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Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class - Couverture souple

Radhakrishnan, Smitha

 
9780822348702: Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0822348705 ISBN 13 : 9780822348702
Editeur : Duke University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India's labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country's economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a "global Indianness" by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of "Indian" norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the "good" Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian.

Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India's high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though, global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family.

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À propos de l'auteur

Smitha Radhakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Duke University Press
Date d'édition
2011
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0822348705
ISBN 13 
9780822348702
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
252
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible