List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii PART I: INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. Middle-Class Construction 3 Chapter 2. Modern Nepali History and the Rise of the Middle Class 39 PART II: CLASS AND CONSUMERISM Chapter 3. Middle-Class Consciousness:"Hanging between the High and the Low" 61 Chapter 4. Consumer Culture in Kathmandu:"Playing with Your Brain" 87 Chapter 5. "Doing Fashion" in Kathmandu: Class and the Consumer Public 117 PART III: MEDIA CONSUMPTION IN KATHMANDU Chapter 6. The Social Practice of Cinema and Video Viewing in Kathmandu 151 Chapter 7. Media Cultures: The Global in the Local 183 PART IV: YOUTH AND THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY Chapter 8. Constructing the Modern Youth 209 Chapter 9. Modernity, Time, and Place: Youth Culture in Kathmandu 232 PART V: CONCLUSION Chapter 10. The Space of Class: Toward an Anthropology of Middle-Class Cultural Practice 249 Bibliography 267 Index 291
This penetrating study of consumption practices in Kathmandu captures the emergence of a new kind of class-based cultural experience, one in which media images and purchased goods increasingly serve as instruments of middle-class self-fashioning. As much a study of profound transformations in Nepali society as a whole as it is an analysis of the lived reality of an emergent bourgeois sensibility, Liechty's research offers important insights into the local cultural ramifications of contemporary forms of globalization. -- Stacy Pigg, Simon Fraser University Providing a well-grounded and at times startling picture of the creation of class identity, Liechty's work succeeds admirably in its goals to document practices of urban middle-class life and the ways these practices produce a newly constituted class. This is a strong, stimulating, and needed contribution to the exciting nascent field of class theory and ethnography in anthropology. -- Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College
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".
"This important and clearly written book should be read by anyone interested in understanding how people in the periphery of the capitalist world economy are experiencing the processes of globalization."--Susan Hangen, Journal of Asian Business "Liechty offers an inspiring cultural analysis of modern life in Nepal that is deeply rooted in history. He thereby connects this seemingly out-of-the-way place to the rest of the world. More generally, Suitably Modern provides a theoretically subtle depiction of middle-class cultural practice that promises to be read by a wide range of scholars interested in class and global capitalism for some time in the future."--Laura Kunreuther, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
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