5 - From Universal to Local Culture: The State, Ethnic Identity, and Capitalism in Singapore

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.