Samir Dasgupta

Globalization, Consumer Culture and Identity Samir Dasgupta

This book is a study of India's consumer culture, touching on questions of globalization, liberalization, social change, and the middle class. Born out of an original empirical study of changing consumer habits of India's middle class and their relationship to the new media culture, the book looks at the nature of consumer culture and how it shapes identities within the middle class. On the broader canvas, the book engages with the sociological debate on the dialectics between the macro and the micro aspects of globalization, mirrored in the paradoxical relation between the global and the local. It explores the global spread of market culture and interrogates how the Indian middle class appropriates, indigenizes, negotiates, and/or resists new forms of production and consumption. More specifically, the book opens up an inquiry into the everyday practices of social life that unravels subjective orientations in constructing human trajectories. The issue of identity is more pressing and contested than ever before in contemporary societies. Kerala - the southernmost state of India known for its paradoxical forms of social development - constitutes the specific locale of this sociological study.