A01=Mark Liechty
Adolescence
Advertising
American middle class
Arjun Appadurai
Author_Mark Liechty
Bangkok
Bollywood
Boutique
Capitalism
Category=GTP
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSA
Category=JBSD
Category=JHM
Clothing
Commodity
Competition
Consumer
Consumer behaviour
Consumer capitalism
Consumer economy
Consumer Goods
Consumerism
Cross-cultural
Cultural capital
Cultural practice
Development aid
Doordarshan
Economy
Employment
Entertainment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Everyday life
Expatriate
Extended family
Film industry
Ghimire
Helena Wulff
Ideology
Income
Kathmandu
Kathmandu Valley
Laborer
Market economy
Mass media
Middle class
Modernity
Moral economy
Music video
Narrative
Nepal Television
Of Education
Politics
Pradhan
Prostitution
Public space
Restaurant
Salary
Shrestha
Smuggling
Social capital
Social class
Social currency
Social Practice
Social status
Society
Standard of living
Sumptuary law
Technology
Television
The Other Hand
Tourism
Upper class
Viewing (funeral)
Year
Youth
Youth culture
Product details
- ISBN 9780691095936
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 17 Nov 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment.
Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.
Mark Liechty is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is coeditor of the journal "Studies in Nepali History and Society".
