3 results
5 - From Universal to Local Culture: The State, Ethnic Identity, and Capitalism in Singapore
- from SECTION III - THE STATE AND LOCAL CULTURES
-
- By C.J.W.-L. Wee, Nanyang Technological University
-
- Book:
- Local Cultures and the New Asia
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 07 January 2002, pp 129-157
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
There has been much discussion within cultural theory and anthropology as to whether global capitalism and its associated culture homogenize the world, or whether modernity is indigenized differently in various locales (Appadurai 1990; and Rabinow 1988). Also, we understand that the very resistance to capitalist forces can revivify “tradition” in the form of — one of the most-cited instances — the misnamed “fundamentalist” Islam. “Culture” seems to be that which emerges from the margins as a contestatory reaction to capitalism.
We may ask, however, if the state's relation to culture is only that of the above. The prominent issue of culture and the state in the discussion of the “East Asian Miracle” has led to a renewed interest in the state itself and to some Asian states’ cultural differences from laissez-faire capitalism in managing development. Much has been made of the “Asian values” identitarian discourse and debate that transpired in relation to the contentious claim, made in both the West and Asia, that there may be cultural causes for these successes.
The statist experimentation with (re-)invented or “ethnicized” cultural identities in the case of the Asian values experiments in Singapore, I contend, represented a complicity with global capital which fostered space via an adversarial style (Wee 1997). At the very least, these experiments indicate that states are capable of managing culture as an instrument to maintain national competitiveness within global capitalism and in themselves represent a shift in local cultural values.
I will investigate these questions by examining Singapore as an instance of the flexible statist management of culture and, also, the economistic cultural logic that led to this “national culturalism”, as I will call it. Dramatic changes occurred in the People's Action Party (PAP) government's cultural management through ethnicity from the 1970s, when the state had an “ethnically neutral” policy undergirded by a rational commitment to cultural modernization, to the international appearance of the “Asian values” discourse and the 1980's re-ethnicization of Singaporeans into hyphenated identities.
Introduction: Local Cultures, Economic Development, and Southeast Asia
-
- By C.J.W.-L. Wee, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
-
- Book:
- Local Cultures and the New Asia
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 07 January 2002, pp 1-28
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It has become less easy to understand economic development as a process in which “traditional” societies become modernized and rationalized as a unilinear transformational process of the world. This process, it is often thought, started from seventeenth-century Europe and went on to post–Second World War United States. The result of this process was that the cultures of all newcomers were increasingly made “the same”, or culturally homogenized.
The Japanese experience, important as the major and the first industrialized Asian society, has not been completely assimilable into this process of homogenization in terms of its values or social structures. The “unique Japan” hypothesis came about, in which Japanese tradition, instead of being seen as a retrograde element, was trumpeted as a vessel suited for economic development (McCormack and Sugimoto 1988).
The economic rise of other East Asian societies (including Singapore), and the newer Asian Tigers of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia) led to variants of the “unique Japan” hypothesis. One variant, of course, was the much-debated Confucianist model. The values of an underlying common culture, it was argued, fostered the virtues of austerity, harmony and group orientation, hard work, and a submissive attitude towards authority, contributing to rapid growth. The entry of obviously non-Confucian societies then led to further modifications. Now, it was argued, you could see a generalized (pan-)Asian values system — representing, some claimed, an Asian modernity for a New Asia — that had contributed to economic growth.
The detractors saw such arguments as ideological tools used to justify authoritarian politics, and the 1997 Asian economic crisis only heightened the controversy surrounding the “Asian values” discourse. While ideological dimensions incontestably exist, it is of significance that “culture” — conceived of here as a society's value systems and local traditions notionally separable from political rhetoric — has become a part of the discussion as to what is entailed in rapid economic development, and of understanding the success and also some of the difficulties of the new Asian capitalisms.
10 - Representing the Singapore modern: Dick Lee, pop music, and the “New” Asia
- from Part Four
-
- By C.J.W.-L. Wee, Nanyang Technological University
-
- Book:
- House of Glass
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 23 July 2001, pp 243-269
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
I
In an implicit criticism of Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher Chantal Mouffe says, “Not long ago we were being told … that liberal democracy had won and that history had ended.” The event that matters is, of course, the collapse of communism. What caught some people offguard, however, was that instead of the heralded ‘New World Order’, the victory of universal values, and the generalization of ‘post-conventional’ identities, we were witnessing the explosion of particularisms and an increasing challenge to Western universalism”, a universalism characterized as “rationalist and individualist (Mouffe 1993, pp. 1, 3) — the supposed culmination of the modern era ushered in by the Renaissance.
Mouffe is referring to the burst of ethnic nationalisms — “the archaic” — which has erupted in Eastern Europe, and of particularistic movements such as radical feminism. Since the 1980s, similar politicocultural contestations or resistances against Western universalism have also occurred in parts of East and Southeast Asia which have experienced high rates of economic growth until the Asian economic crisis in 1997. Samuel Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, has wrongly but influentially chosen to see this challenge as a “clash of civilizations” between Sinic or Confucianist, Islamic and Western civilizations.
While the essentialist term “civilization” must be interrogated (as if the vastness of Asia could be a single, fixed cultural entity), a discourse on “East Asian modernity” has emerged, claiming the status of a counter- or alternative model of modernity — a “regional” universalism, if you like — in which “traditional” Asian values of family-centredness, self-control, frugality, and corporate identity are seen as the foundations for Asian success. Within this discourse, some Asians like to believe that we have indigenized modernity, and that we might escape the cultural deracination thought to be taking place in the West — perceived to be the consequence of its supposedly extreme, individualist modernity. The discourse thus espouses a neo-traditional modernity that has a less prominent role for individualist, bourgeois democracy.