Out Here in Kathmandu: Modernity on the Global Periphery

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

1. The Social Practice of Cinema and Video-viewing in Kathmandu - 139
2. Building Body, Making Face, Doing Love: Mass Media and the Configuration of Class and Gender in Kathmandu - 187
3. Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu - 219
4. Kathmandu as Translocality: Multiple Places in Nepali Space - 269

Part III: Women and the Experience of Modernity

1. Paying for Modernity: Women and the Discourse of Freedom in Kathmandu - 307
2. Dissonant Desires: Women as Consumers and Pornographic Media in Nepal - 343

Bibliography - 373
Index - 395