicity — as I have argued as real participant-observers.15
Having suggested that the "middle classes" are uniquely implicated in ethnic discourse, I do not wish to imply that they are inevitably so. My concern has been to show that there is no logical reason why we should expect a middle class to articulate "enlightened", i.e., universalistic ideals like democracy. It is, of course, also the case that at least some segments of the middle class may be predisposed to democratisation, or, one might add, even Marxism.16 Dealing with the issue of "middle class" consciousness, therefore, must mean looking at the conditions under which middle class groups come to articulate/ practice one or other of the discourses which are imputed to them.
Again this is not a topic which I feel I can confidently deal with in its entirety. But it is worth concluding this analysis by suggesting ways in which we might begin to think about the relationship between the "class position" of the middle class and consciousness in the light of my discussion above.
It will be recalled that I have maintained that a revised concept of the middle classes will have to take account, among other things, of the way groups of people are embedded in the matrix of power relations that constitute the modern state. On looking for a relation between middle class position and consciousness I would want to look more closely at the links between the varieties of middle class discourse mentioned here and that matrix. I have discussed elsewhere one way in which we might link the constitution of power relations in the modern state and the emergence of both universalistic and particularistic discourses among its employees (see Kahn). In the case at hand, such an exercise would involve us in looking at the way power relations in the modern Malaysian state are themselves constituted by ethnic differentiation, particularly in the period since the decline of consensual elite politics (see Kahn and Loh, forthcoming). This, in turn, would allow us more accurately to interpret the potential of various segments of the employees of that state to articulate particularistic or universalistic discourses and political practices.
This is necessarily brief and telegraphic. But my point is that once we stop trying to fit the middle class into a model of class established for nineteenth century capitalism, once we recognise that Malaysian "middle classes" are just as embedded in the state as they are in capitalist economic relations, and once we recognise that the sphere of political control is not simply reducible to the sphere of capitalist economic rationality we will be in a better position, when talking of the Malaysian middle class to understand more clearly "who exactly they are, why they are important, and what difference they actually make". And moreover it is precisely questions such as these which should be concerning anthropologists in and of contemporary Malaysia.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Clive Kessler and Noraini Othman for drawing this article to my attention.
2. The literature here is vast. A good example, from a region in which I have done research, is found in a series of reports on the State of Negeri Sembilan (see Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, n.d.). A discussion of the impact of the NEP on urban Malays is found in Osman (1987).
3. For a discussion of Malaysian feminism together with references on women in contemporary Malaysia see Stivens, forthcoming.
4. See J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, (1935). ' 5. This is a point I have developed further elsewhere (see Kahn, 1989).
6. Evidently the same view has been expressed in other contexts. In the introduction to the recent volume on the Indonesian middle class, Tanter and Young refer to a debate over the desirability of working toward greater conceptual clarity in the notion of middle class (Tanter and Young, 1990: 9-10).
7. While a similar position has been advanced in the Indonesian context by Lev, his views of the potential liberal orientation of the Indonesian middle class is considerably more nuanced (see Lev, 1990, cf Liddle, 1990).
8. This is the definition used by Saravanamuttu to estimate the size of the
middle class, quoted above.
9. Although he does not devote much effort to conceptual clarification, Crouch's informed commentaries on, particularly, Malaysian and ASEAN political developments contain a careful consideration of the impact of the middle classes, and are hence a good source for those interested in pursuing the topic. See for example Crouch (1984,1985, forthcoming).
10. This raises a more general issue about the pertinence of classical Western social and economic theory to non-European contexts. But apart from the obvious problems with the Eurocentrism of these theories, there is also the difficulty in applying concepts and theories pertinent to nineteenth century Britain. The same difficulties arise when these theories are implied to earlier industrialisers like Germany. For this reason I would agree with Kitching who has argued that a central problem in development theory has not been so much in the application of western models to non-western situations, but in the use of inappropriate western models. For this reason comparisons between Malaysia and so-called "late industrialisers" in the West, notably nineteenth century Germany, remain illuminating (see Pitching, 1982).
11. For some recent publications on the relation between ethnicity and various aspects of Malaysian society (the last few years only) see Osman (1989), Selvaratnam (1981), Lee (ed.) (1986), Jesudason (1989), and various contributions in Kahn and Loh (eds.) (1992).
12. See C. Geertz (1963) and F. Barth (ed.) (1969).
13. An example of the latter for the Malaysian case is found in Nagata (1979). But it should be noted that among so-called Marxist approaches to ethnicity, there are those, which "explain" ethnicity by reference to class interest, hence implying a notion of strategy not dissimilar from that suggested by Barth.
14. Indeed Smith has argued persuasively that intellectuals have played a major role in Europe's 20th century ethnic revival (see A. Smith, 1981).
15. The above discussion of culture, ethnicity and the intelligentsia has been abbreviated for reasons of space. I have discussed these things in more detail elsewhere. See Kahn (1989, forthcoming).
16. Here it is worth recalling Alvin Gouldner's suggestion that Marxism too has been an ideology of the intelligentsia, not the proletariat (see Gouldner, 1985).
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