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Suitably Modern
Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society
By Mark Liechty Princeton University Press
Mark Liechty
All right reserved. ISBN: 0691095930
Chapter One
MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTRUCTION
No actual class formation in history is any truer or more real than any other, and class defines itself as, in fact, it eventuates. Class, as it eventuated within nineteenth-century industrial capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic category of class, has in fact no claim to universality. -E. P. THOMPSON, Eighteenth-Century English Society
Performing a Marriage
The wedding took place during the spring of 1991 on the ground floor of a half-completed concrete home among the seemingly haphazard thickets of similar homes that make up many of Kathmandu's sprawling middle-class suburbs. Above, laundry fluttered like Tibetan prayer flags from clotheslines attached to the dozens of twisted steel rods sprouting through the roof from the building's reinforced concrete pillars. Stretching into thin air, anxious for the day when there would be enough money to add another story, the metal rods seemed to mimic the family's uneasy straining to maintain the standards of a local middle-class lifestyle and testify to their part in the ongoing social drama of middle-class construction.
Having been invited by a Nepali friend (a relative of the bride), Ifelt privileged to witness the intricacies of an orthodox Hindu wedding and was sure it would be a traditional and authentic event. Yet before long my happy reverie was shattered by the clamorous arrival of a local video camera crew. As the only "Westerner" in attendance, I felt somehow personally responsible every time the cameramen-to me the embodiments of an intrusive, "alien" modernity-held up the proceedings: interrupting the Brahman priest's chanting, clumsily rearranging the wedding party, shining bright lights onto the already distraught bride, and entangling everyone in light and microphone cords. I was feeling terribly sorry for the group of dignified women seated to one side-who seemed to be enduring the almost slapstick proceedings with stoic resignation-until suddenly an elderly grandmother tottered to her feet shouting instructions to the wedding party and cameramen to essentially "Redo that last bit!"
In many ways this wedding story is an allegory of life in and for Kathmandu's middle class. The wedding served as a stage on which to perform middle-class culture, a culture that labors to produce itself out of the seemingly contradictory resources of "tradition" and "modernity." The awkward dance of the priest, wedding party, and camera crew is a miniature version of the dance of the middle class in Kathmandu, a dance that brings together a host of competing cultural assets, consumer demands, and media influences into a performance of cultural life that is by its nature complex, halting, unstable, and in periodic need of "redoing"! It is this sense of middle-class culture as practice, production, or performance-along with the anxieties that accompany any act of creation-that I aim to convey in this book. Like the unfinished home where the wedding took place, class culture is always a work-in-progress, a perpetual social construction that is as fundamentally bound to the "concrete" of economic resources as it is to the cultural practices of people who jointly negotiate their social identities.
Although the bride and groom were part of a cultural production shared with their elderly grandparents, the two parties were born on either side of a fundamental turning point in modern Nepali history. In 1951 a popular democratic movement (inspired by the Indian independence movement) put an end to a century of isolationist rule in Nepal. The decades since have seen the Kathmandu valley suddenly awash in a tidal wave of transnational political, economic, and cultural currents that have brought new ideas, new technologies, and ultimately, new ways of being. This book traces some of the sociocultural consequences of Kathmandu's opening to the world. It documents ways in which ever-expanding frames of cultural reference, and spheres of cultural influence, have transformed the lives of people in an ostensibly remote and isolated place.
People in Kathmandu are powerfully aware of living in a radically new era. Whereas the grandparents (and even parents) in this wedding story grew up at a time when communications with the world outside the Kathmandu valley required weeks of grueling overland travel, the bride and groom grew up watching global media events like the Gulf War and the World Cup "live" on television. People born since 1951 have witnessed the world arriving along the first motorable roads into the valley; through telephones and now satellite telecommunications; through electronic entertainment media (cinema, television, video, satellite TV); via air transportation, mass tourism, and a surge of global commodity imports; and through the logics of a new bureaucratic state apparatus, party politics, and large-scale foreign development aid. Technological and social developments that took place over the course of centuries in many parts of the world have in Nepal arrived in the space of the past five decades, and in particular, the last twenty-five years.1
In Kathmandu the past and present stand in extraordinarily stark contrast in almost every aspect of daily experience. Seen from the air, Kathmandu resembles a fried egg (map 1): a distinct center marks the old city (once surrounded by a wall), with its densely packed traditional architecture, while the sprawling ring of unplanned post-1950s "development"-rich farmland now covered by commercial districts and middle-class suburbs-stands as testimony to new movements of goods, capital, people, and cultural sensibilities. Similarly, for many urban Nepalis, core social and religious values (often manifest in terms of caste and kin affiliations) are engulfed-and sometimes overwhelmed-by a transformed sociocultural context adrift in new transnational currents: new labor and economic relations, a new universe of material goods, new arenas of public display, and new ideologies of education, progress, and modernity. As Kathmandu residents navigate through a range of built environments with vastly different histories, so also must they negotiate a range of competing and coexisting systems of value and meaning. In Kathmandu the meaning and experience of modernity lies in daily balancing the demands and possibilities of a transforming social and material context against those of a deeply rooted cultural milieu of moral values, systems of prestige, and notions of propriety.
This book has three goals: to describe the cultural contexts and historical processes out of which a new middle-class culture has emerged in Kathmandu; to provide a detailed account of the practices that make up contemporary urban middle-class life; and, drawing on these ethnographic insights, to offer a new approach to conceptualizing middle-class culture. This book argues that class best accounts for the new sociocultural patterns that have come to dominate urban life in Kathmandu. Caste, kinship, and ethnicity continue to powerfully inflect sociocultural experience, but the daily lives of people in Kathmandu demonstrate that the "epistemological styles" (Appadurai 1990b) of social life have shifted, leaving class as the framing principle for everyday experience. Within this emerging class society, this study focuses on the local middle class, those people carving out a new cultural space which they explicitly locate, in language and material practice, between their class "others" above and below.
In this chapter I introduce some of the study's ethnographic contexts but focus mainly on sketching out the theoretical frame that I will use to make sense of the middle-class cultural life that I describe. This requires an excursion into the politically charged debates over class and cultural practice, debates which reach some of their most arcane and acrimonious levels when trying to theorize the middle class. Drawing from both Marxian and Weberian traditions, this study charts a path toward an anthropology of middle-class culture in Nepal, and elsewhere.
This approach to middle-class culture explicitly incorporates cultural processes of consumption (notably including the consumption of mass media), and the production of "youth culture." Class, consumption, media, and youth have all been subjects of anthropological study, but usually in isolation or in pairs: "youth and media" (Fuglesang 1994), "class and consumption" (Bourdieu 1984), "media and class" (Mankekar 1999), "youth and consumption" (Nava 1992, Sato 1991), and so on. Combining and building on the key insights provided by each of these studies (and many others), this book argues that class, consumption, media, and youth must be seen as not merely interactive but mutually constitutive cultural processes. In Kathmandu a burgeoning local consumer culture, the growing power of a mass-mediated popular imagination, and the recent emergence of "youth" as a distinct social category are, I suggest, best understood within the context of middle-class cultural life. Cultures of consumerism, media, and youth are not side effects or consequences of middle-class formation. Rather, they are among the most important cultural processes through which an emerging middle class actually creates itself as a sociocultural entity.
Over the past few decades in Kathmandu, an almost entirely new "intermediate" social "stratum" has emerged in the social gap between historically polarized national elites and urban commoners.2 In the process, members of this middle class have had to construct entirely new forms of cultural practice. This book ethnographically documents the struggles-moral, material, and ideological-that an emerging middle class must undertake to produce a new cultural space where none had been before. The middle class occupies a precarious position along two continua. On the one hand, it is shaped by its self-conscious awareness of its position between "high" and "low" classes. On the other, it is forced to pioneer a space for Nepali national identity somewhere between the global ideological poles of tradition and modernity. People in Kathmandu's middle class are members (and often leaders) of a state with massive ideological and financial stakes in an international economy of "development aid."3 Yet it is their position on the receiving end of a global development apparatus that defines its targets as undeveloped or "traditional" (Pigg 1992, Escobar 1995) that forces Kathmandu's middle class into the dilemma of reconciling their status as modernity's "traditional" other with their desires to claim a legitimate place within "modernity." Indeed, a great deal of the cultural work described in this book-the work of creating a new middle-class cultural space through processes of consumption, mass mediation, and youth culture-is part of the perhaps impossible project of transforming the idea of "Nepali modernity" from its condition as oxymoron in a global capitalist political economy of places into a legitimate reality in local cultural life.4
Mirroring the organization of the book itself, the rest of this chapter introduces class, consumption, media, and youth.
CLASS AND CULTURE
Why Class?
Kathmandu might seem an odd choice for a study of class cultural dynamics. Indeed, not long ago a prominent British anthropologist argued in print that classes do not exist in Nepal and that caste is the only principle of social organization at work (Macfarlane 1994:114-15). While caste remains a strongly determining and self-orienting cultural force, this book shows that in the last decades people in Kathmandu have come to live more and more of their lives in contexts oriented around the social logic of class. From a series of detailed ethnographic perspectives, this book shows that class has increasingly come to be the framing paradigm for many people in Kathmandu, encompassing (though by no means eliminating) the social valence of caste. As more and more of everyday life revolves around the social imperatives of the money/market economy, the moral (and economic) logic of caste is subordinated to the economic (and moral) logic of class.
When writing about class, one has two basic options: either treat "class" as a given-a taken-for-granted, natural, universal category or concept that speaks for itself-or attempt to actually explain the word by describing the experience of class in everyday life. It is the latter option, the effort to understand class as cultural life, that poses a challenge to anthropology. But once we take up the challenge of constructing an anthropology of class, we are confronted with a range of problems. First, such an anthropology has to counter the claims that "class" does not exist, or that even if it did at one time, the late-twentieth-century "triumph" of the global capitalist order and its freedoms has made it a moot point. Yet even if we turn our backs on these neoliberal naysayers and side with the true believers, we are often not much farther along in the quest for an anthropology of class. The large social-science literature on class, in which the concept is far more often used than defined, leaves us the daunting task of actually describing and analyzing the relationship between class and culture. Ironically, an anthropology of class has to confront both the myths of classlessness and of class; that is, it has to challenge those who deny the existence of class, even while it attempts to rescue the concept from its static state in social theory.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
There are many reasons why students of anthropology should be interested in class. Surely one of anthropology's fundamental challenges as it begins a new century is to come to terms-theoretically, methodologically, existentially-with the fact that "the other we study is as modern, or as embedded in conditions of modernity, as we are" (Marcus 1990:5). Indeed, this book will argue that the "conditions of modernity" are even more glaringly prominent on the Third World periphery, in places like Kathmandu, where they stand starkly outlined against memories of earlier, suddenly "traditional," ways of being. Processes of urbanization, market penetration, bureaucratization, industrialization, and class formation play themselves out in ever-changing power relations that bring the local and global together in explosive and unpredictable ways. With fully half of the world's population now living in urban areas increasingly integrated into a world capitalist economy (D. Harvey 1996:403), the complex processes of social life encapsulated in the domains of class relations and practices are realities that anthropologists must confront.
That anthropologists have mainly shied away from the study of class is due only in part to their discipline's "traditional" subject matter.
Continues...
Excerpted from Suitably Modern by Mark Liechty Excerpted by permission.
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