Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India

Unlike élite middle-class Indians, ordinary Indian men are selective in their acceptance of new meanings introduced by cultural globalization. In Globalization on the Ground: Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India, Steve Derné argues that the effects of globalization on existing cultural values differ among social groups. The non-élite middle class in India, for whom globalization has brought little change in economic position and opportunities, has resisted changes to existing ideas about family, marriage, and gender relations. The book suggests that the non-élite middle class accepts only those meanings which can be layered on top of existing meanings that support obdurate social structures, thereby reiterating existing social stereotypes. So, the newly available Arnold Schwarzenegger films intensify the association of violence with masculinity, and foreign pornography incites new means of expressing male dominance. The book also considers how globalization has transformed class and gender in India. Derné argues that with globalization, class identities are defined more by transnational contexts than within bounded nations, are based more on shared patterns of consumption than shared positions in the economy, and are increasingly defined by gender relations. Globalization on the Ground will appeal to students and scholars of globalization, mass media, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

About the Author :
Steve Derné is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Geneseo. His Culture in Action (1995) explores the interconnections between cultural orientations, family structures, and emotions in North India. His Movies, Masculinity and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men's Filmgoing in India (2000) considers how film viewing shapes family, emotion, sexuality, and male dominance. He has just begun a study of conceptions of well being in India. He is the winner of the 1991 Stirling Award for outstanding paper in psychological anthropology. He is the winner of a 2004 Chancellor's Award for Scholarly and Creative Activity. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright Program, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Review :
Globalization on the Ground is an interdisciplinary look at globalisation from the point of view of the common man. He questions whether globalisation means anything to people in the developing world, especially to people in the non-elite circle in India...The book focuses on three major aspects; the essential one being to better understand the course of globalisation by examining its effects on the ground in urban India. --Daily News and Analysis Focusing on the middle classes in India, the book suggests how globalization has transformed culture, class, and gender in India in the years since economic liberalization.--Prabhaat Khabar Steve Derne argues that the effects of globalisation on existing cultural values differ among social groups. The non-elite middle class in India has resisted changes to existing ideas about family, marriage, and gender relations.--The Financial Express