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Reviewed by:
  • Living Class in Urban India by Sara Dickey
  • Jessica Chandras
Sara Dickey, Living Class in Urban India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 262 pp.

In an unlikely start, Sara Dickey begins the acknowledgments of Living Class in Urban India by explaining that ten missing interviews delayed her book by almost a decade. This candid account of Dickey's personal hardship sets the tone of her ethnographic exploration of urban class structures in the city of Madurai, India. The fact that Dickey's writing unintentionally stretched over three decades allows her not only to detail the intricacies of class structures in the daily experiences of interlocutors who belong to various castes and classes, but also to explore how their classed identifications and aspirations changed during her engagement in the field. Such extensive study has made it possible not only to describe the production of middle-class identities building upon other such explorations South Asia (Fernandes 2006, Fuller and Narasimhan 2007, Liechty 2002), but Dickey's text also describes rich subjective experiences of the construction and performance of various classed identities.

Dickey defines socioeconomic class in the introduction as "not only a determining structure but also a process that is produced and generated in the interactions of individuals' and groups' resources, as well as through the relationships themselves" (12, emphasis in original). To explore a system of inequalities without a focus solely on inequity, Dickey uses what she terms a relational approach. Viewing class identities through the relations and relationships individuals establish, she claims, shows how individuals and groups align with or distance themselves from others (12, 21). Bourdieu's (1986) concept of cultural capital broadly frames Dickey's exploration of her interlocutors' evaluations of class distinctions. While Dickey describes that "dignity is not a form of capital," it is intertwined with cultural capital and [End Page 1299] underlies her interlocutors descriptions and discussions of their behavior in their daily lives (22). Using these two analytical concepts, symbolic capital and dignity, Dickey aims to demonstrate how "intangible aspects of class […] contribute to the long-term impacts and inequalities of class and class relations" while not "demonizing the perspectives of those with power and prestige" by analyzing experiences of men and women across various socioeconomic classes, castes, and ages (26, 14).

Dickey explores different intangible aspects and effects of the production and reproduction of class among her interlocutors through ethnographic accounts in chapters highlighting material markers of class, debt, performance, marriage rituals, food consumption, and most importantly, the concept of dignity. After positioning her text in scholarship on socioeconomic class in South Asia in Chapter 1, Dickey explains in Chapter 2 how an indigenous term, takuti, best translates the concept of class from English with her interlocutors. She continues by addressing differences between local iterations of takuti and caste, which paints a picture of class and society specific to Madurai.

Dickey draws what she calls, "narrative portraits" (43) of four residents of Madurai with whom she remains close throughout her fieldwork to constitute the entirety of Chapter 3. The narratives present accounts of their lives as they were told to or experienced along with Dickey, and these stories are interwoven in the following theoretical chapters. Each represents a different class in Madurai and their accounts provide clear examples of Dickey's relational approach to class analysis. Kannan is a lower middle class autorickshaw driver who struggles to obtain enough dowry to marry his daughters into acceptable families and sustain a stable income through his driving. Anjali, born to a large, lower class family, fought for a college education and to start her own print shop, resulting in marriage to a man of a higher class position and elevation of her own class standing. Jeyamani is a young, low caste domestic worker from a poor background who struggles to gain recognition and respect from members of her extended family who occupy a higher class position. Finally, Usha is a comfortably upper-middle class resident who finds herself in a precarious financial position when her husband, a prominent doctor, passes away. Though she is stripped of her financial resources, Usha's cultural capital and dignity remain intact through her transition into widowhood...

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