Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India - Softcover

Nakassis, Constantine V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022632785X ISBN 13: 9780226327853

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity.

As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Constantine V. Nakassis is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Doing Style

Youth and Mass Mediation in South India

By Constantine V. Nakassis

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-32785-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Note on Transliteration, Quotation, and Pseudonyms, 
List of Symbols and Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
1 Doing Style, 
PART I Brand, 
2 Brand and Brandedness, 
3 Brandedness and the Production of Surfeit, 
PART II Language, 
4 Style and the Threshold of English, 
5 Bringing the Distant Voice Close, 
PART III Film, 
6 College Heroes and Film Stars, 
7 Status through the Screen, 
Conclusions, 
8 Media's Entanglements, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Doing Style

"Ambillaikki misai tan alaku".

'For a man, a mustache is beauty.'

— TAMIL SAYING, SAID TO MY BARE FACE

I'd never seen a mustache like Anthony's on a college student. Nor have I since. Anthony was a middle-class young man studying in an elite arts and science college in Chennai, the cosmopolitan capital of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu where I was conducting research (figure 1). The mustache ran across Anthony's upper lip, dipped down at the corners of his mouth, halted at his chin, and then moved outward along his jaw line, stopping midway and curling upward. When I asked Anthony about his mustache, he smirked and simply said "style," which was to say that it was, like other objects of youth status (such as brand apparel and English speech), different, attention-grabbing, transgressive, cool. Not everyone felt that way. For some, such a mustache was too much, too ostentatious. It was hostile, arrogant and uppity. It over did style (style over-apanratu).

A curling mustache like Anthony's is typically associated with the Madurai region from which he hailed — a sign of traditional, if rugged, adult masculinity. Such an abundant mustache is iconic of power, aggression, dominance and thus of particular authority figures — police officers, soldiers, politicians — and certain dominant martial castes. More generally, for young men like Anthony, healthy mustaches are taken as stereotypical of 'big men' (periya alunka): high-status adults who inhabit and uphold the mariyatai ('respect') of "society" and "culture" (kalaccaram) and thus command respect and 'prestige' (kauravam) themselves.

Anthony's mustache was anomalous because within the gendered age hierarchy that defined his liminal place as a young man (ilaiñar), he was excluded from commanding such adult respectability and authority. Not that most youth like Anthony wanted such a status. As Prabhu, a slight, middle-class college student with only a soft dusting of facial hair, said to me, 'At this age, one shouldn't look like a periya al ('big man,' 'adult'). We are youth. What does a college kid need a mustache for? You can't expect us to act like serious people!' As he explained, an adult-looking mustache on a young man is old- fashioned, age- and status-inappropriate, and in the case of a mustache like Anthony's, too rural and aggressive. It would be embarrassing. At the same time, as if to excuse his own (lack of) facial hair, Prabhu noted that not being able to grow any facial hair was also embarrassing. You'd look like a cinna paiyan, a 'little boy' or 'child' whose masculinity was deficient. One needed some facial hair.

Young men's faces, then, betrayed exclusion and ambivalence, liminality. But they produced it as well. Many young men preferred "different" grooming styles that navigated the child's smooth skin and the adult's beautiful mustache: a "goatee" (just the chin), a "French beard" (goatee plus mustache), a pencil-thin, sculpted beard (inspired by American hip-hop fashion), a "trim" (five o'clock shadow) or a light beard (both associated with the rowdy, or 'thug'), or a clean shave (associated with foreigners, urban elites, and north Indians; only worn by students who could grow sufficient facial hair to shave; cf. Srinivas 1976:152). Such grooming styles reinscribed normative adult masculinity and age hierarchy (by differentiating "mature" hirsute youth from hairless 'little boys'), even as they bracketed such hierarchy with alternate grooming patterns, which, importantly, reached toward other, exterior social worlds and subjects: foreigners, US hip-hoppers, urban elites, north Indians, rowdies. Doing so did (or at least tried to do) style (style panratu).

But if most youths' facial hair did style by implicitly invoking normative adult masculinity while explicitly refashioning it, Anthony's mustache was seemingly identical to what youth style otherwise eschewed. And yet, Anthony's mustache also harbored its own metamarks of difference. Anthony kept his whiskers trimmed close and neat, rather than letting them grow out, as if a mere outline of the real thing. But not only was his mustache not quite that of the rugged 'big man'; it was recognizably taken from a recent film, Singam (2010), whose rowdy police-officer hero, played by the film star Suriya, has just such a mustache (figure 2).

By reanimating the filmic representation of this manly mustache, Anthony simultaneously sported and disavowed the very hair on his face, capturing something of its social value even as he put it in quotes. His mustache was and was not the mustaches he was citing. And thus it was and was not his own. As with all style, as we will see, to not brook such difference is to risk becoming too similar to what is cited. This is why, in fact, some of Anthony's classmates saw his attempt at style as excessive and contrived, as over style. It came too close to those hierarchies and inequalities of age, respectability, caste, and urbanity that socially located these youth and kept them liminal and subordinate; it came too close to those hierarchies that these youth, through style, attempted to suspend.

From Style to Style

This book presents an ethnography of the pragmatics and metapragmatics of youth cultural practice in south India. I focus on how practices of style encapsulate and produce experiences of hierarchy, liminality, and ambivalence for college students like Anthony and his peers. Navigating a horizon of avoidance and desire, embarrassment and aspiration, intimacy and status, solidarity and individuation, youth cultural practices of style are performative of youth subjectivity and sociality, of the not quite and the not yet, a semiotic of difference and deferral cast in material form. This book theorizes this sociological and semiotic dynamic, this push and pull of style and its excesses and lacks. I explore how this dynamic underwrites the ways in which youth sociality unfolds in, and constitutes, the peer group and how, in this unfolding, such sociality reaches out to and becomes entangled with the various media forms and social worlds that youth reanimate in their everyday lives: global brands and elite fashion, English and its cosmopolitan ecumene, Tamil film heroes and their film worlds (and mustaches), among others still. Such a study of style is an account of the poetics of liminality as the central feature of youth cultural practice and its mass mediation.

This is familiar terrain for scholars of youth culture. Foundational work on youth subcultures by the Birmingham school of cultural studies...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022632785X
• ISBN 13: 9780226327853
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland