Performing Modernities

8/9/2019 Performing Modernities

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PERFORMING

MODERNITYPracticing Consumption in the face of a Global Imaginaries

Fabian Christoph Blumer

Supervisor: Ravinder Kaur

Module B1, International Development Studies

Roskilde University


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English Abstract

The fundamental interest in this project concerns itself with the relationship between

increasingly transnational imaginaries and consumption practices. By example of two

youngsters in Kathmandu, Nepal, I will show how different transnational flows, primarily

through media, migration and international aid development, construct an imaginary of

modernity which comes to have ideological characteristics. Consequently, people come to see

modernity as an ideal which they actively strive for. Isolating consumption as the chief

practice in relation to this, I am here interested in the motivations and logics behind increased

consumption from the consumers point of view. By applying Judith Butlers concept ofperformativity, I propose an alternative approach to the understandings of consumer practices.

This provides a more situated approach while simultaneously creating increased space for

agency.

Danish Abstract

Den grundlggende problematik dette projekt handler om er relationen mellem de

tiltagende transnationale forestillinger og forbrugspraksisser. Gennem et eksempel med to

unge mennesker i Kathmandu, Nepal, vil jeg vise hvordan forskellige transnationale strmme,

primrt gennem medier, migration og international udviklingshjlp, konstruerer en

forestilling om modernitet der har ideologiske karakteristika. Derfor kommer mennesker til at

opfatte modernitet som et ideal, som de aktivt kmper for at opn. I forhold til det isolerer jeg

forbrug som den styrende praksis, og jeg er interesseret i den motivation og de logikker der

lgger til grund for det gede forbrug fra forbrugerens synspunkt. Ved at anvende Judith

Butlers koncept om performativitet, foreslr jeg en alternativ tilgang til forstelsen af

forbrugspraksisser. Dette giver en mere kontekstualiseret tilgang der samtidig giver mere rum

for agency.


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Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 3

Problem Field ................................................................................................................... 5

Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 6Arjun Appadurai ....................................................................................................................... 8

Global Imaginaries ........................................................................................................... 8Identifying Appadurai ..................................................................................................... 10

Two Accounts from Kathmandu ............................................................................................. 12Kathmandu ...................................................................................................................... 12

Ramesh ........................................................................................................................... 14

Suman ............................................................................................................................. 15Modernity Dissmeminated ...................................................................................................... 16

Mediascape ..................................................................................................................... 17Ethnoscape ...................................................................................................................... 20

Ideoscape ........................................................................................................................ 21Transnational Ideology of Modernities .......................................................................... 23

Practicing Consumption .......................................................................................................... 24

Judith Butler ............................................................................................................................ 27Performing in Modernity ........................................................................................................ 29

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 33

Introduction

The world we live in is increasingly interconnected. Global flows of people, goods and

information travel in ever increasing amounts and at ever faster speeds to all the corners of the

planet, forcing people to situate themselves in an increasingly global cultural economy.

Global, regional and local streams of images, ideas and commodities are encountered by

people on a daily basis. These enable them to construct a great number of new and different

lifestyles, possibilities and ideals which become part of their every day lives and areconsequently used by them to orient themselves by and base their actions on. Together with

access to new and different flows thus come new and different practices.

An initial and fundamental interest in this project thus concerns itself with how such

increasingly transnational imaginaries affect peoples practices. Being interested in

transnational imaginaries, I will specifically investigate how flows of media, tourism and

development discourses come to construct an idea of modernity. I will argue that repeated

images of glamorous lifestyles and cosmopolitan places in media, together with flows of

tourists who construct the places they visit as exotic and different, and development

discourses which neatly divide the world into dichotomous categories, all reinforce each other


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to construct an ideal of modernity which is presented as universally desirable and to be strived

for by all.

A central characteristic of this modernity is its idealization of consumer culture.

Advertised through media, tourism and development discourses, consumption becomes an

inseparable aspect of modernity, making consumer practices of central importance for a

modern lifestyle. Such closely interlinked discourses on modernity and consumer culture

make modern lifestyles without consumer goods and the related consumption practices a near

impossibility.

While the ideas and ideals related to modernity are themselves easily disseminated,

putting them into practice can be more problematic because consumer lifestyles often

necessitate access to financial resources. This can exclude a great number of people from

consumption practices they would ideally like to be part of. Furthermore, also the flows of

media, tourism and development discourses often come to be externally generated in places

which would typically be categorized as in need of development. The combination of largely

externally generated flows together with the limited access to consumer goods and practices

thus often has doubly marginalizing effect. Ironically, it is exactly in such marginalized places

that discourses on modernity are strongest and thus are most actively present in the minds of

people.

Taking this into account, I will in this project mainly focus on the examples two young

men from such a marginalized place, namely Kathmandu, Nepal. I will discuss how they

encounter discourses of modernity in their every day lives and how their consumer practices

relate to these discourses. I will do so by applying Judith Butlers theory of performativity to

the accounts of the two young men and theorize their consumption practices in relation to

discourses on modernity. Doing so will pose a counter reading to other understandings of

consumer practices in marginalized places. An alternative performative interpretation of

consumer practices applied to the accounts of two young men will consequently offer a more

situated approach which will be based in a starting point which takes the consumers point of

view into account

For these purposes the two accounts I will focus on, and the site of Kathmandu, are

especially pertinent. Kathmandu provides an ideal stage for my arguments for a number of

reasons. Never having formally been colonized, access to transnational flows is of relatively

recent history for most Nepali non-elites. This has changed dramatically over the last couple

of decades however. Today, Nepals economy is directly dependent on both tourism andinternational aid development. Development is an industry in its own right in Nepal.


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Thousands of NGOs, international aid organizations and the Nepali government all have their

offices in Kathmandu. In school, in government sponsored media and through the mere

presence of the great number development representatives and institutions, people are

constantly confronted with a development rhetoric which reminds them of living in an

underdeveloped country. Simultaneously, Kathmandu is a very busy tourist destination, where

all the tourists need to pass through on their way to Nepals mountains and trekking

destinations.

The two accounts I will discuss are about Ramesh and Suman, two young men of

middle class background who have grown up in this context. Both of them were born in rural

Nepal before having moved to Kathmandu at a young age. They are both in regular contact

with tourists, are heavy consumers of media and actively pursue other consumer interests such

as fashion. Their regular contact with development discourses, tourists and flows of media

helped them construct an idea of modernity which is very real in their minds. Consequently,

both of them actively and explicitly struggle with the consequences of a marginalizing

transnational imaginary of modernity which positions them right at its edge.

The strong presence of discourses on modernity in the minds of Ramesh and Suman,

together with their precarious position at the edge of an accessible consumer culture, makes

their accounts especially relevant for my purposes. By drawing on the concept of

performativity, I will argue that the importance of consumption practices in their lives reflects

exactly this tension between a transnational imaginary of an ideal modernity and the uncertain

position of their own lives in relation to these discourses.

Problem Field

Based on these reflections I have formulated the following problem formulation

How can one understand peoples increased consumption practices while situating them

in a wider perspective of transnational ideas of modernity?

To specify, I present the two following sub-questions

- How do flows of media, tourism and development discourses contribute to theformation of a construct of modernity with idealistic characteristics?

-

How can the concept of performativity help to create an alternative understandingof consumption practices?


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An investigation into this problem field has the potential to connect global processes to the

experience of peoples everyday lives. By focusing on the accounts of two young men who

live in a marginalized place right at the edge of the normative tradition/modernity divide, it is

possible to gain important insights into the ways people navigate discourses of modernity and

consequently put them into practice. Such an approach has the potential to give a more

contextualized understanding of peoples consumption practices which does not victimize nor

simplify them.

While many studies within International Development work at a higher level, for

example by focusing on policies, analysing economic processes or assessing impacts of

different projects, an analysis as this, which takes its starting point in the accounts of two

specific people, has the advantage that it gives voice to people who often are overhead. While

many things can be learned through this, a particularly important lesson for the field of

International Development is that one needs to be more careful of the categories one

constructs and employs.

Methodology

Like I have described, this project will take its starting point in the examples ofRamesh and Suman, two young men from Kathmandu. Not having had the possibilities to

undertake ethnographic research myself, these accounts allow me to gain access to the every

day lives and the points of view of two different specific individuals. Thus, these accounts,

together with a number of other secondary sources in the form of anthropological studies from

Nepal, India and further afield, serve as invaluable examples around which I am going to

build my arguments.

While being aware that it is an impossibility to completely separate facts from

interpretations, I have separated the different authors comments from their empirical

observations as much as possible. Not having been there to observe otherwise, I will at no

point question the empirical observations and accounts of these studies themselves. I will

however enter into dialogue with their authors, arguing that while they offer some important

insights, alternative interpretations of their accounts can reap more fruitful results. More

specifically, I will argue that the connection of performativity and transnational imaginaries of

modernity to consumer practices can offer new, more situated understandings. Thus, I will

undertake a counter reading of these sources, applying a different theoretical framework to the

same empirical findings.


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In order to do so, I will start off by introducing Arjun Appadurais concepts of scapes,

flows and imagination. By coupling his concepts to Brubaker and Coopers theorizations of

identity, I will combine concepts which take a global interest with concepts which work on

the level of the subject. This allows me to create the necessary analytical framework with

which to analyze the encounters of Ramesh and Suman with global imaginaries. After

consequently presenting Ramesh and Suman, I will have the necessary tools to describe a

global imaginary of modernity and to reflect upon they way Ramesh and Suman experience

this imaginary.

In a first step I will thus begin my counter reading by recontextualizing the setting

which Ramesh and Suman find themselves in. Drawing on Appadurais concepts, I will put

their lives in a global context where the focus will be on the way media, tourism and

development discourses work together to construct a transnational imaginary of modernity.

Such a contextualization has the advantage that it will highlight how the people in the studies

are located in a precarious position in which they are in frequent contact with discourses on

modernity they actively identify with, while they at the same time always have to struggle for

material access to it. In connection to Brubaker and Cooper, this tension between a

discursively present, yet materially evasive modernity results in an actively felt struggle over

identification.

Having laid out this context, I will argue that the peoples consumption practices need

to be understood in relation this context. Here, I will directly confront the other scholars

interpretations of consumption pratices. In order to offer an alternative interpretation, I will

introduce Judith Butlers concept of performativity. An interpretation of the same data

through the framework of performativity connected to imaginaries of modernity, will offer an

important new approach to the understanding of consumer practices. By directly applying

Butlers concepts to the example of fashion as a form of consumer practice, I will show how

practices of conspicuous consumption can enable the actors to access modern identities.

Despite the fact that I offer a counter reading to the findings of the other scholars, I do

not mean to argue that their interpretations are necessarily wrong, nor that my interpretation is

the only correct one. Data can always be interpreted in a number if different ways and there

are a great number of different reasons and explanations for people to consume the way they

do. Even within a single locality consumption practices will vary greatly. Therefore I do not

claim universal validity for my arguments. I do however hold, that an understanding of

consumption developed through Butlers concept of performativity, and contextualized in


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relation to global discourses on modernity, will offer an important alternative understanding

of consumption practices in marginalized places.

While I will follow the examples of Ramesh and Suman throughout the project, I will

also draw on other studies. In order not to generalize too much, I have however focused on

sources with a number of important common characteristics. All of the examples I use stem

from urban areas in countries which would usually be defined as being underdeveloped. They

all are heavy users of consumer goods and actively pursue consumer ideals. Even though I am

hesitant to categorize the people in the studies I use as middle class, as a great number of

definitions for middle class seem to be used, it can be said that all of the people in focus are

not so affluent that they can access modern flows unproblematically to the extent they would

ideally see fit, nor are they so poor that their primary concern is to ensure food and shelter for

the next day. All of these criteria are of direct importance to my interests in this project, as

they place the people in the studies directly at the edge of a transnational imaginary of

modernity. I have therefore chosen to ignore other parameters such as gender, age or more

thorough reflections on geographical location as they are not of direct relevance for my

purposes, even though they indubitably affect peoples behaviours.

Arjun Appadurai

Global Imaginaries

In his book Modernity at Large Arjun Appadurai theorizes and describes the recent

processes of globalization, which he sees as being new in form. He argues that through

increased global flows, made possible in particular through new advances in information and

transportation technologies, people develop new global imaginaries through which they

interpret themselves and their lives. He is especially interested in the roles of migration and

media in this process.

In order to theorize recent globalization processes, Appadurai introduces the concept

of scapes to account for the increasing complexity and multi-directionality of global flows. He

differentiates between five different scapes which point towards different spheres of global

flows: 1. Ethnoscape describes the flow of people such as migrants or tourists across different

countries, regions and cities. 2. Mediascape is the dissemination across space of cultural

goods and information through media such as music, film, print media or the internet. 3.


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Technoscape points towards the movement of technologies and means of production, while 4.

Financescape implies transactions and movements of capital. Finally, the Ideoscape is the

dissemination of ideals and concepts such as democracy, human rights, gender equality etc

throughout the world (Appadurai, 1996: 33-36).

Even though I would argue that Appadurais selection of different scapes is

incomplete and in this sense random, they provide a useful way to think of how information,

goods and people flow. The suffix -scape draws on the word landscape which implies the

multidimensional, irregular and complex nature of these global flows. Just as landscapes,

Appadurais scapes highlight that these flows must not be seen as objectively given, but as

changing form in relation to place and context. Thus they are deeply perspectival constructs

and depend on the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of a given actor (Appadurai,

1996: 33).

Furthermore, the relations among the various scapes are what Appadurai calls highly

disjunctive (ibid.: 35). Each of the scapes are subject to different contextual obstacles or

advantages which either hinder or enforce their velocity and volume in different places. This

has the consequence that some places are better connected to such global flows than other

places.

Appadurai argues for this understanding of globalization constituted of intermeshing,

disjunctive and flowing perspectival scapes, by pointing out how global flows are received in

different ways across different contexts. They become what he calls indigenized (ibid.: 32)

by becoming adjusted to the local environment. In this vein Appadurai takes his starting point

in an argument against cultural homogenization theories. Instead, he argues that with the

arrival of different flows in new contexts, they change form and are appropriated differently.

Rather than focusing on the effects of such global flows on peoples practices however,

Appadurai is more interested in how they allow people to access a much larger amount of

images and information than ever before. These images revolutionarily enable people to

partake in what he calls the transnational construction of imaginary landscapes (ibid.: 31).

While imagination is of course nothing new in itself, Appadurai argues that this new

form of imagination differs from previous kinds of imaginations in three points. Firstly,

imagination has expanded itself from areas such as art and myth into the logic and routine of

every day life. Second, imagination today is often the basis and incentive for action, and not

only for escape. Third, imagination has become collective and transnational (ibid.: 5-8).

While I would seriously question whether these characteristics of imagination indeed are new,it is hard to deny that these tendencies are heavily enforced in the contemporary world. Global


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flows of media, the much easier access to all kinds of information and the highly increased

direct contact of people with much larger amounts of other people, often from around the

world, have made it possible for one to imagine a much wider array of possibilities and

interpret ones own life from completely new angles. It is this idea, that people living in the

contemporary world have learned to imagine a much larger array of what Appadurai calls

possible lives (ibid.: 54), which take place in imagined worlds (ibid.: 33), which is of

special relevance in relation to this project.

While the concepts of possible lives and imagined worlds are very powerful,

Appadurai is mainly interested in the mechanisms behind the creation of such imaginations on

a transnational level. Because I on the other hand will want to apply Appadurais concepts on

two specific accounts, my interest lays more with the way such imaginations of possible lives

relate to peoples sense of self. Therefore it will be more beneficial to introduce Frederick

Cooper and Rogers Brubaker conceptualizations of identity. This will provide an important

link between the global processes Appadurai is mainly concerned with, and the personal

experiences of people such as Ramesh and Suman which I will come to describe further on.

Identifying Appadurai

Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper criticize traditional academic understandings

of identity. They distinguish between weak and strong understandings in previous

academic work. They see strong understandings of identity as being essentialistic and fixed,

thus categorizing people too rigidly and therefore robbing people of agency (Brubaker &

Cooper, 2000: 10). Weak understandings, on the other hand, are commonly so loose and

elastic that they are in danger of loosing all meaning (ibid. 11).

Instead they propose to see identity from a different perspective. According to them,

identity should primarily be seen as a process instead of the more static implication of identity

where identity is something one possesses. It forces one to specify both a subject that does the

identifying, an object that is being identified, plus the actual thing the object is being

identified with (ibid.:14). Following this, they propose two sets of alternative processes for

identity formation, both of which perform different aspects of the roles that the traditional

understandings of identity imply.

Firstly, they propose identification. The word identification is directly derived from averb and thus already implies the processual aspect of identity. Identification takes place for


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example when one characterizes oneself, when one locates oneself vis--vis others or when

one is being categorized by another. How one identifies oneself and how one is identified by

others, which could for example be other people, powerful institutions such as states or even

abstract discourses, may vary greatly from context to context, making the process of

identification inherently situational (ibid.: 14). Because of the plethora of different actors

doing the sometimes contradictory identifying of the same objects, one needs to see

identification as a struggle, as an open ended process with uncertain outcomes (ibid.: 16). In

this sense, identification is a struggle which needs to be fought on a daily basis.

The second important aspect to a more meaningful understanding of identity is what

Brubaker and Cooper call self-understanding. Self-understanding can be understood as

situated subjectivity, as ones sense of who one is, of ones social location and of how

one is prepared to act (ibid. 17). It implies a holistic understanding of who one is oneself

which can be completely tacit.

As Appadurai has pointed out, the intensified globalization processes have had the

consequence that people all over the world have a vastly enlarged network of actors,

discourses and institutions which they encounter throughout their lives. With all these

different actors making different claims about different things, using different discourses and

employing various ways of representation, identification has become a much more contested

thing than ever before. While the array of possible lives one can imagine has greatly

increased, and imagined worlds have become ever more multifaceted in the minds of people

all over the world, processes of self-understanding and identification become ever more

complex and contradictory. In the process of developing self-understandings one thus needs to

place oneself in a much wider context and relate ones own life to much a larger plethora of

other possible lives. Furthermore, self-understandings are constantly challenged through flows

such as media, tourism or development discourses all of which stage their own claims to

identification.

Appadurais concepts of imagination and scapes form the analytical framework with

which I will analyse the accounts of Ramesh and Suman in order to later on argue for a

transnational construction of modernity with ideal characteristics. While Appadurais

concepts are crucial to understand how such a transnational imagination gets constructed,

Brubaker and Coopers concepts of identification and self-understanding will be of special

importance to understand how such imaginations get appropriated into every day lives.


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Therefore, I will now introduce Ramesh and Suman and the context of Kathmandu they grew

up in.

Two Accounts from Kathmandu

Kathmandu

Ramesh and Suman have both lived most of their lives in Kathmandu, the capital of

Nepal. Nepal is a landlocked country of approximately 147000 square meters and lies

situated between Asias two super powers China and India. Lying in the Himalaya region,

around one third of the country lies over 4500 meters and only 16% of the land is arable. It

has an estimated population of 28,563,377 (July 2009) the median age of which lies at 20.8

years. 81% of the population is Hindu, while 11% are Buddhists (all stats retrieved from CIA

World Factbook).

Even though Nepals beautiful scenery and spiritual culture attracts hordes of

western tourists every year, Nepal is among the poorest and least developed countries in the

world. With almost one-third of its population living below the absolute poverty line (ibid.),Nepal reaches only rank 145 out of 179 on the human development index of the UNs 2008

study. Indeed, even Bangladesh, Asias poster child of poverty, has a higher average income

rate, higher GDP, lower HIV/AIDS rates, and lower unemployment rates than Nepal (ibid.).

Even though Nepal has never officially been colonized, they had to bend to British

pressures in 1816, consequently accepting a British representative living in Kathmandu and

influencing Nepali politics. This British representative constituted one of the first important

symbols of western dominance, pointing towards the new positions of both the west and of

Nepal in a new political economy and symbolizing Great Britains political but also emerging

cultural dominance. Consequently, already Bhim Sen Thapa, Nepals ruler from 1806-37

adopted purely western dress, wearing a military uniform in the likes of a British general. In

1830, the British representative proudly wrote home that the whole middle and upper classes

are clad in foreign cotton (ibid.: 43). In the following years, the Nepali elites, but also its

lower classes, desire for foreign material and cultural goods steadily increased. Even though

the Rana dynasty which ruled over Nepal from 1846-1951 kept a relatively tight reign on the

movement of people across Nepals borders and for the most part limited access to western

commodities to the elites, they both set up a Foreign Goods Department and a buying agency


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in Calcutta in the 1920s. By way of an aerial ropeway into the Kathmandu valley they steadily

imported things like pressed-tin ceiling panels, bath tubs, decorative statuary, European

fashions, fine silver, liquor and other luxury goods intended for Kathmandus elites (ibid.:

45). By the late 1940s, the lifestyles between the ruling elite and Kathmandus commoners

grew so big, that one travelling foreigner remarked that the court and the people are two

entirely different entities (ibid.). With only the elite having access to foreign commodities,

such foreign flows thus were imbued in an aura of luxury and exclusiveness right from the

start.

With the independence of India in 1947 and the consequent lack of British support, the

Rana rulers were not able to hang on to their power and in 1951 king Tribhuvan took over the

reign. One of the new kings very first moves was to open Nepals borders both to relatively

unrestricted commodity flows and to the movement of people. This brought unprecedented

waves of foreign goods into the country and exposed its citizens for the first time to large

numbers of foreigners who visited the country as tourists (ibid.: 47). In 2007 Nepal saw over

half a million foreign tourists visiting the country (Ministry of Tourism, Nepal).

In a similar move, king Tribhuvan and his descendent Mahendra, who took over

power in 1955, also opened up Nepals borders to foreign aid agencies. Today, development

is an industry in its own right in Nepal. It employs bureaucrats, foreign advisers, office staff,

professionals, program directors, project coordinators, trainers, trainees, interviewers and

survey enumerators, secretaries, drivers, tea fetchers and all the related goods and practices

(Pigg, 1996: 172). Between 1951 and 1997 Nepal consequently received 3.7 billion dollars in

grants and loans from foreign countries and banks and in-between 1990-2002 almost 10% of

the countrys GDP came directly through foreign aid (Bhattarai, 2007: 43). Together,

development aid and tourism form the backbone of Nepals economy, making the country

directly dependent on foreign flows.

Consequently, the city has gone through drastic changes since 1951. In the last 60

years, the citys population grew seven times the size it was when the Rana rule fell, growing

from approximately 100000 in 1951 to around 700000 today. The city is now accessible by

more than 7000km of motorable roads and has an intercontinental airport. Kathmandu is the

home of hundreds of NGOs, thousands of schools and since 1985 home to Nepals national

TV station. With the large number of tourists, international NGOs and television, films and

other media both from Nepal and from abroad, citizens of Kathmandu now are in daily

contact with global flows and are exposed to ideas and images from all over the world on avery regular basis. It is in this context that Ramesh and Suman have grown up.


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Ramesh

Ramesh and his middle-class parents moved to Kathmandu from an eastern hill districtwhen he was in his early teens. He attended a well-respected English-medium high school

where he learned to speak fluent English. When Ramesh was in high school he for the first

time came into contact with heroin. Over time, Ramesh developed a habit of heroin abuse that

grew out of control. In the years after he first tried heroin, his mother died and his father

married a new wife with several sons. Because of increasing tensions at home, and because of

his addiction, Ramesh began increasingly to spend more and more time with his peer group,

with whom he watched movies and shared other interests such as fashion. His heroinaddiction finally having grown out of control, he now lives in the streets and has been in and

out of rehabilitation programs seven times. Now he lives primarily off of the hustling of

tourists and sewing foreign labels into locally produced garments (Liechty, 2003: 235).

Ramesh constantly evaluates his Nepaliness in light of foreign places even though he

himself has never travelled further than North India. Thus, he constantly compares himself,

his life and Nepal with America, repeatedly referring to Nepal as out here. At one point he

says:

Out here young people like me, we want a fast life, not this slow life I

mean like in the States, where you can stay out all night until you drop.

Here, theres nothing, no bars, and we cant even go anywhere to play video

games (ibid.: 236).

He is particularly fascinated by New York City. He knows the entire citys boroughs,

identifying especially with the Bronx which he connects to an exciting gang life where they

pop pills before going to fights. Talking about these foreign places, he then goes on to say

You know, now I know so-o-o much. Being a frog in a pond isnt a bad life,

but being a frog in an ocean is like hell. Look at this. Out here in

Kathmandu, there is nothing. We have nothing. We even have to stand in

line for kerosene (ibid.: 238).


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Suman

Suman is a twenty-two year old youth who has lived in Kathmandu since boyhood,

where he grew up in a lower middle class family. Ever since finishing high school at an

English-language boarding school, he has been working at a relatives travel agency where he

has been in direct contact with foreigners on a daily basis. Once, he had accompanied a group

of foreign tourists to the village where he spent the first few years of his life and where many

of his relatives still live today. Seeing his old life through the lens of foreign tourists had a big

impact on him, and triggered a lot of introspection. He perceived a painful gap between his

past, symbolized by the exotic village he guided the tourists to, and the modern person he

desires to be. The way he experiences it, Suman does not fully belong to either of these

spheres. I dont have any place to stand. I dont know where I stand. Im in this nowhere

place (Liechty, 2003: 239), he says at one point. He later goes on to say

When I look at you, I can see a person clearly. I can look at your behaviour,

what you say, and the little things you do, and I see who you are. But when I try

to look at myself, I dont see anything. I mean, what I see is only unclear, its so

unclear. Theres nothing really there, just bits and pieces, floating (ibid.)

Suman then talks about how the only place where he had been able to feel comfortable

during his time in school and after, was with his peer group. He had always been afraid of

losing his peer group, as they constituted his only sense of social identity he actively

identified with. He spent as much time as possible with his friends, indulging in activities

such as watching films, listening music and doing fashion, all of which he and his friends

shared similar tastes in. Since then, Suman has become aware how much he has been

grasping on to his peer group, yet, as he points out, the price for falling away is being left

behind (ibid.: 241).

At one point Suman tells about his experiences when watching the American film

One flew over the Cuckoos Nest, in which the main protagonist mistakenly gets submitted

into a mental hospital, where he is unable to convince anyone that he in fact is sane. Talking

about the film, Suman says: after seeing it at my friends house, I just wanted to go out and

scream. I wanted to start hitting someone. It was all I could do to keep from hitting my


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friend (ibid.: 244). Having difficulties articulating why the movie had such a strong impact

on him, Suman explains that it was mainly because he was so shocked that something of

this kind could happen in America, as this was a side of western societies he had never seen

before (ibid.: 245),

Ramesh and Suman are what Liechty calls logical extremes the ultimate

consequences (ibid.: 232). While in the case of Ramesh a combination of personal

misfortune and substance abuse led him into the streets and to the margins of society, Suman

developed a sense of critical self awareness like Liechty found in no other youngster he has

met. I will in the next chapters argue that while Ramesh and Suman might be extreme

examples, the problems they experience are directly related to the environment in which they

grew up in and are therefore experienced by countless other youngsters growing up in similar

conditions, albeit to a possibly lesser degree. To a large extent their problems can be read as

having to do with experiences of their society at the margins of a global cultural economy,

with constant exposure to images and flows of media concerning a modernity they often do

not have physical access to and with a development ideal which devalues rural Nepal and

keeps reminding them of living in a least developed country.

Modernity Disseminated

Appadurai places primary importance for the shaping of imaginary landscapes of

possible lives in mediascape and ethnoscape, taking an approach that takes media and

migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics (Appadurai, 1996 :3). Taking into

consideration the cases of Ramesh and Suman, I will however also argue for the crucial

relevance of ideoscape, in the form of development discourses, for the construction of

imagined worlds and the possible lives therein.

I am in this chapter not interested in working towards a definition of modernity, nor

towards one of consumption. Rather, I want to show how mediascape, ethnoscape and

ideoscape work together to construct a landscape of modernity which is neither unitary, nor

definable, yet still is coherent enough to be perceived as existing out there for people such as

Ramesh or Suman. Despite only focusing on the three named scpaes, I do not mean to argue

that this landscape is being constructed by them alone. Flows such as those of commodities,

languages or financial remittances, which are being ignored here, have important impacts on


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local imaginations of modernity as well. Mediascape, ethnoscape and ideoscape do however,

as I will argue below, work together in multiple ways, reinforcing each other, to paint a

picture of modernity and practices related to it which is coherent enough to be very present in

the minds and lives of people.

Mediascape

Mediascape figures prominently in the accounts of both Ramesh and Suman. Liechty

describes Ramesh as a heavy user of mass media (Liechty, 2003: 236). Ramesh talks rather

explicitly about the influence American gangster movies had on him. These pose stories and

characters he identifies with and which uses to interpret his surroundings with. Ramesh has

incorporated these stories to form an important aspect of his self-understanding.

Also Suman consumes a large amount of media. His strong reaction to the film One

flew over the Cuckoos Nestshows how he uses mass media to learn about places such as

America and to construct images and ideals related to these places. In this case, he was

particularly shaken to see that western modern society, which he previously imagined as

inherently good and fair, has a flip side to it which is the exact opposite.

Thus, both Ramesh and Suman clearly use media as important source for knowledge

about the world and the lives therein. Media has the capacity to inform and entertain a great

number of people. Never before have so many people been exposed to such a large number of

different sources of media, ranging from television programs, films, advertisements, radio,

music, newspapers to magazines, books and increasingly the internet. Mediascapes, especially

those of the entertainment industry, usually are image-centred and narrative-based accounts of

different representations of realities (Appadurai, 1996: 35). They provide consumers a great

number of elements such as characters, plots, settings and images out of which imagined lives

can be constructed. They are however not only used to construct third party possible lives and

imaginary worlds. Rather, to use Appadurais words, they offer individuals with plentitudes of

resources for experiments with self-making (ibid.: 3). Therefore, they also have a

potentially great influence on ones self-understanding and provide a lens through which to

interpret ones immediate world.

Often stemming from cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles or Mumbai, massmedia provides people in other societies with images from those cosmopolitan places and the


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kinds of possible lifestyles therein. These are usually imbued in an aura of glamour,

cosmopolitanism and the new, and consequently have a desirable and positive connotation

to them. This connection between media, glamour, cosmopolitanism and desirability gives the

transmitted images a special message within which the modern and the global often appear as

one comprehensive thing which is represented as inherently desirable (ibid.).

Also Norbert Wildermuth and Anne Line Dalsgaard point out the ideological character

of the images of modern lifestyles presented in the media. In their article Imagined Futures,

Present Lives (2006) they explore the role of media in the imagination of meaningful lives by

young people in Recife, a city in Brazil. In line with Appadurai, they understand the media as

a set of resources that not only facilitate forms of social and cultural knowledge about the

world, but also play an important role in young peoples drive to create stable and meaningful

identities for themselves (Wildermuth and Dalsgaard, 2006: 13). They point out how media

gives youth in Recife access to spheres of modern and urbanized images, commodities and

lifestyles which they would usually not have access to. These modern images are picked up

locally and form a kind of ideal world the youth in their focus group aspire to. Because of

this, Wildermuth and Dalsgaard describe Recifes youth, in a similar way as Ramesh and

Suman, as having difficulties identifying with older generations because they represent an

older time and not the modernity they aspire to. Wanting to differentiate themselves from this

traditional lifestyle, they are almost forced to make use of the images encountered through

mass media as they pose a vital contact to modern images (ibid.: 27). They can then use

these images as resources for the constructions of self-understandings, and use the different

plots, settings and lifestyles as elements for identification. That this link is highly valued can

be seen in the fact that Wildermuth and Dalsgaard encountered a television set wherever they

went, even among families who could not afford basic necessities such as a proper door for

their house (ibid.: 15).

Also Shoma Munshi makes similar observations in her field work among domestic

help and workers in beauty parlours in Delhi. She describes how among her focus group the

purchase of a colour television was of primary importance. In order to be able to afford such a

television, all interviewees underwent some form of hardship in order to purchase a television.

One reduced the consumption of milk and sweets, another stopped to spend money on

fashion, while a third loaned the money (Munshi, 2008: 268). While the women in Munshis

research also used television and films as resources for the construction of possible lives, forinstance of film stars whose styles and clothes they emulate (ibid.: 273), Munshi is more


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interested in showing how media creates desire for consumption and also informs what to

consume. All of her informants univocally acknowledged that television is an important

creator of needs and that it creates a demand in them for objects to buy (ibid.: 267). Munshi

explains this by pointing out how the images and stories presented in television are centred

around consumerist lifestyles which depict an ideal form of existence among viewers. This

ideal form of existence is marked by conspicuous consumption (ibid.: 268). Thus she shows

how television influences her informants eating habits, fashion choices, toiletry and make-up

selections and body care.

It is not only through television and films that this kind of material consumer culture is

advocated. Also the editors of the Kathmandu based youth magazine Teens are aware that

modern lifestyle is very much related to the commodities one consumes. As they explain, the

aim of their magazine is to provide teenagers with answers to questions about what it means

to be modern, conflating western lifestyle with modernity: if they want to be English, they

have to read English magazines, listen to English music, watch English videos, I mean,

everything (Liechty, 2003: 218). Already in the first issue of their magazine, which appeared

in 1991, they informed the readers that each individual has a personality + a style of their

own (ibid.: 220), and in another issue they explain that appearance says a great deal about a

person before a word is spoken. When you look at someone, 80 to 90 percent of what you see

is the persons apparel (ibid.: 221). They constantly equate reality with materiality and

furthermore construct modernity as a discourse that privileges the material as real while

equating persons with objects and emotions with material conditions (ibid.).

In this manner, media constructs a rather coherent image of the modern lifestyle and

plays a crucial role in processes of identity formation. The consumption of mass media is a

highly sought after and important pastime in all the accounts above, ranging from Brazil, to

India, to Ramesh and Suman in Nepal. The images and worlds people encounter through mass

media are presented as depicting ideal lifestyles which take place in glamorous, cosmopolitan

settings. These lifestyles are marked by conspicuous consumption. This creates a discourse on

modernity which is equated with consumption and which is presented not only as inherently

desirable but also as necessary if one wants to get along in ones life.

I do not want to propose that people are cultural dopes and receive these discourses

uncritically and in the same manner as they are presented to them. In fact, many studies,

including the ones introduced above, show how particularly the discourses on consumptionare resisted through counter discourses on morality, Gandhian ideals, traditional values or


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critiques of superficiality. When looking at the people presented in the studies above, it is

however clear that the discourses encountered through mass media had an impact on all of

their lives. While some people might handle discourses on modernity and consumption

cautiously and skeptically, they are still aware of its discourses and are forced to relate to

them in one way or another.

Ethnoscape

Also ethnoscape has an important impact on Ramesh and Sumans self-

understandings. Both of them working in the tourist industry, they come into contact with

transnational ethnoscape mainly through their regular contact with tourists. While Ramesh

spends a lot of time in Kathmandus tourist district Tamel, running small time scams and

touting tourists, Suman works more formally at a travel agency. Especially Suman seems to

be heavily influenced by his contact with western tourists as his story about the tour to his

native village clearly shows.

In line with this, my main interest in this section is to show how western tourists often

come to symbolize the modern consumer lifestyle presented through mass media while

simultaneously constructing people such as Ramesh and Suman as different to modernity.

Tourists can be seen as representatives of the worlds and lives people in marginalized

places encounter through mass media. Tourists typically spend their time with activities such

as going to nice restaurants to eat good food, looking at different sites such as temples or

markets and in general do other things they enjoy. Not doing much else than consume, a

tourist is, in many ways, the embodiment of consumption. Even when just walking around the

streets, their consuming becomes a practice of consumption which objectifies and

commodifies the people and things they see. This automatically creates a process of

identification in which the people the tourists see are identified as exotic, different or just

generally interesting. Consequently, they become categorized as others to the cosmopolitan

tourists from modern places. In this way, the tourist way of seeing acts like a lens that situates

the Kathmandu in an out here place, as Ramesh calls it. This out here place is thus

rendered separate and different from the worlds the tourists usually come from.

Simultaneously the tourists also seemingly provide a window onto the modern places they

come from. These representatives of modernity who spend all their time consuming while


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simultaneously othering the locals, further come to conflate the ideal of modernity with the

practice of consumption.

While tourism is probably the most crucial form of ethnoscape for the cases of

Ramesh and Suman, also internationally moving locals can constitute important symbols. In

her article Consuming Globalization (2005), Ritty Lukose makes a similar point as the one

above in relation to the case of Non-Resident-Indians (NRIs), which she calls the clearest

representatives of this new cosmopolitan consumer (Lukose, 2005: 916). The category of

the NRI was first used as a banking category to attract foreign remittances. Lukose shows

however how the Non-Resident-Indian soon also became a cultural category as well. This

cultural category came to stand for an upper class lifestyle marked by heavy consumption.

This made it possible that one can live an NRI lifestyle without ever leaving India (ibid.).

In both cases, transnationally moving people become symbols of cosmopolitanism

whose behaviours are marked by excessive consumption practices. As Sumans example of

his trip to his old village shows very well, contact with tourists can have very self-conscious

effects which situate the locals, who do not have the possibilities to travel the way the tourists

do, on the margins of an eternally generated modernity. Tourists become concrete examples

of other possible lives which have more possibilities and which come from the imaginary

worlds Ramesh and Suman can only access through media.

Ideoscape

Finally, reflections on ideoscape in the forms of development discourses and

ideologies of progress will reinforce the tendencies described above one more time.

Kathmandu, the home of Ramesh and Suman, is the host of a plethora of NGOs and

development institutions. Nepals whole economy is directly dependent on international loans

and development aid. Development in the form of discourses but also in its material

manifestations, such as schools, hospitals, or aid workers, are ever present in Kathmandu and

consequently constantly remind people such as Ramesh and Suman of the fact that they live

in a least developed country. Constantly being confronted with discourses of backwardness

and development they are taught to understand them selves as living in an underdeveloped

place which is lacking in a number of important ways.

In his provocative account, Becoming a Development Category (1995), Nanda

Shrestha gives a self-reflective account of his experiences growing in Pokhara, a small town

in central Nepal. In the 1950s and 60s, when he was a school boy, development discourses


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first gained force. His personal narrative attempts to reveal how and why the discourse of

development, with the help of foreign aid, solidifies the colonial mindset in the post-imperial

world, crafting cultural values, thinking, behaviour, and actions (Shrestha, 1995: 259). Even

though it can be argued that Shresthas views are very one sided and extreme, they provide an

interesting perspective to reflect on the advent of development practices. He describes how

before the onset of the development discourses, Nepalis, while being poor, would never have

thought of themselves as underdeveloped. Development came to stand for things such as

roads, airplanes, dams, hospitals, fancy buildings and education, which had the power to turn

underdeveloped minds into developed ones (ibid.: 261). In school they learned about science,

technology and also English, which came to replace Sanskrit as the language of special status.

Learning about development in school, Shrestha describes how he and his peers came to

devalue the manual labour work his parents have been working with all their lives. They

refused to help out at home, as they began to identify themselves with bikas, the Nepali

equivalent for development, which could not go hand in hand with working in the fields

(ibid.: 262). In short, Shrestha argues that their contact to development discourses taught them

to see Nepal and their different local lifestyles from a devalued standpoint.

Arturo Escobar is particularly interested in such discourses about development.

According to him, development can best be described as an apparatus that links forms of

knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention,

resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies (Escobar, 1995: 207).

Drawing parallel to Edward Saids concept of orientalism, Escobar argues that

developmentalism constructs developing countries in a similar way as orientalism has

constructed the orient (Escobar, 1994: 6). According to him, development constructs the Third

World by means of discourses as primarily and fundamentally underdeveloped and

consequently treats it as such. It creates dichotomies such as developed/underdeveloped,

rich/poor, urban/rural, progress/backwardness or modern/traditional. These dichotomies have

a clear value judgment integrated into them, lauding the west as being more advanced in an

evolutionary sense. It has become increasingly difficult to think about the Third World

without drawing on development discourses and framing them through terms such as

overpopulation, famine, poverty, illiteracy etc. (ibid.). Consequently, Escobar argues that the

fact of development itself can almost not be doubted, as it has achieved the status of a

certainty in the social imaginary (ibid.: 5).

This is especially true in Nepal, as its economy is directly dependent on thedevelopment industry. Indeed, Stacy Pigg, who has done research about belief patterns in


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relation to shamanism in Nepal, describes Nepalis as having a national obsession with

development which cannot be overestimated (Pigg, 1996: 172). They experience

modernity through a development ideology that insists that they are backward rather than

modern, and indeed have a very long way to go before reaching developed status (ibid.: 163).

Transnational Ideology of Modernities

One of the permeating themes in the accounts of both Ramesh and Suman can be read

as being about this rupture between an idealized modernity and what they come to see as a

backward reality. Taken together, mediascape, ethnoscape and ideoscape work together,

reinforcing each other, to construct modernity as a transnational imaginary with ideological

characteristics. This construction of modernity is rendered real and meaningful through

discourses and practices by development institutions and governments which take

development as an ideal and as a practical goal; through tourists and transnationally moving

citizens who bring with them an air of cosmopolitanism and worldliness while othering

places they visit; and through media, from television, films, music or magazines, all of which

frequently depict glamorous lifestyles taking place in far away metropolis where the fast life

is happening. All these flows work together to idealize an external modernity, while devaluing

the locality Ramesh and Suman find themselves in. Consequently, both of them struggle with

identity related questions of who they are, where they stand, where they are going and where

they belong to. They are unsure as to what their roles in the society they live in are, and, most

importantly, it is not possible for them to embody the lifestyle they actually come to identify

themselves with.

Constant contact to these flows let them know so-o-o much, as Ramesh says, yet due

the disjunctive nature of these flows, material access to them can be more difficult. Constantly

being exposed to these idealized images of modernity which stem from far away places,

Suman and Ramesh have difficulties connecting their every day lives to these ideals. Suman

exemplifies this very well in the way he describes how he is unable to get a clear picture of

who he himself is, only seeing bits and pieces, floating. It is here that the connection of

Appadurais concepts with the ones from Brubaker and Cooper becomes especially

meaningful. With the increasingly transnational imaginaries and the much larger contact to

global flows, identity has become much more contested. Ramesh and Suman are identifiedexplicitly by development discourses and implicitly through tourism and media as others to

modernity. They themselves however, identify with the modern discourses and actively


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distance themselves both from their rural pasts and from their parents who they see as

representing an older generation. Struggles over identification and self-understanding are

therefore very real and present in their lives.

It is in this context that consumption becomes relevant. I have shown how through

both media and tourism consumption becomes integral to the imaginary of a modern life. I

will therefore now examine how and why consumption is employed by Ramesh, Suman and

the people in the other studies, ultimately connecting consumption practices to the struggle

over identity described above.

Practicing Consumption

In his introduction to a special issue ofPublic Culture on alternative modernities,

Dilip Gaonkar argues that people make themselves modern, as opposed to being made

modern by alien and impersonal forces they give themselves an identity and a destiny

(Gaonkar, 1999: 16). I have shown how by encountering discourses on modernity in their

every day lives, people come to see modernity as something desirable, something they want to

be part of. Just wanting to be modern or identifying oneself with modernity does not make

one modern however, as Sumans struggle with his own self-understanding shows. As

Gaonkar puts it, people need to make themselves modern..

Consumption and its relationship to modernity is however not always theorized in this

way. Often, modern identities are assumed to be pre-existent within the minds of people,

which consequently create the need for consumption. Ritty Lukose, who has been introduced

above in relation to constructions around NRI lifestyles, examines the creation and practices

of consumer cultures. She argues that commodities and the desire for them emerge out of

and are resituated within consumer identities (Lukose, 2005: 926). This makes people such

as Devan, the young man she interviews, create a notion of the good life which then

informs his self-understanding as a chethu figure, an irreverent, happy-go-lucky young

man, cruising the public in search of fun (ibid.).

Here Lukose does exactly what Gaonkar warns of. She assumes that Devan has been

made modern, particularly through media discourses, and consequently bases his behaviour

on these discourses. He consumes because he is a chethu figure with a consumer identity

and not because he wants to be a chethu figure as Gaonkar would argue.


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While Lukose focuses mostly on media discourses and how they make people acquire

consumer lifestyles, another way increased consumption practices are often analyzed is by

examining the relation of consumption to class and status. Margit Van Wessel, who writes

about consumption practices in the Indian city of Baroda, argues that consumption pertains

to intra-class comparison and the phenomenon usually referred to as keeping up with the

Joneses (Van Wessel, 2004: 111). In this, it is always important that ones consumption

should be on a par with that of the neighbours (ibid.: 98). She observes what she sees as a

very materialistic community, where people base their social relations on peoples ability to

consume.

Also Osella and Osella observe similar patterns in Kerala, where they argue that

progress should be demonstrated and publicly acknowledged, by at least keeping up with

levels and styles of consumption of those whose status and prestige one aspires (Osella &

Osella, 1999: 1002). Both Van Wessel and Osella and Osella are mainly sceptical of these

consumption practices, where consumption is mainly seen as a platform for competition and

where one is forced to consume because ones class others deem it appropriate.

Others, however, evaluate similar observations more positively by locating a space for

agency within the practice of consumption. Thus, also Leela Fernandes observes how

communities are formed around the practice of consumption in her bookIndias New Middle

Class. She concludes from this however, that individuals use the consumption of

commodities as a strategy of upward mobility (Fernandes, 2006: 73). Similarly, also Shoma

Munshi argues that consumption has the potential to create agency, as it lets the women in her

study make strategic use of consumption so they can buy membership and achieve higher

social status (Munshi, 2008: 273).

Also Mark Liechty focuses mainly on membership when discussing peoples

consumption habits. In the youngsters he observes at different schools in Kathmandu, Liechty

remarks that their attachment to peers and the norms of the peer group can be almost

slavish Thus, the experience of youth among peers is very often an intensely materialistic

one, resulting in a kind of materialistic peer pressure (Liechty, 2003: 214), which makes

people begin to consider themselves and others in increasingly material terms and choose

their peer groups in relation to these.

While all of these studies do a good job in showing how communities are shaped

around the practice of consumption and how consumption can be used as a tool for upward

mobility, they mainly see consumption as a marker for processes of inclusion and exclusion indifferent groups, communities or classes. In this way, it can be said that they see people as


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mainly partaking in consumption practices for the sake of others, in the sense that they

partake in consumption practices so that others can see it and they can consequently achieve

higher social status or be included in different groups.

This misses the point however, that people see consumption desirable in itself and,

much more importantly, for oneself. As I have shown, discourses on modernity and its related

manifestations such as progress or development are deeply embedded in peoples

imaginations and come to be an ideology which people aspire to. It is however not enough to

merely pledge allegiance with the idea of modernity in order to be modern. As Brubaker and

Cooper point out, processes of identity formation are complex with multiple actors involved.

In order to be recognized as modern by others, but also in order to be able to claim a modern

identity oneself, one also needs to appear and behave in line with the ideas and ideals that

discourses on modernity dictate. One needs to make oneself modern, as Gaonkar expresses

it. Therefore it is necessary to also see peoples increased consumption habits as a tool which

allows them to feel modern themselves.

To return to the case of Ramesh and Suman, Liechty, for instance, describes Suman as

being extraordinarily dependent on his peer group which has come to constitute the only

valued sense of social identity Suman has (Liechty, 2003: 241). Sumans group identity

revolves mostly around conformity to group-dictated standards of taste in consumer products

and practices. Liechty explains Sumans heavy attachment to his peer group by arguing that

youth are driven into such peer dependence through fear both of being left behind in the

poverty and backwardness of the past and of the seeming impossibility of the modern future

that society expects them to construct (ibid.). Peer groups, then, according to Liechty, allow

people to flee into the utter banality of day-to-day material existence, consciously avoiding

the future by living for each other in the presence (ibid.).

Like the other authors, Liechty here describes how people create communities around

consumer cultures. While the other authors saw the creation of such communities as primarily

being about social status and recognition, Liechty sees it as something youth flee into as a

kind of escape. Rather than bring relief however, these peer groups bring new norms which

youth have to follow slavishly in order not to be left behind.

While I do not want to question the observations of the studies introduced above in

themselves, I will challenge their explanations of the phenomena they describe. I will argue

that people do not only practice conspicuous consumption in order to signal status, nor do

they obsessively follow peer groups as a kind of escape as Liechty proposes. Rather I willargue that people do so to construct a space where they can practice modernity. These spaces


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allow people to take on the identities of the modern consumers they see through media and

whose lifestyles are idealized in a variety of discourses. They create a space where people

have a chance to be who they already think they are, a space where they can make

themselves modern.

While Gaonkar does not more closely describe how exactly it is that people can make

themselves modern, Judith Butlers concept of performativity can offer such an explanation.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler initially developed her work through a critique of different identity

politics movements such as Black Power, Gay Pride and feminist movements which emerged

in 1970-80s in the USA. Even though Butler is mainly active in areas of feminism, queer

theory and gender politics, her concept of performativity had huge impacts on theoretical

understandings of both subjectivity and agency across various disciplines. The following

introduction to perfromativity will be based on, on the one hand her very important book,

Gender Trouble which was originally published in 1990, and on the other hand, on Moya

Lloyds introductory bookJudith Butler(2007).

In order to attain an understanding of performativity it is necessary to follow Butler

into the area of gender studies, before it is possible to apply her conclusions to my field of

interest concerning consumption and modernity.

Butler develops her concept of performativity through a genealogy of the category of

women (Butler; 1999; 8) which differs from previous deconstructions of gender in that she

radically questions the sex/gender relationship. Previous accounts of sex and gender saw sex

as natural, given and pre-discursive whereas they saw gender as the cultural inscription upon

sex. In this account gender follows from sex in that ones gender is based on ones sex. Butler

draws the logical consequence from this claim: if gender is the cultural meaning that the

sexed body assumes, then gender cannot be said to follow from a sexed body in any one way

(ibid; 9).

Butler goes further than just to point out the different possibilities of gender

constructions by questioning the pre-discursive and biological nature of the sexed body itself

however. She does so by flipping the commonplace notion that gender is inscribed upon sex,

claiming that sex is an effect of gender. To do so, Butler draws heavily on Foucault and his

concept of regulatory ideals. Regulatory ideals are discourses which together with their


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related practices create that which they name. Instead of merely referring to a process,

regulatory ideals also come with a set of norms.

The regulatory ideal which is of primary concern for Butler is the regulatory ideal of

sex. Butler argues, that sex is a concept which comes with a number of ideals, practices and

norms such as related ideas of masculinity or femininity and different kinds of aesthetics,

behaviours and other ideas and practices attached to these. The regulatory ideal of sex thus

brings into material being the bodies it claims only to describe (Lloyd, 2007; 32). It creates

gendered identities which directly follow bodily attributes.

These regulatory ideals create that which they name from moment to moment. Sex,

just as all other regulatory ideals, is thus being created and upheld through repetition. The

repetition of gender related ideas thus creates sex from moment to moment. In this sense, sex

is not something one is, nor is gender something one has. Rather, gender is something one

constantly does, which consequently produces the category of sex. This makes sex nothing

but the effect of the repeated enactment of gendered identities and practices (ibid.). This is

what Judith Butler termed performativity. Signifiers such as gender are precisely the

repetition of acts, gestures and discourses that produce the effect of an identity at the moment

of action (ibid; 54).

Theorizing subjectivity in this way turns the usual dichotomy between the doer and the

deed around. Instead of the doer doing the deed, Butler sees the deed as producing the doer.

This is extremely important. Butler concludes from this, that there is no gender identity

behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very

expressions that are said to be its results (Butler, 1999; 25). In this way, sex becomes a

construction which constantly conceals its constructed nature through the implicit collective

agreement to perform, produce, and sustain the binary genders. It is the credibility and

unquestioned pseudo-naturalness of those productions, plus the power and fear of

transgressing these regulatory ideals, which encourage people to keep reifying them.

Theorizing gender and identity in general as a process and as something endless which

is always in transition, Butler then turns her focus on agency. Because norms such as sex and

gender are culturally conditioned, reified, and upheld through their enactment from moment

to moment, one can, in the process of performing them, generate space for their

transformation. Butler writes, that if the inner truth of gender is a fabrication then it seems

that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a

discourse of primary and stable identity (Butler; 1999: 136). Thus, it is possible tomanipulate categories such as sex or gender.


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In order to do so, Butler argues for a set of parodic practices based in a performative

theory of gender acts that disrupt the categories and occasion their subversive

resignification (ibid.: xxxi). It is in this process of signification and resignification through

the challenging of norms that Butler locates agency. By taking a signifier which is usually

associated with one particular thing, as for example a specific sex, and then resignifying it by

using it in a different context, like for example on the opposite sex, categories become

disrupted and challenged. This has the potential to create alternative domains of cultural

intelligibility and to reconfigure regulatory ideals (Lloyd; 2007: 54). Because norms require

repetition, different forms of repetitions challenge those norms. Thus, the practices that

produce the subject and its identities are also the sites where agency in the sense of

resignification is possible.

Performing in Modernity

As I have argued above, people are not made modern through encounters with

discourses of modernity and their manifestations, even if they embrace their ideals, like

Ramesh and Suman do. In fact, the opposite is the case. Discourses on modernity and its

manifestations such as the development industry or tourism identify people such as Ramesh

and Suman as others to modernity, even while they simultaneously create the promise and the

desire to become a part of it. Just as discourses on modernity do not automatically produce

modern people, Butler challenges the idea that sex automatically produces two opposite

genders. Rather, she shows how sex is an effect of gender. Equally modernity does not

automatically produce modern people and societies. Rather, modern people and societies

produce modernity.

In this sense, modernity can be seen as a regulatory ideal. As described above,

regulatory ideals are discourses, which, together with their related practices, create that which

they name. It is the different discourses on modernity, such as the ones produced through

media or development, and their related practices, most important of which being

consumption, which produce both modernity and its opposite, namely backwardness.

Butler argues that regulatory ideals are being upheld and made seemingly real through

their constant repetition. Just as with sex, modern is thus not something one is, nor is a

modern identity something one has. Rather, modernity is something that gets created through

the constant usage and reinforcement of its connected discourses and practices. In this sense,


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modernity is a practice. If modernity and modern identities are created through the repetitions

and practices of their related discourses, it is possible for people to create modernity, to

become modern, by practicing it. As Butler puts it, it is not the doer that produces the deed but

the deed that produces the doer. It is not the modern person who consequently behaves in a

modern way, but rather the practice of things associated with the modern which produce

modern actors and identities.

This offers an alternative explanation for the importance of consumption in the lives of

people such as Ramesh and Suman. Modernity being a highly valued ideal in the minds of

Ramesh and Suman which is closely connected to the practice of consumption, consumption

offers a decisive way which allows one to practice modernity. This is just what Liechty

observes when he writes that as Suman found an identity built on consumer fashion goods

is one that need to be purchased again and again (Liechty, 2003: 242). Because it is the deed

that produces the doer, modernity related practices, such as buying consumer goods, produce

modern identities. To quote Moya Lloyd again, it is precisely the repetition of acts, gestures

and discourses that produce the effect of an identity at the moment of action (Lloyd, 2007:

54). It is for this reason that Suman needs to buy his consumer identity again and again. As

Butler describes it, identities and regulatory ideals get created, and need to be upheld, through

repetitions. Because identities get produced at the moment of action, they cannot be upheld

through a longer period of time but need to be produced over and over again, forcing people

such as Ramesh and Suman to repeatedly practice modernity related discourses if they want to

uphold their modern identities.

It is for this reason, I would argue, that Ramesh and Sumans peer groups are so

important for them. Not having the financial resources to keep on buying their modern

identities, their peer groups create a space in which they can be modern. While Liechty

interprets the obsessive relationship to their peer group as an escape into the presence, I

argue that it can better be understood as the performative creation of an alternative modern

space. Peer groups allow Ramesh and Suman to associate with people who are in a similar

position as they are themselves, while simultaneously distancing themselves from their

parents generation and the backward society at large. In those peer groups they practice

assertively urban lifestyles where romance, media consumption and, in Rameshs case, gang

fights play important roles. This allows them to performatively upkeep their modern

identities. As this is only possible within their peer groups, these gain essential importance in

their lives.


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Butler then moves her focus to agency, which she sees as the deconstruction of

categories through subversive kinds of repetitions. Even though it can be argued that Ramesh

and Suman here depart from Butlers theory in the sense that they do not mean to deconstruct

any categories but rather access a different category than the one they are usually associated

with, I argue that also Ramesh and Suman use what could be called parodic subversion as a

source for agency. By imitating the lifestyles they see for example on television, Ramesh and

Suman practice parodic performances and thereby challenge dominant discourses which

define them as backward. They subversively resignify themselves as modern by separating

themselves from tradition.

Interestingly, just as in Butlers example of sex and gender, the body also emerges as

an important site for resignification in Kathmandu. Fashion is an important aspect of

consumer culture and fashion related practices figure in all of the studies I have introduced

above. Both Western and South Asian fashion styles are very present in Nepal. Especially

western styles of dress have strong symbolical powers. A lot of people therefore self-

consciously style themselves in imitation of foreign fashion trends, this having provided

Kathmandu with fashions ranging from disco fever to a Michael Jackson and cowboy style

phases (Liechty, 2003: 130). People come to see fashion as an important site for agency, as

one young interviewee of Liechty says

I like it because its really according to fashion that people are able to

move, to get on with their lives. Without it theyre looked at with contempt. As

in other big cities, we have a lot of concerns for fashion here in Kathmandu, I

mean, compared with the rest of Nepal. (Liechty, 2003: 140)

This is a very interesting quote, which sums up many of the points I have made above. The

speaker likes fashion because it enables him to establish a connection between Kathmandu

and the rest of the world, the other big cities. Simultaneously, fashion helps him to distance

himself from rural Nepal where people do not practice fashion and are therefore looked at

with contempt. In this way, he sees fashion as a symbol of modernity and cosmopolitanism

which helps him to align himself with the other big cities of the world. Consequently, he

explicitly locates agency in fashion. By doing fashion, people are able to get on with their

lives, as the young man says.

Locating agency on the site of the body brings an interesting parallel to Butlersproposition of drag as an example of parodic subversion. The practice of drag refers to the


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dressing up in clothes typically associated with the wearers opposite sex. Similarly, it could

be said that the dressing up of a body in western fashion when it is usually associated with a

different style is a similar parodic performance. While this might seem a bit far fetched, the

fact that western fashion still causes for a lot of controversy and discussion, especially if

practiced by uneducated lower class people (Liechty, 2003: 77), people usually associated

with backwardness, shows that it can very well be seen as a subversive act.

One quote from a young man from Kathmandu shows the potential fashion

particularly well

These days the world has become very modern. So, about fashion, its like

without fashion we can do nothing, there is nothing. Before now, it was a wild,

savage age. People used to run around wearing a tree bark! Actually, now, in a

way fashion has become a part of our bodies (Liechty, 2003: 35).

Again, this speaker makes a very similar point as the one above, directly connecting a modern

world with fashion, without which one can do nothing. What is interesting about this quote

however, is how he sees fashion as having become part his body. This is exactly Butlers point

when she argues that the deed produces the doer. In Kathmandu fashion is usually seen as an

activity, something one does, rather than wears, making fashion a practice (ibid.: 135). For this

young man, it is exactly the practice of fashion, which makes him modern. Thus it is difficult

for him to separate fashions from bodies, as it is exactly the practice of fashion which help

produce the persons who wear it. As Butler argues, identities are effects which get produced

from moment to moment through different acts and employment of discourses. Without

fashion, this young man can do nothing, yet the practice of fashion produces the effect of a

modern identity which opens up for different kinds of behaviour. The body thus becomes a site

for resignification which through different fashion practices produces different identities and

possibilities of action.

Similarly, Lukose describes a mushrooming of beauty parlours, fashion saloons and

beauty pageants all over India (Lukose, 2005: 928). She also remarks on the potentially

subversive nature of fashion practices. Devan, the young man Lukose describes as leading a

lifestyle of consumption, describes himself as chethu, which is often seen in a derogatory

manner by mainstream society. She describes chethu lifest

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Performing Modernities