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.

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.

Over the past two decades, the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics have complicated traditional understandings of the relationship between language and identity. But while research traditions that explore the linguistic complexities of gender and sexuality have long been established, the study of race as a linguistic issue has only emerged recently. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race positions issues of race as central to language-based scholarship. In twenty-one chapters divided into four sections-Foundations and Formations; Coloniality and Migration; Embodiment and Intersectionality; and Racism and Representations-authors at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field present state-of-the-art research and establish future directions of research. Covering a range of sites from around the world, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result. As the study of language and race continues to take on a growing importance across anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, education, linguistics, literature, psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, and the academy as a whole, this volume represents a timely, much-needed effort to focus these fields on both the central role that language plays in racialization and on the enduring relevance of race and racism.

In this original and thought-provoking book, Relli Shechter examines the emergence of 'modern' markets in the complex social environment of the Middle East. Focusing on the tobacco market in Egypt, he looks at how markets interact with the society, politics and culture of the region. The history of Egypt's smoking habits - from the water pipe to the Marlboro - closely mirrors wider socio-economic developments in the country. Shechter begins his story by looking at the entrepreneurial Ottoman elite who produced luxury cigarettes for export worldwide. He then looks at the role of tobacco products in forming class consciousness in the domestic market, based on the idea that "you are what you smoke". Finally he looks at the politics of smoking in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Shechter engages energetically with cutting-edge social and economic theories in telling the story of Egypt's tobacco markets. The result is a fascinating book which contains a wealth of newly uncovered material. "Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East" will stimulate and inform anyone interested in political economy, social change and the Middle East region.

Chapter 1 A BENIGN INTRODUCTION -- chapter 2 A PLACE OF EXCEPTIONAL UNIVERSAL VALUE -- chapter 3 A TALE OF TWO HISTORIES -- chapter 4 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ENLIGHTENMENT -- chapter 5 WHAT DO GODS HAVE TO DO WITH ENLIGHTENMENT? -- chapter 6 A BAROQUE CONCLUSION.

This book examines the complexities of lifestyles of the upwardly mobile middle classes in India in the context of economic liberalisation in the new millennium, by analysing new social formations and aspirations, modes of consumption and ways of being in contemporary urban India. Rich in ethnographic material, the work is based on empirical case-studies, research material, and illustrations. Offering a model of how urban cosmopolitan India might be studied and understood in a transnational and transcultural context, the book takes the reader through three panoramic landscapes: new ‘world-class’ real estate advertising, a unique religious leisure site — the Akshardham Cultural Complex, and the world of themed weddings and beauty/wellness, all responses to India’s new middle classes’ tryst with cosmopolitanism. The work will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers in sociology, South Asian studies, media studies, anthropology and urban studies as also those interested in religion, performance and rituals, diaspora, globalisation and transnational migration.