ABSTRACT
For many people around the world modernity is an experience, first and foremost, of life in emerging local consumer societies, an experience tied to the steady encroachment of global capitalism and its cultural logics into ever more communities and ever more domains of life. This welding of the modem and the material is perhaps even more powerful in Nepal (and other 'Least Developed Countries' (LDCs) on the Third World periphery) where decades of state-sponsored and internationally-funded 'development' initiatives have left a thick ideological residue (if little else) that mires understandings of 'progress' in a calculus of quantity (Pigg 1992:499). In a 'developing state' like Nepal, 'modernity' seems to be a largely external condition: its arrival - most often packaged and for a price - from a 'developed' and 'modem' elsewhere constitutes progress. This paradox of Third World modernity, of perpetually being on the 'becoming' or 'receiving' end of the development spectrum, is one of the greatest conceptual challenges that Kathmandu's emerging middle class faces as it carves out a new cultural space that is at once modem and Nepali (Liechty 1999). For these people the equation of the modem and the material - progress and possession - is an often painful, but inescapable, reality (Liechty 1998a).
