The Other Kuala Lumpur by Yeoh Seng Guan

Author:Yeoh Seng Guan [Guan, Yeoh Seng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138205925
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Get it right: The moderate and the excessive

Notions of moderation and excess are crucial to understandings and practices of consumption in Malay middle-class families. These understandings and practices of proper Malay consumption may support, transform or contradict halalisation. Concerns with ‘getting consumption right’ have helped shape new forms of ethnic and religious Malay middle-class identities. Hence, halalisation and its contestation in various middle-class groups are actively reshaping modern forms of Malayness. Said differently, moderation and excess are constitutive of a discursive field into which informants plot their personal consumption.

In the eyes of my informants, quotidian considerations such as thrift were prominent. Through thrift, ‘spending is transformed into an act of saving’ (Miller 1998: 62). This was the case with Ahmad, a man in his late twenties who studied accountancy in the United Kingdom and worked in business development. He moved to TTDI around 1996 to live with his sister, her husband and children in their one-storey terraced house. Ahmad hopes to advance in terms of his career so that he can establish a home of his own. His personal thrift was contrasted to that of his friends who were ‘big spenders.’ Hence, the delicate balance between thrift/saving/piety and excess/investment in consumption is seen by informants as moulding divergent forms of Malayness.

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