Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India by Constantine V. Nakassis

Abstract

Constantine V. Nakassis, Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 336 pp.In words of young Tamil men who populate Constantine Nakassis's engrossing and important new book, and in title thereof, this is book about doing style. Style is italicized throughout book, marking out English term as it is deployed by Nakassis's Tamil-speaking subjects: mostly male students attending five semi-elite and elite colleges in Chennai and Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Style comes up often in everyday talk about status, value, and aesthetics among his friends and subjects (6-7) as they negotiate intimate social hierarchies in college. A central argument and methodological practice of book is to take this notion of as social achievement: emerges from semiotic encounters between youth and producers of radio, film, and clothing as they provisionally align with one another in producing something stylish. This book will be of interest to anthropologists concerned with its major themes of youth culture, branding, language, and mass media. But more broadly, Doing Style is book for those thinking critically about ways that meaningful cultural particulars travel across space and time. How do global cultural diacritics-visible fractions of brands and audible fractions of English-come to insinuate themselves in Tamil colleges? As Nakassis describes it, is intimately bound up with practices of mass mediation, and troubles categories of production and consumption. Nakassis highlights the complex entanglement that media coordinate between multiple social actors (8). Style must be investigated where it is salient, both sides of screen and commodity chain (8).For Nakassis, indicates horizon of avoidance and desire for young college men in Tamil Nadu who are in liminal social position of being not quite boys, but not quite grown-up members of society-a place that is figured as elsewhere, whose time has not yet come (5). The book breaks with previous works that have figured style as aesthetic practices linked to politically distinct working-class youth subcultures (for instance, social practices of dress articulated through punk in Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style [1979]). Doing Style covers host of aesthetic practices, sartorial choices, grooming practices, and speech patterns. Speaking some English (but not too much) is style. Wearing mustache (but of certain kind, and not of another) is style. Dressing flamboyantly in cheap brand-like clothing (but not necessarily in branded clothing per se) is style. Wearing bandana on one's hand like particular Tamil hero-but not repeating that hero's dance moves exactly-is style. Style is understood both as an expression of self and also as quotation, citation (in Nakassis's words) of other moments of performed elsewhere. Doing Style is book, then, about fraught practices of trying to be cool, of trying to fit in but be different.Style positions its bearer as member of peer group, as both similar to and different from other members of class-year group (i.e., freshers, juniors, seniors) who are figured (by college itself and by its students) as non-hierarchical social peers. But in pattern that anyone who has ever been (or known) teenager will recognize, does not stand still, and is instead repeatedly and relationally reconfigured as it is performed. Felicitous performances of must both cite another, external source, re-presenting it, and must also be construable by peer group as not too much, not too different or distinct. Style, if done correctly, should demonstrate correct calibration of individual distinction with similarity to peer group. In this way, itself shapes peer group as a site of sociality marked by fundamental tension between, on one hand, transgression of adult norms through of stylish individuation and, on other hand, modes of intimacy and solidarity that problematize those very stylish acts (9). …