Description
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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Contemporary urban youth culture around the world is thoroughly shaped by film, television, and brand fashion. The youth in Tamil Nadu, anthropologist Costas Nakassis finds, give their own twist to this nearly universal phenomenon through their concept of “style.” Nakassis lived in college dorms, attended classes, participated in film and television production, and conducted interviews with students, college teachers and administrators, film actors, producers and directors, television videojockeys and producers, and (counterfeit) garment producers, distributors, and retailers. He focuses on “style,” a uniquely Tamil youth notion that captions the playful transgressions and inversions through which youth—and young men in particular—create their own space in the world around them. A concept of status and cool, style is performed in multiform ways; for example, through wearing flashy and eyecatching (counterfeit) brand apparel like a “foreigner,” speaking hybridized Tamil-English (“Tanglish”) like a music television video-jockey, or combing your hair like a film star. Style is done through acts which explicitly transgress adult notions of propriety and respect, like drinking and smoking in public, flirting with and teasing the opposite sex, riding the bus on the footboard or roof, or jumping over the dormitory’s walls after curfew to catch a late-night film. It is the form and content of these youth’s daily lives. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of the high jinks and pranksterism of life in a Tamil college, the book brings out the complex ways that acts ofstyle express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation.
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