Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #365866 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
Liechty offers an inspiring cultural analysis of modern life in Nepal that is deeply rooted in history. -- Laura Kunreuther, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Review
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 )

Review
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 )

Customer Reviews

I'm surprised...
I was surprised to see that no one had reviewed this book yet. For those of us working on Nepalese society this is a MUST read. Liechty carefully explores the creation and impact of Middle Class in Nepal including media, kids, and consumerism. It's also a pleasant read that doesn't suffer from the usual rose-coloured glasses tone infecting far too much anthropological work on Nepalese society. I also have met the author and must say he's a knowledgeable person with a passion for Nepalese people and a passion for passing on his knowledge. I highly recommend this read.