1st Edition

Money, Culture, Class Elite Women as Modern Subjects

By Parul Bhandari Copyright 2019

    Based on ethnographic research, this book explores the ways in which elite women use and view money in order to construct identities – of class, status, and gender. Drawing on their everyday worlds, it tracks the intricate and contested meanings they attach to money. Focusing on weddings, travel, and spirituality, Parul Bhandari delineates the entitlements and privileges as well as the obsessions and vulnerabilities that underlie the construction of class, the shaping of elite cultures, and the curating of femininity. As such, this book offers an innovative account of the interplay between money, modernity, class, and gender.

    1. Series Editor Foreword  (Saurabh Dube) 2. Introduction 3. Fashion and Travels 4. Weddings, Opulence, and Hospitality 5. Hindu Glamour: Of Invitations, Hierarchies, and Snubs  Epilogue

    Biography

    Parul Bhandari is Associate Professor, Sociology, at the Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. She completed her PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK. Thereafter, she held a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, New Delhi), the South Asia research centre for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was also a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund’s College and the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.

    Her areas of research interests include the study of family, marriage, gender, social class, Indian cinema, money, and modernity.