Why Those Guys with No Better Income Than You Have the Latest Gadget?

I was hospitalized for about a week due to that damn tropical fever. It’s not like that I don’t have time to buy any pesticide, it’s just the weather. This ‘musim peralihan’, like our fellow Indonesians would say, brings those diseases into frenzy. The mosquitoes are everywhere. I am not even sure where I get bitten.

Aside from the bad news, I get souvenir for you from my visit to the hospital. During my stay in there, which was quite traumatizing—lots of screams around, lots of cries around—I met this guy who happened to look after his ill brother. So young, with sturdy appearance and seemingly twisted mind, He smiles and mumbles a lot.

Well, those are not the interesting part at his disposal. What attracts me was his ever singing mobile phone from which today’s Indonesian top forties entertain us. The thing is quite expensive. While it can play music with built in speaker attached, mine can barely survive a call due to its low battery power.

Is his father rich? No. Is his mother rich? Very likely, no. He doesn’t live on his father’s or mother’s salary like me. He works a low-paid job. 

Then, how can he afford such a relatively expensive mobile while he works only as a blue collar worker? Or a better question, why don’t use the money for more important things fit his needs?

 

Resistance and Humanization

I previously read some good articles that hopefully cast light on this phenomenon. The first is by Nico Warouw of GMU’s Antropology Department. The article, published in Jurnal Analisis Sosial, Akatiga, is actually an excerpt from his PhD dissertation he defended at ANU, or rather that is what I think, which discuss how industrial workers in Tangerang assuming modernity or the image of being modern.

There Nico tells us how low-paid workers buy consumptive products normally identified with middle class households—i.e television, VCD/CD, mountain bike—to constitute their identity which by no means middle class. The act of consuming at the same time is the act of transcending identity and embracing a new state of being modern. This is modernism by the industrial workers. They themselves can be poor or financially insecure but the desire to be ‘modern’ like others around them should not be failed to be fulfilled. In short, this is resistance on symbolic realm.

Another good explanation to the same phenomenon might come from an independent scholar named Marcelo Diversi. He writes an article in Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies journal presenting his ethnographic work on Brazil’s street kids. There he found many street kids know very much about nike shoes or nike products. They know which one is original, and which one is forged. The kids, Marcelo writes, almost like live ads commercials. They mimic all information they get from television perfectly. Ironically, while having all the passion to own a nike they lack the most important thing: the guts to own one. It is ironic when Marcelo gives one of them his nike cap, all of them refuse it. They say they are afraid of being robbed or beaten to death if somebody wants to take the nike away from them.

Here, Marcelo proposes that the nike is a demarcation symbol which draws a clear line between normal people who can have nike without being afraid of being robbed and the street kids who have all the passion but don’t have the guts to have one. Their desire of wearing nike then, is a form of a need of humanization.

The moral story now; don’t feel pity, cynical, or critical. Be proud of them who got better gadgets while not having better income than you. They’re in struggle of something.