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 ...
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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 of "style "express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation."
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