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Showing posts from December, 2017

Living Class in Urban India: by Sara Dickey

Honorable Mention in the  Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy  Book Prize 2018 "She achieves an extraordinarily intimate understanding of her subjects' circumstances" Economic and Political Weekly  Many people still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is radically transforming how India’s citizens perceive class. Living Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with media images of middle-class consumers navigating the currents of capitalism and the inequality they can produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue of class in India, introducing four people who live in the “second-tier” city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker. Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how class is determined