Himal Books

Out Here in Kathmandu: Modernity on the Global Periphery

Mark Liechty

2010, pp. xviii+402

ISBN: 978 9937 8194 7 3 (hardback)

US$ 40

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 ‘Nepal’ 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.

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Mark Liechty is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Suitably 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.