Out Here in Kathmandu: Modernity on the Global Periphery

Last Updated on Thursday, 26 January 2012 06:59 Friday, 25 March 2011 10:03

Chautari Book Series 59

Mark Liechty
First edition 2010
Page 402+, Price 600 (paperback), 1100 (hardback)

ISBN 978-9937-8194-6-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-9937-8194-7-3 (hardback)

Review
Porn and the Kathmandu lady, Himal Southasian, December 2010
Think India Quarterly, vol.13, no.4 pp. 382-387.
The Kathmandu Post 12 March 2011
Republica (The Week) 1 April 2011
 

Out Here in Kathmandu is a collection of essays that demonstrates how cities like Kathmandu locally engage, produce and reproduce global cultural processes. The essays in the book showcase Kathmandu as a site where modernity expresses itself through the discourses of fashion, food, sex, love, mass media, caste, gender and class. These discourses, as the essays suggest, broadly constitute the core of the project of ‘Nepali’ modernity. Through ethnographic finesse and historico-anthropological flair, Mark Liechty also traces the career of middle-class culture and its intimate links with modernity in Nepal’s history. Anthropology in Nepal has hitherto been dominated by a focus on rural society and cultures. In contrast, this book discusses the new urban cultural practices of the middle-class in Kathmandu. Written by the leading scholar of modern Kathmandu, this book will be an essential reading for anthropologists and all others trying to understand contemporary Nepal.

Mark Liechty is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illiois at Chicago. He is the author of Suitable Modern: Making Middle-class Culture in a new Consumer Society (2003, Princeton University Press) and the founding co-editor of the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society.

Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xvii

Part I: Frames
1. Class as Cultural Practice: Middle-Class Experience in Nepal 3
2. How Media “Work”: Mass Media and Consumer Subjectivity 25
3. Selective Exclusion: Foreigners, Foreign Goods, and Foreignness in Modern Nepali History 61

Part II: Middle Class Practice: Media and Consumer Culture
4. The Social Practice of Cinema and Video-viewing in Kathmandu 139
5. Building Body, Making Face, Doing Love: Mass Media and the Configuration of Class and Gender in Kathmandu 187
6. Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu 219
7. Kathmandu as Translocality: Multiple Places in Nepali Space 269

Part III: Women and the Experience of Modernity
8. Paying for Modernity: Women and the Discourse of Freedom in Kathmandu 307
9. Dissonant Desires: Women as Consumers and Pornographic Media in Nepal 343

Bibliography 373
Index 395

< Prev		Next >