By Mark Liechty
Taking consumption as a key cultural dynamic, my research examines how an increasingly
consumer-oriented (and globally-inflected) cultural economy begins to transform the
language, logic, and symbols through which people understand themselves and their society's
social categories. The study considers how Kathmandu's middle class deploys a new sphere
of consumer culture as it seeks to produce local cultural distinction, and imagine links to
transnational consumer publics. "Progress," "fashion," "freedom," "love," "prestige,"
"modernity" and many other rhetorical and material practices--both old and new--go into the
project of constructing a middle-class cultural space between the devalued poles of the urban
poor, and the urban elite. The manuscript under preparation focuses on: the experience of
urban youth; media consumption patterns and emerging consumer cultures; the role of
consumer cultures in the growing salience of class as a conceptual and experiential frame;
and the role of market forces in reconfiguring understandings of gender and sexuality.
This research focuses on mass media in everyday life, though I situate media within a
broader consumer culture. The study presents media and other commodities as parts of larger
cultural assemblages that interact in vast, cross-referencing spheres of meaning. In
developing a theory of a "media assemblage", I suggest that in cultural analysis the project
of commercial media should not be conceptualized separately from the more general
commercial enterprise of commodity promotion.
Modernity and globalization
While this study is located in a rather peripheral geographical area, it tackles a number of
theoretical and methodological dilemmas that will increasingly be found at the heart of
anthropological inquiry as the discipline enters a new era in which its traditional subjects are
fast disappearing.
One: What is modernity, and is Kathmandu a "modern" place? Is it possible to
theorize modernity in such a way that urban Nepalis in the 1990s do not become our
"contemporary ancestors"? Can anthropology rise to the challenge of imagining and
theorizing difference within the category of the modern?
Two: If we do wish to view a place like Kathmandu as modern, how do
we describe and theorize change so that this is more than simply an "A-to-B" ("tradition" to
"modernity") transformation of essences? In my work on Kathmandu I argue that modernity
is less an experience of historical discontinuity than of multiple, mixing, and often
contradictory epistemological styles built around competing ideologies of value and reality.
As people move in new epistemological formations, new ways of imagining identity confront
earlier and still-powerful processes of cultural and social production.
Three: In the face of new theories of globalization and the deterritorialization of
culture, how do anthropologists acknowledge the reality of powerful, mobile cultural forms
and forces, while resisting simplistic assumptions of global cultural homogenization tied up
in facile concepts like "the global village," etc.? In my work I argue that what is global about
modernity is not a uniform cultural outcome, but shared experiences of political, commercial,
and cultural processes. These processes arc across the globe (often tracing relations of power
and dependence) but their cultural "splash" depends on the peculiar conditions of local
waters. Rather than focusing on homogenization, anthropology needs to examine the
continued production of difference within a new global cultural economy. We need to
consider how inequality is reinscribed through the very processes that exist in a culturally
deterritorialized world.
As anthropology enters a new century it is perhaps time to stop treating modernity as an
inauthentic contaminant of non-Western "tradition" and instead view it as a fundamental
component of cultural reality in every corner of the globe. Unless anthropologists can begin
to rethink their goals, methods, and theory, we risk becoming as rare, marginalized, and
ultimately extinct, as our "traditional natives".
Mark Liechty is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
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