ABSTRACT
The conceptualisation of consumer culture as ‘excess’ recalls the conditions of deprivation prior to industrialisation that are still fresh in the collective memories of Singaporeans. The critique against ‘Westernisation’ locates Singapore as a non-Western/Asian ‘culture’ and points to an awareness of the symbolic significance of consumer goods. The labour-intensive, exportoriented industrialisation of the 1960s was well timed as its initiation corresponded with the spatial transfer and expansion of industrial production from developed nations to cheap production sites in selected locations in Asia. The cultural entailments of global capitalism have always been part of the cultural context in which Singaporeans make their lives. Singaporeans, even before that ‘name’ existed to anchor their national identity, have never been strangers to modernisation and have been adaptable to each period of change in the modernisation trajectory. Modernity as a cultural context has never been an importation of the West imposed upon and destroying an existing ‘traditional’ culture.
