6 Tania Lewis
are oriented toward questions of environmentalism and sustainability but
are also invariably co-articulated to a range of other political, economic, and
cultural concerns. As noted, this book is primarily concerned with questions of
sustainability at the level of everyday living, habits, and lifestyles and, in this
next section, I discuss the question of whether South East Asia might offer useful
insights into alternative modes of living than those that have become normalized
and naturalized in the Global North. In invoking the term lifestyle, however, I am
by no means merely concerned with questions of individualized behaviors and
motivations. Rather, as I discuss in the next section, lifestyle practices are tied to,
enabled by, and in turn themselves shape socio-technical regimes and the larger
political and governmental contexts in which they are situated. In South East Asian
countries undergoing major transformations, the question of “lifestyle politics”
becomes even more pressing given that questions of how to live are often shifting
and contested in such settings, opening the way for potential challenges to carbon-
intensive lifestyles and modes of consumption (Bennett 1998; Lewis 2015). As
Beck notes, such transitional moments foreground the necessity of examining “the
co-presence, and co-existence of rival lifestyles, [and] contradictory certainties in
the experiential space of individuals and societies” (Beck 2006, p. 89).
Contesting lifestyles
As I’ve discussed, transformations in South East Asian ways of living or lifestyles
over the past few decades have tended to be viewed in developmental terms, with
Singapore and Japan, for instance, positioned as highly developed consumer-
capitalist nations while the rest of the region is seen as playing “catch-up” with
its relatively “late” modern neighbors (Berkhout et al. 2010). The assumed
developmental narrative here, then, is one underpinned by a progressivist Euro-
American model of modernization marked by a linear shift from agrarianism to
industrialism to post-industrialism. Within an environmentalist context, much
of the region is therefore seen as striving toward the taken-for-granted norms
of Western lifestyles and modes of consumption that have accompanied mass
industrial and, more recently, late industrializing forms of capitalism.
As social practice theorist Elizabeth Shove argues in her book Comfort,
Cleanliness and Convenience (2004), today in much of the Global North our
everyday lives are organized socially and economically to support ways of living
and consuming in which a high level of everyday bodily comfort (from air-
conditioned and heated cars, homes, and offices), cleanliness (for instance, an
expectation of daily showering), and a lifestyle of absolute convenience (from
privatized transport to access to trans-seasonal foods) have become normalized.
However, she shows that, despite the fact that these lifestyle practices have
become naturalized over the past few decades, there is nothing necessarily
inevitable or “normal” about these highly consumptive, fossil fuel–driven
practices. Indeed, for many people raised in the Global North, they can look back
just two or three decades to remember a time when social and technical regimes
structured and naturalized quite different practices and assumptions around