"This penetrating study of consumption practices in Kathmandu captures the emergence of a new kind of class-based cultural experience, one in which media images and purchased goods increasingly serve as instruments of middle-class self-fashioning. As much a study of profound transformations in Nepali society as a whole as it is an analysis of the lived reality of an emergent bourgeois sensibility, Liechty's research offers important insights into the local cultural ramifications of contemporary forms of globalization."--Stacy Pigg, Simon Fraser University
"Providing a well-grounded and at times startling picture of the creation of class identity, Liechty's work succeeds admirably in its goals to document practices of urban middle-class life and the ways these practices produce a newly constituted class. This is a strong, stimulating, and needed contribution to the exciting nascent field of class theory and ethnography in anthropology."--Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College
