ofvernacular - Tumblr blog

[ofvernacular]

Can’t Stop Keeping Up With The Kardashians

In the endless stream of content that beleaguers consumers of art, culture and entertainment, people are constantly in the search for the more scintillating, the more engaging, the more exciting. In this search for amusement and momentary escapism from the capitalistic enslavement of the daily nine to five, reality television proves to be a seductive option. Reality television promises a raw, unscripted, and uncensored experience. There is no plot, it is just a production of people’s real lives, no characters, no pretentions. Reality T.V. gives you access to, as implicit by the name, reality. The phenomena of producing real lives serves as “the ideal of what is natural” in the field of the entertainment industry, as it “diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life” (Adorno 1944, 5). For the scope of this essay, I will investigate the ways in which this reality is produced for spectatorship through the mechanism of the culture industry by analyzing the television show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. The episode selected for analysis is the first episode of the fourteenth season, which is also a special ‘tenth anniversary episode’, aired on September 24, 2017, celebrating ten years of the Kardashian Empire.

           Keeping Up With The Kardashians, first aired in 2007 and running till date, is E! network’s highest-rated show. The megafranchise, consisting of multiple spinoffs and business endeavors, collectively garners billions of dollars every passing year earned from television salaries, celebrity appearances, social media endorsements, and make-up and fashion lines (Forbes 2018). The show follows the lives of sisters Kourtney (age 39), Kim (38), and Khloe Kardashian (34), their half-sisters Kendall (22) and Kylie Jenner (21), and other close family such as their mother and the family’s matriarch, Kris Jenner (62), brother Rob Kardashian Jr (31), stepfather Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner (69), and significant others. Each episode documents one event in the Kardashian-Jenner life, spanning from a day long to a week long, interspersed with clips from camera interviews of the separate family members commenting on the event that is taking place. The structure of all the episodes provides the audience with an immersive experience of the event, being shown (selectively) all the angles of a situation, and all recorded reactions. Each situation is dealt with and portrayed in a similar way, be it a scandal, a holiday, a party, or a personal challenge. As Adorno (1944, 9) says, a trademark of the entertainment industry is that the “content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations.”  The episode analysed for this essay documented the media coverage of the family’s tenth anniversary celebrations, a trip taken by the three Kardashian sisters to Cleveland, and a scandal regarding Kendall Jenner’s advertisement for Coca-Cola.

           It becomes evident from the beginning of the episode that the producers, in our case Ryan Seacrest and Kris Jenner, do not intend to hide the ‘industrial’ nature of the T.V. Show that they are producing. The first five minutes of the show itself revealed the Kardashian-Jenners in the middle of a production studio standing under artificial lighting against a luxurious white background, surrounded by cameramen, producers, make-up artists, crew members etc, posing for a photoshoot by The Hollywood Reporter covering the show’s tenth anniversary. The filming does not discriminate between the home lives and the business lives of the Kardashians, it testifies its promise of showing the family’s actual lives wherever they go, and so the spectator is left under the impression of watching these people in their natural habitat. The spectator accepts that the production studio is as much of a natural habitat for a Kardashian as a luxury restaurant or their home. Following this acceptance of seeing a Kardashian in a natural habitat, the spectator slowly begins to accept every depiction on the show as a truth and a reality. The episode features a vacation taken by the three Kardashian sisters to Khloe Kardashian’s boyfriend Tristan Thompson’s Cleveland house. The celebrity status of the Kardashians becomes evident as entire restaurants and amusement parks are booked out for their visit, and they are greeted by hordes of fans at multiple locations, all which is caught on camera. This stardom is juxtaposed with interval cuts of the sisters speaking to producers on camera, answering personal questions about their feelings, opinions and thoughts to bring them back in touch with the normal experience of the everyman. On being asked (note: the question prompt is never featured on screen, only the response of the Kardashian-Jenner being filmed, which too is evidently edited) about what Khloe Kardashian and her boyfriend do in Cleveland, Khloe tells the camera that they “are boring, watch T.V.” and “do normal things like cooking, cleaning…” These small interviews that are inserted into the videographical narrative that follows the Kardashians humanizes their lives, their emotions, and helps the audience feel as if they’re being communicated all essential information that may contextualize the events being filmed, while providing real human feelings for the audience to connect to. Seeing Khloe portraying herself as any other girl in a mundane relationship reassures the audience of the realness of the people whose lives they so enthusiastically yet absent-mindedly follow.

           The utility of these interview cuts can be illustrated with the way the Kendall Jenner Coca-Cola scandal was dealt with in this particular episode. The depiction of the scandal completely unveiled the mechanisms of the culture industry that may prevail today. One of the first conversations regarding the scandal, about eight minutes into the episode, featured Kourtney Kardashian telling her sister Kendall Jenner on video chat that “Russel called me today saying that we can turn this into a positive and said he’d call mom,” to which Kendal replied saying “yeah, he called me…if I knew this was the outcome I would never have done anything like this.” Many allusions were made to people such as Russell who were the Kardashians’ personal publicists and other business affiliates. The conversations regarding the scandal throughout the episode revealed attempts of the family and their employed publicists to diffuse the scandal that labelled Kendall Jenner a racist for doing a culturally insensitive commercial for Coca-Cola during the Black Lives Matter protests. In an interview with the camera, Kendall explained that when she “first took [the offer] [she] thought it was going to be a good thing. The company is amazing. So many people have done it. Michael Jackson did it, Britney Spears has done it…the list goes on...I trusted everyone, I trusted the teams.” This information reveals the influence of the entertainment business on the lives of the Kardashians. The narratives created when the Kardashian-Jenners refer to the external team recording and controlling their appearances make explicit to the spectator that all social media news on the Kardashians external to the television show is mediated, untrue and ‘gossipy’, while proving the show to be the source of ‘real facts’ or information for the audience to consume unquestioningly. It is the reckless honesty portrayed by the cameras that helps perpetuate the show’s position as an unbiased documentation of now-celebrity lives.

           However, “the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises” (Adorno 1944, 10). It becomes evident to the suspicious eye that the portrayal of what is true on the T.V. show is just the product of another narrative that is trying to be created by executive producer and also star-mom Kris Jenner to clear up any unwanted controversy and keep the show popular and entertaining. Through the show there are multiple cuts where Kendall discusses her regret over starring in the commercial and having no bad intent while shooting it. There is a scene where the family discusses Caitlyn Jenner’s upcoming media appearances and their apprehension of her tendency to say politically incorrect things on camera or, in Kim’s words, “Caitlyn [being] known for saying all the wrong things.” This implies a right versus wrong narrative that could be associated with the family, and Kris Jenner’s motive to always stay on the right side becomes explicit through the content of each episode. Kendall makes clear to the audience on multiple occasions to not pay heed to her father’s public words as “the only problem is that because she’s [her] dad, people are gonna like really believe it and take it and run with it and like what does she even actually know.” Even the ending scene of the show drives home the point that any controversy created by Caitlyn Jenner regarding the Coca Cola scandal is baseless as Kendall sobbingly testifies to the camera that “my dad doesn’t actually know what happened…I just feel really really really bad…that this was taken in such a wrong way.” The T.V. show naturally monopolizes all the news on the Kardashian family, while easily being one of their most edited and mediated productions that run past several bureaucratic check-posts before the final airing.

           It should be noted that the executive producer of this television show, the kingpin of the mediation who controls the final narrative created around the Kardashian Lifestyle, is in fact personally involved with the family’s fortune and appearance. This kingpin is the Kardashian-Jenner’s mother, Kris Jenner. Her influence can be felt in certain productions of truth on the show, such as writing away her popular ex-husband Caitlyn Jenner as an uninformed liar, however this observation may be based on my personal conjecture. The bitterness, also felt by her children towards their ex-stepfather, can be recorded in this show by Khloe’s statement “It’s not cause you’re trans, that’s not why I’m not talking to you, I’m not talking to you because you’re a bad mean person.” The outrage against Caitlyn Jenner is fierce in this particular episode, and the Kardashians make it a point to feature it extensively in their show, publicly demonizing Caitlyn Jenner. It is also interesting to note in the statement above Khloe’s need to clarify that she dislikes Caitlyn Jenner, but not because of her gender. The fact that the show is a product of a business industry that must appease certain public ideologies is revealed in all the Kardashian-Jenner’s effort to be politically correct on camera, and also clear up controversies outside camera regarding political correctness using extensive means such as publicists, personal social media statements et cetera. These small details make evident the fact that ultimately, the show is being produced for a particular consumer, an imagined spectator, whom the show must adjust itself to to keep him or her unquestioningly amused and involved. As Adorno (1944, 9) says, “it is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and complete powerlessness.”

           The “complete power” of these media magnates is shown in the public engagement with their brand that is formulated on the platform of the T.V. show. The blasting sales of Kylie Jenner’s make-up line that makes her one of the youngest and richest ‘self-made women’ (Forbes 2018) or the amused people who flock to watch redundant spin-offs made on different members of the Kardashian clan to remain as connected to the family as possible, prove the influence of the Kardashians on their followers. These followers are provided a “convergent media experience” (Barron 2012, 82) where they can stay in touch with the Kardashian’s personal lives through their social media accounts on Instagram and Snapchat in addition to the T.V. show and Hollywood news, adding a sense of accessibility to their celebrity lifestyle. The fanbase generated by the seemingly innocuous family can be explained by Adorno on page 8:

The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.

Each fan following the Kardashians has become an aspirant to their lifestyle, and a subject of their brand. On page 22 Adorno continues by saying that “the assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products is very suited to advertising,” claiming that each “interchangeable” shot of a celebrity in a production becomes an advertisement for his or her name. Every public appearance made by a Kardashian-Jenner is controlled by and also controls the brand name Kardashian. The brand infiltrates the wishes and wardrobes of its consumers. The Kim Kardashian make-up line generates its profits not from its inherent goodness as a cosmetic, but through its cosmetic connection with the queen of the pop culture industry. Every “recommendation” by the family “becomes an order” (Adorno 1944, 21). The advertising takes place in the show as well as on all platforms of media outside. Whether it be sponsored Instagram posts on Fit Tea, or in the episode under analysis, a three minute sponsored demonstration of Nurse Jamie’s Healthy Skin Solutions which the Kardashian sisters learn about, experience and review on camera. These endorsements become cultural symbols of a Kardashian lifestyle and control the tastes of the public for economic profit.

Through this essay we realize the not-so-hidden business intentions behind the reproduction of the Kardashian-Jenner family life for public reality television. What started out as Ryan Seacrest’s wish to create a successful T.V. show (Cosmopolitan 2018) has evolved into an entertainment empire headed by Matriarch and Executive Producer Kris Jenner, and her business subjects, also children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kendall, Kylie and Rob. There are many instances through the T.V. show that reveal its industrial nature to us, be it the brand endorsements casually mentioned through the episode, the intimate relationship of the family with the business associates such as publicists, personal assistants, crew members etc, the revelation of the politics around Hollywood gossip or the constant editorial interruption in the forms of camera interviews that sprinkle the flow of events in each episode. Nevertheless, consumers keep desiring more of the DASH business, and “desire is always in excess of the object’s capacity to satisfy it” (Phillips 1999, 100). The Kardashians could produce as many spinoffs, brew as much controversy, and curate countless media appearances, and the consumers will never be satisfied. That is because the depiction of absolute reality promises a constant influx of possible new information, gossip and news. Because the consumers’ lives run parallel, in the same space-time fabric as their T.V. idols’ lives, the expectations do not cease. Thus every episode, like a kiss, leaves the watcher disappointed, longing for more. This disappointment ensures the return of the consumer for another round, another peck. Like a moth, the consumer lingers in front of the bright screen desiring a minute more of escapism from the rut of capitalistic enslavement, by submitting him or herself into an alternate industry that controls not their employment but their culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barron, Lee. Social Theory in Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

 Lerner, Rebecca. "'Keeping Up With The Kardashians' Ratings Improve." Forbes. January 26, 2018. Accessed October 29, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccalerner/2018/01/17/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-ratings-improve/#316f29d969c2.

 Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

 Rees, Alex. "Here's How the Kardashians Landed Their Reality Show." Cosmopolitan. October 07, 2017. Accessed October 29, 2018. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a35457/heres-how-the-kardashians-landed-their-reality-show/.

 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

 Robehmed, Natalie. "How 20-Year-Old Kylie Jenner Built A $900 Million Fortune In Less Than 3 Years." Forbes. July 13, 2018. Accessed October 29, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalcovers/2018/07/11/how-20-year-old-kylie-jenner-built-a-900-million-fortune-in-less-than-3-years/.

[ofvernacular]

Tom McCarthy’s ‘Satin Island’ and the Anthropological Apparatus

What does an anthropologist do? U., a corporate anthropologist and the protagonist of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, tells the readers of the novel that “Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal: identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light—” is his job (McCarthy 15). U. is the in-house ethnographer for a consultancy evasively called The Company. The Company “advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas—to the press, the public and, not least, themselves.”  Peyman, The Company’s head and another elusive figure through the novel, liked to say that “[They] dealt…in narratives” (McCarthy 16).

A narrative, defined primordially by the Oxford dictionary as a “written account of connected events,” is further defined as a “representation of a particular situation or process in such a way as to reflect or conform to an overarching set of aims or values.” The narrative, taken as a representation of a set of values, can be likened to an ideology. Ideology, as Louis Althusser proposes, is a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Althusser says that what we commonly call ideologies are one of many “world outlooks,” which when examined

As the ethnologist examines the myths of a “primitive society,” are largely imaginary, i.e. do not correspond to reality. However, while admitting that they do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be “interpreted” to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world.

(Althusser 693)

           If we understand The Company’s role as that of dealing in narratives, in investigating the existing ones and articulating new ones as consultations to other companies and governments, then we come to view the company as an agent of ideologization. When Peyman first hired U., he told him that “the Company needed an anthropologist because its entire field of operations lay in analysing groups, picking apart their operations and reporting back on this” (McCarthy 49). U. being the company’s anthropologist, was their specialist in the intellectual discipline of people and society. Therefore, U. determined the narratives that operated in society, that is, uncovered the imaginary relationships between individuals of society and their real conditions, and found ways for companies to modify these imaginary relationships to their own profit. Whenever the Company took upon a project, the brief would be worked at from “several angles, bringing all [their] intellectual disciplines to bear upon [it]…and slapping the pertinent offerings of each of these down on the collective table.” These offerings would be amalgamated into a concept, and Peyman would convert these concepts “into tangible undertakings that had measurable outcomes” (McCarthy 50) via the Company which, U. claimed, had “supplanted [family, or ethnic and religious groupings] as the primary structure of the modern tribe” (McCarthy 48).  How specifically did U. aid the Company’s clients in achieving this?

…we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp—the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it—and let a client in on how they can best get traction of this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product).

(McCarthy 25; emphasis mine)

           With this construction of narratives for companies, U. helped them gain hegemony, or “social power or domination” (Rivkin 673) in society. These mini-narratives allowed companies to subtly reconfigure the imaginary relationships of people to their real conditions. Antonio Gramsci proposed that “power [could] be maintained without force if the consent of the dominated can be obtained through education and other kinds of cultural labor on the part of such intellectuals as priests and journalists” (Rivkin 673). U. was an intellectual employed by The Company for this very purpose. Gramsci said that society could be fixed into two major “superstructural levels,” one being “civil society” or all private organisations, and the other “political society” or the State.

These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society, and on the other to that of “direct domination” or command…

The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.

(Gramsci 673)

              The dominant group, comprising of the owners of production, that is the corporations, thus control the dominant ideology of the society, meaning that they have hegemony over the society, and U., being an intellectual, stands at the base of this distribution of ideas, or these mini-narratives. The dominated group, or general society, accepts this domination by giving “spontaneous consent…to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group…historically caused by the prestige which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.”

           To further our understanding of how these mini-narratives function in society, we must look at U. as a representative of “the great masses of people” (Gramsci 637) to the corporations, or to “the dominant group” and consider representation through the work of Gayatri Spivak. By representing what the public wants to the corporations, U. is “[speaking] for” them, in a political sense, as opposed to ‘re-presenting’ them in the sense of art or philosophy (Spivak 275). Just as an agent of colonialization would study the natives of their inhabited colony and represent them to the Empire, U., in the capacity of an Ethnographer (historically also recognized as professional agents of colonialization), would do field research which was

…about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample batch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief—blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies…lay bare some kind of inner social logic, which can be harnessed, put to use.

(McCarthy 25; emphasis mine)

and present it to the company, or the modern day Empire.  An example of this was the way U. had, for a breakfast cereal company, unravelled the symbolic significance behind the first meal of the day, behind fasts and breaking them, and feed all his interpretations and discoveries back to the client, for them to incorporate these cultural insights into their branding and packaging to make their way back into people’s shopping carts. The conception of representation as a tool of indirect oppression and even social control helps us understand the deep hegemony formed by the Company, in which U. played a crucial role. In chapter 4 of the novel, while U. pondered his “official function as a corporate ethnographer, [which] was to garner meaning from all types of situation,” he realised that sometimes he allowed himself to think that “[his] job was to put meaning in the world” and not the other way around (McCarthy 38). Later in the novel, in chapter 12, we see a development in these ponderings.

Around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Project but also towards Koob-Sassen [Project] underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous…Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing virtually on their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it…

I started to regress my own part in it all…I was quite literally underground: secreted…among the Company’s foundations…This afforded me no power to shape the Project in a formal or official way—but to unshape it, sabotage it even…

(McCarthy 154, 155)

Upon this moment, U. realized his subversive power as an agent of ideologization, as a mediator of the narrative built between the dominant group and the masses. Koob-Sassen was the Company’s latest and till now most consequential project. His “issuing erroneous interpretations and assertions, or even insinuations, could lead to key decisions being made later that were catastrophically bad ones…[He] could do it, if [he] wanted: [he] could torch the fucker…” (McCarthy 154). The Koob-Sassen project, U. claimed, was so important that there wasn’t a “single area of your daily life that it [hadn’t], in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this.” This pervasiveness is reminiscent of ideological manifestation. Ideologies, enabled through narratives constructed by dominant groups, are so deeply worked into the frame of society that they affect the lives of all individuals, however go by unnoticed. A similar demand of overarching theorisation, titled the Great Report, was made by Peyman to U. personally. It was the Company’s ultimate assignment for U. that he had the liberty to create and work on whenever he could.

“The document, [Peyman] said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other work you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right?

…you don your khakis, schlep off to some jungle, hang out with the natives, fish and hunt with them…then, after about a year, they lug your bales and cases down to the small jetty that connects their tiny world to the big one…send you back to your study…you write the book.

Not just a book: the fucking Book. You write the Book on them. Sum their tribe up. Speak its secret name.”

(McCarthy 70)

This directive can be seen as problematic in many ways. Peyman, the head of the Company which not only directly influences the dominant ideology, but also dispenses ideologies to other companies, other centres of narrative distribution, is demanding an almost “codex” on the “modern tribe,” the entire populous of the era. This overreaching, overarching text, U.’s representation of the social order and the intrinsic logic that determines that social order, could be used corporately for the purposes of ultimate hegemony. This need for a fantastic “brand-new navigation manual” (McCarthy 71) betrayed the Company’s intent to be colonizers of the entire era, the supreme capitalist-industrialists. For the course of over half the novel we see U. investigate the “symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal,” (McCarthy 15) indulging in identifying patterns and connections between oil spills and parachutist deaths, hoping to find some “universal structure lurking beneath nature’s surface” (McCarthy 18). We can understand why a professional ethnographer was chosen for this corporate project, for ethnographers specialise in investigating practices and social behaviours, it is their job to uncover the symbolic, that is the conceptual, purpose of human acts. Any concept to be expressed, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, must be attached to a signifier. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable,” (Saussure 60) and it is called semiology. Culture, like language, is a semiotic affair, claims anthropologist Clifford Geertz (5). Culture, being a collection of such symbols, can be read as a text, interpreted in its own way, and U. does just that. In investigating various cases of parachutist deaths and oil spills, he looks for intertextuality to explain connections that may govern the occurrence of these events. U. being the medium through which the interpretation of what is signified through any social event is passed onto the Company for entwinement into the dominant ideology, becomes a locus of translation. He maintains dossiers, collections of observations and interpretations, on a variety of events, for professional and personal purposes. The intertextuality within cultural practices or social events becomes quite literal in the case of this ethnographer. U. becomes the translator of culture for the companies, an intermediary between these far-removed dominating groups and the masses.

We can understand the nature of far-removedness of those who dominate by the way that they are titled or signified in the novel. The Company always remains the company, and is never signified as anything more specific. “To the anthropologist, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones…the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.” (McCarthy 74). The Company was a generic consultancy, pure and archetypal. This loose signification also helped bolster its affective value for the reader, helping it encompass more meaning and signify more concepts than a more accurate signifier. The lesser the difference between The Company and other companies, the more overarching, overbearing its presence was made to seem. The Company was further headed by an equally illusory character, Peyman, who for his employees was “everything and nothing.”

Everything because he connected [them] individually and severally…connected [them]…to [their] own age… He connected the age to itself and, in doing so, called it into being. At the same time he was nothing. Because, in playing this role, he underwent a kind of reverse camouflage.

That’s a Peyman thing. You would find yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman has named or invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements, everywhere, till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.”

(McCarthy 52)

Peyman’s signification as a god-like figure who was “above” and reclusive reinforced the Company’s signification as an overbearing presence in society. It was told that Peyman “took up spectral residence within some sacred recess full of ministers and moguls over whom he held sway” (McCarthy 53). This description solidified the hegemony that was held by him and exercised through the apparatus of the Company. However, as much as Peyman connected everything to everything, it was still U. who mediated much of society to Peyman, becoming one of his most valuable right-hand men. The writer of Peyman’s fantastic Great Report, the translator of cultural texts, and one of Peyman’s personal interpreters of culture.

Towards the end of the novel, in a chapter revealing the story of another character Madison, the woman U. is dating, we are given testimony to the unassailable nature of a hegemony. In a narration of Madison’s activism days, she tells U. about an incident where protesters against capitalism at the G8 summit in Genoa were gathered, beaten and held by the police. Her narration followed into an account of her abduction by a strange old man in a mansion who made her enact various classical poses. At the end of this encounter she was released from the mansion without many of her belongings except her wallet. When U. asked her how she reached home, she narrated

I saw a little airport icon by the [train] stop just before Turin…so that’s where I got off and bought a ticket back to London—again, with my credit card. I remember thinking that it was ironic.

That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism.

(McCarthy 198)

This account helped place the incontestability of a hegemony once put in place. The dominant ideology was the one in the book that took the ultimate position, the final word. There was no final cultural subversion, U., in the last pages of the book when given the opportunity to investigate his much fantasized Satin or Staten Island took up no such opportunity, and the existing fate of society was accepted by all the characters.

           This essay, in conclusion, tried to trace the story of U.’s struggle with the nature of his company’s work, and understand his company’s role as that of a hegemony in society, with U. being one of its principle propagators of ideology. The essay made it important to understand the works of Gramsci, Althusser, Spivak, and Saussure to forward the argument made, with select references to Anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

[ofvernacular]

Keeping Up With The Kardashians: An Anthropological Analysis

           Reality Television, although greatly fabricated by producers for social appeal and entertainment ratings, acts as a very explicit window into the lives of elite members of society that dictate the popular culture of that society. For consumers of western media, there are no pop cultural icons bigger than The Kardashians. The TV Show Keeping Up with the Kardashians has been documenting the lives of sisters Kim, Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian, and their other immediate family, for the past eleven years. Each episode is filled with rich ethnographic insight into modern American pop culture, family structures, gender roles et cetera.

           For the scope of my essay, I have chosen to analyse the first five minutes of the fourth episode of the thirteenth season (S13E04) titled ‘The Aftermath’, aired on March 26th 2017. In the onset of the episode, before the title sequence, we are shown a scene from ‘Khloe’s House’ in Los Angeles, where Khloe Kardashian, the youngest Kardashian Daughter, is seen sitting and chatting with her younger brother Rob Kardashian and her older sister Kourtney Kardashian’s ex-husband, Scott Disick. Within the first minute of the episode, we are shown a conversation between the three that is heavy in expletives, and sexually explicit in nature about Rob and his girlfriend with whom he is having a child. We are thus portrayed a joking relationship between Khloe and her brother, as well her ex-brother-in-law. The fact that Khloe is friendly with her ex-brother-in-law itself depicts how taboos against divorce are slowly evaporating in western culture. That is not the only non-traditional value we witness about marriage in the first minute of the episode, as we also learn that Rob’s girlfriend, Blac Chyna, the soon to be mother of his child, is African American, whereas the Kardashians are of white European descent. We see that this modern, iconic, American family does not adhere to racial endogamy nor do they follow the tradition of having children within monogamous, legitimate marriages.

           The next three minutes of the episode take place in a shooting location for a photoshoot of previously shown Khloe Kardashian and her youngest step-sister Kylie Jenner. The scene is full of professional make-up artists and hair stylists surrounding Khloe who is seated in front of a dresser. This is the image that consumers of media typically associate the Kardashian clan with, as rich girls who spend all their day indulging in artificial self-beautification and being used to promote consumer goods. The T.V. show certainly glamorizes the lifestyle of such celebrities by portraying them in position of luxury, however, from the conversation in the scene we are given details about Khloe’s personal life that again normalizes her as ‘any other person’ whom the audience can relate to. We see Khloe sitting in her chair during her hair and makeup practicing Spanish for her Spanish classes. She is also surrounded by friends, and they make mundane conversation about Spanish lessons. It is revealed that the photoshoot is for Khloe’s own clothing line, ‘Good American’ that makes denim-wear for a diverse range of sizes, that are conventionally called ‘plus size’ in mainstream commerce. In this scene, Khloe who was earlier shown in a family / home environment, is depicted as a powerful businesswoman who also wants to make a social statement about body expectations from women through her work. This portrays the increasing feminism in American culture, and shows that some women (of course with privilege) have the chance for social mobility and reach spaces, such as business, dominated by men.

           The entire episode (and T.V. show) is in fact very feminist, contrary to popular belief (Dumas 2011, "Michelle Obama on vanity, chocolate and how the President doesn't like daughters to watch the Kardashians," Daily Mail UK, October 19, 2011). It is easy to mistake the glorification of make-up and sex for misogyny, however, through the show, and even in the first five minutes of this episode, we are constantly shown a family that is quite matriarchal in action, despite being patriarchal in technicality. For example, even though the Kardashian sisters have inherited their biological father’s last name, all the property shown in the show is owned by the female members of the Kardashian family. When there is a shot of Khloe’s house, the shot is titled “KHLOE’S HOUSE,” similarly, Kris Jenner, their mother, owns the main family house, and all of her daughters own and live in their own property. The house that is inhabited by Kim Kardashian (the second daughter of the Kardashian family, and the most famous), her husband Kanye West and their two (in later seasons, three) children, is also owned by Kim and depicted in the show as “KIM’S HOUSE.” The entertainment empire that the family runs is also managed by Kris Jenner, and not some male member of the Kardashian clan.

           Right after the professional photoshoot scene charged with female empowerment, we are shown a scene from ‘Kourtney’s House’ with Kourtney Kardashian and Kim Kardashian West, the two oldest Kardashian sisters. They are shown in the kitchen playing with North West, the daughter of Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye West. This is a scene that the audience would be able to relate to about mundane domestic life. Here Kim is seen playing the conventional role of a mother to her daughter, she helps her open a bottle of juice, and encourages her daughter to share juice with her “Auntie Kourtney.” We witness traditional that celebrities popular for their unconventional and ‘immoral’ lifestyles, actually uphold the same traditional family values in their private lives. They use the same kinship terms, and fulfil the roles of socializing their children into cooperative social and family life.  Kourtney and Kim in this scene talk about their children, Kourtney discusses her son’s life at school, and Kim discusses how she would like to have more kids. We are thus brought to realize that females who can be empowered in public spaces can also willingly choose to conform to traditional domestic roles within the home. This concludes the first five minutes of S13E04 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

           The first five minutes themselves took the audience through the major current life events of the three Kardashian sisters, as well as their brothers and their step-sisters. It combined their private lives and their professional lives, depicting different roles played by them in different spaces of society. Contrary to the popular opinion that the T.V. show is a negative portrayal of the female gender, the episode actually portrayed women in many positions of power. It further demonstrated the mechanics of modern family structures such as live-in relationships, inter-race marriage et cetera. Further, it showed family ties between siblings, and gave somewhat the essence of a modern family-run business through the cooperation between Khloe and Kylie.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seacrest, Ryan, prod. 2017. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Season 9, Episode 04, "The Aftermath." 28/03/2017, E! Entertainment. https://www1.fmovies.se/film/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-13.ojy8z/2xlqy4

[ofvernacular]

The Mind as an Extension of the Brain

In Descartes’ Meditation (VI) on the Existence of Material Things, and [on] the real distinction between the Soul and Body of Man, he argues for Dualism by positing that the Mind and Body are entirely different from each other for they have different properties, and things cannot be identical if their properties differ. If the properties of things differ, then they cannot be perfectly united with each other, thus, if the properties of Mind and Body differ on such an intrinsic basis, the whole mind cannot be united to the whole body. (p. 196) If the Mind, inasmuch as it is only a thinking thing (p. 196), is clearly one and entirely indivisible, and the Body, inasmuch as it an unthinking thing (p. 190), is by nature divisible into parts, then it is “sufficient to teach [Descartes] that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” (p. 196) A reconstruction in standard form can display Descartes’ argument more clearly:

1)    If two things are entirely different from each other, then they cannot be wholly united with each other.

2)    If thing M and thing B have different properties, then they are entirely different from each other.

3)    Thing M (Mind) is entirely indivisible and thing B (Body) is by nature always divisible.

4)    Thing M (Mind) and thing B (Body) have different properties.

________________________________________________________________

5)    Therefore, Mind and Body are entirely different things. (2, 4 MP)

________________________________________________________________

6)    Therefore, Mind and Body cannot be wholly united with each other. (1, 5 MP)

In the reconstruction above it is important to note in premises 3 through 6 that Descartes says that he considers the mind to be “only a thinking thing” and “apprehend[s] [it] to be clearly one and entire,” and the body to be an extended, unthinking object. In support of premise 1, Descartes said “although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body, yet if a foot, or an arm is separated from my body, I am aware that nothing has been taken away from my mind.” This established that the mind and body could exist independently without each other, as they are different things with unequal properties and thus, he claims, cannot be united with each other, for even if the body is separated into parts, the mind will remain whole. This paper will focus on objecting Premise 1 of the argument, that things that are different by nature cannot be united, by investigating the causal relationship between the mind and the body by studying the Placebo Effect in modern medicine.

 The Placebo Effect is best described as “any effect attributable to a pill or procedure, but not to its pharmacodynamic properties” (Wolf, 1997). Simply put, a person who undergoes a placebo treatment will think that they are receiving medical treatment for an illness and, even though they haven’t received actual medical treatment, they will experience the same effects as they would have had they actually been given proper medical treatment. For example, being given sugar pills instead of antidepressants, or a sham surgery instead of a real one that makes patients think that they have been operated on when they really haven’t. In a study by Moseley JB (2002) titled “A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee” patients were divided into three control groups, where two groups were given different medical surgeries to treat osteoarthritis of the knee and the control group was given a ‘placebo surgery’ where only an incision was made on the knee and then stitched to give the illusion of a surgical procedure. In the outcome of the study, it was observed over a twenty four month period that all three groups reported the same amount of pain relief and motor improvement. This study establishes that just by pure intellection or thinking, that is by a change in the mind, there was caused a physical change in a person’s body, or their well-being. Even if we consider the mind as solely a thinking thing, and the body as an unthinking thing, we see that these two things with different properties work together seamlessly so that when the mind thinks something, the body reflects that thinking in itself by adjusting its sensations to our thoughts, or our mind. Therefore, we are able to unite these two different things together, as a change in thought results in a physical change in the body, thus disproving the first premise of Descartes’ argument.

 Descartes will however be happy to admit this, as he says that the mind is solely a thinking and unextended thing. He will say that the trial group was made aware that the surgery would lead to an improvement in health, and thus post the trial, their sole power of intellection and imagination (that is the mind) caused them to think and believe that they had become better despite the fact that no medical procedure had actually been administered on their body. Thus in the case of the placebo surgery, there was never a case of mind’s effect on body, as it was only because of the mind and thoughts that the patients felt better. This supports that mind and body exist independently, since it shows that our mind determines what we actually know and feel (which in this case is a feeling of wellbeing after a fake surgery), and that our mind has the power to make us feel better even without a corresponding physical change in the body. This even corroborates his earlier views that physical sensations are deceptive and that he can only be certain of his existence as a ‘thinking thing.’

 However that is not the case. There has been established a tangible effect of the mind on the body, a change in brain chemistry that corresponds with the change in the thinking or mind of the person. In a study by de la Fuente–Fernandez et al. (2001) patients with Parkinson’s Disease were told that they would be given an injection with either an active drug that releases dopamine in the brain or a placebo. They assessed the results through PET scan and found that there was a dopamine release in the brains of all the patients who received the placebo drug, with half of the patients even reporting an improvement in their health (motor movement). In this we clearly see that the patients who thought that they could be receiving an active drug, yet who received the placebo, also showed the same bodily response as those who physically received the active drug. This shows how a change in the mind or thinking of a person, directly caused a physical change (and we know that physical objects can only be affected by physical forces) in the brain or body of the person, leading us to believe that the mind and the body do in fact work in unison. A thinking thing that can cause a chemical change must necessarily engage the brain’s chemistry while it is ‘thinking’ or existing. In this study, the person thought they would receive a drug that would increase their dopamine levels and their physical organ, brain, reflected this expectation by actually releasing dopamine. This direct relationship between intellection and physical bodily processes gives us reason to trust that the thinking thing or the Cartesian Mind is actually rooted in and very much a part of our physical body, more specifically, an extension and part of our brain.

    Bibliography

1)    R. Descartes (1641). Meditiations on First Philosophy. In Haldane, E. S. and G. R. T. Rose (trans.), 1911, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 261–86.

2)    Moseley, J. B., Omalley, K., Petersen, N. J., Menke, T. J., Brody, B. A., Kuykendall, D. H., Wray, N. P. (2002). A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee. New England Journal of Medicine,347(2), 81-88. doi:10.1056/nejmoa013259

3)    Benedetti, F., Carlino, E., & Pollo, A. (2011). How Placebos Change the Patient’s Brain. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(1), pp. 339–354. http://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2010.81

4)    Wolf, S. (1997). Educating doctors: crisis in medical education, research & practice. New Brunswick u.a.: Transaction Publ.

[ofvernacular]

The Power of English in Postcolonial India

In order to influence people, all great orators must understand the relationship between language and affect. There is always a power structure underlying language that is the result of a violent history. This can be understood by inspecting the presence of English in postcolonial India, and discovering the affect of the language on authority, power and prestige. Since the late eighteenth century, the Indian subcontinent had been ruled by British monarchs. These colonialists brought with them a whole new culture to India, including their language, English. In the following centuries, as they grew more powerful in India, so did the English language. This cultural hegemony led to the permanent marginalization of Indian culture and its vernacular languages. Consequently, the Indian peoples were the ones who had to assimilate to the new culture in their own land and learn the new language. The colonialists called this ‘civilization,’ but modern Indian sociologists such as M. N. Srinivas call it ‘westernization,’ which is defined as “the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule” (Social Change in Modern India 50). This paper will explore how the English language became a tool of power and control in India as a result of two violent centuries of colonialism, and how it has become an institutionalized elite status symbol in modern day India.

 The European notion of civilization as “an achieved state of development, implying historical process and progress” was brought to India in the late eighteenth century (Williams 13). The new invaders of the subcontinent recognized indigenous Indian practices as barbaric, thus giving them an invented reason to push their notion of civilization upon the colonized people. Friedrich Nietzsche said “all things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth” (Daybreak 16). Thus, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British imposed their concept of a modern state by introducing Western law and order, creating modern bureaucracy, developing systems of communication, transportation, and introducing Western education. Soon, they achieved a cultural hegemony in India and the colonialists became the Elite. This cultural hegemony helped the British maintain their power and superiority over the Indian subcontinent. We can understand the phenomena through the help of Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks, where he says that hegemony is a result of “spontaneous consent” given by the masses to the changes imposed by the ruling class on general social life of the dominated (in our case, the colonized). The consent is caused as a result of “the prestige which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function” in society (Gramsci 145). Therefore, in colonial India, those who aspired to become like the dominant members of society, the British colonialists, underwent rigorous Westernisation. As a result of cultural imperialism, the cultural symbols associated with colonial Britain, such as their dress, speech and habits, were diffused through Indian society through the new British institutions of education, governance, et cetera and naturally embraced by the Indian bourgeoisie aspirants. It was now that the English language emerged as one of the main tools of social mobility in colonial India.

 English became a language of access. In its pursuit, the value of vernacular languages was lost, and English became the language of power and prestige. As Indians aspired for social mobility, they had to assimilate to the English language to access the privileges offered by the British, such as their education and their seemingly effective governance. At the time, it seemed only natural for Indians to learn English for social mobility, however, this hegemony of English outlasted the British Empire in India and is prevalent till date. In today’s time the knowledge of English is a top indicator of one’s social class, one’s educational background, and consequently a determinant of their job and their social privilege. People who learn English in India have more employment opportunities and can be employed with multinational corporations, such as call-centres, or be employed by the government at post offices. An Indian comedian, Biswa Kalyan Rath, once did a popular stand-up piece titled ‘English and Reproduction’ where he joked about the positive correlation between English speaking Indian men and their chances of mating, illustrating the lure of English-speakers in Indian society. Even India’s most prestigious national education board, Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), uses English as its medium of instruction. These broad social changes are also accompanied by intrinsic shifts in the Indian consciousness. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that a native speaker’s language determines his or her perception of experience. This meant that as Indians converted from speaking in their regional languages to speaking in English, they also underwent cognitive shifts, or shifts in thinking, as a result of using a differently structured language. Whereas earlier Indians had strong in-group tendencies, and would relate to themselves through their social groups, the Westernized English-speaking Indian began to think of herself as a separate individual. Thus, with English came a cultural shift from collectivism towards individualism, where instead of referring to oneself as “we” (as one would using a regional language), the English-speaking Indian began referring to herself as “I.”

 The predominance of the English language in modern India led to a marginalization of all those who didn’t adopt English and still spoke and lived in their native regional tongues. These people, mostly in rural India, are excluded from the privileges received by English-speaking Indians such as social prestige, better jobs, economic power, participation in law and politics, et cetera. Those who don’t know English thus feel distanced from India’s central affairs, such as Supreme Court rulings, which are all conducted in English. Franz Kafka’s short story titled ‘The Refusal’ provides a perfect analogy for the distinction between English speaking and non-English speaking Indians. In The Refusal, the citizens of a small town that is far from the Capital feel physically as well as socially distanced from the politics of their nation. Just as the citizens in Kafka’s story have not brought about any political change by themselves for centuries, and “humbly submit to all orders issued in the capital,” the non-English speaking Indians experience the same detachment from their central governance due to the gap in communication and understanding caused by the marginalized citizens using a whole different language from that of the central government. The obfuscation experienced by the marginalized when they interact with powerful English speakers can be best understood through Kafka’s description of the foreign dialect of the soldiers from the capital that is “utterly incomprehensible to us [the townspeople], and they can hardly get used to ours--all of which produces a certain shut-off, unapproachable quality” (Kafka). The story also discusses how the tradition of all political power belonging to the top-official from the Capital is not questioned by the citizens, nor by the power wielding officials themselves, as everyone, townspeople and political officials alike, have accepted this power imbalance as simply tradition. Just as the citizens recognize that the top-official has not “seized the power, nor is he a tyrant,” and that “it has just come about the years that the chief tax-collector is automatically the top official,” the non-English speaking marginalized Indians also realize that using English in politics and social affairs is not an attack on them, rather, just how things have come to be since the British Raj (Kafka). Therefore, it has led to a detachment of those who don’t use the powerful language English from their own polity.

 In his essay ‘On Truth and Lie’, Friedrich Nietzsche said “the different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages” (The Portable Nietzsche 45). Language, which is invented to be a container of concepts and forms, represents a culture’s history and social reality and what the native speakers of the language designate as truth to a concept or form. Thus, the imposition of a foreign language on a culture inevitably leads to social and cultural change in the society that receives this new mode of articulating its experience of the world. In Indian society, we see that the introduction of English by the British colonialists created social structural changes where English speakers had more social privilege than fellow Regional language speaking citizens. The operation of Indians in English even led to changes in their cultural social values, such as a shift of the Westernized Indian towards individualistic thought and behavior. Finally, one of the main impacts of the English language in India has been its role in keeping India in a state of postcoloniality. The use of English in India perpetuates a colonial past, where without any direct intervention of colonialists, India has embraced the legacy of its colonial rule by preserving one of the British Empire’s main impositions on Indian society. The English language, being a central part of Indian polity and society, thus invokes the memory of its colonial past with every new public debate, legislation, or congregation, giving India the identity of a Postcolonial nation.

  Bibliography

Gramsci, Antonio, et al. Selections from the Prison notebooks. Lawrence & Wishart, 1991.

Henslin, James M. Sociology: a down-to-Earth approach. Allyn & Bacon, 2001.

Kafka, Franz, and Malcolm Pasley. Shorter Works of Franz Kafka. Secker & Warburg, 1973.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books, 1976.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Daybreak: thoughts on the prejudices of morality. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar. Social change in modern India. Univ. of California Pr., 1973.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rath, Biswa Kalyan. “English and Reproduction.” YouTube, uploaded by YoKalyanYo, 24 Nov. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkq5tyksRMc.

[ofvernacular]

Is Spirituality in Modern India Endangered?

In his introduction to Buddhism, Edward Conze calls the 2500 year old religion a form of Eastern Spirituality. The mystical doctrine of Buddhism, he tells us, is a means through which individuals have succeeded in transcending the material world. Buddhist spirituality suggests three ways to approach transcendence: 1) to disregard sensory experience, 2) to renounce attachments (anasakti) and 3) to treat everybody equally. Although there is nothing culture specific in the doctrines of this ancient philosophy, it is observed that the recent historical conditions of industrialization and modernization in Europe have made the West incompatible with conventional spiritual tradition (Conze, 12). Instead of a negation of the will to live and the sensory experience, the Western enlightenment philosophies of ‘Eat, Drink and Be Merry’ encourage people to indulge in life and embrace sensory experiences (Pinker). The same tradition follows into contemporary Europe, with capitalism promoting an indulgence in material gains and an obsession with human productivity. In light of the increasing import of such Western ideals to India, I would like to investigate spirituality in contemporary urban India and understand whether modernization is a threat to our spiritual tradition.

Since Independence, the landscape of Indian society has changed starkly. There has been a shift from cottage industries to the introduction of Multinational Corporations that recruit educated English-speaking middle class Indians. Western material culture has become more superior, and the new generations of Indians are beginning to see traditional Indian values as impediments to growth (Dalal and Misra, 5). In line with this trend, we can assume a decrease in Indian Spirituality to match the scientific and philosophical temperament of the West. Further, the force of capitalism that leaves us craving material pleasure would inevitably hinder spiritual growth.

However, Indian academicians would disagree. “Globalisation is good for the Gods,” remarks Meera Nanda in her book The God Market, elaborating on how Indians are reinventing religion and spirituality for modern times (Nanda, 91). The past couple of decades have witnessed a wave of new-age spiritual Gurus such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Osho, Satya Sai Baba, Mata Amritanandayami and numerous others who adapt ancient Buddhist and Hindu teachings to fit modern day life. The efforts of modern spirituality have led to international collaborations such as World Yoga Day that celebrates meditation and spiritual wellbeing globally. A cross-cultural psychological study also found that a quality derived from spirituality, anasakti (detachment), helps Indian university students maintain low levels of stress (Dalal and Misra, 293). Further, a questionnaire on Happiness, administered to 817 people aged 25–55 years across eight major Indian cities, finds that 75% respondents reported being happy (Outlook, 2005). More than half of these reported that peaceful state of mind provided them happiness, illustrating the significance of meditation and spirituality in the life of the urban Indian.

From this information, it becomes evident that spirituality is still widely prevalent to the Indian soul. However, it is worth asking how close to the original aim of spirituality, which is renunciation and ultimate enlightenment, this new spirituality can bring us. Organisations such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living caters spirituality at high prices, offering ‘Corporate Packages’ charging thousands of dollars for training in meditation and yoga. Poet Javed Akhtar has decried these “crash courses in self-realisation – cosmic consciousness in four easy lessons,” calling them a “tranquillizer for the rich.”  Although there are great spiritual aspirations amongst modern Indians, genuine spirituality in urban India may truly be endangered by this trend dubbed as “karma capitalism” (Nanda, 96). This leaves us begging to ask the question: is Indian neospirituality genuine in its goals, or is it simply a new fad?

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conze, Edward. Buddhism: Its Essence and Development. Harper & Row, 1959.

Dalal, Ajit K, and Girishwar Misra. New Directions in Health Psychology. SAGE Publications, 2015.

Dalrymple, William. “Spiritual Awakening.” New Statesman, 21 Dec. 2009.

“Kya Hai Khushi Ka Khazaana (What Is the Secret to Happiness).” Outlook, 10 Jan. 2005, pp. 24–25.

Nanda, Meera. The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu. Monthly Review Press, 2011.

Fitzgerald, Mary. “Boom for 'God Men' as New Rich Seek Balm for the Soul.” Irish Times, 6 Oct. 2010, www.irishtimes.com/news/boom-for-god-men-as-new-rich-seek-balm-for-the-soul-1.659939.