Cultural Politics Of Markets

Katharine Rankin explores how neoliberal ideology - and its manifestation in global forms of capitalist accumulation - articulates with local culture through an ethnographic study of the social embeddedness of markets. Specifically, the book investigates the dialectical articulation between macroeconomic restructuring in Nepal and the workings of a local cultural economy in a merchant town of the Kathmandu Valley. Exploring how caste and gender ideologies shape uneven opportunities for people in different social locations, Rankin contests the relationship imputed in neoliberalism between market access and social opportunity.