TY - GEN AU - Bhattachharya, Sreedeep TI - Consumerist encounters : flirting with things and images SN - 9780190125561 U1 - 745.4442 PY - 2020/// CY - New Delhi PB - Oxford Uni. Press KW - Relief (Sculpture) KW - Materialism--Social aspects KW - Consumption (Economics)--Social aspects N1 - Contents List of Figures xi Preface xii Acknowledgements xv Introducing the Intersections: Commodities and Their Images in the Consumerist Landscape 1 Why I Love De Beers and Care Less about the Kula Ring Predominance of the 'Pet Themes': Spotting the Elephant in the Room An Emerging Consumerist Class: Releasing Indian Sociology from a Rural House Arrest Three Hundred Centuries and Three Decades: The Delayed Birth of a Consumer Society in India Consumers as Active Participants: Ways of Reading Multiple Surfaces Chapter Scheme: Ten Anti-commandments 1. 'If Your Jeans Are Original, How Come Everyone Else Has One?': Representation of Exclusionary Attitudes in Advertisements 27 Exclusionary Attitudes: Middle Class in the Colonial Period Restrained Consumption: Before the New Consumerist Spree From Thrift to Unapologetic Indulgence: Use Value to Image Value Dressing the Self: Covering the Body, Revealing the Information The 'Elite' and the 'Upper Crest': Some Classist Claims 2. Discovering Lineage amidst Urban Anonymity: Role-Playing through Images of Things 63 'Who's Who' and 'Who's He': Apparel in the Urbanscape 'Discover Your Lineage': Role-Playing through Material Possession Something for Everyone: Catering to the Difference 3.Peer-Reviewed Images: Image-Consuming Selves as Visual Commodities 79 Consuming Body Images and Transforming Body Images for Consumption The Idea of'Extra as Excess': Making and Manipulating the Ideal Body Image I Am Seen, Therefore I Am: Sharing and Circulating the Body Image ( Ob )scene Onscreen: Acceptability and Legitimacy of the Eroticized Body Image Image Meets Body, Body Meets Image: The Process of Becoming the Body/Image 4. Till It Lasts the Wash: Attached Messages, Detached Consumers, and the Trajectory of the T-shirt T-shirt as Casual, Flexible, and Androgynous: The Death of Symbolic Depth Visual and Textual Imprints: New-Generation T-shirts Hybridization and Repetitiveness: A Dual Kitsch 5. Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost : Accounts of an Aspiring Consumer 127 joining Frequently and Absconding Soon After: Fetish on the Fast Lane Living with Bare Minimum : Locating the Self before Aspiring to be a Consumer The Interview: Say Something More about Yourself The First Day: What if They Find Out? Getting Trained : 'Bite the Bs, Kiss the Ws, Roll the Rs, Soften the Ts, Fade the Ps' 360-Degree Feedback: Controlling the Call and Serving the Customer The Absconding Cases and Attrition: Probation Rarely Leading to Permanence (Not) Serving the Customer: Responding to Material Callings After-Call Wrap-Up: Globally Connected and Locally Disconnected 6. Visual Access and Excess : New Ways of Seeing and Sharing 149 The DigitalRemediation The Post-photographic condition Datafication and Dataveillance : self-Generated Data and its Concerns 7. After the Tourists Depart: The Visual Postmortem of a New Tourist Destination 186 Consuming the Image and Travelling the Distance: Gazing at the Destination A Consumerist Trajectory of Ladakh: A Tragedy in the Making Pangong Postmortem: Some Remains after the Tourists Depart 8. The Afterlife of Things: Inorganic Transplants in the Liminal Debris of Consumer Culture 208 The Logic of Discarding as an Impetus for Consumption Usefulness of the Discarded in Debris of Consumer Culture Technological Shifts in an Automobile junkyard Trashing the Waste: The Death of an Ambiguity 9. The Visuality of Materials and the Materiality of Visuals: Loss of Material Sovereignty in an Abandoned Industrial Site 226 Remnants and Remembrance in the Making: A Prelude to the Exploration The Trajectory of jute Mills: The Industrial Expansion and the Post-industrial Demise The Past Intruding on the Present: Subverting How We View Materiality and History Navigating the Anarchy of Debris: Observing the 'Loss of Material Sovereignty' A Postscript of a Deviant and Liminal Space Obsessive Compulsive (Dis)Order: The Promiscuity of Choice and the Ephemeral 254 The ' New': Taking Waiting out of Wanting The ' Now': Own the Moment and Move On All Consuming Effect: Consumerist Tendencies in Personal and Professional Spheres Index About the Author 226 254 264 274 149 186 208 ER -