SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Consuming Modernity: Religious Consumption, the West and Emerging Middle-Class Culture in Lahore, Pakistan

Abstract

This paper examines emerging middle-class culture in Pakistan through a discussion of the trends in religious consumption in Lahore. The popularity and sale of headscarves, CDs and DVDs of sermons, and Islamic children’s literature is often determined by their perceived popularity amongst the Muslim diaspora in the West. The paper analyses the reasons behind such patterns, and uses them to understand the construction of middle-class subjectivity and ideas on modernity in Lahore. In particular, it focuses on how the emerging middle-class uses consumption to assert its modernness, and to contest the moral and economic domination of the established upper-class.

Speaker Biography

Ammara Maqsood is a DPhil candidate in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, and a Graduate Tutor in Anthropology at New College, Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, titled ‘Being Modern in Lahore: Islam, Class and Consumption in Urban Pakistan’, examines contemporary trends in religiosity in Lahore, and their relationship with conceptions of modernity and a ‘successful life’.